Shimmy Bang Sparkle(27)
The Texan exploded with a roar of laughter that sent crumbs spewing from his mouth, pelting me with cheesy buckshot. He slapped his desk and whacked the remote by accident, turning the AC from meat locker to off.
The room went silent. No crunching, no AC, no knuckle cracking. Just the slow creak of the Texan, leaning back in his undersize and bottom-of-the-line office chair. He clasped his chubby hands over his enormous gut and said, “You owed me twenty, Norton. But that was seven months ago. So unless your bike is worth a hundred large, you’re gonna have to do a fuckload better than that.”
13
STELLA
Sirens, so many sirens. I was the first one to notice them. Ruth was listening to something in her earbuds, absorbed by another session with the briefcase. Meanwhile, Roxie was in the shower, a project so time-consuming that we had to block off two hours for the water heater to recover afterward. But I heard the sirens loud and clear. And I didn’t like the sound of them at all. I checked the time on my phone—it was worrisome. Just the right moment for the clerk at the jewelry store to have realized that two-carat princess cut on the twirling platform was actually plastic. It had been a big risk for me to take, but for Mr. Bozeman it had been worth it.
Unless it meant we were about to be busted.
We’d never been busted. Since that afternoon all those years ago at the ice rink, we’d played it safe. For a few years after we helped poor Gus, we didn’t steal a thing. We did talk about it sometimes—that rush, that thrill. The joy of helping someone who needed a hand. But we hadn’t acted on it. Not at first.
One day, when I was about thirteen, I’d been down in Arizona, visiting my grandparents. My grandpa and I were out mucking the stalls, and he rolled up his shirtsleeves. And there I saw it. A tattoo of a spade. Just like I’d seen on the man at the ice rink. It brought me right back to that big moment. All for one, one for all. So I asked him about it. I asked Grandpa about everything—about horses and life and religion, and history and farming and politics. If he could answer, he did. If he couldn’t, he’d look it up in the encyclopedia.
He didn’t have to pull out the encyclopedia for that question, of course. Instead, he looked down at his arm and said, “It’s the mark of the thief. Which is what I was.”
Over cookies and milk, he’d told me. Some people’s grandpas told them fishing stories. Some told them war stories. Mine told me about being a bootlegger, about moving tequila up from Juarez in bales of hay. He told me about stealing to feed his family during the Depression. He told me about the strange and curious life of an upstanding thief.
I told Grandpa about Gus, and Ruth and Roxie too.
And then, little by little, Grandpa taught me everything he knew. Including the most important rule of all: never go in armed, unless you’re prepared for a life sentence. And we never had.
After that, Ruth and Roxie and I stole armed with need, not want. We broke into bullies’ lockers and stole back things they took from those who couldn’t fight back. A baseball cap, a pager. Small stuff that meant something to our friends. While other girls in high school were doing ridiculous things like stealing five-dollar earrings from Claire’s at the mall, I was at the library learning computer code. Ruth learned safecracking from a book she bought at a used bookstore. And Roxie fostered her natural talent for turning heads. In time, we got more sophisticated. We learned to make fake IDs. We watched heist films and picked them apart. We cut out newspaper articles and learned what worked and what didn’t. We learned about fingerprints and footprints and how to ensure we left no trace. We taught ourselves the practical side of thievery, all the while honing our skills. Our jobs got bigger as our responsibilities grew. We adapted from security tapes to memory cards, from hardwired systems to wireless ones. We learned, we changed, we got more confident. We grew from three girls with a devious side and a mission into the Shimmy Shimmy Bangs.
And we’d never had sirens coming at us or after us. Until now.
A piercing set of BWEEP-bip-bip-BWEEPS made my heart freeze. From far away came a long, ominous Eeeeeeeeeeeee. I turned down the volume on the television a few notches so I could get a better bead on where they were coming from. Or going. They seemed to be getting closer, but I had no sense of whether they were moving north to south or crosstown. I heard the whoop-whoop of police cruisers. What I didn’t hear was the eee-ooooo-eeee-ooo of an ambulance or the wah-wahhhhhhhh of a fire truck. All cop car noises. And getting louder. Much louder.
My heart raced, but I remained as calm as I could, until a screech of tires and another, louder, whoop-whoop! pierced the air. It was so loud that it made Ruth rip her earbuds out of her ears. We stared at each other, as car door after car door slammed in the parking lot.
Crawling on my knees across the carpet, I peeked out from between our houseplants. To my utter horror, three unmarked cars were already in position, blocking the entrance to our apartment complex as well as the exit. They didn’t have their guns drawn, not yet, but two of them were out of their cars on their radios, watching our building.
Calm, Stella. Calm. I turned to face Ruth and switched into our code. “I think the UPS man is on his way.”
She nodded curtly, just once. Ruth made cool cucumbers seem like they’d been parboiled. She took my notebooks and printouts from me and placed them neatly on the bottom shelf of our safe. She put the Zero Halliburton on the second shelf and locked up the safe, spinning the combination. She adjusted the floral tablecloth to disguise the safe as a side table, and then she grabbed her sensible, small purse from the floor. She looped the strap over her head and straightened it over her body. “Ready, Freddy.”