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I tightened my fists as I focused on the line ahead of us at some woman buying twenty pairs of sneakers at once, grumbling, wanting things to hurry along. If we were going to do this, get rid of Alice, we needed to move fast. I had a feeling this was a get her before she got us scenario.
I was preparing for the reality. That Axel was planning to kill her.
We’d become murderers.
He sighed as he watched me make that connection without uttering a word. “I should never feed you. Then you can’t cause trouble.” He took the stuff from my arms. “Go get your damn shovel.”
I went for it, regretting finding it because now all I could imagine was the many ways I could hurt Alice with it, which wasn’t practical in any way. It wasn’t realistic. I wasn’t going to harpoon her in the face.
But I got it anyway.
He paid for everything with what cash he had. We took everything outside with us and sorted it.
The supplies we put together in our backpacks. Once he folded down the bedroll and put it between his pack and his back, it looked like an ordinary, slightly full backpack.
Except for my shovel. That kind of stood out, but I angled it in its container between my back and the backpack.
“It ends up looking like an instrument or something?” I asked him.
“Sure,” he said. “Just never take off your bag, ever.”
“What about that other team? The guy on the boat?” I drifted as the name slipped my mind for a second. “Liam.”
“Him?”
“Yeah. Where are they?”
He shushed me by putting a fingertip to my lips. However, he didn’t say anything for a minute. Eventually, he lowered his finger. “I don’t know. But they should be taken out of the city if they aren’t targets right now. They’ll make that determination. From this point on, no more talking about anyone else.”
Right. We weren’t safe anymore. Maybe they couldn’t hear us inside the Sargent Jasper, but out here, we couldn’t take chances. We had to forget they existed for a while.
We were alone from this point out.
It was better that way. No witnesses.
THIEVING NEVER CHANGES
The Citadel Mall was a location I hadn’t been to in a while but was the closest to where we were. Which meant an inexpensive bus ride. The mall was also smaller, with fewer crossways to duck into in case I made a mistake.
Still, it would have to do.
Axel worked with the cell phone he picked up. He was wearing a faded local softball T-shirt and jeans. He wore a baseball cap, too, mostly hiding his face from cameras where possible. Wearing all this, his features somewhat changed. His body was masked by the bulk of the out of shape T-shirt, and the cap hid the length of his hair and changed the angles of his face. Some of the scruff on his face was growing out, as he hadn’t shaved that morning. He blended in pretty well.
“There’s reports about a fire at the Jasper,” he whispered to me. “No arrests, just questions.” He lifted up his head, squinting to look out the window. “The police don’t have them.”
“So they got away or…”
“That was over ten people,” he said. He counted on his fingers. “Our people, your father… the guards, maybe Gretta. All of them.” He shook his head slowly and then waved the phone in my direction. “No reports about missing people. None.”
My heart raced. “Like they disappeared?”
“How do you get rid of that many people?” he asked. “No witnesses, no one asking where they are now.” He blew out a short breath. “They do have them. It’s the biggest cover up I’ve ever seen. She must have more on her side within the department than we realized.”
I absently scratched my arm, looking around the bus at a few other people. Most looked asleep or had headphones on or their cell phones in their faces. “So we need cash to help us get to her?”
“Yeah.”
We arrived at the mall and walked in quickly along with a few others who had gotten off the bus with us. We got away from them as quickly as possible.
“What do you need me to do?” Axel said.
“Ideally?” I said. “Turn off the cameras and send the guards home. Maybe even turn the lights off on cue. Or make everyone pass out.”
He coughed shortly once. “I can do one of those things. Stay here.”
I sort of hoped he was going to make everyone pass out. Picking pockets of people who were unconscious would have been so much easier.
When he returned, he motioned to me to walk with him down another hall. “We’ve got maybe an hour before the security guard catches on that the cameras stopped recording. Maybe more if he’s super lazy today.”
I wanted to ask him how he’d done it, but it didn’t matter. “If you can keep an eye out for guards…”
“I’ve got your back.”
With Axel as my lookout, I kept an eye on people, watching them open their wallets for whatever they bought. If they used a card and I couldn’t spot any green, it wouldn’t do any good to waste a lift. Some card users never carried cash.
It was getting harder for cash-seeking pickpockets these days. I’d forgotten how long it took to spot a potential mark. And when I spotted my first one, I followed him, looking for an angle in.
This was going to be harder to do with a shovel on my back. I was heavier, bulky. Slipping along quietly and going along unnoticed was going to be difficult. I rubbed my hands against my thighs, trying to stop my shaking.
I couldn’t remember being this nervous before. Maybe it was knowing Axel was watching. It served as a reminder that this was wrong.
When I checked behind myself, looking for Axel, I didn’t spot him. Wherever he was, I hoped he wasn’t too far. If this guy caught me…
I tried not to think about that.
I walked right behind the guy and waited for him to pause.
He did just in front of a mall display to look at some sales banner.
I collided with him.
Bump.
Lift.
I put my other hand on his back, trying to look surprised.
He turned and blinked repeatedly at me, seeming annoyed. “Watch it.”
My heart raced, and I almost stuttered a surprised remark back at him, until I remembered I wasn’t wearing what I usually did, a low-cut top to help out. I wore just a T-shirt and jeans and boots, and my hair was up in a cap. I probably didn?
??t look exceptionally distracting. I might even have looked like a boy.
Without being too obvious, I darted away from him, and when I could, ducked into a shop to get out of eyesight. I slipped the wallet behind the backpack and jarred up with the shovel.
Because I was in a shop, I waited, ready with the wallet in my back pocket. Unfortunately, without a cross hallway in this mall, I was stuck with a lot of waiting and hiding, hoping he didn’t put two and two together with my face.
Normally, I’d wait, then put the wallet in the food court where security could find it after I took some cash out. Usually, security found it before my mark even noticed it gone, and by the time they found the security office, it was already there waiting for them. They got so relieved, they didn’t even notice a twenty or two taken out.
Today, I had to leave it in this store and not in the food court. Walking around with it too long… I tried not to think about getting caught.
I pulled some cash out, just sixty out of over a hundred, and left the wallet on the floor near the men’s section in the back of the store.
I needed to get to the other side of the mall and find Axel. And then I realized our problem. This was all we could get today. They’d notice the cameras were off once he reported his wallet missing. It would take too long to locate the wallet stuck inside a store somewhere. They’d turn the cameras back on quickly and they wouldn’t find the wallet before the guy left the mall.
We had to leave. A second attempt, a bump from me being suspicious, with a second report, we’d be toast.
I was rusty, unprepared. We needed another location.
??????
As soon as I found Axel, I told him as much and we were on the first bus outside the Citadel heading into downtown.
“It’s not much,” I said, holding out the set of twenties. I’d taken my hat off and tied back my hair in a bun at the base of my skull to keep it out of my face and to give myself a different look.
He flipped his hat around to get the bill out of his line of site. It was weird seeing it like that on his head. He took the cash from me. Then from his back pocket, he pulled out another wad of cash, a few hundred dollars in twenties. “It’s enough.”
