The Robin Hood Thief

by H. C. H. Ritz

  That was the thought that had been dogging her, the one she couldn’t articulate. Of course. Where were they going to go? No homes, no jobs, no possibilities.

  What had she done?

  5 Days, 13 Hours

  The cold had killed some of the mildew in the hallway, or maybe her sense of smell was going.

  The three deadbolts. Dropping her purse on the tiny two-person table. Mandy at the loveseat, her clamshell in her lap.

  But there was something different, too. Mandy’s cheeks were flushed, a smile hovering at her lips. She actually glanced up at Helen and said, “Hey!”

  Even through her miserable preoccupation about what she’d done, Helen was warmed by Mandy’s greeting. “Hey yourself,” she said.

  She went over and sat down next to Mandy—not too close, not wanting to spook her out of this sudden friendliness.

  Another wave of fever hit, and Helen wished she could lie down, but she wasn’t willing to reveal her illness to her daughter.

  Not yet. It wasn’t time yet.

  A small voice inside asked When?

  Mandy said, “You’ve been hearing about this Robin Hood Thief thing, right?”

  Helen nodded, then wished she hadn’t. The room spun. “Yeah.”

  “Isn’t it cool? Today she erased the record of every single criminal in the entire justice system and let almost half of them go free. Don’t you love it, Mom? It’s totally the kind of thing you ought to love, right?”

  Helen tried to put together some semblance of a normal mom response. The mom from forty days ago. The mom who would never blow up buildings or steal from anyone. The old mom-of-the-high-road.

  “They all get to start over,” Mandy went on, still enthused. “People are freaking out, Mom. They’re doing a spontaneous parade in downtown right now in honor of Cobalt and the Robin Hood Thief. It’s fucking awesome.”

  A parade was kind of awesome. At least some people still stood behind her. But it was useless. She knew that now, too late. “Listen, she’s breaking the law,” Helen said miserably. “Setting violent criminals free. You know they’re going to go back to their old ways. People are going to get hurt.”

  “But she’s given them all a second chance, Mom. Don’t you always say that these people need a second chance?”

  Helen let out a sigh. “Yes. But she’s just setting them back out into the same systemic racism and classism, the same debtor society,” she said, embittered by the knowledge that it was utterly true.

  Caught up in self-recrimination, she spoke to Mandy as if her daughter might actually know the answer to the problem. “How are they supposed to make new lives for themselves with the unemployment rate and the institutional racism and all the rest of it?” She looked at Mandy helplessly.

  Mandy’s face sagged. She looked as if Helen had kicked her, and Helen suddenly realized she had argued them down into a dark place neither of them wanted to be.

  She struggled to think of something to say. Some way to take it back or fix it. With a profound sinking sensation, she realized she had only pushed her daughter away yet again.

  Mandy closed the lid to her clamshell and started to get up, her delicate features wounded.

  Helen put out a hand but stopped short of touching her daughter, knowing not to try. “Wait. I’m sorry. I’m just… I’m frustrated. I’m tired.” For once she’d managed to get the apology out before Mandy walked away.

  Mandy hesitated. They were frozen, the two of them, Helen looking at her daughter, her daughter looking away. Both of them barely breathing.

  “I’m sorry,” Helen said. “I know what I said wasn’t what you wanted to hear.”

  Nothing.

  “I’m a jerk sometimes,” Helen said.

  “Yeah, I know,” Mandy said. There was a little bite to it.

  “Did you like the music Earworm I got you?” Helen asked. She tried not to sound imploring, but in truth, she was begging. Begging for a few moments of connection that actually worked. Begging to close that gap of six years. Begging to be loved again.

  “I don’t feel like talking about it,” Mandy said.

  Helen’s chest squeezed shut, and Mandy went into their room.

  The door closed quietly, not a slam.

  It was a signal. Young adults spoke in code. A quietly shut door meant, “I’m not really upset with you anymore, but I have to assert my right to be upset.”

  The fever vanished and left Helen cold and trembling. She pulled the extra throw out from under the loveseat and put it over herself.

  Jessie slept in the chair in the pool of light cast by the standing lamp. His nose twitched and his paws cycled as he ran in his dreams.

  Helen let out a long breath. The dizziness intensified and the room wavered and spun. She closed her eyes and watched the pinpoints of light dancing behind her closed lids. The flashes of light were fractured, fractals, flickering brighter and bolder in patterns more vivid than any she remembered. Perhaps it was a sign that things were getting that much worse.

  She wondered whether she might not wake up the next morning. Maybe her body wouldn’t give her the chance to take the black pill. And maybe she’d be lucky if so.

  But she wasn’t ready. Not when she had only made things worse. She had to do something now to make them better again.

  She couldn’t help but look at Whatsit one last time before she went to sleep.

  There was a surprising comment at the top of Helen’s profile.

  [ I know Ms. Robin Hood Thief. And I just want you all to know that you misunderstand her if you think she has evil motives. She is a good person. Better than most I have met. And smart. If she did it, she had a good reason. I am on her side. ]

  She let out a slow sigh. It meant a lot. She stared at the message and the profile trying to figure out who it might have been. The profile picture was of a black Lab puppy. The handle was ageg17. She thought she should have known, that it should have been obvious who it was. But it just wouldn’t come into focus.

  She took her sleeping pill and then read the message one last time as the medication claimed her mind and pulled her into darkness.

  4 Days

  In the morning, Helen’s consciousness swam up from visions of flower petals in pastel and jewel shades, all viewed up close—the dusting of pollen around the stamens, the velvet texture of the petals.

  Her consciousness returned with an utterly clear plan.

  She only needed to write a few more emails to Cobalt and compile a list of the thirty or forty richest and most influential American corporations and hand them over to him.

  Then Cobalt could reassign their stock to regular people. Most of the wealth would go to ex-convicts. They would have enough money to rebuild their lives.

  And the new stockholders could hire new boards of directors—they were authorized to do that in most corporations. They could also change the vision and goals of the corporations to address global warming, cut executive pay down to size, and use their immense profits and political influence for good.

  America could belong to Americans again.

  Helen stayed at home that day to work on her task, listening to the news on her e-paper as she did so. The prison break and its fallout occupied almost the entire news cycle. Gun sales surpassed previous records, and there were scattered shootings of supposed ex-felons, mostly unprovoked and panic driven. Otherwise, the peace held. The newly released seemed to be laying low, at least for the moment.

  The authorities lectured sternly about what would be done, but the talking heads from the law schools said there was very little that could be done. The records were gone. The only way to put someone back behind bars was to have their criminal trial all over again. Law enforcement would surely try to do so for the worst offenders, but it wasn’t possible to do it for the hundreds of thousands of minor offenders.

  Christian Smith at LSTV ran half a dozen interviews with ex-convicts, all with their faces blurred out and their voices distorted to prevent identifica
tion.

  A young man. “I’ve been in and out of prison my whole life. I’ve killed people. And I’m only gonna say this once, and only cuz my name ain’t on it. But what the Robin Hood Thief said in her letter—it got to me. She did this for people like me. She really cares. I don’t know if anyone has ever really cared about me in my whole life. But I think she does. So I’m going to go straight, like she said. I’m going to try to do good. And that’s all I have to say about it.”

  Even the distortion couldn’t hide that one of the subjects was a little old woman with a quivery, whisper-thin voice. “My younger son stole my credit cards and ran them up and then didn’t pay them. But I was responsible for them. They didn’t care who did it, just whose name was on the statement. I don’t have any income. My older son supported me. So I went to prison. I was eighty-two when I went in. I’m eighty-seven now.

  “I was diagnosed with leukemia four months ago, but they don’t offer medical treatment to convicts anymore, not for major illnesses like that. Now that I’m out of prison, I can get a black pill, and I can have the peace and quiet and comfort of home, and my older son can be there with me to tell me goodbye. And that might not sound like much, but it’s a lot to me.”

  A middle-aged man. “I was in for eight years. Six years in solitary. I spent another six years homeless afterward. Now it’s been a long time since then. A non-profit company picked me up off the street to give me a job.”

  Surprise darted down Helen’s spine—his story matched Oliver’s to an uncanny degree. She flipped the screen to see the video. It was a stocky man about Oliver’s size.

  “Now it might seem like a prison record shouldn’t matter anymore, for someone who’s been out for so long and who’s got a regular life again. But it does matter to me. Now that my record is gone, I can work anywhere, any kind of job. I can vote again. But more than that…” He took a cloth handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead, just like Oliver always did, and Helen leaned forward. It was Oliver. It had to be.

  “I just feel like I’m free to be a new person. I’m not marked anymore. I’m just as good as anyone else now. I feel like she gave me back my future and also gave me back my past. And I’m just grateful. I’ll always be grateful.”

  Tears slipped past Helen’s eyelashes, and she wiped them away. “You’re welcome, Oliver,” she whispered.

  Completing her task—looking up thirty or forty names and putting them into an email—took Helen all day.

  She hadn’t even recognized the atrophy of her faculties until she tried doing real work again. Less than three weeks ago, she’d been able to research potential blackmail material for Mr. White. Now she could hardly copy-and-paste.

  She felt very nearly destroyed. Very nearly gone.

  She wondered whether, if she didn’t have all of this going on, she would have already died. Perhaps it was only the commitment and the vision and the hope that was keeping her alive.

  3 Days

  So, i dont really think this is possibel. At least, not the way you were hoping it was going to go. Basically the thing is that if we just change who owns the stock ub tthey still have the rcords its just like with the mortgages theyll just put it back unless we delete the history of the records too.

  But its like with the mortgages only a lot worse becuz the records are so distrubuted across the whole country across thousands of people and systems. The brokerage firms and brokerdealers take the requests and there are thousands of those. Also the transfer agents which sometimes are banks or brokerage firms or the corproations themselves. Its their job to track every single stock transfer. There are thousands of those too.

  And then usually the corporations have their own records. And then the SEC tracks stock transfers by major stockholders and the exectuvies and board members.

  So there are thousands of places that have records of every transfer and everyone who owns all the stocks.

  So I kinda dont kno w baout this. Sorry. Dont want to let u down., But the more we dig into th eworse it looks. I dont rly wanna say it but fact is i rly dont think we can do this in ur timeline and basically maybe not at all. Sorry.

  2 Days, 16 Hours

  Helen hardly slept that night, and the waking hallucinations were darker and heavier than normal and hard to shake off, even an hour after taking the waking pill. As soon as she was functional enough to use her e-paper, she checked her email. Nothing. Nothing from Cobalt since the devastating email the previous day. He had shut her out.

  She could hardly sit up. She pulled herself up onto the edge of the bed, just trying to keep her eyes open.

  She could no longer pretend that her medications still had the same efficacy. Whatever was happening to her brain had gotten so much worse that the meds couldn’t overcome it.

  In another day or two, she would be back to the Purgatory state of no sleep at all—unable to keep her eyes open or closed for any length of time.

  Maybe it was all over. Everything she had worked for. She’d freed thousands of criminals and set them loose in a society that was going to go on functioning according to business as usual. Without jobs, they’d go right back to business as usual. The donations she’d gotten for various charities would run out, and everything would go back to the way it had been all along.

  Nothing she’d done would matter.

  Her life wouldn’t matter.

  For the first time since she’d started this whole scheme, her illness overcame her. The emotional energy provided by her successes evaporated and left her with bone-deep exhaustion, a foggy mind, and a trembling body.

  She locked the apartment door and set out on stiff, awkward legs. She would still pretend to go to work as usual. She still hadn’t done the calculus, still hadn’t figured out how to tell her daughter… and maybe the calculus was beyond her now.

  She registered that the polar vortex was lifting and it was much warmer out, but cloudy and gloomy.

  She fixed her eyes on each milestone in turn—the end of the hallway, the entrance to the parking garage, her usual parking spot…

  Still a dozen yards away from her car, she thought she heard a buzz from her e-paper, in the depths of her purse, and she stopped to take it out, hoping it was Cobalt or Mandy.

  No, nothing.

  She waved away a mosquito and frowned at the e-paper. It must have been a phantom vibration. She doublechecked all the screens twice, just in case.

  She felt the explosion before she heard it.

  The wave of heat, the shuddering of the parking garage, the blast that threw her against the wall behind her.

  The wave of heat dissipated as quickly as it’d come.

  She pulled herself back up, fueled by adrenaline.

  It was her car that was on fire. Poor Old Blue was its own funeral pyre.

  Jesus.

  The phantom ring of her e-paper… Helen was not a superstitious woman, but something strange had happened, because if she hadn’t felt that buzz, she would be dead right now.

  But they knew where she lived and the car she drove. And they were going to kill her.

  Mandy… they might get Mandy.

  Panic surged through her.

  She tried to run back toward her apartment, and she fell, bruising her knees and an elbow. She got herself back up and staggered along on unsteady legs, one hand trailing the dirty wall.

  Who had done it? Where were they? Were they watching her?

  Down the first hallway and around the corner toward her own apartment.

  A man was there on the far end, coming around the corner toward her. Dark hair, dark eyebrows and eyes. A tattoo of Roman numerals—XIV—on his cheekbone. A gun in his right hand. A big gun.

  He was death coming for her.

  She ducked back behind the corner.

  She’d known, deep down inside, that it was going to end like this. How could she come to a peaceful end after everything she’d done?

  Her pistol. The little .22 she’d bought from the weapons store. Ever s
ince the assault, she carried it tucked into her pocket.

  She pulled it out and fumbled with shaking hands to turn off the safety.

  She reached around the corner one-handed and fired once, twice.

  Roman-numerals guy took cover behind his corner. Then he fired back at her, and fear took her breath away. She ducked back behind her corner. She didn’t want to die, damn it.

  She looked around the corner. He was coming again.

  She fired again, again, again. She kept missing.

  “You couldn’t even hit the target. You’ll need to come back a coupla times a week until you get comfortable with that.” That’s what the man at the gun store told her, weeks ago.

  “Put it down!”

  A forceful shout from behind her.

  She wheeled around, expecting a cop. She nearly called out don’t shoot, but then she saw the man’s plain clothes. He was with Roman, and he was pointing a gun at her too. “Put it down, now!” he commanded again.

  Put it down? Why would she do that when her daughter was sleeping on the other side of this wall?

  “Fuck you!” she shouted. She shot at him.

  The bullet caught him somewhere. He dropped to one knee, snarling, then raised his gun again.

  Something hit her hard from behind, on the back, above the left shoulder blade.

  She turned. The guy with the Roman numerals tattoo was back there, but still far away, running toward her. Had he thrown something at her?

  She raised her gun and aimed at Roman, then realized the gun didn’t look right. The top part had slid back and locked in place. What did that mean?

  Rough hands grabbed her arms from behind.

  She dropped her weight and rolled into the legs of the man behind her. He toppled over her, and as he twisted, she hit him in the face with her little pistol. It left an angry red mark high on his cheek, and he clubbed her on the side of the head with the butt of his weapon.