Pockets

Most of the stuff we nicked was worthless. The bags always turned out to be fakes, the wallets empty of cash. Tommy and I had started picking pockets in the sixth grade. Watched a tutorial on YouTube and at first it was a prank we pulled on our friends, then a way to get hall passes, and by high school we were running from police every other weekend.

When Tommy's parents were killed by a drunk driver, he moved in with me, and when my mom proved more interested in the bottle than putting food on the table, Tommy and I skipped out and hitched our way to New York.

We had no plan, just a million pockets to empty and a dream that one day our little racket would pay off. As long as we did it together, that's all that mattered. It was the both of us against everyone else.

I'm better at doing the actual picking, which is just as well. Tommy is the star of the show. He's not as cute now as he was when he was twelve, back when he had the kind of chubby cheeks that brought out in every old person the uncontrolled desire to pinch them, but now that we're both eighteen he's starting to develop into a similarly reliable distraction for their granddaughters.

We lifted the black book off a thin-lipped and dour looking man on Madison Avenue who was wearing the shiniest suit I'd ever seen while Tommy was making dove eyes at the girl accompanying him. It's even better than cheek chub. When Tommy is hitting on some poor sucker's daughter fresh home from her first semester of college and she's biting her lip back at him, you best believe the father is thinking about anything but the precise location of his wallet.

Taking the book was my mistake. It was roughly the dimensions of a wallet, and when I'm moving in to pick a pocket, I'm looking at the mark's eyes, not at the thing I'm taking. If he'd broken his gaze away from Tommy, that would have been enough to abort. You don't want to get caught in the act. You want to be blocks away by the time someone realizes they've been had.

This guy, he didn't look away. He didn't even blink. He stared bug-eyed at Tommy while the veins bulged in his forehead and the jaw muscles below his ears flexed. If I hadn't signaled to Tommy that it was time to move out the man might well have broken his own teeth clenching that hard.

"See you round," Tommy said to the girl, and then we sprinted up Madison and around a corner until we hit Central Park.

I pulled the black book from my pocket and Tommy slid closer to me on the park bench to snatch it away.

"Aw, really? Just a boring notebook." He handed it back.

I leaned back on the uncomfortable park bench and turned the damn thing over every last way, flipped through the pages. None of it seemed important for the time being. Lots of numbers and names, so I stuck it in our backpack, the one with the false bottom we used in case the police decided to push us up against a wall and search it.

A couple necklaces later, we brought the day's haul to our usual flipper uptown and laid it all out on his kitchen table. Gary gave us a hundred bucks for one necklace because it had a diamond in it, twenty for the other since it was just gold plate. When we showed him the book, he turned the pages and narrowed his eyes.

"I'll give you fifty for this."

I grabbed it back before he could squirrel it away into the back room of his apartment. "Hold up, what makes this worth more to you than the necklace?"

"Come on, what are you going to do with that thing? Take the cash, boys."

Tommy stepped between the pair of us. "I think we'll hang onto it for a bit, Gary, thanks all the same."

From somewhere under the table, Gary drew a wicked looking handgun. "You kids ought to know a good deal when you hear it."

It wasn't the first time Tommy and I had ended up on the wrong side of a barrel. I heaved my body into the table like a linebacker, knocking it into Gary, sending him flying. The gun bucked in his hand, plaster raining down from the ceiling.

Tommy and I hustled out the door and tore off West toward the pier.

We spent the money Gary gave us on a cheap motel in Jersey, the kind where you'd take it on the chin if the guy at the front desk were a talking cockroach.

In our room with the shades drawn and the door locked, we took another look at the book.

"I thought these were phone numbers," Tommy said, "but look here. They're the wrong length."

On a hunch, I pulled my phone out.

"Say, Tommy." I measured the words out like each one could kill. "How much do you know about cryptocurrency?"

"What? Why?"

"Mister Shiny Suit manages crypto assets. This is a wallet login, and there's twenty thousand dollars' worth of Bitcoin in here. We just hit the frigging lottery, Tommy."

Tommy cupped a hand over his mouth and said in awe, "Biggest pocket we done ever picked."

"Maybe the last one, too," I said.

We grinned and hugged each other tight.

Maybe we blew all the money that weekend gambling in Atlantic City. Maybe we doubled it, tripled it, even. Maybe we flew first class to Europe and settled down on the Italian coast, running our own little pawn shop in the village there. Or maybe we got arrested that night, the cops busting in our motel door, sending us up the river for a bid.

Whatever it was, we did it together.

Like I said, that's all that mattered.