Read Thief: The Scarab Beetle Series: #1 (The Academy) for Free Online

best thing. Makeup came in handy if I needed to go talk to a manager about a job.
    Today, I just needed to look human enough to blend in.
    ♠♠♠♠
    A half hour later, I was on a bus, heading for downtown Charleston. It was a long shot, because tourist season didn’t last through early October. Since the mall was no longer an option, and Tasty’s wouldn’t help me earn enough money, the only place I had left was Market Street.
    Market Street was the home of an old slave trade building, a brick structure with wide open archways welcoming the weather in. I couldn’t imagine what it looked like in the old days, but it was filled with vendor stalls now. The building split up the middle of a street, and nearby on either side of the brick market were two story shops, the old kind with apartments on the second floor.
    When I was in grade school, there was a field trip downtown and we had to write essays to try to explain how historical and romantic this downtown Charleston area was. To me, it was just an outside market, filled with expensive knickknacks people stuff on shelves and never look at again. People who didn’t realize how much money they were wasting. The price of a sweet grass basket, a painting of the old district homes, and a few useless key chains could have fed our family for a month or two.
    As the city bus stopped in front of one of the hotels along the street, I climbed off, scanning the neighborhood. Only a handful of stalls bothered to open during the week when tourists were less likely in early fall.
    I started my way up along one side of the street, with the brick building that was the market to one side, and the rows of stores not yet open on the other. I kept to the sidewalk and away from the vendors. I was unsure of this territory and didn’t want to look too familiar if I had to cross in front of them a few times.
    It didn’t take long to find my first target. He was an older man, with white hair combed over on his head, blue eyes and age spots, like freckles, kissing his cheeks. He weaved around stalls at a slow place, occasionally bending over to examine a trinket. I followed casually behind him. I didn’t like how close together the stalls were, or the fact that the place wasn’t as busy as a mall. It was too difficult to blend in.
    I hated the fact that he was older, too. I didn’t like pickpocketing girls, or older people or kids. Not only were they more difficult to distract with a flash of cleavage, but it just felt worse to be doing something that was already wrong. I didn’t want to be the person who stole old ladies’ handbags.
    The only relief to the guilt I had was that he was wearing brand-new clothes, or so it looked to me. His was well-groomed, with a gold ring on his finger. If he was strolling around downtown in the middle of the week, he was more than likely someone well off enough he didn’t need to work or retired. With his nearly white hair, he appeared older at a distance, but up close he could have passed for perhaps fifty, so maybe he still worked. Maybe he didn’t need a hundred dollars.
    The old man strolled with ease through the center of the market. It became more evident that we were heading the same direction, and he had plenty of opportunity to catch me out of the corner of his eyes, although he didn’t particularly seem interested in me. I pretended to pause on occasion at vendor stalls, fingering through faux silver jewelry and admiring yet another painting of a beach scene.
    He paused in front of a sweet grass basket stall, making me think he might have been a tourist. Normally during the tourist season, local African American women sat along the edges of the shops, on top of cloths spread out along the ground. They weaved baskets made from sweet grass grown locally. Now, a couple of women merely sat along the edges of the displays, showing off the leftovers woven during the summer.
    The old man turned sharply, redirecting his attention. He crossed the