A Heist Story

by Ellen Simpson

  “That won’t be necessary,” Marcey answered just a bit too quickly.

  He stared at her for a moment. “Suit yourself. Hit the red button beside the unit if you start to panic or anyone back here gives you a hard time. This place gives me the creeps late at night.” He turned and started to shuffle back toward the office.

  Marcey glanced out the window at the swirling snow. It was just past seven o’clock, not even that late. “Thanks.” Her words echoed strangely in the corridor. A tremor of excitement shot down Marcey’s spine. She had no idea what she was meant to find here, but if she was right, it was the first piece of a puzzle left behind as a clue to something bigger.

  Unit 5433 did not belong to Marcey, or anyone she knew personally. The number and address were written in the book and its purpose explained to Marcey in a letter from a man who claimed to know her, given to her by Darius’s lawyer. How Devon had even had it was beyond Marcey at this point. He’d said it’d been left with him. Marcey wasn’t so sure now if it wasn’t all part of some elaborate plot.

  When the book arrived on her doorstep, Marcey didn’t think much of it beyond a passing annoyance at the courier, who’d left it without bothering to knock. Obviously, this book had some value, or it would not have been delivered by one of the city’s elite private messaging companies.

  “Everything happens for a reason, Mar,” Devon explained, offering it to her between two fingers. “This might give you a better idea of why this is happening.”

  “For me?” She frowned, reading the address in the same slanted handwriting. “I don’t even know the guy.”

  Devon smiled his mysterious smile and retreated behind his desk, leaving Marcey to read. It was…something else. The ramblings of an old man who had mistaken her for someone else. It claimed the writer was her father, and that he was leaving Marcey his legacy as she was an honest woman.

  “An honest woman?” Marcey raised an eyebrow. “Sure.”

  “Well, you are, after a sense.” Devon pursed his lips, the corners of his eyes crinkled with amusement. “No jail time on your record.”

  Marcey actually laughed, flabbergasted and yet not that surprised by what Devon had said. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have to make an inquiry about that damn ad,” she said. “Darius wanted me to stop bothering you when you were prepping for his parole hearing. The book would be in the trash and I’d be going about my life.”

  Devon put his hands in his pockets and sat back. “That so?”

  Marcey scowled at him. He knew her pretty well by this point, and he wasn’t exactly wrong in thinking that she was intrigued. Marcey let out a heavier sigh than she’d perhaps intended. “Well…what’s this about a job he didn’t get to pull off?” She flipped to the second page. “And what’s this about him being my father?”

  Devon told her all he knew. It wasn’t much. He flipped through the book with her and found the storage unit address and number. “You should go there, see what Charlie had cookin’.”

  The unit belonged to Charles Mock. The same man that ADA Johnson had failed to convict in a very public, very messy trial, not long before she’d taken Marcey and Darius’s case. The man who was apparently Marcey’s father. There wasn’t much proof of that in his note, just a few scant details on an affair when Marcey’s mother was in graduate school at NYU, struggling to support herself. The details were written with such care, though, as though the memories contained in the letter were fond and treasured. Her mother’s backstory was something Marcey knew like the back of her hand. For most of her life, Marcey had been told stories to encourage her to work harder, to be a better person. But her mother had apparently lied about everything for twenty-five years.

  Marcey wanted to hate Devon when he showed her a photograph, because it made this whole thing real. The person who did this to her was real, an honest-to-god person. Not some sort of joke she could dismiss as Devon being a dick and trying to pull a fast one on her.

  “This is Charlie.” Devon tapped a man in the center. “He asked me to show you this.”

  Marcey took the photograph from him. Her eyes narrowed and then went wide with recognition. This was the guy who’d made Linda Johnson look like a goddamn fool right before Darius’s trial. There were pictures of him walking out of the courtroom following the abrupt acquittal and near accusation of Linda Johnson’s office fabricating evidence all over the newspapers. His head was held high and a wicked smirk danced across his lips. Even though she was in high school at the time, Marcey remembered those pictures. They’d felt like a victory for the little guy and a mockery of all that was corrupt and wrong about the criminal justice system. He looked younger in those photographs than in this picture. No way…

  She scowled. No matter how cool or badass it was to get off like he had, this man’s antics had fucking ruined her best friend’s life. This was the guy who sent her this book? This was the guy who was supposed to be her father? She stared at the older man with a head of hair the same color as her own, curling at the top of his head. He was wearing sunglasses, but his nose was unmistakable. Marcey saw the same nose in the mirror every day. She’d seen that nose before too, on an old man down in the park she’d played chess with on the weekends sometimes, back when she’d still had time for that—back before her entire life had gone to shit.

  In the photo, Charlie Mock stood on a beach somewhere, flanked by two women. One was black, taller than Charlie by a good three inches, and smiling broadly behind blood-red lipstick. She was stunning, her arm draped around Charlie’s shoulder and her hair damp from the ocean. Beside them, grinning lopsidedly at the camera, was a blonde woman with pretty green eyes clad in a man’s oversized white shirt and a long, flowing skirt. She was shorter than the others; Charlie’s arm was wrapped around her waist. Her eyes were alive, bright with emotion. Marcey’s breath caught in her throat. She was beautiful. Both of the women were.

  On the back of the photograph was a carefully printed note in the same masculine hand that filled the Moleskine notebook. Charlie, Shelly and Kat, Rio, 2013

  The photograph was tucked inside the Moleskine, along with the letter from Charlie Mock to Devon explaining the conditions of Marcey’s inheritance. The letter was full of emotions, things she wasn’t meant to hear. They were for some image of a child Charlie Mock had in his head, a child Charlie thought would be clever and whip-smart—a child with ambition. Marcey had ambition, yes, but she didn’t want it ascribed to her by a stranger she hardly knew, asserting he had some claim on her life.

  The papers weren’t the only place Marcey had seen him before. The realization hit her hard. She looked up, stunned. “He played chess with me,” she said. “When I was just starting high school—before that trial that ruined Linda Johnson’s career. Like when I was a freshmen or whatever. He would come to the park and play chess.”

  Devon’s face was impassive. “He was always a coward about interpersonal relationships. Amazing he and Shelly hit it off at all, given how she is about commitment. But whatever. He told me that he couldn’t face the idea of ruining your life by telling you these things that your mother wasn’t able to bring herself to admit. I’m sorry you had to find out this way.”

  “Why does he want to lay claim to me like this? I’m not a possession he can just say is his.”

  “Do you think that’s what he’s saying?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The conversation died after that. Later, when Marcey returned home, she went through every photograph her mother kept in the apartment. She devoured old address books and diaries, desperate to find a trace of Charlie Mock. The diaries were empty, and the address books held no more answers than the photographs. Marcey was convinced that this was all an elaborate prank by someone who knew her history with Darius and wanted to mess with her. It was a dick move. She went to bed fuming.

  In the morning, she called Devon back. “How did he know it was me?”

  “You should probably come back into the office.”

&n
bsp; So Marcey took the train and walked the ten blocks to Devon’s office filled with a feeling of not quite dread not quite something else entirely. Devon waited until the pleasantries were done before he pulled a file from his desk drawer and paged through it. “The reason he knew is because he had you tested.” He held out a single piece of paper from the file, his brow furrowed and his lips pursed into a thin, disapproving line. “Not that I thought it was a good idea, but that’s white folks for you.”

  “Tested?” Marcey took the paper from him. It was a DNA test, establishing a paternal match.

  “Charlie told me that he and your mother saw each other on and off for a few years while she was at NYU. He never knew that she’d gotten pregnant until he happened to see a picture of you in the newspaper with her a few years back.” At Marcey’s blank stare, Devon passed her a second sheet of paper, covered in the same spider-like handwriting of the letter and book she received—Charlie’s handwriting. Marcey didn’t like that she recognized it now, and the creeping sense of violation from the idea of being tested was taking all of her mental energy to hold back. She’d deal with that later, when Devon wasn’t around to witness her disgust and horror.

  Attached to the page was a newspaper clipping from the Times, a small black-and-white photo of her mother and Marcey, holding a giant pair of scissors, about to cut the ribbon on the firm’s new offices.

  She must have been fifteen in the photo. “This is more than a few years ago.” Swallowing, Marcey leveled her gaze at Devon. Her hand was shaking. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep her expression neutral. She could not—would not—let him see that this bothered her. The idea of this strange man seeing her in the paper and then jumping to all kinds of conclusions about her. She glanced back down at the date on the picture, thinking back. She’d met Charlie not long after that in the park for the first time. “Kinda creepy if you ask me.” It was dismissive, but it did somewhat reflect how she felt.

  Devon laughed. “I suppose you’re right. But I don’t—didn’t—put much past Charlie. He was always doing questionable things. And hey, time flies.”

  Marcey set the clipping aside to cover the disgust that swept over her face. “This doesn’t prove anything.”

  “No.” Devon shook his head. “But this will.” He tapped the paternity test with his pen. “I don’t know how he did it, I didn’t ask, but somehow he got hold of your DNA, got you tested. I think he used a private investigator friend of his.”

  That was it. Marcey pushed away from the desk, the chair she’d been sitting on rolling away to slam into a bookshelf full of legal reference books. The terrible revulsion she’d only just been keeping in check boiling over and spewing forth from her lips. “How could someone who wrote such beautiful words—” She’d thrown down the results and stalked over to the window in disgust. “How could he just do that without my consent?”

  The violation, the creeping sense of knowing exactly when Charlie Mock had gotten her DNA—during one of their chess games, he’d pulled a hair from her jacket and flicked it away as though it had been nothing… That must have been it; he must have kept it.

  “He was a criminal, Marcey,” Devon said, his expression resigned. “Not a good person.”

  Charles Mock died in a prison.

  Marcey thought of Darius, her stomach clenching. She couldn’t imagine losing him while he was stuck behind those impermeable walls up at Clinton Correctional. ADA Johnson had her plan: she wanted to keep Darius locked away and she wanted to drag Marcey’s name through the mud despite her acquittal. This was a revenge, and a petty one. Marcey wasn’t sure why Johnson wanted it, or why it was so important to do it now, when Darius was set to be released in two months. Provided he won the parole request.

  Marcey wanted to know why, and if that why was here, in this run-down twenty-four-hour storage facility in the south Bronx, then so be it. She was going to follow the leads and Charles Mock’s paper trail until it went cold. She wanted to know if this was all connected to Charles, or if it was truly just about herself and Darius.

  Ted’s heavy footfalls soon fell silent with his retreat and Marcey was alone. She shivered in the cold air and set her jaw. There was no telling what she would find hidden behind the unit door. Devon hadn’t been able to tell her much about what Charles Mock had locked away here.

  Her boots were slippery on the concrete floor of the unit. Marcey hummed, thinking back to the meetings with Devon. The whole situation was a mess, and she didn’t like anything about how Charlie had confirmed her relation to him. Devon’s answer, that he was a criminal, wasn’t enough. Marcey hoped there was something in this storage unit that justified why Marcey had to handle the violation of a strange man snooping into her paternity—into her fucking DNA.

  No answer would be good enough for Marcey. Just as the crawling feeling at the pit of her stomach of violation. Marcey didn’t like being lied to. She didn’t like that Charlie Mock had never even bothered to say anything. All she felt was anger. He’d just taken his proof and dumped his last job in her lap. She’d left Devon’s office confused and upset. There were no other answers, and the feelings she had were difficult to articulate. She’d thrown herself into researching the book and to making sure she had time to come to explore this storage unit.

  The lock in her hand warmed quickly in her palm, sweaty despite the chill at the back of the storage facility. Marcey twisted the knob to the combination she’d memorized almost upon seeing it. Memory was Marcey’s greatest asset: she could recall the ebb and flow of numbers across the page, and recognize patterns where seemingly there were none. She put her tongue between her teeth and pulled down on the lock. It didn’t budge. She tried again. 15-2-34. After another moment of resistance, the lock clicked open and the rusted bolt of it fell loose. Marcey tugged it away from the latch and tucked it into her jacket pocket. It jangled against her keys.

  The door rose about an inch or two from the ground, a small puff of dusty, disused air escaping from underneath it. Marcey bent and grabbed the handle, using her shoulder to throw the door into the ceiling storage space beyond. It rattled, echoing loudly in the empty hall, almost covering up the click-click-click of approaching footsteps.

  Marcey froze. The bright light of the hallway streamed into the unit, but she couldn’t look, not with someone close. She jumped up, grabbing at the handle. She had to close it. Charlie Mock’s secrets were closely guarded, the sort that could not be shared with even a passerby. Marcey was certain of this. What if this person was investigating Charlie, looking to see if his death was faked? What if this person knew of Johnson’s vendetta and wanted to come after her? What if this was one of Devon’s people, following her to make sure that she’d stay out of trouble?

  Click-click-click-stop.

  Marcey peered up the hallway, her knees bent to try and jump up in order to grab the door handle.

  A woman approached. She was broad shouldered, her hair impeccable despite the cold humidity of the weather outside. Her long jacket was coal gray and set off against her dark skin in a way that Marcey found fascinating. Most of all, she was beautiful. Her eyes were sharp, but not unkind, and her lips painted a bright red that stood out starkly against the dark color of her dress beneath the jacket and the warm brown of her skin.

  When she spoke, it was in an affected voice. It took Marcey a minute to figure out why, before the realization slowly slotted into place. “If you’re looking for Charlie,” she called, stopping well away from Marcey, her hands in her pockets. “He’s gone.”

  Marcey straightened. “I wasn’t.”

  “This is his unit, you’re trespassing.” The woman’s gaze flicked from Marcey to the open storage unit, narrowing as she took in Marcey’s face. “I’ve been waiting for three weeks now for someone to show up. How did you find it?”

  “Er—there’s a book,” Marcey hedged. “With the combination written inside.” She pulled the lock from her pocket and held it up so it caught the light. “And I unlocked the door
. Are you a guard or something?”

  There was a smile evident in the woman’s tone, even if it did not translate to her face. “Or something.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Marcey, Following

  The storage facility was quiet, save for the gentle buzz of the overhead fluorescent lights and the creak of ancient baseboard radiators. Marcey shivered, wrapping her arms around herself. Her jacket was too thin to linger in a place like this. She hadn’t meant to linger at all. She wanted to get in, see whatever it was that Charlie had put here, and then go home to figure out her next move.

  He’d left her instructions in that letter. Devon had feigned ignorance, but Marcey knew he was intent on making sure Marcey followed through. Was this woman’s presence meant to confirm that?

  She had to tread carefully. If she didn’t, she was bound to run into more situations like this: a standoff that left her naked, unable to act for fear of blowing everything before she had a chance to get started.

  Her purse swung from her shoulder, passing into the void of open space behind her—all of Charlie’s secrets were back there, and all she wanted to do was slam the door shut and run. Darius was right. She shouldn’t be here, digging into something that could make her life worse before it ever got better.

  “Who are you?” Marcey was surprised her voice didn’t shake. She squared her shoulders, a muscle working in her jaw. She could run away from this woman, duck back out to the rental, and go home. No one would have to know she was ever here. Except this woman. With her full lips and mocking grin. Why was she so damn amused? What was so funny about this? There was nothing funny about her scaring Marcey half to death.

  “Aren’t you going to go inside?”