52stories

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John Pearson didn’t look like a conman. He looked like what he claimed to be, a balding, short mole of a exoteric physics professor, with glasses that made his eyes look like giant moths fluttering against a streetlight. A man that felt uncomfortable in his comfortable vacation clothing, a tshirt that said “Pi r squared? No, pie are round!”, obnoxious bermuda shorts and velcro strapped sandals. John Pearson looked like he would have been as equally uncomfortable in that outfit on a sunny day at the boardwalk as he was in the frigidly airconditioned holding tank of a room he was handcuffed to a chair in.

“Please,” he squealed, to the echoing concrete walls of the room that would have seemed cramped holding three people, but was resoundingly empty and alone with just one, “please!”

The lone door, chipped grey paint over grey steel, opened, and a giant of a man, a linebacker that someone had stuffed into a pinstripe suit, entered. “Please what?” he asked in a strongly accented voice. Through the door after him slouched a weaselly greasy man in a rumpled suit, running his fingers through his oily strands of hair. There was something finetuned about his dishevelment, an aura of disinterest in the world in his scuffed shoes.

John looked between the gorilla and the weasel, his eyes scuttling to either side of his glasses. A sheen of sweat appeared on his upper lip, despite the chill in the room. The giant loomed the wooden chair John had been handcuffed to, and the weasel leaned in the doorframe. There would be no daring physical escape, not when even the smaller man outweighed him by twenty pounds. But surely, John thought, they would listen to reason?

“Please,” John repeated, in a quieter voice, “please let me go. I didn’t cheat, I’ll give the money back, whatever, just let me go!”

The large man and the small man glanced at each other. The small man raised an eyebrow, and the large man nodded grimly.

“Well, John, the thing is…” he drawled out, in that menacing accent common to the port cities of America, “A- we know that you cheated, we ain’t stupid. B- You already gave the casino its money back, you just might not have known about it yet, and C- Most of you, most of you ask for your device back at this point. Me and Rocco here, we kinda got a running bet on it. Normally I win, you kinda disappointed me there.”

John swallowed, having a hard time getting the saliva around his Adam’s apple. Looking at where his hands would have been, if they weren’t fastened behind him, he said, “What… uh, what device?”

The man looked at Rocco, and smiled. Rocco frowned, then shrugged.

“See, our bets nearly always work out, me and Rocco, because we also have a standing bet on what happens if we bring up your devices. Rocco thinks people are basically honest, he says people will fess up at that point. Me? Me, I’m generally the winner. We ain’t dumb, John.”

John’s watery blue eyes knocked back and forth behind his glasses again. A drip of sweat hung itchingly on his nosetip. He didn’t speak.

The large man sighed. He gestured at Rocco, who dug his hand, complete with gnawed off fingernails, through a bulging suit jacket pocket. Finding what he searched for, he pulled out an old-fashioned pocketwatch, snapped it open and closed, and dropped it back into his pocket. John couldn’t keep his eyes from bulging slightly farther than they normally did out of his head.

“Yeah, John. That device. So, what I need you to tell me, for my own edification, is how you can affect roulette wheels with that device. You’re the professor. Educate us.”

“Pah…” John sputtered. Wheels turned in his head, ideas sprang to life. He desperately tried to keep them off his face, to remain neutral.

“Uh, that’s uh a pocketwatch of mine, nothing special, really. It’s not a device.”

Rocco and the man that John was really beginning to dislike looked at each other. “John, my associate and I feel that a bit of honesty on both our parts is called for in this circumstance.” Rocco grinned, the flourescent light shining off his crooked teeth as the giant continued, “We’ll go first. To be honest with you, John, we already opened the watch up. We know it isn’t just a pocketwatch. Now,” he said, cracking his scarred knuckles, “you go.”

John smiled for an instant, then shrugged. “I guess you got me. It’s a watch, yes, but it’s also a… I guess you could call it a gravity gun, in layman’s terms.”

“A gravity gun? John, I find that unbelievable. I believe that you are pulling my, as they say, leg.”

John smiled and shrugged again, his tshirt bunching up on his slight paunch. “It pulls the roulette ball when I want it to. The ball is small, it doesn’t take much.”

“Surely we would have heard of such a thing on the news, John.”

“No, I invented it- with the help of some grad students who didn’t really know what they were working on.” Rocco and the giant exchanged glances. Rocco nodded, and left the room, pulling a cell phone out of his capacious pocket.

The giant man watched the door close, and then leaned swiftly in to John. “John,” he whispered, “here’s where we’re supposed to play good cop and bad cop with you. But I really think you have a thing going here, and they pay for crap around here. So, whatcha gonna do is, when Rocco comes back in, I’m going to have you demonstrate the device, right, get his attention, see? Then I’m gonna hit him from behind, snap his greasy little neck, we hit three or four casinos tonight, you give me a million, I let you go, we call it square. Deal?”

John’s eyes were pinned behind the thick glasses, like insects in a museum. He swallowed, and squeaked, “Deal.”

The man glanced back and forth between John’s eyes, which remained motionless. He paused on one for a second, then leaned back, still looking straight into John’s eyes.

Rocco broke the spell by reentering the room. He glanced at the giant and nodded twice, sharply.

The giant said, “Alright, Rocco, why don’t you uncuff the prof, and he can show us how this gravity thingy works.”

Rocco glanced sideways at his partner, then nodded again. He unlocked the cuffs with a key from that same pocket, and handed John the pocketwatch.

John eagerly started twisting dials on the watch, as he explained, “Gravity comes in both wave and particle types, the particles are called gravitons, and until recently, gravitons were considered theoretical. By my research-”

The giant interrupted. “In your explanation, make sure you explain where your twin comes in.”

John stuttered, “My- my twin?”

“A man, looks exactly like you, dressed in the same outfit even. He was watching the roulette wheel from the second floor slot machines. Got up and left the machines right after you hit on three consecutive numbers. Went into a bathroom and disappeared. Explain about him. Tell us where to find him.”

“Uh…” John finished twisting settings and glanced at the watch in triumph. “He’s… uh… he’s me.” He pressed a concealed stud three times rapidly in succession.

Nothing happened.

John looked at the watch, and started to stutter again, “I mean, uh, what I mean by saying that he’s me, is that, uh, he’s actually my brother, he has another gravity gun, and he has to chain his efforts with mine, and uh…” He had reset the watch and tried pressing the stud in its sequence again.

Nothing happened.

Rocco and the giant looked at each other, and they both nodded at the same time. The giant started sauntering to John, while Rocco dug in his pocket.

“John,” said the giant, “the thing is, you shouldn’t have agreed to Rocco’s demise. That carries a stiff penalty, where I’m from. In one way, I’m kinda happy you did, because that makes my job a little easier. Also, Rocco always bets that you people won’t agree to off him. He also thinks, that if he was in your shoes, he would try to do good with his power, not just get rich quick. He’s a good soul, our Rocco. Not exactly like me,” he cracked his knuckles, looming over John, “I know too much about things. I know people will save themselves before Rocco, I know what I gotta do to those people, I know what a time machine looks like, we get one about once a year here, and I know that they won’t work without that.”

Rocco had pulled a small crystal out of his pocket. A crystal that until recently had been a rather vital part of John’s device.

As John’s hand went limp and the watch slipped through his fingers, Rocco cleared his throat, and said in an accent similar to the giant’s, that didn’t seem so common to the 21st century anymore, “Why do you people always go to casinos? I would stop crime, me.”

The giant smiled at Rocco. “So would I.”