This went well, until the girl he was dealing with got greedy and tried to get over. She had come up on a Visa charge card, but her dumb ass didn’t know the difference between a debit and a credit card. All that week she had been shopping and eating at expensive restaurants. One she had particularly taken a liking to was an Italian joint called Bella’s. She was becoming a regular there, always ordering expensive wine and meals she couldn’t pronounce. On her fifth day of fun, the curtain finally fell. It didn’t take long for the account holder to notice that someone had been making sizable dents in her account. The feds noticed multiple charges to Bella’s on the account and were waiting in hopes that the thief would show. Sure enough, her trick ass showed up.

The police took her down without much effort. Paul couldn’t be sure when it happened, but he had been told she started talking before they even got downtown. She fed them a bullshit story about how Paul was the mastermind, and he forced her to help him. With her bogus story, the deck looked stacked against Paul. His saving grace was that they only found merchandise at his house, no sales receipts. He was handed eighteen months and five years’ probation for his part in the capers. This brought his hustling days to a slow crawl.

Paul sat in the middle of his studio apartment, wearing only a pair of jeans and a stocking cap. His chocolate-colored body was splattered with paint from the dripping brush that he held in his hand. On the easel in front of him was a five-by-five-foot canvas, assaulted with colors. The image wasn’t complete, but you could make out angles and white clouds. These kinds of portraits were Paul’s favorite to paint. Though he wasn’t a religious man, he found a certain joy in the images.

In school, Paul was one of the most talented artists in the city. He was blessed with an artistic eye without having ever taken a lesson. He was offered scholarships to several schools, but none ever panned out. He let his need for cash overpower his common sense, and chose the streets over education. Years later, he found himself a starving artist, hustling here and there to make it and trying to take care of his son.

A knock at the door stopped him midstroke. A mixture of blue paint and egg whites dripped from the tip of the brush and made splatter patterns on the wood floor. He wondered who it could be since he hadn’t expected anyone to come by. He inched toward the door, careful not to step on the loose floorboard. Looking through the peephole, Paul sucked his teeth. He wiped his hands on his pants and opened the door for his childhood friend, Larry Love.