Three blocks away in a valet parking lot, Joaquin crouched next to Leif behind one of the city’s ubiquitous black SUVs, and watched Davon crawl through a sea of vehicles. At school on Friday, Margo had stuck a GPS transponder inside the wheel well of Valentina’s prize BMW, and the three boys had followed the signal all the way to where the gleaming white convertible now sat in the midst of a carefully calculated gridlock.
“Think he’ll be able to get inside?” Joaquin asked, smoothing out his acid-green wig. Axel had actually helped him do his makeup that evening; they hadn’t really talked much, but it had been a significant gesture.
Leif smirked. He’d done his “silent screen” look again—Garbo eyebrows, heart-shaped lips, violet wig in precise finger waves. “Dior Galore can get into anything.”
Joaquin watched as Davon eased up behind the BMW, shrugging off his pack. “Think we’ll fit?”
“It’ll be tight, but we’ll make it work.”
“That’s what he said,” Joaquin returned, and immediately his face swam with heat. What was wrong with him? Only Leif appeared delighted by the ribald quip.
“That’s what who said?” The boy asked playfully, nudging Joaquin with his elbow.
“Wouldn’t you like to know.” He nudged back.
“Maybe I would.” Leif gave him a sly, flirtatious smile—and even though the exchange was totally corny, pressure built immediately in Joaquin’s groin, and the tape between his legs started to pull. Tucking was the most awkward part of drag—strapping down his most sensitive parts with strips of sports adhesive—and Leif’s suggestive tone was inciting his dick to stage a full revolt against its imprisonment.
The problem was, he couldn’t tell if they were actually flirting, or if Leif was just being Leif. The boy was so beautiful, he was probably used to flirting—and their first encounter at the villa had been a disaster. Struggling to make a good impression, Joaquin had been humiliated when Axel introduced him as his “baby brother,” and then scolded him out of the room like a toddler trying to stay up past his bedtime.
Davon’s hand emerged from the sea of chrome and metal, flashing the signal they’d been waiting for, and both boys crept out from their hiding place. The trunk of the BMW was open, and aside from a tire iron and a refillable water bottle, it was empty. Definitely big enough for one … but for two?
“Okay.” Joaquin took a stilted breath. “This is going to be … intimate.”
“I call big spoon!” Quickly, Leif folded himself into the cramped space, curling onto his side to leave room for Joaquin. Peering up with guileless blue eyes, he asked, “Are you coming or what?”
Swallowing hard, Joaquin climbed into the trunk after him. He was used to close confines, of course—but not sharing them. And certainly not sharing them with someone like Leif. His back was squeezed up tight to Leif’s front, the boy’s hips pressing kind of noticeably against his ass, and he swallowed again.
Davon nestled two utility packs into the narrow bit of remaining space, and lowered the trunk lid, immersing them in darkness; and then, immediately, Leif slung his arm around Joaquin. Like they were cuddling. And then Leif tucked his nose into the nape of Joaquin’s neck, and goose bumps swept up the younger boy’s back and across his shoulders. Making a strange noise, Leif murmured, “Okay, are you wearing cologne, or is that just a really good body wash?”
“Body wash,” Joaquin squeaked, scarcely able to breathe.
“I like it.” The boy’s breath was warm against his skin, lips tickling the rim of Joaquin’s ear.
He was going to need much stronger tape.
* * *
Leaving the way he’d come, Davon climbed back into the van he’d boosted for the night’s work. It was a decade-old Nissan belonging to a flower delivery service, but all identifying characteristics had been painted over in a quick but thorough afternoon, and the plates had been swapped. The police weren’t going to stress out over this particular auto theft, and as long as he drove carefully, it was unlikely he’d encounter any problems.
With Mendelssohn playing on the radio, he guided the van down mostly residential avenues all the way from Hollywood to Malibu—a feat requiring the patience of a saint—where he picked up Margo and Axel; from there, the trio made the meandering climb to the summit of Topanga Canyon, one thousand feet above sea level. Just off the coiling switchback that marked the crest, where the road descended into the Valley, a short driveway led to the parking area of a scenic overlook.
The viewpoint was technically closed after sunset, and Davon tried not to feel too guilty about breaking the law as he guided the vehicle all the way to the back of the lot, swinging into a space that was partially screened by trees before killing the engine. They had a contingency plan in the event that the van was discovered, but patrol cars only made occasional sweeps, so the risk of a tow was minimal.
“What’s the story on Valentina’s Beemer?” Margo asked when they were all huddled together under the vault of the night sky. Behind her, the Valley spread out for miles, a sea of winking lights that touched the foothills of the distant Santa Susanas; while to the right, beyond the boundary of the parking lot, there loomed a tumult of wild brush and spindly trees, choked with darkness.
Davon checked his receiver, the signal from Margo’s tracking device still submitting loud and clear. “Miss Petrenko is headed home, right on schedule. T minus … maybe forty-five minutes?”
“Let’s be in place when she gets there, okay?” Pulling up the hood of her black nylon catsuit, Margo tucked her platinum wig out of sight, and then slipped on her night vision glasses. When Davon activated his own, the Valley flared up like high noon, while the sedge and manzanita cloaking the hillside glowed an otherworldly green. Margo looked from one of them to the other. “We ready?”
“We’re ready,” Axel promised, tightening the straps on his pack. Whatever bad blood had been between the two of them before, it had been exorcised. That familiar energy surged between them all, a shared heartbeat, and Davon grinned.
“Then damn the torpedoes,” Margo said, and the three of them slipped into the underbrush, the Nissan’s engine ticking a countdown behind them as it cooled.
* * *
“Okay, now you’re just fucking with me.” Leif struggled to suppress his laughter as the BMW accelerated around a tight bend in the road. It was hot as hell in the trunk, and after hours of telling stories and knock-knock jokes, he and Joaquin had gotten slap-happy. Leif had proposed a game of truth or dare, but since there was no way to execute much in the way of dares, they were now just playing … truth. “There’s no way your favorite childhood movie was Spice World.”
“It was, I’m serious!” Joaquin giggled. “I found it on TV when I was, like, eight, and laughed my ass off. I had no idea what was going on in it. I thought they were superheroes!”
“That explains a lot, actually.” Grinning, Leif slipped his hand down a little and tickled Joaquin’s stomach. About an hour earlier, he’d figured out that the boy was extremely ticklish, and that he made this kind of adorable squeaking noise when you got one of his sensitive spots—which seemed to be pretty much everywhere.
“Stop it!” Joaquin gasped out between fits of his silent, squeaky laugh. “Stop, you ass!” Finally, giggling, Leif relented. “Anyway, I answered your stupid question, so it’s my turn now. Truth or truth?”
“I believe I shall go with truth.”
Joaquin hesitated for just a second. “What did you think the first time you saw me?”
“What did I think?” Leif fumbled a little. He’d been expecting something deliberately provocative. How big is your dick? or How often do you jerk off? The sort of questions he’d be asking if Joaquin were anybody else—if he were not, for some reason, inexplicably insecure about pushing those particular limits.
For a moment, Leif flashed back to that afternoon at the villa, when Margo had invited him to Malibu to meet Axel and Davon. He remembered the crumbling fountains, the dusty hallways, and
the pool filled with murky, toad-green water. And he remembered a boy lying out in the sun when they reached the back deck, with golden brown skin and long, dark eyelashes.
He remembered trying to be unobtrusive while the two brothers argued about who had a right to use the deck and who was being immature, and then peeking at Joaquin as he stormed away because Leif kind of wanted to see what his butt looked like.
“I thought…” Leif licked his lips, grateful Joaquin couldn’t see his face. “I thought your butt was cute.”
“Wait—what?”
Breezily, Leif continued, “Okay, my turn! Truth or truth?”
“Wait—no, wait!” Joaquin squirmed a little in the dark, like he was trying to turn around. “You were looking at my ass?”
“You already asked a question,” Leif said primly. “Two is cheating.”
He started tickling him again, and the stuffy trunk filled with the sound of Joaquin’s squeaking laughter and desperate protests—until, all of a sudden, the car began to slow and both boys went silent immediately. The BMW made a turn, pebbles crunching beneath its tires, and then began a steep climb. One turn later, the vehicle stopped, and Leif heard muffled voices outside.
The BMW jumped forward again, the grade quickly leveling out as they made a wide sweep before gradually coming back to a stop. The purr of the engine died, the vibration that had lulled them for nearly two hours vanishing. There came the mechanized rumbling of garage mechanics, a shifting of weight, and the rocking thump of a car door slamming shut, and then the faint sound of footsteps—and then nothing.
The nothing extended, the vehicle remaining quiet, suspended in time; Leif took soft, shallow breaths, straining his ears against the silence, and they waited. Three minutes became five, eight, ten, and finally Joaquin pulled the trunk release. The faint thunk sounded like a tree falling through a six-story greenhouse as the lid eased up a few inches, revealing the gloomy bounds of what they knew to be a darkened four-car garage.
A four-car garage that was connected directly to the castle by a breezeway, which Valentina was routinely careless about securing.
Leif and Joaquin slipped out of the BMW’s trunk. Slinging their packs over their shoulders, they crept to the inner door, and into the brightly lit corridor that would lead them to the heart of Arkady Petrenko’s heavily fortified compound.
* * *
The rugged hillsides that dropped into Topanga Canyon were crisscrossed with old horse trails, many of which had been gradually consumed by a gluttonous Mother Nature. Margo would find a section that went for ten or fifteen feet before dead-ending in a clot of milkweed or sagebrush, and then pick her way through the undergrowth for a while until stumbling onto the next remnant of cleared pathway.
It made the going slow, but she knew her bearings, having thoroughly studied the route while strategizing the infiltration of Castle Petrenko. The mining magnate’s property was astonishing in size, the acreage encompassing tennis courts, a guest cottage, a band shell, and a paddock for Valentina’s prize Clydesdale, Krasavitsa. There were only three ways in or out, and since the team didn’t have a helicopter, it left them with the front gate—a steel-reinforced barrier manned twenty-four-seven by armed guards—or the rear one.
The still-usable portion of the horse trail wended along the back side of the canyon in a closed loop. It was accessible from Petrenko’s estate by a single point in the perimeter wall that enclosed the grounds, where a radio-controlled iron gate also stood under guard at all times. Nonetheless, it was the most advantageous point of attack, and when Margo at last led the boys out of the dense chaparral, she signaled to them to proceed with caution.
A ribbon of pale earth snaking over the hillside, the trail sloped up to the right, where it curved behind a screen of bushes and disappeared. At the top of the ridge, just visible through the trees, Margo could make out the angular crenellations of Petrenko’s outer wall. Adrenaline beginning to flow, she started up the slope with the boys behind her.
* * *
Three stories of ochre stone and countless windows, Petrenko’s home was a slice of Elizabethan England in the middle of Southern California. No expense had been spared in outfitting the castle with the latest in modern conveniences—and, with thick carpeting and damask drapes, ornate balusters and carved panel ceilings, the place was designed to impress inside and out.
It was late enough that Arkady and his wife, Olga, would be in bed—at least, according to his usual bedtime as recounted to a reporter from Time magazine the previous year—but Joaquin still crept as silently as possible, following Leif out of the breezeway and into a dimly lit vestibule at the back of the estate. Even if her parents were asleep, Valentina was awake—and in addition to home security personnel, each member of the Petrenko family had a full-time bodyguard.
All was quiet, though, as the two boys eased along a claustrophobic hallway and down a short flight of stairs to the basement—where, along with the kitchen, pantry, and laundry facilities, sat the main guardroom. Located at the back of a dead-end hallway, it was the nerve center of Petrenko’s security system, connected to nearly every alarm and camera on the property—except, unfortunately, for the turret display room and front gate.
When the boys reached the head of the corridor, a ceiling-mounted surveillance camera blinked a bright red warning from its opposite end, and they ducked back out of sight. From a zippered pouch in his utility kit, Leif produced a small metal fob with a telescoping antenna—a directional signal jammer courtesy of Margo’s tech wizard, capable of disrupting radio and video output for brief intervals.
From his own pack, Joaquin withdrew a metal gas canister and a coiled length of narrow-gauge surgical tubing. Looping the rubber hose around his shoulder, he nodded to indicate that he was ready. Then, reaching out from their hiding spot, Leif angled the fob upward and activated the switch.
A shrill whine sounded, and Joaquin leaped into action, sprinting down the hallway. Ducking under the camera, he slipped into its blind spot just as Leif deactivated the jammer. Only two seconds had passed, but Joaquin waited on tenterhooks for several long moments to see if the guard inside the room would investigate the brief glitch. The boy was already fitting the surgical tubing tightly around the nozzle of the gas canister, but the heavy metal object would make a convenient weapon if necessary.
But the moments passed, and all Joaquin heard from inside the room was the faint murmur of a television set—no sounds of alarm. Dropping to the ground, he squeezed the open end of the flexible rubber hose through the crack beneath the door, and then cranked open the canister’s valve.
Odorless, colorless, and fast-acting, the anesthetic gas that Margo and Axel had stolen from the animal hospital was concentrated enough to put the average adult human under within minutes; unsure of the room’s dimensions, Joaquin waited awhile before twisting the valve shut again. Then, cautiously, he rapped at the door.
There was no answer. Slipping a rebreathing mask out of his pack—a respirator, equipped with a fifteen-minute supply of clean oxygen—Joaquin secured it in place; next came a mechanized picklock, which had the door open in less than a minute; and then the boy kicked his way into the room, fists up, in case the guard was still awake and this was about to be a fight.
Inside, an elaborate console spread beneath a bank of monitors that offered a black-and-white perspective on every corner of Petrenko’s personal fiefdom. The lone guard sagged limply in his ergonomic swivel chair, down for the count, a full mug of coffee steaming in front of him. Stepping back, Joaquin removed his mask just long enough to report into his comm. “Guardroom secure.”
“Thanks,” Leif said a few minutes later, as they were trussing the guard with zip ties. “I’ve got it from here, if you want to head upstairs.” With a nod, Joaquin gathered up his things. Just as he made to stand, though, the other boy put a hand on his arm. “I’ll do my best to watch your back, but … be careful?”
If it had come from anyone else, Joaquin would have b
een annoyed; but coming from Leif—he felt something warm spread through his chest. “I promise.”
Slipping out the door again, he waved once to the camera before heading back for the stairs leading up into the house.
* * *
The trail rose sharply, leveling off where it met the Petrenkos’ back gate, but the skulking trio stopped short of that final slope—well out of any potential sight lines. The night was alive with the chirr of crickets and the rustle of what Axel sincerely hoped were neither rattlesnakes nor coyotes—because while Margo and Davon waited patiently on the cleared pathway, he was crawling through the brush like prey.
The edge of the trailhead was bordered by mountain lilac and Indian paintbrush, clustered on the steep incline, and they provided excellent cover for Axel to position himself directly across from the gate. He could see lights on the property through the bars, could hear faint music from the guard post. The air smelled of resin and earth, and he really, really hoped that rustling sound wasn’t a snake.
It would serve him right to get bitten to death by some legless reptile after all his sanctimonious lectures to Quino about the dangers of security guards and cops with a thing against million-dollar jewel thieves, no matter how noble their reasons. Sliding his pack off his shoulders, readying himself for when the signal came, he tried not to think about what his little brother was doing just then. The kid had possibly the riskiest job of them all, and if he got caught …
Axel wasn’t going to think about it.
* * *
Death Prefers Blondes Page 14
