21, Downpour

“And that’s when she farted.”  The thunder boomed loudly outside.  Master Thief Owens looked into the sky and took note of the dark storm clouds.  “It wasn’t as loud as that, but it might as well have been.  So yeah, that’s the most awkward moment I’ve ever seen.”

“You’re shitting me?”  Special agent Mikayla Doniak stroked her long grey beard.  She was dressed up in a costume that mad her a bit uncomfortable.  She was a fairly tall woman with very feminine features, but currently she looked like a middle aged Hasidic Jew rabbi, complete with a beard and curly side burns.  

“That fart reverberated off the walls for seconds.  No one made a sound.”  Owens checked his phone to see the if the weather radar app might work.  It didn’t.

“So, then what?”  Doniak was dressed and ready to do what she had to do, but they were hoping the rain would let up a bit.  It didn’t look promising.

“The bride left.”

“No!”

“Yup.  The groom said in front of the whole cathedral that he can’t marry her cuz he’s in love with her sister.  She let one rip, then turned around and walked off in her wedding dress.  No one said shit.”  Owens was reliving the moment and tried not to cringe too much.

“Unreal.  Did anyone try to comfort her?  I mean, what did the priest say?”

Owens laughed heartily out loud.  “They’re all uptight catholics with secret drinking problems and decades of resentment.  Do you really think they give a fuck about the feelings of a girl in her young twenties?”

“It’s her fucking wedding day, for Gods sake!”  The rain pounded down hard outside.

“Look, Mickey, I agree with you!  We were there undercover, and it was tough to get the intel we needed after the party fell apart!  We were too busy trying to take down an arms dealer to worry about how the bride might be doing.”

“I’m still blown away, that’s just unreal.”

“Yeah.  Poor gal.”  Owens shrugged his shoulders.  “The groom’s family has money so this’ll all get swept under the rug.  Rich people are amazing at protecting their own.”

Doniak was getting impatient.  Everything about this trip was turning out to be exhausting.  She had a lock box key that the agents had all discovered was to the one lone lock box in town.  It was located outside the front door of an old decrepit post office building.  The two agents were parked in a jeep about fifty yards away up the dirt road.  

Mikayla was dressed up like an old rabbi, just in case anyone might be watching them.  For now, she wasn’t going to go get soaked in the rain.

“I bullshitted with the band.  They got paid really well even though they didn’t play.”  Owens laughed as he spoke, “they said that it was the third wedding they’d been to in a year that was canceled the day of the event.  They joked that they should change their name to The Kiss Of Death.”

Doniak smiled.  The rain seemed like it was letting up a little bit.  “What was their name, do you remember?”

“Holy shit, I still remember this.  Bayside Illusions.  I wonder if they’re still playing?  That was ten years ago.”  Owens took a deep breath.  “I never got to see them play, of course, but their lead singer seemed like a good dude.  He had nice shoulders.”

“Bayside Illusions.  What a dumb name for a wedding band.”

“Old people don’t like the devil, Mickey.”  Owens spoke like a rock radio DJ from the eighties.  “We don’t do the same old boring music at weddings.  We play good old fashioned, bone crushing, blood pumping ROCK AND ROLL!”  

As if a switch were flipped, the rain stopped.  The mud puddles in the road became perfectly still.  “Ready to do this?” Doniak asked.  “Cuz I’m ready to get out of this fucking costume.”

“Ready,” said Owens excitedly.  “Remember…”

“If it’s a severed head, I walk away, I get it.”  Doniak was impatient.  “You’re a weird fuck, Owens.”  

“We gotta cover all our bases.”  

Doniak rolled her eyes as she got out of the jeep.  She walked up the road as if she were limping, kind of like she were an old decrepit Jewish man.  It seemed like forever, but she was at the lock box before she knew it.  Without looking around, she muttered, “here goes nothing.”  She slipped the key into the lock when her wrist watch started talking to her.

Owens voice was calm.  “Don’t play the hero if there’s a severed head.”

“God dammit, Owens, I’m going to kill you.”  She turned the key and heard a small “click” inside the lock box.  

“Mickey!” said Owens voice through the wrist watch.  “I hear electricity humming on your end.  You didn’t flip any switches, did you?”

Mikayla Doniak looked around.  “No, not that I’m aware of.”  She heard nothing.

“They’re filming you.  Hell, they’re filming us.  Keep your head down.”

“Are you sure?” Doniak asked.  The African dirt street felt like it was a million miles away from any kind of technology, and she was sure that Owens was losing his mind.

“Positive.  This is some sort of a set up.  See what’s in there, but keep your head down.”  Owens was fidgeting with something in the background, then said, “I’m gonna poke around and see what I can find.  Get back to the jeep.”

Doniak opened the lock box door and noted that it was empty except for one piece of paper.  She picked it up and read the top line.  “Dear thief, welcome to Zimbabwe!”  Without thinking, she folded the piece of paper quickly and started to pretend limp up the street with her head down.  

It was still dark and cloudy out, and even though it was mid day, the gloom made it feel like it was almost evening.  Doniak kept her gaze to the ground.  She glanced at a pool of water and saw the reflection of a very large tree above her.  There, in the flash of an eye, was a dash of color in the reflection.  Doniak looked up into the tree just in time to see Owens pull at a branch.   He had some sort of black thing in his hand, but Doniak gasped as she realized she wasn’t looking down.

“Owens!” she hissed into her watch.  “How did you get up there so fast?”

“I climbed.  And I found a camera.”

Doniak continued to walk to the jeep, then saw Owens jump from tree to tree until he was right up against a light pole.  She heard Owen’s voice in her wrist watch.  “There’s the other one.”  She watched Owens scurry up the light pole as if he were a cat climbing a tree.  He reached out and it looked like he was waving his arm in thin air, but all of a sudden he had a black thing in his hand which Doniak knew would be a camera.

One minute later, Owens had scurried down the light pole and was back at the jeep.  He looked at Doniak and paused.  “Wait a sec,” he said quickly.  He closed his eyes and stood perfectly still.  “I hear it.”  He took off at a full sprint towards another tree that was fifty yards away.

“Hear what?” Doniak yelled as he sprinted away.

“Electricity!”  Owens had the ability to hear the faint buzz of electrons traveling across copper wires.  Normally it wasn’t a skill that had much use, but at random times, it came in handy.  Owens slipped up the tree, fidgeted around in the leaves, then dropped back down and sprinted back to the jeep.  He was gone for maybe sixty total seconds.  “Let’s bounce.”

Owens threw Doniak the cameras that he’d stolen.  She was trying to make sense of it all.  “I don’t get it, Owens.  If they’ve already seen me open the lock box, they already have footage of me and probably of you too.”

“Yes,” Owens answered, “but now we have their cameras.  We can see what kind of equipment this is and try to figure out where they bought this stuff, and if we get lucky we’ll find out who they belong to.”  Owens pointed around.  “Mickey, tell me, when was the last time you saw three independent security cameras set up in trees and on a light pole that were all simply surveilling a lone lock box in a small African town?”  

“Obviously something is going on.”

“You bet your ass it is.  He knows.”

Doniak held on tightly as Owens drove down a dirt road and headed out of town.  She racked her brain for awhile and then finally had to ask.  “Who are you talking about?  Like, who is he, and what does he know?”

Owens was clearly lost in his thoughts, but he didn’t skip a beat.  “The thief.  We took his stuff in Canada, but he beat us here.  Let me guess, the lock box was empty, right?”

“No, actually.”  Doniak pulled out the sheet that she’d folded up and showed Owens.  They could see it was a letter.  Doniak read it out loud.

Dear thief, welcome to Zimbabwe!  Before you leave, will you please return that golden hand gun?  You can keep the other things, but when it comes to that one, I got to it first.  Please return it to this lock box at any time, day or night.

Kindest regards, 

Anastasia B

“Dumb name,” Owens muttered.  “This guy isn’t impressing me much.”

Doniak laughed.  “It’s a woman’s name and that’s a woman’s handwriting, Owens. You said yourself that stealing that golden gun was an impossibly difficult thing to do.”  Doniak started to peel the thick beard from her face.  The sticky glue made her question every life choice she’d ever made.  “If it’s a guy, he’s trying to make us think he’s a woman, but my instincts say that our thief is a woman, dude.”

Owens heart beat just a little faster.  He smiled and muttered to himself.  “Anastasia B.  You have become the obsession of my life.”  

In the distance, a master thief looked at her computer screen and realized she had to up her game as she muttered obscenities at the dead security feed from four cameras which she’d thought were perfectly concealed.