Chapter Thirty-Three
THIRTY-THREE
“Normally, I gotta call out to order pizza,” Charlie said instead of “hello.” His exhale filled the speaker, and it was easy to picture him blowing smoke. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”
“Ginny and I just want to talk,” Shepherd said. “That’s all.”
“Hi, Charlie,” Ginny said.
“Hi, yourself. Look, I’m flattered you’ve changed your mind, really, but I don’t conduct business over the phone.”
Shepherd rolled his eyes. The last thing he wanted to do was drive back to Charlie’s house. Maybe they could meet halfway somewhere?
“Charlie,” Ginny said, not unkindly, “the government thinks you’re dead. They’re not tapping your phone.”
Charlie didn’t respond. Shepherd double-checked his phone screen to make sure the retired gangster hadn’t hung up.
“Huh. Yeah. I guess you’re right. Still, I don’t like to discuss too many details. This is my job, right? And I know it’s for your mom, Ginny, but I don’t need two amateurs getting ahead of themselves on me.”
Shepherd’s bicep cramped. He sat up, shook out his arm. “Just tell us the location, OK. And maybe why them. And also what—what would be cool.”
“The Tire Irons got a good deal going, you know. Lots of different … streams of income. Things end up stashed at their clubhouse, you know, while they work out where the best, let’s say, cleaners are.”
Shepherd and Ginny exchanged a look. For a man who had just been convinced that his phone wasn’t wiretapped, he sure was spending a lot of time trying to talk in code. Failing. But trying.
“So they’ve got cash they haven’t laundered yet in their clubhouse,” Ginny summarized. “Where?”
“In a safe behind a clown painting,” Charlie said, which was not a phrase Shepherd had prepared himself for.
“I beg your pardon?”
Charlie continued, without pardoning anyone, “And the day after tomorrow, they’re hosting their annual Fourth of July barbecue. Which means a lot of bikers coming and going. A lot of access to that safe, if anyone knows to look for it.”
Shepherd said, “Behind the clown painting.”
“That’s right.” Charlie exhaled again, blowing smoke on the other side of the phone. “Plus, you’re going to need supplies. Can’t go into these things unprepared. Bad for business.”
“This is, without a doubt, the dumbest thing I’ve ever agreed to, and I let Lex dress me up as a giant baby for Halloween last year.”
Ginny froze in mid-lipstick application. They were sitting in his car, down the street from the Tire Irons motorcycle club clubhouse. The sun was setting directly into his face. Her ice-blue eyes snapped from his visor mirror to his face in a microsecond. “I beg your pardon?”
The tips of his ears burned. He inflated his cheeks and regretted ever being born with a tongue. Shepherd shook his head. “Forget I said anything.”
“Did she take pictures? Please, Shepherd!” She launched herself across the center console, her lipstick marking up his forearm. “Please, are there pictures? I won’t, I won’t ask her for them, I swear! I just need to know they exist.”
Shepherd tugged his arm away, wiped off the lipstick. It smudged on his fingertips. He waved them in her face, bright red and sticky. “Get out of here and go lie to bikers already, will ya?”
Ginny pressed a kiss to his cheek with a delighted squeal before hurrying out of the car.
She pulled her skirt down as she went, closing his car door with a bump of her hip.
She was in a power suit today, a cool gray-toned jacket with matching skirt.
The jacket looked as if it had shoulder pads, too, but instead of making Ginny look like a linebacker, it made her look rich.
Shepherd wiped his cheek with the back of his hand, only to find even more lipstick. “Great,” he mumbled, looking around his mess for hand sanitizer or a napkin or something. “That’s gonna make me real popular with the bikers.”
Relatively lipstick-free, Shepherd used binoculars to search for Ginny. She was knocking on the clubhouse door, a giant smile on her face. The cover story was:
1. She’s a lawyer (objectively true).
2. She was working for the city (not true).
3. She was claiming that the city thinks they have accidentally encroached on the biker’s private property and is sending her to check it out before offering monetary reimbursement (obviously a lie, and anyone who fell for it should be easy to scam).
It didn’t hurt that Ginny was as pretty as she was, with a smile like that, and hair the color of a sunrise.
Sure enough, if the expression on the bearded biker’s face was anything to go by, he believed what she had to say the moment she showed him some official-looking paperwork that Charlie had got hold of. “Don’t ask,” he had said when he handed it over.
The FaceTime ringer chimed on Shepherd’s phone and he slid it on automatically, keeping his camera off and turning his screen recording on.
“Hi, Mr. Rogers,” Ginny said. “I’m inside the building now, and I can already see that it isn’t nearly big enough for their property allowance.”
Shepherd was pretty sure that wasn’t a thing. But he went, “Yep. Yep, I see it. Follow that south wall, please.”
“Of course, sir,” Ginny said, practically purring the honorific. He rolled his eyes, but the tips of his ears burned again.
Charlie had briefed them, somewhat, on his plan. Shepherd liked plans. Shepherd’s brain felt like it finally worked when there was a plan in place, with a backup plan, and another one, just to be safe, all collated, laminated, and bound. But Charlie’s “plan” was …
Well, it was more like a couple of half-finished thoughts strung together.
First, get into the building—“I can’t do it,” he said, “because they know my face, the bastards”—and try to find the safe hidden behind a picture of a sad clown.
As if meth-making, gun-smuggling, money-laundering bikers weren’t scary enough, there had to be clowns involved, of course.
At least these were of the two-dimensional variety.
The next phase was to go back the next day.
They were having a big summer blowout for all the different …
whatever. Charters? Shepherd didn’t have a great grasp on the hierarchy of biker gangs, but they were having a bunch of people over tomorrow for barbecue and booze.
So he was going to just … roll up. Charlie said he’d arrange costuming, which was not a comforting thought.
“I’ll slip in through the back when a distraction is in place,” Charlie had said.
“What’s the distraction?” Shepherd asked, a giant lump of dread settling deep inside his gut, as if he already knew what the distraction was.
“Let me worry about that part,” Charlie said. “I’ve got it all figured out.”
And now, here he was, binoculars in one hand and a phone in the other, as Ginny strolled through the bikers’ HQ with a giggle in her voice and a spring her step.
One of the bikers followed close behind, showing everything off, taking special care to mark all the rooms that could be bigger, should have been bigger, but the darn city took property from them that was rightfully theirs.
It was scary how quickly the bikers believed that particular fairytale, but at least it worked to Ginny and Shepherd’s advantage.
The clown painting caught him and Ginny by complete surprise. When it crept up from the side of his screen, he almost dropped the entire phone. Ginny covered her gasp with an “Oh! How colorful!” and kept on with the tour, lingering a little longer than strictly necessary to survey the den.
It had a sunken floor, like a living room from a seventies sitcom, with a couch big enough for a small army. There was a bar, covered in bottles of various sizes and liquids, and above the bar was possibly the biggest painting of a clown in existence, at least in South Florida.
Shepherd pinched the bridge of his nose hard, swallowed down the sigh. How, just how, on planet earth were they supposed to walk into the clubhouse during a party and steal cash from behind a painting in the middle of the orgy den?
“I really think you have a case here,” Ginny’s voice came from the center of his despair: his phone. “What do you think, Mr. Rogers?”
“Yep,” Shepherd said, thumping his knuckle against his twitching right eyebrow. “They sure got something, all right.”
“I think it’ll work.”
“No way.”
“It’s good, Shepherd.”
“It’s the dumbest thing anyone has ever attempted.”
“Shepherd, come on. We were inside! Or I was. Did you see how quick they were to believe me? And they invited me to the cookout. We’re practically holding the money right now!”
Shepherd sat in the middle of Ginny’s bed, feeling like an idiot, and not just for the way he was sitting in the middle of her bed. “Look. OK. Wait.”
She sat down on the edge and crossed her legs. “I’m waiting.”
“We are not practically holding the money right now. Hold-ing the money means—and I can’t believe I haven’t backed out of this already—it means me driving a motorcycle, and rolling in, and then taking the money. Me. During a giant party.”
She moved to sit against the headboard and stretched out her legs. Her painted toes poked him in the thigh. “Charlie says he has that figured out.”
“Right. Sure. But he hasn’t told us how he has that figured out.”
Ginny bit her bottom lip and smiled. Shepherd refused to look directly at her face. That was why he got in this mess in the first place. Looking directly at her was a mistake. Had been a mistake since he hired her off the street.
“Shepherd, listen. Charlie didn’t make his money from the mafia. At least, not at first. He made his money doing these kinds of heists with his ex-wife, Bee. But that is confidential information, and I expect you not to spread that around.”
“Who would believe me if I did?” He spread like a starfish, arms and legs outstretched and taking up as much space as possible on her bed. “This is nuts, Ginny. I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
“You’re doing this,” she said, crawling over to him. Crawling, on all fours. She was trying to kill him. Or if not, she wanted him to die. “Because you’re a good man.”
He huffed.
She held herself above him, one perfect hand on either side of his face. There was nowhere to look now but directly at the pretty face that had got him into all this trouble. So he closed his eyes.
She kissed his nose. His cheek. His jaw.
“Ginny.”
“The best man,” she whispered in his ear. Then she ran her tongue along the shell of his ear. “The best man I’ve ever known.”
Shepherd swore.
Ginny moved away at first, but only long enough to straddle his waist. Shepherd’s willpower snapped. He opened his eyes, resigned to his fate, as she rose above him with a knowing look. A look that said: I am going to be the death of you, and you are going to thank me for it.
That night, with Ginny’s head tucked under his chin and his arm around her bare shoulders, he sighed. “I want the full details from Charlie before we go in. And I want to make my own backup plans without him knowing.”
She nodded against his chest. “You like plans.”
“I’m good at plans. Plans are the things I’m best at. You know. You’ve seen my binder.”
Ginny patted his chest, her fingers toying with a bit of his hair. “I’m a lucky girl.”