Excerpt from The Maze at Windermere by Gregory Blake Smith, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

So yeah, the motorcycle. Maybe all it was, was just that the guy was a bad drunk. Maybe he was just a bad drunk and it just happened to have been Sandy who had gotten in his way. But the guy started calling shit at him across the room the Casino party had settled into, the women in their cocktail dresses and the men in their dinner jackets with their ties undone. It got bad enough that everyone started getting embarrassed for Sandy. The women wouldn't look at him, or they'd shush the bozo—there was this one British woman there who kept saying, "Oh, what rot!"—and the men had that look men get when one of them is being singled out. The challenge, the appraisal, the are-you-just-gonna-sit-there-and-take-it? look.

Earlier in the evening the motorcycle guy had been friendly enough. Sandy had stood with him on the sidewalk in front of one of the bars down on lower Thames Street and they'd talked tennis. The guy knew who Sandy was, knew his career, had himself played for Williams twenty years earlier, and Sandy had complimented him on his motorcycle parked alongside the curb—an antique red Indian Chief with those deeply valanced fenders and the whole Steve McQueen look—complimented him not because he cared about motorcycles but just because he was a nice guy, right? Hadn't Tennis Life said so?

Anyway, inside the bar it got to a point where Sandy had to answer the guy, had to say something, anything, so he called back over the tables and chairs that separated them: "Dude, I could beat you left-handed!"

"Dude?" the guy had said. "Dude?" Like it was the sorriest-ass thing anyone could say. And he had this way of spreading his hands about himself, gesturing toward the others as if to include them on his side, as if it was the lot of them who'd paid a thousand dollars a plate against the tennis pro who lacked the killer instinct. There was no way Sandy could beat him left-handed, the guy said, and when Sandy challenged him again, the guy had said okay, he was on. One set. Sandy left-handed. Him right-handed. He'd put up the Indian.

"No Indian," Sandy had said. "We just play."

The bozo went "pfft," like what kind of loser was this? Of course they had to play for something. That's how it was done. "The Indian," he said again. "You were drooling over it an hour ago, pretty boy. It's yours if you can beat me."

He had tried to keep his own nonchalance, but the faces on either side of him began to swim at the edge of his vision: the low-cut necklines, the pearls and spaghetti straps, the men with expressions of wanting to look away.

"Lacks the killer instinct," the guy said and gazed around the room with an easy gesture like voilà.

"Okay," Sandy had said. He tried to make his own easy gesture, like okay if that's what you want.

The guy turned back to him. "Okay." He mimicked Sandy's accent, making the word sound like it had three syllables, and then after a few strategic moments had passed: "And what're you putting up, champ?"

And that, he told Aisha, was when he got it. When he understood. The motorcycle was appraised at 30K, the guy was saying. What was Sandy going to put up against it? He had walked right into it, he told her. It hadn't been about tennis. It wasn't even the drunk-former-college-player-who-thought-he-could've-been-a-pro thing. He'd seen that before. No, this was about something else.

"Dude?" the guy mocked.

He could feel the heat coming into his face. The whole room began to swim. He had enough presence of mind not to smile, but that was about it.

"What rot!" the Brit tossed out again.

"Thirty K," the guy repeated, "give or take a couple. I'll accept stocks, bonds, traveler's checks"—he was having fun now—"a new bow thruster for my thirty-meter—"

And that was when Margo had saved his ass, he told Aisha, who propped herself up on her elbow like this was the part she wanted to hear about. This classy-looking woman who stood up and ring-tossed a necklace down on the table in front of the bozo. Sandy had noticed her earlier in the evening, tight black dress, super-short hair, maybe available if it weren't for this girl with—what? cerebral palsy?—this girl who was always at her side. Who was even now staring at him with her pale, strained face. The guy looked at the necklace like it was a grenade that had just landed in front of him. The classy-looking woman had turned to Sandy with that hard face he would come to know.

Excerpted from The Maze at Windermere by Gregory Blake Smith. Copyright © 2018 by Gregory Blake Smith. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.