Chapter Text
Flashing lights and the deafening chatter of a hundred cameras.
The noise was so constant, so complete, that Debbie could do nothing but block it out, could focus only on the path she had to take.
A thousand dresses and capes – blue, purple, gold, reflecting the lights of the cameras and the late afternoon sun that peaked under the pristine white canopy above the chaos.
There was a woman with a list, then a staircase – blood red carpet stretched taut against white marble. Crimson on white always made her stomach churn, ever since that day in the showers. Debbie gritted her teeth and kept walking. It would ruin everything if she threw up now. The puking was meant for someone else, she just wasn’t sure who . Not that it mattered, at least she didn’t think it did. Debbie kept her eyes on the stairs in front of her, resolutely putting one foot in front of the other.
There were decorations, but she couldn’t put them in focus. She slipped past Anna Wintour, eying her watch with professional interest as she avoided the line of people shaking hands. Her palms were sweating, itching. She could already feel the diamonds against her fingertips.
Champagne helped, bubbles popping on her tongue, so sharp they almost hurt.
She knew where to stand, where to move, how many steps to take from one exhibit to the next. She kept her eyes fixed on the middle of the room, on the paper doll people in fancy clothes. No one in the room looked twice at her. It was the people outside of the room that were her concern. The red lights of each camera seemed to taunt her. Her watch – Danny’s watch – ticked far too quickly, and too soon, there was a silhouette – brightly colored, but as yet undefined – rushing across the room, and she followed, careful not to trip. She had rehearsed this, hadn’t she? She knew every crack in the floor.
The bathrooms seemed out of place in their normalcy – bland compared to the event itself. She had been here before. She would push open the door, she would unclasp the necklace, she would replace it with the fake. She traced those events to their conclusions – handcuffs, shouting, orange. She stopped.
Once you’ve eliminated the impossible…
The bathroom door was there, right there, and the necklace was disappearing into it. But the blinking lights in the cameras looked a little different, and if she stayed here…
Whatever remains, however improbable, must be…
Debbie went to get another glass of champagne. She could feel the bubbles against her nose before the liquid hit her tongue. She had the sudden urge to sneeze; her eyes squeezed themselves shut, but the sneeze didn’t come. She opened her eyes.
The truth.
The wall before her looked different. There were still brightly colored costumes floating to-and-fro, but nothing was in focus. She blinked, but the scene didn’t change. The creamy marble on the floor was shimmering. Lights popped in front of her eyes. In the distance, she heard panicked voices. It had worked, then. They had gotten it, whoever they were, whoever had been in the bathroom already. Debbie smiled grimly, heard the click of a camera flash. She raised the glass of champagne to her lips once more, but now the glass was full of the shards of diamonds. She made to set the glass down, but her lips touched the rim against her will, and her hand betrayed her, slowly tipping the gems towards her tongue. It took only seconds for the cuts to begin to form. She tasted blood as crimson as the red carpet on the stairs when she raised her thumb to her lip and swiped it over the broken skin.
Debbie choked, forcing her throat to close. She couldn’t swallow a mouthful of razors. That wasn’t part of the plan. Besides, her diamonds didn’t look like this. They were already cut into perfect, rounded squares – not a ragged edge in sight. She willed herself to be sick as she rushed towards the bathroom, which was now abandoned. On the threshold she tripped, and pain shot through her left ankle. None of this made sense, and the sounds around her – she thought they would dissipate in here with a heavy door between her and the hall – were getting louder all the time. The flashing lights were back, only this time they weren’t cameras. It was as though she had stepped onto the subway, but the car she was in was dark, and all she could see were the flashes of lights outside the windows as the train hurtled past the fluorescent sconces in the rough walls of the tunnel. She almost gasped, but her mouth was full of diamonds, wedging themselves into her cheeks and gums. She breathed heavily through her nose and knelt on the shaking floor of the train car.
She seemed to be alone. With a great deal of effort, Debbie squeezed her eyes shut, released her jaw as much as she could, and pressed both fists to the hollow just beneath her ribcage, jabbing inwards and upwards. Vomiting was a relief – at least the stones were gone from her mouth, though the bile burned against the cuts they had made. She didn’t have much in her stomach – just a glass of champagne, really. It was always hard to eat on the day of a big job. The job. The Met. The Toussaint.
Debbie tried to haul herself to her feet, but the train was picking up speed, and her ankle, which could very well be broken given the height of her Louboutin heels, protested. Her palms were sweating and itching again. Her stomach was queasy. She leaned her head back against something soft, something that breathed steadily. She could hear another heartbeat, a counterpoint to her own, which was hammering in her chest.
Lou?
She wanted it to be her. Was that selfish? To wish this horrible place on Lou? Wouldn’t it be more prudent to pray that she was somewhere, anywhere else? Her chest ached. Maybe she had swallowed some of the glass. That was an easier answer than trying to parse out everything that Lou made her feel. That was long ago, far away.
The train gathered speed, and the lights outside the windows became golden blurs. Then they grew brighter, though they illuminated nothing . Debbie was still leaning on someone behind her, but she couldn’t turn her head, couldn’t move at all. The white light drew closer, spread up her legs, hiding her own body from view. Debbie closed her eyes.
**
The blinding fluorescent light was still there when she opened her eyes, but this time, it was shining above her, contained behind frosted plexiglass. The sectioned ceiling was covered in little dots. She remembered trying to count them when she was in solitary. She always lost track, but it passed the time.
Slowly, carefully, Debbie sat up.
She blinked.
The cell was familiar – small, but not entirely bare. There were books in the corner – her own, mostly gifts from Tammy. There was a toothbrush and a pair of slippers. There was a postcard from Danny with nothing written on it. Debbie narrowed her eyes.
“You’re probably pretty confused,” a voice said, distorted by a speaker.
She looked up and caught sight of Dina through the glass on the cell door, speaking into one of those little microphones that piped sound into the cell. Dina raised her eyebrows in the direction of the door, and Debbie nodded. She didn’t even let Dina halfway over the threshold before she spoke.
“Why am I in here? I can’t…Fuck.” Debbie coughed as the act of talking sent sharp pain through her throat.
Dina grimaced and leaned against the wall across from Debbie’s bed. “You did a lot of screaming.”
Debbie hated the feeling of losing control, and this…She didn’t know what day it was. Fuck, she couldn’t even say what year it was. Her first day in solitary had been May 28, 2013, but she could have sworn she remembered typing 2014 into the computer in the rec room when her work assignment had been to print out notices for the stalls in the employee bathrooms. She made to get off the bed. She needed to move, to pace the tiny room like she often did when the anxiety became too much. But Dina stepped forward and grabbed her arm.
“Best not,” she said. She gestured towards Debbie’s left ankle, which was wrapped in a bandage. Debbie flexed it, and a dull ache spread up her leg.
“What…?”
Dina sighed. “It’s not broken; just sprained. I think you kicked the wall.”
“Why would I kick a wall, Dina?” Debbie asked sharply. Her voice sounded low and strange, ragged. It made her think of Lou, and Debbie tried to block that thought. It only made her feel uncomfortably warm.
“Someone – and no, I can’t tell you who,” she forestalled Debbie’s interruption, before continuing, “Someone drugged you. We think – I think – that they were trying to get you a longer sentence. Drug possession – well, let’s just say you wouldn’t be getting out of here in four years. No way you’d be eligible for parole. No way in hell.”
Four years. 2014, then. But her memories were foggy. “When was this?” Debbie asked.
“Two days ago,” Dina said.
“Which makes today…?”
Dina checked her watch. “May 14th.”
“2014?” Debbie said it with a smirk, as though she were kidding, not wanting Dina to know that she was still a little unsure.
Dina grinned. “Yeah. Still 2014.”
Debbie cracked a smile and then looked down at her lap, fidgeting with the hem of her orange top. May 14th. Lou’s birthday. She wondered where she was. Tammy had told her she was pretty sure she was back in New York, but she didn’t have any other information than that. She desperately wanted that to be true. She didn’t even need Lou to come to visit. She wasn’t even sure she wanted her to. But the fact that she might be nearby…that was comforting. Still, this would be the seventh bottle of perfume that Debbie owed her, one for every birthday they had missed in the six years, two months, and five days since Lou left. Debbie hoped she would buy herself some.
She left. She left me behind. A wave of sadness threatened to overwhelm Debbie. She swallowed hard. The lump that had suddenly appeared in her throat was very painful. “So…,” she croaked, glad that she had the excuse of her hoarse voice to prevent Dina from noticing her candor.
“I know it’s a lot to take in,” Dina said.
“Yeah.”
“I’m just glad I saw it happen. No one should be in here on false charges. ‘Course, that’s not how the world works, but when I see something like this, I don’t like it, you know?”
Debbie nodded. “Thanks. Did you get the shipment this week?”
Dina glanced towards the door, but there was no one passing, and Debbie knew she would have muted any microphones in the room. “Yesterday,” she muttered.
“Sell ‘em, don’t smoke ‘em,” Debbie said with half a smile.
“Yeah, don’t worry.” Dina turned towards the door. “Get some rest, Ocean. It’ll help.”
“Hey, Dina?”
“What?”
“Thanks for saving my ass.”
**
It took about twenty-four hours for Debbie to regain her grip on reality. It was amazing how an entire year’s worth of events could become hazy from one dose of whatever the hell they gave her, but by the end of the next day, she didn’t think there were any holes in her memory.
She still felt like shit, though.
The vomiting, which apparently had been real, continued. It was hard for her to keep anything down, and it only took three days for her ribs to become even more prominent than they had been before. Her throat ached, and the swelling of her ankle rose and fell depending on whether she was able to keep the anti-inflammatories in her system long enough for them to work. Dina told her solitary would be temporary, just a precaution as the drugs metabolized. Debbie wasn’t looking forward to going back to regular prison life. It was quieter here, and she didn’t have a work assignment. She could lie in a stupor and stare at the ceiling, counting dots until her brain finally decided to let her sleep. She could think of Lou without feeling vulnerable in front of her cell mates. She hadn’t wanted her like this since she had first come up with the Met plan eleven months ago in a cell that looked exactly like this one.
On the second night after coming back to herself, Debbie let the daydreams overwhelm her. She had resisted them all day, trying to concentrate on what she could remember of the bizarre hallucinations she had experienced, certain that her brain had probably come up with something useful. She was determined to find it. Her foray into her own mind had been fruitless however, and she had brought herself back to the reality of her cell feeling queasy at the thought of being on a train that never stopped. She had never loved the subway, and now she was beginning to actively hate it. So, she pulled herself away, back to cold, hard cinder blocks. But then she remembered leaning her head back against something, someone soft.
Lou.
It had to have been her. Touching Lou wasn’t like touching anyone else. And being touched by her…
The prison-issued clothing was itchy against her skin, and Debbie felt a rush of heat in her blood that made the room spin. For a moment, she thought the dizziness might lead to another round of vomiting, but then Lou was there in her mind with her fingers in Debbie’s hair. Debbie squeezed her eyes shut. If there was one thing she was good at, it was daydreams. She could create whole worlds in her mind, paste herself into scenarios that had happened, were happening, had yet to happen – it was very useful for jobs. And now…
She could see her, sitting before her. Debbie reached out, and Lou’s skin was like silk beneath her hands, and Lou’s hands were all over her, working over her bare skin – the prison attire was nowhere to be found. She felt herself melting. Lou’s eyes pierced hers with their usual intensity. Her lips were even softer than Debbie remembered.
**
Debbie didn’t glean anything useful from the hallucinations until more than a week later.
She was moved back into her usual cell on a Monday morning after breakfast. Food was still difficult, but she had managed several glasses of water and a bowl of oatmeal that stuck to her insides like tar, sitting alone in the cafeteria. Her new work assignment would start after lunch, and until then, Dina told her she could use the rec lounge or remain in her cell. The gym was strictly off limits until her ankle healed. That was annoying. Debbie usually did her best thinking when punching something.
Still, it was nice to have a change of scenery coupled with quiet while her cell mates were working. Debbie took her time rearranging her possessions, stacking and sorting her books, taping the postcard from Danny onto the cinder blocks next to her bed. She flopped down on the mattress and gazed at the bunk above her, arms folded loosely across her rib cage. The underside of the bunk looked like a grid – thin metal slats interlacing with one another. Debbie used it like a map, overlaying the crisscrossing pattern with a blueprint of the Met. She knew the scale, knew every staircase, every hallway. Some exhibits stayed the same, some shifted. She kept track using the arts section of the New York Times that were provided in the rec lounge. The issues were usually a week or two out of date, but it was enough to get a general picture of which areas remained unchanged. The Gala itself was more of a problem. This year, she had studied every article about it, combed each word in the style section for hints about layout. Next year, she would do the same, and the year after that.
Eyes darting across the underside of the bunk, Debbie traced her route up the broad marble staircase. Walking quickly in high heels, Debbie could span the width of the hall in twenty-three steps. Hosts for the ball weren’t announced until the year of the Gala, but Debbie was counting on someone being a good fit for the Toussaint. That said, the mark could easily be a guest. There wasn’t really any reason for them to be the most high-profile person there. Either way, they would be seated near the center of the room. So far, she knew Lou would be in the kitchen; she knew Amita would be vital and that convincing her would be easy; she knew she needed a fence and fashion designer. That was six, including the mark. Debbie furrowed her brow in concentration, allowed the scene to play out. She watched a silhouette rise from a table in the center of the room. She took quick measured steps to follow it towards the bathrooms, and then…
Debbie stopped herself in front of the imagined bathroom door and blinked. The scene froze. She remembered. In the hallucination, she hadn’t followed the necklace into the bathroom. She had stayed here, outside. Visible. An alibi. It was so simple, she was almost a little disappointed. But then again, she had always done her own lifting in the past. She couldn’t do that now, not with her record. Not for the first time, Debbie cursed the circumstances that had led her to this spot – to staring up at the underside of a prison bunk. Her fingers tingled wistfully, and yet…there was something elegant about running the jewel heist of the century in plain sight.
She needed more people – someone inside the bathroom, definitely. A good pickpocket. No, the best pickpocket they could find. Debbie added them to the list. There was something else. She turned on the spot, surveying the scene around her. Balance of probability suggested there would be two security guards assigned to the necklace, possibly three. She stepped around their bodies, frozen in the midst of running towards the disappearing Toussaint. Their faces were blurred, but their uniforms were lethally detailed, down to the guns at their belts. Debbie shivered. She preferred to avoid guns when she could.
She stepped back. The hallucination had positioned her just outside the bathroom door. She had halted because…because…Gradually, she became aware of a red light in the periphery of her vision. Cameras. She had considered them before, of course. She didn’t know their exact positions, but she knew they were plentiful. She suspected that this version of the Met she had created in her mind had more than the real place. It was always better to be too careful. Smile for the camera, Debs. She heard Lou’s voice, and she gave herself five seconds to savor it, slipping into a different area of her mind, where it was just her and Lou, Lou and her – warm, calm.
But that was the answer, wasn’t it? An answer, at any rate. She had to be seen, but the necklace had to be invisible. The idea was neat and clean, as if it was a gift presented with a little bow not unlike the ones she tied to Lou’s bottles of perfume every year. Debbie pushed Lou aside for a moment with a shake of her head. She panned out from the scene, staring up at her imagined blueprint once more. Neon red eyelines of the cameras shot out in all directions, but if she could control them…
Debbie sighed. She needed a hacker. She needed an extraordinary hacker. If she was certain of one thing, nearly six years in prison would be far too long for her to stay current with technology. She couldn’t do it herself. For a moment she thought of Lou, but no. Lou had always been a little bumbling when it came to even her phone – the allure of being off the grid, disconnected, was too much for her to care about how it all worked. Debbie had cared, but she wasn’t on top of it anymore, and – she smirked self-deprecatingly at herself – perhaps she was getting too old for it anyway. Hackers were young and sharp, not fifty-year-old women who had been stupid enough to get themselves thrown in prison. The blueprint of the Met seemed to melt before her. A pick-pocket and a hacker.
Debbie chewed her lip. The hallucinations, as uncomfortable as they had been, had led her to more conclusions in a few days than she could usually come up with in a month. Her drug-addled brain had opened a door to the rest of the plan. She had her team now. And yes, having to find two more players was a little disheartening, but now she was certain she had everyone she needed. Naturally, she still needed to clarify at least a dozen parts of the plan, but she had enough information to do that, didn’t she? As miserable as she had been, she had learned something. A one-time fix to help her sort out the biggest job of her life.
A one-time fix.
And if she kept telling herself that, maybe the temptation that itched at the corners of her mind would go away. Maybe she could convince herself that another dose of whatever it was – or of something else, something better – was unnecessary. Maybe.
Don’t even go there, Debbie reprimanded herself and gritted her teeth. You heard what Dina said. Drug possession charges aren’t going to help you.
Debbie turned onto her side and closed her eyes. It was ridiculous to even consider it. Ridiculous, impossible, and – above all – reckless. Probably just the lingering effects of the drugs themselves, making her want more. A few more good meals, some rest, and a healed ankle would solve everything. She wouldn’t think of the drugs again.
You’re better than this. You can get there on your own.
Debbie ran her tongue against the sharp edges of her teeth, thinking. She had let herself slip. Spring was always a little depressing. Sure, a break in the cold was a relief, but Debbie wasn’t a fan of the gloom that tended to settle over the city at this time of year. In prison, it was even worse. The yard was so muddy that stepping outside was a sure way to get a handful of uniform violations due to stains. The damp chill seemed to seep into everything, even her mind. Debbie remembered feeling sluggish, lethargic. That’s probably when they pounced, whoever had drugged her. It wasn’t hard to see that she wasn’t operating at a hundred percent. They had taken their chance, and had it not been for Dina, the details of the Met job would be the least of Debbie’s problems right now.
Joke’s on you, Debbie thought wryly. It was just what I needed. She grimaced at the thought. Her heart was pounding much harder than it should be, given that she was lying in bed with her eyes closed. She hated herself for the nervous excitement sticking in her throat. What if…?
She was grateful when the harsh, clanging buzzer that signaled lunch cut through her thoughts. She got to her feet and stepped out of her cell into the crowd of inmates heading towards the cafeteria. She wouldn’t – couldn’t – cave to the temptations. It wasn’t worth the risk. In order to succeed, she needed a singular focus: play it safe, get out, find Lou, run the job.
Get out, find Lou, run the job.
Find Lou, run the job.
Run the job.
If you play it safe, you run the job.