The Robin Hood Thief

by H. C. H. Ritz

  Where the backup paper copies of Mandy’s citizen paperwork were stashed in the apartment. Her blood type. A reminder to get annual physicals and when to see the doctor versus when to just rest. How high of a fever was too high. The best foods for an upset stomach. A warning to stay away from new pharmaceuticals that might not be adequately tested.

  Helen forced herself to stop. She put her hands on her face. She was not going to be there to take care of her child. A document could not replace a mother. There was no point in trying.

  Anyway, Mandy didn't need it. She could look up anything she needed on the internet.

  Helen left what she’d already typed and shared the note. She included the comment, "For when you're older and living on your own." Mandy wouldn't look at it. In fact, Mandy probably wouldn't look at it even after Helen died.

  You're going to have to tell her. But the thought met a closed door inside her. Not yet. Not yet.

  24 Days

  Mr. White came through. His five-million-dollar donation was noted on McCTV on the Monday morning news.

  Helen threw a fist of victory into the air.

  She tried to log into Whatsit to post a celebratory note, and instead of her page, she saw the error message, “This profile is no longer available.”

  She stared in confusion for a few moments before she figured out that the authorities had found the profile and deleted it.

  Wearing a stubborn scowl, she made another one.

  She’d just have to repeat the same process she used last time, with Mr. Takeuchi’s Centaure watch, to prove the authenticity of the new account.

  “Go ahead, delete it again,” she muttered to her enemies in law enforcement. “I can play this game all day long.”

  For another twenty-four days, at any rate.

  It was amazing how much new energy this work gave Helen. Gone was the perpetual debilitating exhaustion of just trying to get through one day at a time, one crisis at a time. Gone was the unending struggle for basic survival, with nothing to look forward to.

  Now, even with a terminal diagnosis and barely a month left to live, she was filled with new life, new energy. It didn’t make sense.

  Her hands trembled constantly, and her heart thudded nonstop in her chest, but she didn’t care.

  She was alive. For now—for the first time—she was alive.

  How long would it last?

  20 Days, 6 Hours

  Helen set out for her robbery the next Friday night with three more successful burglaries under her belt and a total of thirty-three thousand dollars on cash cards, most of them safe with Egemon—not as much as she’d gained and then lost the first time, but enough to ensure that Mandy would be all right for at least a year.

  Despite her victories, Helen set out with a morbid, sick feeling. Her string of good luck couldn’t possibly continue. But what else could she do? She had to make use of the time she had left. Twenty days, now.

  Still, she took precautions. She took extra pains with her disguise, with heavy makeup and a new wig. She packed her Taser and her can of mace, wrapped the garrote wire around her thigh like a garter, and clipped the security system jammers Egemon had given her to her bra.

  She also chose to take a black taxi—a suitably luxurious model with a human driver—so she wouldn’t get caught up in the car pick-up queue. There was a chance the taxi driver would remember her, but it didn’t matter. The cash card she used to pay him was anonymous, and how else could he track her? He would just see tonight’s disguise, same as everyone else.

  Before Helen went in to the party, she had the taxi drive her around the entire estate to get her bearings. It was walled, as all such mansions were, but the front gate was open for the event. There was a busy street just one house down, and she directed her taxi driver to wait for her there.

  She got in as easily as ever, but the bad feeling strengthened. She felt too pressured to delay long. She choked down a few bites of the decadent, luxurious food and wine and exchanged some witty comments with a few people, then went on her way, cursing her stiff legs.

  As always, fear lent her adrenaline even as it made her hands shake. Never mind that this was her eighth robbery—it never got any less terrifying. Who knew what land mines might await in any given room?

  She reached the large, circular antechamber to the master bedroom and was about to enter when a movement in the room stopped her cold. It was a sentry, but it didn’t hover high above her head in a corner like other sentries. Instead, it was slowly passing around the room at shoulder height.

  This one was set to patrol.

  Paranoia paid off—she had the jammers with her. She remembered how Egemon cautioned her that she would only get twenty or thirty seconds once she activated one of them. She needed to get this right the first time.

  She waited until it was on the far side of the room, away from the two doorways, then pressed the appropriate jammer button.

  The sentry stopped dead in its path, and its lights turned off, then flickered.

  She hurried past it into the bedroom, pulled the door mostly closed, and then peered around it at the sentry.

  The sentry remained still, its lights flashing. Was that good or bad?

  She didn’t have time to find out.

  She turned and looked around the vast bedroom, with its conversation area, oversized king-size bed, and two-sided fireplace creating a separation between the sleeping area and an oversized Jacuzzi tub.

  Then she heard a laugh. A woman’s voice coming closer.

  She turned back to the bedroom. There was no time at all for her to get anywhere. She slid under the bed. Luckily, the layers of duvets hung all the way to the floor. She peeked out from a sliver between folds of fabric.

  A woman strolled through the room with light steps, still laughing at something. “I know,” she said as she went through the carpeted bedroom. She went into an adjacent room where her footsteps echoed. Probably a bathroom.

  “No, I’m not doing that. I don’t care what the old witch does. The business is Henry’s already. She signed. She can’t undo it.”

  Helen heard a faint tinkle that went on for a few seconds, then the flush of a toilet. The woman came back out and went back around the bed.

  “Whatever. Look, I’ve gotta get back to this boring event. One of Henry’s business things. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

  The woman passed out into the antechamber.

  Helen peeked out from under the bed. She could see through the open doorway. The woman stood staring at the unmoving sentry, its lights still blinking. No, there were two of them now. Backup had arrived.

  Then a masculine voice, warm and friendly, from the other side of the antechamber. “What’re you looking at?”

  Helen’s heart nearly stopped before redoubling.

  “Why are there two of them now?” the woman answered.

  Helen’s lips drew back in a grimace. Dammit.

  “Is it supposed to be doing that?” the woman asked.

  Helen’s body went weak with fear. She couldn’t hear the response of the man over the pounding of her own heart.

  How much time did she have before the sentries alerted the guards, or before the people did so?

  She’d gotten nothing to steal.

  The man and the woman went back out into the rest of the house, still talking in concerned tones.

  She waited a few more moments just to make sure no one else was coming through. Then she climbed stiffly out from under the bed and hurried toward the sliding glass doors that opened up from the bedroom onto the back garden.

  Just as she unlatched the door, she heard the hard footsteps of the security team a room or two away. She slid the door open as they came through the antechamber, and when they burst into the bedroom, she was running out into the rain.

  The wall at the back of the yard was so close, but so tall. Could she clear it? Would they shoot at her? Were there dogs?

  She had never run with such determination, and ye
t her stiff, trembling legs slowed her. Her purse, with the strap over her shoulder, knocked awkwardly against her hip. The grass was sodden and slick, and she left a heel behind, caught in the soft turf, then the other. Her vision pounded black at the edges.

  There was a sculpture by the wall. A large dove, wings spread.

  She leaped onto the base of it and climbed onto a wing, her hands trembling and wet. Pops sounded around her.

  She threw herself at the wall. The edge drove the air from her lungs.

  She scrabbled for purchase and felt the bricks scrape the flesh of her forearms as she clawed herself forward.

  She threw her body weight over the wall, the bricks catching at the tops of her thighs, landed hard and wrong, and ran as hard as she could, her bare feet splashing in startlingly cold water. At the end of the street was her black taxi, waiting. She flung herself at it, tore open the door, threw herself into the back, and slammed the door.

  The taxi driver looked back, his face melancholy and disinterested.

  “Drive,” she gasped. “A thousand. A thousand dollars. Go.”

  His eyes registered his comprehension.

  He drove.

  Then she saw the blood streaming from the bullet wound in her thigh.

  They started off fast, and the car fishtailed for an instant before the driver got it under control.

  “Where to?” the driver called back to Helen.

  “I don’t know—just drive!” She couldn’t even process what might be happening behind them. She was too busy trying to figure out what the hell she was going to do about the bullet wound in her thigh. Her trembling hands hovered over the blood-bubbling hole.

  Sirens sounded behind them.

  “I’m not doing a full-on chase,” the taxi driver yelled. “I’m not risking my license.”

  “Yes, you are,” Helen shouted. “Another thousand dollars for you, okay? Just don’t let me get caught! Please!”

  In the rear-view mirror, she saw his eyebrows come together, but he kept driving.

  They sailed around a corner, the back of the car swerving in the inches-deep water.

  “It’s too deep,” the driver called out. “We can’t go through floods.”

  “So get us to higher ground!” Helen yelled back.

  Was there a bullet in her thigh? Did she need to get it out? Had they hit an artery? She wished she knew anything about first aid.

  The car swerved violently, tossing her to the other side of the passenger compartment. She shrieked. The car swerved again and she scrabbled for the handle on the roof, over the door. Her trembling hands were slick with rain and blood. They slid right off and she collided with the other door.

  Car horns sounded, too close—frighteningly close.

  Helen looked forward and saw headlights coming right at them. She bit back another shriek. It would have been pointless.

  The driver’s arms were stiff between his body and the wheel as he strained to maintain control of the car.

  Other vehicles flashed past close on both sides.

  If they got caught… if they got caught, it was all over. Her breath came harsh in her throat. Jail. And death. Death without her black pill.

  Something big flashed in the darkness and collided with the door of the car with an immense muffled crash.

  20 Days, 3 Hours

  The car slipped and spun, then regained traction.

  “You’re paying for that!” the driver yelled.

  “Fine! Don’t get me killed, dammit!”

  Then sirens flew past. She saw the flashing lights go by as the taxi whipped to the left, going up, above something and under cover. They skidded to a halt.

  Helen tried to catch her breath. She held up her shaking hands. They were covered in blood.

  “Are they gone?” Helen asked. The car was oddly quiet now that it was stopped. “Are we safe?”

  “They went past,” the driver said. “You’re paying for that, I’m telling you!”

  “Fine! Look, I’m bleeding everywhere. Get me to 3rd and Preston.” It was where the twenty-four-pawn shop was. Egemon knew this world. He would know what to do.

  The driver said nothing, just unexpectedly got out of the car—was he going to leave her here alone?

  She turned to look anxiously out of the windows. He opened the trunk, then closed it again, now with a red satchel in his hand. He got in the car and threw the satchel into the back seat: a first aid kit.

  She struggled to calm down and focus on her task as he drove. The kit included large gauze pads and surgical tape. After slipping around in a copious amount of blood as she tried to examine her leg, she figured out that she’d been shot in the back of the thigh and the bullet had gone straight through the front.

  She put layers of gauze pads on both sides and wrapped them in all the surgical tape. Everyone in action movies said to apply pressure. She pushed as hard as she could with one hand on each side of the wound. How hard was too hard? Or was there any such thing?

  Sweat or rain ran down her back and chest.

  The taxi stopped. “We’re here,” the driver announced, eying her unsympathetically in the rear-view mirror.

  She stared out of the window at the pawn shop. She was still in disguise and beaten all to hell, not to mention barefoot and covered in blood. She would have to walk twenty yards under street lamps. Rough men loitered under the awning of the pawn shop, and they would remember her. Soon she could have a price on her head, and then they might turn her in—even if she paid them off now. No, it was better if they didn’t see her.

  She turned to the taxi driver. “I’ll give you another thousand dollars if you’ll go in there and ask Egemon to chase off those men.”

  He looked at her, his dark eyes reluctant. He would go home tonight having had the single most profitable day of his life, but he surely didn’t want to leave his car in the possession of a madwoman. His car was his life.

  “Two thousand more,” she said.

  He put up his hand.

  She handed him her cash card from her purse, and he scanned it with his e-paper in the front, then handed it back.

  He got out slowly, the car shifting as he took his weight off the suspension, and trudged out to the pawn shop. Moments later, he came back out of the shop. Egemon followed him.

  The pawn shop owner said a few words to the men outside and gave them cash cards. They cleared off. By then, the taxi driver was back at the car with Helen.

  Helen got out, and when she put weight on the injured leg, she bit back a cry of pain. She trembled from head to toe, and all her muscles felt weak. As the cab pulled away, she looked at Egemon there in front of the shop, four lanes away. He might as well have been a mirage in the desert.

  He saw her across the street, and an expression of concern flashed across his face. He jogged across the street to her and looked her up and down. The expensive dress sodden with rain, the bare feet, the blood dripping off her hands and her leg.

  He didn’t say anything. He just picked her up with strength she hadn’t suspected.

  “You’re going to get blood all over you,” she protested.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Shhh.”

  She closed her eyes and unashamedly clung to him and his warmth. A few moments later, she heard the jingle of the bell on the pawn shop’s door, and it almost sounded like coming home.

  Egemon took her into the back of the shop, where a bed, a desk, and a couple of chairs were clustered in the other corner opposite the antique toys. He set her gently on the bed and went to make a phone call while she took off her wig and removed what was left of her disguise with makeup wipes from her purse.

  In short order, a friend—or perhaps relation—of Egemon’s named Zara arrived. The stout woman, her graying hair in a bun, looked over Helen’s many injuries and tsk-tsked. To Helen’s relief, she asked no questions, only murmured about how dangerous things could be “out there” and then lapsed into soft singing in Greek.

  As Zara treated
her, Helen realized that she was a wreck. The skin on her hands, forearms, and thighs was torn up from climbing over the wall, and her ankle was sore and swollen from the jump—not to mention the bullet wound.

  Zara had also brought her a change of clothes. They were comfortable and soft and that was what Helen wanted right then more than anything in the world.

  When she came out of the back room in the new clothes, Egemon was leaning against the counter with his arms folded, his e-cig dangling from his lower lip. Zara was tidying up her medical supplies.

  Egemon shook his head at Helen and took the e-cig out of his mouth. “All right, Ms. Robin Hood. Look, you are pissing them off, okay? You are embarrassing them, and to them, there is nothing worse you can do. They will stop at nothing to get you now. Maybe you need to retire. You have not done enough yet?”

  Helen shook her head. She felt sick down to her bones. “There’s no retiring for me. Just going till I can’t go anymore.”

  He gave her a long look, his dark eyes drilling into hers. “Well, you will have to take a break until that leg gets better. You cannot run for a while. Not for at least three or four weeks.”

  She looked away. Not for three or four weeks meant never again.

  Zara brought Helen some extra prescription pain pills, which she accepted with thanks and a warm smile. Zara made her feel mothered in a wonderfully comfortable way. Spontaneously, Helen offered the other woman a hug, and Zara squeezed her with a gentle “Paidi mou.” Helen took it as an endearment.

  Turning to Egemon, Helen offered him her hand. He took it with a questioning look.

  “I may not be able to keep doing what I’ve been doing,” she said. “I’m not sure what I’m going to do next, actually. But I may not see you again. I just wanted to thank you for everything.”