Grand Theft N.Y.E.

by Katrina Jackson

  Alex scoffed, “Every other week.”

  “Not like this,” Cleo said.

  “Bullshit. You talk about this job like it’s the fucking Holy Grail. These rich motherfuckers don’t have jobs, Cleo. That’s what you always told me. They’re rich and we need to relieve them of a little bit of that dough.”

  “And that’s what we’re doing,” Cleo snapped back.

  “You also told me not to be stupid. And this hasty ass plan is stupid. But if we wait and plan — like we always do — we can catch most of these dummies in Monte Carlo or Tokyo in a few months. So why the rush?”

  “Why not? Why wait a few months when we can clean a few of them out now and spend the winter in Switzerland skiing?”

  “Bitch, you don’t ski.”

  “I like looking at snow and wearing cute winter outfits, though.”

  “Something’s up,” Alex said suspiciously, narrowing her eyes at Cleo.

  Cleo sucked her teeth and turned her back to her sister. She looked down at her wig choices, but she wasn’t really seeing them. In their place was Robert Shimizu; opening his car door for her, ushering her politely inside, driving in the dark night, his hair flowing in the wind, his dark eyes watching her calmly as he fucked her with his fingers.

  She could feel her body heating just thinking about those few snatches of their night together, and she couldn’t let Alex see her like that. She’d spent the past six months having to hide herself from the person who knew her best, terrified that her little sister would see that the hasty one-night stand she’d told her about — “a bitch has needs” — had been more. So much more that she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it. About him. The memories kept her and her vibrator up all night. She couldn’t tell Alex that because she knew she’d never understand.

  But hiding the deep well of yearning was making her restless; reckless, when she’d never been. And even if Alex didn’t know why, she definitely knew something was going on.

  “Cleo, what the fuck?” Alex asked in a terrified whisper.

  She had to take a deep breath and really work to put a smile on her face before she turned back around. “Look, I just… What if we didn’t have to work so much?”

  Alex reared back and pursed her lips. “We don’t have to work this much, but we got mortgages on luxury apartments and daddy to take care of. What 9-to-5 is going to cover that? And who the fuck is going to do it? Besides,” Alex continued, her face full of disgust, “if you think there ain’t some law enforcement agency just waiting for us to get complacent or settle down or get sloppy, then I know something is really up.”

  “I didn’t say stop working,” Cleo corrected, even though she’d given it a fleeting thought more than once over the past six months. “I just meant work less.”

  “Fine. We work less. Starting now. Let’s get out of here.” Alex walked quickly back to the dining room table in the middle of their hotel room and slammed her laptop shut.

  “No,” Cleo said. “This last job, and then we slow down.”

  “Why?” Alex yelled at the top of her lungs.

  “Because this isn’t just the two of us anymore. Brian, Marcus and Gina get a say on the jobs we take on too. And they all agreed that this opportunity is too good to pass up.” As she spoke — mentally grasping at straws — her nerves settled and her voice strengthened. She hid all of her anxieties and that insatiable need for more behind their group dynamics to deflect her sister. It was terrible, but it worked. She could see it on Alex’s frustrated face. When she spoke again, she softened her voice. “Look, if you don’t want to do the job, don’t. You can leave. Go home and spend New Year’s Eve with daddy. Y’all can watch The Wiz and drink too much Crown and probably pass out before the ball even drops.”

  Alex sucked her teeth and rolled her eyes. “Please, if I go home without you, the first thing daddy gone say is, ‘Where’s your sister? Y’all supposed to stick together.’ I’m not tryna deal with that guilt trip going into the new year, just ‘cause you hardheaded.”

  “Then go to Rio. Or Lagos. Wherever.”

  “No, because I wouldn’t be able to enjoy myself. Everybody around me would be having a good old drunk time and I’d be sitting in some corner tipsy, thinking about your dumb ass getting arrested wearing a tacky pink wig in your booking photo.”

  “Tacky?”

  “Cleo!”

  “Alex!”

  They hadn’t yelled at each other like this since Alex was a teenager stealing Cleo’s B2K CDs and refusing to return them. They glared at one another across the room, chests heaving and fists clenched.

  If she were anyone else on her team, Cleo would have kicked her out of her room, and maybe even off the squad. But Alex wasn’t just another con artist she worked with; she was her little sister, and the only person she trusted implicitly. At the end of the day, no matter their reservations or the secrets they kept, they were in this together. It had always been just the two of them.

  “Look, I know it’s your job to worry about all the shit that could go wrong, but this is what we do and we’re fucking great at it. But I’m getting older.”

  “You’re twenty-eight, chill.”

  “I’m twenty-eight and I want to buy a house, maybe go to college or have a kid.”

  “With who?” Alex asked incredulously.

  Cleo rolled her eyes and smiled. “I said maybe. Hell, maybe I want to meet a nice dude with a retirement plan or some shit. The point is this job will give me a little break from all the traveling to just… think about what comes next for me.”

  Alex’s face fell.

  “We can’t do this forever,” Cleo said.

  “Why not? This is what we’re good at.”

  “But maybe it’s not the only thing we’re good at. Who knows? The point is I want to find out. So we do this last job, stack our money and just be free for a year. No more boosting cars for our covers. No more aliases. No more counterfeits or fake passports or lobster-looking ass white men trying to act out some antebellum fantasy on us. We can just be regular ass people for an entire year.”

  Alex had never been good at hiding her emotions unless there was money on the line, and the look of pure disgust on her face was priceless. It also broke Cleo’s heart.

  “Why the fuck would we ever want to be regular?”

  Cleo’s smile was slow to come but when it did, it was like her laughter burst from her mouth. It took a second, but eventually Alex joined her. Their laughter filled the room and eased the tension between them; some of it, at least.

  Cleo wiped a tear from the corner of her right eye and gave Alex the same small smile she used to when she wanted to apologize without having to actually say the words “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t get it,” Alex said. “And I still think something’s up, but I go where you go.”

  Cleo walked across the room and pulled Alex into a hug. “Where I go, you go,” she echoed.

  “If you get me locked up, I’m gonna convince my prison girlfriend to put a hit on you.”

  “That’s fair.”

  The Grand Palace Miami wasn’t the fanciest hotel in the city. Not by a long shot. But it was famous. The hotel owners announced the building in 1932. It should have taken a year from groundbreaking to opening, but the mob had infiltrated all of the city’s construction unions. When it finally opened in 1935, it had cost nearly three times its budget, but the biggest mobsters thought of it as their hangout; the center of their gambling rackets before Havana and Las Vegas pulled their clientele away. It was a fascinating history, and Cleo had been obsessed with it ever since she’d heard the whispers about the charity gala — or whatever rich name the organizers had given this poor excuse for rich people to gamble in a city where it was illegal.

  She stepped into the hotel lobby, her head tilting back so she could see the mirrored ceiling. When it was first erected, the lobby ceiling had been a condensed replica of the Sistine Chapel, but now it was covered in mirrors etched lightly with t
he outline of the original artwork. The Architectural Digest article she’d read said you had to look close to see it, but it was there. If she were here on her own time, she’d have stood still and squinted until she could decipher every inch of it, but she had a job to do and there wasn’t any time to waste.

  At the bank of elevators, Cleo pressed the call button and then looked at herself in the shiny gilded doors. She looked perfect, if she said so herself. Her pink wig was curled in a Marilyn Monroe style and skimmed just past her shoulders. Her makeup was so light most dumb men would assume she wasn’t wearing any… even with the winged eyeliner and the glossy lipstick. But her dress was the showstopper. The structured, black off-the-shoulder cocktail dress stopped mid-thigh and hugged her close. Not that she planned to stay long enough to eat, but she’d be nervous to consume more than a single cracker in this dress, it was so tight. She turned a bit to the right and looked at her body in profile with a smile. She might not be able to breathe too deeply, but her ass was sitting high and ripe in this dress, and that was worth the momentary discomfort.

  If her father had been here, he’d have said she looked like a stack of new money. That’s how he’d always described her mom when they went out on date nights. And as it happened, there wasn’t anything Cleo liked as much as a stack of crisp one hundred dollar bills. So yeah, she looked like brand new money, pastel pink wig and all.

  When the elevator doors slid open, she stood still as the people on it stepped around her to exit and then stepped inside. She pressed the button for the twenty-fifth floor and looked out at the lobby, her eyes lifted to the ceiling one more time.

  “Hold the elevator please,” a man in an off-the-rack suit said, jogging toward her.

  Cleo frowned and pressed the button to close the elevator door. “Sorry,” she said, even though she wasn’t.

  She used the short ride to compose herself, something that was harder to do these days. What had once felt like putting on a second skin now felt… different. She couldn’t pinpoint the exact changes, but for the past six months Cleo had been happy to shy away from buttering up some random multi-millionaire. The idea of dealing with some random man’s mouth and hands on her made her want to heave. She used to be able to shirk off the attention with a graceful ease and an internal reminder that there was money to be liberated at the end of it all. But that was before she’d spent six months in near-constant arousal; her skin sensitive, tingling and needy, but only for a single set of hands.

  “No,” she muttered to herself. She couldn’t think of Robert. Not now.

  “No what?” Brian asked in his bored, robotic voice.

  “Nothing,” Cleo said. She took a deep breath and bounced her shoulders up and down, forcing her body to relax.

  “You good?” Marcus asked. Cleo heard the sounds of a busy kitchen behind his voice.

  “I’m fine,” she said, just as the elevator came to a sharp stop.

  Cleo took another deep breath as the doors opened. As soon as her platform patent leather heels clicked on the marble foyer, she felt fine. She felt like herself again.

  She knew what to expect. Marcus and Gina had done their reconnaissance as part of the waitstaff. The twenty-fifth floor was the mezzanine area. The charity gala’s organizers had turned it into a replica of the casinos in the Bellagio in Vegas, but classier. Cleo nodded in silent approval. To her left was a coat check. On her right was a bar and tight clusters of couches and chairs with people lounging across them.

  She could have rolled her eyes. You’ve been to one rich white gala, you’d been to them all. Men were scattered around the room in expensive but slightly disheveled clothes, with much younger female escorts hanging off their arms; pristine, quiet, bored, boring. Interspersed in the crowd were a few boring queer couples with near-similar dynamics. It was all so…uninspiring.

  Cleo didn’t like to judge, but being some rich asshole’s arm candy wasn’t her bag and never would be, and not just because she was a bit prone to lifting their expensive watches. Cleo had never wanted to be a rich man’s possession, however temporary. She’d thought that being in the con game made her different, but to some degree she still had to play into that role. She had to pretend that money gave these people the right to treat people like capital and she hated it. For years it had fueled her desire to rob them blind, but somewhere along the way, she’d lost the desire for even that. She wanted more, different. She didn’t know what that might look like yet, but she did know that she couldn’t do this for much longer. And she used that realization to stiffen her spine as she walked straight down the foyer from the elevator toward a small table for registration.

  There were two pretty, basically identical white girls sitting there; one blonde, one redhead.

  “How may we help you?” the redhead asked with a wide smile. The other woman’s eyes flitted to take in Cleo’s outfit before moving dismissively away.

  “I’m here to register for the poker game,” Cleo said.

  The blonde cut in. “That game is invitation only.”

  “Invitation or a $100,000 buy-in,” Cleo corrected.

  “That’s right,” the cheery redhead said, as if Cleo was dumb. “Will you be buying in?” she asked skeptically.

  Cleo was ready to tell her that yes, she would. She wanted to look these two smug bitches in the face and tell them that not only was she going to buy into this game, she was going to clean everyone in this room out and when she left, she’d be taking the pens they were using just to be petty. She’d let them keep their cheap jewelry though, she thought to herself. But that wouldn’t serve her plans so she took a deep breath to calm her nerves.

  She let her brain compose a string of scathing responses she knew she couldn’t say, and never got the chance to anyway. Because when she opened her mouth, someone cut her off.

  “I’m covering her buy-in.”

  It was one night. Just a few hours, really. Six months ago.

  Cleo had spent ten times as long with other men and quickly forgotten their names once they were out of sight. But she’d never forgotten that voice. In fact, the past six months had only made the memory of it that much clearer, sharper. That deep but soft burr crawled under her clothing again, stroking the points of her nipples and the hair on her mound like his hands and mouth once had. That voice felt like danger and fun and coming home, all at once.

  She turned slowly, hoping she was wrong, praying she wasn’t.

  It had only been six months, but the man in front of her looked different and completely the same. Cleo couldn’t help but catalogue each difference; his hair was an inch or two longer but neater now, his beard was thicker and shot through with gray. But it was all the things that hadn’t changed that preoccupied her mind. His eyes were still dark and intense, his mouth still soft and playful. And when he reached out to grab her left wrist, she swallowed hard, because his grip was still firm enough to make her want to moan.

  “Cleo, what’s up?” Marcus asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  Instead, she focused on trying to keep her body in check as Robert pulled her to him, his other hand grabbing onto her waist in an iron grip.

  “It’s nice to see you again, Just Cleo. How do you want to be punished?” he whispered into her ear.

  six

  Robert Shimizu wasn’t a patient man, even though sometimes people assumed that he was. They often mistook his control for calm, but those were not the same things at all. Personally and professionally, he didn’t want things hastily thrown together; he wanted the best. He wanted exactly what he wanted. To that end, he could accept that some things took longer than he would like to come to fruition. That didn’t mean that he would wait forever, just that he was willing to wait a while to get everything he knew he deserved; the best.

  But waiting six months to see Cleo Wright in the flesh again was too long.

  Six months ago he’d woken up in his home, his balls aching, his throat so dry his voice cracked, and his stomach growling. But
most importantly, he was alone. After he’d passed out with Cleo in a heap next to him, his unconscious brain had conjured a series of vivid scenarios he couldn’t wait to realize with her over the next days, weeks, years. He’d woken up tired and sore and hard, more than ready for her again only to find his bed and garage empty.

  He’d known before he’d even stumbled out of the bedroom that his car would be gone, but he hadn’t realized until he’d downed half a glass of water that his father’s watch was missing as well. Losing that family heirloom had stung. It was the only thing he had left of the man. He’d grown so accustomed to its weight on his wrist that he felt off balance without it. Robert felt a bright flash of anger at his bare wrist, but it was fleeting. As angry as he felt, what undercut it all was a kind of despondency he wasn’t used to. He showered and changed, walking back into his bedroom in a fresh suit, clipping a new watch onto his wrist.

  He’d looked at his wrecked bedsheets, covered in smudges of her brown makeup, and finally understood what he was feeling. The watch was irreplaceable, but his memories of his father and the family photo albums, which Cleo hadn’t touched, were more important. The car was insured and nothing but a flashy toy, really. But to his core, the thing Robert had been most angry about Cleo taking — the thing that surprisingly mattered most — was herself.

  Robert owned the best private security firm in four states and growing. He had expertly trained crews in Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee and Indiana. Normally, he didn’t go on jobs, but he’d gone to Harvard with the owner of Kismet Diamonds, so he’d tagged along as an extra set of eyes for a job no one expected to be dangerous in the least. He hadn’t expected any problems, and technically there weren’t any. But when he finally found his cellphone in his suit pants from the night before, he saw that he had half a dozen missed calls from his head of security and a text message telling him that Frank Pugh had been robbed after they left.

  “What should we do, boss?” his number two, Stevie, had asked.