“I’ve been missing you something fierce since that awful robbery the other night, you know. I was beginning to feel afraid you didn’t want me anymore.” She stuck her lip out in a pout and ran a finger along the side of his face, grazing her fake nail—a Natalie staple—against his jaw. “You aren’t going to cancel our date for next week, are you? We’re still on for lunch?”
His eyelids slipped down, supposedly sultry, mostly so he could concentrate on her cleavage. “Of course we are. Unless you want to come over tonight, that is. There’s a fight on cable—I’ve got quite a bit riding on Cracker Black Jack, and didn’t you say you put a little down on the match? We could watch it together, order in, maybe fool around a little…”
Her fake smile widened until it felt like her exterior was going to splinter. An evening eating greasy Chinese and betting on a pair of middleweights as they bashed each other’s faces in was something she would normally love.
As long as it was with any other man on the planet.
“That sounds wonderful, but I have this thing at my parent’s house,” she said. “I know I’ve mentioned them before. Maybe you could come and meet my family?”
Todd mumbled something about giving her a call the next day and practically ran in the direction of the elliptical machines. She watched him go, laughing at how easily he was manipulated.
Men.
Criminals or scam artists or respectable doctors—they all fled at the mention of home.
By chance, she glanced over a few minutes later, catching a glimpse of Todd as he stood outside the pool area, chatting up an elderly woman who came into water aerobics three times a week by order of her physical therapist to recuperate from the second of two grueling hip replacements.
It took all Poppy had not to vault over the desk and deliver a roundhouse kick to Todd’s face as he slipped the woman a business card, full of smiles and lies. She could practically hear him giving the pitch, promises of investments and payouts and retirement funds that couldn’t go wrong. The kind of promises a woman in her condition needed to hear.
Another day, another victim.
Too bad Poppy refused to acknowledge that word. If there was one thing this life had taught her, it was that avoiding victimhood had nothing to do with steering clear of risks or ceasing to live. In fact, it had a lot to do with the opposite.
So this was her, taking risks. This was her, living.
This was her, getting back the eighty thousand dollars Todd Kennick stole from Grandma Jean just months before she died.
Asprey toyed with the stem of his glass, enjoying the play of light in his ’84 Chateauneuf du Pape. It wasn’t exactly the vintage he’d have chosen to set off the notes of a take-out hamburger and fries, but they
were
on a budget.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Graff fell into the chair across from him and grabbed the bottle. He took one look at the label and smacked it back on the table. “Please tell me this is one of your empties filled with grape juice.”
Asprey purposefully held the glass to his nose, inhaling deeply and swirling the rich red liquid. “The rustic chestnut notes really bounce off the playful cherry in this, don’t you think?”
“We’re supposed to be cutting back, Asprey. We sat down with Tiffany and agreed—no expenses unless they’re necessary for the job. It’s not right to rely on family money now that we know where it’s coming from.”
Asprey took a deep drink before giving up. Three sommelier classes and it still all tasted the same to him. “Relax. I swiped it from the cellar at Winston’s house. Took a whole case, actually. He loves this stuff.”
“Oh.” Graff sat up a little straighter. “In that case, pass the bottle, will you?”
Asprey grinned. He could probably pass off a theft of the Mona Lisa as long as he said he took it from their older brother, Winston. So far, they’d furnished almost their entire living space above the hangar with odds and ends they’d taken from him. Said furnishings didn’t amount to much, but since they’d all felt it was better for Tiffany to stay at her apartment to keep up a cheerful front and to stay safe, he and Graff could pretend it was a debauched bachelor pad, minus any of the good types of debauchery.
They currently sat around the massage table from Winston’s office, which functioned quite nicely as their dining room table. Other effects included a polar bearskin rug and five versions of the exact same espresso machine, which, no matter how many times Asprey stole it, Winston replaced. His favorite, though, was the bright Kandinsky painting they used to cover up the moldy patch in the wall—he’d had his eye on it for years, and the bright blocks of red and blue could always be counted on to lift his mood.
Asprey liked to think their home was a work in progress. Graff liked to think it was one step closer to vindication.
In a way, they were both right.
If Graff were any other human being, the food and wine would have mellowed him out a little, made him less likely to throw one of the espresso machines into the wall. But Graff was far from ordinary, and feeding him was like giving fuel to a chainsaw-massacre enthusiast. He grumbled the entire meal, his topics ranging from Natalie the Pickpocket to the teenage punk who’d flipped him off on the road that afternoon.
“By the way,” he growled. “I’ve got a few new locations we can look at tomorrow.”
“New locations for what?”
“Don’t play dumb with me. That charming-idiot routine might work on everyone else, but you and I both know it’s an act. We can’t stay here in the hangar anymore. Not after you fucked it all up—”
Asprey listened to the rest of Graff’s monologue with a negligent ear. Once upon a time, Graff had been a lawyer—one of those overblown ones who was almost all for show. His brother could talk for hours, driven only by the sound of his own voice and the accumulation of spittle at the corners of his mouth.
Graff had always been the uptight one, the one most likely to erupt in anger over an overlooked detail or tiny hitch in their plans—and he had the blood pressure medication to prove it. Even as kids, his tendency toward irate anal-retentiveness had been evident. You didn’t touch his collection of Transformers, lined up in a perfect row on his desk. Asprey had done it once, and he still had the capped tooth to show for it.
“Stop worrying so much,” he said when Graff was done. “Natalie’s not going to turn us in.”
“I don’t want to take any chances,” Graff said tightly. “For all we know, she’s a federal agent.”
“She’s not.”
Graff gulped back the coffee and crushed the cup in one fist. “Would you stop being flippant for five seconds? There’s a good chance you blew the entire operation. I know this is all one big joke to you, but we’ve worked too hard and too long to throw it away on a pretty face.”
Not just pretty
.
Asprey knew pretty. He saw it all the time, grew up with it, played with it, definitely enjoyed it. What that woman had was something much more intriguing than beauty, something that made him sit up and pay attention with the kind of urgency that had eluded him for years.
Mystery. An enigmatic magnetism. The kind of complexity that accompanied a painting by a master, where a lifetime of close examination could never yield all the clues.
Of course, Graff saw none of that. If he made a decision not to acknowledge something—be it a universal truth about the world or the value of a fellow human being—it might as well have been crafted of invisible ink. “We’re getting closer, Asprey. We’ve got one job left and we’re done. Then we can go home again.”
You can never go home again
, Asprey wanted to quip, but the words rang uncomfortably true.
He sat back and propped his feet on the table, careful to keep any of his thoughts or regrets from showing. “Nah. She’ll be back.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“We knew going into this that it wouldn’t be easy. It’s
crime
, Graff. If you didn’t want to get your hands dirty, you shouldn’t have played.” Poor, straitlaced Graff. Even though the robberies had been his idea, every day was a struggle with his conscience.
“Our hands were already dirty, Asprey,” Graff said quietly. “That’s why we’re playing at all.”
Asprey didn’t reply. Nothing he could say would help. He’d tried—a thousand times, he’d tried, but any attempt at justifying their past only made things worse. Guilt and Graff shared a symbiotic relationship. It was just the way of it.
So Asprey focused on shuffling through the files in his lap, scouring the hacked emails Tiffany had accessed for their next and final target, a wealthy real-estate developer’s daughter who lived in downtown Bellevue. The woman, Cindy VanHuett, didn’t divulge much in her written correspondence beyond an impeccable attention to grammar and punctuation. Which meant, of course, that Asprey would have to spend the next week or so doing reconnaissance.
The thought didn’t exactly fill him with joy. Recon was not what the movies had led him to believe. There were no high-speed chases or gangsta rap soundtracks playing in the background. Most days, it involved sitting on a dirty park bench pretending to drink the same cup of coffee for twelve hours straight.
It would be a hell of a lot more entertaining with someone like Natalie helping him out. Maybe they could sync their watches, designate a convoy, stake out overnight.
The fun stuff.
Graff never let him have any fun.
“What are you doing later?” Graff asked suddenly, tearing Asprey from a particularly entertaining thought about how two attractive people might keep one another company on a long, cold night spent watching for suspicious activity.
“I was thinking about slipping into a hospital and stealing some medical supplies,” Asprey answered easily. “If we’re going to be working with Natalie, I figure we can use them. Any requests? Maybe some compression hose? You’re always saying your feet get cold.”
Predictably, Graff ignored him. “I need you and Tiffany to do a quick errand.”
That was interesting. If Asprey never got to have any fun, Tiffany was practically a prisoner to tedious, behind-the-scenes work. “Oh, yeah? What do you have for us? Gun running?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Graff muttered. He tossed his car keys on Asprey’s lap, sending the rest of the paperwork flying. “I was afraid you were going to insist on seeing this Natalie Hall thing through. That’s why you’re going to find out everything you can about her.”
“Oh yeah? Shall I consult my crystal ball?”
“No. You should consult Tiffany’s. She planted a GPS tracker on the bottom of Natalie’s boot.”
Asprey dropped his feet and stared at his brother—at the face so like his own but with a kind of deep-seated edge that came from decades of self-loathing. “I didn’t say you could do that.”
“And I didn’t know I needed your permission. I don’t trust her, Asprey, and that’s just the beginning of our problems if that woman intends to poke her nose around. Find out what you can—and then we’ll talk.”
Chapter Five
“You know, you can’t go around bugging people even if Graff says it’s okay.” Asprey pointed at the GPS tracker in Tiffany’s hands. She watched the movements on the screen with a kind of cool detachment as she sat cross-legged on the floor of the hangar, her back against the wall. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he’s kind of like a scary dictator the entire world wants to oust.”
Tiffany got to her feet and moved the small black device out of his reach. “If that’s the case, then what does that make us?”
Asprey chose not to answer that question. Self-reflection always had a way of conjuring up a prickly sense of unease, which was why he avoided it whenever possible.
“Besides—we bug people all the time,” Tiffany added. “You even peek through their windows at night, which, if you ask me, is ten-thousand times creepier. Why is it you’re just now developing a conscience?”
“Because Natalie isn’t one of our targets.” And because slipping a GPS tracker on the bottom of her boot when she wasn’t paying attention seemed like the fastest way to be on the receiving end of another ninja takedown.
“Does that mean you don’t want to come with me to check out where she lives?” Tiffany asked. “We have a location.”
Asprey didn’t even blink. “I’ll get my things.”
The drive took longer than he expected, taking them through the city center to South Seattle, where the buildings got closer together and increasingly touched by disrepair with each block. Their black Lexus—obviously Graff’s, since it oozed lawyerly respectability—grew more conspicuous with each block too.
“Are you sure this is the place?” he asked as he parked the car in front of an abandoned apartment building that had enough particleboard nailed up in place of windows it probably should have come with a hazmat warning.
“Not that one.” Tiffany pointed across the street. “The one with the big gray mailbox out front.”
The second building made him feel only slightly better. It looked as though it had once shared a contractor with the lawsuit-waiting-to-happen they’d parked in front of, but at least all the walls looked solid and the graffiti was spelled correctly. A few plants and open windows indicated life went on inside, though Asprey wasn’t willing to take any bets on the quality thereof.