Oliver Zinn and his best friend, Benny Silver, go to high school together in Hanover, Massachusetts. The year is 1982. Oliver is an only child to his father, a beer-loving, die-hard Patriots fan who works in an electroplating shop, and his mother, who is studying to become a nurse. Benny is an aspiring lawyer with a love of big vocabulary words and a precociously sophisticated palate — the butt of many jokes when he has dinner at the Zinn's place. Oliver and Benny are best friends, though Oliver sometimes feels jealous of and belittled by Benny's precocious, sometimes self-righteous nature. The boys have begun to notice a strange man who lives on the third floor of a building across the street from their school, above a pizza shop called King's. The man's face is wrapped almost entirely in bandages, with only his eyes and nose exposed, and he often stands in the window, idly smoking a cigarette. Intrigued, Benny does some digging, and theorizes that the man is in recovery from reconstructive surgery. He further theorizes the man is the famed fugitive Mickey Thutston, a serial bank robber and controversial "Robin Hood" figure who had escaped from jail three months before. The boys realize there is a $10k reward for any information that leads to Mickey's capture, and they conspire to split the money. They decide not to tell their mutual friends or go to the police station, because they want to maximize their shares of the money. Sneakily, Benny finds out from Oliver's mom — a nursing student — about the timeline of recovery for reconstructive surgery, and determines that the man's bandages should come off soon. Meanwhile, over a round of the code-guessing game Mastermind, Oliver finds out from his dad when his Uncle Stan, a local policeman, is off work. Benny and Oliver then visit Stan, a bachelor whose messy apartment offends Benny's penchant for tidiness, and tell him what they know. Stan says he will look into it. In English class the next day, a lesson on Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" is interrupted as policemen circle the man's apartment across the street. The boys expect to see Mickey try to make a quick escape, but instead, the cops come out of the building empty-handed. Oliver realizes he and Benny were wrong, and feels guilty for having incited a police investigation into an innocent man, all spurred on by his greed for the reward money. He feels further guilt as he reflects on Mickey's reputation as a Robin Hood figure who redistributes wealth. The next week, Benny and Oliver's family go out for pizza at King's, right below the bandaged man's apartment. Now that they know what transpired, Oliver's father drops heavy hints to the restaurant owner, trying to figure out what really happened, but doesn't get any information. When he finds out that Benny and Oliver concealed information from him, Oliver's father reprimands them, and they apologize. Thirty years later, Oliver has returned home, where he plays a game of Mastermind with his ailing father, and reminisces about the Mickey incident. As he observes his father coughing and breathing through an oxygen tank, Oliver desperately misses the days when his father would burst into a room loudly, crack open a beer, and laugh freely. His father reprimands him for having falsely accused someone all those years ago and for doing it without telling him, and Oliver is filled with regret. The game Mastermind, reminds them of the secrecy that has created distance in their relationship.