goes quite according to plan, so you have to stay light on your feet, ready for anything. It’s very adrenalating. It’s the part that gets me high. But I didn’t feel high just then. I felt … betrayed … and betraying. I took it up with Billy, leading with a “Women, huh?” point of view that gained no traction whatsoever.
All he said was, “I think you’re missing the point, mate.”
“Which is?”
But he offered no insight, merely put his head back down over his work. I watched him hammer away at code for a while. Soon he was lost in it, sunk down in the never-ending if/then stew, his total consciousness dedicated to solving a problem that was at once exacting in detail and overwhelming in scope. He chewed on his lower lip, brushed hair from his eyes, and cricked his neck from side to side, all utterly unself-aware. I marveled at the brain that could get so lost, and yet stay found, in the halls of such elegant abstracts. It occurred to me that if I ever wanted to get off the snuke and into something legit, that’d be a place to go: somewhere that made your whole mind bind.
I went out on the deck. The night had turned overcast and damp. Winter was coming to Los Angeles, classically defined as two months of rain between the smog season and the smog season. I loved this time of year around here. Big storms rolled in off the Pacific, arctic tempest moderated by the long trip south, resulting in daylong cleansing soaks. Just then, as if my thoughts invoked it, the rain began, first gentle, soon hard enough to kick up the pungent mix of wet asphalt, oil, and rubber smells from the boulevard below.
Was I missing the point? Was I really?
A long time later, I went back inside. Billy was crashed out on the couch, one half-curled hand still on the keyboard of his computer, the other covering his eyes against the glare of the overhead light. I switched it off, the old-fashioned pushbutton switch yielding a satisfying ponk as the room went dark.
Billy and Allie had mostly worked solo. They didn’t get that things break down at the end of a snuke. Pressure mounts. Tempers fray. People don’t act their best. Me, I’d run enough grift gangs to know that if you get through the event horizon without someone going completely off their gimbals, you’re working with zombies, not humans.
Vic, though, Vic understood this. At least I hoped he did. He was going to have to sell real outrage to Hines. So maybe I helped him along by making his outrage feel real. So what? It was a move as old as any shell game, where part of getting the mark to gamble is riling his righteous ire to the point where nothing matters but screwing the devious weasel who’s running the game. You’ve seen it on the street, maybe: Some blameless granny loses her pin money to a three-card monte man, while you stand there just knowing that the lady got cheated. Now here comes a casual third party, saying he has a surefire system for spotting the red queen or picking the pea or whatever, and you go hard for it because the three-card monte man just deserves to lose, for granny’s sake. Then your money goes away, and you wonder how the surefire system went wrong.
What you don’t see is granny and the monte man and the casual third party all meeting later to carve up your dough.
The key, the linchpin, is pissing people off, to the point where anger trumps judgment. Beneath that, though, is the hidden assumption that you have the power to piss people off … or charm them … confuse them … manipulate them as you see fit. Truly, if you don’t rate yourself a puppet master, you don’t win in the grift.
But if you’re the puppet master, then everyone else is a puppet, and that can get old.
I think it was getting old for me. At a time when I should have been reveling in the snuke, delightedly planning the last cascade of dominos, all I could think about was Vic’s feelings, and Allie’s, even Billy’s. It’s one thing to objectify the mark; it’s a whole other thing to objectify your friends.
Still, Vic was right in one sense: I was poking sticks in wasps’ nests. Now it was just a question of how the wasps responded.