Til heist do us part, p.6
'Til Heist Do Us Part, page 6
“Didn’t you read my message?”
“Yes, but…” He made a vague gesture with his hand toward the studio set. “It sounds like something straight out of a bad movie, and I would know. Apparently, Cristian’s Animal Kingdom was the worst pilot the studios have ever seen. We’re wrapping the second episode tomorrow and then we’re shutting it all down. I’ve got no money left, so I’m going back to my escort and life-coaching business to make ends meet. I even had to rehome my rescue dogs so I could move into a more compact space. They’re much happier out in the country.”
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”
Cristian sighed. “I thought that money would change my life forever.”
“We all thought that. Maybe we dreamed too big.”
After a few last-minute words with his director, Cristian joined us in the car, squeezing into the back of Emma’s Chevy Bolt EV with Chloe and Anil. He and Emma had often clashed over his views about saving the environment and Emma’s determination to fill it with ozone-destroying pollutants from the vehicles she loved to drive.
“I am honestly shocked that you’ve gone electric,” he said after they’d exchanged greetings.
Emma sniffed. “It wasn’t by choice.”
Cristian leaned back in his seat. “Any of you ladies currently single?”
“Chloe’s still with Gage,” I said. “Should I call and tell him you just asked her out? He might leave you with one or two working fingers.”
“Chloe is out,” he said. “How about you? Are you still with Jack?”
“No, but I’m taking a break.”
“I’m taking a break, too,” Emma said when his gaze slid to her. “I just broke up with a dude who lost a certain body part while operating some heavy machinery. I went to see him in the hospital to tell him it was over for reasons of abject stupidity. I mean, what was it doing out there in the first place? There’s a time and a place, is all I’m saying.”
“Was there anything left?” Anil asked, his face a mask of horror.
“Yeah, but I wasn’t into the whole frankenwiener thing. Size does matter. I learned that from Rose.” She looked over at me as she started the car. “What does Rose have to say about this whole thing?”
“I haven’t had a chance to share everything with her,” I said. “She took an acrobatics-for-seniors class after our heist and landed a job on a cruise ship as the evening entertainment. She’s somewhere in the Caribbean with terrible cell service, and all I got in response to my message was permission to use the garage and a promise that she’d call when she got into the next port.”
Emma’s engine gave a quiet hum as she pulled out of the parking lot. “I hope you’re planning another heist with some serious cash,” she said. “I need to get rid of this environment-saving piece of tin and get a Hummer.”
“No one needs a Hummer,” Cristian spat out. “Do you know how bad they are for the environment?”
“Yes, I do.”
“And…?”
Emma looked at him through the rearview mirror. “You’ll get the very first ride.”
Six
Jack and Gage were waiting at Rose’s garage when we arrived. They’d brought a stack of pizzas, a few bottles of pop, and an organic kale salad and kombucha tea for Cristian.
After everyone had caught up, I told them about Angelini’s visit. Jack glared at me while I was talking, his lips pressed tight together, hands shoved in his pockets in his trademark pissed-off pose. I knew he was annoyed that I hadn’t called him the minute Angelini left my office, but my trust in him was broken and I couldn’t take the risk that he might disappear before everyone had a chance to weigh in about what we should do.
Gage was out of his chair and slamming his fist into random objects in the garage as soon as I was done. He was lean and muscled, with the most sculpted jawline I’d ever seen, tawny brown hair, and sharp blue eyes that only softened when Chloe was around. Gage wasn’t a big talker, but both Olivia and Chloe adored him, and there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for his girls. Any threat to them sent him into a protective frenzy.
“I still can’t believe this is real,” Cristian said, stretched out on one of Rose’s folding chairs. “It almost seems too crazy to believe.”
“As crazy as stealing a necklace from the safe of a mob boss while organizing his daughter’s wedding and then helping her escape a forced marriage to a rival mob boss’s son?” I gestured to the whiteboard, which still held the remnants of the plan for our last heist.
“Where is the necklace now?” Cristian asked. “Does anyone know?”
“It’s in India,” I said. “Jack stole it after we returned it to the museum and—”
“Reacquired,” he corrected.
“Whatever.” I shot him a glare. He knew there was nothing I liked less than being interrupted when I was meeting with the crew. “He then repatriated it to India, and it is now in a museum in Delhi.”
“The simple solution seems to be to go to Delhi and steal it back,” Anil said. “Does everyone have a valid passport?”
Jack shook his head. “It’s not simple at all. Pulling off a heist in your hometown is one thing. Traveling to a foreign country to pull off a heist when you have no resources, no contacts, no equipment, and no information is something else entirely.”
“Maybe we should consider alternatives before we book plane tickets to India so we can break into a highly secure museum, steal a cultural artifact worth $30 million, illegally smuggle it out of the country and into the US, and give it to a leader of organized crime,” Chloe suggested. “Just thinking out loud here.”
“Garcia confirmed Angelini was who he said he was,” I said. “I managed to text him for help, and he showed up while Angelini was still there. From what he said, the mob doesn’t consider alternative options.”
“You texted Garcia for help?” Jack gritted out. “Garcia? Not me?”
“He has a gun.”
“So do I.”
“He’s steady and reliable,” I said. “He doesn’t disappear for eight months. He doesn’t go on business trips that require burner phones and secret codes. He doesn’t refuse to tell me what he does for a living. I texted HELP and I knew he’d come. I wasn’t sure about you.”
“You don’t think I would have come if you’d texted me for help?” Indignation laced Jack’s tone.
“For all I knew, you were being tossed out a window in Rio, tortured by the Italian Mafia in Tuscany, or you were in the North Sea trapped in a Russian submarine.”
“The Italian Mafia are based in Sicily,” he corrected me. “Tuscany doesn’t have the port access they need for the drug trade.”
I folded my arms and sighed. “You missed the point entirely.”
“Listen, as much as I want to hang with you guys and rehash old times and listen to your relationship woes, I’m out,” Cristian said. “If you recall, I wasn’t involved in the heist. As soon as we found out that Angelini had Mafia connections and I realized I’d slept with his wife, I walked away.”
“And then you showed up at the wedding and helped us out by sleeping with her again,” Emma pointed out. “You are still part of this.”
“Not the part that seems to have pissed off the boss of the biggest Mafia family in town.” Cristian grabbed his satchel and threw it over his shoulder. “You really should use those recycle bins I left here during the last heist. We can’t do too much for the environment.”
“You can’t be out,” I said. “I told you. He’s got your name—”
“Tell him my name shouldn’t be on the list because I wasn’t part of it,” he said. “He’s got nothing on me.”
“Except the part where you slept with his brother’s wife during his niece’s wedding,” Emma pointed out.
“If he knew about it, I’d already be dead.” Cristian pushed open the door. “Sorry, guys. I’ve got high anxiety and a low danger tolerance, and I’m dealing with too much in my life right now. I lost my house, my dogs, my show, and all the reward money. I just can’t with the whole mob-boss thing. I need to look after myself.”
We stared in stunned silence as the door slammed behind him.
“I can’t believe he just walked out on us,” I said.
“Cristian has always been about Cristian.” Jack checked the window before pulling the blind. “He did us a favor. When you’re dealing with the mob, you don’t want people on your crew who aren’t fully committed.”
“What would Angelini really do if we don’t hand over the necklace?” Anil asked. “I have a hard time believing he would kill us all. That’s a lot of dead bodies to get rid of, and in the end, he wouldn’t get what he wanted.”
“Do you know nothing about the mob?” Emma asked. “Haven’t you seen Reservoir Dogs? Casino? How about Casino Royale? Killing is too easy. It’s the torture they enjoy. Who knows what would have happened in Simi’s office if Garcia hadn’t shown up?”
“I’ll tell you what would have happened if you’d called me,” Jack said, sulking. “I would have dealt with the problem there and then. But you didn’t trust me.”
It wasn’t just a matter of trust. Jack would be dead if I’d called him. Angelini wanted his head, and in hindsight calling Garcia had been the right decision. “I didn’t text you because I thought you’d probably run in the other direction,” I snapped. “Or maybe back to Bloomingdale’s for another smooch session with Clare.”
“Uh-oh. Trouble in paradise.” Emma held out her hand, and Gage and Anil each handed her a twenty-dollar bill.
“You took bets on us?” I stared at them, aghast.
“You gotta admit that you two were always an unlikely couple,” Emma said, pocketing the cash. “Bad-boy rogue thief with dubious underworld affiliations and no fixed address. Hardworking cookie-cutter good girl who worked in a candy store, spent her Friday nights watching crime shows with her octogenarian landlady, showed up every Sunday for dinner with the fam, and never refused a meet and greet with a prospective husband because she didn’t want to let her parents down.”
“I organized a heist,” I protested. “I was arrested for trying to break into a museum. I robbed a mob boss. I got so drunk I passed out on the floor. I did bad things.”
“In a good-girl way. No selfishness involved.”
“What about another heist?” Anil suggested. “We could steal something valuable and then offer to buy the necklace from the museum in Delhi. What rate of interest is Angelini charging us?”
“He said the necklace is now valued at $30 million. He was going to charge 28 percent—”
“So, we owe him $8.4 million,” Anil said, cutting me off. “Unless it’s compound interest—”
“Actually, it was 28 percent and then I made him angry by comparing him to a credit card company so now it’s 30 percent.”
“We owe an even $9 million,” Anil said. “If he didn’t say compound interest, then I think it’s safe to assume it’s simple.”
“I hate it when you do math stuff like that,” Emma said. “It makes me feel like I could be doing so much more with my brain.”
“That’s a crazy amount of money.” Chloe shook her head in disbelief. “He can’t be serious. We’re just ordinary people. Where would we come up with that kind of cash?”
“We barely made it through the last heist,” I added. “We can’t do another one. Even if we did steal something else, we’d have to sell it on the black market, and then convince the museum to sell us the necklace. Too many things could go wrong.”
“I could make another replica,” Anil offered. “It worked last time.”
“He won’t fall for that,” Jack said. “He’ll have a jeweler with him to check it out. I think our best bet is to leave the country and lay low for a bit while we figure this all out.”
“But Olivia is in school,” Chloe protested. “I can’t just pull her out and go on the run. What kind of life is that for a child?”
“One where her mom hasn’t been killed by a crazy Mafia boss.” Emma shrugged when Chloe glared at her. “Just keeping it real.”
I held up my hand to quiet all the protests. “We can’t panic,” I said. “We need facts. Would he really whack all of us if we don’t give it back, or was that just his idea of a motivational speech? I’ll see what I can find out about him. In the meantime, we need to look into retrieving the necklace because that is the simplest solution, leaving the matter of the interest aside.”
“Gage and I will do a little digging into the museum in India and see what we can find out on the dark web about their security system.” Chloe shared a look with Gage. “Maybe it won’t be that hard to steal…”
“We still need to be prepared to leave the country in case it all goes sideways,” Jack said. “I know a guy in West Englewood who can get us fake passports. We’d be too easy to trace if we use our real ones. I’ll need Simi to come with me as a cover for the meet. We can drive out there tomorrow.”
“I can’t be in a car with you all the way to West Englewood,” I said, keeping my voice low. “What if I get the urge to throw something at you when we’re on the road?”
“Why doesn’t Emma drive?” Chloe suggested. “She’s good at staying neutral.”
“Why can’t you come?”
“Because I would take your side,” she said. “Then both of us would be throwing things at him and nothing would get done.”
“You’re such a good best friend.” I smiled for the first time since Angelini had walked into my office, pleased that my bestie would take my side no matter what.
“Until the end.”
I just hoped “the end” wasn’t four weeks away.
Seven
“We’re a couple,” Jack said the next evening in the car while we were en route with Emma to West Englewood. “We’ve been together for years.”
“You want me to pretend we’re together when I still feel like slapping you across the face?”
“You’re good at deception,” Jack said. “You fooled Joseph Angelini into thinking you were a wedding planner.”
“I grew into the role. If you recall, I did such a good job he gave me a five-star review.”
“Now you get a chance to grow into the role of my girlfriend,” he said with a warm smile. “If you do a good job, I’ll give you a five-star review, too.”
Half an hour later, Jack and I were seated at the bar of the Sawmill Pub watching a bachelorette dirty dancing with a complete stranger, both of them unfazed by the guy next to them who was trying to simultaneously pee in a garbage can and order a round of shots as a sweaty group of soccer players flung chicken wings at one another to the heavy beat of Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle.”
“What do you think?” Jack asked, looking around. “It’s great, isn’t it?”
“This is the kind of place you visit once in undergrad and wake up with a mouthful of cigarette butts and bile.” I had managed to score a shot of whiskey for Jack and a gin and tonic for me after a twenty-minute wait at the bar. I didn’t love hard liquor, but when I’d asked for a Long Island, the bartender told me he’d run out of “girly drinks” in the nineties.
“He’s here,” Jack said, looking over his shoulder.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Act like you’re madly in love with me.” He ran his hand down my arm, sending a wave of goose bumps sheeting across my skin. We may have broken up, but our chemistry was still insane.
“How? Do you want me to gaze into your eyes?”
“He needs to think we’re serious and I have something to lose.” Jack moved his stool and ran one hand over my thigh, pushing my little black dress indecently high. “You’ve already made it easy for me in this dress.”
Okay. Maybe I had dressed for revenge seduction and not success, and maybe the neckline of my dress plunged a little low, but dammit, he’d kissed Clare and I wanted him to remember what he was missing.
“Jack…” I grabbed his wrist. “I’m not going to let you…”
“Let me what?” he murmured, his lips barely brushing against the shell of my ear. He smelled of whiskey and leather, and his breath was hot against my skin. “Touch you? You’re my girlfriend tonight. I need to touch you, Simi. Let me touch you…”
“Fine.” My breath hitched in my throat as his hand moved higher, his fingers brushing the edge of my panties. “But you…don’t…need…to…touch…there.”
“You like to be touched there,” he shot back, his voice low and husky. “If I moved my finger just an inch, you’d be dragging me into the restroom to have your way with me.”
Swallowing hard, I pushed his hand away. “Is someone really watching us, or is this just a wish list?”
“He’s watching. Tip your head to the side for me.”
I did as he asked and he kissed my neck, his soft lips burning a trail over my heated skin.
“I miss the taste of you,” he whispered. “I miss the softness of your skin. I miss the way you feel in my arms. I miss waking up beside you.”
Electricity crackled in the air between us. I knew I shouldn’t let him go too far, but it felt so right, like I’d found the missing piece of me. And besides, the crew needed fake passports. I wasn’t giving in. I was taking one for the team. “Your fake girlfriend also likes to be kissed on the lips,” I murmured.
Jack slid an arm around my waist and pulled me out of the chair and between his spread legs. Heat rushed through me like a lava flow, his touch, his deep voice, the feel of his hands on me, lighting me up inside. I inhaled his scent of leather mixed with a hint of musky cologne, a potent mix, and so familiar it made me ache inside. I groaned softly at our connection and pressed my hands against his chest.
