In the shadow of an aging railroad trestle, Midnight Street has learned to survive by its own rules. Ernestine Falk is twenty-one, quick-fingered, sharp-eyed, and one of the neighborhood's most talented pickpockets. But unlike other thieves, Ernie follows three rules: take only from the careless, return whatever is loved, and never take from the dead.

Then an elderly stranger arrives carrying a secret that reaches back twelve years.

After Ernie steals his wallet, the man is found dead before morning. Inside the wallet is a pristine $100 bill from 1934—and a pawn ticket for a locked Gladstone bag deposited at Lucky St. Pawn only hours before his death. The bill is one of the missing notes from a legendary 1935 payroll robbery in which $400,000 disappeared and several men were killed.

Suddenly, Ernie possesses the first tangible clue to a crime that the city has spent twelve years trying to forget.

As a determined newspaper reporter begins investigating the rediscovered money and a mysterious fixer named Laszlo Korda starts searching Midnight Street for the missing pawn ticket, Ernie realizes that the dead man's final journey was no accident. Someone deliberately brought the secret back into the neighborhood.

With a locked suitcase, a vanished fortune, a twelve-year-old crime, and dangerous men closing in, Ernie must decide whether to protect the street that raised her—or uncover the truth before the past claims another victim.