Grift

By Jason Mosberg

Why would a 17-year-old girl pretend to be a high class escort?

Piper is a con artist whose canvas is the city of Las Vegas. She rolls with a crew of young grifters including a card-counting genius, a tourist-hustling pool shark, and a pocket-picking magician. Together, this crew of teenage outlaws live with their mentor Max in the penthouse of a hotel casino. They work hard and play harder. But unlike the others, Piper must balance her hyper-real Vegas fantasy with the reality of raising her 14-year-old half-sister Sophie. Disaster strikes when the Las Vegas mafia kidnaps Sophie and demands a multimillion-dollar ransom. With only five days to piece together the money, the crew races the clock to save her.

"Ocean's Eleven for the Reddit set, with a twist of Oliver Twist floating in a dirty martini none of the characters are old enough to order. Jason Mosberg deftly explores the very real world of Vegas runaways and misfits through the lens of a heist movie Sinatra's great-grandaughter would be proud of." -Sean Beaudoin, author of Wise Young Fool

"Thrilling read... couldn't put it down!" -- New York Times best selling author Aubrey Rose

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jason Mosberg
• Release date: Mar 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311264084

Jason Mosberg

Claw Machines are my only vice...

Book preview

How is this happening? – Piper

CHAPTER ONE – The Strip

How does this work?

For the first time, I look directly into his eyes. It’s hard to make eye contact in the poorly lit Riviera Hotel and Casino. Hard to make eye contact anywhere in Las Vegas. Too dim in the casinos, too bright in the sun.

He seems anxious. Maybe because he’s out of his element. Or maybe because he’s not good with women. I give him a warm smile to loosen him up.

Well, unless you want me here in the casino, we start by getting a room.

He forces a one-syllable laugh.

What’s your name?

Mark.

At the mention of his name, I do everything possible to avoid smiling. I heard somewhere that it takes 10 muscles in your face to smile and 30 to frown. How many does it take to keep from smiling?

Madeline, right?

I nod. But Madeline’s not my name. Piper’s my name. I have a roster of about eight fake names, but I always circle back to Madeline. My mother’s name.

Mark and I wander over to the front desk. One room costs 40 bucks. On Friday and Saturday nights, a room here, booked the day of, might cost over two or three hundred. But on some random Tuesday? They just want to get you in the casino.

He fumbles for his wallet, but I insist.

He seems like a gentleman. Lets me into the elevator first. Opens the door for me. Doesn’t gawk at me. I wonder if this gentleman has a wife at home in Indiana or Rhode Island or Arizona or wherever he’s from.

Once I close the door to the hotel room, he slides his arms around my waist.

There’s one rule I have.

No kissing?

I giggle what I consider a sexy-giggle. "No. That depends on how things go. I kiss when I want to kiss."

So what’s the rule?

I always collect the money first.

Oh. Of course. Mark draws his wallet. He counts out 15 crisp hundred-dollar bills. In this age, people rarely pay for anything with this much cash unless it’s scandalous. Drugs. Gambling. Sex.

The cash never stops flowing in Vegas.

Thank you.

He hasn’t inhaled in a few seconds. Or blinked. He’s waiting to ask me something.

Will you dance for me?

Damn it. There it is.

Dance means strip. No one pays an escort to do the funky chicken fully clothed.

I’m not really in the mood to slowly remove layers of clothing while dancing, but the request gives me a quick in for booze. I glance at the ground and use my most innocent voice. Sure, but I might need some champagne then.

After one glass of champagne, I dance. I don’t enjoy doing it, but it’s not the worst. It’s slow. Tasteful. He’s not expecting me to shake my ass in his face. He can get that over at the Pussycat Lounge for $35. He wants to see class. That’s what he’s paying for. Class.

Fifteen minutes of slow, rhythmic swaying pass. Feels like fifty minutes to me. Afterwards, I stand in my bra and underwear, undergarments that cost twice as much as the room. His eyes have grown bigger and his looks longer. The word gentleman no longer comes to mind.

I pour myself another glass of champagne. After a few sips, I rub my head and grimace.

You okay?

Yeah, just…didn’t eat dinner. Reminds me of this time a couple years ago when I was on a field trip with my class. Me and my friends snuck out and stole a couple bottles of wine from this drug store. One of my friends…well, she was obsessed with grunge music. You know, the 90’s, Nirvana and…well, anyway so we hid the bottles in her baggy jeans and flannel shirt. But none of us had eaten dinner, so of course we all ended up getting sick.

He takes the bait.

"How old are you?"

Seventeen.

His jaw drops. As if his chin instantly gained five pounds.

You’re 17 years old?

I’ll be 18 in two months.

A lie. I’ll be 18 in more like ten months. For a moment, it looks like he’s changing his mind, but they never change their mind.

As he puts his hands on me, I move to my purse.

I’ll feel better if I take my medicine. I pull out some prescription pills. They wash down like two little barrels going over a waterfall of champagne.

His impatience grows. He places his hand on my shoulder. I want to smack his hand away, but I have to pretend his fingers don’t feel reptilian against my skin. Pretend his reaction to my being 17 years old doesn’t make me want to puke on him.

I put my hands on his arm, but then I reel back. He sees then that I’m ill.

Hey. Are you sure you’re okay?

I try to stand. But I can’t. I collapse on the couch.

He rushes over to me, shakes me a few times.

Madeline! Madeline!

A driblet of saliva runs down my lip to my chin. It tickles like crazy.

He shakes me a few more times but realizes this girl is not going to wake up.

As soon as the door closes, I spring to my feet. I want to get out of the suite ASAP. Just in case the guy experiences a sudden burst of conscience. They never do, but I still have my rules.

I walk past the elevator to the stairwell, but I don’t walk down. I walk up four flights. A different key card I had in my purse unlocks the door to room 1216.

On the bed sits the bag I left. I dump out the items: denim overalls I plan to throw over my dress, an extra-baggy hooded sweatshirt, and a baseball cap with a built-in red ponytail wig.

Thirty seconds later down the elevator rides an inconspicuous tomboy.

Fairly smooth, I think to myself as the elevator descends. I wasn’t in the mood to dance, so that was a drag, but at least he hadn’t insisted on paying for the room. If he had, then his card would have been on file with the hotel, and he’d have been much less likely to flee. In which case, I would have needed to use a different variation of the con. I’ve used dozens of variations.

I scan the lobby for the mark, but even if he were there, he probably wouldn’t recognize me. Now I take a moment to smile at the coincidence of his name.

Chances are Mark wouldn’t have stuck around. So you might think the $80 I spent on the two rooms went to waste. But it’s worth it. Worth it for that one time you get seen.

The $80 isn’t the only money that comes out of the $1,500 I just scored. $150 goes to the spotter, who in this case is a fat man named Randy who played Single A professional baseball before he began working as a telephone representative for an escort service called First Class. And of the $1,270 that’s left over, 90% goes to Max. I’m sure 90% seems like a lot, but I owe everything to Max. Compared to everything, 90% doesn’t seem too bad.

From the lobby, I walk outside, hitting the dry desert air just as the afternoon sun disappears below the towers of Circus-Circus. I head south on The Strip – I’ve got another appointment at 7:00.

--How is this happening? One minute, I’m living this dream in Las Vegas, caught in a hyperreal, fantastic version of reality.--

CHAPTER TWO – Butterflies on Surfboards

After stopping in the Venetian for a slice from my second favorite pizza place, Pizzeria de Enzo, I continue down The Strip, forced to inhale the street-level Las Vegas odor. The unpleasant combination of booze, cheap perfume, exhaust, trash, sewage, cigarette smoke, and BO.

Pedestrian traffic always bottlenecks outside of the Imperial Palace because of construction. So I cut through the casino to avoid the congested sidewalk.

Passing by the poker tables, I can feel that nervous excitement in my stomach. People always describe these moments as a tingling, but my stomach doesn’t tingle. The feeling more resembles a continuous rush, like a wave that won’t break.

Other than poker, only one other thing in Las Vegas gives me this feeling.

A glance at my watch reveals 55 minutes before my next appointment. And I still have to change. I can play for a half hour. (Hmm, was it to avoid the heavy pedestrian traffic that I decided to cut through the casino?)

I sit down at a small-stakes poker table where I recognize the dealer. She knows I’m underage, but I know for a twenty-dollar tip, she won’t squeal.

Thirty minutes of Texas Hold’em won’t be enough to win much. It’s just enough time to learn the ins and outs of the other players at the table. But it’ll do more than pass the time. Shit, it’ll be fun.

It’s here, in my moment of bliss, that I consider Mark’s current state.

The beauty of that perfect con is that Mark is probably already at McCarran International Airport. He’d never report anything because he doesn’t know he got conned. Mark departs Las Vegas thinking he left an intoxicated 17-year-old hooker unconscious in a hotel room. He’ll spend the rest of his life wondering whether I died from a bad combination of prescription pills (actually vitamin C tablets) and alcohol (most of which I poured out when he wasn’t looking), not whether he was taken by a con artist.

Randy’s reputation remains intact because Mark would never go back to the escort service and say, Hey, by the way, I left one of your girls unconscious in a hotel room.

And even if he suspected foul play, what can he say to the police? That while hiring an underage prostitute, he was conned? It’s a common fallacy that prostitution is legal in Vegas. Widespread? Yes. Legal? No.

There always exists the danger of seeing someone you’ve conned. Not likely in a town where daily traffic hits a hundred thousand people. What makes it even more unlikely is that Mark will probably avoid Vegas out of fear.

Of course, however small the odds, there still exists the chance of running into a former mark. It happened to me once. I was walking through Paris. The casino, not the city. Never been to France. Never really been too far outside of Las Vegas. So, in Paris, directly under one of the legs of the Eifel Tower, I ran smack into a lawyer I’d conned four months back. I froze. But it was he who turned and nearly ran out of the casino. That is the beauty of a perfect con.

A man with a cheap toupee raises me twenty. I don’t have shit. But I know he doesn’t have shit either. (Note: I inherited a foul mouth from Madeline, and although I’ve cut back, a damn or a fuck still slips out here and there.) I immediately re-raise him forty. His attempt to bluff worked as well as his attempt to convince everyone he isn’t bald. Fearful I’m holding great cards, he folds; the pot’s mine.

Not one great poker player sits at the table. Two decent players and the rest are tourists to the game just as they are tourists to this city.

No-limit Texas Hold’em has become the most popular poker game in the world. And it’s the only game I’ll play.

In round one, each player is dealt two cards face down (pocket cards). Then in round two, three communal cards (the flop) are dealt face up. In round three, another communal card (the turn) is dealt face up. And in round four, a fifth face-up communal card (the river) is dealt. Each player tries to make their best five-card hand from their seven cards (two of their own and five communal). Oh, and it’s not just for high fives or bragging rights; there’s betting after each round.

I’m loath to walk away from the table. My forty grew to eighty, but a twenty-dollar thank you to the dealer leaves me a mere twenty up. Pocket change compared to the winnings from the con I just pulled.

***

I show up for my 7:00 PM at the Flamingo. Just as I walk inside, a bride and groom ride the escalator down from the wedding chapel. Her long legs and heels make her a full inch taller than him, and he stands nearly six feet. A mobster named Bugsy Siegel named this very hotel after the long legs of his girlfriend. I wonder if his lady’s legs were as long as this bride’s.

I head farther into the casino, looking for my mark. The description: a thirty-something, 6’2" man wearing a grey three-piece suit and a bowler hat. Sounds like a high roller. Or a hipster.

There he is.

In addition to the hat and suit, he wears sunglasses despite being indoors. Vegas remains a city saturated with sunglasses. Maybe because it’s sunny. Or maybe it’s just a trend Elvis set in stone. Or maybe it’s because sunglasses hide the deceit lurking in the eyes behind them.

As I approach, I see two gentlemen waiting. Maybe one’s just an assistant or a bodyguard. Or maybe one’s just a stranger that struck up a conversation with my potential client about his hipster hat. But I can’t take any risks. I was told I was meeting one man. You gotta be willing to walk away from a job at the first sign of trouble. So I walk.

Max won’t be angry that I walked. Max would be angry if I stayed.

The walk home dissolves my adrenaline. Any matchstick man, grifter, streetwalker, hustler, swindler, or liar who tells you their adrenaline doesn’t go up during a con is working you over.

***

Arriving at Treasure Island, I wave to a valet named Federico. Yes, I live in the Treasure Island Hotel & Casino.

Cutting through the legions of slot machines, I walk past the glazed eyes and broken hearts of gamblers who are busy at work reinforcing Vegas’s nickname: The City of Lost Wages.

At the tower elevators in the back, I use a special keycard to activate the elevator all the way up to the top.

The penthouse.

As soon as I open the door, a streak of blond hair zips past, disappearing from the main room.

The penthouse where I’ve lived with Max for the past five years is modeled after the deck of a cruise ship. The central living area resembles the deck; the various rooms that surround it function as the cabins. A loft space gives the living area the facade of tiered decks.

The center of the living area has a plexiglass ceiling that slides open like the roof of a football arena, so the pool in the center of the room is indoor or outdoor. It’s very Las Vegas: a touch of the button, a pull of a lever, and one thing becomes another.

A newly placed plastic slide spans the gap between the balcony of the loft and the edge of the pool. Rob looks ready to ride his skateboard down the slide into the water, no doubt what captivated the head of blond hair before she fled.

Rob’s a 17-year-old pickpocket from New York. His personality is dually influenced by his love of skateboarding and hip-hop music. He has a tendency to live on the wild side. Sometimes he acts like an absolute idiot, but he’ll snatch your wallet before you can call him one.

Do it or don’t. Kim seems more annoyed than curious. She sits on the far side of the pool. Her skinny legs dangle in the water.

Kim grew up in New Orleans and learned to play poker and blackjack aboard riverboat casinos. Her real name is Katrina, but I’m sure I don’t need to explain why that became an unfortunate name post 2005.

No one knows how old she is. Maybe 15. Maybe 25.

Besides her ambiguous age, the other Asian clichés she engages include a fondness for dumplings and a predilection for math and technology. Of Vegas’s 72 casinos, most of them have barred her from playing blackjack. Counting cards isn’t illegal. But the casinos can refuse service to anyone, which mostly refers to anyone counting cards.

The casinos all use facial recognition software, and their security teams share a database. Thus getting kicked out of one casino for counting cards pretty much bans you from all of them. However, on numerous occasions Kim hacked into their systems and erased her file. It was a cycle. They caught her. She got banned. She erased the file. She counted cards.

Counted. Caught. Banned. Erased. Back to counting.

This went on for some time before they upped their firewalls. Max has since shown Kim how to play without getting caught. Kim tended to work on her own, but Max taught her how counting cards can be safer and more productive as a team effort.

Rob takes a deep breath, about to attempt the suicidal stunt. I shake my head at him with as much condescension as I can muster. And I can muster a lot of goddamn condescension.

"I’m guessing by the fact that you just built this ramp and are about to slide down into the pool – as only an absolute maniac would – that Max is not here."

Nope. He said he’d be back after dinner. And with that note (like that was his big concern: getting caught by Max), Rob hops on his board and skates down the 45-degree plastic ramp. He looks shocked at how fast the board picks up speed but manages to stay on. He jumps off at the very end, landing in the middle of the pool in an awkward collision of person and water. He surfaces celebrating, and don’t get me wrong, the stunt did merit celebration, but I can’t grant him the satisfaction. I’ve already turned and walked away, pretending I didn’t see any of it.

Piper. Piper, did you catch that? Kim, you saw it, right? That was effing awesome! I’m going to do it again. Kim, get your camera.

I walk to the other side of the room. The game area. Pool table. Ping-pong. Retro arcade games. Air hockey. Claw machine (it’s free but impossible to pick up any of the stuffed animals, which have collected a layer of dust over the years). Six flat-screens. Every video game console ever – from Atari all the way up to the latest Nintendo that hasn’t even officially hit the market yet. Thousands of Blu-rays. A karaoke machine.

Mars sits on a couch watching football. Three different games on three different TVs. He repeatedly taps his knuckle on the table next to him. A knuckle smudged with green chalk.

Mars is an 18-year-old pool player from Texas. Well, more than a pool player, he’s a shark. A great white shark.

How long was she out here?

Mars doesn’t look up from the games. I dunno. Twenty minutes. Give her a break, Pi.

Give her a break? Don’t tell me to give her a break. Not everybody can play the role of the cool uncle.

Mars only shrugs back. The guy is harmless, and I’m happy to let him play the role of the cool uncle.

I head down a hallway that leads to the different bedrooms of the penthouse, stop at the last one, and enter. That blond streak of hair I saw a couple minutes ago belongs to Sophie. My sister. She sits at her desk, writing in a notebook.

I saw you.

I know.

She looks up at me and her eyes burn into mine. Replace her braids of blond hair with snakes, and she’d make a perfect teenage Medusa.

I debate over whether to launch into a lecture. In the end, I refrain. Choose your battles, I remind myself. How’s it coming?

Sophie shrugs. She’s 14 years old. Eighth grade. Well, the equivalent of eighth grade. I make her do these educational tapes and workbooks that correspond with each grade level. I ordered them from this homeschooling website. She hates them.

When you’re finished, you can come out and hang out, okay?

Whatever.

***

Back in my own room, I change into sweats. Most girls would kill for my closet. Dresses from every top designer. Hundreds of pairs of shoes. Dozens of pairs of jeans. Various designer rompers and jumpsuits. Twenty skirts. A hundred different tops.

One time, in the middle of the night, Max took me to a distribution zone where Guess, Louis Vuitton, and Calvin Klein reroute clothes to 60 different outlet stores in Nevada, Arizona, and Southern California. Max told me to walk through and pick out whatever I wanted.

Hard to put a price on what you don’t pay for, but if I had to guess, I’d say my closet is probably worth $50K, easily. Needless to say, if I’m not on the clock, I can be found wearing sweats. Sweats and knock-off Croqs, which I’m proud to say I paid for the old fashioned way: $35 at Target.

I walk back into the living area just as Max enters the penthouse. He waves to me. But then he sees the slide. Irritation washes over him, but not confusion or surprise. He knows it was Rob.

He whistles. Max’s sharp, piercing whistle = time to talk business. We all congregate at a large dining table. Everyone’s here. Except Jesse.

How’d everyone do?

Kim hands him a brown lunch bag. I got heat at two different casinos and had to bounce. Had friendly eyes over at the Bellagio, so I played for an hour. Friendly eyes means someone in the surveillance room was on her payroll. Well, Max’s payroll. In fact, those were the same friendly eyes that first tipped Max off to Kim.

Max takes the bag. Then looks to Rob who hands over his own paper bag. Any trouble? Max is always more interested in avoiding trouble than making money. And he’s really f-ing interested in making money.

No. Nothing really. I played the Good Samaritan for a couple hours with that security guard over at the MGM Grand.

Max nods, content. Rob doesn’t

Reviews for Grift

[Jee Ann · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

If you want a story about teen cons who outsmart mobsters in the glitz and glamour of the Las Vegas strip, then this is the novel for you.

It's like "21" meets "Ocean's 11" or "Art of the Steal", which were all great heist films that revolve around scheming groups determined to take down a similarly scheming enemy.

What makes Grift ultra-amazing is that these kids are 17, 18, 21 - and the romance? It's just a tiny thing, but the characters are AWESOME!

You might guess the twist, but only towards the end, I tell ya. This is such a thrilling read that deserves its own universe, its series.

It reminds me of Maximum Ride's team. Piper is a smart young girl who takes care of her crew. She's also very brave and selfless.

Love their team/family and hoping to see more of them!