Confidence Tricks by Tamara Morgan Read Free Book Online Page B

ends they’d taken from him. Said furnishings didn’t amount to much, but since they’d all felt it was better for Tiffany to stay at her apartment to keep up a cheerful front and to stay safe, he and Graff could pretend it was a debauched bachelor pad, minus any of the good types of debauchery.
    They currently sat around the massage table from Winston’s office, which functioned quite nicely as their dining room table. Other effects included a polar bearskin rug and five versions of the exact same espresso machine, which, no matter how many times Asprey stole it, Winston replaced. His favorite, though, was the bright Kandinsky painting they used to cover up the moldy patch in the wall—he’d had his eye on it for years, and the bright blocks of red and blue could always be counted on to lift his mood.
    Asprey liked to think their home was a work in progress. Graff liked to think it was one step closer to vindication.
    In a way, they were both right.
    If Graff were any other human being, the food and wine would have mellowed him out a little, made him less likely to throw one of the espresso machines into the wall. But Graff was far from ordinary, and feeding him was like giving fuel to a chainsaw-massacre enthusiast. He grumbled the entire meal, his topics ranging from Natalie the Pickpocket to the teenage punk who’d flipped him off on the road that afternoon.
    “By the way,” he growled. “I’ve got a few new locations we can look at tomorrow.”
    “New locations for what?”
    “Don’t play dumb with me. That charming-idiot routine might work on everyone else, but you and I both know it’s an act. We can’t stay here in the hangar anymore. Not after you fucked it all up—”
    Asprey listened to the rest of Graff’s monologue with a negligent ear. Once upon a time, Graff had been a lawyer—one of those overblown ones who was almost all for show. His brother could talk for hours, driven only by the sound of his own voice and the accumulation of spittle at the corners of his mouth.
    Graff had always been the uptight one, the one most likely to erupt in anger over an overlooked detail or tiny hitch in their plans—and he had the blood pressure medication to prove it. Even as kids, his tendency toward irate anal-retentiveness had been evident. You didn’t touch his collection of Transformers, lined up in a perfect row on his desk. Asprey had done it once, and he still had the capped tooth to show for it.
    “Stop worrying so much,” he said when Graff was done. “Natalie’s not going to turn us in.”
    “I don’t want to take any chances,” Graff said tightly. “For all we know, she’s a federal agent.”
    “She’s not.”
    Graff gulped back the coffee and crushed the cup in one fist. “Would you stop being flippant for five seconds? There’s a good chance you blew the entire operation. I know this is all one big joke to you, but we’ve worked too hard and too long to throw it away on a pretty face.”
    Not just pretty .
    Asprey knew pretty. He saw it all the time, grew up with it, played with it, definitely enjoyed it. What that woman had was something much more intriguing than beauty, something that made him sit up and pay attention with the kind of urgency that had eluded him for years.
    Mystery. An enigmatic magnetism. The kind of complexity that accompanied a painting by a master, where a lifetime of close examination could never yield all the clues.
    Of course, Graff saw none of that. If he made a decision not to acknowledge something—be it a universal truth about the world or the value of a fellow human being—it might as well have been crafted of invisible ink. “We’re getting closer, Asprey. We’ve got one job left and we’re done. Then we can go home again.”
    You can never go home again , Asprey wanted to quip, but the words rang uncomfortably true.
    He sat back and propped his feet on the table, careful to keep any of his thoughts or regrets from showing. “Nah. She’ll be