I just . . . I don’t know how to handle this. I don’t know how the hell you do.”
“It won’t last,” she said again. But she was very much afraid her interlude of quiet had ended.
Grant Sparks knew how to run a con—long or short. After his initial terror and fury in prison, he calculated the way to survive meant running the longest continuous, multiarmed cons of his life.
Maybe of anyone’s lifetime.
He kept the gangs off his back—and kept himself out of the infirmary—by smuggling contraband inside. That meant bribing a couple of key prison personnel, but he didn’t have much trouble homing in on who he could get to do what, and what it took to incentivize them.
He still had contacts on the outside. He could order in a carton of reals, then jack up the price of an individual cigarette, split the profit with his source.
Booze and weed moved profitably, too. But he stayed away from hard drugs. Selling smokes would get him a slap. Selling smack? More prison time at best, a shank between the ribs at worst.
He took orders for items as diverse as hand cream and hot sauce, and earned a rep for reliable delivery.
He had protection, and nobody messed with him.
Making sure he also gained a rep for doing his assigned work without complaint, keeping his head down, following the rules came easily. He went to services every Sunday, after gradually letting the prison holy assholes convince him in the power of God and prayer and all that shit.
Reading—the Bible, the classics, books on self-awareness and improvement—helped him transfer from the prison laundry—a hellhole—to the library.
He worked out religiously, and became a de facto personal trainer, always helpful.
Because he needed to keep fully informed about certain people on the outside, he read smuggled-in tabloids, even read Variety. He knew the little brat who put him inside had made a couple of movies. He knew the bitch who’d screwed him over played the penitent mother with the press.
And it burned his ass to read about her engagement to some old, fucking billionaire. He hadn’t considered she had that much grifter in her. Maybe he admired it, on some level.
But either way, payback would come.
He saw an opportunity when he read the brat was in New York banging some dancer (probably gay). He spent some time working out how to give the little bitch a shot, who to assign, how much to pay for the job.
Making connections with anyone up for release had paid off in the past. He saw just how it could pay off now.
It took Cate less than two weeks to realize she hated school. Sitting in classrooms hour after hour listening to her instructor talk about things that—it turned out—didn’t interest her didn’t really open doors, she discovered.
It just closed her inside rooms someone else had designed.
Except for her French course. She liked learning a language, practicing the sounds of it, making sense of its rules and quirks.
Film Studies bored her senseless. She didn’t care about analyzing a film, finding hidden meanings and metaphors. To her, it dulled the magic that offered itself on-screen.
But she’d see it through, every course. Sullivans weren’t quitters, she told herself as she sat through another lecture.
“They expect me to know stuff because I acted, because my family’s in the business.”
She cuddled with Noah on his little bed on what she thought of as Blissful Mondays.
“You do know stuff.”
“Not the sort of things they want. In an acting class, I’d have more to say, I guess. But I don’t know why Alfred Hitchcock decided to film Psycho’s shower scene in those quick cuts, or why Spielberg let Dreyfuss’s character live at the end of Jaws. I just know they’re both really brilliant, scary movies.”
Lazily, he stroked her hair, now nearly to her shoulders. “Do you want to take an acting class?”
“No. That one’s all yours. You’re the one in the hottest ticket on Broadway. I—”
“What?”
She turned her head, kissed his shoulder. “Stupid to think I can’t bring it up, since all that crap’s faded off.”
“You said it would.” He turned to kiss her in turn. “I should’ve listened.”
“It was a kick in your gut, Noah.”
“Lower,” he said and teased a laugh out of her.
“I was going to say that people at college—even the dean of students—have asked if I can get them tickets to Mame.”
“We’ve always got a handful of VIP seats available.”
She shook her head. “Do it once, it would never stop. Oh, I have