Who: Cass and Belen What: A robbery at gunpoint and the making of new enemies. Fun! Where: The street outside the bookstore Cass frequents. When: This evening. Warnings: Swearing, nastiness.
Belen never hit the poor parts of town.
She hit the people who didn’t need what they had, the ones who kept people down, the ones who ate their fill while others starved and died and rose up again to starve some more.
She’d been waiting outside the bookstore for an hour. The bookstore where a single book, the cost of it, could feed a family for months, could give them a roof, full bellies and the strength to love one another instead of fighting long into the night. She waited, dressed in all black, her 9mm Ruger tucked into the back of her jeans. Her long black hair in a braid down her back, her ski mask rolled up.
She waited in the shadows, becoming one with the dark and the nothing, and she waited some more. She’d seen the man go in, in his careless suit and pale, pale skin and too blue eyes. She waited for him to come out again, hopefully with a book in his hand.
She’d have to find a good fence.
Cass did have a book in hand when he left the store, held tucked under his arm as he walked along the street to hail a taxi. His car had predictably been gone from the bar when he’d gone back to check the morning after drinking with Max. He’d been annoyed, and he’d reported it to the police, but he hadn’t found a new car yet, and it hadn’t sent him flying into a rage - really, it wasn’t worth it. He barely drove the thing as it was, and until it seemed practical again he wasn’t buying a new one.
Instead he’d taken a taxi to the bookstore, and was intending on doing the same to get home. The book he’d chosen to buy that evening was no holy grail or major find, but pleasing nonetheless, an early edition of an old classic. It wasn’t worth the price of someone’s house, but it was by no means cheap, and he was looking forward to getting out of the cold and out of public where he could lock his door and pore over it through the night.
He wasn’t looking for danger - he was looking for a taxi, so his eyes were on the road. This was a safe part of town, so he didn’t give the area around him more than a passing glance. There was no reason to expect trouble here.
She tugged down the ski mask, the darkening sky making it less necessary, but she didn’t risk forgoing it altogether. Her ability, thank Chango, meant she could walk up behind him without making a sound on the cold pavement, without drawing the attention of people who were not looking at her. She was just a nothing and nothing more, and she stopped close enough for him to feel her breath at his neck. She pressed the cold, cold steel of the muzzle to that bit of bared skin, a sliver between dark black hair and a dark black coat. “You keep your eyes forward, and no one gets their brains blown out, got me?”
When he felt the cold metal of the gun, he thought at first he was imagining it, or that a drop of cold water had hit the back of his neck from the building behind him, and just as he was about to reach up and touch the spot, she spoke.
He went very still, and dropped his hand. He was just far enough from most of the people on the street that what was happening was likely difficult to see. It would be difficult for him to signal for help without the woman behind him seeing him do it. These calculations happened quickly, in a matter of seconds, and when they were done the next thing he felt was anger, anger like he hadn’t felt when his car had been stolen, immediate and seizing his heart. It was the sort of anger that made him wish he could put the woman behind him down into the pavement, his feelings about hitting women notwithstanding - when one put a gun to the back of his neck and threatened his life, and, even more than that, violated his physical space with threats of violence, all bets were off.
He didn’t say anything. She might see his jaw set from behind, but otherwise he didn’t react.
She stayed far enough back that he couldn’t feel her body, couldn’t tell her shape or height. Her voice was mellow, but nondescript; the sort of thing you couldn’t remember if you tried to. “Papi’s gonna hand over that book real slow,” she told him. First the book, then the wallet. She pressed the muzzle a little harder against that pale skin. “Not like you’re gonna miss it.”
That insinuation that she knew anything, anything about him only served to through his anger into relief and heighten it. He pulled the book out from under his arm with his opposite hand. He did it slow enough that it wouldn’t startle her. He didn’t ask her why she was doing this, because it didn’t matter. Drug money, rent money, food money, whatever it was she was robbing him because she saw no other way to get it. That might be for a variety of reasons as well - maybe she was unwilling to work, maybe she couldn’t find a job, maybe there were mitigating circumstances.
He didn’t give a fuck. He didn’t think there was anything that gave you the right to steal something that wasn’t yours from someone else. Well, maybe one thing.
She took the book, and she tucked it inside her jacket, never once letting her vision falter or sway. “Now your wallet,” she said, no impatience in it, as if she had the entire evening to stand there with him, the muzzle at his neck and only the cold Seattle air between them. Her accent was somewhere between New Jersey and New York, and it sounded like the streets, like needles and gang symbols and things that didn’t see the light of day.
His eyes went half-lidded ahead of her, but she couldn’t see that, just saw him pulling his wallet from his pocket, carefully, holding it in his hand for a moment, and then handing it back to her - but not before slipping his driver’s license out of it. If she thinks he’s going to stand in line at the DMV because she decided to rob him this evening, she has another fucking thing coming.
She noticed the removal of the license and she laughed, a short bark of a sound. “El hijo de puta tiene huevos,” she told him, because that took balls, and she could appreciate it, even in someone she hated. The wallet joined the book, and she craned her head to look over his shoulder from behind. “You got anything that shines on you?” she asked, looking for a Rolex or cufflinks.
He didn’t speak Spanish, but there was just enough similarity there to Italian, which he did know, for him to get the gist. It didn’t make him smile. He was fairly sure that if she hated him, he well eclipsed her feelings at this point. “No.” It was the truth. He didn’t wear a watch, and he’d only been out to the book store, so he wasn’t wearing anything that required cufflinks.
“I wonder how you do this,” he said, suddenly, out of nowhere. “I wonder how you justify it to yourself. Desperation? That might be an acceptable motive. I bet you’re the hero of your story,” he said, with a tinge of thoughtfulness and amusement that had no mirth behind it whatsoever. “I wonder if this is fun, for you.”
Someone obviously didn’t care if they died. The click of the trigger, when her finger moved on it, was loud in the night air. “I wonder how you live with all you got, knowing there’s kids that can’t sleep at night because their bellies are so empty. I wonder how you spend so much on a book, when there’s people dying under bridges tonight because it’s cold and they got no roof over their heads. I bet you’re the victim of your story. Life is fun for you.”
Unsurprisingly, he really didn’t. He heard the click, but he didn’t flinch. When the symptoms of the post traumatic stress he had stubbornly refused to get treated kicked in, it generally wasn’t out of fear for his own well-being, for the simple reason that he didn’t fear for his own well-being. He was fortified by anger, and his hands didn’t so much as tremble. “Life isn’t fun,” he said, tired and yet flooded with slowly simmering anger, “And I’m not arguing my charity record or politics with the woman stealing my wallet.” He turned his head to the side, just slightly, not enough that he could see her properly. “You know, if that’s the point of this, you should just kill me,” he said. “I don’t have heirs, I don’t have family. Actually, I fucking hate most people. But everything I own is going to some respectable charities when I die, because the people who deserve to get by ought to have it. So if you’re really committed to the welfare of the children, you might as well just shoot me now.”
She laughed again, harder, less charitable than before. “Your kind doesn’t give money to the kind that need it. You give it to whatever charity gives you a better tax deduction, whatever charity has filled out all the right forms. Really helping isn’t what you do, papi. Don’t lie to yourself.”
When he turned slightly, when he almost looked at her, she turned the gun around and pistol whipped him with it, and she watched him fall to a crumple on the door. “Don’t look at me when I told you not to,” she told him, knowing he was out for the count, and that he’d had a nasty bruise to deal with come morning.
She rolled up the ski mask, and she walked away, left him there to wake up on his own, and she didn’t look back.