It was raining, of course, but there was cover over the pull-through. There was no one else in the car pick-up line. But two people came up behind her almost immediately to wait for their cars. She hoped they would help block sight lines to her.
Moments later, she heard the house’s front door open behind her and heard the quick, hard footsteps of security. She pretended deafness and didn’t look around, but her back and shoulders hunched in fear. She waited to feel someone’s heavy hand on her shoulder.
The footsteps passed near, but not too near.
Her car pulled up and she opened the door.
The security went past her.
As her car pulled away, she looked back to see them looking out into the grounds, which were well-lit but obscured by torrents of rain.
Of course. Waiting in the line for a car was so foolish that they hadn’t imagined a criminal would ever do it. They’d expected her to be running away or to have a getaway car or to have left through some other exit. They’d expected her to have a plan.
Helen had the car take her to the only twenty-four-hour pawn shop in this part of the city, all the while obsessively checking her rear-view mirror. She expected to see police lights strobing through the rain behind her at any moment. Twenty minutes later, when the car parked at her destination, her heart still pounded, but she felt like she’d gotten away clean. At least for now.
They knew what she looked like, though… or at least what she looked like with twenty-five extra years added to her face. She could only hope that the disguise would be enough, and if it wasn’t, that they wouldn’t have her face in any police databases.
Or if they did, she reminded herself, it didn’t really matter. She was going to die in forty days.
She got out of the car and ducked her head to the rain as she hurried to the door of the pawn shop as best she could with wobbly legs.
Under the harsh lights over the large parking lot, shadows cast down on rough-looking men squatting against the barred glass windows of the free-standing pawn shop. They looked at her with too much interest. She should have changed before coming to the shop—the dress and heels and diamond necklace meant she was worth more dead than alive.
But remembering that she was going to die and that she was already throwing away what was left of her life… there was something empowering about that. What could anyone do to her now? What was there left to lose that she hadn’t just risked?
She stared at the men as she walked past them, and something in her gaze must have unsettled them. They averted their eyes.
She pushed the glass door open, causing a bell to jingle. She glanced around for security cameras. There were none visible, but she doubted a shop with valuable items would skimp on security. There was nothing she could do about it either way.
Harsh fluorescents shone down on a practical, no-frills space, but the merchandise was dusted and carefully arranged along wide, well-swept aisles.
She went to the counter, where a slender Greek man smoked an e-cig under a neon sign that read SELL HERE. He had heavy-lidded eyes, a prominent nose, and a five-o’clock shadow.
While he took a puff, he looked her over with one raised eyebrow. No doubt he rarely saw anyone come in dressed like this.
“You have somewhere I can change?” she asked.
He jerked a thumb toward the back corner.
Not much of a talker, this guy.
With another nervous glance around, she took her bag of clothes to the worn but clean restroom she found back there and locked the door.
A feeling of mourning overtook her as she slipped off the exquisite dress and shoes. They were so comfortable, so perfectly fitted, so obviously quality—luxuries in every sense of the word. She’d always secretly hoped that the rich were just paying a “stupid tax” on designer items, but apparently they really did have a better life in even the smallest of ways.
She debated whether to wash off the disguise and peel the latex off her fingertips, then decided she might as well. Up until this very moment, she hadn’t really known how she would handle this. But as the minutes unfolded, she realized that her best bet was to establish a relationship with this pawn shop.
She came back out of the restroom and went to the front. The Greek man had gone into the back of the store, and she tapped the bell on the counter to bring him out again.
She glanced around the store nervously and out through the windows again. Still no cops.
She opened the stranger’s purse that she’d stolen, and she took out the crystal vase. She unwrapped it and set it on the counter for the man to inspect. It occurred to her then to take a look at the purse itself. A Louis Vuitton. She pushed it across the counter as well.
She also lay down the clothing and diamond necklace. If law enforcement circulated pictures, as she assumed they would, she wouldn’t be able to wear the same items again.
When she finally glanced up, she saw the Greek man giving her a completely different sort of look than he had before. It was openly appreciative without being impolite. It made her duck her head. She wasn’t used to catching anyone’s notice.
He put his e-cig in his shirt pocket and handled the items.
As he did, Helen surprised herself by looking him up and down in return. He had a lean, muscular body under a button-up, short-sleeve shirt. She caught herself and returned her attention to his face.
As he looked over Helen’s ill-gotten goods, his eyebrows raised and then lowered in puzzlement. His well-shaped lips twitched.
He looked hard at Helen, then craned his neck to look at the door to the bathroom in the back corner. The door stood open.
He stared at her again.
“Was that you that came in and went in there a minute ago? Wearing these?” he asked.
Helen smiled. Her disguise was a success. “Yep,” she said. She waited anxiously to see what conclusions he might draw.
He just shook his head. Perhaps he was deciding that he’d just misjudged her age before. He looked again at the items on his counter, then back at her. “You have certificates of authenticity?”
Damn. Hopefully that wasn’t important. She put certainty into her tone. “No. But they’re all real.”
Well, there was a chance that the Vuitton wasn’t real, that she wasn’t the only one who relied on knock-offs to perfect an image.
He frowned and turned the vase over and over in his hands, then held it up to the light. He tapped the Earworm clipped over his ear to turn it on and studied the vase through its forward-facing camera.
Helen watched with bated breath. Had she chosen well? Or was this some cheap gift the Soons had been given and felt obligated to display?
“You have to fill out a form with your name and ID,” he said.
“Fine. I can write something down,” she said. She tried to stare him down but felt her breath tight in her chest. The moment was precarious, and she faked confidence for all she was worth.
The guy gave her a form, and Helen wrote in an invented name and other information.
He picked up the form and frowned at it. “ID?”
“Gosh, so sorry, don’t have it on me.” She leaned forward and stared aggressively at the man.
At last, he caught on. His eyes widened and he grinned admiringly. “So that wasn’t my eyes playing tricks on me before.”
Helen gave him an innocent little shrug.
“I will be right back,” he said.
Helen leaned against the counter, her heart pounding, but now in relief. He didn’t seem at all inclined to turn her in. Perhaps he could be an ally.
She looked out into the pawn shop. It felt empty and desolate without its owner.
Jewelry, computers, televisions, bicycles, art. All these items that people had hoped to come back for when they had better luck. Better luck hadn’t come. What were the odds that her day would pay off? Or would this be the end of the line?
The men outside were staring at her. Again, when they saw her looking, they averted the
ir eyes.
This time, Helen felt mixed emotions. From in here, they just looked sad and desperate. Trying to shelter from the rain late on a Saturday night with nowhere to go and no prospects. These were the people that she had spent her life trying to help. Yes, they were rough, but only because being smooth took money and confidence they didn’t have. And some of them probably had wives and kids at home to take care of.
After the divorce, Helen found herself unemployed twice, and she remembered the agony of knowing that when the paltry savings ran out, there would be no food for her or Mandy—and it would be her fault. It was up to her and only her. She knew the suffocating feeling, the weight on the stomach, that came when you tried as hard as you could and still failed every single day.
The man came back to the counter. “Twenty-one thousand,” he said. “You want a cash card for that?”
Dumbstruck, she stared at him. Had she heard that right? “Twenty-one—thousand? Dollars?”
“Yeah. That was a vintage Tiffany paperweight vase and an authentic Vuitton. Nice clothes and diamonds too. You want a cash card, right?”
She could hardly speak. “I guess?” She realized she had the same deer-in-the-headlights look she detested in Mandy, and she shook it off. “Like a gift card?”
He looked amused. “Yeah, like a gift card. Lets you transfer money without being tracked.”
“Okay, yeah. It’s… faked, I guess?”
He shrugged noncommittally.
“Sorry,” she said.
Now she wanted to bite her tongue, both for the question and for the reflexive apology. If she didn’t look like a complete amateur before, she certainly did now. “Yes, that would be good. Thanks.”
A few minutes later, he came back out of the back with a plastic card. “Good luck.” He handed it to her, then extended his hand for a firm, warm handshake. “Name’s Egemon.” He pronounced it EGG-eh-men. “You got any more stuff like that, bring it in. I will give you a good price.” He even cracked a smile, although it looked a bit out of practice.
She murmured something in acknowledgment and went outside. She clutched the cash card with trembling hands.
Twenty-one thousand dollars. It took her half a year to make that much money.
She was halfway past the rough men squatted against the dirty walls when she noticed them again. They were watching her with gazes too jaded to hope.
She turned toward the men with the cash card in her hand. “You got e-papers?” she asked. She figured they would have those, but not the more expensive Earworms.
They stood quickly, unfolded their devices, and handed them over to her. Their hungry gazes fixed on her hands, trying to see the amount she entered in as she scanned her card. She transferred one thousand dollars to each of them and handed back their e-papers wordlessly. She felt as if she were in church, as if it were a sacrament.
They looked at their e-papers, taking in the number of zeros. One of them said, “Thanks,” his tone doubtful. Two just stared, wordless and with closed expressions. One quickly tucked his e-paper into his boot. They all walked away in different directions.
No smiles. No hugs of joy.
“Good luck,” she called after them.
No response.
She hurried through the rain to her car and drove away with tears swimming in her eyes. Not because she had hoped her generosity would be more appreciated, but because she now saw too clearly that they were too broken and defeated for hope or joy. And because, she realized belatedly, even a thousand dollars would not change their lives in any meaningful way.
Futility pounded at her heart, demanding entrance.
Maybe she should have given them more. Maybe if she had given them five thousand each… With that amount, they could buy interview suits and work clothes and haircuts, get job training, rent a real hotel room instead of a sleep locker, get public transportation to and from a job until the first paycheck came in.
She turned the car around, her heart racing again. But as she turned into the parking lot, she saw that the men were already gone, swallowed up by the pouring rain.
Helen found a quiet street where she could peel the fake plates off the rental Tesla, then did a late-night rental return and reclaimed poor Old Blue from a few blocks down the street, slapping away mosquitoes as she did so.
Still no cops. Perhaps she had gotten away with it, for now.
She drove to her favorite restaurant. She would enjoy a rare luxury tonight—sushi—an indulgence she’d experienced only twice before.
She entered the opulent, darkly lit restaurant and was escorted to a seat near a politely babbling water fountain.
She ordered dinner and then contemplated the Japanese calligraphy on the walls as she waited. Her mind went to the feat she’d just accomplished. Now safely held within these four familiar walls, she felt as if that adventure had happened in a previous life.
Twenty-one thousand dollars taken from the rich, and four thousand dollars—so far—given directly to the poor. That meant something, didn’t it?
I really am Robin Hood now, she said to herself, and she smiled.
Halfway through her wasabi shumai and spicy tuna rolls, her arm spasmed and knocked her glass of plum wine off the table to shatter on the floor.
As the waiter came and cleaned everything up, she put her head in her hands.
Reality came creeping up again, as hard as she tried to fight it off.
She was still dying.
And every success took her closer to eventual failure. Especially successes like the one she’d just had, where she had drawn so much attention to herself. They would find the security footage and zoom in on her.
The bigger the impact she made, the harder they would try to find her.
The faster she made enough money to keep Mandy safe, the less time she would have to spend with her daughter before the police caught up.
She was making no effort to manage her DNA traces, other than her fingerprints, because she didn’t know how to, and also because she was confident police databases had no information on her. But she was no expert in disguise, either. Soon enough, they would figure out what she really looked like, and then they could simply look her up. Photo recognition software was nearly perfect, and like everyone else, she had plenty of photos online.
Above all, she had to take her black pill before they took her into custody.
A chill ran through her as she imagined living out the full duration of her disease while locked up. Returning to that sleepless state, that slow-blinking half-alive stasis between restlessness and exhaustion, then deteriorating into hallucinations, dementia, and coma, helpless in a prison cell…
She forced herself to stop thinking about it. No, she told herself, she would take the pill before she was captured. She would make certain of it.
30 Days
Over the next ten days, Helen completed three lucrative robberies, managing to avoid sentries and evade notice. She delivered all her spoils to Egemon and his ever-present e-cig, and he started looking happy to see her. She paid back the payday loan, paid the rent for May, put aside cash to replace her paychecks, and reinvested money in disguises and clothing and rental cars—and she was still up by forty thousand dollars. And if all had gone well after that, she might have been able to relax.
But she’d hidden the cash cards somewhere.
And now she couldn’t find them.
She had no memory of putting them away, except that she thought she would have hidden them somewhere in the apartment.
She’d already gone through the other rooms, and now she tore through everything under her bathroom sink, hyperventilating but trying hard to use thoroughness and care in her search.
Goddamn disease. Goddamn brain. You cannot do this to me.
The apartment was only three hundred square feet. It was cluttered with the accumulated odds and ends of two people living in the same place for years on end: paper towels bought in bulk and Mandy’s old art from elementary schoo
l and Christmas decorations and extra sheets. There were a ton of plastic shelves and drawers.
She searched everywhere—every shelf and drawer and cubby, under her mattress, between her pairs of slacks, inside the band-aid box in the first-aid kit, in the toilet tank, inside her extra pair of shoes—everywhere.
She went out to Old Blue, just in case, but that was easy to search and she didn’t find them.
There was a chance they were in the new sleep locker she’d just rented with a cash card so it wouldn’t be traceable to her this time. She would go there next, even though she didn’t think she’d done that.
Helen threw herself to the floor in the living room, shaking and feeling lost and desperate and panicked and her chest aching from fighting against hyperventilating.
After all this effort and time, for her brain to betray her like this…
Was there any way Mandy had found them and taken them?
No… surely not. Mandy was irresponsible, but not a thief. Surely she was too mature to do something like that.
Anyway, Helen was confident she had hidden them too well for anyone to find.
Too well for Helen herself to find.
The old sleep locker. Oh God, she gasped. She might have hidden the cards in the old sleep locker.
She scrambled for her e-paper and called. Moments later, the voice on the other end confirmed what she already suspected—it was rented out to someone else now. No, they hadn’t found anything in the unit.
Of course they would say that. Even if they had found them, they would lie.
God help me. All that wasted time, when time was the absolute last thing she could afford to waste, when she had only thirty days left.
She had a single cash card in her wallet. It had less than fifteen hundred dollars on it.
Why hadn’t she written down where she put the cards, when she knew perfectly well her memory was lapsing?
Helen pulled up at the twenty-four-hour pawn shop, and as she got out of Old Blue, she suddenly felt that her legs were heavy as stones. She stared down at them in confusion. They looked normal—thinner than usual, if anything.
The Robin Hood Thief Page 8
