Shadow in Serenity

by Terri Blackstock

  The room had grown quiet, and a few people began to nod and whisper in agreement. Carny looked up at Logan. The look he returned had no trace of his usual amusement. She was ruining it for him, and he didn’t like it.

  Pursing his lips, he took the microphone back and looked into the crowd. Slowly, that smile returned to his face. He deserved an Oscar for this performance.

  “You know, ladies and gentlemen, she’s right,” he said. “This is a big decision, probably one of the biggest you’ll ever make. You do need to think and pray about it, and heaven knows, I don’t want any regrets later on. As I said, I don’t even have approval yet to put the park in Serenity. But the number of investors I get here this week as an indication of community support will swing things in your favor. I’ll be happy to show you the plans for the park as soon as they’re ready, and I’ll speak to my investors about revealing their names as soon as they’ve chosen a town. Transparency is the name of the game. No hurry. Put your money away.”

  The crowd buzzed, and Carny stared at him, surprised at the new twist. She hadn’t expected this.

  “I’ll be staying at the Welcome Inn, and starting tomorrow, anyone who wants to meet with me and discuss making an investment can do that. But I’m not here to rob anyone. I don’t want your grocery money or your kids’ college funds. I don’t want anybody making an investment they can’t afford. Think about it, and if you think you want to be a part of an endeavor that has the potential to set your family up for generations of prosperity, then we’ll talk. But I won’t take your money tonight.”

  He set the mike back in its stand and flashed Carny that amused grin. “You want the first appointment?”

  She crossed her arms. The roar of the crowd rose again. She turned away from the mike so that only he could hear. “I’m impressed,” she said quietly. “But I’m still not fooled. Just be prepared. I’m going to fight you every inch of the way.”

  He bent to her ear. “I’ll look forward to it,” he said. “Can’t wait to change your mind.”

  “You won’t,” she said. “And you won’t change my town, either, not if I have anything to say about it.” She stepped off the stage. “Better not let your guard down, Brisco. I’m watching every move you make.”

  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 ou
t 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.”