Never Saw It Coming: (An eSpecial from New American Library) Read Online Free PDF

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