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.”
Roxie emerged from the hallway and stood in the kitchen, with her hair dripping wet, wearing a pair of black capris and a tank top emblazoned with a sparkly unicorn. She was towel-drying her hair; when she saw me she froze, midscrunch. Even though she looked like a reborn Marilyn Monroe, she was nobody’s dummy. “UPS?”
“Look out the bathroom window,” I told her. “See if it’s clear.”
“On it,” Roxie said, and pattered off through the kitchen as I headed toward Ruth’s bedroom, which had a better view of the lot than the living room.
My stomach was in my throat as I peeked out through the slightly parted vertical blinds. One more cop car pulled into the parking lot, and a clump of beefy cops were huddled together, heads bent, holsters unsnapped. I wasn’t exactly sure what they were after us for; if there was one thing we were, it was careful. But in this business, the cops showing up at the door was a risk we ran. And one we had to be ready for. With my purse over my shoulder, I headed for the kitchen.
“All clear,” Roxie reported back.
“Out the bathroom window,” I said.
The bathroom window was tiny, barely more than decorative when it was all the way open. Roxie affectionately called it “the fart vent,” and she wasn’t far off. But we had no choice. We either had to put our faith in the fart vent or go out the front door into the welcoming embrace of Albuquerque’s finest.
Ruth climbed out first, as lithe and lean as Catwoman. She went out backward and leveraged herself on the top of the window outside, doing a pull-up, maneuvering out without even brushing her skinny jeans on the sill and landing in a crouch. For about two seconds I flashed back to some scene in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Next was Roxie, who wasn’t as fit, but she was no stranger to escaping from dates through bar bathroom windows. She went out with her knees on the top of the toilet. She kicked her legs to get herself through; her wedge sandal heel caught the toilet paper, and it unspooled onto the ground below. She put one arm around Ruth outside, and I heard Ruth say, “Careful. Don’t get scraped up.” I had to give her a shove through, planting my hands on her tush to get her curves to pop out of the window frame. Finally, it was my turn. I followed Roxie’s form. With my purse in my hand, I got myself halfway out before I heard the ominous sound of heavy footsteps, crunching on the gravel and getting louder.
But I was stuck. With nobody to give me a push from behind, I’d managed to high-center myself. I tried to get a purchase on the toilet, but it was too smooth to be of any help against my worn-down Converse. My rubber soles squeaked against the porcelain, but I wasn’t going anywhere.
“Go,” I said as I tried to shimmy my curves out of the window. “Keys are in here.” I gave my purse a shake.
“We’re not leaving you, num-num,” Roxie said. “Live together, die alone!”
So I looked to Ruth. I was serious, and I needed her to know it. And I wasn’t about to let some old Lost reference make me all sentimental, even though it did make my heart ache. It was more important to me, far more important, to make sure they were out of harm’s way. “I’ll find you later. I’m parked in Mr. Bozeman’s driveway. No arguments.”
Without another word, she grabbed my keys from my bag and took Roxie’s hand, and together they scurried over the adobe wall, through a thicket of pampas grass, and to safety.
Like a rag doll, with my purse swinging like a pendulum, I awaited my fate. I kicked my legs, but it was useless. Every wiggle made the sill dig farther into me. I was stuck, utterly and completely stuck. It was unbelievable. I was going to get nabbed, and all because I had an undying devotion to caramel apples. And gummy worms. And gummy cherries. And Nerds. But I wasn’t that curvy, for God’s sake. I tried a good old shimmy-and-shake.
Fine. Yes. I was.
Fantastic.
But the footsteps got quieter, not louder. Farther away, not closer. Turning to the left, I could just see the entrance of the building next to ours. Cops clustered at the front door of unit 4A, and one of them boomed, “Albuquerque PD!”
I went slack in the window, limp with relief. They weren’t after me. They were after my neighbor, who—rumor had it—was the most unscrupulous city councilman anybody had ever heard of ever. “Mr. Dellacourt! Open up!” another officer boomed.
Thank God. Poor sketchy Mr. Dellacourt, but thank goodness for us. Once the initial wave of relief passed, I hooked my purse over my neck like a feed bag and dug around inside for my phone. Automatically, my thumbs went to the top conversation, which was always a group chat with Roxie and Ruth.
Who wants to give my ass a squeeze?
Except right as I was hitting send, I realized what I’d done. The top conversation was now with Nick, not Ruth and Roxie. With hurried and imprecise moves of my thumbs I typed out what was supposed to say OMG wrong person! Instead I said:
Lmg weinf owesin
Nick totally ignored my gibberish, replying with:
Fuck. Be right there.
There were no do-overs in iMessage. Though I hadn’t imagined it under these circumstances, I really wanted to see him again, very much. And I did need a hand. So I went all in and tried to prepare him for the situation. As best I could.
1196 Habanero Dr.
Apartment 3A. I’m . . . around back. Just . . . hanging out.