Ways for Criminals to Take Advantage of Young Women...

I'm trying to write a short story for a certain market, and it needs to be really punchy and twisty and keep readers coming back for more (the idea is that it would be published in ten or so 1K word bursts).

I want the story to be about a college-age woman who intially seems as if she's going to be taken advantage of by a willy charmer she meets either on-line or, more likely, in person at a club or something. I want him to persuade her to do something criminal, with the audience understanding that she's taking a huge risk and he's totally using her, and then I want the twist to be that she's been using him all along and she's actually the master criminal while he's just a rookie.

Any ideas for what the crime could be? Prostitution won't really work, and being a drug mule feels a bit cliched? It's probably what I'll go with if I can't (we can't!) think of something more interesting, but... is there anything more interesting?

 

Whatever she's doing, it sounds like it's very important to her that she commit the crime itself, but also maintaining plausible deniability by making it look like she was being forced to do it against her will, so I'm guessing this is probably something more personal than being just one more drug mule out of however many others the operation already has.

How did she make she that the guy targeted her specifically for the job (instead of accidentally targeting someone else)?

 

I think he should be taking a kind of adrenaline junky kind of approach; trying to persuade her to commit crimes for the thrill of it. I think that has a certain authenticity to it, the sort of thing that you do actually read about; people egging each other on to ever riskier things just for the thrill of it. That'd give you space to build up from relatively small things (shoplifting etc) to mugging and armed robbery, building up to robbing a bank (say) as his planned last thing.

He pretends he's doing the same things as her, staging some videos or whatever to keep her on the hook, with the idea that eventually she'll walk out of a bank with a pile of cash, hand it to him and he can just vanish without any connection to her. On screen we never see either of them actually robbing anything, just them talking about how exciting it was and pushing each other to go further and further. Finally he says she should hit a bank for the ultimate buzz and prove she's the world's biggest bad ass. She says she wants them to do this job together and go and be Bonny and Clyde, the ultimate thrillkillers/lovers and he's infatuated enough with her to risk it, after all he just has to walk in with her, no-one will know who he was.

And finally he walks into the bank with a gun, she shouts "He's got a gun" and he gets shot by the security guard, while she watches the light go out in his eyes; the final thrill was watching him die.

That's just off the top of my head but I kinda like it. It means that all these little sections can be clearly delineated; every time they commit a crime is a new scene so that fits. We see it from his perspective so we know that he's lying and that he has started utterly trusting her when she says she ripped off some liquor store because he doesn't even check the video she sends him. And it's only in the last few lines that we see her shiver with excitement as she watches the man she just murdered die. And no-one will ever catch her.

I'll take my royalty cheque in the mail

 

I'm not sure... and I'm not sure if this is part of an overall plan on her part or if she's just an opportunist. Like, if I went with the drug mule scenario:

I'd probably open the story the day after they met in the club or wherever, with him contacting her in what seems like a sweet way. Or not sweet, exactly, but seductive to sex/dating rather than crime. [so, yeah, you're right, I'd have to figure out how to make her respond in what seems like an innocent way, rather than just blowing him off. If I went with her being an opportunist, she could be a bit flirty without being an obvious femme fatale, probably... and that might be a better way to go, if I end up with something as low-rent as drug-muling. If I/we can come up with a higher-level crime I could probably justify having her target him the night before in a crafty way that made him feel like he was targetting her. And then I'd end that scene/chapter (1K words) with the readers still thinking she was innocent, but him doing something that made it clear to readers that he isn't.

Then the next bit could be her having cold feet about whatever it is and him sweetening the deal somehow, and/or him getting pressure from his side and making it urgent for him to get moving right now, so he has to use her because he doesn't have time to find anyone else. For bonus twist marks it would be excellent if it ended up that she was somehow behind the pressure that made him have to act fast...

And then... more stuff...

 

I like it... but I don't want her to be a total psychopath. At least for this story I don't want that. For a future story... maybe!

(I remember reading a fantasy story something like this once, with a princess or whatever she was seducing a guard and then calling the other guards to kill him for trying to rape her... it was pretty chilling, as I recall. Stuck with me, obviously.)

 

Why not take from experienced psychopaths? Ted Bundy and Charles Manson all appeared normal, charming men. But were skilled manipulators, who made their victims feel they were unworthy of love. Charming on the surface. Shallow in every other trait.

They are well crafted liars as well. I had that type of anti-social personality as a manager once. And remember anti-social is different from asocial.

 

Hmm...

So if the job was originally his idea, and if she's an opportunist who went along with it so that she could turn the tables on him later, was something taking up time in her life that isn't anymore (time that she can now afford to spend doing this instead)? Does she have a lot of free time in general? Does she just think this won't take a long time to finish? Is she letting something else slide so that she can do this instead?

 

I don't know - I guess until I know what the crime is, it's hard to know how long it would take to do the crime, and therefore how much free time she'd need...

Maybe she's a student. I mean, if I go with the drug mule thing, that'd work. She could be swept off her feet, go south for a weekend, get separated from him on the way back and he'd think she was muling but really she could just take off with the drugs and sell them herself. But is there something better than drug muling?!?

 

Maybe she's using him to get revenge on some wrong done to her? Maybe related to work? As a college student, she'd have low-level jobs (or ones involving data-feeding) to finance her studies, so it'd be easy for some manager to try to take advantage of her and she refusing him—and getting fired in consequence. Maybe there's a competition-clause involved and she was unable to find work which she was qualified for at this stage. Competition-clauses can be real restrictive.

Maybe this guy wants her to help him get a job by fudging his credentials? She could use her computer skills gained at this specific company to get him in, but setting them up in a way that she'd be able to tip off law-enforcement that the company hired knowingly a criminal? And that would get the state involved, scrutinising their records and discovering all kinds of fraud? And that would bring the company (and the manager) down?

This is still full of holes obviously...

 

... No. No there isn't. Dealers' boss is given product to deliver, Dealer outsources the product to her (maybe the police are watching him), she steals it for herself, Dealer finds out and tries to get it back from her (before Boss finds out Dealer screwed up by trusting some random woman he just met), but she manages to make Boss think that Dealer stole everything and was framing her.

I'm using this if you don't

 

Just spinning thoughts:

If they meet at a club she could vent about her being fired, and the guy could sense an opportunity. He could get her a job at a company one of his mates' running (ignoring the competition-clause, giving him a handle on her) but when she's plotting to bring down the company who fired her, they wouldn't at the end be in a state to press charges (because they'd be persecuted by law and have a whole lot of other troubles).

ETA: Maybe the guy wants to use being IN this company (for which she's fudging his credentials) to spy on industrial secrets?

 

She could be the "spoiled" daughter of a rich man (like Cher in Clueless) and guy could be a business competitor (or the son of a business competitor and he uses the "we're like Romeo and Juliet" line on her) and he could be wooing her for access to some company secret (I'd need to figure out how he'd be able to get access to this - is there a computer-y thing where he could hack her laptop but there would be a program on her laptop that would automatically counter-hack and use his connection to get access to his company's secrets? That seems kind of passive on her part, if all she has to do is lie around and wait for him to try to hack her. Not very active. Something more dynamic needed...)

And there wouldn't be much sympathy, not much stakes, if she's like Cher. Make it her mom who's made the money, not her dad, and her mom is a struggling up-and-comer with loads of talent, getting to the stage where she's starting to actually threaten the male company's dominance in whatever field it is... so the male company patriarch sets his son to take down the female company.

The son steals some plans for... something... but they don't work. Because they were deliberately false plans. And since this is corporate espionage there was no time/trust for the male team to set their experts to testing the plans (new software? maybe a new video game or something?) so they show them off at a big launch party and are humiliated in front of the press.

Meanwhile, what active thing has the heroine done. She can't just lie around waiting to get hacked!!! She could... steal her own stuff from the company, maybe showing that they've been stealing ideas from her mom for a long time?

And maybe her mom's DEAD! So heroine's doing all this as revenge and vindication. Her mom didn't get the success she deserved in her lifetime because Bad Company (not the band) had been stealing ideas from her for a long time. When she died, whatever that pipeline was dried up (maybe mom was naive and trusting, but daughter is more street smart, although readers won't know that until the end) so BC had to go after a new source of info--the daughter.

Hmmmm...

Don't steal the drug mule idea, @Simpson17866 , but... don't steal this one, either! This might just work...

ETA: I'm outlining! Look at me (us) go! Outlining is fun and easy! (Of course, I've outlined things before. It's the writing-after-outlining that throws me off...)

 

You and I have very different priorities as writers

If it was me, the last 1000 word chunk would be her talking to him while he's bleeding to death and taking a near orgasmic pleasure from betraying him. This guy who thinks he's so awesome and far out and gets off on manipulating her and him getting that totally shattered and at the last moment realizing the full extent of his failure is just... Delicious. Hell, if I was writing it she'd be wiping tears off his face and licking them up and telling him he's a failure just like all the other guys that she did this to. Just doing that reveal where she turns out to be the really dangerous one I think necessitates going as far as possible, to the extent of potentially even having multiple guys show up at the same bank and all of them getting gunned down together or something.

Yeah she's crazy and that's what makes it fun

 

More than one story to be told. Don't want to tell the same one over and over.

 

I think it's been done before, but like the above "spoiled rich girl" thing, he "convinces" her to help her steal something valuable (big diamond, painting) from her dad, who is a tycoon/criminal connected to the mob. Once she's given him the security codes and the heist has gone off, she drops a dime to her dad, boyfriend gets offed but the valuables (which she was plotting to get for herself) are never found.

 

That's a solid idea. It gives her a clearer motive for why she's betraying him too; she absolutely believes that she should have everything that she wants, and when her father puts his foot down and takes back his credit cards we see that she's not just spoiled, she's a bit crazy too. It also gives a good reason why this guy is targeting her; because he's a thief or a grifter and he wants to rob her family anyway so he made an effort to go and find her specifically and it gives him an angle to convincing her to work with him; to get back at daddy.

I do still think that the 'thrill seeking' angle is more sexy though. I think the natural way for her to manipulate him is to pretend to fall for him and that's what pulls him away from him seeing this as just a job into something more personal and that's how he doesn't see that she's pulling his strings. If she's just in this to piss off her dad then it doesn't seem so obvious that she'd fall for him, he's just a means to an end and, in truth, he's not really manipulating her as such, she wants the same thing as him. Unless he's going to try and convince her that running away with a burglar would really show her dad what for it's hard to see it becoming more personal. If on the other hand he takes the approach that crime is exciting, the ultimate thrill in a boring world, then that's got more personal involvement in it and it makes more sense that she'd become infatuated with the exciting, sexy guy who's showing her all this exciting, sexy stuff and would sound more reasonable that she thinks running away with him after the job is more exciting than revenge.

I don't think he'd believe that she's fallen in love with him just to annoy her dad; he'd be happy to sleep with her under those circumstances but I think he'd see that for what it is rather than that leading him to think he can really trust her. I think he would believe she's fallen in love with him because she thinks he's exciting and that would lead him to not realize that she's manipulating him. If he believes she's in love with him then he'll let her talk him into taking more risks too, putting him in the position to be betrayed. If she says it would be doubly exciting to do it (say) in the middle of the day he might give in to that, to prove how sexy he can be, but if she says that it'd just annoy her dad even more he'd say no because he has no reason to care about annoying her father.

The 'thrill seeker' approach I think also sets up the reveal better. In the final moment we see that she's taken the thrill seeking way further than we thought but she's still driven by the same thing. She does think this is all very sexy and exciting but it would be even more exciting to manipulate and betray her partner too. Most people would go along with her earlier on that this is exciting and fun for her, and get why she'd be into this exciting guy. And then we see at the end that she's actually a bit crazy and we have to reevaluate everything we've seen her do because we can't quite tell what was real and what was not. That's important I think. It leaves ambiguity in her. We don't know if this was her plan all along or if she did get swept up in this and then took it too far. Did the guy in fact bring about his own downfall by getting her hooked on the excitement and then pays the price for it? Did she actually like this guy or not?

If on the other hand she turns out to be even more spoiled than we thought and just doesn't want to share then I think that's almost a let down. It shows us that everything she's been doing has been a lie. If she's just greedy then she definitely didn't care about this guy, definitely was doing everything to manipulate him and never felt for him. He was a means to an end and nothing else and that feels unsatisfying. It makes her very cold and very shallow, putting her own gain over someone else's life.

One way leaves us asking if she is really that crazy or if it's karma for this guy; if this was planned or it was spur of the moment. Is she mental and likes the idea of sleeping with someone knowing that she's going to betray them? Or is she actually into him and thinks that he'd want her to do this, the ultimate thrill? We don't know and that's more interesting I think.

 

I haven't read other replies, but maybe something like jacking cars? Or... I don't know if a college student could be working in a hospital (as an orderly maybe, to fund her studies?), in which case he could use her to steal prescription drugs, but that'd probably make your twist implausible unless she's an opportunist.

ETA: Judging by your title, are you looking for something that's specific to women? I mean, there are quite a few unisex jobs, but apart from prostitution and honeypot schemes, I can't think of anything that's decidedly gendered.

 

I like vintage crimes. I'm trying to think of some way for this to work for a nice small-scale jewel theft. They pose as a nice newly engaged couple, he has "taught" her to palm the engagement rings (of course, she already knew how) and replace them, and then when they're suspected and searched he's the one who finds that the rings are in the breast pocket of HIS flawless suit, and...

See, I don't know what she gets out of it.

Edited to add: Maybe her shock and tears at discovering that her beloved is a thief are intended to draw the sympathy of the owner/jeweler, and that's the beginning of her plan?

 

You could add a third party and make it a long con.