Read Down to the Liar for Free Online

to drive me home after, but I’ve still got an hour till curfew and I want to do some strategizing before heading back to Mike’s house.
    I drop into the comfy, thrift-store-fabulous armchair I usually reserve for clients and prop my feet on my desk. The wire. As if this job weren’t bad enough already.
    The wire game (for those of you following along at home) is about convincing a mark you can guarantee he’ll win the lottery as long as he pays
you
for the ticket, rather than buying it like he normally would.
    In the telegraph days, when small delays between events and reporting of those events were common, cons would set up fake betting parlors and trick a mark into plunking down all his money on a racehorse they said they knew in advance would win, when in fact, they knew the horse would lose. The mark would bet big money on the “sure thing” only to forfeit all that money to the cons when the “winning” horse actually
lost.
The cons running the scam would then split the cash and move on.
    The beauty of the scam is that the mark can’t go to the cops without admitting he was trying to place an illegal bet. It’s a neat little trick that’s netted a lot of people some easy money. But it’s not without its drawbacks.
    For one thing, it requires a lot of people to pull it off—people who can turn on you, mess up their parts, or just plain not show up. Marks are easy to lead. Associates are not.
    For another, I’ve never successfully run a wire game before. I attempted it exactly once, and it blew up spectacularly in my face (see previous
associates
comment).
    I normally wouldn’t touch a wire game with a ten-foot cattle prod. But with this much distance between me and the mark, the wire game is pretty much my only option. It lets me lure the mark out of hiding with the promise of a guaranteed sweet reward and then snag him in a net—the Internet, that is. The telegraph may be long gone, but people are the same. For one thing, they’re still far too trusting of technology. And I can tell you from experience that a mark will still bet all he’s worth on a sure thing.
    Now I just have to figure out what sweet reward would tempt a psycho stalker-bully to show himself. A reward I can control.
    In the past, I would have asked my dad for ideas. But he’s in prison and not easy to contact. Of course, if Sam were here, I’d ask him. But he’s not here, and he’s not taking my calls. Which I guess leaves Murphy. I’m still pretty irritated with him about the Carter thing, but he can be pretty creative when he wants to be.
    I check my phone for the time: 9:49. Not too offensively late to make a call. Not that I mind being offensive.
    I drop my feet and lean forward in my chair, resting my elbows on the desk as I scroll through my contacts list. I tap Murphy’s name and press Call. But it’s not Murphy who answers.
    “Hi, Julep. This better be good,” Bryn says.
    Bryn often answers Murphy’s phone for him. He thinks it’s cute. I think it’s nauseating.
    “Frankly, I’m surprised you even picked up,” I say.
    “You have something on Skyla’s stalker?”
    “Not yet,” I say as I reconsider telling her to put Murphy on the phone. Bryn might actually be the better person to ask about this. “I need some advice.”
    “That sweater you were wearing yesterday is hideous. Burn it.”
    I rub the bridge of my nose. I did ask. I should know better by now, I really should.
    “I need bait,” I say, ignoring the malicious sweater attack. “Something juicy enough to convince Skyla’s bully to crawl out from under their rock. Any ideas?”
    “A really big jerk magnet.”
    “Come on. Seriously.”
    “Fine.” Silence falls on her end of the line as she thinks. “There was that celebrity scandal last year—nude photos. But I don’t know if we can get Skyla to pose nude….”
    Nude photos.
Of course.
The con suddenly flares to life in my tired brain, forming connections, cataloging resources, calculating