Playing the Predictable

Buck Meltsner, a former con artist trying to live a new life in Odyssey, is shelving library books at school when a boy named Dion Farkus introduces himself. Dion, it turns out, was the masked kid who gave Buck a black eye in the park, though the ski mask with his name stitched across the top made him easy to identify. With Vance King stuck at home under his mother's watchful eye, Dion has taken over Vance's gang, now rebranded as "Team Vance" because it sounds more positive, and he cheerfully announces that Vance has ordered him to ruin Buck's life. He even admits he won't enjoy bullying Buck, since he kind of likes him.

Meanwhile, at Whit's End, a visitor comes looking for "Deputy Meltsner." He is Landon Davidson, a detective who makes up the entire Technological Forensics Department of the Odyssey police, and Detective Polehaus has sent him to recruit Eugene for a case. The Odyssey Bank has discovered a month's worth of small, unauthorized withdrawals, ten or twenty dollars at a time, from completely random accounts, and the money simply vanishes. At the bank, Megyn Rankin, head of the bank's technology area, shows them that the security systems are airtight, with no hint of a break-in anywhere. Eugene and Davidson decide to keep the investigation secret so the thief won't run or grow bolder, and they set up a "honeypot," an unprotected computer meant to lure the hacker into a trap. Davidson, flustered around Megyn, accidentally calls her "honeypot" and hastily insists he was talking about the trap.

When Dion comes to bully Buck after school, Buck talks him into getting lemonade at Whit's End instead. There Dion proudly tells Whit about his Uncle Judd, who broke out of Campbell County Prison, and about being tasered by police who mistook him for his uncle. But the visit sours when Dion threatens to throw a boy named Bradley Shaw into a dumpster. When Whit tells him guests have to follow the rules, Dion leaves. Whit gently asks Buck whether hanging around one of Vance's crowd is good for him right now, but Buck asks for the chance to keep talking to Dion.

At the bank, the honeypot catches nothing, and then Megyn rushes in with alarming news: more than five hundred dollars has just vanished from a large account, right under the detectives' noses. They arrange to shut the system down overnight, disguised as routine maintenance. Driving Buck home, Eugene describes the baffling case in confidential terms, and Buck responds with a story from his old life: a young con artist befriended an old coin collector, earned his trust, and then staged a fake burglary, breaking a window, ransacking drawers, and wearing oversized shoes so the police would hunt for an outside burglar. He was caught because the collector's dog never barked, proving the "burglar" was someone the dog knew. Buck sums it up with the con artists' expression: "Play the predictable, but don't forget the dog." Eugene realizes the evidence at the bank may be designed to point outside while someone works from the inside.

The next morning, Eugene digs into the employees' computer logs and spots a symbol showing that an external device, likely a flash drive, was used at exactly the times of the thefts. The computer in question sits in a shared office where loan officers meet privately with customers, and while every other machine in the bank is a Cymbalon 10 with no external ports, this one turns out to be an older Cymbalon 9 with a flash drive port in the back, apparently overlooked during the upgrade. Matching the login records against the theft times produces one name: V. King. Vince King, who has a son named Vance. Better still, a security camera hidden in the office clock has been watching all along, and the detectives sit down to see what Mr. King has been up to.

Buck, meanwhile, keeps meeting Dion, who can't figure out Buck's angle. At the Field of Screams, Buck levels with him: "I look at you and I see me." He was once on the wrong path too, until people believed he could change. Dion wants nothing to do with the straight and narrow, so Buck tries another approach, offering to use his con artist experience to train Dion and his team, a better path, he says, than following Vance, who showed what he was made of by sending his boys after Buck in the park. Intrigued, Dion invites him to meet the team at the bowling alley in two days. Buck agrees, but says the training will cost something: "Just your loyalty to Vance." The story ends with the mystery hanging: what exactly is Buck up to, and how does Vance's father fit into the thefts at the bank?