With Squeak Thief headed to beta readers and hopefully coming out at AnthroCon (where I will be to sign it!), I thought I’d refresh y’all’s memory with one of my favorite bits from the opening chapter. Enjoy!
With his jeans, the fox wore a white t-shirt under a collared short-sleeved shirt in a brown and yellow plaid pattern. He had both elbows on the table, his right hand holding his smartphone at an angle. As Kris waited for a reply, the fox scrolled through whatever he was reading.
“I said ‘thanks,’” the mouse said after several more scrolls.
Without looking up, the fox said, “You should probably go. They’ll double back when they don’t find you.”
Kris glanced at the back door. He hadn’t thought this would be easy, but he had thought the fox would be more interested than he was pretending to be. Nobody could be that blasé about someone running into the diner and hiding under a table, even in this particular diner. “I probably have a few minutes. Don’t you want to know why they were chasing me?”
“Not particularly.”
This was not going at all the way he’d envisioned. “I stole something from them.”
“I doubt that.”
“I did.” He dug in his pocket.
“Don’t take it out and show me, idiot,” the fox said. He still hadn’t looked up from his phone.
“If I don’t show you, how can I make you believe me?”
“You can’t, because you’re lying.” Now the fox looked up from his phone. He had touches of grey on his ears and a weary creasing in the fur around his eyes. “Why were they really chasing you?”
“I—I stole something from them.” Kris lifted his muzzle and lowered his voice. “I was helping them pull a job at a jewelry store but I double-crossed them and ran off with all the jewels.”
The fox nodded. “Which store?”
“Kayleigh’s on 7th.”
“Uh-huh. And how did you do it?”
“I pretended to be a customer. I was looking at some pieces. These guys stormed in with guns and yelled at everyone to get down. I pocketed the pieces while everyone was distracted, and the alarm went off right away so they pretended to be scared. We were supposed to split the take but I didn’t show up. I don’t know how they found me.”
The fox scanned his phone one more time and then set it down. “Why didn’t they just smash a display case when the alarm went off and grab some things?”
Kris paused. “That wasn’t the plan.”
“No, but the alarm’s going off and they’re running out anyway. Why not grab a few things from the window? Nothing to lose there.”
“Well, ah. I knew what the most valuable pieces were. So it made more sense—”
“Plus,” the fox went on, “if your friends grabbed some pieces, then at least there’s a chance that the ones you took would be lumped in with the robbery. If your friends just show up, wave their guns, and run out, everyone knows they didn’t take anything. That means that when these super-valuable pieces go missing, they’re going to go to the in-store camera to see what happened to them, and bang, they see you swipe them.”
Kris opened his mouth to reply, but before he could, the fox said, “If, that is, you actually did this, which, as I have said multiple times, you didn’t.”
“Hey!” The possum called across the counter to the table. “Kid, you want something? Coffee, pie? Grilled cheese?”
“Um.” Kris looked from the fox back to the possum. “Can I see a menu?”
“Sure. Back of the booth.”
Following the possum’s pointing finger, Kris spotted the stained, wrinkled paper wedged between ketchup, mustard, and sugar. He pulled one of the menus free and skimmed it. “Grilled cheese, cheddar, fries, and a beer.”
“You got it.”
Kris turned back to the fox and tried to get this back on track. “You seem to know a lot about robbing places.”
“I’ve seen my share of Netflix crime shows,” the fox said.
“How can you be so sure that I didn’t rob a jewelry store? Just because we had a bad plan doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It just means we need better help next time. And that’s where—”
“Oh, I know you didn’t.”
Kris stared, exasperated. The fox looked back at him levelly, and after a moment said, “You want to know how I know?”
When it became clear that the fox wasn’t going to say anything until Kris answered the question, even though it was rhetorical, the mouse nodded. The fox didn’t smile, but he did perk his ears. “One, you pretend to be clever enough to plan a half-assed jewel heist, but you’re not smart enough to actually run out the back door, where you could have easily lost those two. Two, you’re somehow on foot in this neighborhood which is over a mile from the jewelry store you supposedly robbed, and your double-crossed partners supposedly ‘found’ you unexpectedly, which means you’re here for a reason, and again, smart enough to rob a jewelry store and double-cross your partners but then stupid enough to go right where they’re expecting you to? Three, while you are dressed like someone who would be a believable customer in a jewelry store, you’re not dressed like someone who would be a believable thief in a jewelry store.”
“What?” Kris fingered his tailored shirt and his fingers crept up to the leather choker and the silver clasp. “These are nice clothes.”
“They are. But the leather is worn right where your fingers are—probably you fiddle with it there a lot—” Kris dropped his paw from the choker, and the fox went on, “and the shirt is tailored but it doesn’t smell new; it smells like you. A thief would have bought those clothes for the job and they’d look new. These are clearly your clothes, rich kid.”
“Maybe I bought them in preparation for the job a month ago and I’ve been wearing them so they don’t smell new.”
The possum came over with a plate and a green bottle. “Maybe,” the fox said, moving his phone to make room for Kris’s beer, “and maybe you’re smart enough to plan a shitty job and dumb enough not to get away from it, which doesn’t speak well for you, by the way, so I’m not sure why you’re still sticking to that story, but here’s number four, and that’s the big one.” He tapped his phone. “I searched the local news real quick while we were talking. There’s no mention of Kayleigh’s anywhere in it. No robbery, nothing today, nothing in the last week, nothing in the last month. The only mention of them in the local news is that two and a half months ago they were one of the sponsors of the new Youth Center. Very nice of them, actually. So many kids these days really need guidance or they just go wrong.”
Kris looked away from the fox, his mind scrambling as he cut a corner off his sandwich with the edge of his fork, speared it, and brought it to his mouth. It smelled fantastic: buttery and cheesy, greasy and terrible for him. He shoved it in his mouth and then gasped at the heat of the melted cheese.
The fox rested his paws on each other and stared at Kris, ears perked. “What that does mean is that you staged this whole elaborate farce for my benefit, which is the only reason I haven’t already left, but my patience is short and I have places to be. So for the last time: what are you doing here?”
Got him pretty hard, huh