Down to the Liar(13)

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 odds. Now all I need is a hacker.

“Bryn, you’re a genius,” I say. “Put Murphy on the phone.”





The Tale


Unfortunately, it doesn’t take longer than a school day for my shiny new outlook on the job to wear off. The dean seems to have caught on that something’s up, because she was lurking not-so-covertly around every corner today. Plus, Skyla was out sick, which just makes me that much more cranky. I don’t like the idea of her holing up alone when who knows what kind of crazy is waiting to pounce.

“You’d better be right about this, Murphy,” I mutter under my breath.

I kick a plastic empty out of my way as we navigate a musty commercial basement in Washington Heights, avoiding sticky patches and candy wrappers littering the floor as best we can by the cold light of clustering laptop screens and mobile devices. Murphy’s leading the way, since he’s actually been here before. Dani’s trailing just behind us, her eyes scanning the room, though how she sees anything in this dismal cave is beyond me.

“Installing spyware I can do,” Murphy says. “But if you want the honeypot, you need a real hacker.”

“Like Sam,” I mumble to myself.

Murphy shakes his head in the dim light. “There’s nobody like Sam. He’s the best I’ve ever seen. But this guy’s almost as good.”

I snort in disgust as I brush past a stained sofa with a couple making out to the four-four rhythm of the punishing techno beat. Almost everyone else is tapping keyboards and trash-talking each other in an equally techno language. The whole scene drives the spike of anger deeper. I shouldn’t have to be here.

“What kind of name is Tog, anyway?” I say.

“You want the Tog?” interrupts a disembodied voice from behind a nearby monitor.

Murphy stops. “You know him?” he says, addressing the general direction the voice came from.