Page 56 of Book of Night
With Rand gone, Charlie spent a few weeks kicking around. At school, she hung out with her friends. She had more time to go over to their houses and to party on the weekends.
For years she’d told herself that he was the one forcing her to participate in his schemes. But without them, Charlie found herself fidgety. She seemed to need more intensity than the people around her, required a higher dose of adrenaline before she felt anything.
Six months after Rand was buried, Charlie found herself back at the Moose Lodge. Benny laughed when he saw her walk through the door.
“Oh, come on, honey,” he said. “You don’t belong around here. Don’t want to get the truant officer after us.”
She dumped her backpack on one of the tables and walked around to the back of the bar. Checked the ice machine, which produced pellets that fused together and required vigorous use of the pick. She made him a martini just the way he liked it, cold vodka in a glass with the garnish of several olives to take the sting out.
“I want to do a job on my own,” she told him as she pushed his drink toward him. “And I don’t want to work for Knight.”
He frowned at her. “The glooms are the ones that are hiring, these days.”
“Okay,” she said, although her palms had started to sweat. “Just not him.”
He shrugged. “Willie’s nephew, Stephen, got into stealing shadows. Says it’s easy money. Says he can slash off a shadow the way you’d slash the strap of a purse; all you need is one of them onyx knives.”
“So, what, you mug people?” She made a face, having picked up from Rand a dislike of crimes that didn’t require any real talent.
“He’s getting two hundred fifty a pop,” he said. “Twenty times that if it’s one of those magic ones, but that’s dangerous.”
She nodded thoughtfully.
He looked at her skeptically. “But you want a real job.”
She straightened her shoulders. “What is it?”
“The kind of thing one of us might have attempted in our heyday, you know? You know the Arthur Thompson House?”
“Sure,” Charlie told him. She’d gone there with her class, freshman year.
“There’s this group of young gloamists who threw together some money and want someone to break in and steal a single page from one of the notebooks in a locked cabinet. It’s supposed to have something to do with the use of shadows as absorbable energy to alter other shadows blah blah magical crap. You think you can do that?”
Arthur Thompson had invented harvesting electricity from storms and founded the first lightning farm around thirty years ago. That’s what he’d been famous for, before the Boxford Massacre. That’s what he ought to be best remembered for, according to Charlie’s teachers, who wanted to preserve the legacy of a local legend in the face of kids’ interest in the gruesome.
In addition to his interest in lightning, Arthur Thompson was interested in shadow magic. Being a man of science, when he discovered a booth at the county fair run by a group of fundamentalists who believed that gloaming was the work of the devil, he and two of his friends stopped to argue.
Long story short, they all got shot, Arthur died, and his shadow became a Blight who killed over a hundred people. But his house was preserved just the way he left it, including his workshop with all his notes.
“What does it pay?” Charlie asked.
Benny snorted. “Five hundred.”
She eyed him, trying to figure how much his cut was. “That doesn’t sound like much. That’s the price of two stolen shadows.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, you should probably stick to something easier.”
She took the job.
Charlie had always considered herself prickly as a sea urchin, but if she wanted to be the kind of con artist that Rand had been, she was going to have to get better at charm. It was one thing following his cues, and another being responsible for the whole thing.
She practiced with the basics. The short-change con, where you buy a packof gum with a twenty, then mess around trying to get the cashier to give you a ten for nine dollars while pocketing your change, then “correct” yourself by turning over a ten and getting your twenty back. It was some bullshit, but it required smooth talking and the appearance of honesty.
Then the pig-in-poke, which was particularly effective for a teenager. Charlie pretended to find a ring on a street that looked like gold, or something similarly valuable, then asked a passerby if it was theirs. Lots of times she didn’t even have to suggest they give her a twenty and take the ring off her hands; they were so sure they were scamming her that they’d do it themselves.
It helped her figure out how much to smile, how shy to be, how eager. And she made sixty bucks, which wasn’t nothing.
That Saturday, she got ready to pull her first job without Rand.
