Loot

by Jude Watson

  Carlotta was dressed in a pink satin gown with silver trim. Silver shoes peeked out from underneath the hem, and a blue spangled wrap was tossed around her shoulders. Gems glittered at her neck and wrist and sparkled on her knobby fingers. Her unnaturally raven-black hair was drawn into a severe bun.

  She leaned back and looked at them with hooded eyes. “It’s time to talk business. Oh, don’t look so innocent!” she said impatiently. “I know your father and mother stole my moonstones.” She narrowed her eyes. “It was the night of the blue moon. The night of the prophecy — my prophecy. My fate. They stole it for themselves, and I hope they suffered for it.”

  “Stop the car,” March yelled to the driver. He felt tears ball his throat, and he pushed against the feeling, pushed it back against an invisible wall.

  “Keep driving, Samuel,” Carlotta Grimstone called. She turned to March fiercely. “Remember this: I make the rules.”

  “Why don’t you say what you want to say,” Jules said, steel in her voice. “And leave the insults and the threats out of it.”

  “He got rid of the moonstones that very night,” Carlotta Grimstone went on. “I know that much. Almost ten years went by. I never found them. Blue moon after blue moon went by … You know what a blue moon is, don’t you? Two full moons in a month. Rare, and magic. That’s where Merlin’s moonstones glean their power….”

  March’s eyes flicked to Jules. The woman was crazy.

  “When I had them, they gave me dreams … terrible dreams.” Carlotta gripped her satin evening purse. “I saw my death, again and again! But at least they pointed me to a fate I could avoid. It turns out death can be cheated if you see it coming. Now I fear that death is coming again. My only chance is the next blue moon.”

  “Somebody call the psycho ward; an inmate is missing,” Darius murmured.

  She ignored him. “Your father believed in their power,” she said to March and Jules. “That’s why he was trying to steal them back. It is a terrible thing to know your fate. He knew that, just as I did.” She shuddered. “Terrible …”

  She seemed to go away for a moment, her eyes unfocused and haunted. “The moonstones have no mercy,” she whispered. “Do you know what I mean?”

  “No,” March said. He could feel individual hairs sticking up on the back of his neck.

  She leaned back against the seat again and looked down at March and Jules. “You never have dreams?”

  March felt Jules start. He felt a jolt of fear, something a swimmer might feel as a dark shape moved underwater close to him. How did this woman know what haunted him? “Everyone has dreams. So what?”

  Her eyes glittered with contempt. “Let’s cut to the chase. What I’m betting is that Alfred McQuin knew exactly where all seven moonstones are. You do, too. It takes a thief to catch a thief. I want to hire you.”

  “We’re not thieves,” Jules said.

  “And that is why you’re running from the police.”

  “What do you mean, lady?” Darius asked. “We were just taking a walk.”

  She eyed him, and then her glance lighted on Izzy before she gave a dismissive shrug. “I don’t care who you two are. So don’t speak. This one,” she said, pointing at Jules, “comes down from the ceiling like a spider. This one” — she moved her finger to March — “is onstage, opening his mouth like a fish and not singing. And then the lights go out, and that ridiculously vulgar necklace that ridiculously vulgar woman had, with my moonstones in it — poof — it disappears. And you are innocent? Please. I’ll tell Samuel to pull over and we’ll find a police officer to laugh at your story.”

  “What do you want?” March asked.

  “Ah.” She nodded at him. “Good. To the point, like a thief with something to bargain. I want my moonstones. All seven of them. I want them in one week. By the night of the blue moon.”

  “What makes you think we —”

  “And I’ll pay a million dollars for each one.”

  March swallowed. “Uh …”

  “But only if I get all seven.”

  A streetlight caught her eyes, and he saw the desperate need in them.

  “What if we don’t know where they are?”

  “I think you do,” she said. “You are Alfred McQuin’s progeny. You must have inherited some of his skills, not to mention his penchant for taking what does not belong to him. This is tediously simple. Catch up. The moonstones are mine. I want them. Here is my private number,” she said, thrusting a piece of paper into March’s hands. “Call me when you decide. Now get out. I want to go home and watch TV. CSI is on.”

  The limousine screeched to a stop. They tumbled out.

  “What was that about?” Darius asked, dazed.

  “Seven million dollars,” Jules and March said together.

  Jules looked around the dirty, abandoned platform. “Decent place for a pitch, but a lousy hideout.”

  March pointed to the graffiti on the opposite wall. MATT HENNEBERRY COME HOME DOMINICK PH. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing.”

  They sat inside the train car, on the touristy fleece blankets they’d bought in a gift shop. Izzy unpacked the Chinese takeout. Nobody said anything as they passed cartons and chopsticks. The night lay heavy on them. But they were hungry anyway.

  “I had it in my hands,” Jules said, spearing a dumpling.

  “We blew it,” March said.

  Izzy scooped up some rice. “What happened to you, Jules?”

  Jules chewed her dumpling and swallowed. “Oscar was watching the group home,” she said. “I saw the car on the next block over. Same dark green Audi that was at the cemetery. Remember, March?”

  March nodded. He remembered seeing the car, but he had never noticed it in the neighborhood. That is, if Jules was telling the truth.

  “I was looking in the windows when Oscar got back. Pass the sauce, Izzy? The next thing I knew, I was thrown into the backseat.” Jules dunked her second dumpling. “He made me a deal. Help him, and he’d help me. We’d do one job; he’d split the proceeds.” She popped the food in her mouth.

  “So you went.”

  “There wasn’t a choice involved,” Jules said. “My hands were tied. Literally.”

  March looked at her face. He didn’t know whether to believe her.

  She saw that he didn’t trust her, and her face darkened. She concentrated on spearing a spring roll. “He took me to some swanky apartment in the city. He kept most of the rooms locked.”

  “Could you find it again?”

  “Don’t think so … I was tossed on the floor of the car. He pulled right into a parking garage, and we took some back stairs up to the apartment. He never let me see anything. Shades were always drawn.”

  “Scary,” Izzy whispered. She shivered.

  “Yeah. It was.”

  “You did it, though,” March said. “You pulled off the first heist.”

  “Oscar made me practice with the vacuum pack in the apartment,” Jules said. “It was two floors, so he set up a harness and had me suck up stones hanging from the landing. He had the uniforms, the tools; he’d already paid off the night doorman next door so we got away over the roof…. I hate to say it, but it was sorta brilliant.”

  “Yeah, because Alfie planned it,” March said.

  “You mean Oscar stole a plan of Alfie’s?”

  March held her gaze. “Or you stole it from me.”

  Everyone stopped chewing. March and Jules stared each other down.

  “I didn’t.” Jules spoke the words quietly. There was no bluster, no anger in her tone. “And if you’re not going to believe me, forget it. I’m gone.”

  Now everyone stopped breathing.

  When you don’t know what to do, slow a moment down.

  March tried to push past the hurt and the anger at Jules, past the scared feeling and the ache of missing his dad that lay so deep in his heart, all that confusion and mess, and find something real and true. Looking straight at her,
straight into her steady gaze, he realized something.

  That thing that had been missing? That person who wasn’t there?

  It wasn’t his mom. It was Jules. All along, she’d been that shadow.

  It wasn’t like he remembered her. But he knew her. And he knew she wasn’t lying.

  “Okay,” he said. “I believe you.”

  Jules gave a short nod, as if they’d made a deal. “Okay.”

  The oxygen seemed to flood back into the space, and Izzy smiled. Darius picked up his chopsticks. “So did Oscar split the take?”

  Jules made a sour face. “No. He said he needed it for expenses. I think he’s going to fence a few gems at a time for safety’s sake. I knew he was going to sell me out. I figured it was better to steal the Widow’s Knot from him and take my chances.”

  “Then we popped up, and everything went wrong,” March said.

  “Listen to the two of you,” Darius said around a mouthful of kung pao chicken. “Doom, meet gloom. Don’t you realize that we almost got away with it?”

  “Almost isn’t good enough,” March said. “We have squat.”

  Darius shook his head. “Not the way I see it. Jules got her hands on the jewels for a second. March figured out a plan to get us in and get us out, and even how to steal the piece. Maybe would have done it if Jules hadn’t shown up. Almost is pretty good for your first heist when we’re a bunch of kids, wouldn’t you say?”

  Jules grinned. “Watch out. We’ve got an optimist in our midst.”

  Darius smiled back, a genuine grin that made March realize for the first time how handsome he was. “Face it — you two have talent. And some old bat-smack-crazy lady offered us a deal for seven million. I figure I’m ahead.”

  “The moonstones,” March said. “Seven chances to be rich.” He reached into his pocket. He held up the moonstone. “Six to go.”

  The stone flipped from his fingers, almost as if it had jumped. It spun in the air. It seemed to capture every bit of the dim light, drawing it in and leaving them in sudden darkness. It hung in the air. March felt an eerie thrill.

  Then it tumbled onto the blanket, and it turned into just another gemstone rolling against a paper carton of Chinese food.

  “Whoa,” Darius said. “That was … weird. Wasn’t it?”

  They all looked at one another, then down at the moonstone.

  “Where’d you get it?” Jules asked.

  “Alfie. The night he died.” March squeezed his eyes shut. He couldn’t think of that last moment, the one heartbeat between Alfie dying and being alive, that hinge between having his father and not having him.

  All of his crying had taken place when he was alone. He wanted to keep it that way.

  “He was fading out,” he said, “and he said, ‘Follow the falls to day.’ ”

  “What does that mean?” Jules asked.

  “No idea. He was pretty out of it by then. Right before that, he told me to wait a month before I found you.”

  She frowned. “Why?”

  He shrugged. “No clue.”

  The pain of the memory was still searing. Him kneeling next to Alfie, right there, and Alfie looking at him, fading but with that last fierce light in his gaze, and March was saying, Don’t die, and Alfie was saying, simply, NO, getting out that last word in his last breath. The word was no, which didn’t seem right at all. Alfie had said such a big YES to everything.

  Jules picked up the moonstone and held it up. “So we have one from the Amsterdam heist.”

  March nodded. “Oscar has three. One from the vacuum heist you did for him, and you tossed him two tonight.”

  “Yeah, I guess I should have let him strangle you,” Jules said.

  “My point is that I’d be surprised if bat-smack Lady Grimstone didn’t already offer somebody else the challenge to gather the moonstones,” March said. “She wouldn’t rely on a bunch of kids, would she? We’re just a backup plan.”

  “And Alfie left you some kind of list of where the moonstones are?” Jules asked.

  March nodded. “Plus suggestions for methods. Izzy decoded the target list. There are seven moonstones and six heists. Alfie did one in Amsterdam. You did Michelle Westlake, and we all bungled Dolores Leon.”

  “All this for moonstones?” Jules asked. She held it up. “Pretty, but it’s not a diamond.”

  “They’re not just any moonstones,” March said. “They’re magic.”

  Jules sputtered a laugh. “Right.”

  “It doesn’t matter if you think it’s stupid,” March pointed out. “Grimstone believes it. I’m guessing that ten years ago, Alfie sold them to his fence. They were broken up and made into other jewelry.”

  Jules drummed her fingers on her leg. “But what do we do now? Where do we go? The police are going to analyze all the security footage from the museum. They’re going to ID us eventually — it won’t be hard.”

  “I never thought about that,” Izzy said in a small voice. “All those cameras in the museum … they saw us.”

  They were all silent for a minute. They thought of police and judges and jails.

  “There’s only one thing that can get us clear,” March said. “One thing that will make us disappear. Accept the deal.”

  “Seven million dollars,” Izzy said dreamily. “We could go anywhere in the world. Be anything. And have cupcakes for breakfast.”

  “And a yacht,” Darius said.

  “Do you think we could do it?” Jules asked. “Really pull off the rest of the heists? What about Oscar?”

  “That would be the first heist,” March decided. “That’s the only way Grimstone would know we’re serious. We’d get all three of his at once. Wouldn’t you like to do that? Tie him up in knots?”

  She grinned. “You bet.”

  “Even if it means you have to be a thief?”

  Jules chewed her lip. “I guess I already am.”

  “We’re the throwaway kids,” Darius said. “People think we can’t do anything. But we could do this. All of us together make something more than all of us apart, right?”

  “The Throwaways,” Izzy said. “I always wanted to be in a gang.”

  March felt his skin buzzing, his blood alive and racing. A door opened inside his mind and possibility rushed in. Maybe there really was another way to live. Maybe they could really do this.

  “No more adults,” March said. “No more group homes. No more social services. With seven million, we can figure out how to live the way we want. Are we in?”

  Silently, they all bumped fists.

  “The Throwaway Gang is born,” March said. “Let’s make a plan.”

  March spread out Alfie’s list on the blanket. Scrawled next to the list were the names Izzy had deciphered.

  “Here’s Alfie’s list,” March explained to Jules. “Methods and targets. Now we know what he was after. Moonstones.”

  Jules frowned. “What if Oscar didn’t steal the list? What if they were working together?”

  “Alfie liked to work alone,” March said. “But maybe he owed him because Oscar went to prison. When he got out, maybe he found Alfie.”

  “What happened that night in Amsterdam?” Jules pushed her food away. “Could Oscar have been there, too?”

  March thought about the figure on the street.

  “Somebody followed me, but I don’t know if it was Oscar.” Now that he’d seen Oscar in person, he wasn’t sure. He’d only caught glimpses in Amsterdam, and he’d been scared. He didn’t have a clear memory.

  “Tell us what happened. Right from the beginning.”

  “My bike was stolen, so I was late. Just one minute, but that can mean everything in a heist, you know? I got there and didn’t see Alfie. Then I saw someone moving along the roof. I looked down at my phone to check the time. When I looked up again, Alfie was standing close to the edge of the roof, and —”

  Jules stopped him by holding up her hand. “Hang on. Did you hear what you just said? You saw someone moving on the roof. You mean
you didn’t identify the person as Alfie?”

  “Of course it was Alfie; the next time I looked up, I saw him clearly.”

  Jules blew out an exasperated breath. “I worked at the Stick and Rag. I know about what you think you see and what’s actually there.”

  “Like tonight,” Darius said. “We all thought it was you on the cloud swing when it was dark, but it was just a bunch of lights.”

  “It’s called misdirection,” Jules said. “So think, March. Did you see Alfie the first time, or someone else?”

  March thought about the shadow. It was impossible to say whether it was Alfie. He just assumed it was. And the next time he looked … it was only a second or two. Would Alfie have time, if he were that shadow, to get to where March saw him standing?

  No.

  It was too far.

  There had been someone else on the roof that night.

  The knowledge lit up his brain, the realization a spear of agony. “It wasn’t him!” he cried. “The first shadow wasn’t him. I should have known it!”

  “And what would you have done?”

  “Warned him!”

  “Don’t you think he already knew someone was up there with him?” Jules asked. “Why do you think he threw you the moonstone? And what about the bike? What if Oscar stole it so that you’d be late? What if you were meant to arrive after Alfie was dead?”

  March could only sit blinking at her. Jules’s gray eyes were holding his gaze. He realized that she was sitting just as he was, cross-legged, her fisted hands on her knees. It was like facing a mirror.

  The information seemed to come in bewildering bursts. Like all those TV shows in countries where he couldn’t speak the language. He’d sit on the edge of a hotel bed, trying to pick up a word that made sense.

  He had thought one thing, and yet things were going on that night that he didn’t know.

  “You think Oscar pushed Alfie off the roof.” The world was tipping; he was sliding; he couldn’t find a place to hang on.

  Jules’s eyes were on his face. “Maybe. Or maybe he really did slip.”