A Heist Story

by Ellen Simpson

  “Did you tell her that Charlie already suggested one?”

  Marcey stared at her.

  “Oh, don’t give me that look, Marcey. I’m not stupid. Charlie wouldn’t have sent you, a rank amateur, in without a plan. And even if he hadn’t, I sincerely doubt that he intended for you to ask Kat fucking Barber’s opinion on anything.”

  “No, he didn’t, but I didn’t tell Kat that I had the thing all laid out either.” Marcey shrugged. “You’re right, Shelly, she’s got her own agenda. I want to know what it is.”

  Shelly’s eyes narrowed. “So you’re what? Feeling her out?”

  “She wants to get a crew together to do Charlie’s job as well. She wants to run the show, but that’s not happening, so I agreed to compromise and take both of our points of view into account, provided that it still follows Charlie’s plan.”

  “For your little revenge quest.”

  Marcey shook her head. “No, for something bigger, but it does involve that too. Kat filled in some of the details that Charlie’s notes were scant on. The ones that Charlie didn’t think were necessary to convey, but that required a lot of faith.”

  “Oh, right.” Shelly frowned, her voice cutting. “The ones that basically all end in all of us getting arrested.”

  “Yes.” Marcey shook her head. “Those.” She grew silent and glanced around. They were alone, but Marcey didn’t like talking about such things in so public a space. Their footsteps rang out on the linoleum of the airport floor. “There’s an auction. On Memorial Day. And a lot with our name on it. Kill two birds with one stone, ya know?”

  Shelly looked pensive. “So you trust her?”

  The question made Marcey pause. “I’m not…”

  “I don’t trust anyone, Marcey. Least of all you. You’ve made some shit choices already. Why should I go along with you when you haven’t proven to me that you can make the smart choice?”

  Marcey looked down at her feet. “Because I need someone like you,” she said earnestly. “I need someone like you to tell me when I’m fucking up.”

  “I’m not some sort of angel on your shoulder. I don’t play like that.”

  They boarded the train, circling back to the station in Queens where Marcey would take a train into the city and Shelly would walk out onto the street to hail a cab. They were alone in their car. “Would it be so bad?” Marcey asked. “To work with someone else for a change?”

  Shelly sighed heavily. “Who else did Charlie want?”

  “Will you work with me?”

  “Who else, Marcey?”

  “Gwen Lane-Wright…maybe someone for tech. Kat had a few suggestions. Charlie had nothing but a question mark.”

  “Try Montou. I think her first name is Kimiko.” Shelly tapped her chin in thought. “Charlie worked with her, but I’m not sure if she’s out of the game—”

  “Wait, Kim Montou?” Marcey’s brow furrowed, trying to place the name. She knew the name very well, but it couldn’t be… “Japanese, parents came here and now run that bookstore in the West Village where all those anime nerds like to hang out…about yea tall?” Marcey indicated her own height. “That Kimiko Montou?”

  “Yeah, got arrested a while back. Your girl Johnson if I remember right. Something about a two-millisecond delay on some eBay thing. Why? Do you know her?” Shelly asked, expression open and genuinely curious.

  “Yeah,” Marcey answered, shifting her bag to her other shoulder. “I went to high school with her.”

  Shelly left Marcey to the nearly two-hour journey alone with her thoughts on the train without a concrete answer as to whether she’d get involved. When she emerged at her stop, night had fallen, casting the city in a haunting shadow of misty rain.

  Her mother was still up, sitting behind her desk in the home office, illuminated by a pool of light from a cheap IKEA lamp, her face drawn in shadow, deep, dark circles under her eyes. “You’re back.” Her mother tugged her glasses from her face and rubbed a tired hand at the corner of her eyes. Eyeliner smeared out like errant brush strokes in the wake of her fingers.

  Marcey let her duffle drop to the floor and bent to remove her shoes. “Yeah,” she answered. “Guess I am.”

  “Do you have any idea how worried I was?”

  Marcey could not image her mother worrying that much during the tax season. From February to the middle of April, Marcey didn’t so much as see her mother, let alone interact with her. She was too busy hiding herself away at work and shirking her parental responsibilities.

  “Sorry.” Marcey shrugged. “I had a thing I had to go to.”

  “A thing is not a two-thousand-dollar last-minute ticket to London, Marcey. A thing is a weekend in the Poconos, or taking off to Montreal for a weekend. It isn’t running away to another continent.” Her voice was rising now, angry, hurt—all the buried emotions they never talked about and just left simmering, waiting for the next big fight. The pressure of trying to be perfect, trying to hold it all together to make up for the sins of her past, they pressed at Marcey’s will. She gritted her teeth and met her mother’s accusatory gaze evenly, waiting for the next admonishment.

  “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “I’ll pay for the ticket,” Marcey mumbled. God, her entire body hurt. The memory of Kat Barber was still present everywhere. Beneath the canned smell of airport and subway air, there was still a hint of her that made Marcey’s cheeks burn. Marcey pushed her bangs back off her forehead. “I just…I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to get away.”

  “You have to learn to live with what you did. Everyone knows that criminals have to pay their dues to society. Even if they’re coming back to haunt you, you gotta own up to them.”

  “I have paid my dues!” Her mother flinched at the force of Marcey’s rebuke. “I’ve paid them over and over again. Now, everywhere I look, I see my face turned into a cartoon representing what’s wrong with this city.” Her mother’s lips parted, but Marcey blundered on. She couldn’t stop now. “I never said anything about it. Never complained. I did that for you, for this family. I’m not a criminal. I wanted to be the good daughter. I had to get away.” Marcey’s chest rose and fell with the effort of spitting out the truth.

  “And you walked away from everything, because you couldn’t handle the pressure of being better than your reputation.” Her mother drew air in sharply through her nose. It made her look birdlike, all narrow face and flyaway graying hair.

  “I can handle the pressure,” Marcey answered petulantly.

  “You walked away from your job. You walked away from everything I’ve given you, thumbing your nose at it because it wasn’t good enough. Let me tell you something, Marcey. Nothing is good enough in this world. Life, the job that you flat-out dismissed, it won’t ever be enough for you. For anyone. You just have to deal with it, suck it up, and take the good with the bad.”

  “You’re no better.” The words were out of Marcey’s mouth before she could stop them.

  “How dare you!” Her mother was positively shaking. “How dare you say something like that? How dare you imply—”

  “Imply? There’s no implying. I tried my damnedest to make people see that I was no better than Darius back then, but you know what? They saw my skin and my address and they just assumed I was along for the ride, that he was my boyfriend, the scary black man who led me astray. And you know what? You told them that. You let them believe that. You sold a story to those reporters who came to the school, telling them that your perfect daughter could never, ever be involved with that, and it must have been because of bad influences. Do you know how many kids lost their scholarships at school that year because of that? Do you know how many lives you destroyed because of that one remark? Darius is in prison, Mom, and not just a nice prison like you see on TV. He’s stuck in there with people who’ve murdered, who’ve stolen cars with guns, who’ve raped. And you know what he did? He let me talk him into helping me steal some prescription pills so we could buy booze for parties.”


  Marcey inhaled deeply. “Now you know what’s happening? Linda Johnson is using that story to get herself elected. She’s not telling the truth, that she was pissed off that I’d kissed her daughter. She’s putting my face—his face on her campaign posters as a criminal not worthy of anything other than a snap judgment. And you know what? It was all my idea in the first place. I wanted to fit in with the cool kids, so we sold the pain pills I got after getting my wisdom teeth out, and Darius’s leftover Vicodin from when he’d messed up his knee. We took stuff that wasn’t going to be used and we sold it to kids who wanted to get high. We did it over and over and we got caught. We should both be in jail.”

  Her mother looked flabbergasted. “I couldn’t let you go to jail! What would people say?”

  “Maybe they’d say that I’d done my time.” Suddenly tired, Marcey sighed. “Look, I’m exhausted. I’ve been on a plane for hours, and then the commute from JFK…”

  “Where did you go in England?”

  Marcey swallowed, looking away, her fingers gripping the strap of her bag tightly. “I…” Marcey felt like she was choking. “I was in London, like the ticket said. I was with a friend.”

  “Does your friend have a name?” her mother demanded. “Or are they just another lie like everything else that comes out of that mouth of yours?”

  She didn’t want to have this conversation. There was no way to weave the truth around the lie she struggled to keep from bubbling forth. Marcey turned and stalked down the hallway to her bedroom. Her body thrummed with tension. She wanted to hit something. She wanted to scream. She was stupid. Stupid. Her mother would go off and blab to Johnson at the earliest instance, if she was ever asked. The last thing Marcey wanted was her mother asking questions about Kat. There was no finesse in the way her mother handled herself when she was angry. Marcey was afraid of the carelessness.

  “Don’t walk away from me!” her mother shouted.

  Marcey slammed her bedroom door and tossed her keys onto her desk. From her travel bag, she pulled Charlie’s book out and flipped through it. The entry for Kim Montou was toward the back, nestled in between two complicated-looking Indian names Marcey wasn’t going to even attempt to pronounce.

  Montou, K. - NYC - 917-555-0745

  IT, TECH, 1st int, 2006, Tehran.

  Arr. 2012–2 yr. WC

  In 2006, Marcey and Kim Montou were eighteen, still in high school. Marcey got unsteadily to her feet. The book was open in her hands, and she closed her eyes. She tried to remember if there had been any indication Kim even had the aptitude for something like this, let alone the wherewithal. Something illegal, something that would have involved Charlie in Iran in 2006…

  Marcey pulled her phone from her pocket and thumbed down in her contacts to the letter K. There, between a Kailyee and a Lena Marcey barely remembered. Kim’s number hadn’t changed since they were in high school. Interesting. She closed the book and dialed Kat’s number.

  “I trust you made it back in one piece.” Fondness crept into her voice. Marcey could almost see her crooked little half-smile. “No trouble at the border?”

  “None, thank goodness.” A chuckle tumbled easily from Marcey’s lips, warm and familiar. This was too fast—too much, even. She should know better. Kat was involved with someone else… Not that it had made much difference when she took Marcey to bed, but still. “That actually isn’t why I called. Shelly suggested that we get Kim Montou. I wondered if you’d ever worked with her?”

  A shuffling sound filled the phone, and then the sound of a door opening and closing again. Its hinges creaked something fierce. Marcey guessed it was the squeaky door to Kat’s bedroom. “I have,” she answered. “She’s about your age, I think. Helped Charlie with that bit of insanity in Iran back in…well, I don’t quite recall the date, but it was about a decade ago now.”

  “What happened in there?”

  “This isn’t exactly the sort of conversation to be had over the phone…” Kat trailed off; the pause was heavy with realization. “Oh, you know her, don’t you, Marcey?”

  “I could know her,” Marcey said, trying not to give anything away. She was grateful that they were doing this over the phone when she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror over her dresser. Her cheeks were bright red, infatuated. “Is she any good?”

  “Oh, she’s very good, or she was, until she disappeared a few years back. I always wondered what happened to her.”

  “Shelly says she got arrested. Something about eBay.”

  “Huh.”

  They lapsed into silence. It was the comfortable sort of companionship that had Marcey wondering how come she wasn’t upset, or even angry that Kat had a lover. Another wrench in this machine that could ruin everything.

  “How did Shelly take it?”

  “She thinks I’m an idiot.”

  “You are,” Kat agreed. “I have a piece of you now, and you me…but it was a foolish risk. It can’t happen again.”

  She hung up a second later, before Marcey could say good-bye. Marcey stared down at her phone, the +44 country code winking out into blackness.

  Marcey fell back onto her bed and stared up at the ceiling, lists and names and ugly paintings drifting lazily across her mind’s eye as she slipped off to sleep.

  CHAPTER 15

  Marcey, Rekindling Friendships

  Marcey spent the weekend lurking around the West Village. She passed the time easily, standing on street corners and perched on a stool at the counter of a bar, watching and waiting. She’d gone to the library and logged on to one of the public computers to look up Kim Montou’s name, only to find that she’d been sent to prison for two years in 2012 for some sort of phishing scheme on eBay. It explained her disappearance, to say the least. It also explained why she was back here, under her parents’ supervision.

  She eyed the bookstore belonging to Kim Montou’s family, caught on the memory of the place. It used to be a gathering place for the arty offbeat kids who didn’t fit in with the more popular and affluent students who attended Marcey’s high school. If memory served, Kim had worked the register on the weekends. Marcey hoped she could catch a glimpse of her.

  There was very little about Kim written in Charlie’s book beyond the basic description of who she was and what she did. Marcey’s attempts to look up any details about the job in Tehran turned up next to nothing. Sitting across the street, stirring her coffee, Marcey scowled. Going to prison would put anyone off their game, especially in Kim’s ever-changing field. How the hell was Marcey supposed to tell if Kim was still in the game?

  Christ, she was just getting her feet wet with this, but already the frustration was mounting. She wanted to go up to Dannemora and see Darius, not spend the weekend watching high school wannabe goths and pimply nerds go in and out of a Japanese-language bookstore.

  Her instinct to just walk in and see Kim was powerful. They’d known each other back then. It wasn’t that long ago. Marcey had always liked her. She wasn’t sure what was stopping her, but after spending Friday and Saturday sitting on the same stool scowling out across a street at the same elderly Japanese men and women coming in to pick up the newspaper, Marcey was ready to crack. She was sick of watching the patrons of the store, young and old, American and Japanese alike, stop and chat in a language she didn’t know.

  On Sunday, Marcey checked Facebook from her phone. There was nothing interesting in Kim’s feed, save a shared post from Hon-Ya—the bookstore’s—page in both English and Japanese announcing that the store would be celebrating Golden Week with a series of events aimed at families. Marcey put her phone away. The burner was unfamiliar still and uncomfortable to use. At least there was free Wi-Fi here.

  In the papers before her, Marcey had all she could find on Kim’s case. It sounded as though she’d gotten caught through a sheer stroke of luck on the part of the NYPD. There had been a power spike on account of her computers, and they’d thought she was growing weed in the basement of the bookstore. The carelessness bothered
Marcey. Should she bring in someone with such evident disregard for something as easy to correct as an overloaded power grid?

  Marcey read through the transcript of the quick, no-contest trial, and a name caught her eye. The prosecuting attorney for the state was listed on the court record as Linda Johnson. A smile broadened on Marcey’s face. Maybe this was a good idea after all. Anyone with an axe to grind against Johnson was a potential ally, especially if things went off the rails with Kat.

  It was especially warm. Marcey discarded her jacket and leaned forward, her jeans stiff from drying after the morning rain. Her ratty Green Day T-shirt gaped at the neck. Marcey picked at a thread, lost in thought. It was as though her world contracted again into this single island, suffocating her after it expanded in a burst of vibrant color and the taste of Kat Barber’s skin on her lips. Marcey pulled at the thread harder, watching as her sleeve grew looser and the thread tightened. Marcey jerked her hand down, snapping the thread.

  “—payment comes on delivery. Not the other way around. Don’t—Okafor, I don’t have the time to sort out all of your orders right now, I’m sorry.”

  Marcey looked up, surprised. She hadn’t heard that voice in years.

  Kim Montou was standing at the register, squinting up at the board. The guy behind the counter had his eyebrows raised. “Not you,” Kim added hurriedly to him, pressing the phone to her shoulder. “Americano black. Small, please.” She looked messier than Marcey remembered her from high school. Her hair was cut at her shoulders and tugged into a low-effort ponytail. She was wearing a sweater and leggings. She looked like any other post-college twenty-something; the roundness of her cheeks had fallen away to sharp cheekbones and a small nose that still turned upward as though she’d smelled something terrible. Her face was different—it made Marcey look twice. Her eyes were sunken, like she was haunted by something and slept very little because of it.

  Marcey picked up her coffee and sipped it. The guy at the register shook his head and went to get Kim’s coffee. Kim stepped back, her eyes narrowing, glancing over at Marcey. They went wide, and she hung up quickly.