Look Closer

“No,” he says. “I meant . . . this. Us.”

I look at him.

“Whatever you decide is fine,” he says. “No pressure.”

“Doesn’t the girl usually ask that question?”

He laughs. “Maybe so.”

“Well, now the girl’s asking,” I say. “You tell me. Where is this going?”

“I’m . . .” He flips his hand. “I already told you, I like you. I’m bullish if you are.”

This time it’s my turn to wink.

“I’ll be in touch,” I say. Always keep ’em wanting more.

25

Christian

After jackhammering Vicky on my office couch for the last two hours, I make it home near eight o’clock. Sex with a married woman is the best, because you’re their outlet, their Discovery Channel, not their dumpy old husbands they bang out of obligation or gratitude. You should see some of the things I’ve gotten married women to do.

Speaking of couches—Gavin’s already on mine in my apartment, a beer in his hand, tooling around on his laptop. “The fuck?” he says. “You’re late. Hope you at least got laid.” He looks up at me as I walk in. “Oh, you did get laid. Who’s the lucky mental patient?”

I make a motion, a jump shot. “He shoots . . . he scores! The crowd can’t believe it!”

“No shit? Number 7? The one with the twenty mil and the huge rack?”

We don’t use names. He’s never heard Vicky’s name and he never will. Vicky, to Gavin, is just “Number 7.” My seventh target.

That anonymity, that Chinese wall, keeps our friendship out of trouble. I don’t want to know what Gavin’s doing with his financial scams, and he doesn’t want to know what I’m doing with mine. No matter how much I trust Gavin, my friend since childhood, if he ever gets caught in his own scams, he might be tempted to lighten his load by flipping on me. And he has the same thing to fear from me, vice versa. I don’t think he’d ever give me up, and I don’t think I’d ever do that to him if the feds ever nabbed me, but it keeps things light and clean by removing the potential.

No, in this apartment, Vicky Lanier Dobias is just “Number 7.” When Gavin put together the financial plan for her, he left the name blank. I just typed it in and hit “print.”

“I fucking got her, G. Reeled her in like a largemouth bass.”

He puts down his laptop. “Well, Nicky Bag-o-Donuts, good for you.”

I take a grand bow.

“Do tell,” he says. “I need some deets.”

I grab a bottle of Scotch from the bar in my condo. I moved back to Chicago this summer, after finishing my last job. Number 6 lived in Lexington, Kentucky, a fifty-three-year-old woman who left her husband for me and took a million in a lump-sum divorce settlement that she gave to me to invest. I skedaddled, of course, and laid low for a few months before returning for the summer to Chicago, where Gavin lives and not far from where we grew up.

“A gentleman never kisses and tells,” I say.

“Okay, well, let me know if a gentleman shows up. In the meantime, throw me a bone here. You get laid twenty times more than me.”

“Twenty times zero?” I pour a couple fingers of Scotch, raise it in salute, and swallow it, followed by a satisfying smack.

“C’mon, Nick.”

I wag my finger. “Don’t call me that.”

“Oh, sorry. Christian. Why the fuck would you pick a name like that for a cover?”

I swallow another pour of the Scotch. I prefer hard alcohol—no carbs. “Because nobody would pick a name like ‘Christian’ for a cover.”

If I had my druthers, Gavin wouldn’t know my alias. It’s the one flaw in my plan to segregate our friendship from our professional relationship. But he creates my fake identity and everything that comes with it—fake credit and employment history, fake driver’s license and credit cards, fake diplomas and certifications, even those fake news articles from Fortune and Newsweek. He couldn’t do that without knowing the name Christian Newsome.

I drop down in a chair. “I’m telling you, G, this is it. I thought Number 5 was big.”

“Number 5 was the one in Milwaukee? She was

big. She was good for a couple mil, right?”

“Yeah. I mean, it was a gold mine at the time. But this one? Number 7? Twenty million dollars? I get this, I’m done. I retire at age thirty-fucking-four. I hit the lottery.”

“She liked the proposal? The water stuff? The Asian equities?”

“Ate it up. It’s real, right? You said it was real.”

“I mean, basically, yeah,” he says. “People are speculating in water right now. But a return like you promised in five years? No freakin’ way. But what does she know?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t care.”

He shakes his head. “Why do you get all the good luck? Me, I’m busting my ass for fifty, maybe a hundred K a pop. You, you’re stealing this sexy broad’s twenty million and you get to bang her on top of that?”

“I’m banging her so I can steal it, G. She initiated it. What am I supposed to do? She unzips her dress, wiggles out of it in the middle of my office, strips down to her bra and panties, and I tell her I’m not interested? She’d be out the door in a heartbeat. I’d never see her again.”

“She unzipped her dress? Like, in the middle of the meeting? Why doesn’t that shit happen to me?”