you can buy if you know where to look, or hack if you know how to hack. No point in taking down a bereaved widow, for instance, till you gauge the breadth, depth, and liquidity of her husband’s life insurance. Properly equipped, you can weevil into company records, university archives, any state’s DMV. You’re your own personal Freedom of Information Act. So I used available tools to apply a more rapier touch to my search for the increasingly mysterious Allie Quinn.
Nothing. Nothing I couldn’t immediately dismiss as a false positive, anyway; I’m reasonably certain that Aileen O’Quinn was not my gal, less for the distant agnation of the name match and more for the fact that the octogenarian stroked out and died last week. Of course, there was no reason to believe that “Allie Quinn” was even remotely close to her real name, and growing evidence to suggest it was pure marzipan. But the fact that she’d phony up to me made her more vexing still. At this point, I had to assume she was working my same side of the street. But why was she working me?
I attacked the info underground from a slightly different angle, accessing a national bunco photo database. It’s a fact of the grift that sooner or later you will get popped, which translates into fingerprints and mug shots. For the sake of protecting innocents from the predations of guys like me, law enforcement creates and circulates our profiles, including a list of our favorite snadoodles—check kite, parallel marriage, what have you. Say someone turns up in your Walmart parking lot working a hijacked-appliance dodge, where you think you’re buying a stolen stereo but all you’re actually buying is a box of rocks, which you’d have to be dumb as to go for that gaff, but whatever. In that case, your local Jake can sneak a perp snap and try to make a match. So you see, the internet not only works for us but against us. It’s a cat-and-mouse game. Jake thinks he’s the cat.
Since men on the razzle outnumber women ten to one, my search task was easier than if I’d been looking for, say, me. I’m in there, of course, with three known aliases, Milad Majid, Bo Nada, and Sretan Bo017Ei?, all of which happen to mean Merry Christmas in one language or another. They list my specialty as long con securities fraud, which I think is a little misleading. I short con, too.
So sorting by gender was a given. I could have sorted also by age, but I didn’t. Though I thought Allie was contemporaneous to me—north of twenty-five—I couldn’t swear that she wasn’t ten years older. Or younger: I’ve known some precocious girls in the game.
Their daddies teach them. It’s cute.
Likewise, I didn’t filter for, say, geographic tendency or hair color, because quality mooks know to how keep moving and dye. And Allie Quinn, by her sheer absence from the realm of usual suspects, was starting to impress me as a quality mook. The more I virtually paged through the virtual pages, the more I became convinced I wasn’t going to find her there. An hour later, search complete, I knew: If Allie Quinn was on the razzle, she had yet to make the database.
Two immediate questions came to mind. How did Allie know where I lived, and why did she want to meet? I mulled the second question first. It didn’t seem likely that her only interest was in getting her shoe back. Just to be sure, I inspected it closely, to see if it was a particularly pricey brand or had a secret compartment or was made of drugs or something. Nope. Just your run-of-the-mill Payless pump. So then what?
In my experience, human motivation can be broken down to the four broad strokes of sex, love, money, and revenge. Everything else we chase—power, glory, information, exultation, stimulation—is just a subset of these. Like the sign says, “Money can’t buy happiness, but it can rent sex.” So was sex what she wanted? Was Allie on the make? We’ve already discussed the disangular cut of my jib. I’m not “boyfriend cute,” not even “sidekick cute,” really. Yes, I watch what I eat and stupidly believe that regular aerobic exercise will extend the span of my life, for what that’s worth. But I don’t kid myself—as catches go, I’m strictly catch and release.
So then, not sex.
Love, then? Love?
Lovely.
But not likely.
Look, I believe in love. I understand that my father loved my