Listen instead!
Dollar stores, smoke shops, and gas stations. Those were my marks in high school.
A thief is what I called myself. While not a lie, shitheel would’ve been a better way to put it. There was no discipline to what I did, just poor impulse control and sheer luck. But that wasn’t it, I’d also play the part of salesman. Stealing lighters from the Dollar Tree then pushing them at an inflated price to stoners. It was a good system. I made money, made friends, and best of all the girls thought it was sexy. Yeah, they were trashy girls, but they put out. So you can understand, I had no intention of giving it all up.
What changed that was Melody. A dark-haired girl who had a way with words. Or maybe just a way with me. Can’t say I remember all the lines she used, although I do remember the curve of her ass.
She found me during lunch. I was at the baseball field, sitting in an empty dugout with my feet up and a microwaveable burrito in hand. Sun was high up in the sky and giving off that hue which makes everything look just a little bit better.
“Hey there, you’re Enrique. Right?” she asked, while standing in my light. She was dressed in a white tank-top, light blue jeans, and a pair of all white Nikes. Hanging from her ears were some real ugly looking hoops, on anyone else they would’ve been bad, but somehow she pulled the whole, Latina valley girl, thing off.
I stared, ate my food, and didn’t speak.
“Not a talker, huh, that’s okay. It’s not really your voice I’m interested in. What I need from you is more exciting than that.”
“You need to slow down.” While I wasn’t processing every word she said, I didn’t mind looking at her. I could do that for a bit longer. “You want a burrito, or maybe a chicken sandwich?” I pointed towards my gym bag. Inside it were roughly a dozen school lunches. The way our school had set up the security cameras in the lunch room allowed for you to sneak a meal or two off the trays if you were with a crowd. It was so easy I didn’t even consider it a crime.
“Oh, I’m not hungry, and slow isn’t really my style. Thanks, though, but I came to talk business and that’s what I mean to do.”
“Bitch, I don’t even know who you are.”
“Bitch? They told me you were smart, but you’re talking real stupid. I’m Melody, you’ve probably heard people mention me.” She gave me a look like she was the Princess of Peru or something. In hindsight, that probably should’ve been a sign for me to figure out who this chick was. At the moment, I thought she was just another spoiled bitch.
I snorted and took another bite of my burrito.
She walked down into the dugout and sat next to me on the bench. I don’t know if it was just the mixture of shadow and light inside the dugout or what, but right then she looked like something special.
I gave her a smile and then began to take another bite, before I could she grabbed my wrist.
“You wanna listen to what I have to say.” She moved her fingers to my forearm and started talking quiet. “Trust me.”
Over the next few minutes she convinced me to help her. She convinced me to steal a pound of weed. She did it with a strategic use of her body and a breath that smelled like mint. The specifics of what she actually said are a blur to me. It wasn’t exactly the target of my attention. It seemed to be something about a drop-off and pick-up location used by local growers and sellers. A period of time between the grower picking up the money, and the seller picking up the package.
I don’t know if I really trusted her, but right then I would’ve stole the Mona Lisa for a better look at her tits. What can I say? Push-up bras are my thing.
The rest of the day I only thought about one thing. And it wasn’t stealing that weed.
I ended up where I needed to be around 7 PM, clouds were over the mountains at that point. I had to walk down into the flood control channel behind the shopping center I usually stole from. For safety reasons one road had tunnels underneath connecting to the channel, so water could flow without covering it.
The tunnels were where I was heading. As I walked through the channel, pointing my flashlight at abandoned shopping carts and asinine graffiti, little drops of water hit my nose. Within seconds those little drops became big goddamn balls. It was coming down like a thousand firehouses.
I ran my ass to those tunnels as fast as I could. Once inside I pulled out the box of Camels I had knicked from a 7/11 a couple days back. They taste like shit, but man do I love the way I look when I smoke them.
With my nerves sated I looked around the tunnel. It was full of trash and had more graffiti on its walls. It was all dumb shit like wannabe gang names and dicks with top hats. Only thing that made me pause was one finely detailed owl. It had those type eyes which seem to follow you.
Then I found what I was looking for. It was all like she said: buried underneath some cardboard and empty soda cans was a box containing one pound of reefer. It was locked. Luckily, Melody provided a key. She told me her cousin was the seller and that he was prone to losing things. That he’d assume he lost it, and not realize it was stolen for quite some time. I didn’t think to ask why she needed me to walk into a tunnel and open a box. I had just stared at her pretty face and nodded.
The only real trouble I faced was getting my feet wet.
So I took the weed and headed out of the tunnel. Stepping back into the rain I was greeted with the blinding flash of two floodlights. When my eyesight returned there were two sheriff’s deputies waiting for me. The dicks were leaning against their car like they’d rather be somewhere else. I wished the same.
I flicked my cigarette into a puddle and held my hands up.
I wasn’t 18, and the cops were rather certain I wasn’t a drug kingpin, so all things considered it could have been worse. I got expelled, did some time in a juvenile facility, and got one hell of a beating from my father.
I never told them about Melody, though. I still hadn’t put it together. Once my time was up and I got back on the streets, things started to make sense. One of the stoners I used to hang with painted the picture pretty nicely for me.
The girl I took the fall for was Melody Fierro. While I was playing at being a criminal, she was a real one. Blackmail, drug hook-ups, and information gathering was what she specialized in. When she heard about me she discovered a way to kill two birds with one stone. First, she needed to get rid of a pound of weed that a narc was trying to pin on her, second, she was always on the lookout for new business opportunities. With the cops thinking the weed was mine, and me no longer in business, her problems were solved. She even had one of her pussy-whipped lackeys pick up my scam before the cops knew what to do with me.
After I digested all of that, and worked out my stress with an ex-girlfriend, I decided to give it up. I was done thieving. Not because I felt guilty or had regrets. If anything I was embarrassed. I was out of my depth.
How the do you compete with a girl like that? Nah, the dynamic between a guy like me and a girl like her is simple: I get fucked and she gets away.
Sometimes learning you’re a chump is the best thing for you.
by 
Joseph Stryker
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