Vanishing Act Read Free

sound.
    â€œWhat’s so funny?” she asked.
    â€œNothing.”
    â€œSteven Thomas, don’t start with me.”
    He laughed again. “Jeez, Scarlett, you’re starting to talk like my mother. I’d just forgotten about your accent.”
    â€œMy”—she actually said “ma”—“accent? What about
your
accent?”
    â€œI have no accent.”
    â€œOf course not. Northern is the way normal people talk, right? Everyone else has an accent.”
    He rolled his eyes. She hadn’t changed even a little bit since New Orleans. She was still very tall, very pretty, very Southern, and very smart. Too smart.
    She gave him a playful shove. “Let’s go find out about dinner. We have a whole week to fight.”
    She was right about that. Verbal sparring with her wasn’t easy. But he had to admit it was fun.

    Dinner turned out to be pizza. Stevie, Susan Carol, and Mr. Gibson—who had ordered Stevie to call him Brendan—walked two blocks to Broadway to an old-fashioned pizza joint. They sat at a table and Brendan, who was the younger brother of Susan Carol’s mom, told Stevie a little bit about himself. It turned out that some of Susan Carol’s love of sports came from her uncle. He grew up in North Carolina but somehow became fascinated by hockey at an early age. “We had to get up at five in the morning because there were only two rinks in Greensboro and that was the only ice-time we could get,” he said. “But I loved it and stuck with it.”
    Hockey and good grades got him into Harvard. He also went to law school at Harvard and worked for a big New York firm until three years earlier. “Then I got bored and decided it was time to try something new,” he said.
    His new thing was, as he called it, “player representation,” which Stevie knew meant he was now an agent. He had used his old hockey contacts to get the business started, and he was now the CEO of a small company called ISM. The company represented basketball players, tennis players, and a handful of golfers.
    â€œWhat does ISM stand for?” Stevie asked, picking up a third slice of the pizza, which was better than anything he could remember tasting in Philadelphia. When Gibson said ISM stood for Integrity Sports Management, Stevie must have made a face.
    Susan Carol noticed. “My dad says integrity in sports management is a bigger oxymoron than jumbo shrimp. But Uncle Brendan isn’t like other agents, right, Uncle Brendan?”
    Brendan Gibson laughed. “Our business can be pretty dirty, I’ve learned that,” he said. “But we do try to do things a little bit differently. We rarely recruit big stars—we recruit young athletes who really need some help. And when they sign a contract with us, athletes agree to do a certain amount of charity work every year. How much they do depends on how much money we make for them.”
    Stevie had to admit that sounded like a pretty good idea. He had been around enough sportswriters to know that most agents couldn’t be trusted to give you an honest answer if you asked them the day of the week. Stevie remembered Dick Weiss, his escort at the Final Four, pointing out one big-time agent and saying, “If that guy tells you the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, bet everything you’ve got it’ll come up in the west.”
    Brendan Gibson seemed different from that. And, he figured, if he was Susan Carol’s uncle, he couldn’t be all bad. Plus, he was putting him up for a week.
    â€œWe’ve got a few clients playing in the Open,” he was saying. “We’ll make plans to meet out there and I’ll introduce you to some of them.”
    â€œAnyone I’ve ever heard of?” Stevie asked.
    â€œProbably not yet. There’s one girl I have a lot of hope for, though, who you’d like. She’s just a little older than you guys, and she isn’t a