She tried some experimental steps and realized that something was happening to her leg muscles or perhaps her nervous system. Her gait was stiff and clumsy. It was a new symptom—a new reminder that she was running out of time.
As she went in and the bell on the door greeted her with a cheerful jingle, she watched Egemon, who was stationed at his usual spot behind the counter, to see whether he would notice her slow, stiff walk.
“Hi,” she said.
Egemon took a slow puff on his e-cig and breathed out vapor as he studied her. “What is the matter?”
She froze. “What do you mean?”
“You look unhappy.”
“Oh.” He hadn’t noticed her gait. “Nothing.” She joined him at the counter. “Although I don’t suppose there’s any way to recover a lost or stolen cash card?”
He shook his head. “The legitimate ones, yes, if they are registered. The kind I give out, no. They are not connected to anything, no bank, just a fake profile. Afraid you are screwed if you lost one. Did you lose one?” He looked concerned.
“Oh, it’s not important,” Helen said with a shrug. An all-out lie. She let out a sigh. “So I have another question…” She glanced around to make sure they were alone in the store before she confessed her latest plan. “You know those sentries that rich people use to guard their houses… is that all they use? Or are there additional security systems?”
He shrugged. “Depends. Some people have the usual old-fashioned style that goes off if a door or window is opened. Their Earworms turn the systems off automatically when they arrive at home and turn them on when they are out. Other people rely on the sentries completely. They patrol the entire house when no one is home and at night.”
“Ah.” No wonder she’d seen only a few sentries in each house. She’d wondered why some rooms were left unguarded. Turns out the owners of the sentries just put them on standby during parties.
Helen looked down, unsure what to ask next.
Egemon took pity on her. “What you need is a jammer. It interferes with the wireless signals sent between the Earworms and the sentries or security systems. There are a few different types. Some work better on some systems than others. Then there are those that work directly on the sentries. You are interested?”
Helen nodded.
He took another puff and let it out. “Wait here.”
He went into the back of the store and returned moments later with three quarter-sized devices. “You can clip these to your shirt, your waistband, whatever you like. This one”—he held up the black one—“is for Allied brand. This one”—he held up the silver one—“is for Hercules brand security system. And this one”—he held up a silver one with a red edge—“is for the Hercules sentries.”
He put them down on the counter between them. “There is nothing for the other ones right now. It is a cat and mouse game between the security companies and the hackers. The hackers exploit a weakness, the security companies patch it up. So, if you come across anything else, for the moment, you are shit out of luck.”
Helen held up the small devices. “What do they do?”
He leaned across the counter and rested on his elbows. “The ones for the security systems—just get within about fifty yards of the house, push the center of the jammer, wait for the blinking red light to turn to green. Then the system should be down. But look out for the owners returning home. If the light never turns green, it’s not going to work at that house—the system must be newer or upgraded. Try a different house.
“The jammers for the sentries are a bit different. When you push the button, they emit some signal that the sentry does not know, and this causes the sentry to reboot itself. It only works on one sentry at a time. It will get you twenty or thirty seconds. But usually another sentry will come to back up the first one and check to make sure everything is all right, so then you are in double trouble.”
Helen grimaced. “Twenty or thirty seconds… that’s not long.”
“It will not let you stay in a room you should not be in, only pass through. You can use it multiple times. But remember, it only works on one sentry at a time.”
Helen let out a sigh. She felt intimidated and overwhelmed. She needed to do more research.
“What about the gates that people live behind? Are those on the same system?”
Egemon shook his head. “I’ll give you a tip. Look for lawn guys. They’ll already have the gates open. Dress like a salesperson or something. Make sure the yard guys are out back, then ring the doorbell. If they answer, try to sell them something dumb nobody wants. Hardcover Bibles or something. If nobody is home, use the jammer. In you go.”
“Oh,” she said. So much for needing to do research. Egemon was a more valuable resource than she had known. “What if I go in at night?”
He pursed his lips. “Not such a good idea, unless you know they are on vacation. Then you just have to climb over the wall. Find a spot where trees and bushes hide you going over.”
“Okay. Stands to reason. Thanks.” She held up the jammers, reluctant to ask the next question. “How much are they?”
“Tell you what, I’ll give you a ‘repeat customer’ discount,” Egemon said with a friendly wink and a rare smile. “Twenty percent off makes it…” He typed some numbers onto his e-paper. “Six hundred and forty.”
She tried hard to smile instead of wince. Of course, Egemon didn’t know that all her other cash cards were lost. “I appreciate the discount,” she said. “What’s the balance left on the card?”
“Eight hundred and thirty-two,” he read off his screen.
She was down to almost the same amount as when she quit her job fourteen days and four thefts ago. That hurt. She had to make these burglaries work—and quickly.
“Thank you,” she said. He was being kind to her, and more helpful than he had to be. She gave him a warm smile.
As she went out and the bell on the door jingled farewell, he said, “Good luck. Hope it goes well.”
As preoccupied as she was, it made her smile. It was good to have a friendly face around.
A few hours later, Helen huddled in her bed, dry now but still shivering from her misadventure. Her forearms ached from warding off hailstones.
She’d used another series of social engineering phone calls to identify an Entitled family that was on vacation. Mr. Slater, a guest at the Net Worth Notion, was skiing in the Berkshires.
She’d spent more of her precious remaining resources to rent a cheap car, because Old Blue, with its spray-painted dents and duct-taped quarter glass, was too recognizable if anyone noticed it parked on the road.
There was no fence at the front of the stately home, and Egemon’s jammer worked as hoped—the house used a Hercules system that proved susceptible. She just walked right in. But her luck ended when she entered the house.
She found a projcom in sleep mode and woke it in hopes of finding bank accounts she could access, but it was password protected. There was nothing she could do. She wished again that she were a hacker, or knew one.
She went to a second-floor bedroom and was gathering expensive-looking items into a pillowcase when she heard the unmistakable sound of the front door being unlocked and opened.
Aghast, she peeked around the corner near the landing and saw the family dropping their suitcases on the marble floor downstairs. She ducked back into the bedroom.
Among the family’s chatter, Helen heard a male voice say, “Huh… the security system isn’t armed. That’s weird. I’m sure I set it when we left. Sarah, did you turn it off?”
Helen crossed the bedroom toward the window.
The woman’s response was too quiet to be understood.
“Well, I’m turning it back on,” Mr. Slater said.
Helen froze in the act of reaching for the window sash. With the system re-armed, it would go off when she opened the window.
But Egemon hadn’t said anything about not using the jammer a second time. She activated it again, waited
for the green light, and threw open the window.
She set down the heavy, awkward pillowcase full of goods just inside the window where she could grab it once she had a good perch. She climbed out onto the gable of the roof and turned back for her haul.
Then a teenage girl walked into the room and flipped on the light. She hadn’t yet set down her suitcase when her gaze landed on Helen and she froze.
Ear-piercing yells of MOM! DAD! shrilled the room, and Helen scrambled backward, forced to abandon her prizes on the floor.
She made her way down from the roof in a panicked rush, lucky not to seriously hurt herself, and then it began to hail.
She’d warded off the hailstones with her arms as she frantically ran through the yard, down the road, and back to the rental car.
Now she stared dully at the dingy walls of her room, still shivering from leftover fear and adrenaline, futility hard at work on her soul.
For some reason, her mind fixated on the contrast between her apartment and the house she’d just been in. Like all the homes she had robbed so far, the huge mansion held dozens of art objects and other items each valued at hundreds to thousands of dollars. And these weren’t even the items that gave these people their staggering net worth. These were just their decorations.
She stared around her own bedroom. The lamp she got from a thrift store for eight dollars, its mate next to Mandy’s bed on the other side of the curtain. The rented bed that started breaking years ago, propped up with a cement block under the cracked rail. The artwork on the wall—prints purchased cheaply and framed with some Christmas money David gave her a decade ago. Buckling plastic shelves holding her thrift-store accessories and shoes and other personal odds and ends.
She did the best she could to keep everything tidy, clean, and organized. She’d taken pains to paint the room a nice shade that went well with the homemade curtains and the secondhand bedspread. It wasn’t awful, all told.
But everything in this room… it might add up to two hundred dollars, at most, and this was all she had accumulated in her entire lifetime.
29 Days, 12 Hours
Early afternoon on Wednesday, dressed in work clothes and carrying a briefcase so she could pass herself off as a saleswoman, Helen used Egemon’s tip about the yard guys to carry out her first successful burglary.
Even better, she found an unlocked projcom and a series of passwords written down on a sheet of paper in the top drawer of the desk. A few anxious moments later, Mr. Alvarez donated a hundred thousand dollars to Lantern Houses—the same charity he’d given a thousandth of a percent to at the Net Worth Notion.
Justice was served.
Thirty minutes later, she pulled up at the pawn shop and proudly took a cardboard box of her ill-gotten goods out of her trunk.
She couldn’t wait to tell Egemon.
Box in hand, she closed the trunk of the car and started toward the pawn shop, then stopped in surprise.
There was police tape across the door, and the lights were off. The door was boarded up.
She stared for a moment, baffled.
Wasn’t everything normal just yesterday afternoon? She checked her memory, unsure now of everything. Yes, she was fairly certain that just yesterday he’d given her the ‘repeat customer’ discount on the jammers and wished her luck.
What had happened?
With the glass door boarded up, stood to reason it was broken—and yes, sunlight glinted off stray shards of glass on the ground.
Had there been a hold-up?
Slowly, trying to puzzle through the situation, she put the box back in her car and closed the trunk. She went to the building and looked through the glass windows. With afternoon sunlight pouring through, she could see that the shelves of merchandise were still full and neatly organized.
She looked around the parking lot. One fellow in grimy pants and a torn shirt ambled toward her, barefoot, his eyes fixed intently on her. She felt herself grimace. He might have information. More likely, talking to him would be a mistake.
She closed some of the distance, keeping an eye on how far she got from her car, and pointed at the pawn shop. “You know what happened here?”
He flashed a too-friendly smile and called back something unintelligible.
She grimaced again and let him get a bit closer. She pointed more emphatically at the pawn shop. “What happened here? Did you see it?”
“Hey, honey,” he said. He gave her body a completely unsubtle once-over. “You want my digits?”
“Christ Jesus,” she mumbled to herself. To him, she called out, “Never mind. No thanks.” She started toward her car.
The guy kept coming, but faster. He put a hand on his crotch. “Hey, babe, you want some of this?”
She didn’t answer. She just wanted out of there. He was within a few yards by the time she opened her car door to get in.
His tone and posture shifted. He yelled, “Hey! I’m talkin’ to you! You think you’re too good for this?” He gestured elaborately at his body. “I’ll fucking kill you, bitch!”
She got in, slammed the door, and pulled out of the parking lot. In the rearview mirror, she saw him gesture obscenely after her. As she drove away, she let out a deep breath.
Men like that always freaked her out—the expression of entitlement to her body, the sudden escalation, the implicit or explicit threat of violence. She told herself that everything was okay now. Her foolish mistake was behind her, only a memory. She was lucky.
She drove aimlessly for a few minutes, letting her heart rate settle down and the adrenaline ease off, until her thoughts returned to Egemon and the empty pawn shop.
She felt strangely bereft.
A thief disposes of stolen goods within thirty minutes. She remembered that from her initial research a couple of weeks ago. A sensible person would find another fence. Trouble had hit at the pawn shop, and a sensible person stayed away from trouble.
But how hard might it be to find another fence? She suddenly realized how lucky she’d been to find Egemon. Lightning might not strike again so readily. What if it took her days to find another fence she could trust? Only so many days remained.
And what if it was her fault? What if someone had followed her after a theft and taken it out on Egemon?
The police tape across the door. Since the police were involved, they would know what had happened.
A few minutes later, she boldly told a policeman on her e-paper that she’d arrived at her husband Egemon’s shop, 24 Pawn, at 17955 Preston and found it barricaded with police tape—and her husband wouldn’t answer his e-paper. “What the hell is going on?” she demanded.
After some checking, he asked, “Egemon Agnes?”
“Yes, of course Egemon Agnes,” she said. Thanks to her bluff, she now knew Egemon’s last name.
“Well, you’d better come bail him out then. He’s at the 12th precinct.”
Dammit.
“What the hell is he in jail for?”
“You can ask him that yourself, lady. It’s not my place.”
She parked a block away from the police station and sat there in anxiety and despair and asked herself whether she was really going to do this.
It seemed enormously stupid to go into a police station an hour or so after committing burglary.
But Egemon could be in jail now because of her. And even if she wasn’t to blame, she couldn’t let him rot in jail. He had helped her—more than he needed to. He’d given her valuable advice. He was her only safe haven in this new criminal enterprise.
He was the only friendly face in her entire life right now, for Heaven’s sake.
She tried to think through what might happen if she went in there. Staying out of police databases was paramount, or her own plans would come to a crashing end. To bail someone out, did she have to leave any biometrics of her own?
She did a quick search on her e-paper. As far as she could tell, it would be a simple matter of making the payment. Egemon would have forms to sign, but s
he shouldn’t have to sign anything other than the receipt.
They would know she’d bailed him out. Would that get her placed on any watch lists?
Would someone recognize her, even though she wasn’t in disguise?
It was too risky. Surely someone else could help him. Maybe he had family in the area. Maybe someone would show up in the morning to get him out. Or any minute, even. She probably didn’t have enough money to bail him out anyway. She was down to just over eight hundred dollars.
She made up her mind to drive away, to trust that he could handle it.
Maybe the next time she went to the pawn shop, he’d be there again, and she could pretend she didn’t know anything about it.
Pretend she hadn’t sat in her car a block away and decided to leave him there to rot.
She slumped back in her seat.
Hadn’t she decided to be a hero?
Wasn’t she dying anyway?
She just wasn’t ready to face defeat yet, not with so little progress toward her goal of helping Mandy and everyone else.
She let out a long, slow sigh, knowing she couldn’t leave him, even if it would have been the sensible thing to do.
But first she had to ditch the stolen items. She was already outside the thirty-minute window. Surely they weren’t really a danger to her so soon, but if this was a best practice among thieves—her lips twitched into a fragment of a smile at the thought—then she needed to behave accordingly. It would be tragic to lose her freedom, and the opportunity to take the black pill when she needed it most, because she was too stubborn to throw away stolen items.
With tremendous reluctance, she took items that might have been worth thousands of dollars, looked around to make sure no one was paying attention, and threw them into a reeking dumpster. Now she had nothing to show for the two burglaries she’d attempted. She slapped away mosquitoes as she got back into her car, and she drove back to the police station.
With weary resignation, she walked up the few steps behind a burly cop who propelled along a staggering suspect with his head down, and they went inside the low building of dirty gray stone.
The Robin Hood Thief Page 9
