Jake's Thief

Chapter 1Wednesday evening, last week of September Jake Cohen bundled up against the brisk autumn wind. It was his favorite time of the year. Too bad he had no one to share it with. All of his friends, one by one, had found their sub and Jake, although he looked at every new crop, hadn’t. He decided to do the unthinkable—he was going to ask the sub club for help. He didn’t look forward to the flack he was going to catch from his friends, but damn it, he was lonely and they all had a sub of their own, except him. With the changes he was contemplating for his life, now was the time to find someone. The sub club had performed miracles with the other recalcitrant Doms; he should be easy. He actually wanted a sub to love and their help to find him. Earlier that day, he called Reed and asked him if he could speak to Jim. Naturally, Reed wanted to know why. “What earthly reason do you need to speak to my Jim outside of the club?” Reed’s question left him stammering. “I want Jim and the sub club’s help to find me a sub I can love,” Jake told Reed in a mumbled undertone, hoping Reed didn’t quite hear him. “You mean you actually want them to meddle in your affairs,” Reed said, appalled. “You don’t need their dubious brand of interference, trust me on this. And worse, if you f**k up, we’ll be the ones that pay the price.” “I think I do, want them to meddle that is. Please, be a friend. Let me ask Jim and the rest of them to give it a shot. I can’t be any worse off than I was before. After all it was all of you assholes, with the notable exception of Bear, that gave your subs such hard times before commitment. The sub club’s interference had nothing to do with your troubles. I don’t want to give anyone a hard time. I want to commit. I’m sick of being alone.” “How can you possibly say you’re alone? You have all of us and there are new crops of subs that come into the club every month.” He could hear Reed’s incredulity over the phone. “I play, you know I play. However, I haven’t found someone that I want to come home to at night and I think that maybe I’m missing something or not doing something right. Anyway, their record is good, seven for seven love matches. Maybe a little of the other Doms’ luck will rub off on me.” “If you do this, the other Doms may not forgive you. The subs will be so smug they’ll be earning strokes for a month.” “It was okay when I still had Tom but now he’s hitched. I never would have picked a homeless guy for an ex-cop, but the subs worked whatever voodoo they do and it all turned out hearts and flowers, or as much hearts and flowers as a Dom/sub arrangement can be. You all love your subs and they adore you. I want that for myself.” “Okay, buddy, you have my permission to try, but don’t complain when you don’t like the consequences. You’re also going to have to get the other Doms to agree not to give out strokes to their subs for plotting, because this wasn’t the subs’ idea, it’s yours.” Reed chuckled. * * * * As soon as Reed got off the phone, he speed dialed Bear. “You won’t believe what Jake is going to do…” * * * * Davey Howell didn’t want to pick pockets for a living. A year ago he’d had a job, a good one. He had been a paralegal to Bill Danvers, senior partner at the law offices of Danvers, Blake, & Sampson. When Mr. Danvers went on a year’s sabbatical, the other two partners had transferred their dislike for the senior partner to Davey. He hadn’t been able to do anything right. He’d been at that office for five years, and they’d fired him, summarily. Now he was twenty-five and in competition with all the paralegals that just graduated from school. The fact that Davey was fired didn’t look good on his resume and his old boss, Bill Danvers, was gone with his wife for a cruise around the world for a year. He couldn’t get a hold of him for another three months. His unemployment insurance had run out, he’d depleted his 401K and he was out of options. His resume was papered across the ‘net, he’d called every recruiter in New York and no one would hire him without a reference. He went to the jobs counselor at the unemployment office. “If you can’t get a letter of reference from your old employer, you should write to the partner you worked for. He’ll give you a reference, if what you say is true. I called Danvers, Blake and Sampson about you. They gave out a terrible reference. Until the other partner returns, you’re out of luck.” The jobs counselor looked bored and annoyed. “Come back when you have the letter, maybe then I can do something for you.” Davey thought, if he’d been smart, he would have gotten that letter the minute Bill announced his sabbatical, but he’d trusted that the firm would find another lawyer for him to work for. Instead, they had gotten rid of him. He’d hired his own lawyer to sue for wrongful termination, but the lawyer he found was a hack and just sent a few letters which probably went directly into the circular file. Then, he’d run out of money. He had no family, he was a foster kid. He had no friends; you didn’t make friends in the foster system. He was completely on his own. Now, he was standing in the garage of a fancy office building waiting for someone well-heeled and working late to show up so he could pick his pocket. He’d learned to pick pockets in one of his foster homes. He was eleven. His junkie mother hadn’t visited in about three years and an older boy of sixteen thought it was a hoot to teach him. “Davey, you want to learn how to do something useful?” Kyle was rolling a blue rubber ball in his hands. He called it training. Since no one ever noticed Davey, to have Kyle’s undivided attention now made him glow. Davey had a huge crush on the older teen. Davey didn’t care what he was going to teach him, he was all in. Kyle spent the next three weeks teaching Davey how to pick pockets. “You’re pretty good, kid. I’ll take you out on Friday night by the ball field, easy pickings.” “I don’t want to go to jail. I thought you were teaching me for fun,” Davey said, wide-eyed. Kyle slapped him around some trying to get Davey to change his mind. He remembered a black eye, a broken nose and a broken arm. The foster family complained about the fighting and Davey’s suitcase was packed and on the step before he left for the emergency room. Mr. and Mrs. Jones had one word to say when he returned home from the hospital, “Leave.” He begged Mrs. Jones to let him stay. “But Mrs. Jones, he attacked me.” Davey sat in the front seat of an old battered Ford Escort pleading for her to change her mind. He didn’t tell her about learning to be a pickpocket. He was afraid of another beating. Mrs. Jones shrugged her shoulders. “Kyle has been with us for three years. You’ve been here for three months. Kyle has never given us a problem. You are a bad influence.” They got to the house where Mr. Jones was waiting. He started to cry. “None of that, you sniveling little wimp. Your things are on the porch, go out and sit on the step.” He could still see Kyle’s gloating face in the upstairs window as the social worker’s car pulled away two hours later. It was the last time he cried. There was some justice in the world, since he later read in the paper that Kyle was arrested and convicted of armed robbery and sent to Rahway for twenty years but that didn’t help his current situation one iota. Now it was either pick pockets or sell drugs and he wasn’t getting involved with drugs and gangs. He saw what they did to other kids in foster care and the group home. Most of them wound up dead with a needle in their arm. He knew that two-seventy-seven Park Avenue between Forty-seventh and Forty-eighth was one of the most expensive office rentals in New York. He was going to try his luck there. The office had a parking garage. He’d staked it out. The garage was minimally supervised by a man in the front of the entrance in a kiosk watching television. Davey hoped he wouldn’t notice him. He trailed to the back by the elevator and hung out in the shadows. The elevator dinged. He spotted a tall, handsome man with black hair dressed in an expensive suit carrying a courier bag. The guy used a remote to start an Audi. He decided to brush by him and grab his wallet, visible in the inside pocket of his suit. He would pretend to fall and when the guy helped him up, he would do it. * * * * Jake had just started his car with his remote when he saw a young kid walking in the garage. The kid was a stunner. He had light sandy blond hair that hit his shoulders, even when tied in a queue and when he moved under the bright lighting, Jake could see teary red rims surrounding sapphire blue eyes. He seemed a little bit down on his luck. Jake wondered why his shoulders were slumped and as the kid came closer, he saw tears running down his cheeks. As he approached Jake, he stumbled. Jake grabbed hold of him and the kid attempted to pick his inside pocket. In a lightning swift maneuver, Jake had the kid up against his car with his hands immobile behind his back. The kid was silently sobbing, his chest heaving, trying to keep it together. Jake took a pair of cuffs out of his raincoat pocket left over from his last visit to the club and cuffed him. Then he grabbed his phone to call the police. “Please, don’t call the police. This is the first time I’ve tried something like this but I’m desperate. I’m so hungry.” The kid was breathing fast on the verge of hyperventilation. Jake thought he looked as if he might be telling the truth. Dragging him by the cuffs, Jake opened the front door of his silver Audi and threw him inside on the passenger seat. “Tell me why I shouldn’t call the police right now.” Jake had the phone in his hand. The kid began to speak quickly between sobs. “Sir, I’m a paralegal. My boss was the managing partner of Danvers, Blake and Sampson. Mr. Danvers took a year’s sabbatical to go on a cruise around the world with his wife. They left nine months ago. He said he’d find me a place with another one of the partners in the firm because he didn’t want to lose me.” He sobbed again. “As soon as Mr. Danvers left the firm, a lot of other people left too. I didn’t have anywhere else to go. It wasn’t too long before I found out that the other partners hated Mr. Danvers, so rather than laying me off, they fired me without cause. The others that gave notice all obtained a letter of reference from Mr. Danvers before he left. I never thought I’d need one. No one warned me.” Davey straightened himself in the seat and gulped down another sob. “You were a paralegal. Why didn’t you sue for wrongful termination?” “I tried, but all I could afford for a lawyer was a hack, Milton Fried. He sent out a few letters, charged me five hundred dollars—and that was that. The letters probably wound up in the circular file. I paid Fried all the money I could afford. I cashed in my 401K, went through my savings and pawned my television, stereo equipment and my computer months ago.” He paused. “I’m down to my last twenty bucks, which I’ll need to pay subway fare in case I get an interview. I bought minutes for the phone for this month in case I got a call back, but on the first, I’m out of my apartment and I haven’t eaten anything but Ramen for six weeks and there hasn’t been any Ramen for two days.” “What about unemployment insurance?” Jake turned around to really look the kid in his eyes. “It ran out a month ago and because I was fired, I had to wait six weeks before I was eligible and it wasn’t much.” “If you’re good enough to be the managing partner’s paralegal—why can’t you get a job?” “Blake and Sampson won’t give me a good reference and as I said, Mr. Danvers is on a trip around the world. I made all the bookings for him. He should be in Belgrade now. I can’t call him. His wife swore if he heard from the office she’d divorce him and that woman is scary. Besides, I can barely afford a phone. It’s a burner phone and doesn’t make international calls. Mr. Danvers will be gone for another three months. All of the other members of Mr. Danvers’ team got letters of recommendation before he left. They saw the writing on the wall. I was blind to it, too busy trying to do my job to get involved in office politics. I know he’d give me a good reference but now when you call the firm and ask about me, they say I was fired for cause. But I didn’t do anything wrong.” He broke into tears again.