CHAPTER ONE
Then
The girl was lying down in the backseat of her parents’ rusting station wagon, counting down the minutes as she stared up at the green water spots on the roof. If she had a cell phone, keeping track of time would have been a lot easier, especially since the girl still struggled with math. Of course, you could blame her mother for that—you could blame her for a lot of things—since the girl had been home-schooled her whole life. Division and multiplication were about as advanced as things got for the eleven-year-old. But, according to her mother, you only needed to be able to count in order to succeed in grifting, and at the moment, the girl was counting away.
It had been four minutes since her parents left the car and walked up, arm-in-arm, toward the cold lights that emanated from the sprawling house. The girl had no idea where they were except that they were still in Mississippi. She could smell the swamps. The man they were visiting was supposed to be an old friend of her mother’s, but the girl wasn’t too sure about that. She had heard her mother screaming about this Travis man from time to time, and her anger had done nothing except build over the last few weeks. Finally, she had made some phone calls, got herself dolled up in her “special” dress that showed far too much cleavage, made her husband slap on a suit, and dragged the girl out to the car. They were going to have dinner with this old friend of hers, and they needed the girl to do a little breaking and entering while they had the man occupied.
The girl was shocked at first. It wasn’t just that she was getting older and developing her own sense of morals that didn’t seem to gel with the world her parents had created, it was that no one in their family had pulled a scam in years. Her father had steady work at a casino and their tiny apartment in Gulfport had become as much of a home as a home could get. Her parents had promised her that they were finished with grifting for good and that they’d try and lead as normal a life as they could, all for their young daughter. Or so they said.
But her mother had her reasons, reasons that the girl didn’t understand. If they were friends with this Travis man, why were they robbing him? If he lived in an outlandish house with marble pillars and a driveway full of fountains, why didn’t they just ask him for the money? This was another reason why the girl doubted her mother’s story. This man wasn’t a friend at all.
And the girl was being sent right into his clutches.
When the time was up, the girl slowly got out of the car, careful not to make a sound, and hugged the shadows of the house, moving toward the back. She listened for the telltale buzz of security cameras or the click of motion sensor lights and felt relief when she couldn’t detect them. She kept low, quick and quiet until she was in the sprawling backyard, the manicured grounds lit by the moon. She paused behind a fragrant bush and counted the windows down the side of the house. The plan was for her to go in the second window, the master bathroom, then walk out of the bedroom and take the first door on the left. That’s where she’d find the safe, the code written in permanent ink on the top of her sweating hand.
How her mother knew the code to this man’s safe, she had no idea. She stopped asking her mother these things a long time ago.
She scampered over to the narrow, frosted pane window, and just like her mother said it would be, it was open a crack.
The girl would always look back at that moment, the hesitation as she stood below it, the moon behind her. She remembered having a choice—she didn’t have to go through with it. She could run back to the car and tell her parents she changed her mind. But fear and pride kept the foolish little girl from acting on her instincts.
Instead, she silently opened the window and went into the house.
When she eventually left the house, her life would be changed forever.
Now
Bright blue skies, rough desert, open blacktop spreading before me.
Cue the music.
I fumbled with my iPod and selected the Desert Playlist I concocted a few days ago in a hotel room in Colorado. The Doors’ “Roadhouse Blues” came blaring from Jose’s speakers and I let myself smile as the hot breeze blew my hair back.
It had been two months since I escaped Sergei’s fat-knuckled clutches in Ohio. Two months of being on the road and lying low from state to state. Two months of trading in my long, naturally strawberry blonde hair for a choppy black bob. Two months of surviving on Sergei’s money until it ran dry. Two months of being Ellie Watt.
Two months before I finally had to return home.
Well, the only place I’d ever called home.
I loved the high desert though, always have, and seeing the Joshua trees as they clung to rocky, chalk-colored hillsides made a familiar thrill run through me. The same kind of thrill I got when pulling off a scam. Only there were probably more repercussions for returning to the Coachella Valley. A scam, yeah, I was usually good at those. Being home again—being me again—not so much.