by Julie Kriss
“You so should,” Gwen said, a mischievous look in her eyes.
I rolled my eyes. “Jeez, Gwen.”
“Why not? Does he have a girlfriend?”
That made me blush, remembering his words: I have old-fashioned, one-handed sex. Alone. “No, he doesn’t.”
“Then what’s the problem?” She was grinning now, in her element. “Liv, you should get laid. It’s easy. Just drop your panties and get on. I promise he’ll feel properly thanked.”
She was doing this on purpose, I knew. I was the older sister, the less wild one, and she liked to watch me squirm. I also knew it was a bit of an act. As sexy as she was, Gwen didn’t sleep around. She was choosy. A guy had to jump through hoops to get anywhere with Gwen.
“I’ll think about it,” I said, shocking her back.
Her eyes went wide again. “Okay, now I have to see this guy.”
“You’re about to,” I said, glancing at the window again. “His car just pulled up. He’s coming home from work.”
She loved that, of course. We turned my lights off and she positioned herself next to the window, angled so she could see out but no one looking in could see her. I positioned myself on the other side. It was lame, and dorky, but it was funny too. Gwen and I had been apart for a few years while I’d been in art school and she’d been in acting school, but now we lived in the same city, and we saw each other often, and I had come to appreciate it. It didn’t seem to matter how different we were, how different our lives currently were. She was my sister, and in a crazy way, she totally got me.
“Holy shit,” she said when Devon came around the corner from the parking lot. “That?”
“Yep,” I said. Then I forgot about Gwen and watched him. Jeans, work boots, black zip-up jacket that hugged his body. Tousled hair. Those big hands that had felt rough and warm against mine. I remembered that he’d promised to tell me what his tattoo meant if I let him fix my car.
He headed for the stairs to the second level and climbed them. We got a beautiful three-quarter view, his body angled, his legs taking the steps, his ass in his jeans. He climbed stairs as easy as taking a breath, then strolled down the corridor toward his door, flipping his keys loosely around his finger, his mind somewhere else. I could have watched him all day. I had grown up in LA, a place full of beautiful people, and I had never seen a man like Devon. I didn’t even know his last name.
Gwen let out a breath as he closed his apartment door behind him. “Okay,” she said seriously. “If you don’t ride him, I will.”
She didn’t mean it, but it was still alarming. I didn’t think I was a bag lady by any means, but it was hard to compete with a blonde in a skimpy cowgirl outfit. “Touch him and die,” I said, deadpan.
That made her laugh. “Okay, fine. I have to get to work. Some lucky guy is getting a strip-o-gram at his retirement party.” She grabbed her keys and purse from my counter. “Seriously, Liv. That”—she gestured to the window—“is a gift. I think you should take it.”
“I don’t think he’s a nice guy,” I said, remembering what he’d said about driving and drugs and dead bodies. Like an Uber, but a fuck of a lot more shady. “He’s sort of dangerous.”
“Danger is sexy,” she said. “You’re not marrying him, or becoming his old lady, so who cares? Or, you know, you could just sit here and pine while some other smart girl gets on.”
“Right,” I said.
“Right. See you, sis.” She left, leaving the smell of her perfume behind as I sat in the dark, staring at the window. But this was Gwen, and she couldn’t leave it alone. Fifteen minutes later, I got a text.
Save a car, ride a mechanic.
I laughed, tossed my phone on the sofa, and went to the kitchen to make dinner.
Chapter 5
Devon
I thought maybe I’d see sexy-as-fuck Olivia after I fixed her car, but I didn’t. She didn’t come to my door, or bump into me strategically in the corridor. I shouldn’t have been disappointed—a woman like that should have nothing to do with me. But I was.
I wasn’t even sure what it was about her. True, Olivia was a knockout—flawless white skin, intelligent dark brown eyes, dark curls that made you think of sex, a hot body under her dowdy office clothes—but it isn’t that hard to find a good-looking woman. My boss works from a strip club, for fuck’s sake. I’m not the kind of guy who has to put his dick into every woman he sees, but if the need gets bad enough, I can usually find a woman who wants what I’m giving out. Or at least, I used to.
When I’m not subjecting myself to one-handed sex, I prefer women who like it a little bit rough. Olivia did not seem like that kind of woman.
Or maybe she was. The fact was, from the first time I saw her, I wanted to find out.
An artist. A graphic designer. Living by herself, in a place like Shady Oaks. She wasn’t a kid, either—she looked the same age as me, and I was twenty-six. So what was she doing here? Why wasn’t she married to some nice guy and having kids somewhere? Why was she in a dump like Shady Oaks, a sweet plum little target for a dirty guy like me?
I wanted to pull off her shirt, peel off her jeans, get her on a bed and spread her legs. I wanted to lick her skin, put my hands on her. I wanted to fuck her until she was screaming my name and calling me God. Then I wanted to ask her.
I’ve never claimed to be a nice guy.
But I had to put Olivia out of my mind. I had Gray’s driving job to do. The electronics store, the TV’s. The job that had something—no one knew what—to do with Craig Bastien, the drug kingpin.
At eight o’clock, I was at the rendezvous on time. So were my teammates. I’d met them all at one time or another. Danny was a black kid, about twenty, who did a lot of work for Gray. Westerberg was older, about forty-five, with prison tats on his arms and hands. Jam was new, but he was known to be an electronics wiz, the guy who could disarm an alarm or hack into a wi-fi signal. He thought he was hot shit, but so far he’d shown he had the skills to back it up.
The panel van was there, and they were all in it. The sun had sunk below the horizon, and the dark was rising. I drove the van through the shitty end of West Oakland to the electronics shop and waited. The guys went in the back door. There was quiet for a while, and then they started coming back out again, hauling TV’s. I helped them load the back. There was no sound, and we exchanged no words. When we were done loading, we all got in the van again and I started to drive.
That was when it all went to shit.
I wasn’t six blocks from the place before I heard sirens behind us. Westerberg, in the passenger seat next to me, gave a shout, and I sped up, ducking down back streets. The van needed a tune-up, and the automatic was grinding gears like it was a hundred years old, but they didn’t hire me to drive for nothing. I made it work. I kept us moving. It should have been easy.
The cops fell back, and then they were on us again, the sirens a few streets away. Any good driver would be able to project where I was going and cut us off, so I switched direction, heading for the harbor. Then I got on the freeway and stayed on it for twenty minutes, driving back past the outskirts of Oakland while the guys watched out the back window. So far I was just a few minutes ahead of them and I couldn’t lengthen my lead.
It was Jam who called it first. “We’re fucked,” he said. “We have to bail.”
He meant ditch the van, with the stolen cargo, and run.
“We’re fucked anyway,” I shouted, heading for an exit and ducking into an industrial park, abandoned and shut down for the night. “Our fingerprints are all over this thing.”
“Then we ditch the cargo first,” Westerberg interjected. “Less fallout.”
“We don’t have time to ditch them all,” Jam argued.
And then it hit me. The three old-style TV’s that were part of the haul—not flat screens, but the old square CRT kind. Clunky and heavy as fuck, and probably worth nothing. We’d put them with the others, as instructed. But suddenly I knew why.
“The
three CRT’s,” I said. “We ditch those. They’re loaded.”
“Are you kidding me?” Westerberg shouted. “How do you know that?”
“An educated guess.”
I pulled over into a weedy ditch and stopped the car. Danny was out of the van almost before it stopped moving, opening the back doors and pulling out the big old TV’s. His face was grim, all business. I jumped out of the driver’s seat and helped him. I grabbed one of the suspicious TV’s and dumped it, and when it hit the ground it broke open.
I looked down in the ditch at the answer to my questions. This was why Gray had called in a crack team for a few TV’s. This was why Craig Bastien was involved. This was why Gray was scared. Why he’d hired me to drive.
White pills spilled out of the TV case and down into the grass. I wasn’t about to take one, but my best guess was Oxy. Thousands of them. Three TV’s full. On the street, this haul was probably worth twenty grand.
Fuck.
We dumped the Oxy TV’s, then we got back in the van and drove again. It was starting to rain, which was good. The cops would be slowed down a little. The spilled pills might start to wash away. I took us deeper into the industrial park, down another side road and another, never pausing, never stopping. I knew exactly where we were. We passed the airport, and finally I got us on the San Mateo Bridge, back across the bay and up toward San Francisco again.
Finally I pulled into the parking lot of a closed-up diner and stopped the car. “Everybody out,” I said as sirens sounded in the distance. “Ride’s over.”
We ran.
We each took a different direction. The sirens were closer now, closer. I ducked behind a closed strip mall and onto the disused train tracks, following them through the trees. Back toward Shady Oaks.
Because, in the darkness after the worst job of my life, I had nowhere else to go.
Chapter 6
Olivia
I was deep in the zone, sitting at my sketchbook doing a drawing, when the knock came at my door. It was late—at least eleven. Nothing good ever came from a late-night knock at the door.
I checked the peephole and saw a man I didn’t recognize. “Police, ma’am,” he said when he heard me on the other side of the door. He held up a badge to the glass.
Devon, I thought.
I pulled my zip-up sweatshirt tightly around myself and opened the door. “Yes?”
“You seen your neighbor tonight?” he asked, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “Across the way.”
He was gesturing to Devon’s apartment. The light was on in Devon’s window, and as I watched, the door opened and a uniformed cop came out. They were inside his place—the cops were inside Devon’s apartment.
For a second, I ran through all of the things crime TV had taught me over the years. Could they do that? Didn’t that require a warrant? What had Devon done that got the cops a warrant?
I looked back to the cop to see him watching my shocked reaction. He looked bored. He’d probably seen a lot of dumbass civilians with the expression I wore on my face right now.
“Your neighbor,” he prompted. “You know him?”
I shook my head, my face numb. “No.” That wasn’t entirely true, and I didn’t want to lie to a cop, so I added, “I’ve seen him around, in the corridors, the parking lot. That’s all.”
The cop nodded. “You seen him tonight?”
“Tonight? No.” God, I felt like I was lying. Why did I feel like I was lying when I wasn’t?
“Today?” the cop prompted.
“What did he do?” I blurted.
He barely bothered to acknowledge this. “Today?” he asked me again.
“Um.” I thought about it. “This morning. When he was leaving for work.” When I was standing at my window, watching him leave and wondering whether I should talk to him.
“Mm-hmm.” The cop pulled out a notebook and flipped a page. “How did you know he was going to work?”
“What?” Oh, God, he was right. If I didn’t know Devon, I didn’t know he had a job. Then again, maybe he hadn’t been leaving for work—I had no way of knowing. “It was just that it was eight o’clock in the morning, and I was going to work myself, so I guess I just assumed.”
“Huh,” the cop said, still looking down at his notebook. I wondered for a crazy minute if it was a prop. “And not since?”
“N—no.”
“He ever talk to you?”
Lie, Olivia, lie. Just do it. “No.”
“He have friends in the building that you know of?”
“No.” I’d never seen him talk to anyone except me. “I don’t think so. No.”
“Uh huh. And how long have you lived here?”
“Um.” If I wanted to sound stupid, I was doing a convincing job. “Two months.”
He nodded, glanced at me, then down at his notebook again. “You ever go to Pure Gold?” he asked.
My jaw dropped open. I passed the place every day—it was half a mile up the street. “The strip club?”
“Sorry, I have to ask,” he said, breaking the shell of his boredom for a minute. “Some of the girls in this complex work there.” He eyed me up and down—jeans, t-shirt, zip-up sweatshirt, no makeup, hair down—and looked at his notebook again. “I need to know if you’re one of them.”
A stripper? Was he asking me if I was a stripper? Well, strippers wore jeans and sweatshirts sometimes. Still, I’d never been asked that question in my life. “No,” I said. “I’m not a stripper. I work at Gratchen Advertising.”
What the hell did Devon have to do with the Pure Gold strip club? I felt like an idiot, a sheltered child. I’d had a crush on him, but the cops were at his place and he had something to do with strippers. Devon wasn’t some sweet harmless boy in a boy band. He’d never pretended to be one, either—he’d warned me almost from the minute I got in his car.
The cop seemed satisfied. He took down my information, then let me go and moved to the next door.
I stood for a long minute behind my closed door, my mind spinning. What the hell had Devon done? And where was he?
I should be angry. I should dismiss him from my thoughts, from my life, and get back to work. I didn’t need to have anything to do with a criminal. That wasn’t me.
I walked back to my sketchbook, but I couldn’t sit down. I couldn’t even stay still. I paced around the apartment, scraping my thumbnail over my lip, thinking. Damn it, I was worried about him. I didn’t have a phone number to warn him that the cops were at his place. If he came home, he’d walk right into it.
Which he probably deserved, because he was a criminal. I shouldn’t care about this. I really shouldn’t.
I couldn’t be inside anymore, pacing and staring at the walls. I grabbed a beer from the fridge and left, walking down a side set of stairs to the patio.
When Shady Oaks was built decades ago, the patio was probably imagined as a fun place for parties spilling over from the pool. Now the pool was dry and empty, and next to it the patio was dark and cold. No one ever used it, which made it a good place to be alone.
I sat on the hard fence that surrounded the patio, sipping my beer and looking out past the gravel parking lot to the tired straggle of trees beyond. This was a wakeup call—it was time to forget Devon. If he didn’t walk into the trap that was his apartment, it was only a matter of time before the police tracked him down. He wouldn’t escape, unless…
My stomach clenched. Maybe the police were here because something had happened, and Devon was dead. I took a breath. Either way, it was over. I had to get used to it. One way or another, Devon was gone. I took another swig of beer, forcing my brain to stay on the thought until I got used to it.
There was a shadow in the trees.
I put down my beer and stared at it.
It emerged silently into a silhouette. One I recognized right away. Devon was on foot, crossing the scraggly field in the dark, coming toward the parking lot.
I darted a look behind me to make sure I was alone, then
without thinking I stood. I needed to get his attention, warn him away. What should I do? Wave my arms? Would the cops see?
But I didn’t need to do anything. Halfway across the field, Devon stopped. Just as I’d seen him, he’d seen me. I couldn’t see his face in the shadows, but I knew he was looking at me, silhouetted against the lights from the building behind me.
Think fast, Olivia. I shook my head, trying to tell him there was danger. Then I pointed above me to the fire escape.
Devon started to move again, quicker this time. He knew the layout of Shady Oaks as well as I did—which meant he knew that if he climbed the fire escape, out of sight of his own apartment and the cops inside, he’d end up a few feet from my kitchen window.
I left the patio, hurried up the stairs, and headed down the open corridor to my door. I passed the cop I’d talked to, going the other way, and this time my heart barely even sped up. I lifted my beer bottle. “Just taking some air,” I said to him casually, then opened my door and went inside, locking the door behind me.
I went straight to the kitchen and tugged on the window, pushing it up. The night air blew in, cold and damp, making me shiver through my sweatshirt. There was nothing for a minute except silence. Then a big hand gripped my windowsill, a shadow moved outside, a long pair of legs swung over, and in one flawless motion Devon was standing in my dark kitchen.
Chapter 7
Olivia
I still couldn’t see his face, since I hadn’t turned on the light, but I heard him breathe. “What the fuck is going on?” he whispered.
“There are cops at your place,” I said.
He swore, a string of words so foul I gaped at him, and brushed past me, so close I could feel the icy damp on his jacket and smell the faint, sweet tang of his sweat. He moved to my front window and looked out, angled exactly the same way my sister Gwen had been angled yesterday when we’d watched him come home.
“Fuck,” he said again when he saw the cops. “I thought I’d have more time. Did they talk to you?”
