Chapter Text
VALE & COMPANY
WATCH REPAIR — CAMERA REPAIR — ESTATE JEWELRY APPRAISAL
The letters are gold leaf, neat and meant to make the place look older and cleaner than it is. The shop itself is narrow, pressed between a dry cleaner and a closed travel agency with sun-faded posters of Santorini curling in the window.
Nothing about it screams criminal, but that's kind of the point.
Neal wouldn’t usually take this kind of risk, but if there’s one thing he’s learnt since embarking into the kind of life he’s been living ever since he learned the truth, is that you can’t let one person walk all over you, or the next in line will think they have that right as well.
He should have seen it coming, really. His ID might give him five extra years, but his appearance will still take a while to catch up — even if a few makeup tricks and shoe lifts help bridge the gap between eighteen and twenty-three — and the kind of people he’s been talking to these days have more practice seeing through acts like his than the more unaware marks he usually has to fool.
Julian Vale told him it was a lesson.
Neal is just about to teach the fence a lesson of his own.
He breathes in through his nose and watches the street. A cab hisses past. A couple argues softly under an umbrella. Somewhere, a dog barks like it’s been personally insulted by the moon. No one gives the shop a single glance.
Good.
He crosses the street without rushing, because hurry makes people remember you. So does skulking. Neal has learned that the trick is to move like he’s expected somewhere, as if doors open for him because they always have. It is absurd how often the world believes posture over truth.
He reaches the side entrance in the alley, where deliverymen bring in boxes of broken clocks and dead cameras and things people swear belonged to their grandmothers. Vale’s public shop is on the front, but his real business is in the back.
Neal already knows the lock will be boring.
He knows because Vale’s assistant uses this door when he smokes, and because the assistant is lazy, and lazy people are gifts from God to thieves.
The door gives with a soft click.
The shop smells like oil, dust, leather straps, and the stale coffee someone forgot to throw out. Neal takes that in, then moves past the front counter and through the curtain into the repair room. He doesn’t turn on the lights, doesn’t really need to. The streetlights coming through the front windows give him enough to work with, and anyway, darkness is only a problem when you don’t already know where you’re going.
Vale cheated him in a diner three weeks ago with a smile and a roll of fake bills. Not all fake. The top bills had been real, the bottom ones too, but everything in the middle was paper cut to size. Neal had noticed before he got five blocks away, which was probably what Vale intended. Not enough time to confront him without looking desperate. Not enough loss to start a war. Just enough to teach the ‘kid’ where he stood.
That’s the part Neal hasn’t been able to let go.
He knows he’s young. He knows that even with the papers that say otherwise, even with the right clothes and the right smile and the right way of speaking like he belongs anywhere he decides to stand, some people still look at him and see someone they can test. Vale had seen it and enjoyed it. He’d called him talented in the same tone someone might use for a dog that learned a trick.
Neal isn’t here because of the money.
Well… Not only because of the money.
He checks the obvious places first. A filing cabinet near the back wall gives him repair tickets, appraisal copies, old invoices, and a decoy envelope of cash that might as well have a bell attached to it. He leaves it where it is. Vale will count that, probably counts it every morning, maybe twice if he’s nervous. Neal isn’t interested in proving he can take something Vale already expects to lose.
The real stash is behind a tall wooden case meant for camera tripods, set against the back wall at a slight angle. It’s not much of a tell unless someone’s been looking at the room layout and wondering why the wall between Vale’s shop and the dead travel agency next door is thicker than it should be, and Neal’s been wondering for a week. The case shifts with a careful pull, and behind it is a painted panel, well matched from a distance and a little too clean around the edges up close.
Vale’s good, but he’s not as good as he thinks he is. Neal hates that about him. He hates it more because Vale’s good enough to have gotten away with cheating him. One would think that after a year in the business, he’d have learned to count his cash upon delivery, but the diner patrons had made him too nervous to flaunt a wad of cash long enough to count it, which had probably been the man’s plan from the start.
The panel opens onto three shallow metal drawers, and Neal lets his lips pull into a slight smirk.
Gotcha.
The first drawer is watches. He recognizes a few names and guesses at the rest. Some are worth more than what Vale owes him, maybe a lot more, but taking the most expensive one would be greedy, and trying to fence it later might lead the man right back to him. Neal chooses one that’s valuable without being the crown jewel instead, a slim gold piece with initials engraved on the back. Personal enough for Vale to remember, easy enough for Neal to move if he wants to.
The second drawer has rings, stones, a pair of cufflinks, and a necklace Vale probably thinks is the prize of the whole stash. Neal leaves the necklace. It’s too obvious, and it feels like something Vale would notice before anything else, even if it looks plain enough to pass forward without leaving a trace. Instead he takes two small rings and a loose stone in a folded paper. The stone isn’t large, but the cut is clean, and Vale had tucked it behind the velvet rather than in front.
The third drawer isn’t organized like the others, which is what makes Neal slow down. It seems to hold the things Vale either hasn’t identified yet or doesn’t know how to sell without saying the wrong thing to the wrong buyer. There’s an old silver cigarette case, a few coins, a broken brooch, a tarnished chain, and a thin silver band lying near the back.
Neal picks up the cigarette case first, because it’s easy and probably worth enough to annoy Vale. Then he reaches for the silver band.
The silver is finely worked, with a stepped geometric pattern running around the outside and a round medallion set at the front, stamped or carved with a stylized coyote face. He turns it over, looking for a mark, a maker’s stamp, anything useful, and finds only smooth metal and a clasp hidden neatly behind the medallion.
That bothers him. Vale’s whole business is built on stories, and this has none.
It doesn’t feel worthless, though.
Neal studies it for a few seconds longer than he should. It looks like something that belongs in a case, not in a hidden drawer behind a repair shop wall. Museum, private collection, evidence locker if Vale’s luck ever runs out. Either way, Vale has no business having it, which is almost funny, considering Neal’s the one currently stealing it.
He slips it into his inner jacket pocket.
That should do it, he tells himself as he takes the cigarette case too and closes the drawer. He came here to make up his loss and make Vale feel it, not to clear out the guy’s stash. He takes enough to cover what he’s owed, then a little less than he could, because leaving money behind is part of the point. Vale needs to know Neal had options. He needs to look at what’s missing and understand that this wasn’t panic or hunger or some smash-and-grab by someone too stupid to know better.
Neal resets the panel, moves the tripod case back, and checks the room once more. Nothing looks disturbed unless someone knows exactly what they’re looking for, and Vale will. Maybe not right away, but eventually he’ll find the fake roll of bills Neal leaves in the workbench drawer, tucked between two velvet pouches where it won’t be obvious until Vale reaches for something valuable.
Neal considers leaving a note. He even has one ready in his head — something sharp enough to make Vale hear his voice when he reads it — but the longer he stands there, the more childish it feels. Vale didn’t need a note when he cheated him, so Neal doesn’t need one now.
He leaves the roll exactly where it is and closes the drawer.
On the way out, he pauses by the front counter and glances at his reflection in the glass case. The watches below him sit in neat rows, untouched and useless. For a second he looks like the person his papers say he is: older, settled, someone who knows how this world works and isn’t still proving it to himself every time someone decides he’s safe to underestimate.
Then he looks away, because the reflection doesn’t matter. What matters is the weight in his jacket and the fact that Julian Vale is going to learn something tonight.