Top Secret Twenty-One: A Stephanie Plum Novel(84)

“I’ll pass on that. I’m not crazy about prison ingredients.”

“Neither am I.” He glanced over his shoulder at the twenty-story drop to the ground.

Kate didn’t like what the glance implied. “Don’t do it, Nick.”

“Would you miss me?”

“Yes!”

“How much would you miss me?” he asked her. “A lot?”

“Don’t push it.”

“Admit it, deep down inside you like me. You think I’m cute.”

Kate narrowed her eyes. “Are you going to jump, or what?”

Nick smiled, sent her a little wave, swung his legs over the wall, and disappeared from view.

Kate felt her heart give a painful contraction. “No!” she shouted. “You idiot! I didn’t really want you to jump!”

She crossed the balcony to the wall and peered over at Nick in time to see his customized handheld parachute open. She watched him for a minute as he glided toward the skyscraper canyons of downtown Chicago, ate a meatball that was stuck to her jacket, and then called Gunter. Next in line was a call to Jessup.

“I tried calling you,” Jessup said, “but you weren’t picking up.”

Kate filled him in. “Gunter is coordinating a chase with cooperating local law enforcement,” she said.

“If you need help with follow-up, I can send someone,” Jessup said. “Cosmo, maybe.”

“No! Not Cosmo.”



The FBI, the Chicago Police Department, and the Cook County Sheriff’s Office all put choppers in the air, but they couldn’t find any sign of Nick or his parachute. Kate led a search of the surrounding neighborhood, but she knew it was futile. There was too much ground to cover, and Nick had a head start. So she armed a bunch of agents with copies of The Complete Directory of Episodic Television Shows and sent them off to look for TV characters trying to leave town by planes, trains, or automobiles.

Somehow all of Nick’s crew had managed to slip out of the building, but a third of the golden idols were left behind on the loading dock, so it wasn’t a complete loss. And Kate had the satisfaction of knowing that her instincts had been 100 percent right.

She straggled back to her hotel just as the sun was coming up. She was exhausted, and done with smelling like cocktail meatballs. She wanted to shuck her food-stained clothes, take a hot shower, and wash the spinach dip out of her hair.

She unlocked her door, stepped into the room, and froze. There were Toblerone wrappers on the bed, room service dishes on the table, a bouquet of roses, and an unopened bottle of champagne chilling in a bucket of ice. Her first thought in her sleep-deprived state was that she’d walked into the wrong room. She was about to double-check the number on the door when she realized that a pink handkerchief was tied like a ribbon around the champagne bottle. She’d seen the handkerchief before … in the breast pocket of Nick’s white tuxedo.

Un-freaking-believable, she thought. While she’d been dragging her butt all over town looking for him, the jerk had been in her room ordering room service and raiding her minibar. She had to give credit where credit was due. The man had Volkswagen-size cojones. Really big brass ones.

She drew her gun and looked under the bed, in the closet, and in the bathroom. No Nick. But he’d for sure been there. She sat on her bed and plucked a card off her pillow. In a masculine scrawl she’d come to recognize, Nick Fox had written Looking forward to next time.