The Muscle

by Amy Lane

  “I’d give a lot of that shit back if we never had to see Josh here again,” he mumbled.

  “Yes, well, can’t argue that,” Danny said. “Let’s go see what’s doing.”

  FELIX AND Julia looked red-eyed and exhausted, and Danny greeted them both with a hug. While the grown-ups went off to talk grown-up stuff, Grace slipped into Josh’s room, where Josh was playing disconsolately on his tablet.

  Grace wasn’t even surprised a little bit to recognize the same floor plans Danny had given them the night before featured large on the tablet’s screen.

  “Stop,” Grace said. “I already have a plan. Don’t worry about it.”

  Josh glared at him. “You have a plan? How do I know it’s not shitty?”

  “Because if I bothered to put my mind to a plan, it needs to not be shitty,” Grace told him. Duh! He sketched the plan out quickly, and Josh blew out a breath.

  “This,” Josh said, pointing to his tablet, where he’d taken notes. “This is why you need to be at meetings. Oh my God. You said to tell you what to steal and that’s the end of it. Isn’t that what you said? Don’t be stupid.”

  “This whole conversation is stupid,” Grace muttered. “Why are we having it here?”

  “Because I have leukemia, and this is where they diagnose that bullshit,” Josh said bluntly, and Grace’s entire world exploded.

  He stared at Josh for a lost moment or two, and Josh sighed.

  “It’s very treatable,” he said quietly. “I start my first round of chemo tomorrow. If you guys keep me up-to-date, I might be able to work the gala from the back.”

  “The gala?” Grace asked, his voice cracking. On the other side of the cubicle wall, he heard Danny’s voice crack too and wondered if they were cracking over the exact same thing.

  “Yes, the gala,” Josh said. “I’m not dying! At least not in the next two weeks. We’ve worked damned hard for this. No. Fuck that. We’re proceeding as normal—”

  “This isn’t normal!” Grace stood up and waved his arms. “Why would you think this is normal! Who’s going to be Josh when Josh is sick?”

  “Josh is going to be Josh, you random freak! Sit down. Danny and Felix can run what I can’t. But dammit, I was having fun!”

  “Having fun?” Grace pirouetted midpace. “You were puking blood! How long have you been feeling like crap and trying to run this job?”

  Josh rolled his eyes. “I don’t know. A month. Whatever. My point is—”

  The last time Grace had seen fireworks behind his eyes, he’d fallen on his head while fixing a light fixture in the theater.

  “Waitaminute.”

  “What? I’m trying to say that’s a dynamite plan and—”

  “A month! And I’m the freak? Jesus fucking Christ—”

  “Grace!” Josh snapped. “If you don’t shut it down and stop screaming, they’re going to kick you out of here and….” He let out a breath, and suddenly he looked really young and really ill, and Grace wanted to cry.

  “And what?” Grace asked, minding his voice this time because Josh asked him to.

  “And I… I really wanted you here. My folks are trying not to lose their shit, and their eyebrows are at their hairlines, and I think their faces are going to crack.” Josh’s smile went crooked. “You always make me laugh. I was, you know, sort of hoping we could do that tonight, since I have to be here. You could, you know?”

  “Be me,” Grace said in surprise.

  “Well, yeah. That’s why we love you. You’re, well, you.”

  Grace sank into the uncomfortable chair and grabbed Josh’s hand. The other hand was all taken up with tubes and stuff, but this one was free.

  “If you die, I’ll never speak to you again.”

  “Even if I do,” Josh said, “there’s a lot of months in between now and then. I think I can negotiate out of that.”

  “I don’t think so,” Grace said, not having it. “I think you’d have to run a scam from heaven to get me to even open my mouth.”

  “Think that’s what ghosts are?” Josh asked curiously. “A scam from heaven?”

  Grace’s brain lit up like a pinball machine. “Yeah. So, like, when you die, in seventy years, way, way after I’ve gone out—”

  “Ha!”

  “No, no—I’m going to go out like those guys in the movie. I’m going to fly my plane upside down through a barn.”

  Josh snorted. “You won’t make it off the ground. Hunter would have to fly the plane. You could steer it upside down. Or, you know, failed bungee jump off the plane would be good.”

  Grace smiled dreamily. “I could do one successfully first, you think?”

  “No,” Josh said seriously. “Save that one for when you’re ninety.”

  “All my bones would crack. Like Rice Krispies.”

  Josh shook his head. “No,” he said. “Because we’ll have super calcium supplements, and you’ll be one of those ninety-genarians running marathons because you still can’t find your wallet, and you squirrel around the house that much in the morning anyway.”

  “Ninety-generians?” Grace couldn’t think of the word either.

  “It’s whatever comes after septa and octa—and before genarian.”

  Grace nodded and sobered. “Whatever it is, you’re going to live that long with me. Hunter is good, you know. He gets me. But you need to be there too.”

  Josh’s smile was more self-assured this time. More Josh. “I will be. But I think the next time I say stop feeding me, you guys need to not feed me.”

  Grace shuddered. “Yeah. Wasn’t pretty. Live and learn.”

  He leaned his head against Josh’s pillow, thinking about Hunter’s strength and about how Hunter had promised he’d be there in the morning. And how Grace expected him to keep that promise.

  “So that plan you came up with,” Josh said softly, “did you count on a staging area? Like a green room for bad guys? Because they’ll probably keep the infogem there.”

  “No,” he said in annoyance.

  “And how about videotaping the auction—hidden cameras not in the floorplan. You’d be responsible for placing those. Did you think of that?”

  Grace grunted. “No, no we did not. That’s why you need to get better, of course.”

  “I will,” Josh said, and ordinarily it would be such a Josh thing to say, Grace wouldn’t have doubted him at all. But maybe Grace really had grown up, and maybe knowing Hunter—who was definitely a grown-up—loved him, made Grace realize what being young sounded like. But he heard the quaver of uncertainty Josh was trying to hide and realized it was his job to make that go away.

  “I know,” Grace said, like he couldn’t possibly think of any other outcome, even though he was really good at thinking of all the bad outcomes, which was why he was so good at stealing things without being noticed.

  “But only because I have really good health insurance,” Josh grumbled, obviously tired. “I think one of our pro bono jobs needs to be conning that one politician who keeps trying to rescind healthcare into giving us universal coverage. What do you think?”

  Grace’s rabbit mind took a hop. “Could we pretend to be ghosts?”

  “I think heaven would approve,” Josh said.

  They spent half an hour planning that heist, until Josh dropped off to sleep. Grace followed soon after, because he and Josh had done this a lot growing up, planned into infinity like that.

  Apparently acting like a grown-up was just as easy as a grown-up as planning for it had been as a kid.

  DANNY TOOK them both home the next morning, Josh pale and tired because nobody really slept in hospitals, and Danny making encouraging conversation—mostly about the job, because Grace got it now that sometimes work was code for “I love you but I don’t want to talk about the real stuff now.”

  When they got back to the mansion, Josh went upstairs to his room, and Grace followed, peeling off for his own. He kicked off his shoes and crawled into bed fully clothed, not surprised when Hunter came in about
half an hour later.

  He didn’t say anything—didn’t say the C word or talk about Josh going into chemo or how hard it was going to be when they were a man down. And he didn’t ask Grace how he was doing, either.

  He just lay down behind Grace and pulled him close and murmured, “Baby.”

  That’s all. One word.

  Baby.

  And Grace cried and cried and cried.

  Baby

  HUNTER HAD to hand it to Josh Salinger. Not only did he kick ass even when on the verge of being critically ill, he didn’t let shit slide just because he was getting chemo three days a week.

  His suggestions about the staging area and recording the auction had been taken to heart, and the result was that Grace had made a couple of trips into Danny’s museum to plant audio and video bugs in some of the rooms they didn’t think the auction would be in, as well as in the places they did think it might be in.

  He was always accompanied, sometimes by Hunter, sometimes by Chuck, and once by Julia, who, judging by their feed, held his hand and talked to him about why he and Josh should go back to school and asked him if he was eating right, that he seemed a bit thin.

  Grace had allowed himself to be mothered right up until he saw something amazing in the gem room and almost ripped her arm off trying to get the two of them to check it out before they moved on to another place.

  Judging by the bemused look on Julia’s face, she was perfectly willing to humor him. That night, Danny had gotten back from work and looked at Grace with a stern expression on his face, holding out his hand.

  Grace sighed and—after a quick trip to his room—produced a gem of such amazing cerulean blue that Hunter’s heart almost stopped with its beauty. Everybody gasped and said it was stunning, and then, instead of begging to keep it, Grace handed it over, saying, “Thanks for letting me borrow it, Uncle Danny.”

  “Of course,” Danny said. And not a single change in his expression gave away that he might have wanted to strangle Grace and was barely restraining himself.

  But Hunter knew.

  Just like Danny knew it had been acting out on Grace’s part because Josh was taking to chemo like oil took to water.

  Not well.

  Two days before the gala—and five days before Grace’s show debuted, Hunter never forgot that—Felix, Danny, and Julia had a come-to-Jesus meeting in the den.

  At first Hunter thought they were going to cancel the job, but apparently the family motto of The Job Must Go On really was heart deep.

  “You can’t cancel it!” Josh said, before anyone had said anything. “It’s not fair. Grace, tell them!”

  Grace gave his friend a tortured look. “Artur is stressing,” he said reluctantly. “Apparently he has to make a delivery on opening day.”

  “Why so soon after the auction?” Felix asked.

  “Because,” Danny said thoughtfully, “whatever endgame we’ve sensed Kadjic coming to—whatever big takeover he’s got planned, he’s getting close. We knew he was picking up activity—this is just more escalation.”

  “Which is great on one hand,” Josh said. “It proves we’re right and that the gala is where they’ll be, and the timing is perfect.”

  “But it means we have to get it perfect,” Hunter said, catching on almost immediately. “Because if we fuck it up, Artur is really going to be at risk.”

  “And the drop-off is in the theater,” Grace said. “So there will be bad guys in the audience, and Artur….” He bit his lip, and Hunter felt for him. It was funny—Grace had an embarrassment of riches as far as people who cared for him were concerned, but he had only now noticed the riches, and his overwhelming emotion toward them seemed to be terror that they would go away.

  “He very much needs us to follow through,” Felix said. “We understand. We’re not talking about deserting Artur in his time of need. We’re talking about calling in reinforcements.”

  Josh groaned. “Dad. No.”

  “Dad, yes!” Felix shot back. “You can be there in the van with Stirling, only. No running around. We’re going to need Torrance there as our boots-on-the-ground backup guy.”

  “And Soderburgh,” Danny added.

  “No!” Felix and Josh both whined.

  “Yes!” Danny retorted. “For one thing, because it really does take two people to replace Josh. For another, while Torrance Grayson is a great face man and roper—”

  “He’s a reporter,” Felix said dryly.

  “Sure,” Danny agreed. “That’s what he makes money with, but we’ve both seen his news programs. He’s good at getting crowds to do what he wants. If he’s got a rundown of my itinerary, we can get him to fill in as MC. He’ll have the crowd eating out of the palm of his hand.”

  “But Danny!” Josh protested, his voice peevish.

  Danny grimaced. “You can’t play the cancer card now, Josh. Just because the young man has a crush on you, that doesn’t mean we won’t need him.”

  “But it’s so embarrassing!” Josh claimed.

  “I have no idea what you’re complaining about,” Danny told him blandly. “You’re not even losing your hair. So we need Torrance Grayson to take my spot for the masses, and we need Soderburgh to take my spot as security so I can act as backup for Grace.”

  “Cocksu—er, Soderburgh?” Felix complained.

  Danny glared at the love of his life. “First of all, while it’s unfortunate that his real last name is Cox, I think we can all agree that your little nickname for him is in poor taste.”

  “Fine.” Felix glared back. “Soderburgh.” From what Hunter understood, Soderburgh had been the name the man had first given them. It had turned out to be an alias—Carl Cox worked for an insurance company, tracking down stolen art and working security in case any of their big clients had art that was vulnerable, and aliases came in handy. But given that the alternative was Felix’s jealousy coming out in the rather crass nickname, they had all agreed that calling the guy Soderburgh was a good move.

  Everyone but poor Carl, but then, it wasn’t like the group was going to give him any choice.

  “I like Carl,” Chuck said amiably, and everyone but Danny sent him a dirty look. When they’d first encountered Soderburgh on their previous job, Hunter and Molly had almost maimed the guy to keep him from outing Danny as more than a mild-mannered museum docent.

  Everyone had been on board for the maiming except Chuck, who apparently had fond memories of the guy in bed.

  “No hanky-panky,” Felix said acidly, and Julia’s tinkle of laughter let him know what she thought of that.

  “Really, Felix? You and Danny practically sit in each other’s laps!”

  “We don’t do panky,” Chuck said. “Only hanky.”

  “What’s the difference?” Hunter asked, amused in spite of himself.

  “Well, when you got both, it means there might be dinner and breakfast. When you only got one, it means a hand job is a handshake and everybody can get on with their lives.”

  “What if it’s more than hanky-panky?” Grace asked, his eyes moving sideways to Hunter.

  Chuck gave him the tender look one might reserve for a little brother. “Then it’s a relationship, and you take it with appropriate seriousness.”

  Grace’s quick, affectionate grin made Hunter clutch his heart.

  “So, Carl is in,” Danny said. “Felix and I will call him and Torrance this afternoon—they’ll start showing up at briefings when they can make it.”

  “What makes you think they’ll want to show up?” Felix asked suspiciously, and to Hunter’s surprise, it was Julia who answered.

  “They will,” Julia said. “Didn’t you see how much they loved being involved in our last little adventure? After we tapped him for info, Torrance Grayson actually called me up, asking if we were—in his words—thinking of doing anything else exciting. I told him I’d let him know.”

  “Mom—” Josh was visibly melting into his seat. But then, Josh had been pale to the point of green for the past we
ek, so the color in his cheeks was an improvement.

  “Don’t worry, darling,” Julia said. “It wasn’t only about his little crush on you. Trust me. He really does seem to have developed a taste for the game. Of course, he’s known for his investigative journalism—and, oddly enough, for not irritating people he works with. The perfect con man.”

  “It’s settled then,” Danny said, obviously trying to move things along. “Stirling, are all the cameras working? Do we have audio?”

  “We need one more com check,” Stirling said. “I’ve spent the last two weeks outfitting the van you bought me. We can run it from there.”

  Danny nodded. “Excellent. Molly, did you make contact with Papers for your credential forgeries?”

  Even though they were working in catering, apparently even catering needed to be bonded.

  Fortunately, he and Felix had a contact for that. The elusive “Papers” was a surprisingly good-looking young man with an awkward fall of blond hair in his blue eyes and a faint stammer who painted beautiful forgeries—and even more beautiful projects of his own. He was their go-to guy for everything from forged passports to provenance, and although he moved in and out of the mansion like a ghost, he seemed to genuinely enjoy working with them.

  “Yessir.” Molly gave Stirling a sideways glance. “He seems to have a thing for my brother.”

  Stirling’s doe-soft eyes got large and luminous. “I, uhm, he’s….”

  Nobody laughed. Nobody coughed. Everybody stared at Stirling in bemusement and—if they were anything like Hunter—hope. Stirling was awkward and shy or terse and short, with no in-between. To see him perhaps opening up, talking to somebody who seemed to have a kindred spirit, well that would be good.

  “He’s a very nice young man,” Felix said softly. “He was too singular for art school, but he’s worked hard to educate himself.”

  Stirling shot Felix a grateful look, which was unusual, because Felix usually seemed to cow the poor kid. “He’s nice,” he said briefly. “He does good work.”