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Exit Strategy

“That’s a fed,” Max said, indicating a sedan passing them on the street. Charity glanced skeptically at the Ford. American-made cars were just one of the many things that alarmed Max these days.

Weeks had passed since Chris’s arrest, and reading the press coverage from Orange County, Max couldn’t get over how much evidence the police had found in Aragon’s home. Using Chris’s payout sheets as a road map, the cops had rounded up his entire cashing crew; even Marcus, Chris’s pot grower and errand boy, was busted with a hydroponic dope farm growing in his Archstone apartment. After two weeks of hunting, the police converged on Chris’s credit card factory at Federico Vigo’s office in the Valley, arrested Vigo, and seized the counterfeiting gear. Chris was being held on a million dollars’ bail.

The entire operation had been dismantled piece by piece. They were calling it perhaps the largest identity-theft ring in Orange County’s history.

“Shit, I wonder what kind of records he kept on all that,” Max later wrote The3C0rrupted0ne. “I mean, if he was sloppy enough to have equipment at his house.”

Max had already ditched his prepaid cell phone and instituted a “security ban” on his former partner’s Carders Market account. They were routine precautions—he was largely unconcerned about the bust at first; it