A Heist Story

by Ellen Simpson

  The realization dawned on Marcey effortlessly and she flinched away from Kat’s grip. It was the worst possible outcome, the one that they were speeding toward in just having this conversation. To have it spelled out into truth. Marcey swallowed, spoke the truth: “You got caught.”

  “Wei couldn’t protect me forever. I knew it was coming. I hadn’t…expected it so soon.”

  “What did you promise them?”

  “Something I shouldn’t have. Something I thought I was about to come into. You, my dear, were quite the unexpected turn of events.”

  Marcey looked down at her hands.

  “I hadn’t anticipated liking you,” Kat continued. She seemed undeterred by Marcey’s nervousness. “Or finding your naïveté so charming. Either way, I did not anticipate that I wouldn’t want to go through with Wei’s plan. You remind me a lot of Charlie, Marcey.”

  This whole thing was Topeté’s idea?

  “Wei’s plan?”

  Kat’s face contorted, first in surprise and then in realization of what she’d let slip. She sat down on the edge of the bed, not looking at Marcey. “I never meant—I’m sorry. I just never meant to like you, Marcey.”

  “You can’t play both sides!” Marcey threw her hands up in the air. “You can’t bargain with our lives like that.”

  Kat was quiet for a moment before she looked up. Her eyes were still the same, bright green and intense beyond any measure. “I’m not,” she said. “Not yet.”

  The door banged open. Kim and Gwen stuck their heads inside. “We ready to go?” Kim asked. Gwen was silent, but worry was evident in her eyes. She hated Kat but had buried the hatchet for the good of this job. They all knew what might happen, should this go south. Changing the plan usually spelled disaster, but they were committed now, and there would be no other opportunity for them to all meet their goals if they didn’t even try. Four individual goals, and one chance to make it work. “The cars are all prepped.”

  If we can. “Okay.” Marcey glanced at the window. At Kat. They would talk about this later. They had to talk about this later. “Are you ready?”

  Kat’s expression was perfectly blank when she turned around to face the room, face their little band of criminals. “Let’s do this.”

  They didn’t have even well-established cell connections. Kim was a wizard, but she wasn’t that much of one. There simply wasn’t the infrastructure, or any locals willing to create the infrastructure, so they could speak to each other. Instead they were huddled in the cold beside the northwesternmost corner of the property, running over the plan one last time. Marcey checked her pocket for the wire cutters and the video relay feeds she was to place to enable Kim to hack into the security system’s internal workings. That would at least get them eyes. The initial thought was to use their cellphones to communicate, but Kim distributed earpieces to everyone and had them scatter and test them for reception before coming back into where they were huddling.

  “Are we all right?” Marcey asked in a low voice.

  Kim nodded. She turned her tablet so they could see them. “There are cameras in the headlamps you and Gwen will be using, Kat, so Marcey and I can see what you’re doing. I’ve got that scrambler up too, the one that disrupts cell conversations and Bluetooth hacking. I’ll stay out here and drug the dogs. You three go over the wall at my signal.”

  They nodded, all clad in black and their faces grim. Gwen trailed her fingers over the bark of a nearby tree. “Never wish a thief luck.”

  “And never tell them happy trails,” Kat said. She tucked her hair, braided down her back, into the neck of her shirt and stepped forward. “You’ll cut the power and get Kim in?” she asked Marcey.

  Marcey nodded. “I’ve got this.”

  This was something she could do in her sleep. It was a simple beginning of a standard smash-and-grab. The sort of thing Marcey’d done before with Darius’s cousins, and with Darius himself that one memorable time. She knew a bit about wiring from when she was a kid and had taken a class on it after school, and she’d learned more since then. She could get Kim into the system, no problem.

  The idea was that Gwen and Kat would go in, do their thing, and come back out. Marcey would stay outside with the relays so that they could put everything back the way they’d found it once they got out.

  Kat hitched the two long tubes of materials, one of the painting and the other of a deconstructed stretcher bar for the canvas, up on her shoulders and adjusted the straps. Her lips were pursed as though she was thinking hard. She glanced at Gwen as Kim faded into the darkness of the growing night.

  No one spoke. They all were preparing, mentally, for the coming moment. Marcey inhaled and exhaled slowly, counting. Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty. She’d reached two hundred when Kim’s voice came over the comline. “Go,” she said.

  They went. Stealing through the night like shadows caught on a strong breath of wintery wind down the mountain, they ran through the woods and onto the property. The house itself was dark, shuttered against the cold, and massive. Marcey moved cautiously through the damp, still mostly dead grass, avoiding the lingering patchy snow. The last thing they wanted was to leave footprints.

  At the corner of the house they paused, before Marcey oriented herself to find the outdoor electrical relay. She cracked it open with a screwdriver and worked by touch rather than sight, because they didn’t dare use their headlamps outside. The relay here was simple, just a quick splicing in of two wires and tucking the entire bundle back into the box and closing it up.

  “Alarm’s out,” she said. “Go.”

  Kat and Gwen disappeared back up the side of the house and Marcey exhaled slowly. She pulled a small flashlight out of her pocket and bent down to a second box, half-obscured by snowfall from the roof. Down there, the air was still cold and the ice grated at her fingertips as she dug for the cable wire she knew would be running down from the electrical relay. She twisted her fingers, and there it was. Marcey tugged it out and shook the ice and dirt from her fingers.

  “Video feed’s about to go live,” Marcey said.

  “Nice,” Kim answered.

  Marcey stripped the wire quickly, clipped the splicer device to it, and fidgeted with the antenna before tucking the whole thing back down into the dirt. “Feed live?”

  “Feed is live. There are eyes in the sky, ladies.”

  “Excellent, we’re on the move.”

  Marcey sat back on her heels and glanced at her watch. Five minutes. That was all the time they had to be out of here. But things never went as planned, did they?

  “Shit,” Marcey muttered. Her jeans were smeared with dirt. She crouched low, pulled out her phone, and shook it. She didn’t want to tell Gwen and Kat that a pair of headlights had pulled into the long driveway of the property and was now sitting, bathing the far side of the house where the safe was located, in bright light. Any movement would be detected. Gwen and Kat were already inside the safe. “Do you see the light?” she asked.

  “What is it?” Kat’s voice cracked a bit.

  “I see it, Marcey,” Kim answered. “Do you have it?”

  “I got it,” Marcey said. She had to get the guy to follow her somehow. She could just pretend to be lost; she was, after all, still wearing the hiking boots, and there was a flannel in her pack she’d been wearing all week. She had a pack of gear with her: it was their go bag for the trip back, containing a change of clothes and a few toiletries. Marcey looked down at her muddy knees and cursed again. Who the fuck was she going to fool?

  There was no helping it.

  Staying purposefully low, Marcey inched her way around the periphery of the fence and waited until she got to the gap in the back. She threw herself across the gap into the woods and circled back. Her phone signal came through the moment she was back in the woods—of course—and Marcey hurriedly sent Kim a series of texts explaining what she was about to do.

  MD>KM going to circle around and approach house from front. Pretend lost hiker.

&nb
sp; MD>KM switching SIM cards so call the other number. Taking out Com.

  She didn’t wait for Kim to reply. She had to do this quickly. She would get out and rendezvous back with them somehow, in the city, on the set date. She’d make it.

  Marcey pulled the back off her phone and pulled the SIM card out, switching back to her actual card, not the pay-as-you-go version she’d been using since they got to New Hampshire. She plucked the earpiece from her ear and threw it as far away from her as she could. Her fingers shook with cold. She left the phone turned off and shoved it into her backpack, breaking the other SIM into tiny pieces as she stomped through snow and muck circling around to the car and bursting through the woods, forcing herself to look elated. This she could do. This she could fake.

  “Hey! Hey!” she shouted. Her breath fogged in the air before her. There were leaves in her hair. “Hey, mister!”

  The car window rolled down. It was an older guy with sandy blond hair that Marcey recognized dimly. “What are you doing here?”

  Marcey’s teeth, as if on cue, though it was entirely unintentional, started to chatter. “L-l-ost,” she said. “I was hiking down from the Omni. Parked my car up there. Where is here?” Marcey glanced around, eyed the house. “I fell and then I got all turned around and couldn’t find the path.”

  The guy narrowed his eyes before switching off his headlights and getting out of the car. “Christ, you’re soaking wet.” He moved to the trunk and pulled out a blanket. “Here, use this. I work security for this house. I can give you a lift back to the police station. I’m sure if your car was left abandoned and you signed the log, they’re out looking for you.”

  “There was a log? I just started from the parking lot.”

  Shaking his head, the guy gestured for Marcey to get into the car. Marcey hesitated. Strange men and strange cars, while a worthy distraction to a far larger crime, was not worth the risk of being a young woman alone in the woods at night. But she didn’t see another way to get him to leave.

  “Well, get in. You need to get warm, you’ll freeze.”

  Fuck it, there was no helping the situation. Kim had her number, and she was good enough to hack into any phone with battery life even if it was off, so long as they went toward Lincoln, and not further into the mountains, they could track the phone. She hurried around the car and got in gingerly, tapping as much mud out of her boots as she could before getting in.

  The car smelled of wet socks. There was a pair of Nordic skis in the back seat. “Been skiing?” she asked.

  “Nah.” The guy put the car in gear and performed a neat K-turn. “It’s too sticky for that.”

  They drove in silence for a few minutes, the heating on full blast. It took a few minutes more before Marcey stopped shivering. She hunkered down in the blanket and pulled a leaf from her hair. She hoped to God that he would take her back to the hotel and her car. She glanced over her shoulder, at the well of darkness where the house was. “What’s so special about that place?”

  “Why were you over there?” the guy countered. “Don’t give me that bullshit about hiking. You were casing the joint, clear as day. You’re not a good liar.” Marcey opened her mouth to reply, but he kept on. “There’s a cop here, investigator up from New York City. Looking for a girl about your age and height. I’m taking you to him.”

  Marcey’s jaw clicked shut. The door handle was right there. She could fling herself from the car, but the woods were dense and close to the road. She’d get pulverized by a tree. Her fingers twitched. “What’s the guy’s name?” she asked, just a little weakly.

  “LePage. Will LePage.”

  Marcey couldn’t quite manage the smile it took to laugh at herself. Instead she tugged the blanket close. This was going to get messy, but this was what she’d wanted.

  CHAPTER 28

  Marcey, Playing a Hand

  The harsh fluorescent overhead light burned Marcey’s eyes after hours in the dark. Her hands were shaking. She jammed them into her pockets and her fingers twisted around the extra set of wire cutters she hadn’t thrown into the woods. Shit. It was close to four in the morning and the Lincoln police department was abandoned.

  Marcey glanced around, desperate for somewhere to ditch the tool. The guy, Officer Chris Raker, paused at the front desk. Marcey leaned against the counter, carefully feeling along the edge of the raised lip of the front desk. There was a gap there. She exhaled and took her chance as Raker rummaged in the drawer for something. Marcey moved quickly, feeling for the space in the gap of the lip of the table where it was supported by three support beams, spaced evenly apart. There was just enough space to wedge the wire cutters into one of the small pockets created by the beam before Raker surfaced with a ring of keys. “Found ’em,” he said.

  Marcey smiled weakly at him. “Good for you.”

  Raker took her to a small interview room behind the desk. The town was so small that the police office doubled as city hall and the local court. He instructed her to change out of her wet clothes, pulling out dry ones from Marcey’s bag before taking it and her cellphone away with him. Marcey knew asking for a lawyer was a bad idea and would give Raker more reason to be suspicious of her, so she did what she was told, shucking off her wet clothes and leaving them in a pile on the floor. The clothes from her bag were stone cold, and Marcey shivered when she pulled them on. She left her sopping wet boots off and sat cross-legged in the chair, waiting for the moment when LePage walked through the door, smug and smiling. Would Topeté be with him? Would she have some final trump card to play?

  Time passed slowly. There was no clock on the wall, and Marcey didn’t regularly wear a watch. She had no idea how long she sat there, her wet jeans dripping from where she’d hung them over the back of an empty chair in the corner—for observation, probably.

  Marcey was never good at waiting, but this was a game she could play for as long as they wanted her playing it. She ran through the previous few hours in her head, marking the ticks in the progression of the job and how smoothly everything had gone. They’d carry on without her—that was the plan, the goal. There had always been a risk that this would happen, and Marcey had a plan.

  The table she sat at was old, made of plastic and cheap metal. It was rusting at the bottom of one of the legs, making it wobbly. Marcey let it wobble, back and forth, back and forth, to pass the time.

  She thought about Darius. Wondered if this was his experience too, sitting alone in a room, waiting for someone to come in and accuse you of crimes you hadn’t committed. She thought about how that wasn’t her experience. How there’d been a lawyer present with her from the beginning, and how, not even for a moment, had she felt as though she were going to get railroaded into a confession. Was she any better than the people who had done all that to Darius now, willingly committing a crime just for the hell of it?

  No, not for the hell of it.

  Marcey wanted it to be LePage to walk through the door, because she wanted it to be LePage she got away from.

  When Devon Austin Jackson had showed up to Darius’s hearing, he’d been calm, suave, confident, the sort of guy anyone would want fighting for their cause. But he was young and inexperienced against the much more formidable Linda Johnson. He’d lost, but not for lack of trying. And he’d gained Marcey’s friendship for life.

  From what her mother had said, it was LePage who was skulking around asking questions. Topeté hadn’t so much as breathed the same air as Marcey before that chance meeting in the hotel lobby. Christ, Marcey didn’t know what to feel about that, other than that both she and Kat seemed to be struggling with the same problem: they both needed to continue this farce of an attraction—and there was considerable attraction between the two of them—to keep Topeté off her game. Marcey was using Kat just as much as Kat was using Marcey right now. It was just a matter of applying the right pressure at the right time to ensure everything went according to Marcey’s plan.

  And she worried. Worried that it wouldn’t be enough. That Gwen
or Kim would see through it and tip Kat off somehow. That LePage wouldn’t buy the story.

  It was LePage that Marcey wanted to screw over, after all; he was the one who’d cajoled his way into Marcey’s home. LePage and Johnson seemed like a match made in heaven. He was her perfect little lapdog. They were both willing to use personal understandings of Marcey to get at her. Marcey hated them both on principle.

  Topeté was another story. Topeté scared Marcey because of the hold she had over Kat. Kat was a force to be reckoned with on a good day, but Topeté had a way in to Kat that Marcey could not understand. Maybe it was love, that bitter disease that had landed Marcey in this situation in the first place. Love was a problem. It clouded judgment and made one weak. Marcey did not want to be weak. She did not want to be like Topeté when it came to Kat, or Kat when it came to Topeté.

  Topeté was too smart and saw too much, yet she seemed to have fallen right into that insipid trap. Time was not on Topeté’s side, and irrational behavior came with love. Still, Marcey had to give the woman credit. She played the game like she was born to do it, and she had Kat wrapped around her finger in a way that made Marcey’s heart clench uncomfortably. When the time came, Marcey wasn’t sure Kat could do what she had to do. Or, in her moments of stark honesty, that she was willing to do what had to be done if Kat would not.

  Topeté was there, and Topeté would never go away. She was the sign that all this was never meant to be how Marcey had imagined it, but rather the omen of how horribly sideways it could all go.

  A confrontation with Topeté was out of the question. Marcey knew that holding her own in such a situation would only end badly for her. But the position was as intriguing as this move toward martyrdom was. She didn’t know enough about Topeté’s endgame, or about how she would handle the fact that Topeté knew that she and Kat had done what they had. She knew and she was going along with it.

  Marcey didn’t understand. Her hands were shaking. She had done something horrible to Topeté in London. Given in to temptation and allowed a moment to develop organically then, and then allowed it to happen again. She’d let Kat pull her in, enticing her into the darkness of whatever fucked-up game she and Topeté were playing. And why? Why let this manipulation happen?