2 Chapter 2

“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.