“You know what?” He jumps out of his seat. “Let me go get us some coffees. Are you a latte man, Mr. Marsden?”
“Uh, sure?”
He grins. “My treat. Sit tight, I’ll be right back.”
He darts inside, and I blow air through my lips. Yeah, no damn way am I giving some of my hard-earned, or at least hard-won money towards his dumb church. Not a chance. I frown and look at his spreadsheet, and I shake my head. The figure he’s raised is seriously impressive. It’s envious, actually. My eyes move over the tables, and I shake my head. Yeah, I might be in the wrong business here.
I’m looking at his sheet, when suddenly another sheet pops up, blinking with a message asking if he wants to turn on autosave. Instinctively, because I fucking hate it when my laptop keeps asking dumb questions like that, I click yes for him. But then, that second document stays up, and I start to read it.
…And my eyes go wide.
Holy. Shit.
The document has lists of accounts and terms, and from my own little forays into check fraud, I can read what it is. The motherfucker is setting up a shell game. He’s got the main “trust,” which presumably is where this almost two-million is being held safe to be put towards his church construction. But then, there are “feeder” accounts. The average sucker would look at this shit and haven’t the slightest idea what it is, or that there’s even anything wrong with this. But, I’m no ordinary rube.
I know what a shell game looks like. Hell, Jasper taught me this shit when I was seventeen years old. And I know damn well, in a second, what Paul is up to.
The trick is, you make the “feeder” accounts look like legitimate business. And when I glance over his sheet, that’s exactly what he’s doing. One is branded as a “construction advisory contracting firm.” The other is a geological surveying start-up based in Florida. The only problem?
They’re all Paul’s companies.
I glance through the windows of the cafe, and Paul is yammering away with the barista behind the counter. Fuck it. I open up a folder, and I start poking around. It takes me all of thirty seconds to find the cleverly named “Contracts” folder inside the equally ambiguous “Shell Corps” folder. Apparently, you don’t have to be a genius to pull this off in a trusting place like Canaan.
I open the PDF named “Main Trust Contract,” and I start skimming. Instantly, I frown.
The Trust is in Paul’s name, and the contract is a standard boilerplate one, like pretty much every Trust contract I’ve ever looked at. There’s even the subsection that mentions that in the event of a marriage where finances will be joined, the trust is to be dissolved to avoid compromise. That’s standard shit, but then, Paul is getting married.
My frown deepens. What the fuck is he up to? But then, it’s pretty damn clear what he’s up to: Paul’s about to scam this whole fucking town.
There is no church, that’s pretty clear. In fact, he’s got pre-approval contracts for buying property in Costa Rica. I roll my eyes at how brazen and obvious he is, but then, Paul is from Canaan, which is exactly the type of town a con man would pick. I mean, that’s why I’m here.
I scowl at the contracts and some of his other scheming before I glance back inside the cafe. Paul’s being handed two to-go cups, and I quickly close everything down and bring his original spreadsheet up. He steps out of the cafe and grins as he sits and hands me the coffee.
“So, where were we?”
I smile thinly. “Paul, I’m afraid I do have to run. But, let’s put a pin in this.”
He frowns slightly, but he nods. “Yeah, yeah for sure, Gabriel. We’ll revisit soon? Before you leave town?”
I smile. “Absolutely.”
Not. Absolutely not.
I want no part of Paul’s bullshit. I’ve got my own shit to figure out—with what I am, with what this thing with Delilah is, and going along with that, what it means with her and I when I leave town in a few days’ time.
Later on that afternoon, I’ve got one last sermon for the day scheduled at the tent. The place is packed like it’s been since I got here, and I give ‘em a standard dazzler about “being the light” and “illuminating the Way for the unsaved.”
But, there’s no collections plate, and it’s not an oversight, I just don’t pass any along. I also don’t set up a collections bucket, I don’t do any baptisms, and I still don’t sell a single bottle of snake-oil.
When the crowd leaves, I sit on the edge of my stage, scowling. I’d ask myself what the fuck is wrong with me, but I already know what it is.
It’s her. It’s Delilah. But then, I’m not sure if what this new me is with her in my life is such a bad, or wrong, thing.