Three Kings

Things might have gone very differently if the war had gone on, but they ended the draft right before we graduated. For three guys with zero college aspirations, who had been fully expecting, if not exactly looking forward to, getting shipped overseas to die, we were suddenly lost, though we didn't realize it at the time. I knew I wouldn’t have come back. I don’t have the sort of killer instinct required to survive a war. Phil doesn’t either. Brandon, on the other hand, is made of something different. They would have made a four star general out of him, if they didn’t wind up court martialing him along the way.

In an attempt to avoid facing reality, we spent the first weeks of that summer hanging out behind the gas station, smoking dope during the days and drinking beers at night. We spent hours trying to devise plans to escape our current shitty situation, but came up empty no matter how many roaches and empty cans we accumulated. When we’d run out of money, we’d ride around the county in Brandon’s shitbox Gremlin looking for construction sites. The tools we stole would be pawned across the state line to avoid suspicion. It was easy to avoid a paper trail by using fake IDs.

We’d been burgling on and off since freshman year. In fact, Brandon had bought the Gremlin with proceeds from nocturnal excursions to houses of families we knew to be on vacation. Agreeing to never hit the same site twice, we were smart enough to stick to this criminal pact, but after three weeks of regular heists that summer, local contracting firms got wise and began hiring night watchmen at their worksites. It started to dawn on us that we needed to extend our base of operations or come up with a new plan. It was after midnight on Bastille Day when everything changed for us.

Phil and Brandon were in the Gremlin, talking about what to do next, as all the nearby worksites were being guarded. We could have tried sneaking our way in anyway, but Phil said no. He wasn't naturally prudent, quite the opposite in fact, but after being nabbed with a tab of blotter acid junior year, he’d grown reluctant to stick his neck out too far, legally speaking. He claimed he didn't know it was drugs, but Phil had a reputation for being a stoner and they didn't believe him. Six months in juvie hadn't scared him straight, but he’d become what passed for a voice of reason among us. Later, once we came up with Three Kings, he would excel at playing The Good Cop. Truth be told, Phil is a very likable guy and a very good friend of mine, which is what makes the recent threats to kill me and my wife hurt even more.

Brandon wanted a pack of the Pall Malls that made him smell like a grandpa, so he pulled into the station. I had to pee, but before I could offer to go in, he tossed me a handful of change and ordered me to buy him smokes. Brandon had always been kind of a dick, but after he got the Gremlin he started acting like the leader of the group. He still does, and he’s a hell of a Bad Cop, I’ll give him that, but it obviously comes naturally for him, whereas it’s a real struggle for me to pull it off. I didn’t push back. Like I said, I had to go to the bathroom anyway, and getting into a pissing match with Brandon over manners would inevitably lead to his ace in the hole, which was threatening to leave me there.

He’d done it to Phil once. The poor guy had to hitchhike back 45 minutes at 3 AM. He was lucky as hell to catch a semi making a morning delivery to the local supermarket, and have the trucker not be a pervert, just concerned. So I was coming out of the gas station market when I saw a befuddled looking woman wandering around a late model Cadillac. She appeared to be in her late thirties, definitely past the age where a person should be able to put air in a tire.

I didn’t know it then, but I’d come to learn that a lot of people just kind of sleepwalk through life. They let their expectations guide them like a chain as they just follow along. Now here’s the thing, if you can insert yourself as a link in that chain of expectations, you can determine the path. This lady, whose name I don’t remember, was one of these people, just waiting to be led somewhere. Too late, I’d realize I am too, but I’ll get to that if I have time. I’m pretty sure Brandon and Phil know where we are.

I knew Brandon wanted his cigarettes, but when the woman looked at me, I held her gaze for a moment, taking in her country club housewife good looks and expensive outfit. “Fuck Brandon,” I thought to myself, as I headed her way, Pall Malls in hand, “If this pretty lady needed assistance, I was going to help her.”

Believe it or not, it went down exactly like in those letters they publish in stroke magazines. While I filled her tires, this lady who looked like she stepped out of a catalog said her husband was out of town, and invited me over to her big house for a drink. I saw Phil give me the thumbs up from the Gremlin so I obliged. Truth be told, I could write a lot about that night, especially how, at the end, all of my expectations were dashed, but replaced with the sudden swirling potential of Three Kings.

I could write a duodecology about what that did to me, but I don’t have time to get it all down on this motel stationary, so you’re spared the details. Brandin has been calling me on our “cellular” phone to make threats. Phil calls from another number to make pleas. We’re at a motel down by the tracks and I could hear trains in the background of the last “voicemail,” so I know they’re close.

When the encounter was over, I asked for her number, but she just smiled and kissed me as she led me to the door. It was 3 AM, and I figured I’d be hitchhiking home, but when I got to the street I saw the Gremlin parked with its lights off. The first thing Brandon said to me when I got in was “Give me my fucking cigarettes,” but he said it with an uncharacteristic grin. Ten minutes later, he pulled over under a streetlight and they showed me what was in the trunk. Evidently, while I was in the bedroom with the woman, Brandon and Phil had snuck into the house and burgled the place.

They’d gotten away with a big wooden box full of silverware, several power tools they’d found in the garage, a few bottles of expensive liquor, and some other knickknacks. That night, we decided to give up on construction sites and start doing this full time. After liquidating that first haul, we bought new outfits and came up with aliases and cover stories to give to the women we’d let pick us up at bars. One of us would go in as bait, while the other two waited to follow. I grew a mustache to seem older. When there were no interested women to be found, we’d go after men. I never liked doing it this way, but Phil didn’t seem to mind. Looking back, I can’t recall Brandon ever acting as the bait in one of those situations.

The endeavor took us further and further away from home. Eventually, so much time living in hotels began to take a toll. Despite the fact that our bank accounts were all flush with more money than any of us had ever had, what we really wanted was a few consecutive nights in a nice bed. Brandon said he had a new plan. He said the one night stand jobs were great, but pawning silverware and jewelry and grabbing cash from unattended purses was minor league shit. The real money, according to Brandon, was in the long con, but that meant really getting involved in peoples’ lives.

He said there were ways to make people think giving you all their money was their idea. He said we needed to stop hunting randomly, but rather carefully pick targets ahead of time. Ideally they’d be divorcees or widows, but they’d definitively be rich. He said we couldn’t come across as boytoy playthings anymore, but had to present as people of substance. That would make it easier to infiltrate their worlds and eventually get access to their savings accounts and stock portfolios. He said we would all grow mustaches. This plan, according to Brandon, was called Three Kings.

At first, when we were younger, we’d claim we were in the army special forces. We’d give some bullshit reason for being in the area for a few months. Most of what we said was clearly nonsense, but you have to remember that the people we chose were desperate by design, willing to believe just about anything as long as you pay attention to them. If you show someone a good enough time, they’re liable to go along with whatever you say. If they want you to be in their life forever, they’ll do the craziest things. It’s critical to imply, and eventually reveal, that you’re involved in some serious shit.

The first time we did Three Kings, I was the bait. The mark was some rust belt heiress, and she was nice enough, but the stress of staying undercover for days at a time takes a real toll. It’s hard to not slip up, and for those three months I was always a nervous wreck in her presence, but I’d play into it. I told her my unit was embedded in the area to keep tabs on an Iranian terrorist cell. The cover allowed me to keep an unpredictable schedule and remain out of touch with a plausible explanation.

For a person whose life is predictable and predicated on certain expectations, an injection of newness and excitement, especially one couched with a certain amount of danger, can be like a drug. That heiress was a nice lady, and it would have been easy to feel bad for taking advantage of her, so I’d remind myself that all that wealth had come from the blood, sweat, and tears of steelworkers whose families were struggling now more than ever, while she attended luncheons and slept in her mansion on the hill. If there was any regret in me the day I called her from a motel phone saying I’d been taken hostage by terrorists and that the army had written me off as expendable, it disappeared when Brandon showed back up at the room dressed up like a sheik with $50K in cash. For full closure, we had Phil go up to the mansion in an army uniform three days later to let her know I’d been killed in action and that she was being made aware of this as a courtesy, but not to tell anyone about our affair.

Within five years, we had it down to a science. We’d swoop into town, and two of us would establish relationships with two targets. By then we were telling them we were in the CIA, and the bullshit story involved huge amounts of gold behind the iron curtain. We’d imply that we were working outside the bounds of government authority for personal gain, and we wanted to eventually share the wealth with them, because what is love, if not sharing everything. The conspiratorial aspect really gets them hooked, and greedy people are always on the lookout for more easy money, so it doesn’t take much before you’re off to the races.

Over a year or eighteen months you can really take someone down to the bare bones of their finances. We’d say we needed cash for bribes, greasing a policeman’s palm in Riyadh or getting an airport luggage handler at Heathrow to look the other way. Along the way we acquired half a dozen 1oz. gold bars, stamped with some Cyrillic shit to make it all seem more believable. It turns out that if you can create a certainty in someone’s mind that the only thing standing between them and 50 million untraceable, untaxable dollars is one last upfront payment of 250 or 500 thousand dollars, they’ll happily hand it over. If they don’t have it on hand, they’ll get it every time.

On average, we could pull in more than two million a year doing this. One year we made five, but that was an outlier. Brandon set up shell business and moved cash around to cover our tracks, but after expenses we were each making plenty by the time we were in full swing. Two Kings in, one King out. Usually the other Inside King played the Good Cop, and the Outside King took over as Bad Cop, but these roles were very fluid and improvisation was often called for. For example, if we found out the mark spoke Russian, all of a sudden the gold was coming through South Africa. Brandon is very good at accents.

The Outside King was usually free to do whatever he wanted. Phil usually parties, but he’s smart enough to keep it in check, especially knowing how Brandon insists on a full detox before any Inside King job. He expected us to go to the gym, eat right, and keep in good shape. Truth be told, that did make it easier. At one point Phil developed a little pooch of a beer belly and Brandon rode him like a dog until he toned up. He was always hard on me, but Phil definitely caught the worst of it.

Over the years Brandon has floated the idea that if the mark were to die after we married them, we would theoretically inherit their houses and other assets. In fact, he was strongly pushing this sort of pivot to our routine with Anastasia, whom I am currently sharing this motel room with. Phil would always balk when this idea came up, but he’s a gentle soul. I’ll admit that I didn’t feel one way or the other about the plan, but then the damndest thing happened, I fell in love.

Truth be told, I thought I was immune. Over the years it felt like scales had built up over my heart, allowing me to do the most awful things. Anastasia was supposed to be just more chaff for the grinder, but something happened. I had never really had feelings for anyone other than Brandon and Phil, as they were the only people in the world that seemed really real to me, but Anastasia is different. She woke something up in me, or brought it to life, and now I can’t see anything but her. Brandon is pissed.

I guess none of us had ever considered the possibility, because I’m so broken and Brandon only loves himself, and Phil only loves Brandon. Anyway, I don’t know if Anastasia is an angel or if I just grew up, but I do know that they know where we are, and that’s a problem. The bigger problem is that Brandon won’t let me just cut loose. It’s not about the money for him, it’s something else.

Phil and I are perennially broke, prone to spending our ill-gotten gains on whatever vices let us sleep at night, but Brandon has never had those inclinations. As far as I can tell, he’s got multiple accounts and is as flush with cash as any of our marks. He says it’s about loyalty, but it’s about control. I don’t have that killer instinct, but he does and he’ll be here soon enough. I don’t know how I let it get to this point, but realizing who’s been holding my leash this whole time, my whole life, has been a rude awakening.

I tried to make him see that our way of doing things couldn’t last much longer. All these cellular phones and automatic teller machines and the way they scanned your credit card now instead of clunking it through that device had changed the game. We were behind the times with our analog scams in an increasingly digital world. He didn’t want to hear it, though. Three Kings had become his whole reason for being, and letting it go would be a kind of suicide to him. It’s easy to see that now. At this point they want my wife dead, but I think they want me back, as if nothing has changed. We’ll see how that goes.

Anyway, they'll be here soon, with guns. We have a cavalry sword once wielded by one of Anastasia’s Cossack ancestors. It turns out her family wealth really was smuggled out of Cold War Russia by the KGB. Evidently, back behind the iron curtain, it was her grandfather’s responsibility to