Page 5 of Break for Me

I’d found myself wondering what Memphis looked like more than once. I wondered how old she was. I wondered if she had a family of her own or if she was close with her parents. She struck me as someone’s little sister because she felt like my little sister. We could talk about ridiculous stories from past lives without worrying about giving away too much, but we rarely touched on basic facts about who we truly were. In this moment though, I found myself wishing I had a way to hug her. I had no doubt that she could find me anywhere in the world. I had even less doubt that she’d managed to figure out my real name after all these years, but I didn’t possess even a tenth of the kind of technological prowess that she did. I’d never find her on my own if the organization did do something to her. The whole thing made me sick to my stomach.

four

TRISTA

Moving from seedy motel to seedy motel was not at all the ideal way to experience a road trip through the good ol’ United States of America. The one that I’d found this time provided me with a gross little room that was just like every other that I’d stayed in on the path out here. But for this one in particular, Casey Lee, had checked in on an extended stay weekly rate under the assumption that she’d be staying here for at least four weeks. That way the rate was lower and I wouldn’t have to change rooms. It’d been almost a week since I’d had trouble and I was hoping that stopping in Seattle would give me a few months in one place before I had to take off again. It was crowded. The city was filled to the absolute brim with people on top of each other, bustling through their lives, too busy to notice or care when another newcomer was added. It was urban enough for me to blend into the masses, but close enough to the open wild with several small towns in case I were to suddenly need to escape to the significantly less populated pieces of Washington.

Luckily, the grumpy little man behind the welcome desk didn’t bother to ask for an ID since I was paying the full amount up front with a credit card. I had a license for Casey Lee, but it definitely wasn’t a convincing one. I’d had to create it quickly and get moving. Casey Lee was actually a thirty-year-old man from Nevada. He didn’t have any cash in the wallet that I’d swiped off him while we danced in a crowded bar, so I was left with finding somebody new or just sucking it up and going home with him. And I was running out of time so only one of those options was realistic. He wasn’t hideous and I could fake an orgasm with the best of them now. Men like Casey were usually predictable. It only took finding a file cabinet or a simple box within their homes to locate the paperwork that told all the secrets of their lives. His birth certificate, his social security number, and every tax document he’d ever been given were kept in the same place. All I ever had to do was get through a round of sex, wait for them to fall asleep, find those documents, and take photos of all of them before I was on my way back out the door. Occasionally, I would have to hang around the same town for a while to keep an eye on mailboxes for credit cards to be delivered to home addresses. Sometimes I could get by with using a previous card to setup camp in another motel and then I could get away with entering different mailing and billing addresses for cards to come straight to where I really was. But it was tricky and complicated.

Luckily, the internet was a phenomenal teacher. You could learn to do a shocking number of very illegal things online. I’d been doing this for years and I was good at it now. I had most of the equipment to create my own fake ID cards from state to state as I passed through them, but when you occasionally had to make them quickly and blow back out of town, they could come out sloppy. That equipment made up the majority of my possessions since I travelled light. Everything I owned needed to be able to be stuffed into a giant bag at a moments notice. My clothes, laptop, the little printer, the blank cards, two whole pairs of shoes, and a backup cell phone moved from motel to motel with me in an oversized hiking backpack.

Still, I preferred to handle life in cash. It was all stealing, regardless of how anyone looked at it. Stealing a few hundred dollars here and there from lots of people over the span of way too many years was the least of my offenses, so I tried not to spend much time thinking about it. But cash was harder to follow across the country and that made it safer for me. The moment that someone picked up the trail of one of the stolen names, I had to abandon it and run. If I had someone else’s name just to have a passable license for identification and could still use mostly cash, it was nearly impossible to track me.

At this point, I had enough cash stashed away to get me by for a while. I wanted an end to this lifestyle, but I wasn’t so stupid to believe that it could just happen easily. Regardless, I needed a break and I planned to make the stay in Seattle last for at least a little while. I spent an entire day scouting out the area around the motel. I was within walking distance of the bus stop, there was a tiny dollar store around the corner, and a gas station directly across the road that was open 24 hours. I even happened across a disgusting hole in the wall bar that was looking for help not even a full mile from the motel. I used the rest of that day to work up the nerve and a plan to figure out how I might be able to obtain a job with the kind of background that I had. I would need to be able to divulge a certain amount of information to the owner of that bar and unfortunately, just being honest with that person would probably get me further in the direction that I wanted rather than handing out more lies that they’d probably be able to pick apart right there on the spot before telling me to get out.

By the time I was making my way back toward that bar to beg the owner for a job, I’d already spent the first half of that day in the shower, and then praying to any holy creature that might be listening that said bar owner was the kind of person who preferred women, making my hair and my face presentable, and putting on the only outfit I had that best displayed every curve of my body. I had to smile when I noticed that the bar was just named Watering Hole. Not A Watering Hole or The Watering Hole. Just Watering Hole. I felt better still that it was almost completely empty when I walked through the door. Two people were sitting directly at the bar and there was a handful of others spread out through the booths that lined the two walls opposite the entrance. The pool tables in the middle were unoccupied and there was a single person standing behind the bar.

“Help you?” The bartender asked.

“There was a sign on the door that said they were looking for help here. It didn’t say who to ask for.”

“It’s just me,” he said. “Name’s Marcus. Come back this way. Got on an office back here. You boys good out here for a few minutes?” He asked the two men sitting together at the bar. My heart pounded so loudly that it was the only thing I could hear for a solid minute or two. I could manipulate people well enough in most situations now, but there was always a mad rush of pure panic and adrenaline that hit me straight in the lungs right before the process started. I followed Marcus around the edge of the bar toward the back corner where there was a little hallway that had two doors each on either side. He stopped at the first on the left and pushed the door open before he stepped off slightly to the side to hold the door open and let me walk through first. My heart rate calmed back down when his eyes never left my cleavage as I walked by him.

I sat in one of the two chairs on the side of the desk closest to the door while Marcus walked around to sit on the other side. He pulled a packet of papers out of a drawer and reached for a pen.

“What’s your name?” He asked.

“Dakota Lawson,” I said and smiled. It was always safer to use one name for the motel rooms and an entirely different one around the rest of the town where I was staying. Dakota had at least been a woman and I hadn’t even had to change much about her driver’s license to create one for myself out of it. I only stole cash and a photo of her ID, so that was a name that I recycled frequently. It rolled off my tongue now as easily as my own should have.

I took the moment that he spent writing something on the papers in front of him to try to size him up. Marcus was probably in his late forties. Maybe even early fifties with the amount of hair that was turning gray around his temples. The deep lines in his forehead seemed to be there permanently, no matter the expression on his face. His eyes weren’t quite as dark in their shade of brown as mine were, but there was something noticeably kind behind them. Like if he could pull them away from my cleavage long enough, he might even be able to look at me like a daughter. Truthfully, I didn’t care whether he was looking at me like an object or like a child. As long as he was interested in some fashion.

“Have you worked in a bar before?” He asked.

“I have,” I said. Truth. Thank God. “It’s been a while, but yes.”

“What kind of availability do you have?”

“I’ll take any hours that you can give me,” I said.

“Without even knowing what you’d get paid?” He asked with a chuckle.

“Any amount is more than I’m currently making,” I said. He smiled at that one.

“Will you want me to get you setup with a direct deposit to a bank some—.”

“No,” I interrupted. Time for the hard part. “I was actually kind of hoping that if this worked out, maybe you could pay me in cash for a little while.”

He laid his pen back down on the desk so he could lace his fingers in front of his face and stare at me uncomfortably for a second.

“You have to realize there’s a lot of weight behind a request like that,” he said. His eyes narrowed while they burned into mine. At least he was grasping what I was really asking of him without making me even say the words out loud.

Please, don’t document anything about my presence here.

“I do,” I said quietly and even looked down into my lap for effect. “I’ve only been here for a day or two. I’m still staying in a motel even. Things aren’t very stable for me and I just need someone to give me a chance. I can only help myself so much. And I can recognize when I need help from someone else. No one will hire me without a permanent residence. I can’t lay claim to a permanent residence without a job. It’s not a good cycle to find yourself trapped in.”

He sighed and ran both his hands over his face before he leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling.

“Are you running from somebody?” He asked.

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