"Roping him?"
"Roping him in," she explained. "Hooking him. We started rumors about the television show at some of the other gyms, knowing Coker would want to impress us. We figured that he would want the fight to at least look somewhat real, so he wouldn't go as far as slipping someone a roofie, you know? Nothing in his past indicated he had ever taken anyone out in a hit and run."
"The fighter that got hit, Abel, is fine," I said. "I mean, he wouldn't have been fine if he didn't have insurance. But he's fine."
Tempest shook her head. "I'm sorry it happened that way."
"Is all of that - what you did with Coker - is that the way you do things in general, or was he some exception to the rule?" I asked.
That was the burning question.
I could live with her conning assholes and giving the money to the people they'd wronged. Hell, I couldn't just live with that, I could get behind it. There was something downright noble about that, at least in my books.
But if she was just conning people to con them, taking money from good people, honest hard-working people...well, that was an entirely different thing.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"Is this what you do," I said. "Con dickheads? Or was Coker some kind of exception to the rule?"
Tempest exhaled heavily. "When my parents kicked me out, I swore I would do things differently," she said. "I was in Vegas, and I thought I could get a real job, one with a regular paycheck, you know? But it's not who I was. I was a grifter. So I did short cons - card tricks, pickpocketing, that kind of thing, to survive. Then, when I pulled my first long con without my parents, I knew I wanted to do it different - so I picked someone dirty, someone who deserved what he got."
"And that's what you're doing now," I said, my sense of relief palpable. I knew Tempest wasn't the same as her parents, no matter what she thought. I knew she was different from them.
"We grift people who are bad guys," she said. "Murderers, pedophiles, corporate executives who are responsible for stealing their employees' pensions. We make them pay. And then we take care of the victims, the people who were hurt by them. Before, there was no justice for Johnny and Deborah and their daughter. Now they'll be taken care of, for a long time, at least. It's enough to get them back on their feet."
"It's different from what your parents did," I noted.
"My parents conned indiscriminately - it didn't matter to them if you were honest or dishonest. They would have had me pickpocket a nun if they thought she was carrying cash. That's how I was raised. My father used to say that everyone was a potential mark. It just so happened that it's easier to pull a long con on a bad guy, because, well, they tend to be dishonest and greedy, so that's how a lot of their games played out."
"Is that how it played out in West Bend?" I asked. I ran my hand down her back, feeling the softness of her skin under my fingers. I lingered on her tattoos, tracing the outline of one of the birds on her shoulder.
Tempest raised her eyebrows. "Well, the people they grifted here never turned them in. They didn't pursue them in any way. So what does that tell you?"
"That they were dishonest," I said, my fingers lingering on the wings of the bird tattoo. I peered at the feathers, the purples and blues that swirled together. "What's the bird tattoo?"
"They were dishonest," she answered. She paused, glancing at her shoulder before responding to my question. "It's a swallow."
I traced over the edges. "It's beautiful," I said. "Really nice ink. What does it mean?"
Tempest looked at me and flicked her tongue over her lower lip, and for a moment, I was distracted by what she was doing. "Travelers get them a lot," she said. "In old times, sailors got tattoos of swallows to mark the number of miles they'd traveled. So it's just a symbol of freedom, you know? Being on the road. Never looking back."
"Is that what you've been doing?" I asked, tracing my finger around and around the tattoo, raising goose bumps on her skin. "Walking away and never looking back?"
She exhaled heavily. Wearily, I thought. "It's what I do, Silas," she said. "One of the rules."
"What rules?" I asked.
"Grifter rules," she said. "My rules. Never stop moving. Don't look back."
"Those are the two rules you live by, then?" I asked. "Some kind of grifter's code?"
She shook her head. "They're just mine."
"Any other rules, or is that it?"
"One more," she said. "Don't fall in love."
I was silent, my finger tracing down her arm before I brought it back up to her shoulder and down between her breasts. Her nipples rose to attention at my touch, and she squirmed in front of me.
I didn't tell her that she was wrong about the swallow tattoo. Swallows might represent freedom and travel - but she was forgetting the most important part.
And that was the fact that no matter how many thousands of miles they traveled, swallows always returned home.
***
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
TEMPEST