Barclay, Linwood Novel 08 - Never saw it coming

was a total sucker for this stuff, it turned out. He believed some people really possessed this ability, to sense things that others could not. He even watched repeats of
Ghost Whisperer
, which drove his mother crazy. Marcia said she could probably get the dead to communicate with her too, if she wandered around all the time in low-cut halter dresses like Jennifer Love What’s-her-face.
    “There are some things,” Dwayne had evidently told his wife, “that we aren’t meant to understand.”
    Justin told Keisha that was about the time the idea started forming in his head. What really helped spur it along was that his mother had cut him off financially. She used to give him, right off the top, fifty dollars a week, no questions asked, but how far did that go, really? You couldn’t even do one night on the town for fifty bucks. How were you supposed to buy your beer and your weed and maybe something a little stronger, and something to eat on top of that? He tried to tell his mother, without actually mentioning the beer and the weed, that fifty bucks might have been a year’s salary when she was a little girl riding around in a rumble seat, but these days you couldn’t even put half a tank of gas in the car for that.
    Then get a job, Marcia told him.
    So that was how she was going to play it.
    For a while, he managed to wheedle a hundred here, a hundred there, out of her. One time, he said he was debating whether to go back to school, which brought a smile to his mother’s face. He had dropped out of UConn after the first semester. Loved the partying, but found the going-to-classes thing very intrusive. He told her he’d gotten his head back on straight, and was thinking about enrolling in a business school in Manhattan. There were several he wanted to check out. It was time to learn something
practical
, not all this airy-fairy shit they taught at university. That was music to his mother’s ears. So he needed train and cab fare, and he might need to stay over one night. She gave him four hundred. Just like that. He never got on the train, but he did attend a fabulous party in New Haven and passed out on a Yale buddy’s floor. Another time, after telling his mother he’d decided against school, but was going to get a job instead, he said he needed new clothes for interviews. He pocketed the cash she gave him, but stole a few things from a Gap so he’d have proof of a shopping trip.
    Marcia asked him to model his new tops for her. When he pulled them on, he realized everything he’d stolen was a small, and he needed a large because he was six feet tall. No problem, his mother said. She asked for the receipt. She’d exchange the items for the right size next time she was at the mall.
    No big deal, he said. He’d do it.
    But she insisted.
    Lost the receipt, Justin said.
    You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out what he’d done. That was when she cut him off completely. Even the fifty bucks.
    Zero cash flow.
    He didn’t have any qualms about lifting a few things from the Gap, but he wasn’t about to start robbing banks. A little too risky. Justin needed a way to get money out of his mother and stepfather, because when you were ripping off your family, it wasn’t like you were actually stealing.
    But you had to be creative.
    Which was when he found Keisha Ceylon online, got her number, and got in touch. Face to face, he made his pitch. It was pretty simple.
    “I vanish. They bring you in. You find me. They pay you. We split it.”
    Keisha saw a hundred things wrong with the idea. “Suppose they don’t want to hire me. I show up, they slam the door in my face.”
    “You’re not going to call
them
. They’ll call
you
. Or Dwayne—that’s my mom’s new husband—will. See, my mom, she’s not going to be in a hurry to call the cops, ’cause she’ll figure the reason I haven’t come home is I’ve done something really bad, like stolen a DVD at Best Buy or broken a cop car window or bitten the head off a squirrel. If she calls the cops and they find me, I’ll just be in even more trouble, and when I’m in trouble, that means more aggravation for her.” He grinned. “But Dwayne, he’s totally into the kind of shit you do, no offence intended.”
    Keisha said nothing.
    Justin continued. “I’ll plant the seed. Next time we’re watching
Ghost Whisperer
. I’ll tell him, hey, there’s a lady right here in Milford, does this kind of thing all the time. I’ll tell him about when