Assuming Names: a con artist's masquerade (Criminal Mischief Book 1) by Tanya Thompson Read Free Book Online

the pages in the blood of red crayons.
    The third day, I collected a newly arrived Cambodian family from the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport and deposited them many hours later, hysterical and crying at the agency door, every one of them certain they had escaped Pol Pot only to die in Dallas traffic with a lunatic at the wheel.
    A general consensus was very quickly made within the Cambodian community that I should be avoided. Tricia shifted my attention onto the asylum seekers from the Eastern Bloc. A newly arrived group of three was waiting to speak with her, but Tricia was running an hour late and asked if I would spend the time conversing with them. They had been learning English while in asylum camps in Europe, but she didn’t feel they were very proficient. To give them a chance to practice, she suggested I go to the convenience store and buy a couple of sports magazines, as the men were all keen on soccer and sports in general, and then use the articles to initiate conversation.
    In the long list of things I knew nothing about, sports and sports magazines were close to the top. Thinking myself clever, I scanned the periodicals and picked the ones with the word sports in the title. I came back with the October editions of Sports Afield and American Sportsman , unaware there was a difference between sports in an arena and sports in the woods.
    For thirty minutes, I flipped through the pages, trying to initiate conversation, commenting, “And here’s another double-barreled shotgun.”
    But the men would only stare at the carpet.
    “Well, as none of you will say whether you’ve used one, there’s not much for us to discuss there.” Turning the page, I offered, “Let’s see what else there is. Oh look, a bolt-action rifle. Any experience with one of these?”
    The men had just come from the Soviet Bloc, and unbeknownst to me, their paranoia turned my ignorance into one of the most surreal interrogations they had ever endured. Experience told them they shouldn’t cooperate, but Tricia had set me the task to get them speaking, so I kept trying.
    After the pistols were emphatically denied, I read aloud, “Well, this says it’s a M21 sniper rifle adapted from the M14,” but then sounding rather dejected, “I already know none of you are going to admit to using that.”
    The weapons advertisements covered half the page, making the pictures impossible to overlook, but still Eugene and Daniel would scarcely glance at what I pointed to. They kept their faces blank, divulging nothing, and refused to interact, which left only Sergiu hiding a smirk behind his hand.
    His enjoyment was not the only thing that set him apart. He didn’t look like the other two either. There was something about the way Eastern Europeans dressed that marked them as foreign. It was the way they matched different prints and textured fabrics. Stripes might be paired with argyle, or a polka dot tie worn under a hideous snowflake sweater, and the socks would be business thin in running shoes. They seemed incapable of matching styles. But Sergiu was dressed in a dark suit with a plain shirt, and where the Romanians would have finished this look with Nike sneakers, Sergiu was wearing appropriately shined leather.
    I didn’t doubt that Sergiu was the one wearing Givenchy either. It was a heavy masculine scent, smelling rather like a leather boxing glove pounding on a patchouli-scented hippie. Violent yet spiritual.
    Besides his cheerful mannerisms, his wardrobe, and cologne, there was another difference: he wasn’t small or thin like his comrades, but was instead a big barrel of a man that overfilled the small seats in the agency’s front room.
    They were all about the same age, somewhere in their mid-thirties, but this and a common language were the only things they appeared to share.
    Alarmed by my strange and inexplicable questioning of their experience with weapons, Eugene and Daniel stared at the floor, convinced I was a government agent, but Sergiu