A Man of Honor.

Chapter 18: Learning from the best.

"Judges, lawyers and politicians have a license to steal. We don't need one." ~ Carlo Gambino.

The next day I began stealing dust.

That hot tip Lil Miss Malachite had given Roman as a gesture of good faith was first up on my list. I hardly had enough time to call Cardin and the rest of my crew to get the thing set up. Thankfully all the important details for the heist had already been worked out by Neo and Roman so I just needed to follow their lead.

The whole thing went down like clockwork. The SDC shipment had arrived in a company warehouse to await pick up from some company trucks. My crew and I intercepted the trucks before they could arrive at the warehouse, Neo used her semblance to make it seem like there was an obstruction on the road, the trucks stopped and the rest of us held the drivers and workers at gunpoint. There weren't any knights inside since the trucks were empty.

We tied them up and left them for somebody else to find after we pilfered their paperwork and everything else. Neo drove the truck while I bullshitted the bozos at the warehouse to make it seem like I was the guy who was meant to pick up the dust.

The thing I learned about pencil pushers that day is that if you dot your Is and cross your Ts and have everything signed in triplicate, then they will hand over damn near anything to a thief. Neo used her semblance to disguise the company ID card I had stolen and looked like an average SDC worker the entire time. No one suspected anything.

They handed us the dust. A few phoney signatures and some small talk and those chumps working for the SDC loaded the trucks up for us. It was brilliant, we had to deal with a couple of security drones they sent with us but one stop later and we picked up a fresh face. This guy they called Buttons was able to disable the drones with a few quick hacks. The mafia has much better tech support than you might think. And after that we just had to drive over to one of Roman's many warehouses to offload everything.

Looking inside that place and seeing just how much dust Roman had been stealing was amazing. It was stacked to the ceiling. One wrong move and the whole place would have been a fucking mushroom cloud.

"You stole all of this?" I asked Neo in wonderment as we offloaded the trucks, gazing at all the canisters and crates that filled the shelves of the warehouse. Neo only gave me a smug little grin in response.

We ditched the trucks just outside the city limits. We poured gas into the cabs and lit them up to burn. Because this wasn't just about getting the dust, this was about sending the SDC a message. They were paying a price here.

The morning after that little caper I finally called Ozpin to give him the news.

"Mr. Arc... I was beginning to worry about you," he said the minute he picked up my call. It had been a while since I had last spoken to him. Not since that dust robbery he had me do against Junior's wishes that cost me an inch off my pinky.

"Good to hear from you too sir," I told him. "Guess who just stole over a million lien worth of dust right out from under the SDC's nose?"

"Really?" Ozpin asked me. "After I didn't hear from you and that truck robbery I was worried that something went wrong."

"It did," I explained to him. "Apparently some of Roman's guys had already nabbed the truck and we ended up stealing it right out from under him. He found out."

"Oh my... did Junior find out?" Ozpin asked, actually sounding a little shocked that the plan had gone sideways.

"He did, and he was angry, but Roman was also impressed with my work," I explained to him, skipping over the details of my punishment and the beating O-Ushi had given me for being too bold. I was still sore that Ozpin's harebrained idea had led to that so I avoided talking about cutting off the tip of my pinky finger. "And now because of that little stunt Roman and Junior are going to be in the dust business together, and I'm going to be heading it."