Chapter 661 | The Eastside Thing

Chapter 661: 661 | The Eastside Thing

Lamia stared at the window for a long moment. Her jaw worked, and I could see her running the angles in her head, trying to find a way around the problem.

"I checked three times."

"You checked the camera angle. You didn’t check the secondary reflection."

"That’s..." She trailed off. Her hands gripped the edge of the roof hard enough that her scales scraped against the concrete. "That’s a really stupid oversight."

"It’s the kind of oversight that gets you caught."

"I know what it is." Her voice was sharp, defensive, and then it softened into something that sounded almost embarrassed. "I know what it is. I just didn’t see it."

The clock tower in the distance finished its midnight chime. The last note hung in the air for a moment before fading into the ambient noise of the Eastside at night. Somewhere below us, a car alarm started and stopped, and a dog barked twice before going quiet.

"So what do we do?" Lamia asked. "I can’t exactly move the spotlight."

I studied the layout. The camera sat above the register, mounted on a bracket that looked about fifteen years old. The angle covered the front door, the register, and most of the floor space. The display case sat in the front window, technically outside the camera’s direct field of view but caught in that secondary reflection.

"How long does the camera record?"

"Loop system. Overwrites every seventy-two hours. Kask never checks it unless something gets stolen."

"So if nothing appears to be stolen, he never checks the footage."

"Right." She looked at me, and I could see the moment the idea landed. Her eyes went wide behind the mask. "Oh. Oh, that’s good."

"We don’t need to avoid the camera. We just need to make sure Kask never has a reason to review the tape."

"So we don’t steal the hairpin."

"We don’t steal the hairpin tonight." I pulled up my mental map of the neighborhood, the one I’d been building for the past two days of filing incident reports and walking Dralun’s rounds. "We relocate it. You take the hairpin out of the display case and put it somewhere else in the shop. Somewhere Kask won’t notice it’s missing. Then, in a few days, when he’s done inventory and marked it as lost or misplaced, someone walks in during business hours and buys it."

"Buys it? With money?"

"With exactly forty-three dollars and sixteen cents, which is probably the most anyone’s ever paid for something in that case that wasn’t the jade Buddha."

Lamia’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"You want me to buy the hairpin. That I was going to steal. With money."

"I want you to relocate the hairpin to a less visible location so that when it eventually sells at a reasonable price, Kask doesn’t connect the transaction to the shadow figure he’s definitely going to hear about from the Commission liaison who processes his insurance claims."

She processed this. I watched her work through the logic, watched her reach the same conclusion I’d reached about thirty seconds after Dralun mentioned Socorro Vega’s name in that oblique, pointed way he had.

"Dralun told you to do this."

"Dralun told me that if someone wanted to fix the hairpin situation without Kask filing another insurance claim, they would need to be smart about it. Smarter than whoever left gum in a door latch."

"He knew I was planning this."

"He knows everything that happens on his block. That’s kind of his whole thing."

Lamia sat back on her heels. The fight went out of her shoulders, and she looked suddenly younger, like a girl playing dress-up in a costume that didn’t quite fit. The neoprene suit squeaked when she moved, and one of the safety pins on her left boot had come loose and was dangling against the rubber sole.

"So this whole time, he’s been letting me run around his district like an idiot, tripping alarms and breaking windows, and he never once tried to stop me?"

"I think he’s been waiting for you to get good enough that you stop tripping alarms and breaking windows."

"That’s..." She laughed, and it was a real laugh this time, not the theatrical purr or the panicked squeak. It was bright and startled and a little bit wet around the edges. "That’s the most Eastside thing I’ve ever heard."

"Welcome to the neighborhood."

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, smearing her cheap eyeliner across her cheek in a dark streak that made her look like she’d lost a fight with a mascara wand. When she looked at me again, something had shifted behind her mask. Something warmer than the professional distance she’d been maintaining.

"Okay. Okay, new plan." She stood up, rolled her shoulders, cracked her neck. "I go in through the roof access, relocate the hairpin to somewhere less visible, and get out without tripping anything. You watch the street and tell me if anyone’s coming."

"What about the reflection?"

"I’ll stay low. Below the sightline of the display case. The camera won’t catch anything if there’s nothing to catch."

"And the hairpin?"

"I’ll put it behind the jade Buddha. Kask never dusts back there. I saw the cobwebs last time I cased the place."

I nodded. She nodded back. For a moment, we just stood there on the rooftop, two people in masks about to commit a crime that was technically still a crime even if it was going to result in a grandmother getting her wedding present back.

"Hey." Lamia’s voice was quiet, barely above a whisper. "Why are you doing this? Really. You could get expelled. You could lose your license before you even get it. Dralun could report you to the Commission, and your whole career would be over before it started."

I thought about the question. I thought about Teodor on the bench with his pocket watch, winding it slowly and holding it against his chest. I thought about Mrs. Alvarez arguing with Dralun about a railing bolt he was going to fix for free on his weekend. I thought about the five-year-old with bone spurs and the mother who just wanted to know if her son could go to kindergarten.

"Because the ranking system doesn’t count the things that actually matter," I said. "And somebody has to."

Lamia looked at me for a long moment. The green of her eyes was very bright behind the black of her mask, and her lips were slightly parted, showing the tips of her fangs.

"That’s a really good answer."

"I know."

"And very humble."

"That too."