Shimmy Bang Sparkle(45)

She lowered her eyes. She ripped open the little packet of sauce and drizzled it on her carton of rice. “The more I tell you, the riskier it is.”

I knew it. But I didn’t play it cocky—I played it calm and careful. “I get that.” And after a few beats, I added, “I don’t want in on your job. I just want to give you a shoulder to lean on.”

When she looked back at me, her eyes were softer. She chewed her new piece of broccoli carefully and thoughtfully as she studied me. I patted my own shoulder, and she gave me a little smile. I left it with her and didn’t say any more. I dished out some orange chicken on my plate and put some fried rice on hers. I topped up her glass of wine, even though she didn’t need it, and I dug into my beef and snow peas.

“Do you know anything about hotel jobs?” she asked. Almost shy, almost tentative.

“How can you be so sweet even when you’re talking about a felony?” I asked.

She snickered and smiled just enough to show off her dimple. “You didn’t answer the question.”

Deserts, strip mall parking lots, shady-ass places like Pony Up—that was what I knew about. Hotels, not so much. But theft was theft. “I know a thing or two about not getting caught.” I raised my eyes to her and waited.

But I could tell from the way her shoulders had begun to lift that she was definitely tightening up on me. So I decided to cut that fucking tension with the oldest trick in the book. “Knock knock,” I said.

She froze with her fork inside her lo mein carton. “We’re doing knock knocks now?”

I nodded, deadpanning her. “Knock knock.”

She rubbed her lips together and shook her head at me, smiling. Like she couldn’t believe this shit.

Believe it, beautiful. “Knock knock,” I said again.

“Who is it?” she asked.

Awww yeah. “Dishes.”

“Dishes who?”

“Dish is the police! Open up!”

Her laugh was enormous, it was joyful, and it filled me with such happiness. Fuck. I clicked my tongue and said, “Ba-dun-tssss. I’ll be here all week.”

She glanced up at me. “All week, huh?”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said, more serious now. “And that’s not a joke. So you can lean on me, or not. I just fucking like you a lot, Stella. That’s all there is to it.”

She lowered her head so she was looking into her lap. Smiling, embarrassed almost. That’s when she set down her takeout carton and wiped her hands on a paper napkin. “All right, you. I’ll show you part of the plan. Close your eyes.”

She was taking a leap of faith, and I wasn’t about to take my eyes off her. So I pretended to close them and watched her through the gap. She got up on her knees and took the puzzle box from the coffee table. She made a series of taps in specific places, and a secret compartment on the bottom popped open. Whatever she was holding, she kept it palmed nice and tight.

“Hold out your hand,” she said. “And close those eyes tight, please.”

I bit back a smile and closed my eyes all the way.

She placed something in my palm that was hard, solid, and about the size of a golf ball. And said, “Open sesame.”



It was an exact replica of the North Star, so precise in every last detail that it even had the identical internal flaw in the center, a hairline fracture no bigger than a few specks of dust.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, turning it over in my hand. It was the right weight, the right clarity, the right everything. “This can’t be plastic.”

“It is,” she said, wide-eyed and smiling. “High density, that’s why it’s so heavy. It’s within one one-thousandth of an ounce of the real thing.”

I had about a million questions. But only one really mattered. “Why? Why this? Why now?”

She took the jewel from me, rotating it in her fingers. “We’ve had our eye on it for years. When we saw it was changing hands, we started talking about it more seriously.” She palmed it and looked at me. “We all have dreams. And we all want a shot at something better. Something safer. Something saner.” Stella scooted across the floor and lay down, with her head in my lap.

I understood that in my bones. “The only dream I really care about is yours,” I said.

She sighed hard. “Me?”

“Yeah. You.”

I felt her shoulders rise and fall under my hands. “It’ll sound silly.”

“Try me.”

Stella let her head fall slightly to the side. “There’s a ranch in Arizona that always belonged to my family until my grandparents had to sell. It’s called the Big Wide Open.” She turned the jewel another quarter turn, and its facets sparkled. “I’d be able to buy it back. Have some horses, a family even.” She sighed. “Silly, right?”

Silly? Fuck no. A dream like that was what kept guys going when they had nothing else. A dream like that was everything. “You know what that is, though . . .”

Stella shook her head. “Crazy?”

It was crazy—it was my kind of crazy. I could almost see her out there, wherever it was. Driving a pickup, wearing boots. Making her way. “That’s the American Dream.”

She laughed a little and looked with shining eyes at the icicle lights. “It is, isn’t it?”