Signs and Wonders
by Wesley Doyle
Copyright© 2026 by Wesley Doyle
Romance Sex Story: Roy Sutter never worked with a partner, until Nadine out-conned him in a Tulsa bar. Now they run one last game on the healing-crusade preacher who bled her dying mother for a "seed offering" — and the night before it, two liars finally run out of lies.
Caution: This Romance Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Consensual Heterosexual Fiction .
I am going to tell you how I helped rob a man of God, and I’m going to tell it to you from a kitchen table with good morning light on it and the woman I don’t deserve cracking eggs into a skillet behind me, so you’ll know before we start that it comes out all right. I’ve no patience, at my age, for the kind of story that keeps you wondering whether the crooked get to keep what they took. They don’t. Not in this one. That’s the whole reason it’s worth the telling.
My name is Roy Sutter, and for the better part of my life I was a confidence man, which is a polite way of saying I made my living convincing decent people to hand me things they’d have been wiser to keep. I’m not proud of the years, but I’m not going to sit here and lie about them either, because the one honest thing a liar can do at the end is quit lying, and I’ve been practicing.
I want to be clear about the kind of man I was, so the rest lands right. I was not a good man who fell on hard times. I was a coward with quick hands and a warm voice, and I had learned young that the warm voice was the whole of the trade — that people don’t get taken by the smart, they get taken by the kind, or by what sounds like it. I worked alone. I liked working alone. A partner is a person who can testify.
Then I met Nadine Poole, and she took me before I got my hat off, and I have spent every year since trying to deserve the robbery.
She ran a game on me in a hotel bar in Tulsa that I will not describe in detail because I still can’t think about it without admiring it, and when it was done and my wallet was lighter and I had figured out how, I did the only thing a man in my position could do with any dignity. I found her, and I bought her a drink, and I said, “I don’t want it back. I want to know how you did the thing with the ring.” And she looked at me a long moment, the way you’d look at a dog to see if it bites, and then she laughed, and that was the beginning of the best and only true thing in my crooked life.
We worked together after that. I’ll spare you the catalogue. We were good, and we were careful, and we had one rule between us that I’d never had before, which was Nadine’s rule, and it was this: we only took from people who had it coming. Cheats. Bullies. Men who’d already robbed somebody weaker and called it business. Nadine said a con run on a good person is just cruelty with a script, but a con run on a wolf is the closest thing our kind gets to grace. I thought it was sentiment, at first. I came to understand it was the only thing keeping either of us human, and that she’d worked it out long before I came along, alone, the hard way.
And the reason she’d worked it out — the reason there was a Nadine Poole who took strangers’ wallets in hotel bars at all — was a man named Reverend Asa Godbold.
You’ve seen his kind, or his kind’s grandchildren. Godbold ran a healing crusade up and down through the dust country in a caravan of white trucks, a tent the size of a circus, a choir, and a voice that could make a widow believe the mortgage was a test of faith. He healed the lame and the blind and the cancer-ridden, on a stage, under lights, for a love offering — and the love offering was the whole machine. Seed money, he called it. You planted a seed into the ministry, the bigger the better, and God returned it thirtyfold, and if He didn’t, well, that was the seed you’d failed to plant in faith, wasn’t it, and here was the bucket coming round again.
The healings were real in the way a card trick is real. He had a man ahead of the crusade, a fellow with a clipboard who’d work the prayer line an hour before the show and collect the names and the ailments and the room numbers, and Godbold wore a little flesh-colored earpiece under all that anointed hair, and the Holy Spirit that called out “a woman named Alma, with a trouble in her spine, who’s come a long way tonight” was a radio.
Alma was Nadine’s mother.
She’d had cancer in the spine, and she’d had eleven hundred dollars, which was everything, the sum total of a life of piecework and thrift, and Godbold’s crusade came through the county the spring she was dying, and she gave him the eleven hundred as a seed, because he’d stood her up out of her chair on that stage and she’d walked six steps in front of the whole town on legs that hadn’t held her in a year — six steps, on adrenaline and stage lights and the most powerful drug the Reverend sold, which was hope — and then she’d gone home and planted her seed and waited for God to return it thirtyfold and heal her, and instead she’d died in a county bed nine weeks later, still certain it was her own faith that had come up short.
Nadine was nineteen. She’d begged her mother not to give the money. She’d sat in the back of that tent and watched a radio in a fat man’s ear turn her mother’s death into a testimony, and she had walked out of there and never once in the years since had a straight job or a full night’s sleep, and I want you to understand that when Nadine said we only take from wolves, she was not talking philosophy. She was talking about one wolf. She’d been hunting him her whole life. She just hadn’t been big enough yet.
By the time she told me all this we’d been together three years, and we were big enough.
I won’t give you every wire of the machine we built, partly because some of it I’m still fond of and partly because the statute of limitations is a thing I respect the way a sailor respects weather. But the shape of it was this.
A wolf like Godbold can only be robbed through the one door he never guards, which is his greed, and greed’s a lock that opens from the inside. So we did not try to steal from Reverend Asa Godbold. We arranged for Reverend Asa Godbold to try very hard to steal from us, in front of witnesses, with his own hand and his own voice, and then we simply held still what he did.
Nadine became a widow. Not a poor one this time — a rich one, Mrs. Vandaveer, old oil money out of Bartlesville, dying by inches of a wasting illness, terrified, and looking, as the rich and frightened will, for a miracle at any price. I became her driver and her late husband’s cousin and the sole heir who stood to lose a fortune if the old lady gave it all to a preacher, which made me exactly the obstacle Godbold would expect and exactly the man he’d want to get around. We let his advance man find us. We let the clipboard fellow overhear, at a diner, that Mrs. Vandaveer was prepared to plant a seed of two hundred thousand dollars into whatever ministry could stand her up out of her chair — and that her tightfisted cousin was fighting her on it tooth and nail.
Two hundred thousand dollars will bring a wolf ninety miles in the rain.
He came to the hotel himself, which we’d hoped for but not counted on — that was greed doing our work for us — and he sat in that suite and held Nadine’s frail ringed hands in his two soft ones and prayed over her with tears standing in his eyes, real tears, he could cry on a dime, it was a gift. And I played the cousin, and I argued, and I let him beat me, because a wolf needs to feel he’s outsmarted somebody or he won’t believe the meat is real. By the end of the hour he had “prayed through” to a private healing service — just the Reverend, Mrs. Vandaveer, her cousin, and God, no crowd, no cameras, the seed to be planted by cashier’s check the moment the old woman rose from her chair.
He thought he’d arranged a quiet fleecing of a dying woman with no witnesses.
He’d arranged to be alone in a room with us. Which is a different thing.
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