He hadn’t always been this way.
Okay, she had to admit, he’d never been a genius. He wasn’t the sharpest tooth in the rotary saw. He didn’t get a lot of jokes, unless they involved boobs, and once asked how they got the bones out of boneless chicken wings. But Kirk seemed like a good guy when she met him thirteen months ago. She was coming out of Penny’s house after telling her that her aborted child, had she lived and grown to adulthood, would have ended up in a very unhappy marriage, and saw that her front right tire was flat. She’d never had a flat tire before. She’d had cars stolen before, but never a flat. Keisha didn’t know if there was a spare in the trunk, and even if there was, she didn’t have the first clue how to put it on. She stared at that tire the way she used to stare at formulas scribbled on the blackboard in high school chemistry class.
She didn’t have money to call a tow truck. Well, she had Penny’s hundred, but she needed that for groceries, and the rent, which was overdue. That was probably why she started to cry.
Across the street, a construction company was replacing a rotting porch on one of Milford’s century-old homes. One of the workers cutting some boards for the decking noticed Keisha’s plight, took his finger off the trigger of the saw, and strolled over.
Introduced himself as Kirk Nicholson.
Kirk looked in the trunk and found no spare. But there was a jack, which he used to get the flat off the car. He said his boss, a nice guy named Glen, would probably let him take his lunch break early. He’d take the flat over to the nearby Firestone store in his 2003 Ford F-150-how he kept it so immaculate when it was a working vehicle amazed Keisha-so she could get a new tire put on the rim. He knew a guy there, could give her a deal, wholesale price. Shouldn’t take that long. Then he’d give her a lift back and put the tire on for her.
That’s the way it happened.
While they were waiting at the Firestone store, Keisha learned that Kirk’s mother, who raised him on her own, had died recently of a heart attack. He had no brothers or sisters. He told her about Glen, the man he was working for, whose wife Sheila had died in a bad car accident, and how he was raising their daughter on his own. Then he talked about his truck, that he’d got a great deal on it, he’d done a number of repairs on it himself, and was saving up to buy some high-end rims for it.
Keisha was more interested in learning whether he was seeing anyone. She asked him something really clever, like “Does your girlfriend like your truck?” At which point he said he wasn’t seeing anybody right now. He was patient, and courteous, and never put a move on her once. When he was done putting the new tire on her car and had the jack stored back in the trunk, Keisha blurted out that he was welcome to come over for dinner.
That very night.
He said yeah, okay.
Kirk even seemed to like Matthew, nine at the time, who sat at the table with them while Keisha served spaghetti and meatballs. Gave the boy a ride in his truck, even let Matthew show how good he was at one of those Mario games. After the boy went to bed at ten, Keisha cracked two beers and she and Kirk sat on the couch and watched that show with Charlie Sheen, the one he was on before he went nuts and got fired.
“He falls asleep real fast,” Keisha said. “And he’s a sound sleeper.”
Kirk wasn’t so slow that he didn’t understand what she was getting at. He started sleeping over that night. Within a month, he’d let his apartment go and had moved in with Keisha and Matthew.
It was perfect. At first. So nice to have a man around the house, reaching over and feeling someone in the bed next to you, bumping into each other in the kitchen, curling up on the couch to watch TV. Keisha kept waiting for him to hand her his share of the rent. She wasn’t even expecting half. After all, she had Matthew. She was looking for just a third.
Finally, after he’d been there a month and a half, she worked up the nerve to ask.
“Work’s kinda slow,” he said. “Glen only needed me two days this week. And didn’t I take us all out to Burger King Friday night? Even let the li’l fucker get a dessert.”
It was the first time he’d ever referred to her son that way.
Keisha arrived home one day, four months after Kirk had moved in and still no contribution toward the rent, and there, in the living room, for God’s sake, was a set of four mag wheels for his Ford F-150. “Winter’s coming,” he explained, “so there’s no sense putting them on the truck now, and you don’t have a garage, so they’ll be okay here till spring. I’m gonna get a shelf from Ikea in New Haven, put them on display right there by the TV.”
Not long after that, he injured his foot.
Even wearing safety boots, when the cinder block landed on his right foot it broke a couple of bones. Kirk had to quit work and keep his weight off it while he recovered. His biggest fault up to now had been how cheap he was, but these last few months he’d become increasingly, well, mean. Keisha didn’t buy him enough beer, he complained. How could she have forgotten to buy him Oreos? How much had she made reading palms and telling fortunes this week, because he wanted his share? And the kid? Could he dial it down a bit? Always yelling and running around and waking me up when I’m trying to have a nap? And if he touches my wheels one more time, I swear to God Keisha, queen of the psychic con, had been flimflammed. Bamboozled. The wool pulled over her eyes. Kirk had her thinking he was her dreamboat, but he turned out be the anchor tied around her neck.
So, the bottom line was, Keisha needed money. If she couldn’t get Kirk out of her house, she was going to need enough cash to move herself and Matthew out. Justin Wilcox’s scam presented an opportunity she was willing to take, even though there was something about that kid that gave her the creeps.
“You sure you can pull this off?” she asked Justin.
“I took drama,” he said. “Piece of cake. I got it all worked out. What I was thinking was, we pull this off, maybe we could do some other things together? I bet lots of times you need a backup person, am I right? Someone to help fool the customer? The mark? Isn’t that what you call them?”
“This thing you want to pull on your parents, it’s the kind of game you can only run once,” Keisha warned him. “Once you’ve spent this money, you’re going to have to find a new way to make more, and it’s not going to involve me.”
“Whatever,” Justin said. “But let me ask you something.”
“What?”
“All the other times when you go see people and tell them you have some vision about what’s happened to a loved one, don’t they get mad when you turn out to be wrong?”
“Who said I’m wrong?”
“Come on. It’s just us.”
“There’s always something in what I tell my clients that connects in some way. I often tap into something that’s very true.”
“Except it’s not something that actually helps them find who they’re looking for,” he countered, grinning.
“What I give everyone, for varying amounts of time, is hope,” Keisha said defensively.
“Yeah, well,” Justin grinned. “You know what’ll be really good about this thing we’re doing? This time, you’ll be right. You’re going to know exactly where I am. It’s gonna look good on your resume.”
The job was behind her now.
It had been a week since Keisha had led Marcia and Dwayne Taggart to Justin’s hiding spot in those deserted offices. Dwayne had, as she’d requested, paid her in cash later that day. She’d taken Justin’s half, put it in a sandwich bag, put that bag of cash into a small Tupperware container, poured some spaghetti sauce around it, and tucked it into the freezer so Kirk wouldn’t find it. He never made the meals, so she wasn’t running any risk. As for her share, she’d lied to Kirk, telling him she’d only made a thousand on this job, half of which he demanded. The remaining two grand she’d hidden in a Tampax box that sat under the sink.
Justin had told her he probably wouldn’t be around for a few days to collect. He knew his mother would want him to see “someone,” and that she wouldn’t be letting him out of her sight for a while. His stealing the sleeping pills, and that note he’d written her, had her scared to death he might hurt himself.