“Right! We need tools.” She slid open the panel door of his van. Javi caught it and slammed it shut.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll do it. Just keep a lookout, and tell me if anyone’s coming.”
Vero kept one eye on the parking lot and one on Javi as he moved to the front of Helen’s wagon and deftly removed a long, slender sliver of metal from one of her windshield wipers. He worked fast, feeding it into the gap between the driver’s door and the frame.
“What are you doing? Don’t you have one of those slim-jimmy things?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not allowed to have one.” She didn’t have a chance to ask him what he’d meant by that. In a matter of seconds, the lock popped free. “Hurry up,” he said, holding the door open for her, his eyes darting anxiously over the parking lot as she ducked inside and started to search.
Helen’s car was a bit like Helen—reasonably tidy from the outside and, for the most part, in good working order, but a bit scattered once you got right down into it. There were empty fast-food bags on the floor, loose change in the ashtray, a lighter in the drink holder, and essential oils and lotions tucked into the storage bins on both doors. A bag of knitting supplies was open on the passenger seat. Vero dug inside the center console, searching for rolls of cash, falsified deposit slips, or receipts from another bank… anything to suggest that Helen was her culprit, but all she found was a mile-long CVS receipt, a scratch-off ticket, and an opened pack of peppermint gum.
“Hurry up, V. I don’t know how much time we have, and I don’t want to stick around any longer than we have to.”
“I don’t understand. There’s nothing here.” Vero opened Helen’s glove box, but that was empty, too. She had thought for sure she’d find something in Helen’s car. The woman snuck out here every day during her break, supposedly to meditate. But Vero would have sworn Helen was out here with a calculator and a pen, fudging deposit slips, making her paper trail match the balance in her drawer after she’d pilfered a few hundreds from it and stashed them in her…
“Oh,” Vero said as she reached under the driver’s seat. Suddenly, she had a much clearer picture of what Helen had been doing in her car. She pulled out a large Ziploc bag full of assorted vapes, tinctures, and rolling papers. There was a dime-bag full of weed and a colorful assortment of gummies. Javi did a double take.
“Jesus, Vero, put that shit away! The last thing we need is a possession charge on top of everything else.” Vero stuffed it all back under the seat, her mind still wrestling with this new version of Helen. A version where the woman retreated to her car every day to self-medicate. Maybe she wasn’t anxious because she was guilty. Maybe she was just anxious.
But if Helen wasn’t the thief, then who was?
“Someone’s coming.” Javi hauled her out of the station wagon. He slapped down the lock and shut the door, looking both ways before shuttling Vero around the back of the van and wrenching her door open, urging her inside. He tossed the windshield wiper blade into the azalea bushes behind the dumpster and climbed into the driver’s seat as Helen came out of the bank. He started the engine, the force of his three-point turn throwing Vero back against the seat as he whipped the van out of the parking lot.
“You mind telling me why you’re searching some woman’s station wagon for drugs?”
“I wasn’t searching it for drugs. And why are you so freaked out?”
“I’m not freaked out!”
He was totally freaked out. Javi had never worried much about the rules. He’d always played it cool. Had never been one to look in his rearview mirror or drive away from trouble. He’d always been confident he could talk (or fight) his way out of anything. But something had changed over the last three years, and it ruffled Vero that she didn’t know what it was.
“What’s going on with you, Vero? You drop out of school. Then you sneak into your cousin’s garage in the middle of the night with some bullshit excuse. And now you’re breaking into people’s cars. What happened to you?”
“What happened to you?” she fired back. She wasn’t the only one keeping secrets.
The muscles in his jaw worked as he drove. His voice was hoarse when he finally spoke.
“I’ll make you a deal. Neither one of us is going to tell Ramón anything about this. You didn’t see me in his apartment today. I was gone before you got there. I didn’t drive you anywhere. And I sure as hell didn’t help you break into any cars. Got it?”
The van skidded to a stop behind Vero’s Honda. They were back in the parking lot of Ramón’s apartment. Back where they’d started that morning. So that’s how he wanted to play it. No sneaking around together. No swapping secrets. Because that’s not who they were anymore. “Got it,” she said. “It’ll be like you were never here.”
She dropped his tire valve caps on his dashboard, got out of the van, and slammed the door.
Chapter 9
“I’ll see your fifty cents, and I’ll raise you two M&M’s.” Vero pushed two quarters and two candies toward the pile. She laid her cards facedown, studying Terence Odenberry across the break room table. He leaned back in his chair, thinking way too hard about his cards as he gave away the last of his tells. When Terence had a decent hand, he rested his palm on his belly and drummed his fingers on the strained buttons. When he had jack squat, he flicked the edge of a card (the lowest one in his hand, which he always held to the left) before discarding it.
“One more round,” he insisted.
She popped a candy into her mouth and shook her head. She’d won enough to buy herself coffee and breakfast, and she didn’t have the heart to take any more of Terence’s hard-earned money. “Your wife isn’t going to be happy with you if you come home missing half your paycheck. Besides, it’s late, and I still need to mop the bathrooms before I get out of here. I’m beat.”
Vero’s shifts ended at eight o’clock, but she had stayed late every night this week, intentionally dragging her feet through her nightly cleaning duties so she could spend more time shadowing Terence. She had carefully watched and staked out every other employee in this place over the last two weeks, and she still hadn’t managed to identify the thief.
Not that she suspected Terence per se. She was fairly certain the security guard wasn’t guilty of the crime himself. If the man had a dishonest bone in his body, he wouldn’t have been so terrible at poker, she reasoned. He had missed every one of her tells tonight, even a few obvious ones, but if anyone had seen something that might shed light on the culprit, it would be the person who’d spent hours watching the security footage at night.
