Shimmy Bang Sparkle(36)

The bus that would take me home pulled up just as I began to walk across the street, so I made a run for it and caught it just in time. As the bus lurched and bumped along, I toppled into an open seat across from an elderly lady with a set of worry beads in her hand.

“Hi,” I panted. “God, that was a close one!”

That was when I realized it wasn’t an elderly lady. It was a nun.

She looked at me sternly and moved a bead on her rosary.

I put my purse in my lap and tried to compose myself. She was still giving me the eagle eye, and I slunk back a little farther in my seat. And opened up my browser.

My dating history was hardly extensive. I’d dated an accountant and a dentist and a very nice if somewhat odd biologist who specialized in a rare minnow. All my relationships had fizzled out like a wet firework—none of those men could have handled knowing what I really was.

But as soon as the search results populated, I realized that Nick Norton was unlike any other man I’d ever dated. The first image that popped up wasn’t a professional head shot—it was a mug shot. I gaped at the image and said, “Holy shhhhhhh . . .” I looked up from my phone to find the nun staring at me with her rosary swinging. “. . . shhhakalakalaka,” I whispered.

Ignoring her terrifying repent, my child! glare, I focused on my phone with all my might. The image led me to Nick’s rap sheet at mugshots.com. I scrolled down past a crazy-making litany of tattoos, recorded in minute detail under Distinguishing Characteristics, until finally I got to the charge sheet. He had a few old misdemeanors for breaking and entering when he was much younger, each noted with a period of parole—but no jail time. But at the bottom was a felony charge for possession of stolen property, worth over $5,000. It had the federal statute linked on one side, but I didn’t have to click it. I was up on my felonies; it meant he had been convicted of willfully possessing the goods, knowing that they were stolen. I backed up to the search results and clicked on the “News” tab. There was a short article from the Albuquerque Journal about his arrest. For possession of five rough-cut diamonds.

It hit me like a Whac-A-Mole hammer on the forehead.

I knew him. Or more precisely, knew about him. The year before, I had heard about a fence with a reputation for being low-profile and discreet, specializing in jewels. We’d been about to seek him out when he’d gotten picked up by an undercover cop in a sting. It had been around about Halloween, I remembered, because Ruth and Roxie and I had discussed it when we were doing our costumes in the bathroom. Roxie had said she’d heard he was yummy. Ruth had said she’d heard there was no safe he couldn’t crack. And I’d heard that along with being a fence, he was a thief.

Just like me.

I dropped my phone in my lap and watched Albuquerque whiz by in a million shades of beige. He wasn’t just some hunky guy who got me all hot and bothered. He was a guy who, for better or worse, could relate to my crazy, unconventional, decidedly not-the-girl-next-door secret life. He was a guy I could actually be myself around.

God, what a relief that would be, I thought, as I slumped back in my seat.

And the nun clicked another bead on her rosary.



As I stepped off the bus, I reached for my phone to give Nick a call. But there, as the haze of bus fumes cleared, I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. Across the street, pulling out of Mr. Bozeman’s driveway, was a Cadillac. But not just any Cadillac. A white one, with spinning brass rims and a shellacked pair of longhorns wired to the grille.

It was the Texan.

Cue the magenta mist of rage.

I shoved my phone back in my purse and hustled across the street. There were cheesy fingerprints on Mr. Bozeman’s doorknob, and I growled when I saw them. When I walked inside, Mr. Bozeman stashed something under his afghan. Priscilla zoomed around the house, sniffing like crazy because someone new had been in her space. She found a cheese curl on the rug, nudged it with her nose, and sneezed.

I picked up the disgusting cheese curl with a piece of Kleenex, same as I would have done with a dead cockroach, and dropped it in the trash, forcing myself to take some deep breaths to calm myself. Once I had done eight counts of ten and straightened out the garbage bag in the bin, I sat down next to Mr. Bozeman on the sofa and did my best to keep my face absolutely neutral. “Don’t be mad,” he said.

“Of course I’m not mad.” Actually, I was unbelievably mad, but not with Mr. Bozeman. I was mad at the Texan—I detested him for being an opportunist and a fat wolf in even fatter sheep’s clothing. I’d been careful to never cross paths with him; he was like the Joseph Stalin of Albuquerque. You didn’t have to know him to steer clear. And he was just the sort of lousy, nasty SOB that Ruth and Roxie and I sometimes fantasized about taking down, with a handful of too-hot-to-fence diamonds and an anonymous call to the proper authorities.

But we’d never had a reason.

Yet.

Mr. Bozeman’s eyes were bloodshot, and he looked just as worried as I felt. He also looked tired and stressed. Everything an eighty-seven-year-old man deserved not to be anymore. He revealed what he’d stashed under his afghan. It was a betting slip, and he handed it to me. Elvis’s Girl, to win at the Ruidoso Downs Race Track. I closed my eyes. There was no need to panic. All we had to do was cancel the bet. I put my hands to my eyes and rubbed my eyebrows. “When is the race?”

But Mr. Bozeman didn’t answer. I looked up to find him staring openmouthed at the television. A clump of fast-moving horses galloped from left to right, and the bottom of the screen filled up with statistics—the names of the horses, jockeys, and owners, along with the final times. But then the camera zoomed in on a brown filly with pink blinders, with her jockey walking by her side.