Cool but damp air greeted them. Scattered LED lights shone dully over a space that was more office-like than she had expected, though also cold, white, and bare. Clean desks, empty white walls, and mottled white tile floors bounced back a sparse collection of noises—rough words from those in custody, voices of the handful of employees on their phones, footsteps, doors slamming. The cop ahead of her pushed his suspect through the maze of desks and gestured for him to sit.
A stocky, balding cop sitting at a counter took her in at a glance—middle-aged white female, calm, unarmed—then spat discreetly into a white Styrofoam cup.
She went up to the counter. Her heart thudded anxiously in her chest. “I’m here to bail out Egemon Agnes.”
He tapped several buttons on his e-paper and turned it around and slid it over to her. “Seven hundred,” he said.
She winced. She would be left almost penniless. But she scanned her cash card.
As she stared at the signature block on the e-paper, she realized that he hadn’t asked to see her ID—and she remembered that the cash cards were anonymous. She took a gamble and scrawled something illegible.
The cop paid no attention when he pulled back the e-paper. “Wait there,” he said, pointing at a simple wooden bench near the door.
So far, so good. She sat down and tentatively relaxed.
The minutes ticked by. The cop she’d followed in guided his man into a back hallway past dark-tinted glass walls and out of sight. More cops came in and out, some with suspects in custody, others chatting with each other. They ignored her. She tried not to look guilty.
As she waited, she began to feel exposed and awkward. Now she second-guessed herself. Egemon hardly knew her. Would he think it was strange or presumptuous of her to do this for him? Even worse, would he assume it meant something it didn’t?
What did it mean? This urge to rescue him… Was it purely because Egemon was so useful to her?
She was still trying to figure it out when he came out of the back of the building, escorted by another cop.
His face went through surprise, pleasure, and half a dozen microexpressions before it settled on gratitude. The cop took off his handcuffs, and he came to her, and she stood. He looked at her wordlessly with his dark, deep-set eyes. The rest of the world fell away.
Electricity hummed between them.
She wondered whether it was there all along or whether it had appeared just this moment, the result of a good deed thoughtfully performed and thoroughly appreciated.
“I will pay you back the money, of course,” he said.
She almost laughed. “I’m actually pretty glad to hear that.”
Egemon insisted on calling an automated taxi to avoid drawing further attention to Helen. But before it arrived, they stood outside on the sidewalk for a few moments to talk. Rain had started, and Helen opened her umbrella and urged him closer to share in its cover. He stood very near and looked down at her soberly as he answered her questions.
They’d confiscated his cash cards at the pawn shop, and he hadn’t had enough money in a bank account to make bail. But he always stashed plenty of cash cards off site. He would pay her back right away.
His arrest had nothing to do with Helen, not specifically. He wouldn’t say more. “Just routine, I guess you could put it. The cost of doing business.” He shrugged.
“What’s going to happen to you now?” Helen asked.
He looked into the distance with a closed expression. “So I will do some time. It’s happened before.”
Something inside Helen immediately said No. I won’t let that happen. Feeling protective toward this man made no sense in the grand scheme of things, but somehow, there it was.
He looked at her. “You will too, if you keep going this way.”
Only if I get caught before my time runs out.
“I know,” she said. “How long will you have, before…”
“A month or two,” he said. “The dockets are always backed up.”
Then nothing would happen until after Helen was dead.
That didn’t make her feel any better about it.
Helen went home feeling weak, her fingers trembling. Mandy sat on the loveseat, projecting the evening news onto the far wall from her clamshell. As Helen dropped her purse on the dining table, Jessie jumped off the loveseat and came to her to be petted.
Helen didn’t feel like eating, but she knew she needed to—her pants were getting loose—and she went into the kitchen to heat up some chow mein noodles.
She was petting Jessie and waiting for the microwave oven to ding when Mandy said, “Mom! You have an evil twin. Except old. Look, look!”
“I have a what?” Helen looked up. As she took in the image on the wall, an electric shock pierced her.
The projection showed a composite image of three of her disguises.
29 Days, 6 Hours
Helen’s age makeup held up well to the camera, and so did her wigs. Using makeup disguise tricks, she’d successfully changed the shape of her jawline and mouth and eyes. But the overall face shape and cheekbones and nose and eyebrows were exactly her. It was closer than she liked.
“Oh, that’s funny,” Helen managed to say. “Turn it up?”
Mandy obliged.
“—have so far registered an assortment of biological data, including DNA traces and palm prints, but they don’t match records in law enforcement databases. If you see this woman or if you have any information about her, you are urged to contact the authorities immediately. This alleged thief used a Taser against a security guard and should be considered armed and dangerous. In the meantime, be on the lookout for any uninvited house guests, and contact authorities immediately if you spot this woman. These thefts may just be the beginning of a crime spree.”
“Wow, Mom. Didn’t know you were a house thief.” Mandy grinned widely.
Helen studied Mandy’s face, trying to guess whether she might suspect the truth. She saw only teasing in her daughter’s expression.
“Yeah, very funny,” she forced out. She looked at her noodles and knew there was no way she could get them down now. She put the plate in the sink. “Hey, I’m going to go lie down.”
Mandy didn’t reply. Her attention was on her clamshell again.
Helen went into their bedroom and sagged onto her bed.
And she’d been in the police station an hour ago.
Then again, probably no one was looking for her at a police station.
Now they had biometrics data and a picture that wasn’t too far off. Now if anyone recognized her on the street and took a picture with their Earworm—and she wouldn’t even know it—and sent it in to the cops… She pulled up the image from the news on her e-paper and studied it. No, probably she wouldn’t be recognized. In the picture, she looked twenty-five years older, and the difference between early forties and late sixties was significant.
She would have to alter her appearance more radically in future disguises. She would have to do more with her nose… She would have to sacrifice her perfect eyebrows, damn it. She half-grinned, that such a thing would bother her. She wished that changing her eye color from green to blue had helped more, but it hadn’t, really. Too subtle. She would need to get brown contacts to wear sometimes.
More importantly, now everyone knew her modus operandi of crashing parties and pocketing items, and now they would tighten security at these house parties. She would have to be more careful.
She thought about whether she should stick to burglaries from now on and give up on crashing parties. Approaching it pragmatically, she weighed her profits against her failures in each category. With burglaries, she was zero for two. With house parties, she was four for four… even though she’d lost the cash cards in the end. She decided she would forge ahead with both methods. House parties on weekends, burglaries during the week. Time was too short to let a single day pass without making an attempt.
She gave herself a bit of credit for staying rational about all this. Seeing
herself on the news had been a nasty shock, but she was adjusting quickly. But then, she’d always expected that she would get caught eventually.
She got up and paced. Something else was bothering her about this news story, but she couldn’t pinpoint it.
Pacing turned out to be a bad idea. She was too weak, and she had to sit down. She put her hands over her eyes and leaned forward, her hands touching her knees.
They thought she was a criminal.
Well, she was a criminal.
No, they thought she was a common criminal. An everyday thief who just wanted to steal stuff for her own gain or to buy drugs.
But what did it matter if they thought that? Most of the “common criminals” in prison didn’t deserve to be there. It was a corrupt system.
She thought of Egemon again. He fit the “common criminal” profile. Had he really chosen that life or had he been forced into it? A life where you went to prison periodically was only better than the alternative if the alternative was truly awful.
Oliver, her old boss at Justice for All, was an ex-offender who’d served eight years for armed robbery—including six years of solitary confinement—emerged a broken man, was homeless for six years, then was given a job at Justice for All and cobbled together something of a functional life and personality after that.
Helen couldn’t bear to think of solitary confinement. It sounded fine to the uninitiated. Lonely, perhaps, but peaceful. No, the United States was the last “civilized” country that still used it, because so many of the inmates went mad, because these were prisons turned mental institutions the way they were two hundred years ago, with screaming and horror inside every tiny room, every cell housing a forgotten and fragmented soul with no possibility of escape.
And the children who were now being put in jail for truancy and who might, if they were the slightest bit unlucky, live out the majority of their lives in solitary confinement—that part turned Helen’s stomach.
She held the silver locket that held her black pill, grateful again to have it. Afraid, again, of losing access to it in jail, like so many others.
No, Helen didn’t object to being confused for a common criminal. She felt sympathy and grief for the common criminal.
And yet she wanted the world to know—to fully understand—what she was doing. This wasn’t about stealing. This was about economic justice, no matter that it was small in scope.
There was only one way to make that clear. She was going to have to go public.
Dear LSTV,
I am the female thief who has been stealing from the high-net-worth homes around town. But there’s more you should know about me, and I invite you to tell the world.
You see, it doesn’t matter what happens to me. I’m not in this for my own personal gain. What I’m interested in is providing a little justice. And that’s why almost all of my profit from this little venture goes to charity.
These people with all the money—they don’t deserve it any more than the poorest person living in a cardboard box in a doorway. The super-rich just got lucky. And it’s time they got a little unlucky. I’m here to see to that.
Tell them I’m coming for them.
Love, the Robin Hood Thief
28 Days, 18 Hours
The next morning, Helen struggled out of the drug-induced sleep state and found herself curled up in the fetal position, fighting not to break into sobs. Her waking hallucinations were of David submerged in the ocean, swimming through hundreds of corpses that drifted in the water like a school of fish.
Helen had met David when he was one of her clients when she worked at a nonprofit that helped unemployed people get work. It had been her job to lead the training sessions on employment skills and interviewing.
He had a country-boy look to him, with short blond hair and tanned skin. He always wore plaid shirts and jeans. His sad blue eyes caught her attention, that and the slightly bowed right arm he held close to his slender body—a remnant of some past injury.
On the last day of the training, as he went out to catch the bus, she stopped him just outside the building, in the parking lot. She told him, "I’m sorry, I just couldn’t let you go without speaking to you. I think you may have the saddest face I've ever seen.”
It wasn't an encouraging comment, exactly, but there must have been something about the fact that she noticed and that she cared. He grinned just slightly and his light blue eyes shifted to pleasure for an instant—just a flash of happiness—and that was the moment she fell in love.
He told her his secret in the first week that they dated. “I never tell anyone this,” he said, and she felt special, that he would choose to confide in her.
David and his extended family had lived in New Orleans.
When the ocean surge abruptly swept over those sea walls and submerged the centuries-old city for the final time, David had just finished having lunch with his younger brother. They’d walked out into the street just as the wave tore through, breaking David’s arms as it broke his grip on his brother, who perished.
So many perished.
David had managed the city team that maintained the sea walls. He blamed himself for the loss of New Orleans and for the loss of his brother. He never forgave himself. Never forgot the sight of the corpses drifting in the water as the surge settled and David swam with broken arms up to the surface.
Helen told him it wasn’t his fault, but he didn’t believe her.
She married him a year later, and that didn’t help, either.
She earnestly tried, with David. But years of her best efforts and even the gift of a beautiful little girl failed to make him happy.
He drank four beers every night—never more—to dull his pain, but it lingered, and it consumed him. As time went on, he retreated farther and farther into himself.
Helen walked on eggshells to avoid setting him off. He didn’t hit her or threaten her, he just snapped at her for everything. But Helen was sensitive and it wore on her to always be wrong, to always be under attack, to never be good enough.
Then Mandy got sick. She was twelve years old when a flu turned into what Helen feared was pneumonia. Helen stayed home from work, at her daughter's side, too worried to even read, just sitting and watching her breathe. Thinking. Days to just think.
David was working from home, then, on Earworm, and he just sat there working or watching shows, not lifting a finger, telling Helen she was being paranoid when she told him she was worried about their daughter.
At last, after five days, Helen took Mandy to the emergency room by herself, while David pretended not to see them leave. And sitting there in the ER waiting room, nearly panic-stricken, listening to the bubbling sounds coming from her daughter's lungs and trying to convince herself that her precious only child would be okay, that she hadn’t waited too long, she found herself possessed of a slow-burning and well-reasoned rage.
Why did she share her life with this man? It was hopeless. She had spent sixteen years trying to bring the flicker of pleasure she’d seen that day in the parking lot into full flame, and it had never happened. It would never happen. He was too broken to help, and she’d been a fool to try.
When Mandy got well, Helen told David to leave. And he went. Without a fight and without complaint. It was as if he’d just been waiting for her to finally get around to it.
But she failed to understand how much it would hurt Mandy.
After the divorce, David rarely agreed to see Mandy and never initiated a visit himself. Helen’s actions only exposed David’s lack of investment, yet to Mandy somehow it was all Helen’s fault. And Helen didn’t know how to make that better.
And then David died suddenly of a heart attack three years later. He was only in his forties, and slender. The autopsy showed a congenital heart defect that had never been diagnosed.
The day they got the news of David’s death, Helen went to comfort Mandy as she lay crying in her bed. Helen put her hand on Mandy’s shoulder, and Mandy pulled away and snapped,
“Don’t touch me! Get away from me!”
Mandy jerked away from every affectionate gesture after that. When Helen said “I love you,” Mandy answered with thick, resentful silence. A door had slammed, and Helen was an unwelcome roommate, nothing more.
Helen tried to talk to Mandy about it, and she left the room every time. Helen left a note offering to pay for grief counseling, and Mandy threw it away.
After months of unwavering coldness, Helen stopped trying to touch her daughter. It hurt too much when Mandy turned away or knocked Helen’s hands aside or snapped, “Stop it!” It had been a year and a half since Helen had last tried.
Helen didn’t know how to turn it around, and Mandy didn’t want to.
Helen tried not to blame herself for David’s death, even though Mandy so obviously did. Helen told herself that she couldn’t have helped David, that he’d refused to even get a checkup the entire time they were married and that wouldn’t have changed. But still, at times, she thought maybe there was something she could have done. Sometimes she thought maybe Mandy was right.
She lay on her bed now and waited for the waking pill to bring her out of the quicksand of these memories, and she fought against the tears.
If she had kept David in their lives, maybe—just maybe—Mandy would have someone to take care of her now that Helen was going to leave her behind.
28 Days, 12 Hours
Helen had chosen her news outlet carefully for her letter the previous night. LSTV tended to be sympathetic to causes like hers. She felt she would get the right kind of coverage there, and that morning, she learned she was right. The string of thefts was minimally newsworthy on its own, but with Helen’s email attached to it, it was like candy to whatever passed for journalists these days. They read her email hourly for the next twenty-four hours.
She wondered if they’d tried to reply to her, but she’d sent the email from an anonymous email address and then deleted it, just in case.
The Robin Hood Thief Page 10