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are too busy reading the paper or surfing the Internet or playing with their iPhones to care. Sometimes I think you could be masturbating while waiting in line and no one would notice.
    The cute brunette with a Celtic-knot tattoo on the inside of her left wrist who takes my order looks like she just passed legal when she got out of bed this morning. I’m a sucker for brunettes. So despite that I know nothing good is likely to come of it, I chat her up to feed my ego.
    “I like your tattoo,” I say.
    “Thanks,” she says, without a smile.
    “No beginnings or endings. Timeless nature of the spirit. Infinite cycles of birth and rebirth. Or is it just for good luck?”
    She glances at her wrist and looks up at me with a little more interest than before. “Most guys don’t know about all that stuff.”
    I just smile and thank her for taking my order, then I claim a chair and wait for my cappuccino, catching the barista glancing over at me every so often.
    In addition to my morning routine, I’ve developed some repetitive consumptive behaviors that, while not destructive, are a definite by-product of my lifestyle.
    Cappuccinos. Apple fritters. Lucky Charms.
    Mochas. Mentos. Corporate-coffeehouse baristas.
    Just to name a few.
    Some might look at my behaviors and call them addictions. Fixations. Arrested development.
    I prefer to think of them as endearing eccentricities.
    I look around Starbucks, checking to see if my ten o’clock is here, looking for furtive glances or a knowing nod or an index finger brushing across the nose à la Paul Newman and Robert Redford in The Sting . But no one looks my way other than the cute barista and an attractive Asian woman in a red coat talking on her cell phone as she walks out the front door. I’m hoping my buyer actually shows. If things don’t pick up soon, I might have to start poaching door-to-door and selling my product at a discount.
    “Grande cappuccino!”
    When I walk up to the counter, the barista who took my order hands me my drink. “It’s for no beginnings orendings,” she says, displaying her wrist like an offering. “The timeless nature of the spirit, like you said. I don’t believe in good luck.”
    “That’s too bad,” I say, taking my cappuccino. “Because I was kind of looking forward to testing out mine.”
    I give her a smile, then I walk back to my table and sit down and wait for my appointment, trying not to look desperate.
    My life used to be a lot easier. Poaching luck provided an ultimate lifestyle of freedom and wealth and endless opportunities. I had everything I ever wanted and more. But that’s the problem with feeling like you’re on top of the world. Eventually, you begin to think you own it.
    Three years ago in Tucson, I was contacted by a woman for a contract job. Not for a particular mark, but for a specific type of luck. Something I’d never poached before. A job I shouldn’t have taken. But the amount of money she was offering was too good to pass up.
    For people who are born with it, bad luck isn’t toxic. It’s just something they live with, something their systems have acclimated to. But for poachers and people who aren’t born with it, bad luck is like a virus that grows exponentially the longer it stays in your system. Though Grandpa used to tell me stories about poachers who only trafficked in bad luck. Specters, he called them. I can’t imagine what it would be like to steal bad luck for a living. Once was bad enough.
    I’d poached long enough to have a constant dose oflow-grade good luck running through me for most of my first thirty years, but when you steal bad luck, it stays in your system, too. And bad luck, whatever the quality, pretty much cancels out anything but pure, soft, high-grade good luck. Which isn’t easy to find when you really need it.
    I learned that lesson the hard way.
    But when someone hands you a bag full of money that amounts to more than you made poaching the previous two years combined, you