Path of Thieves Read online

  SYNOPSIS

  CHAPTER 1 SHOPPING

  CHAPTER 2 SEVEN

  CHAPTER 3 EIGHT

  CHAPTER 4 SPEAKERS

  CHAPTER 5 NINE

  CHAPTER 6 TEN

  CHAPTER 7 INTERFERENCE

  CHAPTER 8 ILLEGITIMATE

  CHAPTER 9 GAME DAY

  CHAPTER 10 KEYON

  CHAPTER 11 TWELVE

  CHAPTER 12 AFTER

  CHAPTER 13 THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER 14 AGAIN

  CHAPTER 15 GRADUATION

  CHAPTER 16 SWAMP BREAK

  CHAPTER 17 AFTERMATH

  CHAPTER 18 PINK

  CHAPTER 19 SIESTAS

  CHAPTER 20 SERIOUS

  CHAPTER 21 TORRENTS

  CHAPTER 22 DISNEY LUNCH

  CHAPTER 23 FIVE DAYS

  CHAPTER 24 TWO DAYS

  CHAPTER 25 INTACT

  CHAPTER 26 MOM

  CHAPTER 27 CONFESSION

  CHAPTER 28 WORRIES

  CHAPTER 29 PRESSURE

  CHAPTER 30 NO LOLLIPOPS

  CHAPTER 31 FRIENDSHIP

  CHAPTER 32 GAINESVILLE

  CHAPTER 33 THROATS AND POTATOES

  CHAPTER 34 MINDBLOWING

  DODGING TRAINS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT SUNNIVA DEE

  CONTACT INFO

  Other Books by Sunniva Dee

  Football hero by day and thief by night, Charles “Cugs” McConnely leads a double life in the small town of Newbark, Florida. At sundown, the seventeen-year-old turns burglar, forced into the business by the man who should be teaching him the difference between right and wrong: his father.

  Cugs is a pro at both games, but only one can secure him a college scholarship. It should be an easy decision, a no-brainer—if Newbark hadn’t proffered the only life he knows.

  After run-ins with Nadine Paganelli, his accidental victim and the sole person to have caught him in the act, Cugs starts to realize that hearts can be stolen too.

  When his long-lost sister makes contact, lies are uncovered and truths revealed. Suddenly, Cugs finds himself questioning both plans and loyalties. Because sometimes the only way to move forward is by pulling the bottom out of the past.

  I snip cables with practiced ease. Watch dying flares signal that the deed is done. My father calls for me, wanting me to hurry. It’s dark, a good thing, but a younger me wants the lights on.

  I’m done with my first task of the night. Next, I’ll head inside and search rooms for residents. I don’t like where we are, by a one-story bungalow on a golf course. The owners are supposedly rich, but everyone’s rich to my dad.

  This never grows old. Or maybe it’s been old from the get-go. Yes, that’s it; shopping has always been old.

  “Cugs, what are you waiting for? Get in there, dammit.”

  “Going.” I prowl on.

  It’s been a decade, but wrongness still floods my veins. What would it be like if my first time was now? Would my muscles lock up, or would adrenaline course hard making it impossible to complete my duties? I fill my lungs with air. I can’t forget to breathe when our goal is to enter and exit fast.

  The front door creaks as I shove inside, and my pulse quickens. All instinct, here I am again. Again and always again. I listen, scan, smell. This is what we do.

  Tonight, Dad’s right. No one is home, so we can swipe the main areas in peace.

  “Bedrooms first. We’re doing gold and cash.” His reminder is unnecessary. We always know what we’re shopping for ahead of time.

  Bungalow. Three bedrooms. Easy. Green bills on top of a chest of drawers in the master suite. Bright diamonds dangling off a jewelry tree.

  Car lights beam from the driveway. The garage door whirs in a robotic buzz.

  “Out the French doors!” At Dad’s shout, I ninja-glide to the den and open before he’s even there. Backyard shadows can be friends. While lights flood the house behind us, we run wordlessly, hop hedges under a moon dulled from the clouds above.

  A block away, we shuffle into Dad’s car. My heart still thinks we’re on death row.

  “Show me.” Dad’s voice is breathy as he focuses on the loot in my arms.

  “Can we get out of here first?”

  The car jerks forward, but irritation fills the void of his answer. I’m no teenage rebel, but black doodles rave in my chest at how I’m patient and he’s not.

  I plug in my iPhone and let “Things I Do” by Türküm explode from the speakers, not that he’ll understand. Dad slams it off, but my eyes cause him to turn it back on at a lower volume. It’s the least he can do for me.

  I’m chilling in the prefab’s coolest feature, a window with a built-in seat. It’s a week since our last shopping trip, and I’m busy suppressing what’ll happen any moment now.

  Head against the window frame, I watch peeps on the playground outside. Bear’s there. He lives a few houses over. Once he notices, he’ll wave for me to join him on the swings with Liza. He doesn’t mind me being “the third wheel,” his words.

  “Do you want some tea?”

  “Nope... thanks.” I try not to look at Cynthia as I shake my head. When have I ever wanted tea?

  Cynthia is my father’s new wife, my quote-unquote stepmom. She’s twenty-two, and she leaves her underwear around the house. Yesterday, I found a fancy bra on the couch. It was thrilling and disturbing as hell.

  “You sure? It’s one of the new teas I just got shipped from Key West.”

  “Tea leaves from the Keys?” I can’t help angling my head up to check if she’s serious.

  “No, silly.” She smiles prettily. “They have this awesome tea store there, and the tea’s imported from wherever it’s made, like Uganda or something. China?”

  Dad used to flirt with Cynthia at the supermarket. He’d play around and act like he’d tip her for bagging his groceries, and then I guess he finally did—with a wedding band. She’s hot though, and could be a friend or the older girlfriend of a friend.

  “Why don’t you order it directly from China?”

  “Oh gawd, Cugs!” She slaps her hand over her mouth and giggles like the girls at school. “No, thank you very much. How long do you think that’d take? Plus, I’d rather get American tea.”

  “I thought you said it wasn’t made in America.”

  “Ah, you know what I mean.” Did she just roll her eyes at me?

  Yeah, Cynthia definitely doesn’t remind me of a stepmom. I’ve already had one, and there’s no replacing her. I was little when Dad thrust me into the car and raced off, leaving my sister and Mom behind.

  I used to call her Mom. She was Mom until suddenly she wasn’t anymore. But hey, that’s water under the bridge. Dad and I haven’t talked about Mom or Paislee in forever. Maybe because it’s over a decade since we fled Rigita, Alaska, and ended up in the hole-in-the-wall town of Newbark, Florida. Here, the swamps skulk only a mile away, and the ocean is a distant fantasy.

  “You done daydreaming yet?” Dad asks from the hallway. He rented this prefab at the outskirts of town as soon as we arrived, a small two-room with a den-slash-kitchen nook and a bath. Even whispers sieve through the walls and leave everyone informed, which complicates my life now that Dad has remarried.

  “It’s shopping time.” His playful expression causes stress to travel up my calves.

  “Can’t. I’ve got practice.”

  People think I love stretching, which would be bizarre for a football player. I’d prefer their misconception to the truth though, that anxiety travels through my muscles and into my bones, causing a burning pain that doesn’t ease until the week’s shopping is over.

&nbs
p; Dad snorts. “Call Coach and tell him you can’t make it because your father needs you.”

  “We’ve been out three times this month. I thought we’d hit our quota.”

  “Quota.” Dad chuckles. He loads a coil of rope into my arms in passing. “Here, pop it in the trunk, will ya? Don’t forget to pull the car up to the entrance first so the neighbors don’t see you. One more year, and the hedge will be tall enough to give real privacy,” he adds, a content tinge to his pitch. “Actually, if you hunch over while you walk—”

  “I’m aware.” I feel my mouth press shut. Can seventeen-year-old guys be bitter? I thought it was a grown-up thing.

  As I stand, the rope weighing a thousand pounds in my arms, I press my heel against fake wooden boards and stretch. I breathe in deeply, allowing oxygen to flood me. “I’ll help you prepare, but I want to stay behind.”

  “Not a chance, Cugs. You’re the best scout any shopper can have.”

  “Burglar.”

  “Let’s stick to ‘shopper,’” he replies without anger or resignation.

  I think the sky is the best thing about Newbark. Funny, considering how the sky is everywhere. “A normal weekend would be awesome.”

  “This again? I only ask that you work the weekends. I do the nine-to-five weekday shopping alone. That’s not good enough for you now?”

  “I know, but—”

  “People travel. Leave their houses unguarded on the weekends. We’re doing Magnolia Avenue in South Beach. We haven’t hit the area since February of last year, and if all goes well, we’ll hide in the dunes afterward and celebrate. I’ll get us a few microbrewskis. Perhaps we’ll shop a nice meal from one of those hoity-toity fridge rooms they have down there.”

  A small joy hits me. Fathers aren’t supposed to be burglars, and they don’t buy beer for seventeen-year-olds, but Dad’s rewards don’t come often. When I was younger, he’d lift toys and electronics for me to enjoy back at the prefab when I’d done a good job.

  “Remember our last brewski celebration?” He nudges me, brown eyes glinting. “I think the moon was out. Right? And I brought a duck covered in some sort of orange jelly from that gated community in Fort Lauderdale.”

  “Jade Gardens.”

  “Yeah, Jade Gardens. We’d hit them more often if it wasn’t for their alarm system. Damn impressive that one. Remember how we left right when the cops came? We all but brushed the side of their car.” He grins.

  Me, I don’t find it exhilarating to live on the edge. My poison is those moments when Dad and I sit below a black sky, when we’re out of sight and I’ve left my fear behind at the last house. That’s when he has all the time. Dad will exhale stories from an era when innocence and ethics prevailed. He’ll reminisce about my grandparents, about uncles I’ve never met.

  He’ll paint tales of grouse hunting interrupted by polar bears, describe the antics of some girl he never caught. Yeah, with his mind inside a few beers, my father becomes lighthearted, and he lures crooked-smiles from me.

  “Can’t we take a break?” I plead now.

  “What do you mean, ‘break?’”

  “Just… Oliver and Toeffel—what do they need this time?”

  “They got a big request for Apple products, so anything portable, like iPhones, iPads, and laptops with that half-munched apple on them will work. Should be a no-brainer. We’ll just eat our way through the upper end of Magnolia Avenue, and once we hit fifteen-twenty products—”

  “Dad!”

  “What? I’ve promised Cynthia a vacation, so you’ll get your time off soon enough. Just a few more hits, and we’re good. I’m going to surprise her with tickets to Hawaii,” he adds proudly. “She deserves to get away.”

  “Twenty products is a lot.”

  “McConnelys aren’t quitters.”

  I get into Dad’s Chevy. It’s small and gray and unassuming, perfect for Dad’s shopping needs. I back it up and enter the prefab, grab the rope and tool case and load them into the trunk.

  I’m an old man when I straighten, watching Dad’s preparations.

  “Five minutes, son,” he replies without my asking. “Go get dressed.”

  “It’s early,” I try though I know it won’t help.

  “Not really, no. If we leave now, we’ll be there in two-and-a-half hours’ time depending on traffic. It’ll be dark by then.”

  “I’ll bring the clothes.”

  “No. You’ll bring your change of clothes. Those.” He juts his chin toward the shorts and t-shirt I’m wearing. Dad is thorough. I guess it makes sense when sloppiness is the brick road to jail.

  I drag past him to my room, to a small window with blinds and a standard-sized bed with a mattress Dad bought for me last year after the Jade Gardens raid. Flimsy mirror doors protect the entrails of my closet. They need new bearings and get stuck in their tracks, but I jiggle one of them, making my reflection wobble before it relents and allows me access.

  I find my form-fitted black T-shirt and pants. Black socks and shoes. Last weekend, I snagged my black cotton gloves on a fence. They ripped, and there’s dried blood on them when I pull them out of a pocket.

  I get dressed. Sigh at the washed-out writing on the front of the tee: Got Milk? There was a time when that inscription shone white. Of course I didn’t use it on Dad’s shopping trips back then.

  The writing has faded into the shirt now, its charcoal shimmer a reminder of has-been purity. It was after too many rounds in the washer that my father threw it at me the first time, saying, “Here, this one’ll do.”

  In the car, he chatters in an attempt to snap me out of my anxiety. When he hits subjects I’ve got opinions on, I’m compelled to answer, but mostly I keep my eyes shut against the crap we’re about to do.

  I’m shooting myself in the foot though, because my mind has a routine that isn’t better. It returns to pasts I didn’t enjoy, and today it begins with my oldest, saddest memory.

  “Cugs. Please call Mom and me. We love you.”

  I bob my head in the backseat of Dad’s Chevy. Paislee’s hair tickles my nose. I’m five, maybe six, and I’m trying not to look at her because it’s hard not to cry—can’t cry now that my strong sister cries over us. I tuck my chin in against my throat and stare at my stomach.

  Paislee and I have each other. When Mom and Dad fight, we play games. She’s older than me, so she takes me way to the playground. She pushes me on the merry-go-round. I squeal when it goes faster and faster.

  “Adults are stupid,” she whispers when I pass her. “Kids are smart,” she whispers the next time, and “They’ll stop yelling at each other soon, super-soon.” My sister is always right. She only takes me home once the house is quiet.

  I didn’t get into the Chevy on my own. The sun hadn’t risen when my father lifted me from my bed. I held onto my blanket, an anchor, but he separated it from the bed and swirled it around me.

  In hindsight, I think he tried to leave quietly, that he chose the dead of night because no one would be awake. But Paislee and Mom heard us and barged out of their rooms, my sister a tornado of defiance and panic that leaped off the porch and after me into the car.

  “Please don’t leave me,” Paislee cries. To me, she cries it.

  “I’m here,” Mom chokes out.

  I can’t stand it. My arms fly around my sister’s neck, and I squeeze so tightly and never want to let go. Dad gets mad, so mad—

  “Paislee! Get the hell out of the car!”

  “Don’t talk to my daughter like that!”

  My body shudders when Paislee lets go. I can’t control it, and she can’t stay to make it better.

  “You’ll be okay,” she whispers as he drags her away from me, her eyes big—sad— “Call. Just call. I love you, little rat.”

  I open my eyes. We’re stopped at the traffic light of Shweiner and Fitcher. There are no
cars, but my father is a careful driver. He obeys traffic laws in ways I’d like to obey other laws, like those concerning the property of others.

  At least Dad doesn’t lie; he never promised Paislee that we would call. A bob of the head counts as a promise. It means “yes,” and my sister’s plea was too clear for me to have misunderstood. I’m the liar in the prefab.

  I trip through the unknown door, the aftertaste of my seven-year birthday cake still sweet on my tongue. My elbow hits the wood, causing a small thud.

  “Be quiet!” Dad hisses.

  “Why? Who lives here?” We’re far from Newbark, and Dad was nervous while we ate my cake at a bakery on the way here.

  “You don’t know them.”

  “Oh. Do you?”

  “‘Shh,’ I said. No, I don’t. Listen, we’re going to play a game, all right?”

  “Okay…” Dad doesn’t seem playful. “What game?”

  “As soon as we’re inside, we’re going to play that we can’t make a sound, and then we’ll play that we’ve been hired to find treasures made of gold, diamonds, and all sorts of jewelry.”

  “Oh.” I’m unsure about this new game. We’ve never played it before. “What do we do with the treasure if we find it?”