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The reason Sam didn't turn the kid in to the feds was that he had a girlfriend. The kid, that was - although Sam had a girlfriend, too, getting around that age when being called a 'girl' made her feel young and attractive and happy to live the good life again, just the way Sam liked them.
He was a romantic (the kid, again, not Sam).
Ridiculously good-looking, if you liked 'em ridiculously good-looking (Sam didn't, no sir) and with the kind of easy charm Sam saw staring back at him every time he looked in a mirror (less and less often, these days; he knew what he looked like, thank you, and his hair was getting to the point where it didn't need a whole lot of work anymore to appear rakishly tousled).
"So I reckon we've got a bit of a problem here," Sam said, sipping from a bottle of beer by way of saying: 'hey, look, the longer you talk to me, the easier I'm going to get'. "Mister - what was your name again?"
"Halden," the kid said. He didn't ask what kind of problem?'.
Sam would have given him brownie points for that, except that the kid probably thought he knew what kind of problem Sam was referring to, and as it happened, he was wrong.
"Right." There'd been a time when his third bottle of beer would have given him a nice buzz. "Nick." Sam liked using people's first names - it either made people feel like you were their friend, or it annoyed the heck out of them. "Not your real name, of course."
The kid hesitated and glanced to the table where his girlfriend was sitting. Clasically good-looking, if you liked the type (Sam didn't, although he had when he'd been the kid's age).
"Let me tell you why we've got a problem here, Nicky," Sam went on. Momentum, that was what was important in these sorts of situations. "You're a tease, I'm a slut."
The kid opened his mouth, closed it again. Real elegant, except not really.
"What you do is: you make people like you, yeah? Get them to trust you, making all sorts of promises and then, right when they think you're their bestest friend in the world - bam, you're gone." Sam's expression held no judgment. He'd been to strip clubs; he understood the appeal.
"Are you saying I'm some sort of con man?" the kid asked, all wide eyes and innocence and total bull shit. Another great actor lost to a life of crime. Made Sam wonder what it took for people to make it in the movie business, really it did.
He took another swig of beer. The girlfriend looked at him like she was wondering what kind of woman would want to sleep with someone like him. Cute.
"Difference between you and me is: I deliver," Sam said, ignoring the act. "I've got something nice going on here, get me? Something good."
"Good for you," the kid said and ouch, that stung. Not.
Sam shrugged, then figured 'what the hell' and tossed in a grin. He had a nice grin. Sexy. Or so he'd been told. "Hey," he said, "don't knock it till you've tried it."
The kid blinked once. Then he smiled back - nothing grinning and no teeth, but with a very nice touch of youthful dumbness and idiocy that Sam hadn't even tried to pull off in decades.
"Is that an offer?"
'Do I look like that much of an idiot to you?' Sam thought, but didn't say. No sense in ruffling the kid's feathers. "Indeed it is." Sam unleashed his own smile - devastating. Or so he'd been told. "You get out now, and I won't come after you. If you're really nice, I won't even mention you to my friends."
The kid glanced at the girlfriend again. "That almost sounds like a threat."
"Oh, I'm sorry. If it almost sounded like a threat, then clearly I wasn't making my point clearly enough," Sam said. "I hear Miami's nice this time of year. New York. Heck, try LA. I don't care."
"Just so long as it's not here," the kid said. Real quick on the uptake, he was.
"Got it in one."
"All right, I can do that," the kid said. "I'm not looking for trouble."
'No, it looks like you've found plenty of it already. Nice package, though.' Sam nodded pleasantly.
"Glad we got that settled," he said.