“Emily,” Absinthe said. “You try.”
Emily nodded solemnly and did her best. It was clear Jimmy couldn’t wait to make his try. For being so young, the two stuck at it far longer than Absinthe thought they would. By the time the hour was up, they were actually hitting the wall with their rocks.“What you’re learning today, girls, is seemingly not a lesson in self-defense, but it really is. It’s important to know. I’m going to tell you straight up that if you’re caught using what we teach you for anything you shouldn’t, like shoplifting, or stealing for personal gain, we will be very disappointed in you and the club will punish you in ways you don’t ever want to know about. Am I making myself clear?” Ink said.
Nicia and Siena, Max’s two girls, and Zoe, Czar’s daughter—all three stared at him with wide eyes and nodded their heads solemnly, looking like they might faint. Ice had to turn his head away to keep from smiling. His little Zoe was always so somber. Nicia and Siena were as well. Ink could look very scary with his tattoos and his frowns.
“You need to learn to pick pockets. There might be times when someone will take your identity, or you will have to know theirs but will want to return it without them knowing. You have to be so good that you won’t get caught. That means you have to be able to take a wallet or remove a weapon from anywhere on your enemy without them feeling you take it,” Ink continued. “That’s what you’ll be practicing today.”
Storm unveiled the three dummies they’d hung from several trees—two men and a woman. One was dressed in a business suit. One in jeans, T-shirt and vest. One in a dress with a purse. All of them had a multitude of bells hanging from various pockets and lapels.
“We have a list of items each of you will have to retrieve from each of the dummies without ringing the bells,” Ice said. “I’m going to show you how to do it and then, one by one, you’re going to try it. It can be frustrating, but the idea is to have fun with it. Don’t get upset when you’re not perfect first time out. Zoe, you always think you have to know what you’re doing immediately. This isn’t like that. It’s a skill, which means it takes practice. You have to do it over and over to be good at it. Absinthe said you’ll need to practice over the next two weeks before coming back to show us how good you are at it.”
The three girls followed Ice to the first dummy and watched while he retrieved each item Storm called out to him to take from the “businessman.”“Each of you are wearing the jeans Lana sent you ahead of time,” Maestro said. “At least you’d better be, or you can leave class now.” He looked at the four kids sitting in the grass in front of him, waiting to see if any of them had disobeyed the dictates of the email that had been sent along with the delivery.
No one moved. Maestro nodded. “Good. We might as well just get to it. I know that Czar and Max have worked with you on shooting various guns. We’ll train with knives, but today we’re going to be working with garrotes. Lana sewed one into either seam along the sides of your jeans. The garrote is very thin and rarely can be detected.”
Benito, Max’s son, broke out into a huge smile, exchanging grins with Kenny, Czar’s son. “Cool,” Benito said. He felt along his jeans. Kenny did the same.
“It can’t be detected,” Maestro repeated, “otherwise it’s useless to you.”
“Is there a problem, girls?” Lana challenged as Darby and Lucia exchanged a look of concern. “If you would prefer to be excused, you can be. You don’t have to learn this. Blythe and Czar made it a point that these lessons aren’t mandatory.”
Darby shook her head. “I want to learn. It’s just that Blythe is so cautious with us all the time …” She trailed off. “I definitely want to learn.”
“Me too,” Lucia said.
“All of you, stand up,” Preacher said, not waiting for any more explanations. “This takes finesse, not a bulldozer, Benito. You have to have the fingers of a pickpocket. You have learned how to pickpocket?” He made that half a question, half a statement. “If not, you need to go to the class Ice, Storm and Ink are teaching. You have to have that light a hand. No one can suspect you because you use this only in dire circumstances or if you’re …”
Reaper cleared his throat and Preacher broke off abruptly. They weren’t going to talk about assassination. That had been discussed ahead of time.