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According to her calculations, she was indeed behind for two months in her rent, plus late fees. She would certainly contact the bank to get things sorted out, but she knew how all that bullshit worked. It would take weeks to verify the supposed purchases, and in the meantime, she had to somehow persuade her landlord to let her stay.
The options that other people afforded were vacant for Liz. She didn’t have any rich family left who could loan her money while she figured everything out, nor did she have any close friends who had a dime to spare. Heck, she didn’t have any friends since there was no time to socialize, and her family was so absent she couldn’t remember the last time she had spoken to any of them. She was barely getting by as it was, her head filled with pipe dreams of becoming a lawyer.
She scoffed at herself, feeling like a fool, her head in the clouds while reality bitch slapped her.
Liz gritted her teeth as she slammed herself back down on her office chair. She was getting to the point where she wanted to cry, but that was something she rarely let herself do. Her parents had taught her that vulnerability was a weakness, and although she knew none of that was true, it managed to seep in and influence her anyway.
Her throat and eyes stung as she peered out the window. Cars jetted by on the busy road, and a wash of light from the streetlamp pooled itself on her tiny balcony. Liz gazed down at her hands, and the sound of that gym member’s thumbs shattering like delicate glass echoed in her mind.
Her heart should have recoiled at the thought, but it didn’t. Instead, it both invigorated and scared studious little Liz.
She stood from her desk and went to the recycling bin she had shoved in the small storage closet. She searched for different newspapers and magazines, grabbed a thick batch, and brought them back to her desk along with scissors and glue.
She had seen something like what she was about to do in many made-for-TV movies. She wasn’t exactly sure if it seemed naive, but she didn’t care. She was desperate, and with desperate times came desperate measures.
Liz had witnessed a direct assault, and even though the mob had connections to the police, she knew that they disliked inconveniences. She wrote out what she was going to say to Vito on a separate sheet of paper, then proceeded with the tedious task of cutting out each letter separately and gluing it to another blank sheet of paper.
She asked him for five thousand dollars to keep her mouth shut. The mob was made of money. She had seen the club and knew how much the membership was. She assumed it would be wallet money for them, while that amount could likely help her situation immensely.
A part of Liz knew her idea was absurd. She was too smart not to listen to it. But at that point, she couldn’t see any way out of the hole she had found herself in other than losing her apartment and likely having to go into government housing while the bank investigated the hacking incident.
Liz wasn’t going to allow that. She was dead set on her dreams of becoming a lawyer, and some asshole hacker wasn’t going to veer her off that course. After all, she would only be blackmailing a mobster, not some innocent stranger.
She wrote out the plan on a pad of paper through the night, making it as foolproof as she possibly could. Her heart continued to beat inside her chest like a caged bird. And Liz had to admit that what she was doing was daring, and it riveted her cushioned little life.
She would put the note in Vito’s locker at the gym since she had his information as an employee. She would have to spend all of the money she had stashed in her wallet to get a burner phone for him to contact her, and she would give him a location where he could leave the money. She would then, hopefully, disappear into the ether, having been barely noticed by an organization that had a lot more than some quiet woman to worry about.
She had the benefit of their assumptions to rely upon. No one would suspect the girl who spent most of her time reading during the dead hours at the gym, the one with a tight ponytail and thick glasses, to be the head of a blackmailing operation. In Liz’s case, appearances were deceptive, and she was going to lean hard on that.
The very next day, Liz bought a burner phone, then added the number to her blackmail letter. Her hands shook as she finished gluing the cut-out pieces of newspaper to the sheet, trying to ignore the tremors as she blew on it to make it dry.
She slipped it into an envelope and took it with her to work. Because of her organizational skills, Liz was often left alone to close up, so she waited for those few hours at the end of the day to do what she needed to get done.
She went into the locker room, having turned off the cameras in the men’s changing room briefly. She continued to tremble as she slipped it inside, using the crack at the bottom to do so. After she put it in his locker, she felt faint again, staring at the metal door, her stomach churning with what felt like regret.
Liz gritted her teeth, then zipped out of the locker room. It was far too late to have any morals in the situation. She flicked the cameras back on and began her usual nightly routine.
It was exciting to pretend to be someone else, someone who was daring and gutsy, even if it would be the only time in her life she tried to be. She instantly understood the appeal of superheroes; don a mask, and you can be who society never allowed you to be.
Liz thought that she was going to feel better after delivering the letter, but it only made her apprehension worse. When she returned home that night, her landlord was standing in front of her door with her arms crossed like a mother ready to scold their child.
Liz normally shrank away from conflict, but the influence of what she had plunged into within the last twenty-four hours gave her a sense of brazenness she hadn’t ever encountered.
“I can explain,” Liz said, holding her hands up in the air. “I have been hacked, and I’m dealing with the situation.”
Her landlord was a woman she would have considered pretty if she wasn’t there to reprimand her. She wore her long black hair in a ponytail like Liz did, and her eyes looked nearly black in the cheap light of the hallway.
“That’s equivalent to the ‘my dog ate my homework’ excuse,” the landlord said. “When do you think it will all be fixed, hmmm? I’m not running a shelter here.”
Liz let her hands fall to her sides, then pressed her nails into her palms. Her jaw tightened in a manner that would normally make her crumble at the authoritarian’s feet.
“Did you not hear me?” she snapped. “I’m getting it looked at. Some asshole hacked into my account! I always pay on time. Give me a break!”
The landlord’s eyes widened, and just when Liz expected a screaming match, her lips curled into a smirk. She started to look pretty to Liz again as she stepped away from her door, impressed by her venom.
“Have it your way then,” the landlord said, her tongue slipping between her lips.
It was kind of sexy.
