Excerpt: Beginner's Luck

Chapter One: Ex

My name is Vic Thackeray, and my big sister is the most awesome girl in the world. This is her story.
One thing you may notice about this story is that I'm not in it, at least not for a while. I will show up eventually, but this isn't really my story and I have to start from the beginning if it's going to make any sense at all. And at the beginning, I was about a thousand miles away while Lise was breaking into her ex-fiancee's house.
Breaking and entering was always Lise's preferred means of entering any room or building. She taught herself how to pick our home's door lock when she was twelve because she had frogtten to bring the keys with her that morning, and once she had the skill down pat she stopped carrying keys, period. So even though she was in fact carrying a set of keys to Kyle Hansen's duplex, and had come there for the specific purpose of, among other things, returning them, she nonetheless attacked the front door lock with a few favorite pins and tools and had it open in seconds.
Kyle Hansen was a cop. So was hardly unexpected that he turned out to be untrustworthy, in general and in particular vis-a-vis the affair Lise had caught him at with she who must be referred to as 'That Hairdresser Whore with the fake tits' which prompted this midnight visit. Being a cop meant that he kept cop hours, and being a fairly young cop meant that he worked nights more often than not, so Lise knew that she'd have plenty of time to retrieve all of her things while he was out harassing the various students, drunks, and prostitutes of his precinct. She brought two large suitcases with her, which was probably a bit excessive except that she knew if she only brought the one she'd have ended up with one last t-shirt or pair of shoes that wouldn't fit that she'd either have to carry by itself all the way back on one bus and two trains, or else she'd have to leave them and give Kyle an excuse to call her back and invite her over to get them (or worse, he'd keep them as some kind of souvenir, or give them to some future girlfriend, although that Hairdresser Whore with the fake tits didn't wear anything her size, so at least there wasn't that to worry about.) When she told me about this, I asked why she couldn't have just thrown whatever was extra away, and she just stared at me like I was from Mars and talking in some kind of Martian language instead of English.
Lise went directly to the bedroom, put one of the suitcases on the bed, and opened it. She the proceeded to methodically empty the drawer that held her clean clothes. After that was done, she cross the room to the laundry hamper, emptied it onto the floor, and sorted through the dirty clothes, tossing his
aside and hurling her own in the general direction of the suitcase. Few of those actually reached that target, as Lise throws more 'like a girl' than about ninety percent of her fellow females, but most found the bed or at least the floor around it. One balled-up pair of ankle socks, thrown with force but without accuracy, sailed over the suitcase and made contact with an old lamp that was resting on a dresser in from of the foot of the bed, dislodging it from that perch. Lise tried to race it to the floor below in a doomed attempt to catch it, but arrived only in time to see it shatter on impact with the floor. She was collecting the pieces, vague plans involving super-glue beginning to coalesce in her head, when she noticed the camera.
The camera was small, an older, pre-digital model with an output cord that ran to the base and then along the lamp's power cord. Lise followed that behind the cabinet and saw that it split off from the power cord and entered the cabinet from the rear near the bottom. She opened the bottom drawer and saw that it was shorter than it should have been. So, she pulled it out of the dresser entirely, revealing the hidden compartment behind it.
Inside was a video cassette recorder, it's clock, oddly enough, displaying the current time rather than flashing "12:00" like a vcr clock ought to. She touched the eject button and the machine obliging vomitted up a video cassette tape, unlabled and partially wound.
People who record themselves having sex, Lise reasoned, don't just have one tape that they keep using again and again until they can't remember if it's got last week's Gray's Anatomy or the fianl hour of some old movie that you thought you wouldn't stay awake through or the six o'clock news from when your roommate's cousin was interviewed about their psycho nutbar neighbor. No, they did it to build a collection. So where(thought she) would Kyle keep his homemade porn stash? (Not to be confused with his homegrown porn 'stache, which was still safely above his upper lip.) She tossed the tape into the suitcase and began to walk through the other rooms of the house, considering.
She kept returning to the office, even though she found nothing in the desk or closet. There was also a tall file cabinet that was practically empty. Eventually she thought that might be suspicious itself, and lifted it up and moved it a foot to the left, revealing a wall safe behind it.
Finessing a standard door lock and cracking a safe are two entirely different propositions. A serious safe, such as you might find in a bank or a jewelry store, that kind of safe can take hours to open, and possibly some carefully applied high explosives at that . This was not that serious of a safe, but it wasn't exactly a joke, either. Lise returned to the bedroom and took her purse out of the second suitcase. From that container she removed an electronic stethescope, and walked back to the safe. About twenty minutes of spinning the dial back and forth later, the safe opened.
Inside were a half-dozen video tapes, two of which were labeled 'Lise'. Lise grabbed them immediately. Now, I never saw either of them-thank god; there isn't enough therapy in the world, but according to Lise she was, with Kyle, strictly under-the-covers, lights-off, missionary position, so there probably wasn't much visible on those tapes beyond Kyle's hairy backside, but there was a matter of principle involved. It was only after she had the tapes in hand that she noticed the other contents of the safe.
Apart from the tapes, the safe was filled with money: neat stacks of twenty dollar bills double wrapped with thick rubber bands. One hundred bills per stack and twenty eight stacks in total mean fifty-four thousand dollars.
When they were together, Lise handled the budget, and knew exactly how much money came in and went out of Kyle's bank accounts. The answers were "a little" and "almost all of it", each month. So either Kyle had inherited from some relative with money he'd never mentioned to Lise, or he'd won the lottery ...or he had been taking bribes. Lise had wondered where the money he'd been spending on that Hairdresser Whore with the fake tits had come from. With this kind of money he might have been the one who paid for the tits himself.
Lise was suddenly glad that she had brought the second suitcase along after all.