by Cindy Dees
Her eyes narrowed vindictively. “Good.”
Ashe’s smile widened. “Remind me never to make you mad. Hell hath no fury like a ticked-off female.”
“I think that’s supposed to be no fury like a woman scorned,” she corrected him.
“Yup.” He sighed. “I’m drunk.”
Smiling, she guided him to the French Quarter and hailed them a cab. Ashe was alert enough to watch carefully out the back window and declare them not followed before she finally gave the driver Bastien’s home address.
The cop was working all night again, so she poured a bunch of water down Ashe, got him to gulp down some preemptive ibuprofen for tomorrow morning’s headache, stripped him out of his suit coat and shoes, and let him collapse across their bed. She barely managed to get the covers pulled down before he crashed. He was unconscious by the time his head hit the pillow.
She covered him and crawled in beside him, cuddling up against his big, relaxed body. She bunched up a pillow to make herself comfortable and then settled next to him with a sigh of contentment. She could really get used to sleeping with him like this. Even passed out cold, he still made her feel safe and protected. He was a good man. Better than she deserved.
A sense of creeping foreboding intruded upon her contentment, and no amount of ignoring it made the feeling go away. Her fretful thoughts turned to tomorrow night’s heist, and any remaining sense of peace was destroyed. She lay next to Ashe for long hours, counting his gentle snores and wondering darkly how many more times she would get to lie beside him like this before her deception was exposed.
Max, what have you gotten mixed up in? More to the point, what had her brother dragged them all into?
Ashe’s shoulder shifted beneath her ear almost as if he’d heard her thought and was reacting to it. Truth be told, she and not her brother had been the one to drag the government operative into this whole mess. And she had no doubt she was going to live to regret that decision.
If she knew what was good for her—and good for Ashe—she would break off this relationship with him first thing in the morning. She would thank him for his help and invite him to get on with his regularly scheduled life. Somewhere else. Although the idea of never seeing him again caused physical pain in her stomach, she resolved to be strong and end things between them. Tonight, though, she would enjoy feeling safe one last time.
* * *
But she woke up the next morning to discover that her resolve had evaporated. When her eyes opened and she stirred, he woke immediately and smiled down at her. Not just any smile, either. It was hot enough to curl her toes and sweet enough to melt her heart. She would never find another man like him. What was she thinking to contemplate breaking up with him? She was riding this train all the way to the end of the rails.
Sadly, she knew the ride of their relationship couldn’t last forever. When he found out how much she’d been withholding from him, that would be it for them. But she was as trapped in her course as he was in his.
Maybe it was the realization of impending doom that gave their lovemaking such a bittersweet quality that morning. She actually felt tears tracking down her cheeks when they both fell back to the mattress panting. How on earth was she going to give him up when the time came?
“Are you okay, sweetheart?” he asked in concern, using the pads of his thumbs to wipe away her tears.
“Oh, uhh, yes. Fine. I’m just happy to be with you. It’s all a little overwhelming how fast things are moving between us.”
He tucked her close against his side while she silently kicked herself for letting a chance to come clean with him slip away.
Ashe left immediately after breakfast, murmuring something about needing to go over to the naval air station to pick up a few supplies.
Hank made her own preparations for tonight’s caper, walking through her part of the plan over and over in her mind. She tried to envision every single thing that could go wrong and how she would respond if it did. Odds were the only thing she hadn’t thought of would be the one to go wrong, but her father had always said that mental preparation was the key to success in any endeavor.
Ashe was gone a long time. When he returned, he was all business and spent nearly an hour teaching her how to use the electronic number descrambler that would be critical to breaking into Vitaly’s safe. She still couldn’t believe they were going through with this madness.
“Ashe, I have to try one more time to talk you out of this robbery. It’s a bad idea.”
He grinned rakishly at her. “Honey, bad ideas are my middle name.”
“I’m serious. It’s too dangerous. One of us could get hurt or killed.”
“Only if we get caught. And we’re not going to get caught.”
“Speak for yourself,” she grumbled under her breath. “My middle name is Klutzy. If there’s a way to screw this up, I guarantee I’ll find a way to do it.”
He chuckled at that. “Hence the careful preparation now.”
It wouldn’t be enough. Nothing was enough to overcome her natural tendency to mess things up. Ashe just didn’t know her or her history well enough to understand that.
The afternoon passed all too quickly. Her misgivings mounted with every passing minute. Long before she was ready, Bastien and Ashe sat down with her at the kitchen table for one last walk-though of the heist. And then it was time for her to dress in her usual sleazy attire.
Had some cosmic force sped up the passage of time? It seemed as if it had been only the blink of an eye, and she was crawling out the back of the van a few blocks from the club. A giant lump of lead lodged in her stomach, and foreboding weighed heavy on her mind. She had a bad feeling about tonight’s subterfuge.
As the club filled with patrons and the alcohol flowed, her apprehension continued to climb. It attempted to claw its way out of the back of her throat with sharp talons embedded in her flesh.
The plan was to wait until the bar was at maximum capacity and maximum drunkenness, a little after midnight. It would be late enough for the diversion they had formulated to work and early enough to give them a few hours to get away before Vitaly discovered the theft.
In theory.
The clock over the bar raced toward the witching hour, and then...well, before she was mentally prepared to become a safecracker, it was time.
Bastien, who’d been drinking and socializing randomly for a couple of hours, caught her eye and requested a round of rum and diet colas for two big tables of patrons. The signal.
She ordered the drinks and told the bartender to go light on ice. The harried guy merely nodded and moved away to mix the order. When her tray was filled with the drinks and the bartender had turned away to respond to someone yelling for him at the other end of the bar, she unobtrusively slipped into the storeroom and opened the small soft-sided cooler hidden in her purse. Into each drink, she dropped one of the special ice cubes Bastien had prepared last night. Several Mentos candies were frozen into each cube.
When the cubes melted and the Mentos mixed with the diet cola, the drinks should commence exploding all over the patrons. With an assist from Bastien, the idea was to initiate a massive brawl that would spill over into the lap dance lounge. If all went well, Vitaly would be forced to dive in and help break up the fray. Which would be Hank’s cue to slip into his office and crack his safe.
Easy-peasy. Except a million things could go wrong. The drinks could fail to fizz. A fight might not break out. Vitaly could refuse to get involved. For all she knew, her boss had already discovered the little radio transmitter hidden in his office. He could be lying in wait to catch whoever was targeting him.
However, if everything was going according to plan, Ashe was messing with the wireless security camera feeds to Vitaly’s laptop right about now. The idea was to make the pictures flicker in and out for a few minutes before Ashe finally cut off the feeds entirely, using the radio transmitter she’d planted in the office yesterday to block the signals.
Hank moved to the s
toreroom door and peeked out. There. Vitaly was just heading into his office. Her gaze swung to her right. The bartender was turning away from her, moving down the bar in response to someone yelling for a drink. Now. The coast was clear. She slipped outside, tray of doctored drinks in hand.
Now to wait for the next dancer to start before she delivered the drinks. The idea was for the ice cubes to melt into relatively full glasses of cola. The new girl, who did look extremely young, started to dance to hoots and whistles. Perfect. The patrons were completely distracted and not drinking.
Hank set the drinks down on the table in front of the very boisterous and particularly drunk crew that Bastien had hooked up with. He’d chosen well. This bunch had just reached that belligerent level of drunk where they were all spoiling for a fight and pretty sure they were invincible. She backed away from the table and turned to take another drink order as a patron grabbed her elbow.
She figured she had five minutes before all hell broke loose. Ashe should be upping the intensity of the signal problems from the wireless security cameras by now. She served a few more tables and did her best to act nonchalant while the dancer gyrated, the ice cubes melted, and Bastien stirred up controversy between his two tables of drunks over which college football team was the best in the South this year.
She had to smile to herself. He’d chosen his topic well. In this part of the world, football was serious business. Insulting someone else’s team was fighting words in this town.
Bastien had the tables of drunks nearly in a row even before the drinks started to explode. There had been quite a bit of discussion between Ashe and Bastien last night on how to suspend the Mentos identically inside each ice cube so the drinks all went crazy at approximately the same time.
Whatever Bastien had eventually done worked, because within about ten seconds of each other, a half dozen drinks erupted, spewing soda everywhere. It was an easy misdirect for Bastien to roar something about the other guys having thrown their drinks on him and his buddies, and the fight was on.
More drinks exploded in quick succession, adding gasoline to the fire of the evolving brawl. The result was the entire first table jumping the entire second table.
A last few drinks exploded just to add to the general confusion. Drunks at the surrounding tables took umbrage at getting sprayed with sticky soda and seemed happy to use it as an excuse to jump into the fracas. In a matter of seconds, what seemed like the entire bar was a madhouse.
When Vitaly didn’t immediately emerge from his office, Hank opened his door without knocking and said urgently, “All hell’s breaking loose out here.”
Her boss, who’d been frowning hard at his laptop, surged up from his desk, swearing, and shoved past her.
Something—a beer bottle, she thought—sailed past her head and slammed into the wall. She ducked and slipped into Vitaly’s office and closing the door, using her hip to shut the door and making sure not to touch the knob.
She yanked on a pair of latex surgical gloves and then locked the door. Ashe doubted that Vitaly would call the police to report the theft, but he might know how to collect fingerprints and run them on his own. Hence the gloves. No sense making it easy for her boss to figure out who’d robbed him.
“I’m in,” she whispered.
Her earbud came alive instantly. Ashe’s deep voice murmured, “Hey, hot stuff. Do you have the descrambler I gave you?”
“Yes.” She moved over to the cabinet and opened it to reveal the safe. Following his directions and using tiny magnets embedded in its case, she stuck the electronic device to the front of the safe beside the numeric keypad. Red numbers began to flutter across the descrambler’s face.
“This should only take a minute or two, since we already have most of the combination,” Ashe reassured her.
Hank started counting, and it had never taken so long to get to sixty in her life. A particularly loud shout went up outside the office at about forty seconds, and she muttered, “Can we hurry this up?”
“Sorry. The device is having to test every single number between one and ten thousand in combination with the other digits we already have.”
Too nervous to be still, Hank moved around behind Vitaly’s desk. “Ashe, can you let the security cameras run again?”
“Sure. In fact, that’s a good idea. Just a sec. How’s that?”
On Vitaly’s laptop, a video feed flickered into existence. It showed a view of the main bar from one of his security cameras. The brawl appeared to be in full swing and showing no signs of slowing down.
She reported under her breath, “The fight’s still going strong. We’ve still got a couple of minutes.”
“Great. Lemme turn off that feed, then. No sense giving Vitaly too much video footage to be able to analyze.”
Relieved, she started to step away from the computer. But then she froze. Vitaly’s cell phone was lying right in front of her on the desk. “Ashe, Vitaly’s phone is here. Is there a way for me to download its contents to you?”
“With the right equipment, sure.”
“Do we have that equipment here in the club?”
“No. I have the gear here in the van, but that won’t help you now.”
“Can I email files from it to you?”
“No!” Ashe bit out sharply. “Not only are files likely to be encrypted—assuming you could even get past the phone’s security code in the first place—but you would leave behind a record of who you had sent the files to and which files you had sent. Vitaly would get wise to us in a second.”
“Rats,” she replied. “Getting into his phone would be the mother lode of information on whoever he’s working for.”
“Eyes on the prize, baby. We take the money, draw out his boss, then track the boss to your brother.”
Ashe was right. But the phone was sitting right there. She’d been angling for weeks to get a look at that phone. And it was on the desk, in plain sight, taunting her with its closeness. She made a quick decision.
“Change of plans. I’m taking the phone. I’ll bring it out to the van when I dump the money with you. You can copy the data off the phone, and then I’ll bring the phone back.”
“No, Hank. Stay on task. We’re cracking the safe.”
Something big, like a body, slammed into the door. She lurched in alarm. “You don’t understand,” she whispered urgently. “All his finances are on this phone. It’s the key to the whole operation behind the Who Do Voodoo.”
“Hank—” Ashe said in warning.
“Save it. I’m doing this, and you can’t talk me out of it. Besides, the thingy on the safe just beeped.”
To the sounds of Ashe swearing in her ear, she raced over to the safe. “Hush, Ashe. You’re distracting me.”
With a last curse of frustration, he clammed up. Stony silence filled her earbud. Tough. She knew what she was doing by taking that phone. Quickly she followed the steps he’d taught her for opening the safe. The descrambler had done its job, and it was an easy matter to punch in the combination displayed on its electronic face and swing open the safe’s door. A small, crowded compartment yawned before her.
“Is there cash inside?” Ashe asked brusquely.
“Oh, yeah. Stacks of it,” she muttered as she commenced stuffing rubber-banded bundles of cash into her purse. “This is a lot more than the fifty thousand we were expecting.” On impulse, she riffled through one of the bundles of cash. Mostly twenty-dollar bills. Some hundreds. She estimated fast, guessing that she was looking at upwards of four hundred thousand bucks. “Apparently Vitaly’s been a bad boy and is holding out on his bosses.”
“Take it all.”
She smiled wolfishly at Ashe’s terse order. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
“Like I’d have stopped you from doing whatever the hell you want, anyway,” he grumbled.
The problem was that several hundred thousand dollars in cash turned out to be bulky. They hadn’t been expecting anywhere near this much to be here, and her purse b
ulged full to the gills by the time she wrestled it shut and barely managed to zip it. She would just have to hope Vitaly didn’t notice the dramatic change in the size of her purse.
She closed the safe and pocketed the descrambler. Now to escape. Adrenaline surged through her body, and the urge to flee was so strong she could barely contain it. The tricky part of the heist was going to be getting out of Vitaly’s office unnoticed.
“Can I get a peek at the security cameras again?” she breathed.
“Coming up.”
Vitaly’s laptop showed static for a moment, and then a picture flashed into view. Crud. The bar fight was starting to wind down. She had to get out of here fast. She searched the computer screen and spied Vitaly facing toward his office. Damn. If she left now, he would spot her for sure.
She spoke into her microphone. “Is there any way Bastien can get Vitaly turned around facing away from his office?”
Ashe answered, “I’ll relay the request to Catfish. Stand by.”
“When I leave, you’ll need to deactivate the cameras so Vitaly doesn’t see me slipping out of his office.”
“I’m on it. I’ll give you the word when it’s safe to leave.”
Hank moved over to the door, and while she waited for Ashe’s signal, she stripped off the latex surgical gloves and stuffed them in her bra. Searching around for something to protect the doorknob from fingerprints, she spied a bar napkin on the floor. She picked it up and palmed it.
“Go,” Ashe bit out.
It was an act of pure faith to assume that Bastien had done his job and cleared the path for her to sneak out of here. She eased the door open a crack and, crouching low, slipped out. Closing the door behind herself, she crawled the few feet to her right to hide behind the bar.
She jolted when another waitress already there turned to mutter, “I swear. This place is the toilet of humanity.”
Hank winced. Had the girl seen her come out of Vitaly’s office? She muttered back, “I had to hide under a table until the fight moved away from me. Are the other girls okay? I couldn’t see a thing from where I was hiding.”
