For my Mickey,

  who sees me.

  PROLOGUE

  So here’s the short version of things: I did something stupid, some people got hurt, and I’m about to try something far worse. If you want the longer version, there’s some things you need to know first.

  My name is Barrett Rye, and I am a confidence man. I’ve been other things before. When I was eight I wanted to be a magician. When I was sixteen I started working in organized crime. Now, nineteen years later, I’m a professional trickster.

  I’m going to make you a promise, right here at the start of everything. It’s probably the most important part of the story, so if you can only remember one thing, remember this:

  Nothing I say is the truth.

  Of course, if you can only remember one thing, then you should put the book down now. You’re going to need to remember a lot more than that. If you think you’re up to the task, though, I have one more promise, nearly as important as the first:

  Nothing I say is a lie.

  “But, Barrett,” I hear you say, or at least you would if we were capable of having an actual dialogue, “how can that be? How can what you say be not the truth and not a lie?”

  “Well,” I say to you in this imaginary conversation, “that’s the trick of it all. If I told you that, I’d give up the whole game.”

  FRIDAY

  CHAPTER 1 Barrett Rye, 10:22 P.M.

  Perhaps we should start in Brock’s gambling den, a private club in the back of a garment warehouse in downtown Omaha. An old man sits in a defunct break room, and if you know the password, he’ll let you through a broom closet to the space behind, a modern recreation of a prohibition speakeasy. There are six tables inside, two each for poker, blackjack, and roulette. Brock has filled the room with wood paneling and richly cushioned seats. The serving girls wear cocktail dresses and ferry drinks from the bar. The dealers wear crisp cummerbunds.

  There’s a trio of legal casinos right across the river in Council Bluffs. People come to Brock’s for the thrill of the criminality—a moment of excitement in milquetoast lives—or because they are desperate. Brock is more than happy to accommodate them all. The whole room smells of musk and sweat layered with cheap booze and stale cigars, and overwhelming it all is the acrid bite of adrenaline in the corners of my mouth.

  There are six of us at the table, but only two matter. There’s a hair over three thousand dollars in the pot, and we’re the only two left in the hand. The first might be the largest human I’ve ever seen in person. He’s a nearly seven-foot wall of muscle whose eyes sit too close together beneath his encroaching brow. I’d never want to see him across from me in a darkened alley, but at a poker table? A sucker is born every minute, and this man has a face that screams his idiocy to the world.

  As for his opponent, well, what can I say about him? He’s handsome—of course—but in a casual way. A way that makes you think he could be your friend. “You’re already twelve hundred into the pot,” he says, grinning a salesman’s smile to the bruiser across the table. “What’s three more?” He straightens the cuffs on his perfectly tailored suit.

  I’m about to do something profoundly stupid. I’m going to cheat. I might not have become the magician I dreamed of being as a kid, but I know how to vanish a card and replace it with another. Months of planning come down to this one move, but if this bruiser can’t get it through his steroid-addled brain that he needs to call, it all will have been for nothing.

  It’s not about the money on the table here. I need orders of magnitude more than that if I’m going to convince Enrico Scarpello, the head of the largest criminal syndicate in Chicago, not to kill me. But if I’m going to get that money, I need this man to call.

  The big man studies his cards a moment more, as though they might have changed since he last looked at them, then pushes his chips to the center of the table and turns over the two pair I knew he had.

  And now, if you watch closely, you’ll catch me. The moment of truth. Here comes the move.

  “Kings and tens? That’s good. But not quite good enough.”

  The four guards whose sole job is to keep the games here honest don’t spot it when the flush is turned over. But somehow the giant idiot who hasn’t managed to string more than three words together all night does. The cards on the table are not the cards I was dealt.

  He stares at them. His forehead wrinkles, skin pinching together around an old scar. His hand darts out, faster than you’d think possible. The whole casino stops for a heartbeat, and there is no sound but the rattling of a roulette ball. Two bouncers materialize at the tableside.

  My arm strains. There is no fighting him as he turns both of our hands up, working to expose them to the room. It’s only then that I see the card. I haven’t quite managed to get it all the way down inside the sleeve. There is the tiniest corner of the off-suit jack—the actual card I was dealt—poking up above the cloth.

  I feel the gasp ripple through the crowd more than I hear it. The audacity of cheating in Brock’s house is staggering. The bouncer’s grip descends, and I rise to my feet.

  Brock Schmidt, the man himself, comes out from the back rooms. He is a compact man, dressed to match the gangster aesthetic of his establishment, but despite his small size, he commands attention with an easy authority.

  “I swear to god, Brock. I don’t know how that card got there.”

  “Be quiet. I’ll deal with you later,” Brock says. “I want everyone here to know that cheaters are dealt with in the harshest possible terms.” Brock turns to the giant, leaning back to take in the man’s full height. “Will you join me in private to discuss how we can make this right, Mr.—?”

  “Barrett,” the man says. “Barrett Rye.”

  Yeah. The big fucker? That idiot bruiser who can barely talk? That’s me. I told you—never the truth, but never a lie. I learned early on that my size might draw attention, but while plenty of people look at me, nobody sees me. They think my identity ends with my biceps, so my brutishness is the best disguise I have. Nobody wants to think they got outsmarted by the guy who has more muscles than brain cells.

  Sorry. I was in the middle of something.

  “I didn’t do anything,” my opponent protests, and he’s right. I slipped the card up his sleeve as I grabbed his wrist. “Come on. You all know me.”

  “Yeah, Richard,” one of the bouncers says. “We do.”

  Richard slumps. The full extent of how fucked he is sinks in. As the bouncers escort him away, I let Brock lead me after them.

  “What about my chips?” I ask, looking back at the small pile I had at the table. One of the serving girls is neatly transferring it to a plastic tray.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Rye,” Brock assures me. He’s stopped trying to look me in the eye. It’s too much of a strain on his neck. “Your money will be kept safe. Every dollar accounted for. I don’t believe I’ve seen you in here before.”

  He won’t come out and ask me who I am, but I can feel him trying to figure me out. How did I notice what all his people missed?

  “No,” I say. “I just moved here.”

  “None of my men saw Richard swap that card.”

  I shrug. “I don’t like cheaters.”

  “No,” he laughs. “I don’t think any of us do. If you ever need work, I could use an eye like yours.” I’m sure having someone who looks like me on his staff would help burnish his image as well.

  “I’ve got work,” I say. My tone doesn’t leave room for a follow-up.

  “Too bad. In the meantime, we have something of a bounty system around here.” He withdraws an envelope from his jacket pocket and holds it out to me.

  “A what?”

  “A bounty. Five thousand dollars to anyone who helps uncover a cheat. This is only the third time I’ve had to pay it out.”

  “Huh,” is all I say as I take the envelope. I had known about the bounty program, of course. But I don’t want Brock to know that.

  The lush appointment of the games room gives way to institutional space in the den’s back halls, and Brock tries to direct me to his office. I watch the bouncers lead Richard in the other direction, out to the dark alley behind the building.

  “Is that not satisfactory?” Brock follows my gaze.

  Silence, I have found, is one of the most powerful tools I have, and so I am silent. I let my frown speak for me. My hands flex slightly. My shoulders tense. Brock wants me to follow him away from the door, but that’s not where I need to be. I wait for him to have the idea himself.

  “You don’t like cheaters,” Brock says, feeling out my words. I don’t respond. I let the silence work. “They make you angry, and you’d like to express that anger.”

  I smile back with as much cruelty as I can muster.

  “That sounds reasonable to me.” Brock turns from his office and leads me into the alley.

  CHAPTER 2 Two Months Ago

  Enrico Scarpello, the man who ran organized crime in Chicago, had asked me to join him in his office. Most collection guys wouldn’t be meeting with him personally, but I’d been working for him since he was a street boss, so I didn’t think anything of it. The guys out front waved me in when I arrived.

  The old man sat behind his desk, looking pristine as always. He was laughing at something Mickey had said. Mickey was sitting across from him with an accounts book open between them. That was when I knew something had happened. There was no good reason for me and Mickey to be meeting with Scarpello together. Plenty of bad reasons, but no good ones.

  Mickey turn