Chapter Five
Five
Disappointment washed over me as I stood in the garage where we had planned our last heist, staring at the sea of empty chairs. My former landlady, Rose, an octogenarian with a colorful past as a Broadway performer, had offered the garage behind her Evanston home as a base of operations in exchange for being the “grease woman” in our crew. I could still smell the faint scent of chocolate from the pastries her ex-lover Chef Pierre had fed us during our heist-planning sessions, and the barest hint of her floral perfume.
“Where is everyone?” I asked Chloe. After sending out an urgent message on the secure server we’d used for the last heist, I’d expected the crew to show up on time, even if it was a Friday, excited to get together and catch up for the first time since we’d parted ways. It hadn’t occurred to me that they wouldn’t show up at all.
“Maybe they didn’t get the message.” Chloe straightened the whiteboard I’d used to plan our last heist. “We haven’t used that server in over a year, and everyone has been busy spending their reward money to make their dreams come true.”
“They must think it’s a joke. I shouldn’t have used the word whacked .” I grabbed my bag and gestured to the door. “We’ll have to go and hunt them down. We’re all in this together.”
“It is pretty crazy,” she admitted as I locked the door. “Gage was stomping around this morning cursing and swearing. He wanted to call some guys he knew from his time in service to help him take Angelini out.”
“And where is your secret black ops ex-military boyfriend?” I lifted an eyebrow. “Why isn’t he here?”
“He’s picking Olivia up from soccer practice.” She shrugged. “He’s not in town often, and when he does show up, he insists on driving her everywhere. She’s got him wrapped around her little finger.” She tipped her head to the side. “What about Jack?”
“I haven’t heard from him since I kicked him out of my place. He said he was going to bring proof that Clare had set him up, but now I’m wondering if he heard that Tony Angelini is looking for him and he decided to skip town.”
“I still don’t understand,” Chloe said as we made our way down the tree-lined street. “How did Angelini find out we took the necklace? Or that Jack was the one who framed his brother?”
“He said someone gave him a list of our names. We were ratted out.”
“Jack?”
“I don’t think so. He has the most to lose. I actually can’t imagine anyone from our crew putting us in danger.”
Chloe raised an eyebrow. “Does that mean you believe him about Clare?”
“I don’t want to believe him,” I said as we headed toward the L train station. “It’s easier to tell myself that what I saw justifies my decision to break up with him in the first place. But when I saw Clare’s face…that smirk…I think she knew I’d be there, so it isn’t a big leap to accept that Jack was telling the truth.”
I’d been tossing and turning all night trying to figure it out. Jack wasn’t an unkind person. I’d never seen him be purposely cruel. Even when he’d disappeared from my life except for a few random messages and the odd sexy-times video call, I’d never gotten the impression he was purposely trying to hurt me.
“Maybe it was revenge for dumping him.”
“Then why did he show up on my balcony? He was desperate for me to believe him.” My hand tightened around the strap of my bag. I was tired of thinking about it, tired of trying to understand a man I thought I knew.
“Are you trying to convince me or yourself?” Chloe asked.
I was saved from answering that difficult question when my phone finally pinged with a message. Anil, our gadget guy, couldn’t make it because he was at the gym training to be an MMA star, but he did have Emma’s address…
For someone who had just received an $833,333 windfall, Emma was living it rough. We found her crashed out on the couch in a run-down apartment, an empty bottle of tequila in one hand and a lime in the other. Her dark hair had grown to shoulder-length and had been haphazardly chopped and dyed with vivid green streaks. She was lean and gaunt without her curves, but she’d added new designs to her sleeves of ink, a septum piercing, and two new piercings in each ear.
“Emma.” I shook her awake while Chloe went to fill a glass of water. “You were supposed to be at Rose’s garage for a meeting.”
Emma opened one eye and closed it again. “How did you get in here?”
“The door was open.”
“Damn lock is still busted from the police raid last week,” she muttered. “I told my roomies not to bring their clients into the house.”
“This isn’t a house. It’s a disaster.”
“I’ve lived in worse. Cars, toilet stalls, caves, even a coffin—”
“We don’t have time for this.” I pulled the bottle from her hand and replaced it with a water glass. “What are you doing here? I thought you were going to use your reward money to train for Formula One.”
“I thought so, too,” she said. “I did karting as a kid, so it wasn’t hard to switch to single-seater vehicles, which is where you make your name and get in the running for the twenty Formula One seats that come up each year. Except I’m thirty-five and competing against kids who are eighteen and at their physical peak. Not only that, but you’re also looking at paying $400,000 for Formula BMW races and up to $1,000,000 for GP2 races, plus you gotta have money for mechanical problems and the basics of living. Guess how fast I blew through that reward money? Too fucking fast.”
“What about your dad?” Chloe asked. “I thought he was a Formula One driver. Couldn’t he help you out?”
“The old man is retired now and living his best life in the Bahamas. He said if I didn’t do it on my own, it wasn’t worth doing. Same thing I heard from him all my life—school, sports, birthdays…He wouldn’t even come to the daddy-daughter dances.”
“So how are you paying for”—I looked around the utter dive of an apartment—“this?”
“Back to driving an Uber,” she said. “Fourteen-hour days.”
“What happened to Anil? I thought you two were living together.”
“He moved back in with his parents when I moved out.” She sighed. “I miss the guy. He was like a little brother, and I got to introduce him to the best parts of life—first time getting stoned, first time getting so drunk he couldn’t stand up, first time with a hooker…” She trailed off when Chloe gasped.
“Just kidding.” She chuckled. “I wouldn’t corrupt him that way. Anil is one of the good guys and I wanted him to stay that way. But I did introduce him to a friend of mine who owns an MMA gym. He needed some proper training to make his dream of fighting for UFC come true.”
“Let’s get you cleaned up and go and find him,” I said. “We’re going to need him if we have any hope of getting out of this alive.”
Anil was lying flat on the mat in the middle of a makeshift octagon when Chloe and I walked into the gym where he did his MMA training. Emma was still in her car trying to get rid of her hangover by playing Death Magnetic at full volume. Anil looked more twenty-one than twenty-six years old. His thick black hair had been shaved down to a number two, making his bushy eyebrows the most dominant feature on his lean, narrow face.
“Anil? Are you dead?”
“I wish.” He turned his head and groaned when the medic climbed into the ring. “Put me out of my misery. Please.”
“Fourth time this week.” The medic checked Anil’s blackened eyes and put a finger on his pulse. “You need to build up some muscle before you step into the ring. You’re too skinny—all arms and legs. Think protein, weight lifting, high-intensity power moves. You’re trying to skip steps and that’s just not going to work if you want to go pro.”
“I can’t eat any more,” Anil said. “Ever since I moved back home, my mom has been cooking for six. I’m stuffed with samosas.”
“You need protein,” the medic said. “Not carbs.”
“Why did you move back home?” I asked, kneeling beside him. “Why didn’t you get a place of your own when Emma left?”
“My parents were desperate to have me back so they could find me a wife after you so brutally rejected their attempt to arrange our marriage.” His voice caught, and he drew in a shuddering breath. Anil loved his drama.
“Brutally?” I stared at him, aghast. “I just said we weren’t compatible. Our four-year age difference was just too much.”
“You broke my heart.” He stared up at the ceiling, his dark eyes watering. “I still haven’t recovered. How could you pick Jack over me?”
Given that he was still apparently under the mistaken impression I was marriage material, I decided not to mention that Jack and I were no longer together. “I’m sure you’ll find your perfect someone. You’ve got a great job…” It occurred to me in that moment that we might need a decoy and Anil, who had made a replica of the Wild Heart necklace for our last heist, was best placed to get one. “Are you still working as an engineer at that 3D jewelry-printing company?”
“Yes, and I got a promotion,” he said. “My entire life is going to be a slow, tortuous climb up the middle-managerial ladder until I finally reach the top, and after six months they’ll give me a fake gold watch and thank me for my forty years of service. That’s what they did to the last middle manager who retired.” He covered his face with his hands. “I can’t believe this is my life. The reward money was supposed to make everything better, but I’m still living in my parents’ basement being pressured to get married, working at the same company, and losing fight after fight in the ring. I can’t take the stress.”
“I get it,” I said. “My parents arranged a meet with a potential husband two days after I broke up with Jack.” Damn. I’d let it slip.
“You’re not with Jack?” He rolled to his side, resting his head in his hand. “Will you marry me? My parents will forgive you for rejecting me if you give them grandchildren. I paid off their mortgage, so we can live with them as long as we want. We can have the whole basement to ourselves. There’s lots of room unless we want to have more than three kids. I’m still a virgin. You could teach me things, mold me to your desires.”
Chloe stared at me open-mouthed. Anil had changed in the last year, and not, I had to say, in a good way. What had happened to his joie de vivre? His enthusiastic innocence?
“Thank you for the kind offer, but I’ll have to pass.”
The medic helped Anil to a bench outside the ring. He was definitely more ripped than I’d ever seen him, but his arms and legs were a mass of bruises and his handsome face bore a few lines and wrinkles I hadn’t seen before.
“I can’t believe you were planning to blow us off,” I said. “The message I sent you wasn’t a joke. Tony Angelini threatened us.”
“I’m sorry.” Anil shook his head. “I wanted to be physically ready in case anyone gets kidnapped again. My performance at the end of the last heist was substandard. This time, I want to beat people up for real instead of just running around in a costume scaring them.”
“We need you for your Mensa and gadget skills more than your MMA skills,” Chloe said. “Don’t tell me you’ve given up on your pursuit of higher thinking.”
“Actually, I just went to a Mensa meeting last week.” Anil sighed. “It was debate night, but we spent most of the time debating what we should debate: Gif or gif? Code wars? Who Goku could beat…? Kirk versus Picard? Which comic book character would smell the worst? The theory of time travel? Can a lightsaber cut through adamantium?”
“Do I want to know what you decided on?” Chloe asked.
I shook my head in warning, but there was no stopping Anil once his geek mode had been triggered.
“Balrogs. Did they have wings or not?”
“Maybe we don’t need him,” she whispered, clearly uninterested in the wingedness of Balrogs. “I think he’s off his game, and to be honest, he seems a bit depressed. Let’s just go and get Cristian.”
“No way. He’s our gadget guy. We just need to get him back to Rose’s garage and give him something to fix.”
Cristian met us outside the TV studio where he was filming his animal show for kids. He was wearing some kind of safari uniform, a far cry from the flashy shirts and designer clothes he’d worn when he worked in my dad’s tailor shop by day and ran his “life coaching” escort service by night. His escort side hustle saved us from being caught during the heist when Joseph Angelini’s wife turned out to be one of his clients, and Cristian became our “inside man” in every sense of the word.
“What’s this all about?” Cristian asked, kissing me on both cheeks. He was half Portuguese, half Brazilian, and all F-boi, with a degree in zoology and a passion for saving the environment. He’d used his reward money to rent a house with a yard big enough for two rescue dogs and to start production on his dream television show.
“Didn’t you read my message?”
“Yes, but…” He made a vague gesture with his hand toward the studio set. “It sounds like something straight out of a bad movie, and I would know. Apparently, Cristian’s Animal Kingdom was the worst pilot the studios have ever seen. We’re wrapping the second episode tomorrow and then we’re shutting it all down. I’ve got no money left, so I’m going back to my escort and life-coaching business to make ends meet. I even had to rehome my rescue dogs so I could move into a more compact space. They’re much happier out in the country.”
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”
Cristian sighed. “I thought that money would change my life forever.”
“We all thought that. Maybe we dreamed too big.”
After a few last-minute words with his director, Cristian joined us in the car, squeezing into the back of Emma’s Chevy Bolt EV with Chloe and Anil. He and Emma had often clashed over his views about saving the environment and Emma’s determination to fill it with ozone-destroying pollutants from the vehicles she loved to drive.
“I am honestly shocked that you’ve gone electric,” he said after they’d exchanged greetings.
Emma sniffed. “It wasn’t by choice.”
Cristian leaned back in his seat. “Any of you ladies currently single?”
“Chloe’s still with Gage,” I said. “Should I call and tell him you just asked her out? He might leave you with one or two working fingers.”
“Chloe is out,” he said. “How about you? Are you still with Jack?”
“No, but I’m taking a break.”
“I’m taking a break, too,” Emma said when his gaze slid to her. “I just broke up with a dude who lost a certain body part while operating some heavy machinery. I went to see him in the hospital to tell him it was over for reasons of abject stupidity. I mean, what was it doing out there in the first place? There’s a time and a place, is all I’m saying.”
“Was there anything left?” Anil asked, his face a mask of horror.
“Yeah, but I wasn’t into the whole frankenwiener thing. Size does matter. I learned that from Rose.” She looked over at me as she started the car. “What does Rose have to say about this whole thing?”
“I haven’t had a chance to share everything with her,” I said. “She took an acrobatics-for-seniors class after our heist and landed a job on a cruise ship as the evening entertainment. She’s somewhere in the Caribbean with terrible cell service, and all I got in response to my message was permission to use the garage and a promise that she’d call when she got into the next port.”
Emma’s engine gave a quiet hum as she pulled out of the parking lot. “I hope you’re planning another heist with some serious cash,” she said. “I need to get rid of this environment-saving piece of tin and get a Hummer.”
“No one needs a Hummer,” Cristian spat out. “Do you know how bad they are for the environment?”
“Yes, I do.”
“And…?”
Emma looked at him through the rearview mirror. “You’ll get the very first ride.”