ERICA
Chapter playlist:
Snake Eyes — David Holmes
Game On! — Daniel Pemberton
Dale is truly terrifying and I’m not even remotely upset.
“I got you, suckers!”
He bursts out of the penthouse bedroom in yesterday’s wrinkled polo, glasses crooked, and his laptop held over his head like a championship belt. Every single one of us jumps.
“Dale!” Tanya presses a hand flat to her chest. “Goodness! My heart.”
“Sorry, sorry.” He isn’t sorry. He’s grinning like he swallowed the sun. “But you all need to see this.”
He turns the laptop around. Even from across the room, I can read the header on the file he’s pulled up. Whitfield & Kane Trust Co. Foreclosure Filings, 1928–1971.
“The money funded political favors,” he says. “It trails all the way back to before the Depression. There’s falsified paperwork on basically every file I could get my hands on. Not just the Armitages. It’s a pattern. A whole ugly, decades-long pattern.”
“Are you sure?” I ask.
“Yes!” He sets the laptop down on the table where I’m having my bagel.
“It’s all here. The trail starts in Lexington, that’s where I looked first. But then I went down this rabbit hole of disputes.
Families who pushed back on false loans.
None of them won, of course, but then I followed the money.
Beneath the ledger, Whitfield & Kane operated a systemic political machine. ”
“That’s some rabbit hole,” Ivy says.
“And this is where it gets really good,” Dale continues.
“Over the years, Whitfield & Kane took out ghost loans, which were then transferred to private offshore accounts. This washed money bought votes, funded luxurious campaigns, or paid for blackmail material to keep uncooperative politicians in line.”
“I’m a little bit scared right now,” Rue says.
“And check this out, Whitfield & Kane used code words to conceal what they were really doing. A ledger entry reading ‘Bought 4,000 crates of premium structural bananas’ was actually a code for bribing a state senator. Isn’t that cool?”
I lick cream cheese from the corner of my mouth. “I… guess?”
“Then, when the fake loans defaulted, Whitfield & Kane wrote them off as bad debt caused by the economic crash, hiding the crime in plain sight. I mean, I’m not saying they caused the Great Depression, but I’m not NOT saying it either.”
“That’s quite a bold claim,” Zoe says.
“Not if you consider how the greed of a few individuals was basically knocking over the world’s biggest economic domino line.”
Rue kicks her feet up on the sofa. “Wow.”
“How did you find all of that?” I ask.
Dale slides his glasses off in one smooth motion like Clark Kent transforming into Superman. “I’m an accountant. Finding numbers is what I do.”
“That’s my man,” Tanya says, beaming at him.
Dale clicks the keyboard. “Oh yes. I think the average everyday employee at Whitfield & Kane will be… juuuust… fine.”
Zoe stares at him a beat too long. “We created a monster.”
Dale takes his laptop over to the armchair, mumbling something about compiling all the data into a spreadsheet, and we all sit there dumbfounded for five minutes.
I finish my bagel, down the fresh-squeezed orange juice room service delivered, and look around at my crew. My heart is full. There are my people. Well, except for Jeremiah. I wish I could fold him into this part of my life.
I clear my throat and begin the morning-of address I always do. It’s more of a checklist, really, one which I probably don’t need to go over. My girls are the best in the biz. They’re ready.
I do it anyway, if only to calm my nerves.
“Suri.” I start with her because she’s got the hardest job tonight. “How are we on the biometric override?”
“Tested twice. We’re good.”
“Tanya. Keycards? Turndown cart?”
“All accounted for.” She pauses for a second. “I can’t believe I’m the maid again. I have a business degree.”
“Keep the uniform,” Dale calls from the armchair. “For the honeymoon.”
Tanya’s whole face goes pink.
“Rue,” I say, knowing she’s been practicing the swap with Suri’s forgery. “What’s your latest time?”
Her feet tap on the armrest. “One point five seconds.”
“For the extraction or replacement?” Zoe asks.
Rue gives her a dry look. “Both combined. Do I look like an amateur?“
“Just asking.”
“Ginger?” I call across the room. “What’s the code word you decided on?”
“Baguette,” she says in a ridiculous French accent.
Tanya snorts. “Baguette?”
Ginger blinks at her. “Erica will be eating dinner. It’s not a weird thing to say.”
“I’m still jealous you get to eat Beef Wellington bites,” Zoe says.
“I’ll get you a doggie bag,” I say.
“Anyway, what’s the code word for the Argentinians?” Zoe asks.
“Evita.”
“For Eva Perón?” Ivy asks.
“Or Eva Braun,” I say. “It works double duty.”
Rue lifts a finger. “I like it.”
“Zoe.” I leave her for last because she’s been with me from the beginning and knows this job inside and out, just as much as I do. “Are we good with comms and cameras?”
“The latest tech, boss.”
“And Dale…”
Everybody looks at Dale. Dale looks up from his laptop, glasses sliding down his nose.
“You can sit in the van.”
His chest puffs up like I just handed him a medal. “Getaway driver. At your service.”
“We’re going three blocks,” Zoe says.
“The man in the van,” he quips. “With the plan. Eating flan… out of a pan.”
“If you don’t stop, I’ll lock you out,” Zoe says.
“Like a ban?” He smiles brightly.
Tanya just shakes her head at him.
“You’re an honorary member of our clan,” I say, and leave it at that.
For the rest of the day, we run logistics and go over the timing until it’s ingrained into our brains.
Dale clears out the penthouse so there’s no trace of anything but what we’re taking with us downstairs.
Then they go to the loft and sweep it clean, including breaking apart Tanya’s scale model of the Four Seasons, which Dale was sad to throw in the trash.
Ginger and Suri go find the hotel manager and harass him into letting them into the vault once more to retrieve Miss Capucine de Montfleury’s sacred perfume formulas. We don’t want any loose ends.
When early evening rolls around, Ivy does my hair and makeup.
“Stop fidgeting,” she says. “I need you to stop thinking for one hour. Just let me work.”
“I’m not thinking too hard.”
“You’re running the whole night in your head.”
“Am not.”
“You were mumbling numbers,” Suri says, while working on something with tools at the table.
“What’s that?” Rue asks.
“A retractable lightsaber,” Suri says casually. “I’m still not happy how the internal chassis is working with the housing. See?”
She picks it up and rattles it.
“I need to secure the blade base connector so it matches the interior hilt pins.”
“You had time to make an entire lightsaber?” Zoe cries. “From scratch?”
Suri just shrugs. “I’m neuro-spicy. My hands need a side quest or I lose power. Speaking of power…”
She presses a button and a glowing blue light bursts out with a shhh-krrr sound followed by a buzzing hum.
When it’s time to slip on my dress, I use the bedroom for privacy, and also because I like a big reveal.
Ivy comes in with me to help me zip up and do the last fluffs of my hair.
She looks utterly pleased with her handiwork, and does one last-minute sweep of my hair to the side of my shoulder that’s bare.
I wouldn’t have thought a dress like this would have worked, but the nice saleswoman understood the assignment.
The dress is monochromatic black, head to toe, but unmistakably the flag if you look twice. A structured one-shoulder bodice wraps asymmetrically across my chest. The whole thing is dense with crushed velvet stars against satin.
Below the waist, the stripes descend in wavy, alternating diagonal panels in matte crepe and satin that flare when I walk. It’s both gothic and patriotic, and completely, deliberately me. And underneath, laced tight to the ankle where nobody will think to look, a pair of black combat boots.
I step out of the bedroom, and there’s a collective hush among my friends.
Rue’s jaw hangs down. “You look hot, girl.”
“You look like justice,” Suri adds.
“Good,” I say. “That’s what I’m going for.”
I’m nervous on the elevator ride down. Funnily enough, not for the job, but in anticipation of seeing Jeremiah.
But when he sees me, all my anxiety floats off into the ether.
He is devastatingly handsome in a tailored tux. It gives in all the right muscular places, and tapers into a sleek silhouette.
“You are… stunning,” Jeremiah says. His tongue is effectively on the floor.
He takes me in slowly. The hair, the makeup, the dress.
And then his eyes catch on the hem where I’ve hitched my skirt to step up to the red carpet without tripping, and he stops cold.
“Erica. Your shoes. I told you, if the gift cards didn’t cover everything, I had cash. ”
“Oh, the gift cards covered more than everything.” I let the skirt fall back over the boots. “I bought these to go with the dress.”
“Of course you did.”
“And I bought myself a pair of Wonder Woman boots too. Couldn’t help it.”
He nods, laughing. “That checks.”
Camera shutters fire in overlapping bursts in a wall of white light.
Reporters are shouting questions over each other from behind the stanchions.
A boom mic dips toward a couple two spots ahead of us.
Someone’s publicist is already steering a starlet toward the backdrop emblazoned with the tournament logo and positioning her at an angle so the photographers can get her good side, probably.
“Judge Marchetti, ten o’clock,” Zoe murmurs in my ear. Her eyes are on the security feed from the van. “And that’s Cordelia Byrne air-kissing her way down the carpet. She’s chaired six galas this year alone. This one’s probably just a regular day for her.”
Somewhere behind us a photographer calls out, “Who’s the date, Precio?”
“My lady,” Jeremiah says, without missing a beat.
Something in my chest does a happy, undignified flip, and we go in the ballroom.