Just Plain Trouble

She took a little device out of her purse. It looked like one of those black things the bank teller uses to swipe your card at the window. She held it up and told me that it was a card cloner. "What I'm going to need you to do, is every customer that pays with a credit card, you'll divert their attention to the wall of other things we offer, while swiping the card with this, then you go ahead and swipe the card through the POS and do the transaction. That's all." "Why?" She sighed heavily, as if resigning herself to having to explain something to a child. "This is the real business I am in. The spa isn't even paying the bills, much less keeping me in the style of life to which I'd like to become accustomed. Why you looking at me like that?" "You clone credit cards?" "Don't give me that, okay? It's a victimless crime. I've cloned Mary's card. My roommate? Ran up ten thousand dollars before they shut it off. She got all of it taken off her bill in less than two weeks. I got to buy a lot of things that I turned in to the bosses, who then fenced it around the City. They then pay me a commission. I do it to pay the rent and the light, and I get some nice shoes out of it, and Amex took it off Mary's bill after a tiny bit of hassle. Everybody wins." "The bosses?" "It's a ring of Mexicans in the City that're doing it all over, in Mexico, Belize, the City, and now Antigua." I kept my mouth shut, and decided to learn everything I could about card cloning so I could make sure it never happened to me, then find out who this ring was in the City, and get them all busted.Just Plain Trouble covers a wide range of contemporary hot topics such as polyamory, illegal immigration and the transgender phenomenon, as seen by Peter Pan's alcoholic brother.