Crime thrillers love to insist that crime doesn’t pay, which is pretty rich, since staying on the straight and narrow isn’t exactly lucrative either. While so many of these glorified Old Testament cautionary tales posit dollar-signs-over-the-eyes greed as the motive for leaping into the choppy waters of illegal transgression, anyone just trying to get by in the rigged system of American capitalism might draw a different conclusion.
In fact, so slim are Emily’s occupational prospects that when a coworker tips her off to an opportunity to make a quick, tax-free $200, she barely hesitates to follow the lead. This is her induction into the lawless world of “dummy shopping,” a scam that entails using stolen credit card information to purchase expensive items from stores so they can then be flipped on the street.
Emily’s traipse into lawbreaking has the specificity and the mundanity of a story yanked from the headlines.
I want evilhag to have my children 😍