Chapter 1
Nadia
The best thing about stealing from a trucking company is that nobody at a trucking company has ever been happy to hear a phone ring.
That's the whole trick. That's it. You can keep the disguises and the wigs and the guy in the van with the headset.
Ninety percent of my working life is finding an organization where the phone ringing is already bad news, and then being a slightly different flavor of bad news that can be made to go away.
"Northland Freight, this is Dana."
"Dana. Hi. This is Karen Petrosky at First Meridian, commercial fraud." I had a headset, a spreadsheet, and a Days Inn desk chair that squeaked, so I was standing up. "I need to talk to whoever handles your payroll disbursement and I need to do it in the next four minutes."
Pause. Chair sound. Somebody in an office deciding whether their day was ruined.
"That would be Marcy."
"Is Marcy at her desk?"
"Marcy's at lunch."
"Dana," I said, and I put a little tremble in it, one degree of human wobble, "is there anybody there who can pull up an ACH batch, because I've got a screen in front of me with your company's name on it and I'd really rather this not be my afternoon either."
That's the other trick. You don't threaten them. You include them. You put the two of you on one side of the desk and the problem on the other. Nobody has ever, in the history of the world, wanted to be alone with a problem.
"Let me get Ron."
Ron took ninety seconds. I could hear him arriving before he got the phone — the walk of a man who's about to say now what's this about.
"Now what's this about?"
"Mr. — is it Ron?"
"Ron Sitko. I'm operations."
"Ron. Karen Petrosky, First Meridian fraud services.
I'm going to say a number to you and I want you to tell me if you recognize it.
" I read him the last four of an account.
His account. Which I had, because a man in Fargo had sold me a stack of routing data for eight hundred dollars and a genuine belief that he was the smartest person in the transaction.
"That's ours."
"Okay." I sat down. Squeak. "Somebody attempted a forty-one thousand dollar batch out of it at nine-fifty this morning. We caught it. It's held."
"What?"
"It's held," I repeated, because the second most important thing after including them is calming them down, so they can feel the specific relief of you being on their side.
"Nobody's lost anything. I'm not calling to tell you you're on fire.
I'm calling because the way it was structured means somebody's got current credentials, and current credentials means the next one won't look like a fraud attempt at all. It'll look like Tuesday."
Ron breathed at me for a second.
"What do you need," he said.
Oh, Ron. Ronald. You beautiful cooperative man.
The rest took nineteen minutes. I'm not going to walk you through all of it because the middle of a con is like the middle of a magic trick — it's boring and it's mostly paperwork and if I explain it you'll be disappointed in both of us.
The short version is that at eleven-forty in the morning I convinced Ron Sitko to move his own payroll into a "quarantined mirror account" for one business cycle, for his protection, at my institution, and Ron did it happily, and Ron thanked me.
Well — some of it. Here's one piece, because it's the piece that mattered later.
"Ron, one more thing and then I'll let you go."
"Sure."
"This account's got a parent entity on our side.
Says Northland Freight Holdings, and then there's a second line, and the second line's blank.
" I made a small tapping sound with a pen against the desk, which does more work than any sentence I have ever constructed.
"That's usually a data thing, but if there's a real parent I should be flagging them too. "
Long pause.
"There's no parent," Ron said.
"There's a blank field."
"There's no parent," Ron said again, and his voice had changed, and I filed that away as a man protecting his own job, because that is what nine hundred and ninety-nine of them are doing.
"Understood," I said. "I'll code it as a legacy field."
"Do that," said Ron.
He thanked me. He said, "I appreciate you catching that."
I said, "That's the job."
Which, you know. It was.
I hung up and stood in the middle of a room in the Sleep Inn on Highway 22 in Dickinson, North Dakota, and I did the small stupid dance I have done at the end of every single job since I was twenty-three, which involves my elbows and which nobody has ever seen and which is, at this point, the closest thing I have to a religion.
One hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars.
Not forty-one. The forty-one was the story. The forty-one was the shape I gave him so he'd have something to be afraid of that was smaller than what was actually happening.
I texted Fitch: done. 162. tomorrow?
Then I got in the shower and sang.
Here's my situation at that point in my life, briefly, because it explains some things about the rest.
Thirty-one years old. Six names on paper, four of which had passports, three of which had credit histories better than mine. No apartment. Two storage units. A car I liked more than most people.
One partner, formerly. Pepper Vance. Reno. I'll get to it.
And one genuine skill, which is not the accents and not the paper and not the phone voice.
The skill is this: I can tell what somebody is afraid of within about forty seconds of hearing them talk.
Not what they want. Wanting is loud and everybody lies about it.
Afraid. Ron Sitko was afraid of being the guy who didn't catch it.
Dana was afraid of Marcy. My mother was afraid of the sound of a car in the driveway, and I learned to hear it from the bathroom at the top of the stairs when I was five years old, and I have been unable to turn it off since.
That's the skill I'm ashamed of. Not the stealing. The stealing is fine. I steal from institutions and insurance carriers and men named Ron who will be reimbursed by Thursday.
It's that I can look at a person and find the soft spot immediately, like a bruise, and there isn't a version of me that doesn't.
My phone rang at 12:06.
"Fitch. Tell me you love me."
"Where are you?"
Fitch's voice had a thing in it. Fitch's voice always had a thing in it — the man sweated through a wool coat in February, he was constitutionally moist — but this was a different thing.
"I'm in a bathrobe," I said. "It's a great robe. Ask me about the robe."
"Nadia. Where'd it come from."
"Northland Freight. Little haulage outfit, six terminals, Ron in operations, I sent you the—"
"Who told you Northland."
I sat down on the end of the bed. The good feeling in my chest started rearranging itself into something with corners.
"Weber, in Fargo. Sold me the routing." I made myself keep the voice light. "Fitch. Use words."
"Northland Freight's a shell."
"Everything's a shell, that's why we—"
"It's a Wild Hunt shell."
The air conditioner clicked on. That's what I remember.
I sat in a bathrobe in Dickinson, North Dakota, with a hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars in an account with a made-up woman's name on it, and the air conditioner clicked on, and Fitch said the words Wild Hunt, and I understood in a completely bodily way that I had made a mistake I could not talk my way out of.
I knew what the Wild Hunt was. Everybody in five states knew what the Wild Hunt was in the way you know about weather. You don't have opinions about weather. You dress for it.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay? Okay?"
"Fitch, I need you to breathe with your whole face."
"They just took apart the Ash Company. Do you know what took apart the Ash Company looks like? Because I know a guy who—"
"Fitch."
"—and he doesn't talk right anymore, Nadia, his jaw doesn't—"
"FITCH." I stood up. "I'm giving it back."
Silence.
"What," he said.
"I'm giving it back. All of it. Today. That's the whole plan, that's the entire plan, I've finished thinking.
" I was already pulling clothes out of the bag with one hand.
"You're going to meet me and you're going to take it, and you know somebody who knows somebody, and it goes back up the chain with a nice note. "
"A nice note."
"A card. I'll get a card. Do they like cards?"
"Nadia, I'm not touching that money."
"You're a fence, Fitch. Touching money is the—"
"I'm not touching it!" His voice went up into a register I'd never heard out of him and haven't heard since. "You don't hand it back! Handing it back means you had it! Handing it back means somebody has to look at you while you're doing it!"
And this — I want to be honest about this, because everybody's honest about the parts where they were brave — this is the exact moment where I stopped being annoyed and started being afraid.
Because Fitch was a professional coward. Cowards are the best barometers in the business. A brave man will walk into anything out of vanity. A coward has never once been wrong about a room.
"Where are you," I said.
"Nope."
"Fitch, where are—"
He hung up.
I found him anyway, because I'm good, and because Fitch had exactly one habit, which was a diner called the Ponderosa where he ate a patty melt at one o'clock every day of his life like a man setting his watch by grease.
He saw me come in the door.
He stood up so fast he took the tablecloth with him. There was no tablecloth. That's how fast he stood up — he generated the sensation of a tablecloth.
"Fitch—"
"No."
"I have it in a bag, I'm not asking you to—"
He went out the fire door. The alarm went off. He left a shoe.
I want to be extremely clear that I'm not exaggerating for effect. Fitch left a shoe in the doorway of the Ponderosa Family Restaurant in Dickinson, North Dakota, and did not come back for it, and a waitress named Sharon looked at me and said, "Was that about you?"
"A little bit," I said.
"You want coffee?"
"You know what, yes."
I sat in Fitch's booth and drank Fitch's coffee and ate a third of Fitch's patty melt, because I have never in my life let food go to waste and because I needed six minutes to think.