Never Play Another Man's Game Read Free

cold fingers worked their way into the car. I sat in the below-zero silence watching the house. I left the engine off; a car parked on the street with the engine running would attract unwanted attention. I waited until one before I backed out of the space and turned around. I was being extra cautious with Ruby. I didn’t want to risk a chance of her seeing my car drive by her house. The sight could easily set off something in her con brain that she would feel as gut instinct. I didn’t want to give her any warning. I wanted her thinking she was the one doing the looking so that she would never see me coming.
    I was back the next night just in time to see Ruby leave. The Malibu pulled away from the curb with a screech of tires and tore down the street. I didn’t follow the car; instead, I stayed where I was and watched the house. For twenty minutes, I watched the windows. All of the lights were off and no one opened the curtains to look at the street. At ten thirty, I got out of the car and walked towards the house on the opposite sidewalk. I passed Ruby’s place and crossed the street when I reached the park a half a kilometre up the road. I walked down the other side of the street watching for any nosey homeowners who might be peering into the street from their living rooms. When I was sure that I was not being watched, I turned off the sidewalk and walked over the lawn to the side of Ruby’s house. The space between the house and the neighbours was separated by a six-foot-tall wooden fence. The solid fence, and the lack of a light on the side of the house, made picking the lock easy. No one noticed me crouching beside the reinforced metal door. The lock took thirty seconds to turn.
    I opened the door and stepped inside unafraid of tripping an alarm system. Ruby was a grifter — she ran cons, picked pockets, and committed every type of fraud imaginable — so she would never want the law in her house even if she were the victim of a crime. I checked for an alarm just in case, but I was right. I then checked if anyone else was home. All of the lights in the house were off, but that didn’t mean the house was clear — someone could have been sleeping. I checked each room and found no one catching zzzs. The house was empty and there were only size-four clothes in the closets. Ruby lived alone. Throughout the house was picture after picture of Ruby with a young boy. In each picture, the boy got bigger and older until the boy maxed out and no longer grew. I’d never known that Ruby had a kid.
    I walked away from the frames and began a deeper search of the house. I found money stashed in a coffee can in the freezer, a gun under the mattress, and several fake pieces of ID with the same woman’s face on them. I also found three wigs in the bathroom. All three were the same colour and the same length — each just in a slightly different style. Inside the medicine cabinet, I found more pill bottles than any person should have. I also found a daily pill dispenser. I popped open the pill slot for the next day and saw that Ruby would be taking twelve pills on Tuesday. I didn’t recognize any of the names etched on the pills, but the cancer pamphlets on the night table filled me in.
    Ruby had lung cancer. To fight the disease, she had been going through radiation and chemo. The pamphlets listed hair loss as a possible side effect; the wigs confirmed it as a definite. I went back into the bathroom and looked at the wigs. Beside the three, there was a fourth Styrofoam head that was bald. This was the style that Ruby had chosen for the night. I pulled the folded piece of paper from my pocket, placed it in front of the head under a prepaid cell that I had bought the day before, and then I walked out the door.
    The next day, I tailed Ruby to Limeridge Mall. She drove a lot more carefully and checked behind her a lot more often after she had found my note, but it didn’t matter — I was