Eli started typing the names of large banking institutions into the browser bar of a series of new tabs. It was a desperate bid for information and resources. Usually the accounts logged you out.

Usually.

But Jo—oh God, Jo—had left herself signed into her password manager. Eli could practically envision her clicking Trust This Device and not giving it a second thought. He found an account where two-step verification hadn’t been turned on and he was, miraculously, in. It was a petty-cash account, but Eli had money to play with now. He had resources.

He cracked his knuckles. He opened a new tab.

What could he do with nine thousand dollars?

As he searched, he found a staggering number of pyramid schemes. Weight-loss supplements. Protein powders. Laxative teas. Tupperware. Makeup. The inventory was irrelevant, really. But the key was to buy volume and then trick someone else into buying more volume.

Eli wanted to get rich quick with a low-capital investment here. Not get stuck with massive overhead costs. The more he searched, the more he saw that all those multilevel marketing schemes cost people money. Besides, if he was going to buy inventory, it had to look like something the bookstore could legitimately sell. Nobody came to Wild Nights looking for detox-laxative tea. At least not intentionally.

He needed a way to flip the cash in this account into more cash. If he could do that successfully, maybe he could help Jo get enough to buy a stake in the bookstore.

There had to be another way to flip the money.

Maybe gambling?

There was online poker, but it was difficult to wire the cash now that gambling online was illegal. There was no good way to funnel the bookstore’s funds into the online accounts.

Not good enough.

Maybe he could buy into some kind of cryptocurrency. But it would take days to figure out how to transfer the cash, then another few weeks at least of growth, if it even went up at all.

Eli didn’t have that kind of time.

Friday. He had until Friday.

It was nearly 1:00 A.M. when Eli found the inventory of Jordans.

They were older and more rare, the kind that could really go for something. The photos looked good. Eli noticed a couple of potentially super-unique items—a retro Air Jordan IV and a pair of kicks that looked like they could have been those Nike Mags—the Back to the Future II ones.

The price was low enough to account for the fact that the seller wanted to off-load them, but not so low as to ring alarm bells. And the total inventory was priced around the nine-thousand-dollar mark. The sale of the individual items all together was worth at least eighteen to twenty-one thousand, though. That was what Eli had gotten from googling all the shoes he could ID and seeing what they were going for.