Time for me to take the book. It calls me on sleepless, sticky nights, and I hunt whenever the house is empty. In Dad’s safe, above the rafters, under the sink, behind the rat poison and the bleach.
There’s gold on every dog-eared page between the tatty leather bindings. A water-stained Watermelon Drop, a paperclipped Pig in a Poke. Every grift, every swindle any sucker, any stooge ever fell for. Our family diary of scams, a huckster’s how-to of hustling gulls.
I’ve scrabbled on high shelves and under every squeaky floorboard for my father’s prize possession. It was his father’s before that, until Dad played a distraction game on Grandpa and slipped out with the book in his battered case, one thunder-hot day. Grandpa won it from his father in a hand of poker; father and son were both cheating, but the son cheated better.
It will be mine once I’ve checked the inside of every box-sprung bed, under every couch and behind every wardrobe. It's in the blood. A tingle in my top lip at the approach of a perfect Mark, a pounding of my heart in the build-up, the ecstasy as I find the sweet spot, the convincer that hooks them and reels them in. The moment of now or never. I win or you lose. I’m good, so I mostly win. Then I’m gone, with their wad in your back pocket, whistling and throwing my hat and wig in the bin as I leave.
My father will be so proud the day I lift it from his hiding place, shimmy down a drainpipe, disappearing to earn my crust running cons on unsuspecting schmucks, nostrils filled with the sweet smell of gasoline from the bridges I’ll burn, whistling as I go.
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