The Robin Hood Thief

by H. C. H. Ritz

  Helen thought of the mansions in the White Oaks area last night. Ten thousand square feet for two or three people.

  They didn’t need it, dammit. And for the hundredth time, she thought that someone needed to take away their excess and give it to those who really needed it. Like Robin Hood. Stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.

  She smiled, remembering that when she was a little girl, she wanted to be either a cat burglar or a policewoman. As an adult, she was amused that crime and law enforcement had appealed to her equally.

  Her gaze landed on the large sign outside a squat building. GUNS. AMMO. KNIVES.

  Without even thinking about it, she turned into the pothole-pitted parking lot.

  A few moments later, she looked with amazement at the assortment of weaponry available to her. Tasers, shotguns, bows and arrows, mace, Bowie knives, rifles, handguns, machine guns.

  She shook her head, remembering the battle for better gun control over the past couple of decades. She was looking right at the evidence that they’d lost that fight.

  The aisles were uneven—some more narrow than others. Old particle-board shelves, some with a distinct lean or an odd warp, held the merchandise, each labeled with a hand-scrawled price tag.

  A salesman with short gray hair moseyed up. His stomach preceded him. He tucked a mini Snickers wrapper in his pocket and mumbled a “Mornin’, ma’am” around the final bite.

  “Good morning,” Helen said politely, and turned back to the shelf of merchandise in front of her.

  He took the hint. “Just let me know if you need anything.” He went behind the counter and sat on a stool, looking relieved to take a load off.

  She paced through the aisles with her head buzzing. As she studied the weapons, certainty and excitement grew in her.

  Yes, it was time for this. Not to kill people—not even to hurt anyone if she could avoid it—but to do something dangerous. Something reckless.

  If she who was dying couldn’t risk it, who could? Who would ever be able to?

  Her heart rattled in her chest.

  Her diagnosis was a calling to do what others couldn’t. Knowing she would die in forty-three days, there was no reason she couldn’t throw her life away in pursuit of what mattered most.

  She could do it. She could become like Robin Hood. Steal from the rich and give to the poor.

  After all, she’d always wanted to be a hero.

  She marveled at how coolly she considered this. She wasn’t the same woman anymore. Something bold was in possession of her.

  She thought again about her capabilities. How steady were her hands these days? Could she fire a gun? How well could she aim if a muscle spasm came on?

  She called to the man. “Is there a place nearby where I can practice with a gun if I buy one?”

  He raised one substantial arm and pointed. Then she saw the large, hand-printed sign tacked up in a dark corner. SHOOTING RANGE. An arrow in green marker directed her to the next room.

  “Oh.” Feeling foolish, she smiled at him and went to take a look.

  The man followed her. “It’s just me here,” he said as he put another candy wrapper in his pocket. “You wantin’ to try out a gun?”

  “I can do that?” she asked in surprise.

  A corner of his mouth turned up. “Sure. It’s better. You can’t return guns after you buy ’em. You gotta pay for the ammo, though.”

  A few minutes later, she wore heavy ear protectors and pointed an automatic .45-caliber weapon at a cut-out of a man that was well lit in an otherwise darkened hall. She felt ridiculous. The shop employee, also wearing ear protectors, chewed another bite of chocolate while he stared at her intently, making her self-conscious.

  She pulled the trigger, and the weapon practically leapt out of her hands, jolting her hand and wrist and hurting the base of her thumb. She cursed.

  The man lost his smirk. “Use both hands,” he yelled close to her ear protectors. He showed her how to wrap her hands around the handle of the gun. She tried again. The kick of the gun hurt both wrists.

  “You’re closin’ your eyes,” the man yelled. “Don’t do that. Keep your eyes on the target.”

  She sighed and tried again.

  A few minutes later, the man waved her out of the booth. They both took off their ear protectors. “You’re still flinching and shuttin’ your eyes. You couldn’t even hit the target. Now I’m not saying you couldn’t get better with practice, but you’re going to have to practice. You’ll need to come back a coupla times a week until you get comfortable with that.”

  “I don’t have that kind of time,” she said as she massaged her wrists. “I need to be able to use this now.”

  He grimaced. “Right now, you’ll fire once, if that, and you’ll miss, and whoever you’re shooting at will take this away from you and kill you with it. No offense, ma’am.”

  She set her jaw. “A smaller gun, maybe?”

  “I’m guessing you want stopping power. A smaller caliber weapon isn’t going to stop anybody. Especially not if he’s pissed off or high or both.”

  “Well, maybe I just need to scare somebody.”

  He leaned back on the rental counter in the shooting range area. “Ma’am, no offense, but”—he gestured at her slender body—“you’re not going to scare anybody unless you have a big damn gun in your hands, and even then, not if you’re afraid to fire the gun you’re holdin’.”

  She let out an angry sigh. “All right. Fine. Let me see some other options.”

  He led her back into the store proper. “Tasers are a good choice for self-defense,” he said over his shoulder. “They don’t kick like a big gun does. They’re pocket-sized, and you don’t have to aim all that well, and nobody wants to get hit with a Taser. They’ll dissuade. And they have stopping power. You’ll have time to run away.”

  “All right. Give me whichever one you recommend. What else do you have?”

  He shot her a sideways glance as he walked toward the Tasers. “A Taser’s what you want for self-defense or home protection, ma’am, you can trust me on that.”

  “I… might need more than that,” she said carefully. “What about those?” She gestured at the knives.

  “You have any trainin’ in knife fightin’?”

  She didn’t answer.

  He kept moving. He took a Taser off a peg and handed it to her. It had a gun-like build. “Fire it just like a gun. Wait till he gets within twenty feet. If he’s inside a room with you, he’s probably close enough.”

  “I want a knife, too,” she said stubbornly. “A big one. And you know what, I do want a gun, a smaller one than the one you showed me. And mace. And…” Suddenly inspired, she tried to think of anything she’d ever seen used in an action movie. “What’s the wire thing called they use to choke people with?”

  His eyes went wide and his lips twitched in what she suspected was amusement. “A garrote? You want a garrote? Ma’am, how’re you gonna get someone to hold still long enough to wrap it around his neck? Ask him nicely?”

  Helen glared at him. “I’m a paying customer, aren’t I?”

  He rolled his eyes and headed toward the knives. “Yeah, I guess you are.”

  As he bagged her items a few minutes later, he suddenly chuckled. “Ma’am, I don’t know who pissed you off, but I think I feel sorry for ‘em.”

  A few minutes later, she sat in Old Blue, clutching the bag of weapons and laughing like a maniac. “I’ve lost my mind.”

  Still chuckling, she opened her e-paper to notepad format and added to her list of resources: a semi-automatic pistol, a Bowie knife, a garrote, a Taser, and a can of mace.

  It wasn’t wise to take the weapons home. Same thing for storing them in Old Blue. These days, cops searched cars at almost every routine stop. She also needed to be careful not to implicate Mandy somehow. Above all, she had to keep her daughter safe in all of this.

  Come to think of it, could she keep Mandy safe while doing this Robin Hood thing?


  She leaned back in her seat. Nothing was more important than preserving Mandy’s safety and freedom.

  She suddenly realized that she had just spent a lot of money that she had yesterday willed to Mandy.

  Her eyes went wide. She had forgotten that this money was for Mandy.

  How could you forget that?

  Another realization cut through her, and her chest squeezed shut. Rent hadn’t been paid yet for May. It wasn’t the tenth yet. She always paid it on the tenth.

  She should never have forgotten something like that. Never.

  She checked the receipt, which she had barely noticed before in her giddiness. She was horrified to see that she had spent just under six hundred dollars.

  She only had eight hundred in the account to start with. Rent was four hundred. She couldn’t even make rent now.

  She had to go right back in and return the items.

  Even before she had spent hundreds of dollars on weapons, how was she expecting to pay rent for June? She’d quit her job.

  She couldn’t afford to quit her job. She couldn’t get through forty-five days without income. That was three paychecks she had walked away from.

  It was the prion disease. It had to be. Helen was extremely attentive to money and bills. She would never have squandered money thoughtlessly like this or failed to carefully budget their remaining dollars.

  And she would never have quit her job on a whim.

  Dammit, Helen. What were you thinking?

  She would be compelled to return to work tomorrow, to do the same old futile, hopeless work for the rest of her dying days. And that hurt. But not as much as realizing that she had recklessly endangered her daughter’s survival.

  Helen stared out of her car window, agonized by what she was up against. Every time she did her budget or otherwise considered her finances, a cold, hard, dead feeling clamped over her chest. There was something merciless about numbers. They took hopes and dreams and chopped off their limbs to make them fit into the right boxes.

  Her hopes and dreams were up against truly merciless numbers right now. Leaving Mandy a few thousand dollars was almost, although not quite, meaningless. If Mandy moved straight into a sleep locker, she could make it maybe five months on that amount of money.

  But Mandy was still in job training for retail management and wouldn’t graduate for another year. Before, in Mandy’s first year of school, Helen tried making her work at the same time, and Mandy started flunking her classes. She couldn’t handle it.

  That meant Mandy would have to drop out of job training and go get a job early. And with minimum wage eliminated a decade ago, she would only be qualified for what they now called a room-and-board wage. That destroyed her chances of making it through the next few years without debt—and, eventually, debtor’s prison.

  The situation was dire. No more dire than for millions of other families across the country, of course. Helen had worked with so many people in this situation in the course of her years in nonprofit work.

  Which brought her back around to what she had just done. Bought almost six hundred dollars in weapons. Decided to become a sort of Robin Hood.

  That decision wasn’t just about making things better or fulfilling a long-held dream. It was about ensuring her daughter’s survival.

  She had to do this. She had to resort to theft. Mandy wouldn’t make it otherwise.

  But she didn’t need all these weapons. She had gotten carried away. It was irresponsible.

  She got back out of her car and went toward the store through a drizzle that had just begun. She was raising her arm to push the door open when she saw the paper sign taped to the door:

  ALL SALES FINAL.

  NO RETURNS. NO REFUNDS. NO EXCEPTIONS.

  You’ve got to be kidding me.

  She stared at the door in dismay, rereading the message again and again as if it might change.

  A mosquito buzzed near her neck, and she slapped it away.

  She found her way back to Old Blue in a daze.

  It was done. There was nothing she could do about it now. She just had to make it work.

  First step—find a safe place to keep the weapons.

  43 Days, 14 Hours

  A couple of hours later, Helen surveyed her new hideout with resignation.

  The sleep locker was a short, featureless, windowless box, like a storage unit, with centralized climate control. It was only a few feet wide and filled mostly by a bed. High shelves filled the wall over the bed, opposite the door. On the near wall, there was a shower stall area separated by a plastic privacy curtain that also enclosed the toilet and a sink with a stainless steel mirror.

  The mattress was impervious rubber on the outside, and the furniture and walls were plastic-coated metal. When she moved out, staff would hose the locker down and the water would run into the drain in the middle of the tile floor. But they never fixed the damage that accumulated over the years—the dented seat of the toilet, the chipped and broken tiles, the profanities deeply etched into every surface. And the smell of mildew that lingered from the mattress.

  Although it resembled a prison cell, a sleep locker was still better than living on the street, for those who could afford it. If nothing else, a tenant could lock the door against intruders.

  Back when Mandy was a newborn and Helen couldn’t work again yet and David had lost his job and there was nothing to be done about it, they lived in a locker like this for five weeks.

  With no crib and no space for one, Mandy had to sleep with them. But Helen didn’t trust David to sleep in the same bed with an infant. The mattress was narrow, and David slept hard after his nightly four beers. She had heard about babies suffocated by parents who drank. She made David sleep on the tile floor, on folded blankets placed over the drain, and he barely spoke to her the entire five weeks.

  This time, Helen told herself, she was renting a locker by choice. This time it was in the hopes of making things better.

  She stashed her new assortment of weapons on the rusting shelves over the bed and headed back out.

  To become a sort of Robin Hood, to help Mandy and everyone else: this was her new calling—and a necessity so far as Mandy was concerned. But where did she begin?

  She approached becoming a thief the way she approached any unfamiliar territory: reading about it.

  If she went to a library, she could use a public computer anonymously.

  She choose a library distant from her apartment, but she soon regretted it. Construction closed two lanes of I4 while they expanded it from ten to fourteen lanes, and a slow, dreary rain held steady. Traffic crawled. A trip that should have taken about thirty minutes took an hour and fifteen. That kind of delay had always frustrated her, and now her life was ticking away.

  She found parking two blocks away, stepped out into the oppressive humidity and ever-present mosquitoes, and weaved her way through the constant crowd of pedestrians.

  As she walked, she watched and listened carefully, as always, for signs of violence—it was a habit to look out for anyone behaving erratically, to listen for the pops of gunfire. You never knew whether someone would choose this moment to make a statement. And she watched for sudden movements. Anyone running might have just spotted a crowd of rioters or someone with a weapon or a bomb.

  Helen went into the library. She remembered when they were havens for the homeless. No longer. Signs declared, “No Standing. No Sitting on the Floor. No Sleeping at Projcoms. No Sitting in Conference Room Without a Reservation.”

  The minimalist strip-center locations didn’t offer physical books anymore, just a room with computers, one conference room, and a stack of free disposable e-paper books at the front desk. The gadgets were flimsier and more cheaply made than a regular e-paper. You could load about twenty or thirty books before the pixels wore out and the e-paper became unreadable.

  She found a projcom available. These were virtual or projected computers—the only physical apparatus was a cigarette-box-sized console that sa
t in front of the user and projected the holographs for the screen and the keyboard. Typing on a nonexistent keyboard took some getting used to.

  Her legs weakened unexpectedly as she went to sit down, and she caught herself by the edge of the table and sat down carefully and waited to see if it would get worse.

  After a moment, she decided nothing else was going to happen. Just that moment of weakness to remind her what was happening to her body and brain. She sighed.

  She opened the “anonymous” option on the browser, gestured to shrink the screen a bit, turned on the privacy filter, then glanced both ways to make sure no one was paying attention. Her hands trembled with nervousness, which was absurd. No one could suspect her of a thing—not yet. And a handful of other users had their screens set up the same way. She didn’t stand out.

  She typed in “where to fence stolen goods,” then glanced around nervously again. She couldn’t help it.

  The first result was a law enforcement article where she learned that fences operated behind legitimate business fronts—often pawnbrokers and jewelers.

  Helen reviewed the list of items that thieves most often selected for fencing. She dismissed drugs and shuddered at human trafficking and child pornography. She frowned at endangered species: trying to steal an animal or bird sounded like a messy, complicated business, besides which, she loved animals.

  That left jewelry, art, and firearms.

  A crack of thunder startled her, and she glanced up as the lights flickered. A patter overhead became a roar. She looked out of the window to see sheets of rain coming down. It was a proper Florida thunderstorm now—one of the few things that hadn’t changed about her home state since her childhood.

  After another cautious look around, she went back to her research. Apparently, thieves preferred to sell their goods within thirty minutes. They could find a fence any time of day or night. Also, she could expect to get forty to fifty percent of the value of the item.