Black or White

Chapter 7 )( Time for a Woman Hunt

   Marcus came back to the kitchen once night had fallen to find Dan, his own pet rat, in his pantry. He threw a blanket at the hungry creature, it landed with an oomph from Dan then he turned to leave. Dan rushed to grab his arm before he reached very far.

"Marcus, look. I know you have like a life, but I need you to drive me around in the next few weeks at a moment's notice to potentially dangerous – although I doubt they will be – situations." Marcus pulled his arm from Dan's grasp, made to walk forward again then turned to look at Dan in the dim room. What he said sounded ridiculous but that was not new enough to question.

"Why?"

"Well, I might have found the site slash group chat where Plum Girl gets all her targets from."

"You make her sound like a hitman."

"Hitwoman," Dan corrected. Marcus stared at him a felt his already droopy eyelids droop some more in tandem with his shoulders.

"Dan, why would I do that?" Dan smiled a little.

"Because if I get to see her again, maybe I'll stop having her as the only thing on my browsing history." A lie but Marcus did not need to know that.

"That 'maybe' is problematic speech, Dan. It's not a good way to convince someone."

"Please Marcus. I need this and you are the only one I can ask. Literally. I need you, friend." It was an argument that would not have won Dan over but Marcus was a different breed of man.

Marcus sighed.

"I'm going to bed. You have my number but traffic is something I can't control and your thing sounds like a time crunch." Dan stepped forward and gave Marcus a loose hug. "Just go to sleep Dan."

"Sure, friend. Thanks."

Marcus walked off to his bedroom, the sound of some rustling fading as he went. If only his parents knew half of their money was going to feeding a friend of his rather than Marcus himself. They didn't talk to him enough to care anyway.

Marcus just wondered in the slot of time before he fell asleep what the hell his friend was going to get himself into, over a girl he nicknamed after a fruit. He let out another tired sigh and decided to leave those thoughts for another day.

Was it careless behaviour of Dan to drag his friend around the city to places that may or may not be dangerous? Well, that depended on whether the situation was dangerous or not (it really didn't), hence the question.

Some questions Dan could not answer but he could finally tell where Plum Girl would be, or he could take a good guess. The group chat she operated from, or was assumed to, had less than a hundred members, but Dan noticed that the numbers dropped after her last theft. The people in it were self-proclaimed poor and very frustrated with their 'superiors' and the mistreatment they had endured over the years. The group description made it seem like they had started out as just any old group to rant about their working dilemmas, a little community for comfort. Plum Girl's escapades had turned it into a target pool, with detailed descriptions of wealthy people who had done the members wrong and where to find their riches in hopes that Plum Girl would enact their revenge for them.

In the first week of joining, Dan had Marcus drive him to the locations for three different profiles given on the group but, even after a whole night spent outside the building waiting for a sign of Plum Girl, nothing came of it. Naturally, Dan assumed he had not actually found what he had looked for but seeing as he did not have anything else he stayed on the group and hoped.

Another week and a half passed and the profiles kept coming in; Plum Girl's hits still did not match up. Dan grew ever more frustrated and dejected, still, when the articles came up, he read them. Marcus kept his eyes on Dan during it all and Dan really did consider telling him to stop – that is until one day when Marcus pointed out that one of her more recent hits was a building they had visited. Dan hit himself over the head, stupid indeed.

There was a line up and Plum Girl was taking her time to go through it, she could not keep up but she cut it close. So Dan scrolled up in the chat, to the beginning, and used the same profiles from before to predict where Plum Girl might be next.

That took the pair to a few more spots in the following days. The first spot was as good as the last few, an all-nighter in front of some well-lit multilevel building, but the second had a glimpse of black and white leather out through the window of a small house in the rich side of the city. Marcus had to pass Dan a bottle of water from how parched he got just seeing her that night, the embodiment of his goal so close yet so far.

It took three more spots and two failed attempts of following her, one of which had the police involved, for Dan to really see where she went after the thefts she committed. Then a follow up one to make sure he was right, which entailed Plum Girl changed out of her black and white outfit somewhere on her walk away from the crime scene and walking back to an apartment building almost at the edge of the city, near the river.

Dan went up the stairs behind her on his tip toes, he ducked whenever he expected her to look back but she never did. He will admit that the way he watched her go into her apartment from the corner of a stairwell was very stalker behaviour, but he was not going to hurt her so he thought it was fine – a lie but no one needed to know that.

She was through the door by the time Dan blinked. He took a moment to just stand there, the thought of how so many things could go wrong with what he planned to do next, or even with the current part of his pseudo plan. Plum Girl could have seen him or the apartment she just walked into was not even her own and perhaps she would knock him out on his way back to Marcus' car; but that was just his paranoia thinking for him.

Dan hopped his way down the stairs and out the apartment. He made his way back to Marcus' car while the thoughts of how he would be going home to figure out how to pick a lock took over his mind.

It took him two weeks and a lot of practice on Marcus' door. He had walked right up to her door with little obstruction and the ease of his entry should have been more satisfying than it turned out to be.

Dan sat in the chair farthest from the door, where the light from the windows did not reach him. He sat and he waited, his feet tapped against the floor and his breaths came out a bit shallow at the prospect of what might happen once Plum Girl arrived – that was if she did arrived.

He kept his head down, eyes in his lap. The door clicked and Dan's head snapped to attention and he stood. It was time; Dan thanked God that he did not have enough water in his system to piss himself.