8/25/22 — Deft Theft

Darren stepped aside to let people on the crowded subway car. The more the merrier, he thought.

Crowded train cars are a cutpurse’s wet dream. People pushing up against one another, trying their hardest to ignore the fact that their bodies are uncomfortably packed in with dozens of strangers, some of the getting more intimate human contact here than they get at home with their partners.

Rush hour on the 5 train between Grand Central and Borough Hall, he could get five wallets a stop, plus phones, AirPods, watches… if he felt like it the occasional ostensibly displayed fresh engagement ring. It was easy work. Train lurches, someone jostles him, he jostles someone, they feel a little something, maybe a grab, maybe a poke, and something doesn’t feel right but they write it off as the price of crowded public transit, not noticing the missing item until they’re on the platform and the train, with Darren, is long gone.

More people got on. Someone pressed up against him. Perfect. The car was at max capacity and when the train lurched, the human mass pressed him against the guy stupidly keeping his wallet in his outer coat pocket. He made the grab. Then he decided to go for the watch, for good measure.Train lurched again. Some idiot bumped him and poked his lower back with his stupid belt buckle or bag or whatever. People are so inconsiderate on the train.

Luckily this wasn’t enough to throw Darren off his game. He’d been at this for more than a decade and he was very good. He saw himself as a craftsman. An artisan. He practiced the old ways. He detested muggers with their in-your-face tactics, and relished pulling off a perfect unnoticed snatch. “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life,” he always said, spending someone else’s money at the bar after a couple hours work.

He pocketed the wallet and the watch and slipped out at the next stop. No sense going all the way to Brooklyn — being in the tunnel that long just increases the chance of getting caught.

On the platform, he watched the train go, but it looked like one of the passengers was watching him. Looked him right in the eye. “Whatever,” Darren thought. “Too late for them to find me now.”

As he made his way toward the uptown platform something didn’t feel right. He was lightheaded and dizzy. A transit cop approached him, and Darren had a moment of panic that he tried to hide.

“Buddy, you okay?” The cop asked. “You’re bleeding.”

Darren registered the look of genuine concern on the cop’s face before everything went black. Later, in the hospital bed, the doctor would say some stuff about how he can still have a great quality of life with just one, and a detective rambled on about black market kidneys, but all Darren could do was marvel at the artistry of the thief.