Cutting Loose

by Westlake, Samantha

  The bartender’s face didn’t betray any expression, but even that blankness gave some indication about his feelings towards me as he fetched the wineglass. I did my best to ignore his expression, took a sip of the wine (decidedly mediocre; he hadn’t given me the good stuff), and turned, looking around the restaurant and pretending that everything was okay, that my life wasn’t in the process of falling apart.

  The time was only barely past five, so there weren’t too many seats filled in the restaurant. There were a few senior citizens slowly eating soup for dinner, and a couple tables of younger men and women out for what looked like a company-sanctioned happy hour. Their outfits – button-down shirts, ties, and Dockers on the men, blouses and patterned dresses on the young women – were those of yuppies anywhere. They might as well be indistinguishable from the people I’d worked with in my own job.

  Until today. I idly wondered how many days of absence would be tolerated before I was officially fired.

  My eyes fell on another couple of men sitting at a table nearby. I couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying, but they seemed to be the most interesting of the people to watch, so I settled on them.

  One of them looked significantly younger than the other; I’d guess that he was only a few years older than me. He had dusky skin and hair that was nearly black, which contrasted attractively against his brilliantly white teeth that occasionally flashed when he smiled. He wore a dark navy suit, almost black, that looked to be perfectly fitted and tailored to his form. He seemed to be having a good time, leaning forward and occasionally gesturing as he talked to his companion. He looked like he was very familiar with the same level of wealth my family had – but unlike me, he seemed very comfortable and confident in that wealth.

  I turned my attention to the other man at that table. He looked significantly older – I guessed that he was in his mid-to-late fifties, judging by the gray hair around his temples and his voluminous salt-and-pepper mustache, giving him a permanent frown. He also wore a suit, although his stretched a bit tightly around an expansive waistline. Something about his appearance gave me the impression of a retired banker, one who had grown fat and happy on the profits of a many-year bull run without any major recessions. He didn’t seem to be speaking as much as his younger companion, but he nodded along and looked like he agreed with the words of the younger.

  Sipping my wine, I watched them. I tried to guess what they might be discussing. Maybe they were lawyers, planning a new court case. Maybe they were bankers, discussing their latest deals. Whatever it was, they both seemed happy and enthusiastic, comfortable in their wealth and privilege.

  I felt the black clouds of despair starting to creep closer from where they’d been lurking, just over the horizon. Had I really just decided to throw all of my family’s wealth away? I could still go back – it had only been a day. If I got my bank cards replaced, ordered a new cell phone, they’d probably never figure out that anything had gone wrong-

  No, that wasn’t the case. I knew my mother would sniff it out. I could never manage to keep any secrets from her, as much as I tried. That was part of what drove me crazy, filled my head with the temptation of leaving. I didn’t have any control over my life, couldn’t make my own choices without her interjecting and deciding whether or not I’d be allowed to do so.

  No, the only option open to me had been running. I was smart, capable, I told myself. I could make this work.

  The two men seemed to be wrapping up their conversation now. They’d both ordered already, and their plates were mostly cleared and pushed off to the side so they could continue talking. Now, the younger man was speaking with confidence, rather than the agitation that he’d shown earlier, and the older was mostly just nodding in agreement. They seemed to have reached a consensus.

  The younger man stood up, smiled, extended his hand across the table to the older. The older man also smiled and stood up, reached out. They shook hands – and that’s when I spotted it. If I’d not been looking right at the younger man’s well-manicured fingers, if I’d finished my glass of wine, I might not have spotted it. Even now, it happened so quickly that I almost couldn’t believe what I’d seen.

  The younger man took the elder’s right hand with his own, and then dropped his left hand on top. With that brief instant of cover, I saw the fingers of his left hand move dexterously – and then, as he pulled his hands back, the older man’s expensive gold-and-silver watch dropped right off his wrist.

  The watch fell right into the waiting fingers of the younger man and vanished in an instant.

  I sat there staring, stunned. My mouth started to open, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak or call out. It had to be some sort of joke, right? No one would steal somebody’s watch in public, so confidently, after eating dinner across from him and talking with him for the entire time?

  The younger man smiled, stepped forward towards the exit. On the way, he had a moment of presumed clumsiness and bumped into the older man. This time, I only saw it because my suspicions were up, because I was watching with heightened suspicion.

  As the two men brushed against each other, the younger man’s fingers again slipped where they didn’t belong – this time, into the elder’s pocket. They lifted up a second later, and I caught the flash of keys held delicately between two fingers. The younger man had just lifted the elder’s keys!

  Surely, this wouldn’t escape notice. Wouldn’t the older man with the graying mustache need those keys to drive home? Oblivious for the moment, he stepped towards the exit.

  The thief lingered behind for a moment, looking down and fiddling with the keys that he’d stolen. I tried to peer more closely without raising his suspicion, but I couldn’t see exactly what he was doing. It looked like he had fished a little box from his pocket and was sticking one of the keys in it, as if he could unlock it? That didn’t make sense. It seemed not to work, as he quickly gave up, stuffed the box back into his pocket – and then, with a jangle, dropped the keys onto the floor.

  “Rudy! Wait a second!” the thief called out. This was the first time I’d heard his voice clearly, not just indistinct sounds too soft for my ears to interpret. He had a deep, strong voice, the kind that would inspire confidence and camaraderie in any group. All the better for a thief, I realized with a shock.

  The older man – Rudy – turned back. “Yes?”

  “Are these yours?” The thief bent forward, picked up the set of keys that he’d just dropped on the floor. “You wouldn’t want to leave these behind!”

  “Oh my!” Rudy rushed back, retrieved his keys from the thief. “They must have fallen out of my pocket. Thank you for noticing!”

  The thief smiled back innocently, as if he hadn’t been the one to lift them in the first place! My mouth dropped open at his brazenness. He acted as if he’d done this a thousand times before, as if he didn’t care in the slightest that he’d just committed a crime! What would he do if Rudy noticed that his watch was missing?

  The thief patted Rudy on the back, as if reassuring him that anyone could lose their keys, it wasn’t a big deal. His eyes swept around the restaurant – and then landed on me and stopped!

  I knew that I should look away, force a neutral expression onto my face, pretend to only be vaguely interested in them as background scenery while I drank my wine. But for a split second, my face remained locked in its expression of shock, and the thief noticed. His eyes lingered on me for just a fraction of a second too long before he turned away, walked out of the restaurant with Rudy, chatting easily to him.

  I turned back to the bar, wrapped my fingers around my wine glass to keep them from shaking. I already had enough on my plate with my very uncertain future. I didn’t need to get involved in anything else-

  “Hi there.”

  I nearly leapt off my bar stool at the words, spoken unexpectedly from just to my left. I turned in surprise – and there he was, sitting casually next to me as if he’d been there the entire time. I hadn’t even heard him approa
ch.

  The thief. He looked at me with dark eyes. No smile to show off those white teeth now – he looked suspicious, almost dangerous. I felt acutely aware of how alone I was, how no one else knew that I was even in this city.

  My mouthful of wine turned to vinegar, but I forced myself to swallow.

  Just when I thought it wasn’t possible, my day still managed to get worse.

  Chapter Three

  * * *

  “Hi there,” the man sitting beside me at the bar said, and I tried to keep my fingers from shaking in fright.

  He was a thief. I’d just seen him steal a man’s expensive-looking watch, and then do something to that man’s keys. I ought to run away from him, maybe distract him long enough for me to call the police-

  -on what? I didn’t have a cell phone.

  New plan. I could distract him and then go to the bathroom – and maybe find a phone back there? I could borrow it from another woman here, if she decided to use the bathroom at the same time as me. Maybe I could get him to go to the bathroom, and I could ask the bartender to call the police. If I ordered him a bunch of drinks, would I still have to pay for them, if they were ordered in the service of catching a thief? Somehow, I didn’t think I’d get off the hook on the bill.

  I realized belatedly that the man had said something to me, and he was waiting for me to respond. “Sorry,” I said. “What was that?”

  “I asked what you were doing here, all by your lonesome,” the man said. The words could have sounded suspicious, threatening, but they were defused by his smile. It had come back from wherever it momentarily vanished to, lighting up his face and softening my suspicions despite what I knew of him.

  “I’m…” What could I say? “…just stopping in for a drink.” There. Not a lie, not detailed enough for him to catch me in a lie.

  “Really.” He didn’t sound convinced. “You work around here?”

  “No.”

  “You live around here?”

  “No.”

  “Do you always give one-word answers to innocent questions?”

  “No – hey!”

  He smirked at me, looking inordinately smug that he’d caught me. “I’m just not too interested in talking to someone like you,” I said, feeling stung.

  “Someone like me?” He placed his hand on his chest, leaned back a little, faked an offended expression. “Why, I’m hurt. What do you mean by that? Are you talking about the color of my skin?”

  “No – I’m talking about what you did to that guy! Rudy!” I gestured towards the table where he’d been sitting.

  “Struck a business deal?” He did such a good job of faking blank confusion that I almost started doubting what I’d seen with my own eyes. “You refuse to talk to businessmen?”

  “I mean the watch!” I could have easily missed it, if I hadn’t been paying attention – for just an instant, his eyes widened, his mouth paused slightly in framing his next witty retort, his smile wavered ever so slightly. His mask was back in place before my next heartbeat, but I knew what I saw. “I saw what you did with his keys,” I went on, lowering my voice to a hiss. “I saw you steal his watch. You’re a thief, not a businessman!”

  I waited for him to deny it, to tell me that I must have been mistaken, or maybe to just storm off as a way of escaping.

  The man, however, did none of those things. He glanced past me, raised a finger. I felt a little hurt by how quickly the bartender was there, bobbing at attention. “Macallan twenty-five, neat,” he said.

  A couple seconds later, a heavy tumbler was in his hand with a couple splashes of dark amber liquid inside. The thief lifted the glass to his lips, inhaled the scent of the whiskey, then took a sip. The entire time, his eyes never left my face.

  “What do you want, then?” he asked, his tone flat and even.

  “What do you mean?”

  No smile now. “Are you interested in a payout? Are you stalling while you wait for the police to show up? Are there grand thoughts of justice swimming inside that pretty head of yours?”

  “I…” I hadn’t thought about this at all. “I haven’t called the police.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Forgive me if I don’t take you at your word.”

  “It’s the truth!” I glared at him, hating that I felt tears starting to brim up, unwanted, at the corners of my eyes. “I don’t want anything from you! I don’t want anything from anyone! That’s why I’m in all this mess, and I hate it!” The tears were emerging, and I turned away from him, reaching up to angrily swipe at my face in a futile effort to clear them.

  I half expected the thief to leave, to take this opportunity to make good on his escape. When I lowered my sleeve, however, I saw his slightly blurry figure still there, watching me with the barest hint of a smile on his lips. He looked like an ornithologist who just discovered an extremely rare and unusual species of bird, and was watching closely to see what it might do next.

  “Stop looking at me like that,” I said, my voice a little muffled by the tightness in my throat.

  He pushed my wine glass a little closer to me. “Finish that.” He turned towards the bartender. “Another one of those for her.”

  “I don’t want another.”

  “You need one. Unless you’d care for some whiskey?” He tilted his glass towards me.

  Irate, I wanted to piss this guy off, make him stop patronizing me. I reached out and snatched the glass from his hand and threw down the entire remainder of whiskey in a single big swallow. It burned like fire in my mouth and I nearly spat it out, choking a little and feeling my face redden as I forced it down.

  The man looked a little sad. “That was a hundred dollars of good scotch,” he sighed.

  “Well, it tasted like crap.” My words were a little spoiled by a coughing fit. If the man had patted me on the back, I might have smacked him, but he kept his hand clear. “And I’ve got my own problems. Stop trying to help me.”

  “What problems are those?”

  I should have told him to piss off, told him that I really had called the police. But in that moment, feeling more vulnerable and alone than I’d ever been before, even when I’d been at my most miserable from my family’s machinations, I couldn’t keep it all contained.

  I broke down. In between glasses of wine that the bartender kindly kept refilling every time this man wiggled a finger, I told the thief everything about the last eight hours. From the dropped muffin to running away, to my car breaking down, to ending up in this restaurant, spending my last few dollars and not knowing what I was even going to do tonight, much less with the rest of my crappy life.

  And although the thief might be an objectively awful human being for committing crimes, he turned out to be a pretty good listener. He didn’t interrupt me with questions or to offer empty platitudes, but he nodded along, and I could tell from his face when I’d occasionally lost him and had to go back to explain my thought process (or lack thereof). He ordered another one of his stupid glasses of pure fire in liquid form, but just sipped slowly at it as I blubbered through my tale and gulped down another couple glasses of wine, not thinking about how I’d pay the bill.

  I finally finished, dropping the most recent napkin that had grown sodden with my tears. I added it to the small, wet clump of other napkins that fell in service, piling up on the bar top. They formed a small mountain, white and soggy against the wood of the bar. I looked at the man, feeling emptied by the outpouring. It was somewhere between catharsis and bleak existential horror.

  “Those problems,” I said. “Got any fancy answers to that?”

  The thief started to open his mouth but paused as the little bell hanging above the restaurant’s front door dinged. He looked over my shoulder at the entrance and his mouth snapped shut, cutting off whatever he’d been about to say.

  I turned to see what had thrown him off. Another man had entered, but he didn’t look particularly interesting. Tall and solidly built, he could have been anywhere from weather-beaten twenties to
well-kept forties. His sandy blond hair was trimmed short and messy without any element of style, and he wore a white shirt and gray slacks under a trench coat that both looked a bit rumpled, as if he’d taken a nap in them. His blue eyes had a look of paternal disappointment, as if his son just told him that he’d failed algebra for the second time.

  “Sawyer, what are you up to now?” asked the newcomer, his attention mostly on the thief next to me. He glanced at me without really seeing me, his eyes sliding over me as if I was just another piece of furniture.

  The thief – Sawyer – responded with a gleaming smile, too big and broad to ever be truthful. “Hello, Agent Eastman,” he replied, so innocent that butter would solidify in his mouth. “Stopping in for a drink after a long day’s work of catching criminals?”

  “You’re one to talk. Come on, Sawyer. We saw Guilford leave, and you’re in here. Doesn’t take a skilled detective to put the dots together.”

  “And that’s why they put you on the case, is it?” The insult went over the newcomer’s head, but I had to bite back a smile. Sawyer kept talking, not letting this blond Agent Eastman pick up on the witticism. “Come now, Eastman. I’m not up to anything suspicious.”

  Agent Eastman transferred his surly glare over to me. I felt a bit offended to be included in the same judgmental glare as Sawyer, but I didn’t have anything to say, so I just returned his stare. “And who’s this, then?”

  “She,” answered Sawyer, leaning on the pronoun, “is a candidate for my assistant. I’m here interviewing her.” He glared back at Eastman, adding to my own. “An interview that you are rudely interrupting.”

  I had no idea what Sawyer was talking about. An interview? Assistant? But I’d just spilled my guts to this man about all my problems, so maybe this was his attempt to throw me a bone. He and this newcomer, Agent Eastman (agent of what?) clearly had no love lost between them.

  Eastman kept up his frown as he looked between us, but I sensed him wavering. “Sawyer, don’t do anything stupid, okay?” he finally said, reaching up to rub at the bridge of his nose with two fingers. “I’ve got enough on my plate without having to deal with you, on top of everything else.”