Shadow in Serenity

three


Logan’s motel room was cold when he returned to it that night. He’d left the air-conditioner on to combat the damp muskiness of the room, and now it felt like a meat locker. Locking the door behind him, he dropped his briefcase on one of the hard, tightly made beds and got out his laptop. He sank onto the other bed and booted it up.

He looked dismally around the room. It ought to feel like home, as many motel rooms as he’d stayed in over the years. But no matter how many times he came back to a room like this, it felt empty.

Quickly, he shook the counterproductive thought from his head. Montague wouldn’t have stood for it.

Just as he wouldn’t have stood for what had happened tonight. Montague would be packing his bags right now, ready to hightail it out of town, knowing that the odds were against his scam working against such a strong challenger. If Montague were living, he would have accused Logan of falling prey to Carny’s challenge.

Lying down, Logan stretched his arms behind his head and closed his eyes. “You’re right, old buddy. But I’m not you. I never have been.”

As many rules as Montague had taught him about the line of work he’d fallen into, there was one rule that had served him better than any other over the years. Follow your gut. And tonight, his gut said to stay in Serenity, play this one out, and face the challenge Carny Sullivan had thrown at him.

He didn’t like being thought of as a two-bit con artist. He didn’t like being called a liar. And he especially didn’t like having his integrity questioned.

Even if everything she suspected about him was true.

It wasn’t as if he ever really hurt anyone. As Montague had always said, you can’t cheat an honest man. Logan considered himself something of a teacher — a teacher of the hard lessons that people needed to learn. Better from him than from some mean-spirited criminal who would leave them unable to recover.

Logan’s scams were always clean and neat. He came, he squeezed, he left. End of story. No attachments, no regrets, and no real consequences.

He’d already paid his dues long ago.


Logan had learned the first of life’s dirty lessons when he became a ward of the state of Alabama at the age of five. He had never known his father, and no one explained to him why his mother had vanished from his life. Each night, after he was sent to a strange bed in a strange home, he would lie awake for hours, remembering bedtime stories and whispered prayers, songs his mother had sung while she bathed him, the laughter in the house where they’d lived. She had never left him before, except at a babysitter’s while she worked, and he had always trusted that she would come back for him.

Until the day she didn’t.

By the time he was six, he’d stopped looking for her in crowds. When he turned seven, he’d forgotten what she looked like. At eight, he learned to curse her for leaving him alone, and by the time he was nine, her memory was just a numbness in the center of his heart. He had neither expectations nor answers.

By the time he was ten, he had learned that no one — especially his mother — really wanted him, and that he was nothing more than an unwelcome burden to the string of families who’d taken him in.

In his foster homes, his brightness wasn’t seen as an attribute. Instead, he came across as sarcastic and smart-mouthed. His youthful inquiries into the workings of the world often landed him in the attic or basement for punishment. When his third foster mother withheld meals from him for an entire day because of what she considered a “sassy mouth,” he stole five dollars from her purse, climbed out the bathroom window, and went to the corner convenience store, where he bought a bag of potato chips and a soda.

It had been the perfect crime — until the worried store clerk, not accustomed to seeing children out so late, reported it to his foster father, who was a regular in the store. When his punishment resulted in a beating, and his teachers reported his bruises, Logan was moved once again.

As Logan grew older, he channeled his intelligence into surviving. He knew that he had been denied the blessings that other children his age took for granted, and that good things weren’t likely to come his way unless he found a way to take them.

Taking those things landed him in more than his share of trouble and got him thrown out of every home he was dumped into. By the time he was eleven, he’d given up on the idea that anyone would ever love him and began to rely on his size and intellect to get him out of scrapes. He looked at least three years older than he was, and that number seemed to multiply exponentially as he got older.

At the age of twelve, standing five feet eight inches tall, he went to live with the Millers. Evelyn Miller, a small woman with a pallid complexion and a perpetual scowl, embraced martyrdom and never missed an opportunity to tell anyone within earshot how miserable her existence was. Her husband, Scotty, was a foul-mouthed ex-construction worker with a bad back that kept him from holding a job.

That Scotty lived next door to the local pool hall was no coincidence, Logan discovered. Scotty spent every night there, drinking with his cronies and shooting pool — bad back or not — laying down bets that he usually won. For the first time in his life, Logan found himself fascinated by something. As time went on, he found it increasingly difficult to stay away from the pool hall when Scotty was playing. But Evelyn fought hard to keep Logan away from the place, afraid that if the state found out, they would close down the Millers’ foster home and stop sending the checks they so badly needed.

So every night, Logan hung around the house, listening to Evelyn stomp around quoting Scripture under her breath and sweeping up cigarette butts, yelling at the five children in her care to get out of her way and go to bed. Logan was always the first to oblige. As soon as the lights were turned out, he slipped out the window and crept over to the pool hall. Scotty never sent him home.

Logan was a quick study in deception, and after watching Scotty’s techniques for some time, he realized the man was a hustler. Scotty would engage every newcomer who entered the pool hall and challenge him to a game. The first game Scotty would always lose, as his opponent expected, and then while the poor soul was counting his money, Scotty would suggest a triple-or-nothing playoff. Inevitably, he’d sweep the table clean in his first few shots, and would always go home the richer for it.

Logan practiced pool until he became even better at it than Scotty — and rehearsed the con. If people continually underestimated Scotty’s talent, they would certainly underestimate the talent of a kid.

Before long, Logan took the hustle to new levels, and spent his afternoons hitting the other pool halls in town, engaging other boys in games, the first few of which he would lose. Then he would turn things around and blow them away in a winner-take-all coup. When he had taken the crowds in the area pool halls for all they were worth and was well known in each, he decided it was time to move on to greener pastures. There was no sense being dependent on the Millers or the state of Alabama anymore. He was fourteen but looked older, and had a pocketful of money and a lucrative vocation.

For a while, Logan hustled his way from one town to another, stopping in every pool hall along the way and swindling the regulars. Not accustomed to losing so much money to a kid, his marks often got angry. Logan made many an escape out the men’s room window, the fire-exit door, or down an alley, with a posse of pool-cue-waving losers on his tail.

One night when he burst out the front doors of a combination bowling alley/pool hall, running from two irate opponents, a van screeched to a halt in front of the building. The passenger door flew open and a man’s voice shouted, “Get in, son!”

Since the only alternative was to be beaten senseless by the pool players he’d bested, Logan dove into the front seat without a moment’s thought. The car skidded away, leaving the men behind, cursing and vowing to get even.

Catching his breath, Logan sat up and glanced at his rescuer. He recognized the man immediately as one he’d noticed earlier, sitting at a table between the bowling alley and the pool tables, watching him hustle. Something about the man had made him uneasy; he had a white mustache and sucked on a pipe, a knowing look in his eyes as if he recognized a hustle when he saw one. He wore a three-piece suit with a paisley tie. In the bowling alley, he’d worn gold-rimmed reading glasses, and Logan remembered thinking that he looked like a nineteenth-century banker from one of those western flicks.

“I don’t know who you are, mister,” he said. “But you probably saved my life. Thanks.”

“You have a few things yet to learn, my boy,” the man told Logan in a heavy English accent. “Your technique is excellent, but your style needs a great deal of work. And your escape leaves quite a lot to be desired. How old are you, boy?”

“Nineteen,” Logan lied. “I’ll be twenty next month.”

“You’re twelve if you’re a day,” the man said.

“I am not!” Logan protested. “I’m fourteen!”

The man smiled. “That’s more like it.” He extended his hand across the seat. “My name’s Montague Shelton. And yours?”

Logan briefly considered lying, but decided there was no purpose in it. “Logan Brisco.”

“Logan Brisco,” the man said, rolling the name over his tongue. “Sounds like a cowboy name. You Americans love cowboys, don’t you? Outlaws and cutthroats and such?”

Logan shrugged. “It’s just a name.”

“Where are your parents?”

“Dead.”

“How convenient,” Montague said. “The parents of all runaways are dead.”

“I’m not a runaway,” Logan said, growing uneasy. “I haven’t seen my mother since I was five, and I never knew my father.”

“I don’t know a great deal about your American laws,” Montague said in a gruff yet polished voice that was growing gentler by the moment. “But I do know that they don’t throw children out on the street when they reach fourteen.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I’m mature for my age. Maybe they knew I could support myself.”

“Hustling pool? Yes, I can understand why they’d send you out on your own.”

Logan looked at him. “Are you gonna turn me in or what?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“Because I’ll just run away again. I don’t belong with the Millers. They probably haven’t even noticed I’m gone yet. They’ll be mad when the social worker stops paying ‘em, but other than that it won’t matter.”

“Did they beat you?”

Logan almost laughed. “Scotty? No. He yelled a lot, but he has a bad back. He was scared that if he hit me, I’d hit him back. And Mrs. Miller yelled at me every hour on the hour, but she wouldn’t dare raise her hand to a kid bigger than she was.”

“Where are you sleeping tonight?” the man asked.

“I don’t know. I have money. I could stay in a motel, if I wanted. But sometimes I just sleep in a parked car in an apartment complex or something.”

Montague eyed him. “This is your lucky day, young man. I just happen to have a hotel suite myself. You’re welcome to sleep in the extra room.”

Logan wasn’t used to handouts, and he was suspicious of generosity. “What’s in it for you?”

“I could use a business associate,” the man said. “We shall see how things look in the morning.”

Logan didn’t know what he meant by that, but a good night’s sleep sounded enticing, and if the man tried anything funny, Logan was pretty sure he could hold him off. Montague was big, but he was old. At least fifty.

Except for the man’s snoring, which he found tolerable compared to Scotty Miller’s, Logan found the sleeping conditions more than suitable that night. The next morning, as he headed out the door, Montague stopped him.

“Young man, how would you like to go from making pocket change to real money?”

Logan shrugged. “Who wouldn’t?”

Montague placed his glasses back on his nose and stood up. Stroking his mustache, he strolled around Logan, studying him. “You have promise, boy. I think dressed in the right clothes, with the right haircut, you could probably pass for twenty.” He took off the glasses and kept talking while he wiped the lenses on his lapel. “Not that I mind youngsters, you understand. They just have no place in my organization. But I could use a partner.”

“What organization?” Logan asked.

“My traveling enterprises,” he said. “I’m a businessman. I need someone of executive caliber, someone who looks fit and trim in a suit, someone who has a talent for making money.”

“I don’t have a suit,” Logan said.

“We’ll get you one, lad. If you stick with me, you’ll wear the finest clothes, eat the finest meals, sleep in the finest hotels. I’ll make you a rich man. Are you interested?”

Logan shrugged. “I don’t have anything better to do.”

“Excellent,” Montague said. “We’ll have you fitted in Atlanta tomorrow, at which time, we’ll get you a new birth certificate, inflating your age just a wee bit, and perhaps a driver’s license. You can drive, can’t you?”

Logan nodded, though he’d never been behind the wheel. He’d worry about that later.

They loaded the car with Montague’s belongings — a computer, a small printer, and several boxes of paper of various sizes and colors. “Where’d you get all this?” Logan asked. “Are you in the printing business?”

“I once was,” Montague said. “I consider myself something of an expert in printing, and these machines help tremendously in my work. They are to be treated with the best of care. Without them, my business is greatly handicapped.”

When they were on their way, Logan asked, “Are we heading for Atlanta today?”

“After one brief stop by the bowling alley,” the man said. “I was taking care of some business when I ran into you last night. I must conclude it this morning.”

Logan worried that the men he’d hustled last night would be there this morning, but it was still early, so he decided he’d risk it. They pulled into the parking space near the door, and Montague sat still a moment. “Are you a man of honor?” he asked Logan.

“Well — sure, I guess.”

“You must be, if you’re to travel with me. Honor and loyalty. I expect you to support me in any of my endeavors, and I will do the same for you. Is that clear?”

Logan nodded. “I guess so.”

“No guessing, young man. You must be decisive. You must know what you want and how to get it. Indecision is the kiss of death in this business.”

Logan squinted at him. “What business did you say it was, again?”

“Moneymaking,” Montague said, dropping his keys into his pocket. “Now, come along. You’re my assistant, here to help me carry the load. I do the talking.”

Logan nodded and fell in behind Montague. The man walked with purpose, and the moment they were in the bowling alley, he went directly to an automatic teller machine against the wall. Putting his glasses on the tip of his nose, he punched a few numbers into the machine’s computer, nodded his head at the string of numbers that filled the screen, and turned around as if looking for someone. Logan hung back as Montague cut across to the front desk.

“Hello, sir. My name is Sidney Moore, of the First Federal Bank of Birmingham. We installed this ATM machine late yesterday, but we had several complaints throughout the night on our twenty-four-hour line. I understand it isn’t working properly.”

“Yeah, it took a bunch of people’s cards. Told ‘em they had insufficient funds. One or two I could believe, but I doubt everybody who came in here was in the red. And on a Friday, too, when they just got paid.”

“Hmm,” Montague said, fingering his mustache. “I’m going to have to remove it and take it in for repair. We’ll make every effort to have a replacement here later today.”

“Sure thing,” the manager said. “We got along without it just fine until yesterday.”

“Please tell your customers that their cards will be sent back to them in today’s mail.”

The man nodded and turned to a customer needing bowling shoes. Montague strode back to Logan and the ATM machine. “All right, son, let’s load it up.”

“Load it?” Logan asked. “Load it where?”

“In the back of my van,” he said. “I assure you that it fits.”

“But it must weigh a ton. And isn’t it built into the wall or something?”

Montague winked and slid the machine easily away from the wall. Unplugging it, he said, “It’s no heavier than a small computer. But help me so that it looks heavier.”

Logan lifted his side and found that it didn’t weigh more than twenty pounds. Together, they carried it out to Montague’s van and slid it in. Before closing the back door, Montague leaned in, opened a compartment on the back of the ATM box, and retrieved two dozen or so ATM cards. Then, tearing off a printout at the back of the box, he nodded for Logan to get into the car.

As they slowly pulled out of the parking lot, Montague handed him the cards and the printout. “You see, my boy, having someone else’s ATM card means nothing if you don’t have their PIN numbers.” He reached over the backseat and patted the box affectionately. “But my friend here just took care of that for us. Look for the account numbers and match them to the PIN numbers the people punched in with them. The printout has it all. Then put the cards in order.”

Quietly, Logan did as he was told.

“We’ll have to hurry,” Montague said. “Since it’s Saturday, the banks aren’t open, but we mustn’t take chances.”

Montague pulled into a bank parking lot and idled the car for a moment. Logan watched, astounded, as he donned a big baseball cap, a pair of dark glasses, and a mouthpiece complete with a black mustache and beard. Tossing Logan a wig, he said, “Here, put this on. Just for the camera. We don’t want to be identifiable.”

Logan pulled the wig on, and Montague pulled up to the drive-through ATM machine. “First card,” he told him.

Logan handed him the top card.

“PIN number?” Montague asked.

“Three-two-nine-five,” Logan read.

Montague slid the card into the machine, waited for it to respond, then typed in the number. The computer asked him what amount he’d like to withdraw. Logan followed Montague’s fingers as he punched in two hundred fifty dollars.

Holding his breath, he watched, amazed, as the machine rolled out two hundred fifty dollars. “One more,” his mentor said, reaching for another card.

They repeated the steps and got two hundred fifty dollars more.

That morning, they hit ten more banks and drew two hundred fifty dollars out of twenty different accounts. By the time they were on the highway toward Atlanta, they had five thousand dollars.

Logan was charmed. “Do you do this all the time?”

“Absolutely not,” Montague said with a note of pride. “I have many other ventures. With my knowledge of computers and printing, I virtually have people handing me money wherever I go. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that knowledge isn’t a wonderful thing. It’s your key, young man, to anywhere you want to go.”

When Montague handed him his cut — one thousand dollars — Logan decided he wanted to know everything Montague knew.

Over the next few years, Logan traveled with Montague under several aliases, and watched, ever amazed, as the man posed as an airline pilot, complete with a Delta uniform, and paraded around airports cashing counterfeit checks at the terminal desks. Then he and Logan went to the hotels that housed the pilots, checked in for the night on Delta’s tab, cashed another check the next morning, and went on their merry way. Some of them were payroll checks on Delta’s account, others were personal checks in the name of Lawrence Cartland, but they had all been created with Montague’s printer.

Sometimes Montague would dress in a bank security guard’s uniform, complete with an unloaded gun. As he proudly explained, white-collar criminals did not carry loaded guns. He would padlock the night depository at airports and collect all the receipts of the day by simply standing beside the depository, looking official, and explaining to everyone who came to make a deposit that there had been several break-ins at the depository. He had been ordered to collect the receipts personally, he said. And they believed him.

Montague made Logan several fake birth certificates under various names and ages, which enabled him to get driver’s licenses in several states, and Logan became his getaway driver, his assistant in carrying machines and bags of money, his diversion when one was needed. He also learned how to counterfeit the most detailed documents as well as Montague.

But they both specialized in cashing counterfeit checks, with routing numbers at the bottom that would make the banks’ computers send them to banks all over the country before anyone realized the checks weren’t good. By then, he and Montague would be long gone.

They were victimless crimes, Montague always said. Crimes against airlines, corporations, banks. In the few cases where actual individuals took the losses, as in the ATM withdrawals, Montague kept their thefts to a minimum.

In one case, when the police had been close on their trail and Montague was desperate to escape, he had convinced a stranger he befriended in an airport bar to cash a check for five hundred dollars. The check was phony, but he’d saved the man’s business card, and when they reached their next destination, he’d sent the man a money order for the full amount plus interest.

Montague’s code of honor was strict, and by the time Logan was old enough to pull his own stings, his friend’s unwritten “commandments” had been drilled into his mind.

1. Never fall in love. The moment a woman got under your skin, you were to leave town. There was nothing more dangerous to their chosen career, Montague maintained, than the brain damage a woman could inflict on a man. It caused him to take unnecessary chances and make serious mistakes. That would jeopardize everything they’d worked for.

2. Only take from those who deserve it. Honorable men only took from those who could afford to lose something or those who were insured. But after that rule always came the qualifying caveat — “You can’t cheat an honest man.” Logan assumed that meant that anyone who fell for their schemes actually did deserve it.

3. Never stay in one place too long. They had to assume that the Feds were always on their scent, just a town behind them. One day too long could make the difference between freedom and years of incarceration.

4. Never let your conscience slow you down. There was no room for guilt or regret in this line of work. On the few occasions when Logan expressed those feelings, Montague made it clear he had little patience for it.

5. Never allow your picture to be taken, except for counterfeit IDs or passports. All it would take was one photograph sent to the authorities by a suspicious mark and shown to a past victim to land them behind bars.

6. Always travel light. Accumulation could be fatal.

In their business, one had to be able to leave things — and people—behind without regret.

7. You can be forgiven any crime if you commit it with class. Montague had outfitted Logan in a wardrobe fit for a Trump, forcing him to discard all his jeans, tennis shoes, and T-shirts. They were always to dress and carry themselves with class, and they slept in the finest accommodations and ate the richest food. “People will believe you are whatever you appear to be, my boy. Your life is a blank slate, and you must imagine your past and future to be as grand as you wish it,” Montague said.

Armed with those rules, Logan concocted his first original scam at age sixteen. Posing as a twenty-one-year-old, which was believable since he now stood over six feet tall, he went into a tax-filing office carrying a fake W - 2 form and a stolen Social Security number and had his tax return done. When it was finished and his sizable refund was calculated, he requested “fast cash,” an immediate refund offered by the company at a nominal interest rate, much like a loan. Logan walked out with two thousand dollars in his pocket. When Montague tried the same scam, he netted even more.

The heady feeling Logan got from charming his way through his own scam was addictive, and soon he had more ideas. For each, he spent hours at the library, researching the ins and outs of the businesses he intended to sting, making phone calls and talking to people, and analyzing the ways that he could pull off the most lucrative con.

Montague was clearly pleased with Logan’s progress, and as Logan grew closer to adulthood, Montague became the closest thing Logan had ever had to a father. As the years passed, Logan realized that he hadn’t been that much help to Montague in the early days; rather, the man had wanted him along to combat loneliness. Their friendship served both of them well.

The older Logan got, the higher he lived, and the more money he and Montague needed to maintain their lifestyle. Logan put his mind to work on bigger schemes, looking for ways to sweep a town of all its spare cash and move on without looking back.

The idea came to him when he was lounging in a hot tub one Sunday afternoon, watching television. He saw a documercial for a real-estate venture. “That’s it,” he said aloud.

Montague, who seemed to be sleeping in the bubbling tub, opened his eyes. “Did I miss something?”

“Seminars,” Logan said. “We need to give some seminars. You know. On real estate, or investments. Let’s say we come into a town, hold a seminar laying out some get-rich-quick schemes that would have the greediest people salivating. We tell them they have to invest that night, or it’ll be too late. Then we tell them that we have to go to the site — you know, Brazil or somewhere — and that we’ll be back with their deeds. Give them time to have their checks clear before they get suspicious.”

“Seminars,” Montague repeated, thinking it over. “My boy, I believe you may have something there.”

They did their first real-estate scam in Picayune, Mississippi, a small town near the Gulf Coast, where the residents showed up at their seminar, checkbooks in hand, ready to make the investment of their lifetime. They sold property in Brazil that would allegedly be developed into one of the most sought-after resorts in the southern hemisphere. They walked away that night with fifty thousand dollars.

It was the first of many. Montague lent a touch of integrity and regality to the act, and Logan offered unabashed enthusiasm, along with a zealous passion for his product, whatever it might be. Together, they couldn’t lose.

“This is the caper that could help us retire from this nefarious life we lead,” Montague said with a grin one night as he stacked his money into bundles and packed them into a suitcase.

Logan laughed. “You, retire? What would you do?”

“Buy a ranch in the Southwest,” Montague said without hesitation. “Find myself a nice little bride. Raise horses.”

“I can’t see you on a ranch, Montague,” Logan said. “I’ve always imagined you usurping a prince and taking over his castle.”

“Much too high profile for me,” Montague said. “When I retire, it will be quietly. I’ll put it all behind me and hope the hounds never catch up.”

But the hounds — better known as the FBI — were always on their trail, inching ever closer, gathering more ammunition for the day they caught them. The pair had returned to their hotel more than once to find police waiting at their door, and once, as agents banged on the front door, they’d escaped out the back. It kept them moving, and it kept them careful. And it kept Logan tired, even though he found more happiness with Montague than he’d ever known since he was five.

But those happy times were soon to end. On Logan’s nineteenth birthday, just before they were to pull off one of the biggest scams of their career, Montague collapsed on the hotel room floor. Logan fell to his knees at Montague’s side, eyes locked with his mentor’s, crying, “What’s wrong?” Alarm colored Montague’s face, then confusion, then terror. Before Logan could decide what to do, his friend was unconscious. He was dead before Logan could get him to a hospital.

Logan buried his friend in the town they had been about to sting, then disappeared into the night alone, not sure where he would go, but eager to get there. For some reason, he wound up returning to his hometown. A little research led him to an aunt, his mother’s sister, who was not at all happy to see him. When he realized that she, his mother’s only relative, had known he was abandoned and allowed him to go into the foster care system at five years old, a deeper loneliness than he’d ever known set in.

He couldn’t remember another time since he was five that he had cried, for that kind of weakness made him too vulnerable. But that night, as he drove across the country in Montague’s car, with no destination and no ties, he wept like a baby. For years, he had felt like an adult, been treated as an adult, been paid as an adult. But that night, he felt like a child who’d just been abandoned for the second time.

For a while, he lived off the money that he and Montague had acquired — money they had stashed in several safe-deposit boxes across the South. When several months had passed and the grief was not so profound, he tried to formulate a plan. But try as he might, he couldn’t make himself carry out any of the scams that came to mind.

It didn’t matter, because the FBI had a long memory. When they finally tracked him down, they made him pay. His sentence was fifteen years in a federal penitentiary under the name that was on his current driver’s license — Lawrence Cartland. His bankroll was confiscated to make restitution to those he’d robbed.

Even in prison, Logan knew how to work a room. He made friends with all the guards and worked with gusto at every job given him, and he was paroled after serving half his sentence.

As much as Logan deserved to be called a criminal, he hated the label. So when he was free again, he decided to turn over a new leaf. He’d lost nearly eight years in prison, and he had no desire to lose any more. Montague had shown him that he had brains and that he could do just about anything he set his mind to. Maybe he needed legitimate work. Maybe it was time to get a real education.

He worked as a fry cook while studying for his GED and aced the test the first time he took it. He immediately applied for a grant to a nearby university, using his real name — Logan Brisco. He lived four years in the college dorm. Montague had taught him that one should never forget his assets, and Logan’s happened to be a handsome face and a wizard’s tongue. He could sell slab beef to a vegetarian and make her feel she’d gotten a deal. With minimal study, he charmed all his teachers into thinking he was their most gifted student, and he wound up with a transcript full of A’s and a degree — his first and only legitimate credential.

Logan’s first job after he graduated was in computer sales. He earned phenomenal commissions, for he was the best salesman the company had ever had. Always eager to find a new angle, he researched every aspect of the products and his customers and used every resource available to move the merchandise.

But when his boss began cheating him out of his commissions, he realized that con artists existed even within the bounds of legitimate enterprise. If that were the case, he’d rather do things Montague’s way.

One night he watched an episode of 20/20 about the effect of the economy on the Mayberry-like town of Serenity, Texas, a former oil boomtown whose wells were drying up. What could be more perfect? Decent bank accounts from the boom days coupled with desperation about the future. They would be his first marks.

It took a few months of preparation and planning, but the payoff would be worth it. He’d planned to spend two weeks laying the groundwork, hit them with the so-called seminar, sweep up all the cash they gave him, and leave town before anyone had second thoughts.

Then he met Carny Sullivan, and found that there was an even greater game than pulling off this scam. To Logan, success lay not in the money, but in the degree of challenge. Even if it broke all of his old friend’s rules, he was going to see this through.