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the truck onto my street.
    â€œIs that why you didn’t leave like everyone else?”
    â€œI didn’t leave because this town is my home. After Mrs. Chupick passed away, I couldn’t see moving anywhere else. It may not be much, but all of my memories are in that little farmhouse.” We pull up to my house. “If you want to have a real sense of community, you have to marry a town like you marry a person. It’s for better or worse. Brentwood may have a sickness right now, but I vowed to stay in sickness and in health. Understand?”
    â€œI do.” The Free City had a lot of things going for it, but a sense of community was never one of them. Even at the academy, being a year younger than all my classmates made it tough to have any real friends. Moving out to Brentwood was the first time in my life I had either, so I do understand where Mr. Chupick is coming from.
    â€œBesides,” he says as he lifts the shifter into park, “where would I go?”
    Where indeed. I thank him for the ride and throw the door closed behind me.
    I hear Martin mumbling something in the living room. He does this sometimes when he’s trying to figure something out. Whatever it is, he can tell me about it in the morning. I grab the rotted banister and start upstairs but then stop for a moment to listen to some of Martin’s mumbling. I can’t make out the words but they sound unusually spastic.
    What is it that has him so frazzled?
    It’s only two steps to the landing but it hurts every inch of my body. Toes, knees, the balls of my feet, they’re all sore. I drag myself around the stairs and into the living room where Martin is pacing back and forth in a stylishly loose-fitting black suit with polished black shoes. His white shirt is unbuttoned at the neck. His unlinked cuffs dangle haphazardly from his jacket sleeves, and his hair is tied back cleanly. If James Bond were a nerd, he’d be Martin Baxter.
    â€œBollinger Bands,” he keeps saying. “Bollinger Bands.”
    I have no idea what that means.
    â€œIt’s just Bollinger Bands applied to a card distribution.”
    â€œHow was the game?” I ask.
    â€œYou expect abnormalities in the data set, of course. You expect those abnormalities, but over time those abnormalities should be normalized by the moving average. The standard deviations do allow for a margin of error.” He places his fingers on his lips and purses them. “I did everything right,” he says.
    â€œMartin?” But he isn’t listening.
    â€œI did everything right. I kept the count. I calculated everything, everything on the fly. I kept a forty-card moving average and bound it high and low with one standard deviation. That tells you your entry and exit points, right?”
    â€œIf you say so.” I barely grasp what he’s saying.
    â€œI tracked it all. I knew exactly which way the table was trending. When it was trending up, I pressed up accordingly. When it started going the other way, I pressed back down. I split my tens exactly when I was supposed to, doubled when the numbers said to double, stayed when they said not to. Hit. Stick. Double. Split. I did everything right. Even on the insurance, which is normally a sucker bet, I knew precisely when the numbers favored hedging. I did everything right.” Martin turns to look at me. “I did everything right. The numbers were not wrong.” Now I can see the fear in his eyes. My stomach drops as Martin lifts his glasses off the bridge of his nose and pinches his sinuses. “Fifty thousand.”
    â€œYou owe the entire stake to the syndicate?”
    â€œIt was a zero-sum game,” says Martin. “All or nothing.”
    He doesn’t need to say it. We both know what that means. This is exactly how the syndicate operates. First they get their hooks into you, then they own you. In general, you don’t ever want to owe the syndicate any amount of