Up leaving their operating tools inside people's skulls. That would be the cure, although Coz never used words like 'cure.' He wore funky sweaters and let her call him Coz, but he was old school inscrutable, to the point where Sasha couldn't tell if he was gay or straight, if he'd written famous books, or if (as she sometimes suspected) he was one of those escaped cons who impersonate surgeons and wind What they needed to do was switch things around in her head so that the challenge became not taking the wallet but leaving it. Sasha and Coz had dubbed that feeling she got the 'personal challenge,' as in: taking the wallet was a way for Sasha to assert her toughness, her individuality. Sasha no longer took anything from stores-their cold, inert goods didn't tempt her. He was trying to get Sasha to use that word, which was harder to avoid in the case of a wallet than with a lot of the things she'd lifted over the past year, when her condition (as Coz referred to it) had begun to accelerate: five sets of keys, fourteen pairs of sunglasses, a child's striped scarf, binoculars, a cheese grater, a pocketknife, twenty-eight bars of soap, and eighty-five pens, ranging from cheap ballpoints she'd used to sign debit-card slips to the aubergine Visconti that cost two hundred sixty dollars online, which she'd lifted from her former boss's lawyer during a contracts meeting. But this wish only camouflaged the deeper feeling Sasha always had: that at, tender wallet, offering itself to her hand-it seemed so dull, so life-as-usual to just leave it there rather than seize the moment, accept the challenge, take the leap, fly the coop, throw caution to the wind, live dangerously ('I get it,' Coz, her therapist, said), and take the fucking thing. It was easy for Sasha to recognize, looking back, that the peeing woman's blind trust had provoked her: We live in a city where people will steal the hair off your head if you give them half a chance, but you leave your stuff lying in plain sight and expect it to be waiting for you when you come back? It made her want to teach the woman a lesson. Inside the rim of the bag, barely visible, was a wallet made of pale green leather. Whose peeing she could faintly hear through the vaultlike door of a toilet stall. On the floor beside the sink that must have belonged to the woman Sasha was adjusting her yellow eye shadow in the mirror when she noticed a bag It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel.

A visit from the goon squad book