Read Online Thief by Mark Sullivan - Free Book Online Page A

Navidad, Sister,” Luisa said, bowed, and rushed out the door.
    Sister Rachel walked to the doorway to Monarch’s room. She walked in quietly, not wanting to wake him, and scanned the various machines monitoring and aiding his recovery. Luisa was right. His vitals were stronger.
    The missionary doctor sat and studied Monarch, feeling conflicted. On the one hand, she loved Robin like a son. On the other, he was a constant source of worry, puzzlement, and uncertainty. It had been so right from the beginning.
    Almost twenty years before, in the middle of the night, Claudio Fortunato had run into her clinic in the Villa Miserie, the worst slum in Buenos Aires. He brought her to el ano , a garbage dump where the poorest of the poor scavenged for survival. There she found young Robin Monarch sprawled in the mud.
    He had been stabbed through the ribs and into his right lung, which had collapsed. She’d managed to save his life physically, but had found it much harder to reach him spiritually.
    The process had taken months, but in Sister Rachel’s memories that Christmas Eve, the arc of time shrank into moments. She saw herself by his bedside in the old slum clinic, gesturing to the gang tattoo on young Robin’s inner right forearm after he’d grown strong enough to sit up.
    â€œ Is that what you plan to do when you’re well?” Sister Rachel asked. “Go back to your life with La Fraternidad de Ladrones? The Brotherhood of Thieves?”
    Angered, Robin said, “I’ve got no other life. My parents were murdered. I lived on the trash heaps in the ano , Sister. I ate garbage, Sister. The brotherhood rescued me, Sister.”
    â€œAnd the brotherhood almost killed you,” she said.
    Robin said nothing, looked away.
    â€œWho stabbed you?” Sister Rachel asked.
    Robin looked over at her and shrugged. “Just some random guy.”
    â€œYou must think I’m stupid.”
    He blinked, but then shook his head. “I don’t, Sister. You’re a great doctor. You saved my life.”
    â€œYes, I did, though I’m beginning to wonder why.”
    That seemed to upend him. “Why? Didn’t you take like some kind of oath to help people or something?”
    â€œYou didn’t think I’d be able to piece it together from your wounds? The slashes high on your right arm, the cut across your left wrist? You were in a knife fight.”
    â€œNo,” Robin began.
    â€œYou’re lying to me,” Sister Rachel said. “Your whole life has been spent lying, hasn’t it? Lies, upon lies, one emptiness after the other. Lies are all you have to look forward to if you return to your old life, Robin. Sooner or later, the lies will disintegrate under the weight of truth—they always do—and you’ll be in some other hospital or prison bed, or dead with an empty soul to show to God.”
    Sister Rachel fell silent for a long moment. “Or you can decide to end the lying and the deception and the thieving and the violence and become a better person, a stronger person, a person whose soul God would find worthy.”
    Robin gaped at her as she got up from his bedside, and made to leave.
    â€œMy soul has already been emptied,” Robin called after her retreating figure. “God will already find me unworthy, Sister. It’s over for me.”
    The missionary doctor turned, her face softening. “God never finds the living unworthy, Robin. God always gives us a chance to redeem ourselves.”
    â€œWhat does that mean, redeem?”
    Sister Rachel returned to his bedside. “It means that you take another path, a better one that helps make up for whatever it is you’ve done before.”
    â€œI don’t understand.”
    She thought for a moment. “Have you ever seen a balance beam scale?”
    â€œYou mean like fence’s have?”
    Sister Rachel winced, but said, “Exactly. And now I want you to think of