The Woman with the Wallet (Costa Family #10)

Chapter Twelve

CHAPTER TWELVE

Miko

She was in the car for two minutes, and the whole space was already full of that brown sugar sweetness of hers. It was proving to be a fucking problem. I couldn’t think straight, thinking about how good that would smell up close, my nose teasing up her neck as my lips pressed…

No.

Nope.

Couldn’t let my mind go there.

We had a long drive to go, and I couldn’t be doing it with a raging hard-on.

“This is my favorite time of day,” Max said, pulling me out of my battle to try to stop imagining all the fun ways we could waste some time alone together while waiting for something else to happen.

“Five in the morning. Why?”

“It’s right before the city really starts to wake up. I’m usually on my way home from jobs at this time. I’ve always preferred seeing morning from the ‘wrong’ side of it.”

“Because, when you were on the streets, you didn’t sleep at night?” I asked, watching as her head whipped in my direction, her brows furrowing.

“How did you know that?”

“Doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure that a teenage girl on the street wouldn’t feel comfortable sleeping when the rest of the city is too quiet to overhear if something happens.”

“To be fair, the city doesn’t typically give a fuck if they’re awake either. But the kind of men who take advantage like the anonymity of night for the most part.”

“I’m guessing that Megs slept like a baby with you as her watchdog, though.”

“She was younger,” Max insisted, straightening, ready to defend her friend.

“Seems softer too,” I agreed.

“Good.”

So, I’d been right about their dynamic. While not related, Max took on the mantle of big sister. And protector. She’d shielded Megs from the uglier parts of the world, trying to ensure that Megs didn’t become cold and jaded. By letting herself become enough of those things for the two of them.

It was sweet and sad in equal measure.

“How old were you when you got permanently off the street?”

“It was a slow process,” Max said as she fiddled with the heated seat button. “For a long time, we alternated sleeping on the street and staying in the shelters, depending on how much room there was. As I got more jobs, we tried to rent rooms by the night, when possible.

“But it wasn’t until I really found my niche with picking pockets that there was enough of an influx of money for put down on first, last, and security. Been busting my ass ever since to make sure neither of us ever end up in a tight spot again.”

“But Megs works, right?” I asked. I understood the urge to protect and provide. I was especially guilty of spoiling my sisters. But it was important to make sure they could take care of themselves too. Especially given my lifestyle. God forbid something happened to me, I wanted to know they all could stand on their own. That was why I was so hard on Nero and would be on my other brothers as they joined the Family in an official way.

“Of course she works. But she doesn’t make a ton of money. Nicole is the same. They could probably pinch together enough to make it work, but it wouldn’t be as comfortable as it is now.”

“But you expect the boyfriend to move in eventually to make things easier on them.”

“Yeah.”

“Then you’ll be alone.”

“I’ll be fine.”

Survivors like her always would. But that didn’t mean she would do well. It seemed like a lot of her identity was wrapped up in taking care of Megs. If that was off the plate, what would she have left?

The answer came as quickly as the question formed. Work. She would have work. As a fellow workaholic, I understood that. But my motivation for working so hard was to get into a position where I no longer had to. I would have a whole crew to do a lot of the work. It would give me the freedom then to focus on what was important. Family. Both the family I already had and the one I wanted to make with the right woman.

As we drove along, Max fiddled with the radio, always managing to land on songs I loved, pointing out all the random wildlife we passed with the enthusiasm of a little kid. Or, more accurately, an adult raised in the city who’d only ever been exposed to pigeons, rats, and the occasional dog or cat.

“Ever have any pets?” I asked when we’d stopped to fuel up the car and she tried to befriend an extremely feral cat on that cusp of kitten and adolescence that kept hissing at her when she tried to just talk to it, not even get close.

“I used to feed the pigeons bread I got out of dumpsters that was too stale for me or Megs to eat. People hate on them, but they’re actually kind of sweet. Megs tells me that pigeons were pets we used during wartime, and then we, in typical awful human fashion, just let them all loose. That’s why they’re kind of dependent on humans still for their food supply. They don’t have the skills of wild birds.”

“I always liked the pigeons too. Come in some cool-ass colors.”

“Do you think there’s any meat in there I can get for her?”

I figured it was maybe a little telling that she immediately imagined the feral street cat who hissed at everyone who got near was a female but chose not to speak on it.

“I’ll find something,” I assured her, deciding that I would walk my ass across the highway with cars flying by to get to the fast food place to get her some meat to feed that damn kitten if I needed to.

It didn’t come to that, though. The rest stop included a typical convenience store that had some likely two-day-old hot dogs and a soggy sandwich that I could pull the turkey off of.

“I wish you would let someone take you in,” she said to the cat as she tossed ripped pieces of turkey in its direction. “The kind of people willing to wait for you to warm up might actually be worth it.”

Funny, I was thinking the same damn thing about her as I watched.

We were half an hour behind schedule, but I couldn’t bring myself to tear her away from the kitten until some asshole who worked at the rest stop came by to shoo it away. He looked like he was about to scold Max for feeding it until she took a threatening step toward him and started to throw some impressively foul language at him for ‘possibly scaring a little kitten into traffic.’

“He looked ready to wet himself,” I said, smiling at her as we both climbed back into the car.

“He was a dick. I hate people who are assholes to helpless creatures just because they can be.”

Again, there was some projection there, and my heart fucking hurt at the idea of the shit she must have gone through as a homeless teen.

“Okay,” she said after turning down the music when I said we were turning down the right street finally. “How about you tell me where we’re going,” she demanded.

The street was like I remembered. A mix of residential homes and businesses. And they were the kinds of homes with too small driveways, so a lot of the residents needed to park on the street, allowing me to snag a prime spot close enough to the building across the street to be able to watch without binoculars.

“That’s the place,” I told her, nodding out the windshield to a long, low gray stucco building. There was only one window out front, and it had bars on it. It looked like a fortress because it was.

“What is it?”

“A diamond processing center,” I told her.

“Why come all the way out here? There’s a whole diamond district in the city.”

“Yeah, but that’s a really close-knit community. Wary of outsiders, given their work. There’s no in there. This is different. The security is still tight, but there are lots of people in and out of here that don’t exactly have a vested interest in its security.”

I’d spent the better part of a year planning this job, researching, schmoozing the right employees, waiting for the right opportunity.

All to have it fall apart because I got my wallet lifted.

“Can I ask something?”

“Yeah,” I said, turning to look at her since there was no activity at the warehouse yet.

“If you know who you were working with, why isn’t someone coughing up blood somewhere yet?”

“Because neither of them fit the description you gave me. I want to see if you spot him here before I start knocking heads. There’s a chance they weren’t to blame. I don’t take joy in hurting people if it’s not necessary.”

“So that thing about the mob having morals is true?”

“To an extent, yeah.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning we will do anything necessary, up to and including some gnarly torture,” I told her, thinking of Brio and the stories of his little ‘adventures,’ “to defend what and who is ours. But we don’t hurt women and kids. We try not to hurt anyone who is innocent. We might be wise guys, but we’re not bad men.”

“And you also don’t want to fuck up any insider you have at a place like this, in case your heist is never found out.”

“There’s that too, yeah,” I admitted. The mob was nothing if not greedy for more well-paying jobs.

“What happens if I don’t see him today?”

“We come back tomorrow for the night shift. Figure we’ll be miserable enough being here all day. Better to split it up. If you don’t see him then, it’s time to go make some visits.”

“While we’re still in this area?”

“Don’t worry. That’s not the kind of shit I’d bring you in on.”

“Why not? I think I might enjoy watching the bastard who fucked up my face get his equally as messed up. Oh, here we go,” she said, leaning forward toward the dash as the first car pulled into the lot.

It was a slow trickle. The ones who showed up twenty minutes before their shifts just to sit in their cars and mentally prepare for their days only climbed out when it was five minutes to opening. The vast majority of the employees showed up with little to no time to spare. And a few were late.

Max fell back in her seat, sighing. Frustrated.

“There are others who come in later,” I told her, trying not to be frustrated too.

Sure, I’d shown her a bunch of the employees whose pictures I’d found on the website, but there were a lot of other random people who apparently didn’t warrant a headshot on the website. The people in logistics, janitorial, security, drivers, etc.

This was a reasonably large operation. That was the only reason I’d been able to pull off the job I had.

“Okay,” Max said, rustling around in the snack bag to pull out a bag of Twizzlers. “So, tell me the job. And don’t try to tell me it’s secret or some shit like that. I’m not going to try to rob a diamond warehouse.”

That was fair. If she wanted to, she clearly would have had the skills to do it. And we were already so deep in this together, what were a few more details?

“Part one involved making two contacts inside the building. One, an IT tech.”

“Who could fuck with the cameras to hide the heist.”

“Yep,” I agreed, loving how sharp she was. “The other was someone with access to the diamonds.”

“To grab them.”

“To switch them,” I corrected.

“With what? Zirconia?

“Moissanite,” I corrected. “It’s slightly more expensive but it’s also more convincing. It does fade over time to be less of a dupe, but I only needed it to pass a quick glance-over inspection in case schedules ended up differently than we planned.”

“So, the person with access to the real diamonds just brought in the fakes, swapped them out, and brought them to you?”

“That’s about the gist of it, yeah.”

“Why, though? If they were capable of doing it, why not just do it themselves?”

“Obviously, the IT guy couldn’t do it himself. And the other contact couldn’t do it without the IT guy and the fakes. That was where I came in. They got paid in advance with strict instructions not to make any big purchases in case the heat started.”

“And you’re not only out the diamonds, but the advance you paid out to those guys.”

“Yeah.”

“Shit. You’re not at risk of, like, losing your apartment, are you?”

“Nah. Things will shake out. If I can’t recover them, I’ll just be busting my ass more than ever this year to try to recoup the loss.”

“Want a Twizzler?” she asked, flicking one toward my face.

“They taste like cherry plastic.”

“They’re strawberry,” she told me, taking it back and nipping a bite off of it. “I’m not judging you and your boring-ass protein bars.”

“They might actually keep me full while stuck here for hours.”

“You underestimate how little I can survive on,” Max said, making my heart sink at the reality behind those words.

It was sometime in the late afternoon, our day full of snacking mindlessly, drinking cold coffee, and shifting around uncomfortably in our seats, that I finally had enough.

“Let’s call it quits for today,” I said, reaching for the gear shift. “Go get some real food. Some rest. Warm up.”

Turning the car on and off and idling for hours had been hell on the gas, making us need to have periods in the bitter cold just to last as long as we had.

Max was trying to be a trooper about it, but she looked pale, her stomach had been grumbling, and even when the heat and butt warmer were on, she was shivering slightly.

“Don’t tolerate the cold as well as I used to,” she said when the vents came on full tilt so she could lift her hands and hold them in front of the hot air.

Christ.

That was a bleak thought.

Luckily, though, she wouldn’t be cold for long.

I’d maybe splurged a bit on the hotel, even though I knew I should probably start being smarter with my money until I located the diamonds.

But I couldn’t quite shake the urge to pamper someone who so clearly needed and deserved a little bit of spoiling.

Though as I pulled into the lot, I couldn’t help but wonder if getting an adjoining room was a good idea after all. Or if the temptation was going to be too strong.