On Every Street (The Artists Trilogy #0)

The only problem with that meant I’d have to seduce someone, and I’d never seduced a soul in my life. Luckily Gus and I never talked about this; I would have died from mortification. But I was a virgin, and aside from some weirdo boy I knew back in high school, I hadn’t really been kissed before. It’s kind of hard thinking about being naked with someone when you’re terrified to let them see your damn leg. And yet, somehow I was going to have to get to know some man in some way if I was going to get what I wanted.

Of course, in order to do all that, I had to create a new identity. Well, actually Gus created it for me. He taught me that I could choose any name as long as the initials corresponded with my own. I chose Eden White. With my tan and long blonde hair, I was hoping a sexy name (aka triple x video store name) would give me that extra edge. He then went about making me a new driver’s license, social security card, even a fake passport. Everything had to be absolutely perfect in order for any of this to work because Travis and his men were the type to sniff out your lie before they caught a whiff of your perfume.

“Your con is a long con, one that will take a lot of time,” Gus said to me while we washed my truck one sweltering Sunday. “Long cons are the most dangerous. The longer the con, the more likely you’ll screw up.”

“Oh great,” I said, wringing the cloth into the bucket.

“Sweetie, no one said this would be easy. Not to mention you’re conning for all the wrong reasons.”

I threw the rag on the hood and put my hands on my hips. “The wrong reasons?”

He peered at me from above his sunglasses. “You’re conning over emotion, over a feeling. Con for money, it’s tangible. When you con for revenge, you might not know when you’ve won.”

“Oh I’ll know,” I told him, and went back to wiping.

He scratched thoughtfully at his mustache. “For your sake, I hope you will.”

By the time I was ready to leave Gus and put my plan into action, he’d taught me everything he could about conning. Thankfully, because my parents had brought me up to be a scammer, I was already pretty adept at lying. I knew all the basics of most cons…I’d just been out of practice for so long. When I was eight years old, it was like a second nature to steal from collection plates at church or lie to rich folk to get money. I was going to have to find that deception and manipulation that had once come so easy to me. I supposed my days of innocence weren’t so innocent after all.

“Now you remember what I taught you,” Gus said to me as I sat in the truck, idling outside of his house. He leaned on the open window, arms folded, deep in thought.

“I won’t forget,” I promised.

He seemed to ignore me, his eyes focused on the dirty dashboard. “Once you drive out of here, you won’t be Ellie Watt. You’ll be Eden White. You’ll scam for money, steal for survival. You’ll be giving the world a proverbial fuck you. You’ll be a con artist, just like your parents and just like their parents before them.”

“So I guess there’s no turning back, huh?” I joked, but his eyes sliced into me.

“You can always turn back, Ellie. No matter how far you go, no matter what you’ve done. You can always turn back. You can give up your ghost.”

I nodded, beads of uncomfortable sweat forming on my forehead.

“But if you do,” he went on, “make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons. You’re the only person who should cause your regrets.”

I had no idea what that meant so I merely smiled and nodded, eager to get going, to start my new life.

He didn’t budge, his head still in the truck, eyes locked on my face. “The minute you’re in trouble, the minute you think you might even be in trouble, you call me. You email me. You come here. Revenge is sweet, but it’s a sweet poison. Stay smart, never let your thoughts drift, and don’t involve your heart, no matter the cost. You got that?”

“I got that,” I said hoarsely.

“That’s my girl,” he said, giving a satisfactory slap on the roof of the truck.

And so for the second time that month, I had to drive away from a rare breed—someone who cared and looked out for me. Let me tell you, it doesn’t get any easier. Hot tears coated my cheeks through most of Texas. I cried tears of fear and tears of loss. I cried just to cry. I cried my last tears as Ellie Watt.

Unfortunately, there was a huge learning curve when it came to being Eden White. It wasn’t just the name change, with a new birth date to remember and a whole new history. It was the conning part. I was planning to get a legitimate job when I got to Mississippi, maybe in a restaurant or something, especially since I didn’t want to draw any suspicion to myself. But until then, I was going to be a grifter. I figured if I had to be lying to people anyway about who I was, why not take it further? Besides, it was something I could stop doing at any time. I could quit and go legit with the snap of my fingers.

Plus, I was a natural. I was born to lie, born to scam. Okay, well maybe I used to be a natural—like I said, huge learning curve here. I spent a good two months running cons through Louisiana and Arkansas, doing exactly what Gus had taught me. Well, almost. I made more than a few mistakes—mistakes I only got out of by riding on my youth and rapidly deteriorating innocence.

The one time I actually got busted it was over trying to do the right thing. I had been at a diner, scoping the scene for someone to scam. I’d been going after disheartened men: road weary truckers or local boys who were on a bender. My smile was wide, my hands were quick. It was easy to get a free meal from them and even easier to take their wallets. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t that heartless. I usually took their wallets, excused myself to the ladies room, helped myself to some cash, and returned it with them being none the wiser. I knew what a pain in the ass it was to have your wallet stolen—cash and credit cards were easier to replace than business cards, driver’s licenses, and keepsakes. I just couldn’t see myself turning into one of those con artists that didn’t have a heart or soul.

Hence why I had to do the right thing when the opportunity came up. Maybe I was already trying to bend karma in my favor. While I was casing a diner just outside of Little Rock, I noticed one of the waitresses giving me a sketchy look. I certainly didn’t look suspicious considering my hair was perfectly curled, my jeans neat, and my v-neck shirt clean, but she was giving me the stinkeye like I was already on America’s Most Wanted. I decided to play it safe, even though there was an overweight and drunk dude in the corner with the world’s messiest beard, trying to eat a slab of steak that might as well have been mooing. He would have been a perfect target, but I wasn’t about to chance it.

However, after I had paid for my food and got up to go, ready to hit up another joint that wasn’t so paranoid, I noticed a wallet had been left behind on the table next to me. An elderly woman had been sitting there by herself and I could see her walking slowly across the parking lot outside. I snatched the wallet up from the table and ran outside to stop her. I was just touching her shirt, my hand brushing the back of her bucket purse, when I heard the words, “Stop, thief!” behind me.

I froze as the elderly woman spun around, suddenly spry. She stared at me and the wallet in my hand as I was holding it out for her, coincidentally near her open purse.

I smiled quickly as her eyes widened. “You left this behind.”

Suddenly the waitress from the restaurant was beside me. “You stole it, I’ve been watching you.”

I turned and glared at her. “Well you couldn’t have been watching me very closely or you would have seen me pick up the wallet from the table and try to return it to her.”

The waitress narrowed her eyes, already making up her ignorant mind about me. Behind her I could see one of the cooks coming out of the restaurant, a cell phone in hand. All the diner patrons were at the smudgy windows, peering out at the scene like it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to them.

“Do you want me to call the police?” the cook called out, gesturing to his phone.

I rolled my eyes, feeling the anger rushing through me. “Why would you call the cops when I’m just returning this woman’s wallet!” I yelled at him.

The waitress’s eyes somehow narrowed even more, drowning in hate and clumpy mascara. “I said I was watching you. I know your type.”

I shook my head in ironic disgust and tried again to give the wallet back to the lady. The old woman snatched it out of my hand and shoved it in her purse, and now I had two people trying to kill me with their glare.

“Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, taking a step away from them. My truck was only a yard away. “I ate my meal, I paid for it, and I saw the woman had left her wallet behind. I came outside to return it. You can go and watch the video playback if you don’t believe me.”

They obviously didn’t believe me because the waitress yelled over her shoulder, “Call the cops, Bill.”

And I took that as my cue to run. I turned on my heel and sprinted to my car, hearing people call out behind me. After my key nearly broke off in the lock after a few panic-inducing seconds, I jumped in and started my engine. The cook was now running toward me, on the phone, as if he could do something to stop me.

The fact was, they would go back and review the footage and find out I did nothing wrong. But I wasn’t about to stick around and try and clear my name. Gus had told me to stay as far away from the cops as possible, no matter what the situation, and I had to believe him on that one.

I roared out of the parking lot, almost clipping the cook on the hip, and sped off down the road. I was going to have to change my license plate now at the next stop, the first time I’d be dipping into the stack of fake ones that Gus had given me. California was seriously over, another tie to the person I was snapped in half.

After the Arkansas incident, I laid low for a while before I built up enough nerve to try grifting again. I decided to forgo the usual money-snatching and tried pigeon drops on the rare post-Katrina tourists in New Orleans and change-counting scams on convenience store clerks in Baton Rouge. I was slowly but surely getting better at it, never taking too many risks and getting out early while the getting was good. Kenny Roger’s “The Gambler” played over and over in my head.

Finally, I realized that it was no longer about becoming a better con but about avoiding what I set out to do. The long con. The one that would bring me close to Travis, that would bring me my peace. I was getting cold feet.

I got over it by trying to meticulously plan what I was going to do to Travis. I had a small bottle of chemical solution in my glove compartment, ready to go at a moment’s notice whenever I found that little window of opportunity.

I realized how crazy I must have sounded, planning to throw acid in the man’s face. This was America, not the Middle East. There were saner, cleaner ways of getting one’s revenge. I could figure out a way to out him to the police and get him arrested (something I was sure that Gus could help with). Maybe I could tip them off to a rival drug cartel. I could blackmail him, ruin his life, run him broke and to the ground. Maybe with enough planning, I could do all of that.