Sting

by Jude Watson

  “Why should I hand it over, just like that?” March stalled. “How about a little negotiation?” He cast about for anything, anything, to delay them. They were drifting now, closer and closer to the current.

  “Excuse me, I am holding a gun,” the other man said in an undefinable accent, the kind Alfie would call “fake Bulgarian” because an American wouldn’t be able to place it. “Do you think I won’t use it? You think I care about kids?”

  “You think we care about you?” Jules asked, brandishing the paddle. She thumped it against the boat.

  “You better watch it, little girl. You want to be fish food?”

  “Hurry!” the captain yelled through the bullhorn.

  The kayakers in the channel were clearly more experienced than March and the gang. There were about eight kayaks, and they were heading in at an angle, well north of the beach. They knew they could use the current to help bring them in. Their route would bring them within shouting distance. He waved his paddle at them.

  One of them cupped his hands around his mouth. “Need some help getting in? It’s a tricky current! The tide’s coming in!”

  The guy moved the speargun down along his body. “We are good, thanks!” he yelled cheerfully to the kayakers, but his face was rigid when he turned back to them. “Give us the stone. Now.”

  March held up a stone. He saw the paddle in Jules’s hand, her knuckles white with effort. He gave her a slight nod to be ready.

  March threw the stone high. At the same moment Jules pushed off with her paddle against the boat, sending it skittering out into the current. The man reached up, dropping the speargun. Torn between the speargun and the gem, he stumbled and fell into the water after the gem. The other guy scrabbled for the speargun.

  March and the gang were already off, perfectly in sync, and shot out farther into the current. The kayakers were now between them and the boat.

  The captain boomed through the bullhorn, but March couldn’t make out the words over the roaring in his ears as he pushed his paddle against the water. It was a race toward the inlet, and the current was their friend.

  Paddles digging deep into the water, white water foaming around them, they shot into the inlet. Behind them they heard the cabin cruiser power down, unable to follow. Sneaking a quick look back, March saw the captain staring out at them. He raised a hand like a gun. He used his index finger. And shot.

  Moments later they flew into a deep green ocean. Current hit current, sending the boats spinning. Choppy waves buffeted the kayaks. To the left they could see heavy surf pounding the ocean beach.

  The current was sending them straight out to the deep water.

  Izzy’s face was white with terror.

  “We have to get to the beach!” Jules shouted.

  “Put your vests on!” March ordered.

  They pulled on the vests. Straining, pushing, grunting, they found their rhythm and positioned the kayaks toward the beach.

  The two kayaks rose and fell on the swells. White caps crashed and foamed. The beach seemed impossibly far. The kayaks seemed incredibly flimsy.

  “Izzy,” Darius said, his voice a croak. He cleared his throat. “I want you to climb back here with me. I’m going to keep my arms around you. You don’t let go of my neck. You don’t let go. I’m going to keep you safe.”

  Gingerly, Izzy climbed into the rear seat with Darius while Jules reached over to steady their kayak. Izzy was trembling as she folded herself against Darius and put her arms around his neck. She faced out to sea, and her eyes suddenly widened.

  “Guys …” Izzy said.

  A wall of water was coming at them, larger than any of the swells they’d seen. Even as they watched, it gathered force and power, the top of the wave licked with white foam.

  “We’ve got to ride it in!” March shouted. “HANG ON!”

  Izzy let out a shrill scream as the kayaks lifted high, high above the surface of the ocean. The people on the beach looked as small as dolls.

  “Oh, oh, oh, NOOOOOOOOO!”

  The tremendous energy of the surf picked up the kayaks and hurtled them toward shore. Screaming, they could do nothing but hang on. March’s paddle flew into midair as the energy of the wave rushed them headlong forward. The power of it sent them rocketing into space, green water all around them.

  A few terrifying seconds later March felt the kayak scrape against the sand. He felt the suck of the tide trying to drag him out again, and he quickly scrambled out, falling in the water, stumbling, rising, falling, and dragging himself and the kayak in, Jules by his side. He wiped his eyes free of the stinging salt water.

  Izzy was lying on the sand, her hair wet, coughing, trying to get up. Darius bent over her. Murmuring, he picked her up and set her on her feet. He turned toward March, and the expression on his face made March’s heart skip a beat. He’d never seen Darius look so afraid.

  “Whoa, dude.” A young man in board shorts approached them. “That was, like, a suicide run. Awesome.” He held out a fist to bump against March’s.

  Weakly, March lifted a shaking fist. “Awesome.”

  “You don’t understand, Hamish,” Jules said. “The guy had a speargun. And he was prepared to use it.”

  “Closest escape ever,” March said. “Mostly luck we’re standing here.”

  “And the wave,” Izzy said. “It was the size of a mountain.”

  Darius said nothing. He leaned against the wall, looking out Hamish’s window.

  “The Top Cats gang wasn’t after the diamonds in Paris,” March said. “They were after the sapphire. This was no coincidence. Did you know about this?”

  “Of course not,” Hamish said. “But am I surprised? Look, young yogis, these are the most expensive sapphires in the history of gems. So if my tipster happened to tip off someone else … how was I to know? It’s just … uh, unfortunate that the most infamous gang in Europe has decided to cross the ocean at this particular time and intersect with you.”

  “Intersect?” Jules spit out. “They had a speargun!”

  “And they must have known we were there,” March said.

  “I’m guessing that they were already staking out the club,” Hamish said. “They radioed the boat and said, ‘Hey, the game is afoot. Stop those kayaks.’ ”

  “And we’ve really crossed them now,” March said. “They know we have two.”

  “Indeed. What did you throw at them anyway?”

  “One of the cheap blue zirconias you gave me,” March said.

  “Just like Alfie always said: ‘It never hurts to have a spare.’ So it’s all good,” Hamish said. He held up a hand as they opened their mouths to protest. “True, it’s more dangerous than we wanted or expected. But.” He spread out his hands. “We have two stones. Only one more to go. Do we have a choice but to go on?”

  “We always have a choice,” Jules said.

  “Who’s the next mark?” March asked.

  Hamish picked up his phone and adjusted his reading glasses. He tapped in some information, then looked over the top of his glasses at them. “Have you heard about a pop star person called Lemon?”

  “Lemon Cartelle?” Jules shook her head. “Hamish, you’d have to be living under a rock not to have heard of Lemon. Haven’t you heard ‘Devoted 2 U 4 Only 1 Nite’? Or ‘You Love Me You Know It Uh-Huh’? She’s had about five top-ten hits in a row.”

  “Jules, my young friend, you are talking to an old person,” Hamish said. “I’m still pissed that the Eagles broke up.”

  “She’s your easy mark?” March asked. “You’re crazy. She’s got to be surrounded by bodyguards and paparazzi.”

  “Ah! This is most likely true,” Hamish agreed. “But may I remind you that you just stole a gem from a much harder target? She’s just bought a condo in Brooklyn, territory you know well, and where your safe house is. I mean, the one I found for you. Cakewalk.”

  “What exactly is a cakewalk anyway?” Jules asked.

  “Duck soup,” Hamish answered.

&nb
sp; “Well, that explains it,” March said.

  Hamish leaned back, a look of astonishment on his face. “All this resistance! All of you in this room are the children of some of the best criminals ever to walk the earth. Where’s your pride?” He pointed at March and Jules. “Son and daughter of Alfie McQuin, you have the two most famous sapphires in the world in your grasp. How can you possibly turn down the third? Considering your genetic imprint?”

  “I’m not my father,” March said.

  “Of course you are! You’ve got his eyes, his hands, and his marvelous capacity for breaking and entering.” Hamish put his hands together. “We’re so close. If we tried to sell these two, we’d have the feds on us in a New Jersey minute, which is faster than New York — have you seen the way they drive? I’d have to cut them down, and then we’d just have a handful of little blue gems. Our only shot is with Ransome. So. Do this one thing. Check out the mark. If there is one iota of an insurmountable problem, then I recut the gems and hope we get enough to live for a couple of years, and hope that Zillah takes pity on us. But don’t forget — the stones want to be reunited. The sooner we do that and hand them off, the better for all of us.”

  March felt the lure. Only one heist to go. The make-or-break moment that sang in his blood.

  The stones felt heavy in his pocket. But they didn’t weigh as much as where he came from, and who he was.

  That night, they walked to the beach close to Mikki’s house. They trudged along the sand, then plopped down to watch the slow progress of an orange sun through a powder-blue sky. Streaks of pink and purple began to spread along the horizon, and the sky turned lilac.

  “Only one left,” March said. “Hamish has a point. And it’s in Brooklyn, basically our home ground. That’s a plus.”

  “So you want to do it?” Jules asked.

  “I want to go to New York and check out the mark, yeah,” March said. “We’ve got two of the most famous sapphires in the world. How can we walk away?”

  “I almost lost Izzy in that surf,” Darius said. He turned to her. “I almost lost you.”

  She put a hand on his knee. “You didn’t, though.”

  “It felt like someone wanted to wrench you from my arms,” Darius said. “This curse is serious. The whole thing feels too big.”

  Nobody spoke. The sun was blood orange now, right at the horizon line. In just seconds it would wink fire, and then be gone. The hot wind picked up, blowing sand in their faces. Maybe it would rain.

  “Okay,” Jules said with sudden briskness. “I get it. The curse is bad, Hamish could be lying, the Top Cats are scary, the feds know who we are. All bad. Plus we’re retired, and today I almost puked when I saw that wave. But we have tickets back to New York tomorrow. We’ll go, we’ll check out the mark, and we’ll take a vote there.”

  “The important thing is to stick together.” Izzy tugged on the sleeve of Darius’s T-shirt. “Right?”

  Darius dug his bare feet in the sand. He looked out at the sea. The water had turned a dark gray, stained with red.

  “I’m not going with you,” he said.

  Izzy pressed her hands against her mouth. Her brown eyes were huge, and her gaze didn’t leave Darius’s face. He didn’t look at her.

  He couldn’t look at her, March knew.

  He couldn’t look at any of them.

  “It’s just too hard to be with you right now,” Darius said.

  Jules shot March a look. Say something.

  What could he say? He couldn’t say, I’m not mad, because he still was.

  All he knew was that he felt awful. Scraped raw. Confused. Like he wanted to dig a hole in the sand and crawl into it like a turtle.

  “Look,” March started. “I think that —”

  “I messed up royally,” Darius interrupted. “Stupid like my dad. Careless like my mom. Whenever I get something good, I lose it. That’s my genetic imprint.”

  “Not so,” Izzy said, her voice soft. “You haven’t lost anything.”

  Can we review that? March wanted to say, but Jules was pressing his foot so hard he thought he might whimper.

  “You don’t trust me anymore,” Darius said to March. “Today, you kept reminding me what to do. You never used to do that.”

  “I just wanted everything to work,” March said. “The stakes were big.”

  “You didn’t rag at Jules, or Izzy.”

  “Do you want an apology?”

  Darius shook his head. “March, I don’t want anything except to go back to that day in the bank, and this time I just walk away.”

  March felt his breath catch. It was what Darius had called him. March. He never called him by his name. He called him Marcello, or Marco, or bro, or dude. In Darius’s mouth, suddenly his own name sounded terrible. Serious.

  Like a good-bye.

  “It’s just … too hard to be with you right now,” Darius continued. “All of you,” he added, with a gentle hand on Izzy’s knee. “Looking at you is painful. Knowing what I did to you.”

  “D, we don’t care,” Jules said.

  “Appreciate that, Jules, but I do.” He straightened and shook his head. “Anyway, I should stick around here. Watch over my mom. Don’t have a good feeling about what’s going on.” He held up a hand. “I know what you’re going to say, and you’re right. She was never there for me. Ever. She lies like it’s nothing. Went to jail three times, and I bounced into the system. Got beat up, got betrayed, got kicked out of school. So tell me something. Why do I feel guilty?”

  Izzy tried to smile. “Because you’re sweet as coconut pie.”

  Darius dug his bare feet deeper into the sand. “I just got to do something right, for once. So I’m staying.”

  Jules and Izzy turned to March, their eyes pleading. Like he could stop this. Like he could come up with some combination of words that would change Darius’s mind. When all March could think about was keeping them on track, getting them the funds to remake a life, recapture a dream.

  “We’ll miss you,” March said. He was going to add something about Darius coming back to them, but Izzy suddenly jumped to her feet. She took off down the beach, running fast, not looking back.

  Darius gave a sigh so deep his shoulders shuddered. He got up and walked away in the opposite direction.

  And just like that, they were broken.

  The next morning, Izzy kept her head down and leaned against Darius to say good-bye.

  “I’m so sorry, Iz,” he murmured, his head bent over her, as though he were cradling her in his body. She looked so tiny next to him. “This isn’t forever. It’s just now.”

  She nodded, her head against his arm.

  “And if you need me, I’ll come to you, no matter where you are.”

  She nodded again.

  March watched Izzy. She was folded up like a leaf. She took a deep breath, and then it was like she gathered herself together from the ground up, like a tree.

  She pulled away and smiled at Darius. She nodded again, a gesture of understanding.

  She walked out the door to Hamish’s car. He would drive to the airport and leave his car in long-term parking, then hop a different flight to New Jersey. They’d meet in Brooklyn that afternoon.

  “I’m going to worry about her no matter what,” Darius said. “You take care of her for me, both of you? She’s strong, she’s fine, but she needs to know someone is there.”

  “Absolutely,” Jules said.

  “I’m there,” March said.

  “I messed up,” Darius said. “I put us in a place that’s bad. You get us out, you hear me? You can do it.”

  March bumped fists with Darius. His throat was thick, and he couldn’t say good-bye. He didn’t know how the impossible had happened; he only knew his world had blown apart.

  He walked out into the bright sunshine, not really sure if he’d see his friend again. From everything he knew, everything he’d seen, life was like that.

  * * *

  Jules didn’t speak. She kept her he
ad turned, her face toward the window.

  He leaned closer. “That was worse than awful.”

  “Then why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I tried!”

  “We’ll miss you? That’s the best you could do?”

  “He’d already made up his mind. Besides, he wants to take care of Mikki.”

  She turned. Sometimes Jules’s gray eyes were so clear, it was like he could see right through their light into the truth. “Do you really think he would have stayed,” she said, “if he hadn’t felt so ashamed that he let you down?”

  They met Hamish in Brooklyn. He showed up in a white panel truck with SCRUMPTIOUS BAKERY: WE BAKE IT YOU EAT IT on the side.

  “One of my nephews owns it,” Hamish explained, waving at the bakery truck. “He’s an idiot, but he comes in handy. I’m taking you to his garage. That’s your safe house. But first, I thought we’d just do a drive-by of Lemon’s condo — fancy building in Williamsburg. We’ve got no time to lose. No time to be sad. The game is afoot!”

  Hamish snaked through Brooklyn traffic. Beyond the windows, street life was humming in a riot of dogs, strollers, beards, bicycles, and shops selling beeswax and handmade brooms. Every chair in the sidewalk cafés in Williamsburg was filled with young people enjoying sunshine and green tea. March had walked these streets many times, but he’d been retired. Now that he was in the game again, he was noticing things, like how the lights were timed, if there were cops on the street, what kind of locks were on the many bicycles.

  Lemon lived in a luxury building that was pretending to look like a warehouse. Hamish pulled over into an illegal space, and the gang tumbled out.

  “Doing this just seems kind of … lesser without Darius,” Izzy said.

  “I know,” Jules said.

  March did, too, but he couldn’t say it. He checked out the security as they strolled across the street. The three of them traded notes.