Businessmen, inventors, and artists steal anything and everything. Filmmakers, painters, writers, most of them wouldn’t have created anything without ripping off someone else. Musicians have stolen from each other probably as far back as the muses – Elvis and Led Zeppelin would never have amounted to anything if they hadn’t been blatant thieves – and writers take what they need (“immature poets imitate; mature poets steal”). And governments, well, you know they take whatever they want. I always thought it was Dylan who said that if you steal a little they put you in jail, but if you steal a lot they make you a king, but Frank says that it was Eugene O’Neill. Maybe Dylan stole it from Gene and he stole it from someone else. Nothing belongs to anyone; it all just gets passed around from hand to hand, and keeps going long after we’re gone. It’s the theft of the thing that keeps it going, gives it value and history, and lasts.

We all steal something; it’s the way we are. My father was a thief, I guess, but more of a crook. He worked at a desk in City Hall as a building inspector. He took kickbacks and bribes and took what he could out of the budget, a little here and there, enough to raise suspicions but never enough to get caught outright. He was investigated twice, but nothing ever came of it. He was dirty, and didn’t mind people knowing, as long as they couldn’t prove it. “You can’t get greedy,” he said. “Take a little but still do your job and nobody cares. It’s the guys who take too much that get themselves in trouble.”

—

“You don’t need much to get by in the world,” Frank said one time when we were watching a target. We were sitting in the parking lot of a self-storage facility, a series of huge warehouses where people bought space to store stuff they’d probably never look at ever again. “It’s like renting a dump,” Frank said. “Most people have too much.” “Plenty of people don’t have enough,” I said. “The world can deal with lack,” Frank said. “What we haven’t figured out is how to deal with excess.”

“My father would have liked you,” I said.

“I doubt it.”

“You think like him,” I said, “but you express it better. College education. He would have liked that.”

“He went?”

“Not my father. Trade school. He was smart though. Read a lot, like you. Knew a lot about a lot of stuff, like you. Was always trying to figure everything out, like you, see all the angles. He wanted me to go to college. That was a big disappointment, believe me.”

“Junior college. That’s not nothing.”

“Only one year. Then I quit and went to work, for the baby on the way.”

“I still can’t believe that.”