In Pocket

IN POCKET

By

Martyn V. Halm

Pushdagger Publishing Limited

IN POCKET

ISBN: 9789491623073 (ePub)

ASIN: B011LW05BO (.mobi)

Copyright: Martyn V. Halm

Published: August 1st, 2015

Publisher: Pushdagger Publishing Limited

The right of Martyn V. Halm to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any format.

Picking the wrong pocket might prove fatal…

Nomadic pickpocket Wolfgang gets blackmailed into teaching his craft to the mysterious Lilith, a young woman with no aptitude whatsoever to become a pickpocket. Wolf figures the easiest way is to go with the flow and instruct Lilith in the art of emptying other people’s pockets, but even he could never foresee the dreadful consequences…

IN POCKET is a standalone novel by Martyn V. Halm, the author of the Amsterdam Assassin Series. Follow Wolf as he gets entangled in a possibly fatal web of violence and deceit, where nobody is who they seem to be and everyone has a hidden agenda.

For Maaike, the love and light of my life.

And to Tycho Thelonious and Nica Hilke, thankfully still too young to read my work.

Also available from this author:

AMSTERDAM ASSASSIN SERIES:

Novels:

Reprobate

Peccadillo

Rogue

Ghosting

KillFiles:

Locked Room

Microchip Murder

Fundamental Error

Aconite Attack

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Click this link and fill out your email address to stay up-to-date.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 01:51 AM

The world is strangely tilted when I open my eyes to the deafening roar of the helicopter reverberating against the walls around me. The down draft of the blades stir the loose dirt on the grimy bricks and I shield my eyes as swirling grit stings my face. Around me everything remains dark. The helicopter’s searchlight must be trained on something else. Or someone else.

The wind dies down and the roar changes to a thumping bass-line as the police helicopter flies off. Just around the corner, I hear a siren starting up. Sounds like an ambulance, not a police vehicle.

I close my eyes again.

I must’ve passed out. For an instant, I think. Just long enough to lose my bearings. My shoulder smarts from lying on the bricks, but the dull pain in my abdomen is worse. I remember her face looking up at me. And the hard punches in my belly, now a faint throbbing.

Without opening my eyes, I push myself into an upright position, the bricks damp and cold against my buttocks. My legs feel like they’re asleep, but without tingling—the usual pins-and-needles sensation is mysteriously absent.

A bad sign. I think I can forget about running. Or even getting up.

I open my eyes and blink a few times to focus.

The wall across from me is less than two meters away. To my left, a dead-end. To my right, plastic garbage bags leaning against an overflowing dumpster.

The siren grows louder and I lean forward carefully to peek around the dumpster.

Sodium lights flood the sidewalk with a sickly orange glow that reaches into the dead-end alley just far enough to touch my grubby sneakers. A neon-yellow ambulance races past the mouth of the alley, the sound of the siren fading quickly in the distance.

I go through my pockets to check my possessions, but I seem to have lost most of them.

Money, gone. Keys, gone. Straight razor, gone.

I look at my filthy pants, stained with dark spots and smelling of urine. I look at my hands, smudged with street grime. And it all comes back. Why I’m wearing these clothes. My possessions aren’t gone. I left them with her before the stakeout.

I only had my phone and the gun. They’re both gone.

All I have left is the small carton in my inside pocket.

Around the corner, I hear muted voices and the crackle of a two-way radio. A moment later, a car starts up. My right hand grabs one of the plastic garbage bags and a spasm of pain pierces my gut as I heave the bag and toss it next to my legs.

The car halts at the mouth of the alley and the bright beam of a searchlight shines on the opposite wall, then swerves around towards the dumpster that hides me from view. The beam briefly illuminated my grimy pants and the garbage bag hiding my sneakers, but moves away without a pause. The light clicks off and the car trundles away.

I realise I’m holding my breath, and let it out slowly.

I listen, but don’t hear anyone else, just my own raspy breathing. I’m alone.

My left hand touches my belly. Comes away wet.

Sticky.

I raise my hand to my eyes, but it’s too dark too see.

I peer past the dumpster again, but all I see is a cobblestone quay and a canal. Not enough information to determine where I am. Just another dead-end alley, somewhere in the centre of Amsterdam. The street sign is missing. Or was never there at all. Not all dead-end alleys here have names.

I remember the carton in my inside pocket and take out the pack of cigarettes. I open the lid and brush my finger over the filter tips. And the metal wheel of a disposable butane lighter. I breathe a sigh of relief. I don’t know what would be worse: no cigarettes, or cigarettes and nothing to light them with.

I shake one from the pack and light up. My hands automatically shield the bright flame to prevent giving away my position. In the light, I count the contents. Seven left, not counting the one I just lit. And a folded piece of tinfoil curled around a tiny waxed paper envelope. I won’t use that unless the pain becomes too bad.

I glance at my left hand. The sticky stuff covering my palm is red. I lower the lighter to see my belly. The lower half of my shirt is dark with blood. In the weak light the blood looks black. I touch the mess gingerly.

Three holes. Bullet holes.

The lighter sputters and dies. As the flame goes, a ghost-flame shimmers on my retina. I shake the lighter by my ear. Sounds like there is still some fuel left.

I cup the glowing tip of the cigarette in my hand, return the pack and lighter to my inside pocket, and blink to restore my night vision.

A shadow glides over the walls as someone passes the mouth of the alley. I watch from behind the dumpster, unable to draw in my numb legs sprawled amid the refuse that litters the bricks.

The shadow flows over my pants and disappears from view.

I listen to the receding steps.

I don’t want to be found. Not after what I did.

I drag on my cigarette. No idea what time it is. If I’m still in Amsterdam’s old quarter, I should be able to hear the bells from any of the myriad of churches littering the inner city. That should help me pinpoint my location.

I take a last drag and extinguish my cigarette against the bricks.

The numbness in my legs worries me. Maybe the bullets damaged my spine.

In the distance a church bell chimes.

Once. Twice. Silence.

That sounded like the Oude Kerk, but I’m not sure. If this was the Red Light District it would be busier.

Two strikes, so it’s two in the morning.

Six hours till dawn.

A whole night to die in.

And muse about the events that got me in this predicament.

If only I hadn’t picked the pocket of the fat woman.

THE FAT WOMAN

The crowded tram struggled through a wet and dreary Amsterdam, a persistent drizzle from the overcast sky coating the windows and blurring the world outside. Early evening rush hour, so the passengers—packed together like canned sardines—were tired and hungry, on their way home to dinner.

I was neither tired nor hungry. I was working. Trams were my favourite hunting grounds, rife with possibilities.

Assessing opportunities, I made my way to the rear of the swaying tram, my expression dour and eyes dull to fit in with the sullen rush hour crowd, segregating themselves with music that blocked their hearing and screens that occupied their vision. The nasty weather caused the passengers to be even more intent on isolating themselves from their peers, pressed up against them with their damp clothes and dripping umbrellas.

Selecting potential marks is a simple process. The main thing is knowing which marks to avoid. For instance, you want to avoid the ‘faux riche’—dressed to the nines in their fake brand clothes with golden bracelets around their wrists and gaudy rings on their fingers. If they had real wealth, they wouldn’t travel by public transport. They watch the rich on television and mimic their style, including a penchant for credit cards. I have a buyer for plastic, but I prefer cash. I do sometimes take their smartphones, especially the upmarket models with the white earphones. However, these faux riche often buy only the visible hallmarks and their white earphones are connected to cheap phones. The ones worth stealing are often used for playing music, and that prevents me from stealing them.

Commuters make better targets—sleepy when heading for work, or tired from the daily office grind when riding home. Oblivious. Dulled by routine. And many carry cash, often in thin billfolds or money clips. And some have nice watches, although not many are worth stealing.

Then I came upon the perfect mark.

A gargantuan mountain of flesh hung from the straps by a flabby arm, swaying with the tram, a grocery bag between her bloated legs, another clamped in her free hand.

A perfect mark combines low risk and high profit. Like stoned or inebriated tourists. Or obese housewives. Obese people are used to being in the way, used to being jostled in the cramped spaces of public transport. And housewives often carry their entire housekeeping allowance in wallets too bulky with discount stamps and bonus cards to fit in their pockets. So they slide the wallet in among the groceries and don’t notice its absence until they get home.

Close enough to smell the grease under her cloying floral perfume, I hunkered down by her ankle-less calves and surveyed her bags while I re-tied my laces. The housewife hadn’t stuffed her wallet in the grocery bags, so I rose and studied her coat. A black plastic raincoat, which didn’t make her look any slimmer. The right-hand pocket bulged with promise, but was blocked by the flabby arm holding the second bag.

With the next stop less than a minute down the line, I allowed myself to be unbalanced by the movement of the tram, bumped into the fat housewife and dipped my fingers into her pocket. Her watery porcine eyes flitted over my innocuous features while her already downturned mouth pursed in disapproval at my lack of balance. I smiled an apology as my fingers closed over a thick wallet with a metal clasp and a buttoned-down section for bills and receipts. No chain, but a piece of twine knotted to a ring set in the leather.

While pretending to regain my balance, I lifted the wallet and severed the string with a flick of the razor in my other hand. As the wallet slipped into my hip pocket, the straight razor disappeared up my sleeve again.

Despite my care at extracting the wallet, the slight tug on the string must have set off waves of alarm undulating through the globules of fat. No more than three meters separated us when her shrill voice rang out over the usual din.

Pickpocket, she wheezed at the top of her lungs. That guy stole my wallet.

I looked back at her with the rest of the passengers. Ignoring her would’ve marked me instantly. With a look of mild interest on my face, I kept moving away from her. Nobody seemed interested in me—most passengers were distracted by their aural cloud of music pumping from their players, and people moved aside as I pressed past them. The upcoming stop was popular, so I wasn’t the only person moving towards the exit.

Stop him! she wheezed and pointed at me. Pickpocket.

Her accusatory finger wobbled with the swaying of the tram, unable to single me out. I shuffled around another passenger—a pretty raven-haired girl engrossed in a paperback novel—and took my place in the queue for the doors.

When nobody seemed able or interested in bringing me to justice, the fat housewife decided to take on the task herself. After pushing her grocery bags together against a bench, she left them behind and waddled towards me with alarming speed. Her pudgy hands—skin red and wrinkled from washing dishes—clamped with white-knuckled fury around the steel posts.

I hoped I had timed my extraction correctly. The seconds seemed to pass by too slow for comfort. In the angled mirror mounted near the doors, I followed the housewife’s lumbering progress, keeping my face bland, but breathing deep to quell the panic that was churning my stomach. The fat woman lost precious seconds squeezing her bulk past a mother with a stroller and came for me with her arms outstretched, smiling in triumph. I readied myself to deliver a blow to her chest with my elbow if she managed to pass the last two people before the tram reached the stop.

The pretty raven-haired girl with the paperback novel released the steel post to turn a page just as the tram came to a shuddering halt. Tottering on her high heels, the girl tried to grab the post again, missed and crashed backwards into the fat housewife, shoving my mark onto the lap of a man perusing a newspaper.

Beautiful. I couldn’t have planned it better.

Sandwiched between the newspaper man and the raven-haired beauty, all the fat housewife could do was wheeze and glare at me with impotent anger as I skipped lightly from the tram into the rain.

Almost getting caught is like being thrown off a horse—you have to get right back on or you lose your nerve.

I ducked in a doorway and fished the pack of cigarettes from my inside pocket. Took out the tinfoil, rolled a tube and heated up a stripe. The heroin ran golden brown and I sucked the sticky sweet smoke through the tube. I slipped it carefully back into my cigarette pack. I’d re-use the tube several more times before I’d smoke the accumulated residue.

Relaxed and high, I took the tram to the Munt and walked the Kalverstraat down to the Spui. After six more takes, I figured I hadn’t lost my nerve.

I sat down on a park bench, smoked a cigarette and took out one wallet after another, trying to construe the personalities of my marks from the receipts left in the wallet. The best are from supermarkets, barcodes allowing for itemised receipts. The fat woman’s wallet revealed a receipt filled with low-fat products—she must’ve started her diet recently. A young female backpacker seemed to collect passport photographs from a plethora of conquests. The other wallets didn’t reveal much of interest. I stuffed them all in a mailbox. They’d find their way to the police station and from there possibly back to their owners.

LILITH

On my way home, I stopped at a supermarket for groceries and carried my bags to the wasteland that bordered Cruquiuskade. After I checked to see if I was being watched, I sauntered down the rubble-strewn path along the railroad embankment.

The wasteland used to house the storage facility of a national moving company until Van Gend & Loos opted to relocate to a cheaper area near the west harbour. The empty building was then used for the storage of vehicles towed by the traffic department. Most of the parking violators were visitors to the city, and when the city council realised that wheel-clamping damaged commerce, the wheel clamp was abolished and towing was limited to only the most egregious violators. With the decreased towing of vehicles, the traffic department moved to a smaller facility near the Bijlmerbajes.

The abandoned storage facility was torn down to make room for houses, but the real estate developers ran into a snag. According to the newspaper articles I’d read, the property didn’t belong to the city, but to the Nederlandse Spoorwegen. The national railroad company had bought the land decades ago with plans to turn the area into a shunting yard. For some reason the NS didn’t go through with their plans, but they held on to the property as the value of the prime real estate location steadily increased. While negotiations between the Amsterdam city council and the Nederlandse Spoorwegen dragged on for years, the area turned into a wasteland.

High on the embankment a train rumbled past as I reached the old Bedford van that had been my home for the past seven years.

After I left the juvenile detention centre a year early, I used to change locations every week to avoid attracting unwanted attention. I know they’re probably not looking for me anymore, not since I came of age, but some habits become ingrained.

The wasteland was a great location. I had been camping here for close to three months without anyone bothering me. The only people around in the daytime were dog walkers whose pets needed room to run. None of them ventured far enough to spot my van, hidden behind heaps of industrial refuse. At night, only the occasional freight train disturbed the silence.

My pet rat Gabriel was asleep on my sleeping bag, hardly twitching his whiskers as I climbed into the van and closed the sliding door behind me. I popped King Crimson in the CD player and listened to