The Job

by Janet Evanovich

  The Job is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by The Gus Group LLC

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Evanovich, Janet.

  The job: a Fox and O’Hare novel / Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg.

  pages; cm.—(Fox and O’Hare; 3)

  ISBN 978-0-345-54312-7

  eBook ISBN 978-0-345-54314-1

  1. United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation—Fiction. 2. Government investigators—Fiction. 3. Women detectives—Fiction. 4. Swindlers and swindling—Fiction. I. Goldberg, Lee, 1962– II. Title.

  PS3555.V2126J66 2014813′.54—dc23 2014035375

  www.bantamdell.com

  Cover design: Carlos Beltrán

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Authors

  FBI Special Agent Kate O’Hare slouched back in her tan leather executive office chair, looked across her desk, and surveyed the lobby of the Tarzana branch of California Metro Bank. The desk actually belonged to the assistant manager. Kate was occupying it because she was waiting for the bank to get robbed. She’d been waiting four days, and she was wishing it would happen soon, because she was going gonzo with boredom.

  The boredom vanished and her posture improved when two businessmen wearing impeccably tailored suits walked through the bank’s double glass doors. One of the men wore Ray-Bans and had a Louis Vuitton backpack slung over his shoulder. The other man was stylishly unshaven and had a raincoat draped casually over his right arm. It hadn’t rained in L.A. in two months, and no rain was expected, so Kate figured these might be the guys she’d been waiting to arrest, and that one of them wasn’t all that good at hiding a weapon.

  The man wearing the Ray-Bans went directly into the manager’s glass-walled office. The man with the raincoat approached Kate’s desk and sat down across from her. His gaze immediately went to her chest, which was entirely understandable, as she was wearing a push-up bra under her Ann Taylor pantsuit that made her breasts burst out of her open blouse like Poppin’ Fresh dough. This wasn’t a favored look for Kate, but she was the job, and if it took cleavage to capture some slime-ball, then she was all about it.

  “May I help you, sir?” Kate asked.

  “Call me Slick,” the man said.

  “Slick?” she said. “Really?”

  He shrugged and adjusted the raincoat so that she could see the Sig Sauer 9mm semiautomatic underneath it. “Keep smiling and relax. I’m simply a businessman talking to you about opening a new account.”

  Kate glanced toward the office of the manager. FBI Special Agent Seth Ryerson was behind the manager’s desk, and the real manager was working as one of the bank’s four tellers. The Ray-Bans guy was giving Ryerson instructions. Ryerson turned to look at Kate, and she could see that sweat was already beading on his balding head. As soon as any action started, Ryerson always broke out in a sweat. In five minutes, he’d be soaked. It was never pretty.

  Kate and Ryerson had been working undercover, following a tip, hoping the men would show up. The bank fit the profile of the six other San Fernando Valley banks the Businessman Bandits had held up over the last two months. The Tarzana bank was a stand-alone building in a largely residential area and was within a block of a freeway on-ramp and a major interchange.

  Kate knew there was a third “businessman” in a car idling in the parking lot. She also knew that an FBI strike team was parked around the corner waiting to move in.

  “What do you want me to do?” Kate asked Slick.

  “Sit there and be pretty. Here’s how it’s going to work, sweetie. My associate is telling your manager to take the backpack to the vault and bring it back filled with cash or I will put a bullet in your chest. My associate will then leave the bank, but I will stick around for a minute flirting with you. If any dye packs explode, or any alarms go off, I will shoot you. If nothing goes wrong, I’ll simply get up and walk out the door, no harm done. All you have to do is stay calm, and this will all be over soon.”

  It was the same speech he’d given to the women at the other banks the Businessman Bandits had held up. Slick always picked a young woman with cleavage to threaten with his gun, which was why Kate had worn the push-up bra. She’d wanted to be his target.

  Kate looked past Slick to the lobby and the bank tellers. There were seven customers in the bank, four at the counter and three in line. No one seemed to notice that anything unusual was happening. Ryerson left the Ray-Bans guy in his office and took the Vuitton backpack to the vault.

  Kate’s iPhone vibrated on her desk. JAMES BOND showed up on the caller ID.

  “Ignore it,” Slick said. “Look at me instead.”

  Kate shifted her gaze back to Slick’s carefully unshaven face, his stubble a shadow on his thin cheeks and sharp chin. The phone went still. After fifteen seconds it began to vibrate again. James Bond wasn’t a man who gave up easily.

  “That’s annoying,” Slick said. “Do you always take personal phone calls during work hours?”

  “If they’re important.”

  The phone continued to vibrate.

  “Shut it off,” Slick said. “Now.”

  Kate shut the phone down. A moment later her desk phone rang.

  “I don’t like this,” Slick said. “On your feet. We’re walking out of here.”

  “It’s just a phone call,” Kate said. “It’s probably my mother.”

  “Up!” he said. “And start walking. If anyone approaches you, I’m shooting you first and then whoever else gets in my way. Clear?”

  This isn’t good, Kate thought. There were customers conducting business, coming and going, and there was a possibility that one of them would accidentally cross their path.

  “Should I take my purse?”

  “No.”

  “Won’t it look odd if I walk out of the bank without my purse?”

  “Where is it?”

  “The bottom drawer, to my right.”

  “Stay where you are, and I’ll open the drawer. Do not move.”

  He stood and moved around the desk, all the while keeping his eyes on Kate. He held the Sig in his right hand and reached down to open the drawer with his left. The instant his attention shifted from Kate to the drawer, she smacked him hard in the face with her keyboard. His eyes went blank, the gun dropped from his hand, blood gushed out of his smashed nose, and he crashe
d to the floor, unconscious.

  Kate picked the gun up and aimed it at his partner in the manager’s office.

  “FBI!” she yelled. “Don’t move. Put your hands on your head.”

  Mr. Ray-Bans did as he was told. Everyone in the bank froze, too, startled by her outburst and shocked by the sight of her holding the gun.

  Ryerson rushed out of the vault, his gun drawn, big sweat stains under his armpits. He looked confused. “What happened?”

  “I had to go to Plan B,” Kate said. She turned to the customers in the bank. “Relax, everyone. We have the situation entirely under control, and you aren’t in any danger.”

  Kate’s desk phone wouldn’t stop ringing. She kept her gun aimed at Mr. Ray-Bans in the manager’s office, and snatched at the phone with her other hand.

  “What?” she said.

  “Is that any way to talk to James Bond?”

  “You’re not James Bond.”

  It was Nick Fox, and truth is, Kate thought Nick was pretty darn close to James Bond. A little younger and mostly on the other side of the law, but just as lethal and just as sexy.

  Fox was a world-class con man and thief. Kate had tracked him for years and finally captured him, only to have her boss, Carl Jessup, and Fletcher Bolton, the deputy director of the FBI, arrange Nick’s escape. In return for conditional freedom, Nick had agreed to use his unique skills to nail big-time criminals the Bureau couldn’t catch using conventional means.

  Kate had been given the unwanted responsibility of helping Nick neutralize the bad guys. She was also supposed to make sure Nick didn’t go back to his life of crime. The Bureau didn’t have Nick under constant surveillance or wearing a tracking device between assignments, so it was up to Kate to keep him on a loose leash. It had been a few days since she’d last spoken to him.

  “Did I catch you at a bad time?” Nick asked.

  “Yes. What do you want?”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  Kate went silent for a beat. She had no clue what he was talking about, but whatever it was, at least he hadn’t done it. That was good, right?

  “I’m kind of busy right now,” she said.

  “No problem. I just thought you’d want to know.”

  Kate hung up, and the phone rang again. It was Carl Jessup.

  “Your cellphone isn’t working,” Jessup said.

  “That’s because I’m in the middle of a bank robbery thing.”

  “We’ve got a big problem,” Jessup said in his distinctive Kentucky twang. “Yesterday, Nicolas Fox stole a five-million-dollar Matisse from the Gleaberg Museum of Art in Nashville.”

  “Are you sure it was Nick?” she asked, watching as Ryerson called in the troops and cuffed Mr. Ray-Bans.

  “I’ve just texted you a photo from one of the museum’s security cameras.”

  Kate turned her phone on and clicked on MESSAGES. The photo showed a man in an oversize hoodie holding a painting under his arm. The man’s face was partly obscured by the hood, but she could see enough to recognize Nick.

  “I’ve never seen Nick in a hoodie before,” Kate said.

  “I’m not interested in his fashion choices,” Jessup said.

  “You don’t understand, sir,” Kate said. “Nick shops on Savile Row, not at the outlet mall. He wouldn’t wear a hoodie from Old Navy.”

  “He was trying to blend in with the local yokels.”

  “How did he steal the painting?”

  “He walked into the museum in broad daylight and took it off the wall.”

  “Where’s the fun in that?”

  “He got away with it, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, but that’s not why he steals or swindles. It’s all about the challenge of the crime or the person he’s targeting. What’s the point of just lifting a painting? Anybody could do that.”

  “Maybe he lacks impulse control,” Jessup said. “The reason doesn’t matter. What matters is that he did it. He broke our deal.”

  “It doesn’t add up. If he wanted to break the deal, he’d pull off something really big, an ambitious hustle with a payoff in the hundreds of millions of dollars. This is small-time.”

  “Five million dollars isn’t small-time to me,” Jessup said. “We’ve kept him too busy to pull off anything more elaborate. So he grabbed the low-hanging fruit.”

  Kate thought about it as she looked through the bank’s double glass doors. The strike team agents, guns drawn and wearing Kevlar vests, were converging on a BMW and pulling a man out of the driver’s seat. Five million dollars would probably be a dream score for the three guys they were arresting today, but not to a master criminal like Nick Fox. He’d had the chance to run off with a half billion dollars during their first assignment together, and he’d resisted the temptation. This felt wrong. Not to mention he’d just called, and she assumed that this theft was the thing he hadn’t done.

  “Nick is smart and discreet,” she said. “Why would he let himself be caught on camera?”

  “To give us the finger. The Gleaberg is only a block from the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office. He’s really rubbing our nose in it.”

  This was the first aspect of the crime that felt to Kate like a Nick Fox caper. It took chutzpah to take a painting from a museum so close to hundreds of cops. Even so, she wasn’t sold.

  “I want you to get on a plane to Nashville and take him down fast,” Jessup said, ending the call.

  Kate blew out a sigh, hung up the desk phone, and stuffed her iPhone into her pocket. She looked down at Slick, who was still on his back, bleeding from his nose. His eyes were open but unfocused.

  “Hey,” she said to him. “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know. How do I look?”

  “Like a train wreck.” She stuck his gun under her waistband and yanked him to his feet. “Let’s go.”

  Kate turned Slick over to the strike team and joined Ryerson.

  “So what’s the big crisis?” Ryerson asked.

  She pulled her phone out and showed Ryerson the photo. “Fox has come out into the open again.”

  “Lucky you.”

  Kate walked to her car, a white Crown Vic police interceptor she’d bought at an LAPD auction. Like many FBI agents, she kept a go bag, a packed duffel bag of clothes and toiletries, in the trunk. The duffel bag had been in there for three months and her clothes probably smelled like her spare tire, but she could head straight to LAX and catch the next flight to Nashville. Before that happened, she needed to talk to Nick.

  He answered on the second ring. “Remington Steele, at your service.”

  “Remington Steele? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Is it too on the nose?”

  “I thought you were James Bond today.”

  “I’m trying to keep things interesting.”

  “My fear is that you’re trying to keep things too interesting.”

  “Everything I’ve done lately I’ve done with you,” Nick said.

  “Not everything.”

  “Not for lack of trying. But a man has his needs.”

  There was a time not so long ago when Fox’s sexual banter annoyed Kate. Now she was annoyed to find that she was enjoying it.

  “Where are you?” she asked him.

  “On my yacht.”

  “You have a yacht?”

  “I do this week,” he said.

  “I suppose you’re somewhere with clear blue skies and no extradition treaty.”

  “Marina del Rey.”

  “Really?”

  “Come see for yourself,” he said, and gave her the slip number.

  The gleaming Italian-made yacht at the end of the dock was eighty feet long with sweeping, forward-striving curves that expressed wealth and an urgent desire to keep moving. Nick was standing on the flybridge, sipping a glass of champagne, watching Kate march down the deck. There was an easygoing, natural elegance about him, accented by his aviator shades, white linen shirt, salt-washed chinos, and the sea breeze ruffling his brown hair. He di
dn’t look like a man expecting to be hauled back to prison.

  Kate reached the yacht and looked up at him. “Where did you get this?”

  “It belongs to a playboy sheik whose hobby is spending his family’s oil money making movies. This is where he stays when he comes to L.A. to play producer. I’m yacht-sitting for him.”

  “Does he know that?”

  “No, but I’m sure it would give him enormous peace of mind knowing someone was taking good care of his boat.”

  She came on board and met him on the flybridge, which was outfitted with a wet bar, a grill, and a U-shaped lounge that wrapped around a teak table on which a platter of shrimp was set.

  “What’s your connection to the sheik?” she asked, accepting a glass of champagne.

  “He invested in one of my movies.”

  “You don’t make movies.”

  “That was the fun of getting him to invest.” He gestured to her outfit with his glass. “You look like a banker who is very proud of her assets.”

  “I was undercover,” Kate said.

  “No doubt springing a trap for the Businessman Bandits. Did you get them?”

  “Yep.” She took a shrimp from the platter on the teak table and dabbed it in some cocktail sauce. “How did you know that’s who I was after?”

  “I like to keep current.”

  He stole a glance at her cleavage just as she accidentally dropped a shrimp tail into it.

  “Nice catch,” Nick said, grinning.

  Kate looked down at herself, retrieved the shrimp tail, and tossed it into the water. “I knew these breasts would come in handy someday. I assume you know about the theft of a Matisse in Nashville yesterday?”

  “It’s what I didn’t do. The theft was a crime of opportunity. High-end shoplifting.”

  Kate showed him the cellphone with his picture on it. “That’s you in the picture.”

  “That’s someone disguised as me, ruining my reputation.”

  “And framing you for a crime.”

  He waved that off. “I’m already a wanted man. What bothers me is that this heist makes me seem desperate and sloppy. This is obviously a ploy to send the FBI in the wrong direction while the thief makes a clean getaway. But it shouldn’t be too hard for us to catch him.”

  “There is no ‘us’ on this.” She put the phone back in her pocket. “I’ll handle it.”