Page 1 of Stolen Sin

Chapter 1

Emily

Sitting out behind the restaurant where I work with an enormous Diet Coke, I’m seriously at the point where I’m considering sub-table hand jobs as a second form of income.

Which is how I consider trying to explain my desperation level to Rachel, a fellow server at Cucina Amore, since she’s the one most likely to catch me mid-stroke.

I’m not really serious about it. Honestly, it’s a super impractical way to earn extra cash. I’d eclipse the number of dicks I’ve touched in my life after Guest Number Six, and I’m not really sure what the market rate for a handy is these days. But I’ve reached the sort of rock-bottom patheticness that leads people to do insane things with their bodies they’d never otherwise consider.

I don’t say any of this. Nobody here has any idea what I’ve been going through, mostly because my dad would be mortified if I talked about it, but also because they can’t really help all that much.

I’m in the alley behind the restaurant in my server blacks while Rachel smokes a cigarette and talks about her current-or-maybe-ex boyfriend and all the drama that entails (larceny, petty robbery, domestic assault, occasional drug use, infidelity—they nail all the trashy greatest hits) and I can’t concentrate on the latest saga of Danny The Absolute Piece of Shit Who Also Happens To Have A Magical Penis Which Is Why She Can’t Just Leave The Motherfucker.

And I’m seriously thinking about robbing a bank.

It wouldn’t go well. I’ve never used a gun and people aren’t intimidated by me. I’m five-foot-three with dirty brown hair and have been described as “fuckably cute” by more than one guy, but I don’t think that’s the kind of physical appearance that would inspire a bank teller to hand over the keys to the vault. But crime is probably better than hand jobs. And a lot faster.

“And then frickin’ Danny comes charging into the back and like pushes me, physically, bodily, into the back office, where Ethan’s sitting at the desk and counting out stacks of cash and like shoving it into this weird bag, and Danny starts yelling about this guy I’ve been messaging on Instagram, but I’m like, Dan, seriously, shut the fuck up about Liam, he’s just a friend and he’s a model that lives in California anyway, you stupid prick, which made Danny put his hands on me again, and then Ethan got so frickin’ mad for no reason and threw Danny out?—”

I basically throw my Diet Coke in the air to get her to stop talking for one second. She looks at me like I’m insane as she takes a drag of her cigarette, and I pounce in the meager two seconds while she inhales and exhales a thin stream of smoke.

“What do you mean, Ethan was counting big stacks of money in the back room?”

I shouldn’t have sounded so eager. Rachel’s rolling her eyes at me, and I bet she knows what I’m thinking, but right now I feel like a kid catching Santa Claus dropping presents under the tree. This is kismet, it’s magic, it’s the exact sort of insanity I’d seriously consider right now, because it could possibly work.

“You do realize this place is basically a frickin’ cash business, right?” Rachel waves a dismissive hand at Cucina’s crumbling building. We’re located in a mediocre neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, which isn’t exactly prime real estate, and yet Cucina Amore gets a steady stream of clients.

Most of those patrons are men, and most of those men pay in cash.

There are obviously rumors. People talk about how the place is actually owned by the mob, and it’s some kind of money-laundering scheme, and most of the guys that eat in this dump are really made men and soldiers. That’s what Rachel says, anyway. And she could be right, there really is a high proportion of men coming through here, mostly single, sometimes with a girlfriend or two, but they always give off that shady vibe. Like they’re casing the joint. Or like they’re busy being seen.

I just never put much stock in that. It’s Chicago, which means everyone’s in the “mafia” or they like to pretend they are, anyway. From what I know, the mafia got wrecked by RICO cases back in the nineties and hasn’t been the same since. I figured rumors are rumors, and Italian-American men just happen to like the Bolognese and the faux-Roman ambiance.

Now, I’m not so sure.

“Yeah, but why was Ethan counting it?” I press, sounding a little too eager even to my own ears.

“Duh, because as the manager of this shithole, it’s his job to do the bank drop every night. And he’s gotta keep the books? The idiot stashes the stupid thing in a safe under his desk and the safe doesn’t even lock. I opened it once on accident. But seriously, Emily, you’re missing the frickin’ point. Ethan saw Danny put hands on me and he didn’t even try to stop it! I’m serious, I’m done with these macho dickheads, I’m totally done with them?—”

She goes on like that for a while. I drink my Diet Coke and nod along and make encouraging comments, because I really do want her to dump Danny—the guy is an absolute monster of a human being and doesn’t deserve to breathe—but we’ve had this conversation a few dozen times at this point. They’ll fight, Danny will apologize, they’ll bang, she’ll swoon, the karmic cycle restarts.

It’d be depressing, but the predictability is almost a comfort in these trying times.

Once our break’s over, it’s back to work. Cucina’s quiet on a Wednesday evening, and all I can see as I wait tables and run orders are all the men sitting around at the bar, dining with much younger and dolled-up girls at the tables, even a few older guys wearing lots of fake-looking gold jewelry buying their wives an extra drink or two in the booths. But all of them talk loud, laugh louder, eat too much, drink too much, and curse like it’s their life’s work to come up with an original insult.

I can’t stop thinking about the duffel bag.

Rachel and I are both closing tonight. Once the place clears out, I’ll do most of the work while she argues on the phone with Danny. Ethan will be busy wrapping up the bar and yelling at Rachel, and nobody will be paying attention for at least a half hour—which is more than enough time to slip back into the office, grab the money, sneak out the back door, and stash it in the dumpster.

I won’t take everything. Just a few hundred dollars. Enough that Ethan will go along on his blissful way without ever realizing what happened.

It’s not like I’m taking it for me. Isn’t there a long tradition of thieves stealing from the rich and giving to the poor? Cucina Amore is doing just fine, whoever owns this place won’t even notice if a couple stacks of cash disappear, and it’ll mean everything to me.

It’ll mean my father might not get evicted from his house for one more month.

Which is all I can think about. My seventy-six-year-old father, on Social Security, drained of retirement savings, with a second mortgage on the house he grew up in, the house that he raised me in, the house where my mother died—the house that he wants to die in. That house means everything to us. And it might be gone in three lousy weeks unless I come up with more money to make a payment large enough to keep the bank off my ass until I can figure out what to do long-term.

This situation isn’t tenable. It hasn’t been tenable for months, but I was making it work. I serve tables here at Cucina Amore in the evenings, and for a while I was getting up early to work phones in a call center all day. I was netting exactly four hours of sleep per night, which is apparently not nearly enough, because I fell asleep in the middle of a conversation with a very kind older lady named Jan who seemed interested in buying a warranty program for her personal computer, which is honest-to-god real and not some piece-of-shit scam, I double-checked before taking the job, and I woke up to a dial tone and my manager firing my ass on the spot.

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