The Bad Beat by Tod Goldberg Read Free Book Online Page A

ago. It’s this old Christmas club account my mom gave me when I was born. He drained it.”
    The problem with degenerate gamblers is that it’s never about winning or losing; it’s about the rush of playing. It blinds your ability to make good decisions. It ends up putting everything you have in jeopardy . . . like your son’s life.
    “Okay,” I said. “So these guys come and demand money or they’re going to kill you, am I correct?”
    “Me,” he said, “and everyone in my family. They gave me MapQuest directions to my aunt Jill’s house in Austin, my cousin Matthew in San Francisco and they even showed me a picture of my mother’s grave. They said they’d dig her up and kill her again. And when they find my dad, they said they’d kill him, too, but they’d do it slowly.”
    “Here’s the thing, Brent,” I said. “If they kill you, they won’t get any more money. Do you understand that?”
    “Yeah. So, great, I’m paralyzed or something instead. I’d rather be dead.”
    “Why didn’t you just go to the police in the first place, Brent?” I said.
    He got up off of the bed and began to pace my loft, much like Sugar had, much like half a dozen other clients had when faced with the one question that should be the easiest to answer. It portended extenuating situations, which I presumed would lead to the Russians.
    “They told me not to,” he said.
    “Right. Of course,” I said. “But was this before or after you contacted the Russians and took their money for a device that doesn’t exist?”
    “How did you know?” Brent asked.
    “Because I’m a spy,” I said. “And because you’re smart and did the only thing you could to save your father’s life. And I don’t know any other way you’d be able to get your hands on sixty-five thousand bucks. That nugget of information didn’t elude me, Brent.”
    “Thanks. For the smart part, I mean.”
    “But being smart is also the one thing that could likely get you killed,” I said. “How much did they send you?”
    “Which time?”
    “ Which time? How many times have there been?”
    “Well, they asked to invest in the project and so at first I kept shining them on, just like all the others, until this all happened and I said, okay, they could get in on the Angel level for seventy-five thousand.”
    “And what happened next?” I asked.
    “They asked where they could wire the money,” Brent said.
    That got Fiona interested. Money does that to her. Especially money garnered as an ill-gotten gain. “How long,” she asked, “would it take you to build me a Web site like this one of yours?”
    “Fi,” I said. “Still not helping.”
    “Michael, if Russian gangsters are giving away their money, why shouldn’t we profit from it? We could clearly cover our tracks much better than a dumb college kid. No offense, Brent.”
    “Some taken,” he said. “And anyway, I didn’t know they were gangsters, like I said. I thought I was dealing with an accountant somewhere in the Ural Mountains.”
    “What did you do with that money?” I asked.
    “I paid the bookies and I paid my tuition, or else I was going to get kicked out of school. Dad didn’t pay any of my school stuff for the last six months, which I didn’t realize, of course, until he was gone. They were going to lock me out of the dorms and everything.”
    “Okay,” I said. “How much do you have left?”
    “Nothing,” he said. “Or, well, nothing from the first payment. I had them send me another seventy-five thousand two weeks ago, which was supposed to facilitate delivery of the initial specs for the project, which, you know, don’t exist.”
    I was silent for a moment while I tried to figure out all of the mistakes Brent Grayson had made, all of the terrible choices he was forced to make by his father, Henry, and then the likelihood that I could be killed while trying to help him out of this barbed-wire corner.
    “When did the Russians figure out that there was no