"Exactly. But at the last minute the grifters decide that the mark should give each of them a fraction of the amount out of his own pocket as good faith money, maybe only ten percent. The mark doesn't mind 'cause he's gonna be holding the poke worth five times that much. He gives 'em the money. The grifters take off… Then the mark opens the wallet to find out that they switched the poke on him and he has a wallet full of cut paper."
"People fall for that?" she said, amazed.
"Every day, Victoria, in every city in the world. It's one of the most common hustles around."
He straightened up and looked at his work on the door of the light green Escort. Now she understood why he had insisted on that color and size car… The mid-sized light green Ford Escort with yellow letters on the door now looked exactly like a government vehicle.
"Now all we need is yellow hard hats and clipboards. People always believe you when you've got a clipboard," he grinned. "Don't ask me why."
That night Victoria lay in bed and listened to the crickets sing. Yesterday it had been a spandex dress and hooker heels. Tomorrow, the silly green jump-suit and a yellow hard hat. They would walk up to an unsuspecting farmer carrying clipboards and pretend to be from the Department of Agriculture. No big deal! So what? She tried to go to sleep, but for some reason her heart wouldn't slow down; her adrenaline wouldn't stop pumping. It was strange… Why was this even more exhilarating than the pre-game jitters she got before a big court case? She didn't want to admit it, but she finally had to face the truth: It's more exciting, she thought, as she adjusted her pillow in the darkened room. Because it's against all of my rules. But that wasn't all there was to it. All her life her mother had tried to get her to loosen up, but Victoria had kept strictly inside the white lines, never straying, always staying on course. Now, because of the horrible guilt over Carol's death, she had put herself in the hands of this charming con man. She was lying and cheating and, strangely enough, loving every minute of it. In some deep part of her, a dormant ember, long dead, had started glowing again… She had almost forgotten this feeling, but it had happened before, when she was a small child and her mother had taken her to the market. She had stolen candy from the big open bin, her little six-year-old heart beating wildly on the way out. She had gotten away with the theft, but later her mother had caught her eating the candy and had loaded her into the car along with the candy and driven her back to the market. All the way, Victoria had pleaded not to make her go. Her mother marched her inside the market and got the manager. She had to give back all the candy, apologize, and promise to pay for whatever she had eaten. She was so humiliated, she cried all the way home. She promised herself she would never ever steal again. It was a promise she had kept for almost thirty years, but now was about to break. And she had never felt more alive.
The next morning they set up the moose pasture. It was so easy, it was almost ridiculous. They drove down the entrance road of Cal Oaks Farm in their green Escort with the Agriculture Department decals on the door, decked out in their doctored jump-suits. The clipboards held prop pages torn from the phone book. Yellow hard-hats rode officially on their heads. They pulled up next to the barn where a startled, heavy-set blond man in coveralls looked up. Beano already knew that his name was Carl Harper from some letters he'd looked at in the mailbox out by the road. Beano glanced down at his clipboard as he got out of the car.
"Jill, this is the Harper place, am I right?" he said, loud enough to be heard.
"Believe so, Danny," she said, her heart beating frantically as Carl Harper walked up.
"I help you folks?"' he said; his pale eyes zigzagged suspiciously around, from their faces down to the door of the car and back up to their uniform pocket decals.
"Well, I'm hoping," Beano said and gave him the rainmaker. "I'm Danny Duncan with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and we're out here trying to help the space engineers at NASA this morning," he grinned.
"How's that?"
"Well, NASA and the U.S. Army coordinated on developing a brand-new kind a'paint." He turned to Victoria. "You wanna show him, Jill?"
From the back seat she pulled a can of paint that they had mixed that morning with their two-to-one formula. The paint was now a rusty, coppery-reddish color.
"This here is called Ferrous Oxide Paint," Beano began, "and what it's supposed to do is protect exposed metal, for in the neighborhood of fifty years. The deal here is once it's on, you don't have to repaint for half a century, if you can imagine that. NASA and the Army came to us over at D.O.A. and said maybe we could get some farmers around here to allow us to put it on their pipes and water cisterns, sorta give it a test."
Harper wiped his nose with a big red handkerchief, then stuffed it back into his back pocket. "Kinda bright," he said, looking at the paint, already trying to imagine it on all his exposed metal. "What you say's in it, again?"
"Well, I admit I ain't a chemist," Beano said, "and I ain't quite sure. Jill, what's in this stuff? You got them specs?"
Victoria looked on her prop clipboard. "It's basically an aluminum-phosphate-based paint with sulfur and cilineum nitrate," she said, cursing herself because her voice was shaking.
"There ya go," Beano said, smiling. "I think the cilineum nitrate is yer magic ingredient."
"What's the deal again?" Harper said, looking at them closer.
"Well, sir, I've been driving around all morning looking for a farm that looks like the pipes and cisterns're about due for a paint job. What we'd like to do is paint your exposed metal out there with this stuff and see if NASA and the Army are right. You probably won't have to paint again for fifty years. Cost to you is not one red cent. We'll wanna put some white letters, FCP amp;G, on the cisterns to identify your farm from the air," he said, reading off the Fentress County Petroleum and Gas initials.
"FCP amp;G? What's that stand for?" Harper asked.
"It's the paint. Ferrous-oxide Cilineum Phosphate. G stands for government," he smiled. "Also, they wanna see if the normal letter paint affects the base coat. If ya say yes, you're gonna be helping your government. Can you imagine the tax savings if all the tanks and jeeps and such don't have to be painted but once every half-century?"
"I don't gotta pay nothin'? And you all're gonna paint all my pipes and cisterns for me and this stuff is gonna last fifty years? What's the catch?" he grinned.
"Kinda strange, ain't it?" Beano grinned. "Your government's finally givin' ya something back."
"Son of a gun," Carl Harper said, figuring this was indeed his lucky day. "When y'all need to start?"
"First thing tomorrow," Beano said. "Just need you t'sign this official release…" He had typed up a release on the motel office typewriter that morning. It didn't look very official, but Beano said once they got that far in the scam, it wouldn't matter. The farmer would already be a laydown. And since they were really going to paint his pipes for him, he was the only mark in this scam who would actually be coming out ahead.
Mr. Harper signed the paper without a second glance, then shook hands with both of them, grinning the whole time.
As they drove away, Victoria couldn't stop smiling.
"We're gonna have to get you a tattoo under your watch," Beano said, and suddenly they were both laughing.
Chapter Fourteen.
PAPER COLLAR JOHN WALKED THEM THROUGH THE BIG Store, which was on the top two floors of the Perm Mutual Building on Market Street. The offices had once belonged to State Mutual Insurance, and had housed the Account Supervisors, Vice-Presidents, and the company's Regional Director. The spare-no-expense, taste-conscious executives had put in matched blond cypresswood paneling and white plush-pile carpet. When S.M.I, had closed this office two months ago, they had removed everything of interest except for some built-in lighting and one brass chandelier in the main conference room. The two floors were now empty, but very promising. Beano, Victoria, and Roger followed Paper Collar John around the floor, over parqueted wood where Roger's toenails tapped musically, then across plush white carpets where everybody's shoe leather squeaked. They walked in and out of sumptuous office suites and secretarial areas with their matching wood walls and paneled filing cabinets. Beano had already filled John in on the moose pasture at Cal Oaks Farm, and had given him Steven Bates's name and number, and the number of the real-estate agent who handled the deserted construction company across from the farm. Now, John was giving Beano the terms of the lease deaclass="underline"