Con man Sam was born into a world of scams, hoaxes and schemes. Settling in Miami after making a major art swindle, he lives high and plays rough, but somehow ends up broke. So he rockets out of the sunshine state to Las Vegas. In the hope of pulling off the scam of a lifetime, he joins a motley crew of amateurs, including a former reality star, a retired showgirl, and his stripper brother, who is running a con of his own.
Love, loss, and sex are set against the bright neon of the Las Vegas strip in this sizzling romance!
I owed a guy money.
A lot of money.
And I made a deal with the devil.
Yeah, I’m a thief. Not proud of that, but not disturbed by it either.
No moral compass at all, survival of the fittest was what it boiled down to. I lived as high as I could for as long as I could, and then I would be on the hunt for another sucker to take down. There truly is one born every minute, as P.T. Barnum famously said. I learned how to hotwire a car, pick a pocket, forge a check, and dodge rent. My family’s coat of arms would have consisted of a piece of broken hanger and a pair of soft gloves to prevent fingerprints.
***
With fake glasses from a discount store, a smashed-in fedora, and wearing a baggy golf sweater from a thrift store, I had hunched my shoulders forward and lowered my face into the shadows. I was certain that to the group of young men I had just plowed into, I looked to be the age of any of their fathers. The fact that the young guys had all been pounding drinks helped as well.
I was still clutching the nearly empty cup in one hand as the group untangled me from them and we called out, “I’m sorry!” and “Excuse me!”
Walking away, I adjusted the glasses, and with my head still down, crossed the street. Picking up my pace, I went another half block before angling myself next to a trash can, and casually dropped the cup inside. With a deft move, I palmed the glasses from my face and let them fall into the container next to the cup.
Straightening up, I slipped open the buttons of the sweater and shrugged it off of my shoulders as I walked. Pulling the hat from my head, I casually popped the dents I had put in it earlier, and then plopped the inexpensive straw cover onto the back of my head. In the course of a few blocks, I had gone from looking like a middle aged guy to blending in and looking like any of the other hipster types the strip was crawling with.
Mingling into the crowd, I stepped onto the moving beltway leading into one of the complexes to dump some other stuff. Once inside the sprawling place, I eased into a men’s room stall, stripped out of the sweater, balled it up, and then pushed it into the slightly oversized hat. Then, from my pants I pulled the two wallets I had grabbed in the manufactured fallout. Both were, as I had expected, thick with cash. Pocketing the money, I shoved the wallets deep down among the wads of paper hand towels. At the sink, I scrubbed up with hot water, slicking my hair back with my fingers, and bared my teeth at my reflection to make certain that nothing was stuck in them.
I walked out of the men’s room looking like the clean-cut twenty-something that I am.
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