Among Thieves

by David Hosp

  Devon met up with the Irishman at around ten, and they went over the plan again. That took about twenty minutes. Then they sat in the Irishman’s apartment, saying nothing. Devon turned on the television and started watching some of the NCAA tournament, but Irish turned it off. He didn’t seem to be much of a hoops fan.

  At eleven-thirty, they put on the police uniforms Vinny had gotten for them—real ones, not some costume-shop fakes, complete with guns and utility belts—and pasted on cheesy fake mustaches. Then they headed out.

  The drive over to the Fens took a little time. Devon was careful to stop at the lights and keep to the speed limit; the last thing he wanted at that point was to get pulled over. Not that anyone was likely to pay them any attention; there were still so many people out on the street drunk off their asses. That was good in the sense that the real police would already be overwhelmed responding to reports of drunk and disorderly behavior, bar fights, and traffic accidents. Devon had tried to keep Irish as relaxed as possible, but had only been successful for a time. Now he was at a half-jog, trying to keep up with the man as they made their way the short distance from the car to the museum.

  The warm weather made their overcoats seem more out of place. It was the one part of their uniforms that wasn’t authentic, and Devon hoped that the security guards wouldn’t notice. There was little they could do about it; the coats were necessary to conceal some of the tools they would need to do the job.

  They walked up to the back door and rang the bell. It was one o’clock, and it took a minute or two for someone to answer. The voice on the intercom sounded as if it belonged to a kid. “Hello?” he said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Lissa Krantz sat on the enormous sofa facing the fireplace in the living room of her top-floor apartment in the Back Bay. Her legs were pulled up underneath her and a cashmere blanket was pulled up to her waist. Looking out through the bay windows, she took in the Esplanade that wound along the banks of the Charles, and looked out toward Cambridge on the other side of the river. She’d always enjoyed the apartment, but it had only felt like home for a year or so—since Tom Kozlowski had all but moved in.

  “You want a glass of wine?” he called from the kitchen. The apartment was large enough that he had to yell.

  “No thanks,” she called back.

  “Beer?”

  “Nope.”

  They were a mismatched couple. She’d grown used to the quizzical stares that greeted them wherever they went. He was nearly twenty years her senior, and despite having been off the force for a few years he would always look like a cop. Not the Hollywood variety, with their silk suits and their styled hair, but an old-school cop—the kind of wash-and-wear, just-the-facts-ma’am kind of cop who still viewed the world through a two-toned lens. She would never change him. Fortunately, that had never been her goal.

  It was ironic. She recognized that when people looked at the two of them out on the street, they wondered how on earth he had managed to catch her. And yet she had chased him. Everything about him had captured her from the beginning. Her psychiatrist no doubt still tied the attraction to a troubled past and unresolved parental issues. Maybe he was right. On the other hand, she seemed to have less need for her psychiatrist these days.

  In her heart, she knew that the attraction was more than just repressed childhood insecurity. Deep down he was smart and decent and kind, and something about his rough features, scarred and uneven, stirred a base passion in her. The past year with him had been the best of her life.

  Now, in all likelihood, it was about to end.

  He walked into the room, beer in hand, and sat down into an overstuffed chair cornering the sofa. “Long day?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “You were there for most of it.”

  “How’d it go at the doctor’s?”

  “Fine.” She opened her mouth to say more, but nothing came out. “How did the meeting go with Ballick?”

  He shook his head. “Not very well. Safe to say that he won’t be helping us out. On the other hand, we didn’t get shot, which is always a plus.”

  “That’s good. I mean the not getting shot part.”

  He looked at her and she turned away. “You sure everything’s okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “I don’t know. You seem weird.”

  “How so?”

  Kozlowski’s face twisted. He was still a novice at deciphering her moods, and he approached conversations like this the way an apprentice animal trainer approaches a tiger for the first time—carefully, and with a healthy amount of fear. “Don’t know,” he said finally. “I can’t put it into words.” It was a catchphrase he’d picked up somewhere in the past year, and he used it as a fallback defense. It was usually effective.

  “Well, I’m fine,” she replied.

  “Good.”

  She said nothing for a while, and the two of them just sat there as he sipped his beer. “There is one thing we need to talk about,” she said finally.

  “Sure,” he said. “What is it?”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  She had planned to say the words gently, so they would land with the weight of a feather. Instead she blurted them out, the consonants exploding in her own ears. Kozlowski looked as though he had been slammed over the head with a toaster. He sat there, his beer dangling midway between his mouth and the side table.

  “I found out today,” she continued. “I was expecting the doctor to tell me that I had the flu, but, nope, turns out I’m pregnant.”

  Kozlowski still said nothing.

  “Well?” she said, looking at him. “You wanna join the conversation?”

  “I think we should get married,” he said at last.

  “Fuck you,” she replied, getting off the sofa and storming out toward the kitchen.

  “Is that a yes or a no?”

  “You really don’t get it, do you. You don’t understand that this isn’t the 1950s, and you and I aren’t Ozzie and Harriet. I’m not some fucking damsel in distress you have an obligation to. You don’t even know whether or not I want to keep the baby.”

  “Do you?”

  “Of course I do, asshole.”

  “So, what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is that I don’t know whether I want to be married. I’ve never seen myself in that role. And I sure as hell don’t want to be married to someone who’s only asking because he knocked me up and he thinks he owes it to me.”

  “Who said anything about owing?” Kozlowski’s voice was raised, though it wasn’t quite at her decibel level. “I love you, and you love me—at least it seems like you do when you’re not acting like a crazy person. You’re pregnant with my kid. I’m sorry if it seems to me like these are all good reasons why we should get married.” He got up and walked over to the window.

  “I don’t care about should.”

  “It’s not about should! Not in that way. But I am who I am.” He turned and looked at her. “I’m fine with what we’re doing now—this thing between the two of us—when it’s just us. But you start adding a kid into it, then, yeah, I want to be married. I want my kid to have real married parents.”

  “Parents are real whether they’re married or not.”

  “That’s great—for other people. But not for me. Not for us. I love you, and I’d want to be married with or without a kid, but if we’re going to have a child together I need to be married.”

  “So are you saying you want to be married, or you need to be married, or you should be married? Which is it?”

  “Jesus Christ! I don’t know!” he yelled. His face was turning red now. “I don’t parse every goddamned thought I have out like that! Tell me which is the right answer, for the love of God, and that’s the answer I’ll give you!”

  They stared at each other for a few moments. “You want to get married.”

  “Fine,” he said, “I want to get married.”

  “Fine.” She walked back and sat on the sofa.

&
nbsp; “Good,” he replied, walking over and sitting next to her. They sat there, next to each other, both staring straight ahead, not saying anything for several minutes. Then he picked up his beer and took a sip. “So, we’re gonna have a baby,” he said, still not looking at her.

  “And we’re gonna get married,” she added.

  “I’ll be in my seventies when this kid graduates college,” he said, his voice flat.

  “If you’re expecting me to wear some big frilly white dress and walk down an aisle somewhere, you can forget it,” she replied.

  “My seventies,” he repeated. He took another sip of his beer.

  She looked over at him, studying his face. Then she reached over and slid her arm under his, grasping his hand. “You’ll be a better father in your seventies than any other man I’ve ever known at any age.”

  He squeezed her hand, then turned to look at her. “You’ll look beautiful no matter what you wear,” he said.

  They sat there for a long time, both of them struggling to adjust to the sudden, tectonic shift in their worlds. Neither of them was particularly comfortable with change, and Lissa knew that this was a bigger change in Kozlowski’s life than he could ever have anticipated. But she also knew that he would handle it. As much as he hated change, he was the most reliable man she had ever met.

  As she considered the changes to her own life, a strange feeling came over her. It was a feeling with which she had little experience, and it overwhelmed her as she tried to put her finger on what it was. It took several moments, but at last she figured it out: for the first time in her life she felt totally, utterly happy.

  Sally wasn’t used to the quiet. She’d spent her life in neighborhoods where the noise never died. There was a constant stream of yelling and slamming doors and sirens. There was always a bar nearby that violated last call, and her mother was always one of the last to leave, often just coherent enough to find her way home. Sally couldn’t remember a night when her sleep wasn’t interrupted.

  In Finn’s apartment near the top of Bunker Hill at night, though, there was no noise. Every once in a while a car would drive by, but the cars on the hill had decent mufflers and never backfired, so she had to strain to hear them. There was no screaming, and people kept their televisions low enough that their neighbors didn’t have to listen to the show on next door. She found the silence disconcerting. Left alone with her thoughts she felt physical discomfort, as if she were lying in a pool of insects crawling over her skin, around her eyes and ears, into her skull.

  She sat up in bed. Finn was downstairs, and she was alone in the guest room. She stood up and walked over to her duffel, reached inside, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. There was a fire escape landing outside her window; she opened the screen and stepped out onto it. Sitting down, she pulled out a cigarette and struck a match. She took a drag as she thought about her predicament. Notwithstanding the kindness her father’s lawyer had shown her, she was still pretty sure she was fucked.

  She’d had a glimmer of hope a year before, when her mother left her with Devon. She’d felt deserted, but she was old enough to recognize that her mother had sunk so low that she wasn’t able to function. Sally had been taking care of herself for a couple of years by then, and had already come to terms with the fact that her mother loved her drugs more than she loved her daughter.

  When her mother announced that Sally was going to go to live with her father, Sally was shocked. Her mother had never mentioned her father before. Sally had grown up under the impression that her mother wasn’t entirely sure who her father was. That wouldn’t have surprised Sally; monogamy didn’t seem to be an instinct her mother possessed. Not even on a weekly basis. Sometimes, Sally feared, not on a nightly basis.

  And so, when her mother announced that she was taking Sally to live with her father, Sally allowed herself to hope. For just a split second, she indulged in the fairy tale all unhappy children hold in their hearts. She let herself believe that she was a part of something greater. She let herself envision her father as a lost prince who would deliver her from her life of squalor and fear.

  Devon hadn’t quite fulfilled her dreams.

  It wasn’t his fault, she knew. Sally’s mother had never told Devon about her. They showed up that morning on Devon’s stoop, and Devon had come to the door warily. Sally wondered what had transpired between the two of them for her not to tell him he had a daughter, and for him to approach the door that day with such trepidation. They never told her, though.

  The introductions were short. “She’s yours,” her mother said. “Her name’s Sally.”

  Devon had just stood there, his mouth open, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his lips. He was wearing a dirty T-shirt and he hadn’t shaved in days. Neither one of them knew what to say. For a moment, Sally thought he was going to slam the door in their faces. She wouldn’t have blamed him, either. He didn’t, though. After a healthy pause, he said, “I’m Devon.”

  To his credit, he never complained about taking her in. Most guys would have, Sally knew. Most guys would have at least asked for a paternity test. That was never an issue with Devon, though. He seemed to accept instinctively the fact that Sally was his daughter. In some ways, he even seemed excited about the prospect. He treated her with a sort of fearful awe. She supposed it was something approaching love, but she had little with which to compare it to verify her suspicion.

  All the love in the world, though, couldn’t improve their living conditions. It was a step up from her mother’s situation, but then a step up from crack houses wasn’t exactly the Ritz. She gathered quickly from his schedule that Devon didn’t have any legal employment, and she deduced that he was a thief. She asked him about it once, and he didn’t even try to lie. That didn’t bother her; in her experience, theft seemed a minor sin. She just wished he was a better thief; he was barely making enough to feed them and pay the rent. Every once in a while she would catch him looking at her with what she could only describe as shame in his eyes. As if he was failing her. Maybe he was, a little, but she was safe and dry. She’d learned not to hope for more.

  Recently, that look had begun to recede from his eyes. He’d seemed more confident; optimistic, even. Once again, she had allowed herself to believe that maybe—just maybe—better things were on the way. Now he was in jail. She vowed never to feel hope again. It was a promise she’d made before, but seemed unable to keep. Hope was crack to her; she couldn’t seem to give it up no matter how hard she tried.

  She took another drag off her cigarette just as the silhouette of a head appeared in the window to her room, making her flinch. “You scared me,” she said.

  Finn poked his head out the window. “I scared you? I came up to see if you needed anything and found the room empty; talk about scared. What are you doing?”

  She considered lying, but decided against it. She held her cigarette up in view.

  “You shouldn’t smoke,” Finn said.

  “You’re not my father,” she replied. It came out with a harsher edge than she intended. “Devon lets me smoke,” she explained. “My mother was too fucked up to care one way or another.”

  Finn climbed out onto the fire escape. It was an awkward fit out the window for a grown man. Once outside, he stood up and looked around. “I’ve never been out here,” he said. She looked around. The window was located on the back side of the building, and the fire escape looked sideways on the hill. Down below she could see the street and the upscale brownstones across the way.

  “It’s not bad,” she said.

  “There’s a roof deck upstairs. It’s got a better view. You can see both the water and the monument.”

  “This is better than any view I’ve ever had.”

  He looked down at her. “Fair enough.” He stood there for a moment, then took two steps down the fire escape and sat next to her. It was cramped, and she shimmied toward the building to give some room; she didn’t want their legs touching. He sat there for a minute. Then he turned and looked
again at her cigarette.

  “I swear, my father lets me smoke,” she said. She’d picked up smoking from her mother a couple of years before. She figured it beat suicide.

  “I didn’t say anything,” Finn said. He was still looking at the butt. “It’s just…”

  “What?”

  “You got an extra?”

  She reached into her pocket, pulled out the pack and tossed it to him. “You shouldn’t smoke,” she said.

  “So I’ve heard.”

  He lit the cigarette and took an ex-smoker’s drag. He held the poison in his lungs for a long time, milking its full effect, like a man lost in the desert drinking at an oasis. Finally he let the smoke out in a loud, long, satisfying exhale. Looking at the glowing ember of the cigarette, he asked her, “So, you doing okay with all of this?”

  She shrugged. “Which part? My mom ditching? My dad being in jail? Having no place to live?”

  “Your father being in jail and you having to stay here with me.”

  “Par for the course in my life,” she said.

  He took another long drag off the cigarette and held it for a shorter time. “It’s not always gonna be like this,” he said as he exhaled.

  “No? What’s it gonna be like?”

  “That’s up to you.”

  “Is this the part where you share an inspirational story about how hard life was when you were growing up, and how you beat the odds?”

  “No,” Finn said. “Not anymore.”

  “Good. I’ve heard it before. It’s like every guidance counselor’s been given the same script. I’m in control of my own life; I can do whatever I want; if I just apply myself, all the doors in the world are open to me. Except it’s a load of shit. Worse, they know it’s a load of shit. They say the words, but they know what really happens.”

  “So, what is it you want?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. A view as good as this, maybe.” There was a part of her that wanted to cry, but she wouldn’t let herself. What would be the point?