The girl coasted down the street in her beat-up Chevy truck, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible. Considering it was Mississippi in April and everyone had their heads hanging out of their trucks, sweating like pigs, she fit right in.
But she wasn’t a local. She’d only been back in the state for three weeks, and during those three weeks, she kept seeing the same people. That was on purpose. The girl had found a familiar house—a rich man’s house where bad things happened long, long ago. And she watched that man’s house day in and day out. Sometimes from far away. Sometimes from up close. But she made sure that no one ever saw her.
And as she watched his house, this man she remembered as Travis, she watched many men come and go. Some women—some very attractive women—but mostly men. Men who got shit done. Men who wore suits and talked smart. Men who’d cut off your ear with nail clippers.
She watched the men, figuring out which man was the most important to Travis. Which man held the most power. And, over time, she figured out it was a man who looked no older than she did. He was practically a boy, with longish hair that flowed delicately as he walked. When she watched him from afar, you wouldn’t think anything of him. But he had a way about him—the way he held himself with such ease, gestured with such control, such confidence, that you couldn’t be fooled. That man, as young as he seemed, could not be underestimated. Even Travis seemed to regard him like a snake in a cage, a snake that could easily slip through the cracks.
Once the girl decided that this man was the man she needed to know, she waited until he left the compound, roaring off in a ‘70s Pontiac GTO, and followed him. She followed him day after day after day. Seeing where he went. Every day he’d leave the affluent suburbs of North Biloxi and head to the quaint town of Ocean Springs. He’d pull up to his small white house with its curved stained glass windows and sprawling porch and disappear inside.
The girl never saw anyone else visit the man. She often wondered what he did in there. Did he watch TV? Did he sit on his back porch watching the waves crash against his private beach, the wind rustling the sea grass? Was he lonely?
She wondered all these things about the man and slowly gathered up the courage to find out for herself. One day she followed the man to his favorite café in town, and instead of hiding out in her truck like the stalker she was, she decided to go into the shop. She decided to finally meet this man.
The girl walked in still sweating from the humidity outside. Inside the shop it was cool and surprisingly busy. She spied the man in the corner of the room, relaxing back in a wicker chair, a cup of tea in his hand. He was flipping through a Men’s Health magazine, seeming bored yet content.
The girl took a deep breath, ordered a coffee at the bar, then took a seat on the couch nearest him.
Up close, the man was just as young as she thought. Maybe twenty-three at the most to her twenty. It was hard to tell when he was dressed so sharply. He wore a watch like the kind her parents used to get her to steal from rich men. He gave off an air of sophistication and wore cologne that smelled more like tea than the tea he was drinking.
She tried not to stare at him too much, but after a while, he caught on. Perhaps he’d always known and had been playing his cards slowly.
He looked up at her, and in that instant, he took her heart away. His eyes saw right into her. And he smiled. He liked what he saw.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The second we got into Jose, we roared off down the street in the opposite direction of the main drag. It would take a little while to get out of town, but I wanted to make sure we weren’t being followed, and I really wanted to make sure we weren’t about to zip past Javier and his henchmen if they were scouting certain roads.
“Where are we going?” Camden asked as the houses on the street got smaller and more spread apart. Sand and brush invaded the suburbs.
Why, I thought, so you can text your new buddies? I had to stop thinking that way, thinking that Camden could have made a deal with the Devil, but my paranoia was at an all-time high and there was no such thing as being too careful.
“We’re going to clean your money,” I told him, taking a sharp left onto a street that led out into the desert.
“You know how to do that?” he asked.
I gave him a wry smile. “Of course I do. I’m a con artist. Almost every paycheck is dirty in some way.”
“Dirty deeds done dirt cheap.”
“Oh, I do nothing for cheap. Not even this. Put your cell phone on the dash.”
He was startled. “What?”
I nodded at the dash. “Do it. Put it up there. I don’t want to see you sending any covert messages.”
There was silence. I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. He was staring at me, seemingly befuddled.
“What?” I asked impatiently. “What’s the problem?”