Publisher's Synopsis
Jake had always had a knack for talking with people; with people, around people, in front of people, it didn't really matter, he just got along well and was a believable guy. That made it easy for him to gain the confidence necessary to weasel his way into their private lives and find out their deepest darkest secrets. Not that he actually wanted to know those things for his own personal knowledge but it was often necessary in order to find out how to steal their cash or their gold.
He dealt mostly with cash if he could as that was so much harder to track and for his victims to claim back. "Oh, no sir. This is my cash, I've been saving for years," he'd said on more than one occasion and no one could prove otherwise. He didn't feel like he was a bad guy for taking people's money, they voluntarily handed it over to the thieves in the government all the time in the form of taxes and never did anything more than whine. Excise tax, gas tax, income tax, land tax, sales tax, luxury tax, land use fees, vehicle registrations, speeding tickets, toll fees; the list literally went on forever. And no one did a damn thing about it. How could he be wrong? His occupation was just another tax on folks too stupid to see it coming. He bent people over in a few days or weeks and did to them what the man had been doing to them for years.