Chapter Seventy-Seven
Seventy-Seven
Usually, Mary would wait at least a year before sending Denise a message so that they could start implementing the ‘mistress’ phase of their ‘wedding con’.
After her marriage to Phillip Evans, Mary quickly discovered that what was commonly known as the ‘honeymoon period’ of a marriage would either be on its last legs, or well and truly over by the first-year anniversary.
By then, the petty arguments would’ve already started…
the sex life would’ve lost at least half of its sparkle, if not all of it…
and the husband would be much more welcoming to flirts from other women than he would’ve been just a few months earlier – but this time, Mary decided to move things up from the one-year mark to eight months… and she did so for two main reasons.
Reason number one was simple – Quaddra would, no doubt, be Mary and Denise’s last-ever con.
Denise wasn’t the only one who had grown bitterly tired of running and hiding like a fugitive every time they finished a con.
Mary didn’t want to do it anymore either.
She was tired of running, tired of the lies, tired of pretending, and she sure as hell was tired of not knowing who she really was anymore.
Yes, it was a good con, one that in the past fourteen years had earned them millions, but it was also very risky, and Mary just couldn’t wait to be done with all of it – forever.
Mary had truly never intended to run the ‘wedding con’ more than just once. Her divorce settlement from Phillip Evans back in the UK was supposed to have set her and Denise up for life, but things turned out a little differently from what she and Denise had expected.
They were just two young women in their early twenties and neither of them understood anything about business.
They had no idea that despite how wealthy Phillip seemed to be, almost all of his capital was tied up into his business – his restaurants and cocktail bars – and neither of them was going to take over Phillip’s businesses and run them, so after the divorce, Mary liquidated everything for an absolute bargain price.
At the time, Mary and Denise didn’t really care for what could’ve been.
They’d just made more money with that one con than they’d ever made before – almost one million pounds between the two of them – and for two very young women who, just a few years before were pickpocketing people on the streets of London, one million pounds was crazy money.
The decision to travel to America came not because they were thinking about running the con again.
They just wanted to get the hell out of the UK before someone figured out what they’d done.
The choice had been between the US and Australia, and the US won on a coin toss.
Another coin toss decided their first stop in America – Vegas – and that proved to be a huge mistake.
Las Vegas was an incredible city, considered by many to be the biggest circus on the planet – a show town that never slept and never disappointed.
It was a city full of lights, people, shows, games, laughter, and of course…
money. Grace and Julia didn’t gamble their million pounds away, but two young women, splashing cash around like millionaires would always grab the attention of the wrong people, especially in a city like Vegas, and the two young con artists fell victim to a much more experienced and seasoned gang of con artists – electronic hackers – who managed to upload a remote access program to Grace and Julias’ cellphones.
The program allowed the hackers to observe, in real time, Grace and Julia using any of their smartphone applications… including their internet banking one.
It took the con/hacker gang just a few days of listening in and tracking Grace and Julia’s internet banking activity to be able to pretty much clean them out.
If not for the fact that Grace and Julia kept a significant amount of cash locked in their hotel room safe, they would’ve lost everything they’d made within ten days of landing in Vegas – a true ‘welcome to America’ block party.
It had been Julia who had suggested that they run the con again.
By then, they were both living in Chicago and she had just met someone called Erick Middleton, an entrepreneur who, on paper, looked like the real deal – easily worth close to ten million dollars – but the truth was that he owed money to some really nasty people.
For their second run, the roles were reversed – Julia played the bride and Grace became the lover.
Their natural talent in being able to pick up an accent with tremendous ease, once again proved invaluable for the success of their con, as neither woman wanted to reveal that they were British.
But Erick wasn’t just involved with some dangerous people.
He was a pretty nasty piece of work himself.
Julia didn’t have to fake the bruises, the beatings, or the abuse…
and neither did Grace. When the divorce settlement came, just a year and a half after Julia and Erick’s wedding, the extent of Erick’s debts and dodgy dealings was finally revealed.
Out of his ten million plus fortune, all that he really had left to his name was about one hundred thousand dollars in investments, which the judge awarded to Julia, but in all honesty, neither Grace nor Julia cared for how much money they’d be making anymore.
They just wanted Erick out of their lives forever, and for that they tightened their ‘in court’ game somewhat, faking even knife wounds.
Erick was tried for attempted murder and received a total of twenty-seven years in prison.
But Erick had friends… a lot of very dangerous friends…
and it was after their con on Erick Middleton that Grace and Julia had to rethink their tactics.
That was when they decided that they would have to split up, at least for six months to a year – tracking two separate people was much harder than tracking two people together.
They also came up with the idea of the burner phones and the code words that had to be used at the beginning and the end of every message.
But the events from Vegas, together with the fact that they knew that some of Erick’s friends would be looking for them, had truly rattled both women, so they created one extra level of security – a single code word, which if used anytime throughout the message, signaled trouble, as if one of them was being forced to leave a message.
If either of them heard that specific word in the message it meant ABORT – pack the fuck up and leave… now.
Julia had hated the idea. The last thing that she wanted to do was to be away from Grace, and she really didn’t want to run the ‘wedding con’ anymore. Grace didn’t want to run it anymore either, but she wasn’t going back to pickpocketing.
From Chicago, Julia moved to Miami, in Florida, and changed her name to Candice Logan. Grace moved to Boston, in Massachusetts, and changed her name to Samantha Chambers. That was where she met Nelson Stewart.
Call it third time lucky, but finally, after eleven years, Grace and Julia’s ‘wedding con’ did pay off. They both walked away from Nelson with a little over 2.5 million dollars each.
Back then, before the scam, Grace had told Julia that Nelson would be their last con, even if it didn’t pay off…
and she one hundred percent meant it, until she saw an article in the newspaper about a young billionaire entrepreneur called Quaddra Buckner, and Quaddra wasn’t just rich…
he was dirty, rotten, filthy, stinky rich.
But there was a second reason for Mary wanting to move the ‘mistress’ phase of their ‘wedding con’ forward by four months.
And it was that second reason that was keeping her up at night and making her question just about everything because Mary truly never saw this coming.
She never thought it possible either, because if there was one thing that she knew for sure about herself was that she hated men.
They were arrogant, conceited, opinionated, controlling, irresponsible, self-centered, and in most cases, avoidant of criticism.
In her experience, they were also always abusive in one way or another – physically, verbally, emotionally, psychologically, or a combination of those.
No matter which way Mary tried to look at it – as a daughter, stepdaughter, lover, friend, fiancée or wife – men had always used her…
they’d taken what they wanted and discarded her as if she was trash – that was why she hated men so much.
So why the hell was she falling desperately in love with Quaddra?