The Mysterious Stranger (The Confidence Game 3)

Chapter One

If everything went to plan, this would be the last night Zeke would sleep in his own bed for the best part of a year.

He’d miss his bed. It was a Grand Master. Extra-long, firm, pocket springs, viscose memory foam, silk-blend topper. He’d miss his cool gel-infused pillow and his bamboo cotton sheets. He’d miss the nights he crashed into that bed late, exhausted from a night out, or lay about with a book, or shared it with a playmate.

He’d miss playmates.

Hopefully they’d miss him too.

If they got lucky, the job wouldn’t take a full year. They’d find the information they needed to break up the cult in less time. Military-grade weapons. Money laundering. Abuse. Worse.

He kept his eyes down on the scuffed wooden floor, his hands clasped. He’d been coming to this church basement two nights a week for months, saying little, avoiding eye contact, unshaven and looking like he’d just rolled out of someone else’s bed and didn’t own a comb.

It was time to spin his story.

The therapist Consuela lightly touched his shoulder. “Are you ready to talk?”

He felt a little sorry for Consuela. Professional, empathetic, good at her job. She had no idea who she had sitting in her grief counseling session. If she did, she’d likely recommend a course of action more legal than psychological. But this was it. Time to make his play and chance that the one friend he’d carefully cultivated here would make his final move.

He looked up and caught Spencer’s eye. Friend was a loose term given to Spencer, it was an unearned honor. He cleared his throat and looked at the floor again.

“My name is Zack Woods.” Zack Woods was close enough to Zeke Sherwood that he’d have no trouble adjusting to the change, and the two names shared enough similarity that if he slipped he’d be able to convince people they’d misheard. He didn’t want anyone mishearing anything tonight.

“I haven’t spoken up before because my situation is a little unusual, but Spencer encouraged me, so here I go.”

“This is a safe place, Zack. No one here will judge you,” Consuela said.

A quick smile flashed her way and he went on. “I was cursed to be born into a wealthy family.” He shrugged a shoulder. “Money isn’t everything. My mom died when my sister Rosie and I were kids. Broke her neck in a fall. My father was abusive. He might’ve killed her. We’ll never know. He starved Rosie and me. Beat us. Kept us out of school.” He spoke in short, chopped-up sentences to signal his discomfort. “It wasn’t so bad for me, but for Rosie.” He lowered his gaze to the floor. “I still don’t know everything he did to her. She became an addict.”

He took his phone out and flicked up a photo of his partner in crime, Aurora Rae Archer. Rory was probably at the gym right now in her boxing class or at her favorite bookshop, making herself one with the new releases, spending big. No one had ever abused Rory. “I nearly lost her and she’s all the family I have.”

There were carefully prepared before and after shots. Rory looking stunningly glamorous in a skimpy swimsuit, and then made-up and photoshopped to look bony and sick, her eyes sunken, her skin a mess, her hair brittle. The faked track marks on her pale arms might be overkill but not in terms of the story he needed to tell. He passed his phone to the man on his right, knowing this was a dramatic moment everyone would want to see.

“My dad was murdered.” He watched the faces of the members of the group as the phone got passed hand to hand around the circle. What he saw on Spencer’s face made him drop his chin, so he didn’t give away any hint of a smile.

“Zack, you don’t have to censor yourself. Please go on if you feel you can,” said Consuela.

“Rosie and I were suspects for a long time, but the police did good work and found the killer. A carjacker. It’s been rough. Rosie went to rehab and she’s clean now. I came here hoping it might stop the nightmares, you know, help me work out what I’m supposed to do with my life now that I’m free.”

“Thank you, Zack. I know that wasn’t easy for you. Is there anything else you’d like to share with the group?”

Aw hell, yeah. He’d like to apologize to Consuela for his subterfuge. Tell Rita that her husband was a shithead and she had no reason to feel bad he was dead. Make sure Abdul got it that his wife would want him to move on, and Dae-Jung that he had a lot of life left to live and it wasn’t his fault his brother got cancer.

And he’d like to break Spencer’s nose. At least twice.

Every genuine member of this group deserved to heal, but he couldn’t say any of that because Zack Woods was depressed and withdrawn and the less he spoke up the more vulnerable he appeared and that’s just how he needed this to go.

Isolated, defenseless, lost. Three checks on the list of best suited to be recruited into a doomsday cult. Rory in her starring role as Rosie ticked off a few more. Disillusioned, damaged, desperate to belong. If he’d done his job here, he’d be graduating this basement, and with Rory by his side, heading for the valley stronghold of the Continuance, home to the five thousand followers of Orrin Epcot, who was preparing to survive the imminent end of the world.

Sure, maybe they’d all be wiped out by a rogue asteroid before breakfast. And if not, in three-billion years, earth would explode in a ball of fire anyway. But barring a cataclysmic event, the likelihood was that Zeke would be looking for coffee, eggs and waffles every morning for the next seventy-odd years. That was certainly the plan.

But not if you bought what Epcot was selling. The imminent collapse of civil society. A world turned violent as it

’s challenged by climate change, political corruption, racism and wealth concentration. Epcot was a big fan of economic collapse, war, starvation, the return of mutating untreatable diseases like leprosy, and the idea that only those who were specially chosen and prepared would survive.

If you bought what Orrin Epcot was selling, any day now the only way Zeke could get an egg for breakfast was if he had his own chickens, which he guarded from attack with his own army.

Epcot might even be right about hard times coming. Everything this self-styled prophet had to say had a grain of truth in it. But since he was a lying, cheating, thieving con man who was profiting from the fear he engendered in followers, Zeke was willing to go to the wall to say he’d be showing up for breakfast at his favorite café for a long time to come.

It was one thing to believe in being prepared for devastating emergencies, or long-term civil unrest. To have your own underground bunker and supplies of food and water stored away. It was smart to know the thirty-seven things you should hoard, that a crayon could burn for twenty minutes.

The Latter-day Saints had a five-hundred-page manual full of sensible advice for shit times, and every Sherwood had a go-bag filled with all the things they’d need to start a new life if they had to cut and run.

But building your own settlement, a gated, isolated community cut off from the rest of the world to house your own survivalist cult was taking things to the extreme, especially when you were taking advantage of people too hurt, lost and vulnerable to know better than to hand over all their money and trust you with their lives.

Oh, and who could afford the privilege of being conned.

“Zack. Anything else you want to say?”

He looked across at Spencer. Orrin Epcot’s recruiter. He was a worm who haunted groups like this looking for the right candidates with the right backgrounds and bank balances to bring into the fold. He hadn’t been able to contain his reaction to the pictures of Rory. Her tragedy was his opportunity.

Zeke shook his head. “Just that I think everyone here is going to be okay and thanks for listening.” It was the best apology for wasting their time and attention he could give. Well, that and the whacking great big anonymous donation to Consuela’s community programs.

He tuned out when another group member started talking and in a few minutes the meeting broke up. He knew Spencer would follow him outside. He knew tonight their conversation would be different as it shifted from Spencer educating him, to finally inviting him and Rory to join the Continuance community.

Yeah, he was going to miss his bed.

Chapter Two

In retrospect, trying to fox Zeke into thinking she didn’t have a hangover after the farewell party only proved Rory did. She wouldn’t have made that mistake if her head wasn’t throbbing.

Good thing they hadn’t sighted another car on this highway to nowhere for a good hour because he laughed hard at her “I feel great”, swerving over the midline, making her brain slosh about in her skull and her stomach groan in protest.

“Aurora Rae, if my brother, our hotshot boss, knew you were going into this hungover, he’d paddle your delectable ass.”

No one called her Aurora Rae except Zeke, who’d been on that bar top, shirtless, shaking his own delicious ass with her last night.

“He would not.” Ass paddling was more Zeke’s speed than Cal’s.

Cal had only ever touched her tenderly when they were together as lovers, and partners in a series of long cons. It was over a year since they’d broken up and she still missed the romance of him, but the break-up itself no longer hurt so badly.

Wished she could say the same about the embarrassment over how she’d behaved when it went down.

Cal had been honest about his feelings. He loved her, but he wasn’t in love with her. His answer to her so-when-are-we-getting-married question was the gentlest, clearest, never. It had cut like no other truth, a diamond scoring the fragile glass of her heart. Cal was her happy-ever-after, but turns out she was never his and that’d upended her world. Made her doubt she saw colors true, could tell birdsong from a warning siren, because she’d missed all the signs.