"I have no idea what you're talking about," she responded quickly.
"You're so full of shit, Tempest," I said. But the fact that she was avoiding telling me that she had done this amazing thing for Johnny and his family was no longer pissing me off.
Instead, I was beginning to find it endearing.
I slid my finger under her chin and tilted her face up toward me. "You and your team stole the money from Coker and gave it to the family."
"Yes," she said. "Coker deserved it. He was an asshole."
I couldn't hide the smile that crossed my face at the idea of this girl destroying Coker. "Fucking A right he deserved it."
"You don't care, then?"
"Care that you conned that dickhead and gave the money to Johnny and his family?" I asked. "Why the hell would I care?"
"Because it's not exactly legal, Silas," she said.
I laughed at the irony of her thinking I would care about her engaging in illegal behavior, when I was the one considering having Coker taken out into the desert.
"What?" she asked. "You're laughing."
"I'm laughing because you're the one who's naive, Tempest," I said.
"What do you mean?"
"Coker and I have a past," I said. "I'd have thought you grifters would do better research."
"We didn't drill down to the individual fighters," she said. "This was about Johnny. I didn't know you were one of his. I mean, we knew that he had done some real shady shit..."
"I was one of his fighters for a while," I said. "The fuckhead asked me to take a dive - he had bet against me. I was tired of his bullshit and ready to quit anyway. I was going to go with someone else. It was my last fight, and I'd bet on myself. So there's no fucking way I was taking a dive."
"So he made sure you lost," Tempest said. I felt her palm, warm on my chest, and she looked at me, anger in her eyes.
"He knew I didn't trust him," I said. "But I was seeing someone..." I watched Tempest's expression change, and I could feel her stiffen in my arms.
"I don't want to hear about someone -"
"Not someone important to me," I said. But I had to hide a smile. The fact that she was bothered that I mentioned another woman was charming. I liked this little jealous streak that Tempest had going. "The girl I was seeing slipped me something before the fight. She put something in my water, and...well...shit happened."
"Jesus, Silas," Tempest said. "They - my crew - said that Coker had a history of that kind of thing. I didn't know that he had hurt you, though."
"I'm fine," I said. "Now. But I got the shit kicked out of me something fierce. "So after that, I got the hell out of Vegas and came back to West Bend."
"Why were you in Vegas, fighting again?" she asked, shaking her head.
"I was just doing a favor to a friend," I said. "He wanted me in his corner at a fight. I was the only person he trusted. And then he got mowed down in a hit and run. It was a one-time deal – my doctor said I wasn’t supposed to fight again, after what Coker did to me, because of the head injury. But I couldn’t say no."
Tempest nodded. "That was our fault, Silas," she said. "We were roping Coker, but we didn't think he'd go that far."
"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."