Free Dead Cat Bounce by Nic Bennett

screens in front of him.
    “Well, I can give you twenty minutes, but after that you’ll have to stop entering these mysterious numbers of yours.”
    “Dad—”
    His father cut him off. “I’ll tell you what—I’ll ask the Baron if you can come back again tomorrow.”
    “You will?” Jonah exclaimed. He turned back around to face his dad, a giant smile plastered across his face.
    “I will,” David announced, grinning awkwardly in return. “But,” he said, his features taking on their usual stoic arrangement, “don’t get used to this. Tomorrow will be the last time you come to work with me, and that’s only if the Baron says it’s okay. You’ll be going back toschool on Monday evening, and I don’t want you thinking about this place when you do.” With that, David nodded, walked around to the Baron, said a few words in a hush, and returned to Drizzlers’ Den.
    The only thing Jonah could make out from his father’s conversation with the Baron was the Baron shouting, “Of course! We’ll have iPod again. Getting to be a regular part of the gang, that son of yours! I’m not sure I’ll ever want to give him back to you.”
    Those four sentences were enough to make Jonah positively burst with excitement as he continued entering the trades.
    As Jonah typed in the information, it seemed to him as if he wasn’t merely inputting; he was building up an elaborate tapestry from the strings of numbers in front of him. There was a pattern to the trades, and two companies were at the center: River Deep Gold and Mountain High Minerals. But there was also a smokescreen being laid around everything so that most people would just see a series of unlinked buys and sells, the connections hidden to them. Jonah didn’t have time to wonder why the Baron was doing this, but he knew in his gut that his intuitions were correct.
    The tally on Jonah’s trading screen kept growing larger and larger as the minutes ticked by—one million, five million, ten million, fifty million, one hundred million, two hundred million, three hundred million, four hundred million, five hundred million—until the Baron called time at ten thirty-two A.M. precisely.
    “All right, lads, start closing down,” he yelled out, flicking the mute switches on both his phones. “What’s our final tally, iPod?” he asked, turning to Jonah.
    Jonah looked at the bottom of the screen, doing a double take when he saw the number. “Five hundred and twenty million,”he said, forcing his voice to be loud and clear because he knew that’s what the Baron would expect. Inside, though, he was in total shock—
$520 million! That was a huge amount of money.
    The Baron seemed satisfied.
“Très fort. Très fort,”
he said. “Half a billion quid and not a sniff of a market reaction. They have no idea what’s going to hit them tomorrow.” He moved his eyebrows up and down and stroked his mustache, a smug smile playing around his mouth.
    There were nods all around.
    Or nearly. Dog was the only one of the bunch to look confused. “Wait, tomorrow?” he echoed. “We’re not waiting
that long
to really drive it home, are we?”
    “That we are, Dog. That we are,” the Baron answered, nodding. “Our resident inputter, iPod”—here he looked at Jonah—“has to leave us again for the great and terrible wonderland that is adolescence. But fear not! He will return tomorrow.”
    “What about Jammy?” Jeeves asked.
    “What about Jammy?
” the Baron repeated, his tone aggressive, taunting. “I’ll ask Amelia to call him and tell him to take the day off.”
    “You’re giving him an extra day of vacation?” Milkshake asked, jumping on board the bandwagon.
    “I wouldn’t exactly call it that,” said the Baron, attempting to push his chair under his desk—it wouldn’t go very far considering its sheer size.
    “So you’re firing him?” asked Dog, his hands stretched out on his desk in front of him as if he needed to grasp something wooden, solid, to