Thick as Thieves

by Sandra Brown

  “I’ll email you a copy of the deed.”

  “Are there any house plans to go with it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Blueprints would be helpful.”

  “I’ll see that you get copies of everything.” That would take some finagling. She hadn’t yet broached the idea of renovation with Lisa, and she predicted that her reaction would be negative. On steroids.

  As though reading her mind, he said, “What about your sister? Is she onboard? The house is half hers. What’s she think of your project?”

  “You ask a lot of questions, Mr. Burnet.”

  “I’m careful that way. Do you have your sister’s thumbs-up?”

  “In all honesty she didn’t warm to the idea of my coming back here, to this town.”

  “Why?”

  She gave him a pointed look. “I’m sure you know why.”

  “Yeah, I guess I do. You’ve got a lot to live down. I admire you for trying. But I gather your sister doesn’t feel the same.”

  “No, she doesn’t. After the loss of my baby, she urged me not to stay. I won out.”

  He looked at her for so long and with such intensity, she had to will herself not to squirm.

  At last, he said, “Tell me what you have in mind.”

  “What I had in mind when I came here was to make a home for my daughter and me. Lisa’s former bedroom was to have been the nursery. I was going to turn my parents’ bedroom into a playroom with a built-in mom-office tucked in under the sloped ceiling in the corner.”

  “Good use of otherwise wasted space.”

  “That was the idea. And that room gets a lot of sunlight.” She’d fantasized scenarios of her playing with her gurgling baby girl while dust motes danced around them.

  Now, thinking back on the many domestic tableaus she had imagined, she slid her hand beneath her hair and massaged the back of her neck. Quietly, she said, “For obvious reasons, my needs have changed.”

  He sat there without saying anything, abnormally still, and she wondered if his ability to remain like that for an extended period of time had been a facet of his military training. It would certainly be of benefit to a soldier. But it was unsettling to anyone who came under his scrutiny while he was at it. At least to her it was disquieting.

  Eventually he reached for his mug and took another sip of coffee. “Do you have a particular style in mind?”

  “Something different.”

  “From what?”

  “From what it is.”

  “That would entail a clean sweep.”

  “I realize that.”

  His long legs had been stretched out at an angle to the table, ankles crossed. He pulled them in now, placed his forearms on the table, and leaned toward her. “Forgive my bluntness. Can you afford this?”

  “I won’t know until you submit an estimate.”

  “Right.” He thought it over. “I’ll make up a list of things. Not the pretty, sexy stuff. The basics. Wiring. Plumbing. Roofing. Like that. I’ll attach a high-end estimate, as well as a low-ball one. Pricing will depend a lot on your choice of materials.

  “If you don’t like my ideas, if you can’t afford to have the work done, if you decide your sister’s advice was sound and move back to Houston, all you owe me is a hundred bucks for putting in the time. Sound like a plan?”

  She swallowed, but her voice still came out huskily. “Mr. Burnet? How did you know I had moved here from Houston?”

  There was the merest flicker in the blue eyes before he shrugged off her question. “It’s general knowledge.”

  She shook her head. “I haven’t told a single soul.”

  “That’s the scuttlebutt. Beats me how it got around. I don’t even remember who told me.”

  “Like you don’t remember where you were when I was pointed out to you.”

  He gave a huff, trying to blow it off. “Is that a big deal?”

  “I don’t know. Tell me why anyone would be discussing me with you.”

  He raised his arms at his sides. “Everybody and his grandmother has been discussing you. Because of the…event.”

  “The event being my personal tragedy.”

  “Which you suffered in public. Gossip thrives on other people’s miseries.”

  “Yes. It does.” She pressed the heels of her hands to her temples. “Just like when my father abandoned us.”

  “Did he abandon you?”

  “What would you call it?”

  “Flight.”

  She lowered her hands and glared at him.

  Not that it had much effect. He said, “It’s generally believed that he wasn’t deserting you, so much as he was escaping capture.”

  “Is that what you believe?”

  “Facts point that way. The night he went missing, Welch’s store safe was cleaned out, and an employee died under mysterious circumstances. The money was never recovered, that suspicious death is still unexplained, and Joe Maxwell was never seen again. So, yeah, I’d say he’s cloaked in mystery, and, like it or not, so are you.”

  Raising her voice, she said, “Well, I don’t like it.”

  “Then you should have stayed gone.”

  She shot up out of her chair, shoved it aside, and stalked from the room. When he caught up with her, she already had the front door pulled open. “You told me yesterday that you aren’t the man for the job. I couldn’t agree more. Thank you for coming out this morning, but—”

  He reached past her shoulder and pushed the door shut.

  The suddenness of his movement alarmed her. She backed up to the adjacent wall. Her heart was thudding. “Have you been driving past this house every night?”

  His chin went back a notch. “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Yeah, I did.” Moving slowly, he raised his hands shoulder high and took several steps backward, away from her. A cleft formed between his eyebrows. “Someone’s been driving past your house?”

  “Every night. Almost from the day I moved in. Even before I lost the baby.”

  “Have you reported it?”

  She shook her head.

  “Why not?”

  “At first I didn’t think much of it. I passed it off as curiosity-seekers. Then after the emergency in the supermarket, I didn’t want to send up a flare and call further attention to myself.”

  He digested that, then said, “Have you made out what kind of car it is?”

  She took a breath. “Is it you?”

  “Why would I be driving past your house every night?”

  “That’s not an answer. Is it you?”

  “No.”

  A simple denial. No embellishment. No telltale expression. Ergo, a perfect lie. A perfect liar. “Is lying another skill you honed while in juvenile detention?”

  His jaw clenched.

  She wasn’t going to be deterred by his apparent anger. “The marijuana was your first offense, but it wasn’t your last, was it?”

  “No.”

  Her breathing shallow, she asked, “What other crime did you commit?”

  Chapter 6

  That night in 2000—Ledge

  Stopping along the roadside minutes after pulling off a burglary, to conduct a meeting with your accomplices, in a ditch no less, was just one of the reasons that this whole escapade of Rusty’s design was all kinds of ways fucked up.

  During the planning stages, Rusty had charged Ledge with the task of driving them, and he had been okay with that. In fact, he wouldn’t have had it any other way. If escape became necessary, he figured he knew more back roads than the other three. He certainly trusted himself over any of them to keep a cooler head in a tight situation.

  “It only makes sense for us to convene in the parking lot of your uncle’s bar,” Rusty had told him during one of only three covert meetings they’d had in advance of the burglary.

  “It will be hopping on a holiday Saturday night. Cars and pickups will be coming and going from happy hour till after last call. Our cars won
’t be noticed in the overflowing lot. You’re in and out of there all the time. Christ, you live there. So nobody will think twice about you leaving and returning an hour or so later.”

  As Rusty had predicted, the theft itself had been incredibly easy to pull off. When Foster opened the vault, Rusty had exhaled a short laugh. “That’s a fucking lot of Easter bonnets and chocolate bunnies.”

  They didn’t stand around congratulating one another, though. They’d hastily stuffed the banded bills into one large canvas bag provided by Foster. As they’d left with it, Ledge had halfway expected an ambush. At any given heartbeat, he’d feared spotlights hitting them, SWAT officers swarming, and a cop with a bullhorn shouting for them to drop facedown and place their hands behind their heads.

  It hadn’t happened. Ledge had driven them away while the same mean-looking cat that had been eating from a pile of garbage when they’d arrived was still eating from it when they’d left. Not even he had scurried for cover behind the row of dumpsters behind the store.

  But now, after having made a clean getaway with their haul, when they were halfway between Welch’s and the bar in the middle of freaking nowhere, Rusty told him to pull over.

  “Pull over? What the hell for?” Ledge spoke for himself as well as for the two in the back seat, who shared his incredulity and were vocal about it.

  “Just do it,” Rusty said, squelching their chorus of protests. “We need to lay some ground rules before we split up.”

  The car was still rolling to a stop on the shoulder when Rusty opened the door and got out, taking the money bag into the ditch with him. The back of Ledge’s neck began prickling with apprehension, and it lasted the whole while they were huddled in that damn, stinking ditch. While pretending to be cool and unruffled, he’d kept a close eye on Rusty. Ledge wouldn’t put it past him to whip out a pistol and shoot the three of them right there.

  As it turned out, he’d only wanted to assert his authority. The son of a bitch.

  Strangely, though, Ledge felt even more uneasy now as they were climbing out of the ditch. Foster slipped, and Ledge had to lend him a helping hand. He didn’t like not having his hands free, and for a fleeting moment, it occurred to him that Foster’s bumbling might have been a ruse to distract him.

  But all Foster did once he made it up the slope was to thank Ledge. Without further mishap, the four of them piled back into the car.

  But the tension inside it was palpable. At least among three of them. Rusty appeared to be untroubled. Riding in the passenger seat, he whistled softly through his teeth and used his fingers against his knee to drum out a beat only he could hear.

  They didn’t meet a single vehicle as they took the turnoff toward the lakeshore and Burnet’s. Ledge drove to the farthest, darkest edge of the parking lot where tree limbs were so low, the Spanish moss hanging from them brushed against the windshield.

  He pulled to a stop but left the motor running. In an atmosphere of hostility and mistrust, he said, “Nobody followed us, but we’d better scatter quick.”

  “I agree,” said Rusty. “I’ve said everything that needed saying.”

  “You said more than needed saying.”

  The complaint had been muttered, but Rusty heard it. “Hey, Ledge,” he said conversationally, “why do you think it is that Joe doesn’t do his drinking here? Why doesn’t he give your uncle Henry his business? Do you reckon he thinks nobody knows he’s an alky?”

  The back door slammed hard enough to rock the car.

  Angrily, Ledge said to Rusty, “Why not just lay off?”

  “I didn’t mean any offense. Truly,” Rusty said with exaggerated earnestness. Then he looked into the back seat and changed his tone to a threatening one. “Foster, if you fuck up, we’re all fucked.”

  “I won’t. I promise.” The accountant scrambled out and disappeared into the maze of vehicles.

  Rusty opened the passenger door and pulled the canvas bag from the floorboard. He patted it affectionately and grinned across at Ledge. “Well, see you around, partner.”

  Moving faster than Rusty could blink, Ledge’s right arm cut an arc across the console, his fingers locking around Rusty’s wrist like bands of iron. “Hear me, and hear me good, you prick. You had better hope that nothing bad happens to my uncle or this place, because if something does, I’m gonna assume you’re behind it, and I’ll come after you, and I will kill you.”

  Knowing he’d made himself understood, he released Rusty as swiftly as he’d grabbed him. Rusty appeared too shocked, too afraid maybe, to move. Then he climbed out with the bag and closed the door.

  Ledge put the car in gear and drove away, out of the parking lot.

  Although he realized that his uncle and Don could use an extra pair of hands on such a busy night, he couldn’t face them just yet. They would know right away that something was bothering him, and when they probed him for a reason, he would have to lie, and they would detect that, too.

  His getting caught smoking pot and having to go to detention had come as a disappointment to his uncle. But Henry had been unwavering in his support. They had weathered that dim chapter in Ledge’s life without Henry losing all faith in him.

  So God forbid that Henry ever find out what he’d done tonight. Sick over the mere thought of that possibility, he headed back toward town and Crystal’s house. He could shelter there with her for a while. She didn’t require him to make conversation.

  The squad car’s flashers didn’t come on until it was right on his tail, and the lights nearly blinded him, causing him to swerve toward the shoulder.

  He braked hard and skidded to a stop in the gravel.

  His heart began racing. His breathing turned choppy. Mentally chanting, No way they could know. No way they could know, he watched the two sheriff’s deputies in his side mirrors as they approached, one on each side of the car. He placed his hands on the steering wheel at ten and two.

  The one who came to the driver’s side shone a flashlight in his face. “Hey there, Ledge.” He kept the beam of his flashlight on Ledge’s face, while the other, on the passenger side, swept his over the interior of the car. Ledge wondered if there was mud from the ditch on the floorboard. Shit!

  “Keep your hands where I can see them, Ledge,” the deputy instructed. “Open the door slow, and get out.”

  “What did you stop me for?”

  “Get out,” he repeated.

  Ledge did as ordered. “Why’d you stop me?”

  “Assume the position.”

  “You gotta be kidding.”

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?”

  “I wasn’t even speeding.”

  “Assume the position!” the officer shouted.

  Ledge turned and placed his hands on the roof of the car and set his feet wide apart. While the deputy was patting him down, the other was rifling through his glove box. “There’s nothing in there,” Ledge said.

  “Where are you keeping your stash these days?”

  “I don’t have a stash.”

  “What? You gave up smoking dope for Lent?”

  “I gave it up after being put in jail only for sharing a joint with friends at a party.”

  “Every druggie has a sob story.” The deputy said to his partner, “Pop the trunk.”

  Ledge said, “There’s nothing in there but a tire iron and a spare.”

  “You wouldn’t lie to us, would you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, we got a tip saying you were selling out of your car on the parking lot of your uncle’s bar.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Somebody saw you chatting with a group of people inside your car.”

  Ledge broke a cold sweat.

  “Have you graduated from using to dealing, Ledge? Were you having a get-together with customers, or competitors?”

  He knew not to say anything more. Some lessons learned in juvie were valuable.

  “Give us names, Ledge. Who were you meeting with?”

  My accom
plices.

  The deputy prodded him in the spine. “Cat got your tongue? What have you been up to tonight, Ledge?”

  From the opened trunk, the second deputy chortled. “Unless he can come up with a real good alibi, it’s back to jail he goes for dealing.”

  “I’m not dealing.”

  “Then you must be planning on staying high every day for the rest of your life.”

  The deputy frisking him whistled. “I hope you have a good lawyer and a better alibi.”

  Ledge dropped his head forward and snorted a bitter laugh.

  The deputy jabbed his backbone again. “You think that’s funny?”

  No, there was nothing funny about it. But, at the very least, it was ironic.

  He had a killer of an alibi.

  He’d been stealing half a million dollars.

  Chapter 7

  In reply to Arden’s question about his criminal history, Ledge was accurate, if not quite truthful. She had asked what crime he’d committed. It wasn’t the one he’d been arrested for.

  “A lot of smoke was found in a bag in the trunk of my car. More than one would have on hand for personal use. I was booked for possession with the intention to sell.”

  “A more serious offense,” she said.

  “And I was two years older. Not quite eighteen, but charged as an adult.”

  “Were you guilty?”

  “I was set up.”

  “Isn’t that what all criminals say?”

  “I’m not all criminals. It happens to be the truth.”

  Gazing up at him were wide eyes the color of a smooth, expensive bourbon, the kind that warmed the belly. Only a few minutes ago, her eyes had been sparking with anger. Now he saw in them only apprehension.

  Small but telling, involuntary, feminine motions—hooking her hair behind her ear, shifting her weight from one foot to another, wetting her lips—were indications of her uneasiness. He made a lot of people uneasy. But usually it didn’t bother him. With her, it did.

  “Are you afraid of me?”

  Without equivocating, she said, “I haven’t made up my mind.”

  “If you’re that unsure, it means you are. I sensed it the minute I darkened the door. You’ve been on edge the whole time I’ve been here. How come?”