Fear and Honor

by M. S. Parker

  I'd held him when he cried.

  We'd taken him back to our house then, but social services had come to get him the next day. I'd told him as he was being led to the car that we'd see each other in school, and things wouldn't change.

  Except they had.

  The day Bron walked out of my life, everything else fell apart.

  Not more than two hours after Bron left, Dad got a call from a friend who'd told him that their company had lost their pension. From there, it'd come out that Dad had invested our family savings with the same man. We'd lost everything.

  Things only snowballed from there.

  Mom and Dad fought constantly, and Bron was nowhere to be found. I'd asked all over high school, and even biked to the police station, but nobody would tell me anything.

  After two weeks, I'd come home from school to find my mother gone. Eventually, Dad and I found out that she'd run off with an investment banker. I hadn't seen her since, and I'd never even considered using my FBI connections to find her. She left me, and that was all I needed to know.

  Bron had never called, never come back to school. When my father started drinking heavily, all I'd wanted was to talk to my best friend. But he was nowhere to be found.

  Then, a month after my fifteenth birthday, Dad put a bullet in his head. He'd left me a letter saying he just couldn't deal.

  So I'd gone to live with my great-aunt in Detroit, knowing that I'd never see Bron again. And a part of me had been angry enough at him for not making contact that I was glad.

  Now that I had the police reports in front of me, I didn’t feel much better. It had taken me hours of searching through the unorganized archives to get a hold of his parents' case. I'd been out of the city before it'd gone to trial, but the thieves had been convicted.

  Bron had been at the trial, and I'd almost cried at the picture of him I found in a newspaper article. Him standing there, wearing an ill-fitting suit, his expression angry. His name wasn’t in the newspaper, but the article itself had identified Bron as a ward of the state.

  I'd figured out long ago that he must've been put into foster care. He hadn't had any other family. I just hadn't understood until I was much older that he'd probably been put in a different school district, which was why I hadn't seen him again. The only thing I still didn't have an explanation for was why he'd never tried to contact me after that day.

  I put in a request for his case file from social services and hoped they could tell me how my friend – the boy who'd once stayed up with me to watch for a meteor shower even though it was pouring rain – had turned into the kind of man who could waltz into a museum and steal millions of dollars’ worth of art.

  I hadn't even thought about him in years, but the thought of him like this broke my heart.

  “Agent Melendez! I thought I gave you strict orders not to spend the night here.”

  I raised my head to see Colman giving me a disapproving look.

  “It’s too soon for you to be pulling double shifts here. I don’t need a bright new agent suffering from burn out.”

  It was possibly the first one hundred percent professional thing he ever said to me, so I decided to honor it with an actual apology. “I’m sorry, Agent Gau. I just got caught up in this lead I was chasing.”

  He cracked a smile, reminding me that he could be a bit charming when he wasn’t being an obnoxious ass. I supposed he would've had to know how to turn it on at some point, or he would've been out of a job a long time ago.

  “Turn up anything good?”

  I shook my head, unwilling to rat out Bron just yet. Besides, all I had was my opinion that the man in the reflection I saw was the boy I'd once known. I'd need more proof than that before I could identify him.

  “Well, go home, shower, take a nap. I’ll see you around noon.”

  I nodded and shakily stood from where I had been huddled at my desk for hours. Every muscle and joint in my body protested the movement after being in the same position for so long. I tossed my coffee cups in the trash, grabbed my jacket, and headed out.

  By the time I walked the half mile to my shoebox of an apartment, the chilly air had woken me right up. I took one look at the front door of my building, then one at my car that hadn’t budged in at least a week. Less than two seconds later, I had my keys out and was warming up my vehicle.

  My destination? The CPS office. I didn't feel like sitting around forever and waiting for someone to call to tell me that the files I wanted weren't available.

  Besides, a little badge flashing never hurt anybody.

  Newly determined, I stepped on the gas, channeling my inner Benita. While I liked to think I could never quite reach her level of recklessness, I was far from timid behind the wheel.

  When the receptionist did finally appear from wherever she'd hidden until her official start time, I then had to fill out a visitor’s log, then be escorted through approximately one million file cabinets lining the halls like some sort of fortification, then finally be introduced to a harried-looking woman in charge. And it didn’t end there. She then took me down to the archives, which had approximately two million more filing cabinets.

  It was in that dark, cramped, dusty room that I was informed that I could probably find what I needed somewhere in the mess, but it wasn't guaranteed. Then she wished me luck and my one-woman search party for the files I needed ensued.

  Minutes ticked by, then hours, and I searched desperately for any scrap of what could have happened to my best friend. I knew I needed to get back to work by noon, but I couldn’t just leave empty-handed. I knew what I had seen on that security camera, and I needed to figure out this whole thing before anyone else did.

  And then, finally, I found it. Misfiled in the wrong 'M' drawer, I pulled out two blue folders stuffed with yellowing paper. I quickly navigated my way out of the depressing pseudo-basement, brushing what felt like layers of dust off of myself as I went. Nodding goodbye to the receptionist, I tried not to look like a half-terrified, half-giddy school girl. In my hands were the answers to questions I'd forgotten for a decade.

  The emptiness in me that I usually filled with work, work, work gnawed at my consciousness. Perhaps this was why I'd always felt like something was missing? Because I'd lost him without explanation?

  My shaking hands tore into the folder as soon as my car door closed. I couldn’t risk reading it at the station and having Benita find out. I read the case worker's notes first. She'd described him as withdrawn, moody, but also said that his responses hadn't been unexpected considering the circumstances. She'd recommended that he not have any contact with anyone from his past until the people who'd killed his parents had been found – as per the suggestion of the detectives investigating the case.

  Now I knew why he hadn't called at first.

  I moved on to the rest of the file. As expected, I saw thorough notes about Broderick’s first placement. They looked like a nice couple, but only a few weeks after Bron had been placed, the husband had developed cancer, and their three foster kids had to be relocated to different homes. Bron had been sent to a group home and had stayed there for quite a while before getting into a fight with one of the other kids. They had both been deemed threats to the other and moved.

  The next house he'd been assigned to had caught fire, and there'd been rumors of his involvement, though he'd denied it. At the next house, his arm had been broken, but he'd refused to say how. Three weeks after that, he disappeared. The subsequent missing person and runaway reports were half-hearted and vague. He'd been fifteen in an overloaded system, and there'd been no one to look out for him.

  I closed the files and closed my eyes. I was now almost completely sure that Bron was the man in the security footage. It'd only take some digging into his criminal history to confirm it.

  I was walking a fine line between betraying someone who'd once meant the world to me, and a career that I'd pursued to make things right.

  Shaking my head, I willed away my tears. Whatever the answe
r to my dilemma was, I doubted I would find it in the CPS parking lot. Besides, I needed to take a shower before Gau got wise to my extracurricular activities.

  I knew one thing for certain. Coming here had opened Pandora’s box, and I needed to prepare myself for everything that was almost definitely going to come tumbling out.

  Bron

  I sipped coffee, staring out the window at what I was fairly sure was the building devoted to the FBI white-collar crimes and fraud division. It actually hadn’t taken much research to discover the address. I supposed the white-collar division didn't really have as much to worry about as the ones that dealt with organized crime or things like that, but there were still plenty of criminals like me who didn't have my abhorrence of violence.

  I shook my head and forced myself to focus my thoughts. I was trying to see if I could catch sight of Karis as she went in. Not that I knew what I would do when I did see her.

  It had been more than a decade since I'd last seen the gangly girl from my childhood. The girl who'd given me my nickname, the nickname I'd never been able to give away. She'd been my best friend; the one person I'd always known would have my back. Then, as we'd gotten older, the friendship I'd felt for her had begun to change into something more.

  I hadn't exactly known when it first happened, when I'd first noticed that my always very-skinny friend was suddenly not as skinny anymore. And her legs had seemed to grow and grow. As I'd dealt with my voice cracking, and my own growth spurt that made my knees ache, she'd grown prettier each day.

  From the time I was twelve, I'd gotten into more than one fight with boys who talked about her, then had to lie to her about why my knuckles had been bruised or bloody. And it never mattered why they'd talked about her. If they'd been mean, I wanted to defend her. If they'd been complimentary, I’d gotten even angrier. They'd had no right to think about her that way.

  She'd been mine.

  My everything, my world.

  And I'd never gotten the chance to tell her that. I'd waited for months, paralyzed with worry that she wouldn’t feel the same way, that if I asked her out on a date, I'd lose her friendship. When I finally decided to tell her, I'd wanted to do it in a special way. So I'd asked her to go camping with me.

  I'd been getting ready to tell her when her dad had shown up.

  And my world had been destroyed.

  Because of what happened to my parents, some shrink decided that I needed to cut ties with my past, or at least keep my distance for a while. By the time I'd finally gotten away and ridden a bike back to our neighborhood, her house had been boarded up with a weathered for sale sign posted in the front lawn.

  She'd disappeared.

  I'd asked around, but all anyone could tell me was that her mother had run off, her father had killed himself, and she'd gone to live with a relative that no one knew.

  That was the moment I'd stopped caring about anything. Everyone I'd ever loved was gone. All that was left was heartache.

  But now she could be here – right here – and I had to see her. Talk to her. I needed to know if she'd felt the same way back then.

  If she felt anything for me now.

  If I felt anything for her.

  And that was why I was staking out her work. Granted, I had no idea if she was in the field or not, but I didn’t care. I would sit and wait at the charming café across the street, pretending to be a college student like many of the other patrons. A graduate student, obviously, but just some hard-working kid like all the others. It was probably the worst possible thing I could do, but I couldn't find it in myself to walk away.

  Luckily, I didn’t have to wait long. Just a bit before noon, the FBI agent I'd once known as my best friend came stalking down the sidewalk outside the café. She stood at the corner, waiting for the light to change, and I used the time to absorb as many details about her as I could. The curly hair, those cheekbones, the legs that seemed to go on for ages.

  I lifted the book I was reading, although I was really using it to shield my face in case she suddenly decided to look into the building. I was fairly certain I hadn’t left a trace of evidence behind, but if Karis was half as smart as I remembered, she might've been able to think of something I hadn't.

  Emotions I hadn’t felt in a long time begin to creep up from the tidy little box I'd shoved them into. Suddenly, the whole world was just about this tall, beautiful woman who could very much put me away, but could also be someone...special.

  The past was closer than it had ever been.

  The way she tapped her foot while she waited to cross reminded me of her chronic impatience when she waited for the microwave popcorn we'd made every Friday night for years.

  The harried expression hanging about her eyes echoed back to how anxious she'd always gotten when she was behind on her self-made homework schedule.

  Then the past caught up with the present when she strode across the street, far more confident than the girl I'd known, reminding me that she was a federal agent who was investigating a case, and she could, right now, be chasing a lead that could end up with me behind bars.

  And that was when I realized that the Karis I'd known and loved would never have approved of what I did, of who I'd become. She'd have been ashamed of me. We'd both had our parents taken from us under shitty circumstances, but she'd taken what had happened to her and used it to make the world a better place. And here I was, daydreaming about some dramatic reunion, when in reality, any meeting we had would no doubt end with me in handcuffs.

  Anger welled up in me. This woman had just appeared like a ghost from a past I thought I'd long buried, only to stay beyond my reach. It was infuriating. I supposed that after so many years of playing the grifting game, I was used to getting what I wanted, but in this case, I knew it was impossible.

  As she disappeared into the building across the street, I stood. I knew without a doubt that woman had been my first love, and I was about ninety percent sure I still had feelings for her.

  I was also one hundred percent sure that she was permanently out of my reach.

  Bron

  I didn’t get much sleep that night. Despite being surrounded by all the high-life luxuries that I usually enjoyed, I just couldn’t get comfortable or let my mind settle. And in the rare times where I did manage to drift off, I was plagued by dreams of the past. Some good, some bad, some real, some imagined, but all of Karis.

  The time she and I had snuck out to catch fireflies even though it'd been well past midnight.

  The senior prom we'd never gotten to go to together.

  The way she'd held me the night my parents died.

  The time that little English twat Renny McFadden had called me a wanker, and Karis had given him a bloody nose before I could even ask what the word meant.

  A specially planned night where we'd make love for the first time.

  The body I'd never gotten to know.

  I woke up cranky, and I knew I had to get her out of my head. Hell, I didn’t know for certain that the FBI agent I'd seen was actually Karis, or even if she was, if she had any idea that I was in the city, let alone involved in the museum theft. Obsessing over something when I had so little in the way of facts was not only pointless, but it was clearly fucking with my head.

  The only thing I could think of to fix it was to focus my attention on something else. So, I decided to start my next big play. It was a long con. One I'd been playing around with since I was close to tying things up with the museum job. That one had been for hire. This one would be for me.

  There was a certain art collector who'd just relocated to the upper districts of the city, one Leticia Backman. She came from money, old money, and she wasn’t afraid of spending it. She was heavily involved in charities, and helping those who had less, so originally I'd avoided her. Call me cliché, but I had a bit of a Robin Hood streak even after all these years of the grifting game. I didn't like the idea of hurting innocents.

  My parents had been innocent.

  One of
the ways I maintained that standard was to employ a hacker to do thorough background checks. He also kept an eye out for anyone who might pique my interest. That was how I found out that she always donated and volunteered just enough to mitigate any tax increases from what she'd paid out in the nineties, and never a penny or second more. And she always supported politicians who cut programs to the needy. Needless to say, she came off the do-not-pursue list pretty fast.

  It wasn’t that I resented rich people. Every society had them. What I resented was the rich using those they considered under them for gain. It was one thing to sell a service, need, or invention and make millions. It was another to milk loopholes and dodge taxes so the rest of the country had to make up the difference. In fact, there were few things in the world that I hated more than those who hurt the innocent.

  Pretty much just guns...and fad diet crazes.

  Since this was going to be a long con, I'd done as much research as I could while I'd been cultivating my alias at the museum. I knew everything about Ms. Backman. Her birthday. Her dog’s birthday. When she'd received her last Botox injection.

  I was nothing if not thorough.

  But a woman of such refinement and wealth was used to people pursuing her for her money, anxious to be kept or ask for a hand out. And a woman in her early fifties had also lived through a time when she'd had to field off advances from men who'd thought they were better equipped to deal with finances than a female.

  I had to do something new. Something unexpected, and I had an angle that she hopefully hadn’t encountered before.

  First thing first, I chose my clothes carefully. Not too over the top, but a nicely fitted polo and designer slacks. Some grifters thought it was stupid to spend two hundred dollars on a pair of pants, but I always maintained that was because they’d never seen their own ass in two hundred dollar pants. Also, it was genuinely accepted that poorly dressed grifters didn't do well – unless it was part of the con itself.