Someone To Steal (2 page)

Hey, he LIKED that.

Course he did. I’d like to eat a whole bag of Oreos, too, but it’s not a good idea.

You on business?

Nah. Vacation. See you next week.

Have fun. Find a guy. See if he has a brother for me?

Good night. It’s 3AM here!

Oh. It’s five here. Sorry.

Since she was awake anyway, she checked the webcam to see that Tico was already up and tormenting his stuffed toy mouse. Then she put on her running gear and went down to the gym. After a few trips up the rock wall, she dragged a mat out onto the floor and kicked up into a handstand. She used the yoga floor to do a few flips, a one-handed cartwheel, and a short run of back handsprings. She finished with an aerial backflip, landing straight and throwing her arms up with a flourish as she used to do in competition. To her surprise, the sound of someone clapping heralded the end of her routine. Whipping her head around suspiciously, she saw a man standing on a treadmill, a look of amusement on his face.

He wasn’t tall but he was powerful, compact, with the appearance of coiled energy about him. He was older, probably thirty-five or so, with dark hair starting to go to gray at the temples and a closely trimmed beard. He looked European and arrogant. Riley nodded to him and went to an elliptical trainer for something to do, to look busy. She was a little embarrassed that he’d been watching her.

The man turned on his treadmill at a steep incline and set off at a strong pace. Riley tried to ignore him and increased the resistance on her own workout to draw her focus. Despite her resolution to control her breathing, she kept stealing glances at the man, watching the extension of his muscular legs, the barest pump of his arms revealing corded lean muscle, his spare, efficient stride. Watching him run was like finding diamonds, she thought, startled by the idea. He was the first thing besides jewelry that she’d looked at covetously in a very long time.

I want to steal him
, she thought, and an uncharacteristic giggle escaped her lips. She stifled it, returned to her machine and checked her pulse with the sensor, finding it erratic and too high.

After a while, she was ready to quit, but he was still on the treadmill. A competitive spark kindled in her mind and she decided she wasn’t going to quit first. Admittedly, she’d eaten part of that sub sandwich the night before. White carbs always slowed her down, but she could overcome the sluggishness. She unzipped her hoodie and dropped it to the floor, needing cool air on her arms and chest to keep going. She glanced at him. He was smirking at her, taking in the line of her lithe arms and bare shoulders. She felt his gaze on her like a touch, and her nipples hardened inside her sports bra.

Her breath came a little harder, a little shorter as she pushed herself. Her glimpse toward him made her gasp a little as he peeled off his shirt midstride. His lean, hard torso had a narrow pale scar down the right side. She felt the overwhelming urge to run her tongue along the smooth, corded length of it. The pant of exertion had a palpably sexual feel as she pressed on, trying to keep her eyes trained on the wall ahead of her, trying not to look back over her shoulder at him. Her eyes flicked to the side and she glimpsed his reflection in a mirror, a trailing bead of sweat glistening between his shoulder blades.

With sweat dripping in her eyes, Riley decided she was being stupid and slowed her machine, unwilling to admit she’d had her ass kicked by an old guy with a scar. Instead, she opened a bottle of water and took a long drink. She took a towel from a basket and mopped her face and neck, bending to retrieve her hoodie.

“Good run,” he said easily, dark eyes sparkling with mirth. His voice was low and stirred something in her chest that she couldn’t name.

She nodded, not saying a word, and went to take a shower. A very cold one.

Even in the shower, her eyes shut against the stream of water pouring down her face, she kept seeing that scar, wanting to touch it, to feel the bunched muscles of his back under her palms. Before she knew it, Riley was pressing her fingers between her legs eagerly, thinking of his stride, his arrogance, his ironic gaze. By five in the morning, she was back asleep, dreaming maddeningly of the bearded man on the treadmill.

Later in the morning, Riley finished her paperback by the pool and slipped in for a quick dip. She swam a few laps freestyle, moving easily through the bright water, and made her way to the swim-up bar. Sipping a melon daiquiri, she smiled when she saw the guy from the gym. Cooled by the swim and emboldened by the rum, she approached him.

“Finished with your workout?”

“Drinking at nine a.m.?”

“It’s called a vacation. Want a sip?”

“I’ll pass. I’m not a fan of sweet things.”

“Your loss,” she said with a shrug, catching the straw in her mouth and taking a long draw of sweet melon goodness. “I’m Riley,” she added. “Business or pleasure?”

“I’m just here on business.”

“Pharmaceutical convention?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Heath Long.” He held out his hand and she took it, feeling sparks dance along the length of her arm at his merest touch.

“Good to meet you, Heath. How long have you been running?”

“Long enough,” he said dismissively. “Have a good—drink.”

He gave her a crooked grin and slid into a backstroke to the other end of the pool. Riley frowned and drank her drink. The first hint of attraction, and the guy swam away from her. She grouched to herself as she finished her daiquiri and looked around, spotting a diamond and platinum bracelet that was definitely genuine and had no place near chlorinated pool water. After following it with her eyes for a few minutes, she stretched out on a lounge and napped. Vacation, she had decided, was boring.

Later she went into town, intent on a little souvenir shopping. She preferred to steal her jewelry, but she was happy enough to find a belt or sun hat to take home. As she contemplated a big round basket at the outdoor straw market, Riley caught sight of the enigmatic Heath Long again. Not in the crush of browsers seeking a bargain on a shell necklace made in China, he was watching the port with binoculars.

Fussing with her hair a little, poking frizzed pieces back into her ponytail, Riley dropped her basket and wove through the crowd toward him. He had a rucksack. It seemed odd, seeing a man his age with a backpack looped over one shoulder. It made him look professorial, and, like everything else about him, it intrigued Riley.

She offered him a bottle of water from her tote bag. Glancing at her in surprise, he accepted it and continued to gaze at the harbor for a minute before tucking his binoculars into the backpack.

“Looks like six cruise ships in and another two on their way. I’m going to see the church. Want to come?”

Riley nodded, ready to follow him. They wound their way out of the tourist area and into a stately residential neighborhood. He stopped in front of a tall peach house, narrowed his eyes, and then turned to her.

“Must’ve got turned around. I’m not used to the way these streets are laid out.” He turned around and headed back the way they’d come as she tapped at her phone screen, pulling up a map to the church.

“Yeah, we went the wrong way. I wonder why I followed you?” she teased. “Because you’re my elder?”

“Must be my smooth sense of self-assurance.”

“Nah. That’s not it. Here, go right,” she said, leading the way back toward the harbor. “Anyway, Mr. Self-Assurance, you got us lost.”

After a couple of blocks, they came to the old church. Riley snapped a few pics with her phone.

“Want me to take one of you in front of the church? I can text it to you,” she offered. He shook his head.

“Thanks, but I’m not much in the market for pictures of myself.”

Riley ducked inside the church to sign the registry and see the relics. When she emerged from the dim, stuffy interior, Heath was nowhere to be found. She hung around for a few minutes, looked down an alley, but he was gone. She’d been ditched.

That was absolutely, positively it for her patience with this man. He had blown her off at the pool bar, and he’d walked off and left her alone at a tourist spot. Enough. She wandered back to the straw market and bought a red woven shawl and stole two more pairs of diamond studs off tourists who were bargaining rudely with the artisans. Even a bit of petty theft couldn’t take the edge off her disappointment.

Back at the resort, she sat in her room doing some transcriptions, thankful for free Wi-Fi and air conditioning. She went for a run on the beach and bought a magazine to read by the pool. After it failed to keep her attention, she tossed the publication aside and went back upstairs to work. In fact, she was still transcribing a medical history when she got another text; this time from Danny, her fence.

You in Costa Rica?

Yeah. Why?
she replied.

Did you pull the hit on the Modigliani? I want in. I got contacts in art.

What?

Famous sculpture missing from some rich guy’s vacation home. It just arrived yesterday. Guess it wasn’t you.

Nope. Not me. I’m not into hauling around big statues. Too hard to hide. Thx for giving me credit, tho.

She searched Modigliani online and found the headline. Pictured above the article was an image of the piece, an elongated and stark mask. Beside it was a photo of the peach house she and Heath had stopped at when they took a wrong turn on the way to visit the church.

Staring at it hard, she wondered for just a moment if Heath had been watching the harbor for the departure of the ship that had delivered that sculpture. Puzzled and somewhat affronted, she read everything she could find on the sculpture, the artist, and even the industrialist who’d bought the statue at auction recently by phone.

She kept thinking back to Heath’s seeming sudden realization that they were on the wrong street, the way he’d narrowed his eyes at the peach house, had looked back over his shoulder at the structure as they walked away. He hadn’t wanted her to take his picture at the church...maybe he didn’t want any proof that he’d been in the country. She called the front desk and asked to speak to Mr. Long.

“We have no registered guests by that name, ma’am,” the clerk told her.

“Heath Long? No one? Did he maybe check out already?” she inquired.

“No, ma’am. We have had no one by that name.” The clerk assured her. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

“No, thank you.”

That bearded bastard had fake-named her. Frustrated, she tried to remember anything that might have given an indication of his real name. No, he had responded readily to ‘Heath’ and gave no information about himself apart from allegedly being in Costa Rica on business, which was a term that covered a multitude of sins.

Riley returned home, reclaiming Tico, who rejected her affectionate reunion emphatically. Winning him back steadily with a regime of belly rubs and salmon, she watched the news to see if anyone had been caught and perhaps hanged for snitching the Modigliani in Costa Rica. There were no developments highlighted in that case, but there was a flurry of excitement in Atlanta around an upcoming auction.

The late Oscar-winning actress Sheila Graves had stipulated in her will that her legendary collection of gems must be auctioned off in her hometown of Atlanta. Various gowns and other memorabilia were on display at the chosen auction house, but the jewels were the real star of the show.

She’d seen Graves’ famous performance in the gangster film when she was only eight. She been entranced by the glamor and sadness of that actress, with her limpid blue eyes and diamante headband. She had learned a lot from that movie—mainly that mob affiliations were a sure ticket to ruination and early death, but that the wardrobe and jewelry were fabulous while they lasted. She had dressed up as a flapper for Halloween two years in a row growing up because she wanted to be Sheila Graves. Not the doomed mob moll from the film, but Graves herself.

Looking up the auction catalog online, she discovered that
the
earrings were featured. Those diamond Deco fans that Sheila wore during her much-photographed alcoholic meltdown on the set of the flapper film. If there had been an ‘add to cart’ button on-screen, Riley would have tapped it. She had picked out her next conquest. She wouldn’t fence these. They had sentimental value. She’d clip them on while mopping the floor every week, enjoying their sparkle and specialness. Grinning, she clicked through all the auction information online. There was an external link to an upcoming magazine feature on the collection. When Riley selected it, there he was.

Cain Booth. Art dealer.

The lead had a picture of Sheila Graves accepting her Oscar. A beauty shot of an amethyst necklace she had famously been given by one of her many lovers. A close-up of her executor, one Mr. Booth of Atlanta. The quote they had pulled read, “
An old family friend of Graves, Cain Booth has set up this auction as a labor of love. ‘It’s really a tribute to everything she’s meant to this country as an entertainer and a collector of beautiful jewels,’ Booth says.”

Instead of storing the collection at the auction house, the Graves heirs had entrusted Mr. Booth personally to see to its safety. He name-dropped the cutting edge brand of his motion detectors and infrared cameras and unbreakable codes smugly. She glared at his photo, taking in the trimmed beard, the threads of silver in his hair, the seemingly cheerful crinkles at the corners of his dark eyes that didn’t quite manage to hide their feral intelligence. Riley scribbled notes on a scrap of paper, systems to look up and learn to conquer.

She had a week until the auction, and she’d have the earrings in her possession before the event. She was tempted to go to the auction itself afterward, since it was set to open with a showing of the flapper movie from its original film reels, followed by a twenties-style soiree. It sounded like a hell of a shindig, but she’d skip it and take the Art Deco diamond earrings instead.

It would be a most profound pleasure to relieve the haughty and deceitful Cain Booth of the care of one of his precious charges. His boasts of how impenetrable his penthouse was made her itch to circumvent those measures to stroll in and take the diamonds. He might be able to outrun her in the gym, outsmart her in the streets, but there was no better cat burglar than Riley. She knew that with research and practice, she could defeat the system, defeat the man who’d rejected her, and get something pretty she wanted in the process. It was the very definition of win-win, to her mind. She only wished there were some way she could rub his face in it. Riley herself, that girl from Costa Rica he couldn’t even bother to have a fling with, would steal his treasure.

He lived on the top floor of a renovated historic building. She found sample floor plans on the building’s web site and used photos taken of the interior of his penthouse for the magazine feature to construct a map. Reading up on Coritech Security Solutions, she found diagrams and video of how the system itself worked. It was state-of-the-art and the marketing department evidently liked to show it off, providing her with extensive online footage.

There was also a Japanese youth who had tried various antics with his parents’ new Coritech residential system to see what would set it off. Video surveillance, motion, thermal and pressure detectors, intrusion alarms, glass break sensors—Booth’s place was better protected than the US Mint, as far as Riley could tell. He had no safe or vault, as he’d remarked in the article, because he had no need of such a measure. Works of art, he said, were created to be seen and enjoyed, not locked away.

She chose moisture-wicking clothes, her lightest running shoes, her tiniest tools, and the sensor glove for the job. She had watched the demonstration videos of the Coritech system so many times she could quote the narration. She ordered a small thermal sensor and tested it repeatedly until she figured out how cool her body temperature would have to be to avoid triggering the sensors with her heat. She planned to stand on the roof of his building, cooling her core temp just enough to pass, since the sensor was only on the front door. She packed freezable ice packs to put on her neck and under her arms.

Pressure-wise, she had sufficient acrobatic experience to vault herself onto furniture. The Japanese boy’s attention-seeking shenanigans provided her with the information that the system has a slight vulnerability in detecting very fast movements. Normal walking pace or even a jog triggered intrusion alarms, but a sprint or handspring might be quick enough to elude the tracking.

Riley decided to enact her plan the night that Graves was being honored with a street naming and reception at City Hall, two days prior to the auction. Surely the actress’s executor and esteemed family friend would attend such an event and leave his apartment complacently vacant for a few hours. It would be undisturbed upon his return, apart from the negligible absence a pair of fan-shaped baubles.

Her planning, interrupted only by Tico and transcriptions, swallowed the time until the big night. Refreshing the cat’s water and food, she turned on the local news for a live view of the red carpet at City Hall. She didn’t see Booth, but he might have already arrived. Riley left the TV on for Tico, checked the Crock-Pot, determined that she had about ninety minutes before her taco soup was done, and took off at a sprint.

The Andrews Entertainment District was starting to heat up as she sped by. Crowds of barely-clad girls already strained at velvet ropes to angle for admission to the dance clubs. she stopped across the street from his building and went around back, making her way up fire escapes. Riley swung herself up onto the roof where the wind was fierce, and cooling her heated skin.

She picked the lock of the service entrance neatly and walked down, dropping her ice packs in a polished brass wastebasket. Her sensor gloves helped her find the key code for his elaborate lock, and then she was inside the sanctum.

It was a baroque palace, all cream and gold, softly lit by tall lamps flanking the window with its skyline view. Rising up on the balls of her feet, Riley propelled herself into the air and landed solidly on the velvet sofa. Scanning the room, her eyes fell on the intricately carved rosewood box, which sat on a glass table along the far wall. She stood and walked the back rim of the sofa like a tightrope, vaulting across to a chair, nearly knocking it over with the force of her landing. The chair legs wrought a squeak against the wooden floor. She winced, but no alarm was forthcoming. She judged the glass table too fragile to support her weight. She came down off the chair with a swift flip, landing in the splits, distributing her slight weight along the floor as evenly as she could before scissoring into a leap and landing on the chair that flanked the table on the opposite side, nearest the box.

Standing on the chair, she examined the box with sensor gloves and found it unprotected by electronic sensors or locks. Lifting the lid gingerly, she picked through the shimmering trove until she found the earrings in a velvet bag. Opening the drawstring, she poured the fan-shaped diamond earrings into her open palm and stopped to secure them to her earlobes, just for a moment. Their heaviness and substance amazed her. She tilted her head on one side, trying to catch her reflection in the window before her.

Riley heard him clap, the same cocky, ironic salute he’d given her after the tumbling run in a Costa Rican gym. Then she heard him cock the gun before she even found him with her eyes.

Lurking in a shadowy doorway was Cain Booth in dusky charcoal gray, his hair and eyes darker than the night that seemed to cling to him. The hand that held the revolver was steady, the face mirthless.

“Impressive routine you have there, kid. Too bad it’ll only get you killed.”