She went to write down these notes in her e-paper’s notepad, but as she glanced around nervously again, she suddenly realized it was a terrible idea for her to keep notes of her criminal endeavors. She deleted everything she’d noted already.
Next, she searched on “how to find reputable fences,” but when all the results were fence-building companies, she gave up.
She stopped, stretched, and thought this through a little further as she gazed out of the large windows. The palm trees lining the street were dancing in the heavy wind. She noted with some alarm that water was higher than usual. Cars were creeping by.
She checked the weather from the projcom. A red band at the top of the page announced a major storm and multiple flood warnings for Orange County.
Great. She needed to leave soon, before it got worse.
What else did she need to learn before leaving for the day?
What would she do with the money once she’d completed a theft and a sale? How could she safely get the money to Mandy—and then any excess to charity?
In the movies, they always used offshore bank accounts. She opened another browser tab. Two web pages later, she’d learned that they were useless to her—she’d have to provide her real name and address and statements for her current bank account—even explain and substantiate the source of the funds she deposited.
She let out a sigh. She had no idea what she was doing. What were the odds that she could pull any of this off? And her fading memory was haunting her. What critically important thing was she going to forget next, at just the wrong moment?
Her shoulders sank, and she stared at the projected screen in front of her. It all seemed a little too real all of a sudden.
She shut down the screen, picked up her wet umbrella, and went out into the torrential rain.
42 Days
The next morning, Thursday, the waking process was either easier or Helen was just getting used to it. She dreaded the awful dreams or hallucinations when she went to bed, but not more than she would have dreaded a completely sleepless night. It was worth it. She was grateful the long nightmare of sleeplessness was over for now.
The weather forecast was relatively clear—rain, of course, but no flooding expected.
Helen got up at her usual time and went to her old office. She needed her old job back, first of all. And secondly, a definite plan—however improbable—was starting to form out of the chaos in her mind. She would need access to her work clamshell.
Justice for All kept records on all the wealthy for phone banking day and to organize charity events. She would use those records to do a little social engineering and find targets for her Robin Hood plan.
As she got out of her car and went in, she wondered whether Oliver had told her old coworkers yet. What would they say when they saw her again?
As she stepped in the office door, the others stared at her too long before focusing on their work too intently, and her heart sank.
Clearly, Oliver had told them. Yet they didn’t say anything to her. They didn’t even look at her a second time.
As she weaved between the desks crammed into the too-small room, she found herself glaring at their downturned faces. I’m dying here, people, she wanted to say to them. And yet, what could they possibly say? What would she have said if she were in their shoes?
She rapped on Oliver’s desk to get his attention.
“Helen! I’m surprised to see you here.” He pulled himself to his feet.
“Hi, Oliver. Yeah, sorry about that. Didn’t mean to interrupt everyone’s day.”
That last bit came out a little more bitterly than she’d intended.
“No problem, no problem at all. Uh—what… what can I do for you?”
“Can we talk outside?”
For the second time this week, Oliver picked up his can of soda and they went out and took up positions in the dimly lit hallway.
Oliver looked concerned. “So what can I do for you?” he asked again.
“I’m afraid I’m here to throw myself on your mercy. I realized that my decision on Tuesday was a little hasty. I may not have much time left, but it’s enough time that I can’t afford to go without a paycheck.”
Oliver wasn’t nodding agreeably, the way she’d envisioned it. His brow folded in what looked like worry.
“So I have to ask you for my old job back… if that’s okay?”
Oliver took his cloth handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow. “Um…”
This wasn’t good. She felt her face freeze up.
He delayed by taking a sip of his soda, then put on a patently fake smile. “Helen, you’ve been a great employee, and you’re a wonderful person.”
Definitely not good.
“But you didn’t get the donation from the charity event Tuesday night… that was eight percent of our office’s budget, remember? I don’t mean to blame you—I’m just saying, the money didn’t come in, right? I was in big trouble with national. I had to do some fancy footwork. And the shortfall was covered by… well…” He trailed off, looking suddenly unable to complete the sentence.
“By my salary for the rest of the year,” Helen finished woodenly.
“The way Brian is talking… look, I’ll call for you, and I’ll fight for you, and I’m willing to take the heat for trying, but I will be amazed if I can get him to approve it. How many weeks do you need?”
“About six weeks,” Helen said, her mouth dry.
Oliver took another sip of soda. His forehead was turning pink. “Okay, I’ll see what I can do. Look, I’ll call him right now.” He tried to smile, but Helen could see that she was causing him tremendous stress.
As he pulled out his e-paper, Helen reached out a hand. “No, stop. Oliver… don’t worry about it. Okay? I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
Twenty minutes later, she stumbled out to Old Blue in a miserable daze.
Oliver had insisted on calling, and Helen was forced to listen to one side of the most awkward and demoralizing conversation about herself she had ever been subjected to. There was nothing quite like listening to someone argue that since an outstanding employee of eleven years had a terminal illness, six weeks of salary might not be too great a sum—and lose the argument.
None of it was Oliver’s fault. She knew that. Her old boss apologized a dozen times—at one point, she thought he would break into tears. Brian, the national manager, was a world-class jerk, and that wasn’t the fault of Oliver or the local office or even Justice for All in general. But it didn’t stop it from hurting.
She aimed then for the second part of her plan, asking to get some “personal files” from her clamshell—only to learn that it was already wiped clean and the password changed.
Once she made it to her car, she took deep, forceful breaths in a determined attempt to hold back the tears. She refused to cry.
She had less than two hundred dollars in her account to fund her plans and to last Mandy and herself a month and a half.
But she would find a way to make this work. She would help Mandy. And everyone else. Somehow.
After leaving her old office, Helen drove aimlessly through heavy traffic, rain, and endless construction and tried to think of another plan. Breaking into the office to steal someone else’s computer would have been pointless. She didn’t know anyone’s passwords and she was no hacker—nor did she know any hackers.
There were no paper records to steal anymore. The long-awaited paperless office had taken hold with the advent of the Earworm and the e-paper.
Asking Oliver for a list of names and addresses for the Entitled felt awkward at best. She couldn’t think of an adequate pretext.
Her original idea was to attend fundraisers and parties and house concerts and sneak out with something to sell. It still seemed like a reasonable idea, but she didn't know how to find the right people to call for information about upcoming events. She also didn’t know she was going to look the part of a wealthy socialite on a budget of two hundred dol
lars.
Utterly at a standstill, Helen decided to go home to check on the window replacement. Yesterday morning, after taping some plastic over the space where the window had been, she’d called the apartment manager, and they were supposed to come in to replace it this afternoon. They’d agreed to add the cost of the repair to next month’s rent. Which she might not be able to pay anyway.
She got back to the condo feeling defeated. Money, the lack of money, the likely futility of trying to get any more money, the broken window, her failing memory, the fact that she was dying, the crowds and road construction and traffic, the fact that she was dying… the fact that she was dying.
Mandy sat in her usual spot on the loveseat, her clamshell balanced on her knees and her Earworm over her ear, typing away. She looked up, dark eyebrows raised, when Helen entered. Her look was antagonistic, and her tone matched. “What are you doing here?”
Helen held back a sigh. She had forgotten Mandy would be at home. Her diseased brain was failing her. And why did Mandy always have to talk to her like this?
“I do live here, don’t I?” She put down her purse on the two-person dining table.
“It’s Thursday. You have work.”
“I took off. Errands and chores.”
Mandy stared, unblinking. “You never take off.”
“Well, I did. Deal with it.” Helen got out the coffee and measured it into the coffeepot.
“Well, if you’re running errands, why are you home?” Mandy asked.
Helen clicked the coffee filter into place a little too hard. “Because I have things I need to do,” she snapped. Stop it. Stop yelling. Don’t let her get to you.
“Like what?” Mandy snapped in return.
Helen glowered at the black liquid percolating into the pitcher. She didn’t want to remind Mandy about the broken window incident.
“You know what? Nothing. Never mind. Forget it.” She picked up her purse and opened the door to leave.
She came face-to-face with a maintenance guy with his hand raised to knock.
“Oh, hello,” he said.
Great. Perfect.
She opened the door and stood aside.
Two men carried in the long pane of glass.
The fight disrupted, Mandy got up and moved to her bedroom doorway wearing a deer-in-the-headlights expression. “What is that for? Ohhhh… That.” Her hostility faded into the background, and she gave her mother an anxious look.
Helen folded her arms and leaned against the fridge. She didn’t want to talk about it. About any of it.
They watched the workers in silence. The distance between mother and daughter fairly hummed with unspoken thoughts.
Helen knew what it would take to get her daughter to voice those thoughts when she was in this sort of mood. A longer gaze, a slight smile. Perhaps an idle, neutral comment.
But Helen was holding too much back. She hadn’t done the necessary calculus yet—hadn’t figured out how to tell her daughter the right things in the right way at the right time.
She remembered again how Mandy cried when she found out her parents would die first, how she said, “Then I wish I had never been born.” How Mandy reacted when her father died three years ago.
Helen kept her gaze averted, her arms folded, blinking back tears.
A few minutes later, Mandy ducked into their room and closed the door.
41 Days
Early in the afternoon, after taking a long, quiet break at a sunny coffee shop downtown to steady her nerves again, Helen finally figured out the next two steps in her Robin Hood scheme.
In retrospect, it was obvious. But she couldn’t count on her brain to recognize the obvious anymore.
First, she opened her e-paper to its largest size and looked up the Orlando society magazines, the types that always had photographs of fancy events so that the Entitled could gossip about one another. She had a hunch that the Net Worth Notion would be covered.
She was right.
The article had a complete list of those who’d donated, although it stopped short of listing the net worths in question. It was enough. It was easy to look up their phone numbers after that—she didn’t understand why any of the Entitled felt obligated to be accessible by phone, but many did.
She loved the idea of targeting those who had attended the Net Worth Notion.
If possible—if she could make any of this work—she would give the stolen money to the very same charities they gave a tiny percentage to that night.
Now that would be karma in action.
After she got enough money to give Mandy.
She assembled the list of phone numbers and readied her e-paper.
A ripple of discomfort ran down into her stomach and made it tingle. Her heart palpitations redoubled. They shook her chest.
Nerves. It’s just the usual, she told herself, and she put herself into phone banking mode: unfailingly polite, undaunted by failure, working by the numbers.
She dialed the first person on the list.
“Good afternoon, this is Helen Dawson with Justice for All. Mr. Brechtsen is a past donor and I wanted to invite him to a gala we’re having on Saturday. I apologize for the short notice, but—”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but he’s not available on Saturday night.” A woman’s voice.
“Oh, he’s not available? Well, that’s what we get for the short notice, I guess! Some other gala, I imagine?”
“Sorry I couldn’t help. Goodbye.” Click.
Damn. Nothing useful there. Helen marked the name off the list and called another person.
“—a gala we’re having Saturday night. I apologize for the short notice, but we had some cancellations and—”
The man on the other end of the line could not have sounded more haughty. “Mrs. Kirkpatrick doesn’t accept B-list invitations. Good evening.” He hung up.
Next call.
“—I apologize for the short notice, but—”
“I’m sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Soon are hosting an event of their own Saturday night.”
Helen’s heart jumped. “Oh, another gala, I imagine? Or is it a private party? Not something that Justice for All could possibly attend, I suppose?” She inadvertently added a nervous chuckle and then mentally kicked herself for it.
“It’s their fiftieth wedding anniversary. I’m afraid it’s not the sort of thing a charity would be invited to. Thank you for your call.” Click.
Helen grinned triumphantly. A fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration was the perfect party to crash.
That completed the first step of the day.
Next, some online paperwork.
To fund her criminal activities, she would have to withdraw the contents of her retirement account—what would have been her daughter’s limited inheritance.
“Sorry, kid. I’ll make it up to you,” she murmured to herself as she hunted through the appropriate web pages for the right forms.
She discovered that withdrawing early required a sixty-day waiting period—and she had forty-one days left.
Further reading revealed that she could bypass the waiting period by supplying an end-of-life exception form specifying her anticipated date of death—a morbid process, to say the least.
And it would still take two weeks to get the payout.
And she would lose half the total to early withdrawal penalties and taxes.
But she had no choice. She needed resources. She couldn’t pull this off while looking as poor as she really was.
That request initiated online, she turned to something even more odious: she went to another website to take out a payday loan against the anticipated early withdrawal. The disclosure statement revealed that the annual interest rate was 730%, and that didn’t include the fees, which were $30 per $100 borrowed, or the nonrefundable application fee, which was $50.
She did the math: if she took a loan for $1,000, she would pay $350 in fees and then $300 in interest by the time she received the retirement fund check.
It hurt so much to pay $650 just to have $1,000 cash in hand today. She fought herself for ten minutes to tap the button to confirm the loan. But she had no choice. She had less than $150 in her checking account and 41 days left to live. She couldn’t afford to wait.
That done, and her account up to $1,150, she turned to the next errand: buying a new dress. One tiny silver lining: It might be more enjoyable to shop as a rich person than to shove her way through the overcrowded racks of worn-out thrift-store clothing, all of it carrying the discomfiting smell of other people’s detergent.
She went out to Old Blue and kicked the door so the handle would work and headed toward the Apple Orchard upscale shopping district to the southeast. She’d often eyed with envy an upscale consignment shop just outside the edge of the shopping district. With designer items at discounted prices, it was a place where someone like Helen might plausibly splurge on a dress sometimes.
As she turned onto a major street that would take her out of downtown, a string of ambulances rushed by with sirens wailing. A moment later, three fire engines followed. Helen watched them go with a frown. Something major was happening. Maybe another riot.
She turned up the news, but the newscaster was midway through a leisurely story about an overall increase in the activity of the El Lobo Feroz street gang.
Traffic slowed to a crawl, then to a stop. Rain started. Helen pulled herself up straight to look ahead, but she saw nothing but a sea of cars. She slid back in her seat and rubbed her hands over her face. She didn’t have time for this. The days and hours were ticking by.
“Breaking news,” the newscaster said, and Helen turned up the volume. “A series of explosions rocked the federal courthouse in downtown Orlando about ten minutes ago. We are being told that court was out of session today for early summer holidays, and no fatalities have so far been reported.”
Bombing the courthouse? Helen raised an eyebrow. The terrorists—or activists, depending on who you asked—were aiming higher than usual.
The Robin Hood Thief Page 6
