Double Dipping

by Michael Bracken

About the Author: Michael Bracken is the author of several books, including the private eye novel All White Girls, and more than twelve hundred short stories in several genres. His short crime fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Mystery Weekly, The Best American Mystery Stories 2018, and in many other anthologies and periodicals. He is recipient of the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer Award for lifetime achievement in short mystery fiction.

Excerpt

Lightfinger Louie Levoy loitered around the Ambassador Arms entrance early Thursday morning, doing his best to appear inconspicuous and non-threatening. He was waiting for Carson Davidson, a businessman who lived on the fourth floor of the apartment building and who left each weekday morning precisely at five a.m. Louie had never seen Davidson but had been told to expect a stout middle-aged man wearing a snap-brim fedora and an ill-fitting blue suit who would turn left when he exited the building.

At 4:56 a.m., his mark appeared. Louie, feigning the after-effects of an all-night drunk, stumbled into the man and made the dip. As his mark shoved him aside, Louie stumbled, almost losing his grip on the wallet he’d lifted.

He regained his footing, stepped into a nearby alley, and hurried away. Under normal circumstances, he would strip cash from the wallet and discard it into a dumpster, but that morning’s dip was anything but normal. Fat Freddy Mosby, a fence he often used when he lifted jewelry and watches, had offered him five large to lift this particular wallet on this particular Thursday.

At seven-thirty that morning, Fat Freddy filled one side of the rear booth at Sunrise Diner, a three-plate breakfast spread out before him, his fork poised over a short stack of flapjacks. When Louie slipped into the booth opposite him, Freddy asked, “You got it?”

“I got it.” Louie slid the brown leather wallet between Freddy’s plates.

Story Comments