Unbeatable

“I’m not tired.”

Bozo didn’t appear to flinch at Mira’s trickery when it activated. His confident smile held through her entire transformation under the watchful eyes of Frankie and Katie, who made sure not to be spotted as they crouched by a bench.

Mira quickly pulled out the reels she’d be using. Since Bozo was alone, unlike they were, she had only one picture of him on each and two pre-shot images of her in different poses. It was abundantly clear from both of them that Mira loved the camera.

“We’re just going to play a-“

“I already know the rules, thank you.”

“Oh. Alright then. Do your best!”

The grid had been assembled. When the pictures began to mix, Bozo only half-heartedly watched. He even blinked a few times.

“So, what’ll it be? Think you can match all of them?”

“For the sake of his park, Coaster Bozo can do anything.”

He put his fingers to his chin for a second, but in moments he was tapping his fingers all over the board. He made exactly five moves before he was done.

“Yep, that’s it. You can reveal them now.”

Frankie’s eyes bulged. Wasn’t this guy a total idiot the last time I saw him? She just knew something had to be up.

“Frankie, look!”

Katie’s words only just barely qualified as a whisper, the older sibling gasping before her exclamation with her finger shooting forward into the air. Not one to ignore her companion, Frankie did indeed look- and what she saw shouldn’t have surprised her.

Two of them were right behind a standee of Mira- the guy with the glasses and the good-looking one, whispering into a mic as the other held a pair of binoculars. Following Katie’s finger, she spotted a second pair, under some bushes- the second woman she’d ever clubbed in the head with an iron pole, seemingly recovered- and, infuriatingly, the asshole who had shot twenty-one less-than-lethal rubber shotgun pellets into her stomach. Possibly thanks to his parody of a Bostonian accent, he was responsible for the binoculars in his duo, and not the microphone.

But before Frankie had any time to be all that angry, Mira flipped over the reels- all of which were perfectly assembled and matched into groups.

“Wow! The first winner of all time! Everyone, give… er, what was your name again, sir?”

“It’s Coaster Bozo! Good greif…”

“…Give Coaster Bozo a hand! Congrats, hon.”

Mira blew a kiss- the motion activating her secondary storage trickery. 300 tokens sprayed from her wrist like a jackpot.

Bozo grinned, but did not make a fool of himself, waiting for the shower to be over before he picked up his reward. The sisters could see it then- this was only a small addition to the enormous sum he had already collected with the help of his loyal marketing team.