Free Made for Sin by Stacia Kane Page B

about the Gallo thing.”
    “Nothing to tell.”
    “Not according to Felix.”
    He shifted in his seat. Damn Felix. “It wasn’t a big deal. He was a husband I was tailing, and he and his wife got in a fight and she told him all about it. He showed up at my place with a gun and demanded I give him everything I had on him—which was a lot—and I refused. That’s all it was.”
    “You broke his arm, his collarbone, and his leg,” she said, “and made him shoot himself in the foot.”
    And he’d be breaking Felix’s gossiping mouth next, or he would if he wasn’t one of the few real friends he had. Although it was hard to remember what a good friend Felix was when he could feel Ardeth’s eyes focused on him, watching his reaction, waiting for a response he couldn’t think of.
    Damn it, why was she putting him so off-balance? It wasn’t the strangeness of the circumstances, of the night, or of anything else. He just felt like…like there was something he wanted to say to her, like there was a conversation they should have been having that they weren’t having. He’d spent plenty of time with plenty of women, but he couldn’t remember ever feeling so unsure of himself.
    Maybe it was better to change the subject back to something he felt comfortable with. “So why Mercer, do you think? What do you know about him?”
    She paused long enough to let him know she was well aware that he was changing the subject, and why, but she allowed it. “He’s—he was—a great dipper—a pickpocket. I don’t think he’d ever been caught, at least not once he got out of his teens. A great lockpick, too. Trained by a magician—Enzo Lario. Ever heard of him?”
    “Yeah,” he said, surprised in spite of himself. “My mom used to pal around with him, before I was born. I met him once or twice, but I guess he wasn’t too into dating a woman with a kid.”
    “I didn’t know that.” It was her turn to sound surprised. “I mean, I know your mom spent a few weeks guesting at the old Crown when he was there, but I didn’t know they were friends.”
    “Everybody was my mother’s friend. If you can call it that.”
    “Hey, she did what she had to do,” Ardeth said. Something in her voice sounded different. Sad? No, wistful, he thought. Wistful. “It can’t have been easy.”
    His mother was another subject he definitely didn’t want to discuss. “What did yours do?”
    “Died,” Ardeth said. “When I was three.”
    And now he felt like an asshole again. “Oh. Sorry.”
    “It’s okay. I don’t really remember her. And my dad took care of me. Taught me everything I know.”
    “I’ve heard of your dad,” he said. “Mickey, right? Mickey Coyle.”
    “That was him.” Pride touched her voice.
    “I’m sorry for your loss.” Her recent loss, now that he thought of it; Mickey Coyle had died just a couple of months before.
    “Thank you.” She shook her head slightly, her smile soft and sad in the darkness. “He used to take me to work with him, when I was little. I was an experienced decoy by the time I was five. When I was six he started teaching me basic lifting—you know, finger tricks, card tricks, sleight-of-hand stuff. He was the best.”
    “I’ve heard that.” It was true, too. The guy had been something of a legend—kind of like Va-va-voom Vera, now that he thought of it.
    “What did yours teach you?”
    That was an odd question. She knew so much about him, she had to know that. “Never had one.”
    “That’s not the way I heard it.”
    Oh, right. She meant Laz. “Nobody’s ever told me anything different,” he said. “So why don’t we leave it at that.”
    “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize it was a sore spot.”
    “It’s not.”
    “Sure it is.” She sucked on the Coke he’d bought her and made a face. Yeah, sitting in the car for forty minutes hadn’t made it taste any better. “You’re kind of a walking sore spot, Speare. I wonder why.”
    “You’re not as good at