Erica
Chapter playlist:
Cold Comfort Lane — Holy Moly & The Crackers
The first time I’d worked with Tanya, she’d been three minutes into a job when she spotted a sixty-pound pit bull locked in a slumlord’s car in the parking garage. She hadn’t hesitated. She got him out and she kept him. Named him Waffles.
The slumlord was our mark, and after Zoe had sent refund transfers to all his tenants, she slipped into his DoorDash account and rerouted his lunch order to the tune of nine hundred dollars on his own card.
She sent the food to a local soup kitchen.
The slumlord went downstairs after he was notified his order was completed and found no food, a parking ticket, and his dog gone.
We have lots of stories like that. In three years of working various jobs together, Tanya had built a cover identity so airtight that Zoe was still getting job offer notifications from one of the target companies.
Senior Compliance Auditor, or something like that.
They’d tried to recruit her on several occasions, each time the offer getting more and more lucrative.
At one point, Zoe considered it until she remembered she does what she does because she’s a free spirit.
Tanya has sourced documentation for six jobs across four states.
She had contacts for things I hadn’t thought to need contacts for yet.
Customs officials, overnight freight, a very discreet notary in Baton Rouge who worked Sundays.
She didn’t just solve the problem in front of her.
She solved the next three while she was at it.
There’s no one else I trust for this job more than her.
I need her specifically, and that’s why Zoe and I made the trip to Lafayette, Louisiana, currently sitting in Tanya’s kitchen while she waxes poetic about her fiancé, Dale.
Waffles rounds the corner with a drool thread hanging from his chin and Dale’s dress shoe clamped in his mouth. He walks across the kitchen and disappears through the opposite door.
“He never asked for details,” Tanya says. “That’s the thing about Dale. He looked me in the eye, said he loves me, and said he needs me to stop doing whatever it is I do. He didn’t ask what. He just wanted me to stop so he could take care of me.”
We hear a thud in the next room followed by another thud. Waffles definitely made a toy out of Dale’s shoe.
“He cried when we announced our engagement,” Tanya continues, not missing a beat. “At his grandmother’s house. In front of everyone. His grandmother cried, his aunts pulled out their phones. Someone wrote ‘new chapter’ as a Facebook caption.” She picks up her mug.
“I saw it,” Zoe says. “It came up in my suggested posts.”
Tanya closes her eyes.
Waffles comes back. He no longer has the shoe. He has Zoe’s tote bag. Dragging it. It makes a sound across the tile and disappears into the hallway.
“No, no, Waffles,” Tanya says. Into the air, not at him specifically.
“That’s my… ” Zoe starts.
“He’s just a baby,” Tanya says.
Zoe looks at me. I shrug.
“He loves me,” Tanya says. Quieter now. “That’s the whole problem. He loves me and he made me promise in front of God and seventeen witnesses, and I don’t…” She stops. Sets her mug down. “I don’t want to break that.”
Waffles comes back. He no longer has the bag. He has a bathroom towel. He drops it at Tanya’s feet like a peace offering, sits on it, and looks up at her.
“Who brought Mama a present? Who did that? You did. Yes, you did.”
His little knob of a tail wiggles back and forth. He puts his chin on her knee.
She coos and scratches behind his ear.
I watch this happen and think, not for the first time, that I would like a dog.
Practically, it makes no sense. A dog needs a home base, a routine, someone who is where they said they’d be.
I am none of those things. But if I were, if I had a house (a real one, with a yard, and maybe a husband), I think I’d get a husky.
Or a black lab. Or a great dane. Something large and unserious.
Something that would eat the couch and I wouldn’t even be mad about it.
I’d learn to make sourdough from scratch and actually understand what that meant, the feeding of the starter every day. Going to bed at ten o’clock. Joining the PTA.
That one actually makes me chuckle. Me! At a PTA meeting. Volunteering for the bake sale. Wearing a name tag that says Hello, my name is Erica.
Yeah right.
But then I think, maybe it actually would be nice. Genuinely. The bake sale and everything. It would be a refreshing way to live. And I’m so tired. Just this one last job. After this one I could figure out the rest.
And then, unbidden, I think of Jeremiah.
I don’t mean to. He just turns up in the margins. I find myself wondering, for no productive reason whatsoever, what kind of dog he’d have. Probably a golden retriever. Something sunny and emotionally available. Or one of those crusty white dogs. Or a chihuahua.
I try to imagine finding someone like him.
Not him, of course. Someone in the same general vicinity of him.
Easy in his own skin, shows up when he says he will, helps old ladies at airports.
In some other version of my life, maybe.
A version where I go to hockey family barbecues and stand around with a paper plate making conversation with people who have normal jobs and a 401K.
What would they think of me? Would I even fit in with the whole trad wife set? Someone would eventually point at me and say, “Who let in the riff-raff?”
“Erica.”
I blink.
Zoe is watching me with an expression I know very well.
“What?” I say.
“Your cheeks are pink.”
“It’s hot in here.”
“The air conditioner is on full blast.” Her eyes narrow. “You’re thinking about that guy, aren’t you?”
Tanya perks up. “What guy?”
“There is no guy,” I say.
“He’s a hockey player,” Zoe says, and unlocks her phone, undoubtedly to give Tanya the hockey thirst trap low-down.
“I’m listening.” Tanya leans in, resting her chin on her hands.
“He’s just a mark,” I say, before Zoe can take Tanya down the hot-guys-on-the-internet rabbit hole.
“Dale was a mark,” Tanya supplies, matter-of-factly.
“That’s completely different.”
“Well, he wasn’t exactly a mark,” she allows. “Mark-adjacent.
Meaning he was an innocent bystander and a means to an end.
We’d done a job on a dirty conglomerate about two years back.
Dale had been a mid-level accountant there.
The kind of cubicle-sitting, pencil pusher who’d bring a PB&J for lunch and remembered everyone’s birthday.
Tanya had needed his keycard and a copy of an internal audit paper file he had access to.
That company was so shady, they had actual physical ledgers the IRS couldn’t trace.
That’s why Zoe couldn’t get in the digital route.
Tanya made a point to run into Dale in the elevator, manufactured a reason to talk, and after she’d had everything she needed and was about to disappear, he mustered up the nerve to ask her out.
He’d never had any idea what the company he worked for was actually doing.
That was the thing about Dale. Just a man with a decent heart who’d taken a steady job, clocked in and out every day, and minded his own business.
The Dales of the world are never the mark.
Just like that hockey player isn’t the mark. That’s a line we don’t cross.
We only ever target corrupt organizations.
Companies that prey on people, predatory operations, men with too much power and not enough consequences.
And we’re efficient. Small sums that Zoe can manipulate with a simple alt/click/shift, or moving over a decimal point.
She’s good at burying those kinds of things.
When we did that job, we made sure none of it could be traced back to Dale.
Then, at Tanya’s request, Zoe performed her techy magic on a Linkedin job listing and they made Dale an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Now he works for a legit firm with a corner office.
“He’s not like Dale,” I say, even though Jeremiah is also mark-adjacent.
“Okay,” Tanya says, in a voice that means she’s willing to drop it.
Zoe, to her credit, lets it go.
“So, this DC thing. What would I need to do?” Tanya asks.
“The usual,” I say. “Props, gear, costumes. Logistics. Nothing out of your wheelhouse.”
She absorbs this. The math line appears between her brows. “This is about something, isn’t it?” she observes.
“It’s always about something.”
“No.” She looks at me. “I mean it’s a real something. Whatever this is, it’s big.”
I let the pause sit. Then I say, “Yeah. It’s a big whale of a real something.”
She’s quiet. Waffles, apparently bored of sitting, heaves himself up and walks to the counter. He puts both enormous paws on the edge of it, stretching his neck. He gets his whole face in the butter dish.
Tanya watches him. “Oh, you found the butter. You found it. Yes, you did, my smart boy.”
Waffles’ snout is covered in butter. His big, slobbery tongue licks it clean.
Tanya looks back at me. “I made a promise,” she says. “In front of Dale’s grandmother.”
“I know.”
“Dale would be…” She stops. “What if it goes south?”
“Has it ever gone south with me?”
She cocks her head and gives me a hard stare. “Two words. Bergen County.”
We do not discuss Bergen County. I choose to pretend Bergen County never happened.
I deflect, my eye catching the stack of bridal magazines on the sideboard. “You don’t have a wedding date.”
She goes very still.
“Engaged eight months,” Zoe says, from my left.
“Eight months,” I say. “But no date. Because a wedding costs money you don’t have yet.”
Tanya says nothing. This is itself a confirmation.
“Do this job,” I say. “And you can book a castle. An actual castle. With a drawbridge if Dale wants one. And a honeymoon that isn’t a long weekend within driving distance of Lafayette. Maybe even Scotland.”
I think I’ve got her there, because she’s obsessed with Outlander and Dale just happens to have Scottish ancestry.