Fiction- Short Story

Con Man

One more way to take what wasn’t his

Image by Freepik

The first time Mark Henning discovered his gift, he was nine years old and holding a stack of his father’s business cards. The embossed letters read “Henning & Associates, Investment Consulting,” though there were no associates and precious little consulting. What his father did have was a basement full of old raffle tickets from the Sacred Heart School Fall Festival, 1987.

Mark had watched his father work that particular con for three months. The old man would buy a single legitimate ticket, then spend evenings in the basement with a printing kit, reproducing them by the hundred. He’d sell them door to door in the nicer neighborhoods, pocketing everything. The beauty was in the timing. By the time the festival rolled around, the real organizers had already collected their money and moved on. Nobody tracked individual ticket sales. Nobody checked serial numbers.

But Mark saw the flaw. His father was thinking too small.

Mark watched his father’s fingers stain with ink, feeling something click into place in his mind like tumblers in a lock. “Dad,” he said, his voice steadier than it had ever been before, “why sell them to people who might actually go to the festival?”