by Holly West
She lifted the remote from the bed and clicked off the power on the set. “You don’t look good in white. Washes you out.” She kissed him on the lips. The deep scar over Sam’s eye had been healing well, but would always be a prominent new part of his face. It was the last of his injuries to heal after their previous job went a little sideways. No better place to recover than the back woods of Mississippi. New Hampshire might have it on their flag, but this was the real land of Don’t Tread On Me. People minded their own around here. Live and let live, so long as you live according to the gospel.
“How much did we get from the wallet?”
“Sixty-three.”
Sam gave a one shouldered shrug. Small fries, but better than nothing. He knew she did it to stay in practice and to alleviate the boredom that came with hiding out in a roadside motel while he healed up.
“I wish,” she said, “that these people wouldn’t be their own worst stereotype, y’know? I mean, some of the best people we’ve met are from the south. Then you go and meet some real mouth-breathers and you see why the New Yorkers have such an easy time tarring them with one brush.”
“Yeah, but then you go up to New York and see how easy it is for Southerners to paint them all as mobbed-up mooks.”
“Everybody likes to put somebody else in a box, don’t they?”
“Sure do.”
They ate sitting on the bed, dripping ketchup and milkshake onto the bedspread. Far from the worst it had seen, surely. Each one made different groans of satisfaction. The grease bomb burgers were lard-laden delights of decadence and gluttony. Worth every damn calorie.
Too stuffed to move by the end of the feast, Sam switched the TV back on. Rachel was too weighed down with fast food to protest. The preacher’s hour of power had ended and a local news broadcast now played. This stretch of road, midway between Tupelo and Starkville, generated barely enough news to fill out a half hour local broadcast. High school sports, the latest from the Mississippi State teams and weather rounded out the headlines.
One story caught both of their attentions, even through the food coma. The male anchor of the pair, one desperately trying to hide his Delta accent as he read the teleprompter, explained about a sad turn of events for some families looking for some good news.
“Almost a dozen families found out they’d been bilked tonight when the adoption agency they’d been working with to bring a new baby into their lives was revealed to be a scam.”
It seems the group, working closely with local churches in the middle of the state, had started the process of adoption for these families, even providing them with pictures and fake backgrounds on the children, and then after payment was made to the tune of forty thousand dollars each, had declared a “financial emergency” and was forced to file for bankruptcy. The man at the top had been funneling off the money and using it to buy himself things including a boat and twin jet skis for his lake house. When his paperwork seemed off, the state agency looked into it a little deeper and they didn’t have to dig far to find out this guy had been using desperate families to finance his lifestyle for years and now it had finally caught up with him.
The failed mechanics of it fascinated Rachel.
“It’s like a pyramid scheme,” she said. “He runs out of money for one group since he, y’know, stole so much of it, so he uses the money from the next group to pay for the first and now he’s got himself in a spiral.”
“Amateur.”
“I do feel bad for the people. A little.”
“You heard what he said, working with local churches. These are gonna be serious bible thumpers.”
“Maybe. They still want a family, though.”
“Only sucker more ripe on the vine than a parent, is a wanna-be parent.”
The news report went on to say that the man at the top of this scam had bilked more than a dozen small church groups and religious organizations throughout the South. This time, he’d dealt directly with members of a group called the Shepherds of the Golden Lamb. The news anchor described them as, “a small group of fervent Old Testament worshippers who keep mostly to themselves.”
As Rachel’s empathy for the victims reached her throat and built into a lump there, one of the potential mothers was interviewed on the news. Her hair hung lank and thinning, her voice a gravel road of nicotine abuse, and her T-shirt stretched taut over her thick middle invited anyone to Come Take My Guns (if you dare).
“This man will have to answer to God. He knows what he’s done to our families and the others. All we wanted was to bring a little light in our lives. You got gays and dykes can adopt and that’s okay? And look at us here, God-fearing people who get ripped off for no good reason.”
Rachel turned to Sam. “Did she say ‘gays and dykes’?”
“She did.”
“Fuck her.”
The next woman didn’t help Rachel’s attitude toward the victims any.
“I prayed to Jesus for them not to abort these precious little angels. And now what’s gonna happen? These girls hear the adoption fell through, you know they’re just gonna go off and find some radical liberal doctor to give ’em a procedure. Makes me sick.”
Rachel waved an angry hand at the TV. “Don’t they understand that there never were any babies? The scam got exposed and they still don’t know they’ve been scammed.”
“We also have science and they still believe in talking snakes and burning bushes.”
“Okay, turn it off,” she said.
Sam switched off the set. “Y’know,” he said. “It does give me an idea.”
Rachel saw a familiar gleam in his eye. She knew it meant he had a new con in mind, and had a good guess what it might involve. The gears were turning. The plan formulating. She bounced up straight on the bed, eager to hear what he had to say.
The grift was on.
Click here to learn more about The Sound of Breaking Bones by Eric Beetner.
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