I took in a deep breath and steadied myself. The conversation had my heart racing. “I just want what I said. I want an eye for an eye. And I need you to show me how. How to get close. And how to disappear.”
“How to be a con,” he mused, taking a sip of his beer. “Yes, I think I can do that.”
CHAPTER THREE
I spent the next two weeks with Gus, barely leaving his side. In the mornings we’d let the cows out, in the evenings we’d let them back in. I shoveled hay, I shoveled shit. I cleaned up his house, I made dinner. I helped whenever I could, because whenever he could, he was helping me. He was teaching me to become a con artist like my parents, but hopefully better.
We went through all the steps. In order to get close to Travis, I needed to infiltrate his crew. Because I didn’t know anyone in the whole drug cartel line of work, I was going to have to make do with what I had. Which basically was the fact that I was a vagina with legs. The easiest way for me to get close to anyone on Travis’s side of things was to stake him out, find a man who was close to him, someone who could succumb to my charms, and go after him.
The only problem with that meant I’d have to seduce someone, and I’d never seduced a soul in my life. Luckily Gus and I never talked about this; I would have died from mortification. But I was a virgin, and aside from some weirdo boy I knew back in high school, I hadn’t really been kissed before. It’s kind of hard thinking about being naked with someone when you’re terrified to let them see your damn leg. And yet, somehow I was going to have to get to know some man in some way if I was going to get what I wanted.
Of course, in order to do all that, I had to create a new identity. Well, actually Gus created it for me. He taught me that I could choose any name as long as the initials corresponded with my own. I chose Eden White. With my tan and long blonde hair, I was hoping a sexy name (aka triple x video store name) would give me that extra edge. He then went about making me a new driver’s license, social security card, even a fake passport. Everything had to be absolutely perfect in order for any of this to work because Travis and his men were the type to sniff out your lie before they caught a whiff of your perfume.
“Your con is a long con, one that will take a lot of time,” Gus said to me while we washed my truck one sweltering Sunday. “Long cons are the most dangerous. The longer the con, the more likely you’ll screw up.”
“Oh great,” I said, wringing the cloth into the bucket.
“Sweetie, no one said this would be easy. Not to mention you’re conning for all the wrong reasons.”
I threw the rag on the hood and put my hands on my hips. “The wrong reasons?”
He peered at me from above his sunglasses. “You’re conning over emotion, over a feeling. Con for money, it’s tangible. When you con for revenge, you might not know when you’ve won.”
“Oh I’ll know,” I told him, and went back to wiping.
He scratched thoughtfully at his mustache. “For your sake, I hope you will.”
By the time I was ready to leave Gus and put my plan into action, he’d taught me everything he could about conning. Thankfully, because my parents had brought me up to be a scammer, I was already pretty adept at lying. I knew all the basics of most cons…I’d just been out of practice for so long. When I was eight years old, it was like a second nature to steal from collection plates at church or lie to rich folk to get money. I was going to have to find that deception and manipulation that had once come so easy to me. I supposed my days of innocence weren’t so innocent after all.
“Now you remember what I taught you,” Gus said to me as I sat in the truck, idling outside of his house. He leaned on the open window, arms folded, deep in thought.
“I won’t forget,” I promised.
He seemed to ignore me, his eyes focused on the dirty dashboard. “Once you drive out of here, you won’t be Ellie Watt. You’ll be Eden White. You’ll scam for money, steal for survival. You’ll be giving the world a proverbial f**k you. You’ll be a con artist, just like your parents and just like their parents before them.”
“So I guess there’s no turning back, huh?” I joked, but his eyes sliced into me.
“You can always turn back, Ellie. No matter how far you go, no matter what you’ve done. You can always turn back. You can give up your ghost.”
I nodded, beads of uncomfortable sweat forming on my forehead.
“But if you do,” he went on, “make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons. You’re the only person who should cause your regrets.”
I had no idea what that meant so I merely smiled and nodded, eager to get going, to start my new life.
He didn’t budge, his head still in the truck, eyes locked on my face. “The minute you’re in trouble, the minute you think you might even be in trouble, you call me. You email me. You come here. Revenge is sweet, but it’s a sweet poison. Stay smart, never let your thoughts drift, and don’t involve your heart, no matter the cost. You got that?”
“I got that,” I said hoarsely.
“That’s my girl,” he said, giving a satisfactory slap on the roof of the truck.
And so for the second time that month, I had to drive away from a rare breed—someone who cared and looked out for me. Let me tell you, it doesn’t get any easier. Hot tears coated my cheeks through most of Texas. I cried tears of fear and tears of loss. I cried just to cry. I cried my last tears as Ellie Watt.
***
Unfortunately, there was a huge learning curve when it came to being Eden White. It wasn’t just the name change, with a new birth date to remember and a whole new history. It was the conning part. I was planning to get a legitimate job when I got to Mississippi, maybe in a restaurant or something, especially since I didn’t want to draw any suspicion to myself. But until then, I was going to be a grifter. I figured if I had to be lying to people anyway about who I was, why not take it further? Besides, it was something I could stop doing at any time. I could quit and go legit with the snap of my fingers.
Plus, I was a natural. I was born to lie, born to scam. Okay, well maybe I used to be a natural—like I said, huge learning curve here. I spent a good two months running cons through Louisiana and Arkansas, doing exactly what Gus had taught me. Well, almost. I made more than a few mistakes—mistakes I only got out of by riding on my youth and rapidly deteriorating innocence.