---
title: "The Jump – An Original Short Story"
canonical: https://scamsnow.com/stories/the-jump-an-original-short-story/
type: stories
author: "SCARS Editorial Team"
published: 2026-09-28
modified: 2026-09-28
summary: ""
organization: "ScamsNOW.com - the Official Magazine of Scams Fraud & Cybercrime"
organization_url: https://scamsnow.com/
llms: https://scamsnow.com/llms.txt
---

# The Jump – An Original Short Story

# "The Jump"

## An Original Short Story by Tim McGuinness, Ph.D.

### This is a Work of Fiction

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## The Jump

##### An Original Short Story by Tim McGuinness, Ph.D.

# I. The Table

I have told this story more times than I can count, and never once all the way through, because there is always someone at the table who cannot hear the end of it yet. So I tell the part they can carry, and I hold the rest. I am going to tell all of it now, and you can decide for yourself which part you are ready for.

I met Jim Tuan at his sister's kitchen table in Pascagoula, in the spring of the year everything came out. Her name was Renee. She had called the church, and the church had called me, because I was the one in that congregation who had been through it and did not mind saying so. That is how I came to be sitting across from a man I had never seen before, watching him try to explain something that could not be explained, while his mother (Má)  sat at the end of the table with her hands folded and did not say one word the entire afternoon.

You have to understand what Jim was to that family before you can understand what happened to him after. He was the one who handled things. When their father died, Jim took over the accounts. When their mother's memory started to go, Jim set up the arrangements. When Renee's boy was diagnosed and the bills came, it was Jim who moved the money around so that the bills got paid and Renee never had to look at them. He was not the oldest. He was simply the one you handed the envelope to, because he would open it and deal with what was inside, and you would not have to think about it again.

I have met a hundred men like Jim since. They are the ones the scammers love best, and not for the reasons you would think. It is not that they are gullible. It is that they are used to being the answer. When a woman who called herself Lena wrote to him from a hospital in Cần Thơ, where she said she was a contract nurse, and asked him for nothing at all for the first two months, Jim did not see a trap. He saw a person who needed handling. By the time she needed money, he had already decided he was the one who would provide it. The needing was not the hook. The being needed was.

Over eleven months, Lena, or whoever was behind that identity, took everything in the joint account Jim held with his mother, then everything in the account he held for Renee's boy, then a loan against the house. I am not going to tell you the numbers. The numbers are never the point, and if you have been through it you already know them, because they are your numbers with the decimal moved.

I have spent a lot of years around boats since, and I know now that a hull can take on a great deal of water and still make it to the dock, if the man at the wheel keeps his head. What sinks it, is not the water. It is what he does when he sees it coming in. Lena was the water. What Jim did next was the rest.

# II. What He Did Next

Here is the thing I did not understand at that table, and did not understand for years afterward, and which I want you to understand now, because it is the whole story.

The scam did not ruin Jim Tuan. The scam was survivable.

I know this because I sat with the bank's fraud officer eight months later and heard him say so, in the flat voice of a man reading from a screen. The first four transfers went through a domestic correspondent bank. Had they been reported within the first week, most of that money would have been frozen and, in time, returned. The window on the next three was shorter but not closed. By the time he got to the transfers Jim had made in the last four months, the fraud officer stopped reading, because there was nothing to read. Those were not Lena's transfers. Those were Jim's.

When Jim understood what had happened, when the hospital in Cần Thơ turned out to be a stock photograph and the nurse turned out to be a voice that no longer answered, he did not call the bank. He did not call Renee. He sat in his truck outside the branch for an hour, he told me, and then he drove home and began to move money. He moved money from an account that was not yet empty into one that was, so that a statement would look right for one more month. He signed his mother's name on a document that let him do it. He told Renee the boy's fund was fine. He told his mother nothing, because she would not have understood, which is its own kind of lie. He did this for four months, each month a little worse than the last, each month a little further from the shore, until there was no more money to move and nowhere left to hide the fact that there had never been a nurse.

The panic is the part everyone forgives. Every person at every table I have ever sat at knows the panic. What they do not forgive, what they cannot forgive, in themselves most of all, is the four months. The concealment. The forged name. The look on the sister's face when she finally asks, not *how could you fall for this*, because she already knows how, everybody knows how, but *why did you not tell me*.

Renee asked him that. Straight out, at the table, in front of their mother. And Jim, who had an answer for everything his whole life, did not have one.

He said, *"I thought I could fix it."*

Renee said, *"You could have. In the first week. You could have fixed it in the first week."*

And that was the inquiry. There was no courtroom, and no one ever pressed charges, because the mother's memory was already too far gone to testify to whose name was whose. But I have sat through the real kind since, the kind with a judge, and I promise you it was no worse than that kitchen. A sentence was passed at that table. Nobody said it out loud. Jim heard it anyway, and he spent the rest of his life trying to get someone to carry it out.

# III. Postcards

He left Pascagoula that summer. I am not sure Renee asked him to. I am not sure she did not.

He wrote to me. That was the strange thing. I was nobody to him, a man from a church he did not attend who had sat across a table from him for one bad afternoon. But I had said one thing to him at that table, when Renee went to check on the boy and his mother had gone to lie down. I said, *"I did the same thing. Not the money. The hiding."* And he had looked at me for the first time all day as though I were a person and not a witness. So the postcards came to me.

Mobile first. A boatyard, hull repair, cash work. Then he jumped, and now Biloxi, a marina office, keeping the books, which I remember thinking was a brave choice or a foolish one. Then Port Arthur, another jump. Then somewhere in Louisiana with a name I could not pronounce. Each jump, each card said less than the one before. Each one had the same shape, though, once I learned to read them: a job, a room, a few months of quiet, and then a line at the end like *someone here knew Bobby from the yard in Pascagoula*, or *ran into a fellow whose cousin banks where Mom did*, and then the next card would come from somewhere else. Another jump.

He was not running from the law. There was no law after him. He was running from being known. A man who has done a thing he cannot forgive cannot stand to be looked at by anyone who might know it, because their looking confirms the verdict, and the verdict is the only thing he has left that is entirely his own. So he jumps.

Twice in those years he wrote to say he had joined something. Once a group at a church in Beaumont. Once a program he had found online. Both times I wrote back and said, *go, and go again next week, and the week after that, and do not stop going when it gets boring, because the boring part is where it works*. Both times the next postcard came from a different town. He had signed up. He had not done the work. I want to be careful how I say this, because I have done the same, and I know what it is to mistake the signing up for the doing. It is not laziness. It is that the work requires you to sit in a room with your own jump, week after week, and let it stop being the whole of who you are. And Jim did not want it to stop being the whole of who he was. It was the only thing he was sure of.

I did not hear from him for a long while after Louisiana. Long enough that I stopped waiting for the mail. Long enough that when the next card came, another jump from a town on the Texas coast called Sabine Landing, I had to sit down to read it.

# IV. Mr. Jim

Sabine Landing is not on the way to anywhere. It was a shrimping town once, and then the shrimp went and the plant closed and what was left was a few hundred people, a marina that barely stayed afloat, and the kind of quiet a man like Jim had been looking for in every town before it. Nobody there had a cousin who knew anybody. Nobody there had heard of Pascagoula, or cared.

He got work fixing outboards. Then hulls. Then the marina itself, which was owned by a widow who could not keep it up and who let him take it over piece by piece, for a share, in exchange for the labor. He did it honestly. I want to say that plainly. Whatever Jim was, he was not a thief by nature, and in Sabine Landing he counted every dollar twice and wrote every one of them down and showed the widow the book each Friday whether she asked or not. I think the book was the point. I think he needed a place where the numbers could be seen to be right. The numbers mattered.

Three years of that, and he was Mr. Jim. That is what the town called him, and I have never been able to write it down without hearing how it sounded, because it was said with a kind of affection that was also a kind of reliance. Mr. Jim fixed your boat. Mr. Jim knew a fellow at the co-op. Mr. Jim would sit with you on the dock when your wife was in the hospital in Beaumont and you did not want to drive home to an empty house. He had become, in that town, exactly what he had been in his family. The one you handed the envelope to.

I drove out to see him the spring after the card came. He met me at the marina in a clean shirt, and he had put on a little weight, and he shook my hand like a man with a business. We sat on the dock and watched the water, which was brown and slow and smelled of diesel and mud, and he told me about the town. He told me a group had started meeting in the back of the marina office, Tuesday nights. Not his idea. A woman whose husband had lost their savings to a fake investment had asked if she could use the room, and then a man whose mother had been taken by the grandparent scam, and then a few more. Jim made the coffee. He did not talk much, he said. He just made the coffee and sat.

*"They think I'm trụ cột - the strong one," *he said, and laughed, and it was not a good laugh.

I asked him if he had told them.

He looked at the water a long time. *"They know I was scammed,"* he said.* "They don't know the rest."*

I want to tell you I said the right thing then. I did not. I said something about how the rest was his to tell when he was ready, which was true and was also a way of not saying what I was thinking, which was that a man cannot make coffee for the wounded forever with his own wound bound up under a clean shirt. Sooner or later someone leans against it.

His son Danny came down that summer. Danny had been sixteen when everything happened and had stayed with his mother, Jim's ex-wife, and had not spoken to his father for most of the years of postcards. I do not know what changed. Maybe nothing did except that Danny turned twenty-six and had a little money from a settlement and wanted to buy into something. He bought into the marina. Jim's share, and the widow's, over time. On his father's word that the numbers were right.

They were right. That was never the problem.

# V. Brown

I am going to call him Brown, because that is close enough and because I do not want to give him the dignity of his real name, which was not his real name either.

He came to the Tuesday group in the fall. He came the way they always come, which is slowly, and helpful, and from the side. He had a card that said *Asset Recovery Consultant* and a story about a firm in Houston that worked with the FBI, and a website with a seal on it, and a way of listening to people's losses that made them feel, for the first time since it happened, that someone with power was paying attention. He did not ask for money the first night, or the second. He asked questions. He wrote things down. He said *I think we can do something here* in the tone of a doctor who has found the thing on the scan that everyone else missed.

Jim saw him. I need you to hear that, because it is the hinge of the whole story. Jim was not fooled by Brown. He told me so, later, in the only letter he wrote me that ran longer than a page. He said he knew by the second Tuesday. The seal on the website was wrong. The firm in Houston did not answer its phone. Brown's questions were the kind you ask when you are figuring out how much is left, not how much was taken. Jim had been on the other end of that kind of listening once, in a hospital in Cần Thơ that did not exist, and he knew its tone.

And he let him in.

I have turned that over for years, and I can only tell you what Jim told me, which is that turning Brown away would have meant standing up in front of that room and saying *I know what this man is, because I have been taken by one, and not once but in a way I have never told you*. It would have meant admitting to those people, who thought he was the strong one, that he could not be trusted to tell a good man from a bad one, and that the reason he could not was the four months, the forged name, the jump. Letting Brown in cost him nothing that night. Turning him away would have cost him Mr. Jim. It would have cost him their reliance.

So he gave Brown the room. And when the woman whose husband had lost the savings asked Jim, privately, on the dock, whether she should trust this man, Jim said, "I think he's all right." Though he knew different.

And when Danny, who came to the group sometimes to keep his father company, asked the same, Jim said the same.

Brown took the group in one night in February. Eleven people, the recovery fee paid up front, the wire sent to an account in a state none of them had been to. He took Danny for more than the rest combined, because Danny had the settlement money and his father's word. Then Brown did the thing I have never been able to forgive, and I say that as a man who has spent a long time learning what forgiveness is for.

He did not just leave. Leaving would have been business. Before he left, he sent an email to everyone in Sabine Landing whose address he had gathered in four months of listening, the group and the co-op and the church and the widow, and it contained the story of Pascagoula. Not all of it. He did not have all of it. But he had found enough. The forged signature. The mother's name. The four months. He had gone looking, the way they do, for the thing that would hurt worst, and he had found it, and he sent it, not because it got him a dollar more, but because Mr. Jim had stood above him for four months in a clean shirt, and Brown wanted him to know that he had never been anything but the man who jumped.

That was the first revenge. I want you to remember that it was the scammer's. People forget that. They think of revenge as something victims are tempted by. It is also what the predator does on his way out the door, and it looks exactly the same from inside.

# VI. Thảo

Renee drove down from Pascagoula the week after. Somebody in the family had gotten the email, the way these things travel, and she had read it, and she had read what Brown had done to Danny, who was her nephew, and she had put her bag in the car.

I was not there. I have pieced together what happened from what Jim wrote and what Renee told me, much later, and the two accounts do not disagree, which tells you something.

She found him in the marina office. Danny was not there. Danny had stopped coming to the marina. She stood in the doorway and did not sit down, and she said what she had driven four hours to say, which was that she had defended him. For years. To their cousins, to the church, to their mother's friends, to anyone who asked what had become of Jim, she had said he was rebuilding, he was doing well, he had a business now, he was helping people. And now every one of those people had a copy of an email that said what he was, and they had a nephew who was ruined on his word, and she could not walk into her own church.

*"You are dead to this family,"* she said. *"Do not come when Mom goes. I mean it. Do not come."*

Jim said nothing. He did not argue and he did not explain. He stood behind the desk with the book open in front of him, the book where every dollar was written down twice, and he let her say it, and when she was done he said, *"All right,"* and that was all.

I have thought a great deal about Renee, and I want to be fair to her, because she was not a cruel woman and she is not one now. She did not shoot him for Danny's money. She shot him for her own shame. For the years of defending him, for the church she could not walk into, for the fact that she had believed him twice and had told everyone she knew that she believed him, and now they all knew what her belief was worth. Her grief had a debt attached to it, and Jim was standing there in the office, and he was the only one she could collect from. She half knew it, even then. She told me so. She said the whole drive home she kept thinking, *that was not right*, and she kept driving.

And Jim took it. Of course he did. He had been waiting eleven years for someone to pass the sentence out loud. Everyone else had only ever hinted at it, or forgiven him, which was worse. Renee said it plain, and I believe that when she said it something in him settled, the way a man settles when the doctor finally says the word he has been afraid of, and the fear turns into something he can at least hold.

He was gone from Sabine Landing by morning. The book was on the desk, squared to the edge. Every dollar in it was right.

That was the second revenge, the family's.

And the third was his own, and it was the longest running of the three, and it did not need anyone to fire it. He had been carrying out his own execution since the day he sat in the truck outside the bank, one town, one jump at a time. Renee only gave him permission to finish.

# VII. What Hollis Wanted

I am going to tell you the part I usually leave out, because it is about me, and I have never been comfortable in this story as anything but the man who watched.

I wanted Brown.

The group in Sabine Landing wanted him too, what was left of it. They found me, because Jim had mentioned me, and they wanted to know if I knew people. They meant people who could find a man, expose him, make his name and his face and his fake seal follow him from town to town the way Jim's own story had. Some of them had already started. There are places online where you can do that, and a whole way of living that grows up around it, a kind of second scam where the victims scam themselves out of their remaining years by spending them in pursuit.

I wanted it more than any of them. I had known Jim eleven years. I had read every postcard. I had sat on that dock and said the wrong thing. And I knew, as I know my own name, that if I went looking for Brown I would find him, because I am patient and I am careful and I had nothing left that I wanted more.

I did not go. And I want to be honest about what that was, because it was not a decision. A decision is something you make once. This was something I had to do every morning for a long time, and some mornings I did not do it well. I would sit down with my coffee and the laptop, and I would feel the pull, the old warm pull toward the thing that would finally make someone hurt for what had been done, and I would close the laptop and go to work, and the next morning I would do it again. I am still doing it. It is quieter now. But it is not gone.

I did not go because I had watched, over eleven years, exactly where the debt leads. Brown collected his from Jim and it did not make Brown a man. Renee collected hers from Jim and it did not give her back her church. Jim collected his from himself, every day, and it did not give him back the first week, when he could have picked up the phone. Three people, and every one of them believed, at the moment they did it, that what they were doing was justice. That it was proportionate. That it was owed. That it was satisfying.

And every one of them was wrong in the same way, and I could feel myself about to be wrong in it too.

# VIII. Freeport

The call came four years after Sabine Landing. A landlord in Freeport, a woman with a tired voice, who had found my number on a postcard in the drawer of a dead man's nightstand.

He had rented a room above a bait shop. He had paid on time. He had worked, she thought, at a yard down the channel, and he had not talked much, and she had not known his last name until she found it on the envelopes. He had died in his sleep, the doctor said, sometime on a Sunday, of the kind of thing that takes men who are sixty-one and have not been to a doctor in a decade. Nothing chosen. I want that understood. Whatever else he did, he did not choose that. He just stopped taking care of the body that carried the sentence, and eventually the body put it down.

She had found two numbers. Mine, on the postcard. And Renee's, on the envelopes.

I drove up. It is not far. And when I climbed the stairs above the bait shop, Renee was already there, sitting at the small table by the window, with the envelopes in front of her, and the book.

It was the same kind of book. Squared to the edge of the table. And in it, in Jim's hand, every dollar he had made in four years, and every dollar he had sent. Money orders, one a month, to Danny, at an address in Houston. Never a large amount. Never enough. Never, Renee said, with a letter. Danny had told her about them, and had not known what to do with them, and had cashed them, because he needed the money, and had hated himself for cashing them, and had never written back. Forty-seven of them. The forty-eighth was in the drawer, made out and stamped and not yet mailed.

We sat at that table a long time, the two of us. The family's revenge and the friend's grief. Renee did not cry, and then she did. She said, *"I told him not to come to Mom's funeral. He didn't come. I stood in that church and thought, at least he listened."* And she put her hand flat on the book.

I did not say anything for a while. Then I said, *"Who does the debt go to now?"*

She looked at me.

I said,* "Brown took from him. You took from him. He took from himself, every day, for fifteen years. Who collects now? Danny? You? Me?"*

And she said, *"Nobody."* And I said, *"No. Nobody." *And that is where I am going to leave the two of us, at that table, with the book between us and the forty-eighth money order in the drawer, because there is nothing after that in the story that you need.

# IX. To You

If you are reading this, I am going to assume you have a jump of your own. Not the falling. Everyone falls; falling is what the world is built to make you do now, and there is no shame in it that I recognize. I mean the thing after. The four months, or the four weeks, or the four hours. The hiding. The name you signed. The phone you did not pick up. The thing you did not tell the one person who would have helped, because telling would have meant being seen as the person who had done it.

I want to tell you three things about revenge, because I have watched it from inside three different people, and I have felt it in myself, and I know what it is now.

The first is that it always feels like justice. Every time. Brown believed Mr. Jim had it coming. Renee believed she was owed. Jim believed the sentence was fair, and that he was only the one honest enough to carry it out. Not one of them, at the moment they did it, would have called it revenge. That is how it gets in. It does not knock and announce itself. It comes dressed as the right thing.

The second is that it never collects. That is the whole of it, and it is the thing nobody can tell you in a way that you will believe until you have sat at the table in Freeport yourself. The debt is real. What was done to you was real. But it cannot be paid, not by the one who did it and not by you, and every day you spend trying to collect it is a day taken from the only account that is still yours, which is the rest of your life. Brown is somewhere tonight. He is not paying. He will not. And nothing I could do to him would give Jim back the first week.

The third thing is the one Jim never learned, and it is the reason I am still here to tell you this and he is not. The sentence can only be lifted by the one serving it. Not by a sister. Not by a son cashing a money order. Not by a friend on a dock saying it is yours to tell when you are ready. You. And not once, in a single morning of resolve, but every morning, for longer than seems fair, until one day it is quieter, and then one day it is something you carry instead of something that carries you.

I wanted Brown. I closed the laptop. I will close it again tomorrow.

That is the work. That is all the work there is.

This is the way.

Yours Truly,

*Hollis Grier*

* *

**Postscript**

*Almost every victim thinks about revenge. Fantasizes, dreams, longs for it. It is not satisfying, it is death. It is not the Yellow Brick Road, it is the Red Road. It does not lead to a place with peace, it leads to a place where you forever carry that which you want revenge for. It leans on you, no matter where you jump it follows. It follows.*

*All of us have things in our life that caused us to jump, even if it was a small one. We call ourselves survivors, yet in reality, no one survives. Life has no winners. It just has a brief amount of time, and what we do with that, how we live it is what matters. *

*There are no answers, though there is truth. You can forgive yourself, and you must let the sentence go. Let revenge go. There are no “do overs,” instead of jumping, sit down and forgive yourself. And forgive those who hurt you, because that is the path to peace.*

*“Consider these things, whether you are willing at such a price to gain peace, freedom, and an untroubled spirit.”*

— Epictetus

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