Shimmy Bang Sparkle(44)

He nodded slowly. “You guessed it.”

Albuquerque wasn’t a very big town, and if a person wanted to gamble on horses, there was really only one place in town to do it. “The Texan?”

Again he nodded.

“God, I hate that man.” I crunched down on my M&Ms angrily. “So much.”

“Fuck. You do?” He reached into the bag and pulled out a handful. “I’d like to crush up his fucking cheese curls into powder and mace him with it on my way out the door.” He ran his hands up and down my calves. “OK, my turn again. Fill in the blank. There’s a shit-ton of reasons to steal, but you are mostly motivated by . . .”

It was so unexpected, such a sweet mix of straightforward and devious, that I burst out laughing. “I don’t know,” I said, looking up at the ceiling. “I mean, really? One thing?”

He nodded. “Short and sweet.”

Need. Revenge. Putting what was wrong back to right. Helping others. Sticking it to the man. “Justice?”

He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Yeah. I get that.”

“What are you about? One word, fill in the blank.” I tossed an M&M up into the air, and it totally missed my mouth.

He took a second to think it over. “God. I don’t know. Habit, really. I grew up doing it—I never knew much else. So I did what I knew. And kept on doing it.”

“Are you still in the business, or have you given it up?”

That question seemed much more difficult for him to answer. It looked as though he wanted to tell me but didn’t quite know how.

“I guess I want to be done with it all. So fucking badly,” he said, shaking his head. “But like I said, I got debts to pay. If I can pay them honestly, then I’ll do that. But if not . . .” He ran his hand through his hair. “Then I’ll have to figure something else out. What about you? From what Roxie said today, it seems like you guys have something lined up. Or did.”

“It was going to be our last one,” I said. “Part of me still wants to go ahead with it. By myself.”

His expression went from flirtatious to serious in an instant. He turned his head slightly, looking somewhere between skeptical and protective. “Alone? What was the job?”

For the first time, I kind of froze. If I were to do it on my own, I didn’t even have a plan. It wasn’t even for sure. And anyway, if he was trying to get straight, that was the last thing he needed to know.

Wasn’t it?

Before I had to give him an answer, his phone began vibrating on the coffee table.

I’d been saved by the eggrolls. For the moment.





22

NICK

We were on the floor of her living room. On the coffee table was the full spread—enough takeout to last us for days. She sat with her feet tucked underneath her. Each time she undid the flaps on one of the containers and looked inside, she let out an excited little, “Ooh!”

But I wasn’t going to let her distract me. She’d said they were planning one last job, and she was thinking of doing it alone.

Which I didn’t like the sound of. At all.

I knew a thing or two about big jobs. I’d known a guy when I was just starting out, a Bible-thumper with a passion for cheap weed, who had had a theory that every crew did three jobs in their time together. There was the Genesis Job, which a crew did when they were first starting out; the Revelation Job, which made a crew realize what they were really good at; and the Exodus Job, the last one before a crew got the fuck out of the business for good. Or . . . got thrown in jail.

The Shimmy Shimmy Bangs’ Exodus job wasn’t going to be some princess-cut, two-carat platinum engagement ring taken from a jeweler on Central. It’d be big. It’d be gutsy. And thanks to that brochure that the Texan had tried to use on me as bait, I suspected I might know exactly what it was already.

I waited until she was deep into her orange chicken before I asked—it would give her no time to prepare, and if her mouth dropped open . . . that’d be my sign.

As she put a piece of chicken in her mouth, I sprang it on her. “It’s the North Star. Isn’t it?”

Her mouth did drop open, and a piece of broccoli fell from her fork onto the carpet. She gave me five quick blinks. She plucked the broccoli off the rug and busied herself with her napkin. There was the blush. I had my answer. “Could I . . . have . . . some soy sauce?” she said.

I shook my head and moved the packets away from her, like I was moving chips on a poker table. “Tell me. What are you planning?”

She tried to snag one of the little packets, but I was quicker on the draw.

She bit her lip and flared her nostrils. “Pass. Next question.”

That was fire on the flames. “The North Star, alone? You don’t get to pass on that one.”

Now she tried to grab the mu shu pancakes, but I grabbed those too and stashed them between me and the sofa.

She was looking pretty indignant. A little fire in those eyes. I liked it. A whole lot. “Here’s how I see it. You had a plan, and probably a good one. But now you’re two partners down and still planning to do the job?”

“That would be bananas.”

I slid the soy sauce back toward her and put the pancakes on top. “So that’s it, isn’t it?”