The Heist (2 page)

She eased open the door to the operating room and found a fully decked out surgical suite that took its design cues from an Apple Store. Everything was sleek and white. All the equipment gleamed like new cars on a showroom floor.

She closed the door and peeked into the post-op room. There was the standard hospital bed, the IV stand, and the usual monitoring devices, but the similarities to any other hospital room ended there. The room was luxuriously appointed with fancy French furniture, ornate shelves filled with leather-bound books, a flat-screen TV, and a wet bar stocked with assorted spirits.

He’s smart, she thought. Posing as an asbestos removal company was the perfect cover for Nick’s scam. It ensured that everyone at the hospital kept their distance from the old building while Nick and his crew were actually creating an elaborate set and staging their con.

Finally, she went to the pre-op room. The door opened onto a long ward with an abandoned nurses station and several curtained-off areas behind it. She stepped inside and cautiously slid open the first curtain. An unconscious middle-aged man in a hospital gown was stretched out on a gurney and hooked up to an IV drip. Kate checked his pulse. It was strong.

She made her way through the ward, yanking open curtains as she passed. All six of the men who’d come in that day from the airport were there, each of them sound asleep and, she assumed, a million dollars poorer.

The windows in the building vibrated, and she heard the unmistakable
thwap-thwap-thwap
of helicopter blades above her. Nick Fox was on the roof, she thought.
Again!

She ran out of the room and to the stairwell, climbing the four flights as fast as she could, which was remarkably speedy for a woman whose most frequent dinner companions were Colonel Sanders, Long John Silver, Ronald McDonald, and the Five Guys.

Kate burst onto the roof ready to fire and saw a blue Las Vegas Aerial Tours chopper on the helipad, its side door open, several “doctors” and “nurses” inside.

Nick Fox was not among them. He stood casually midway between her and the helicopter with his hands in his pockets, the wind created by the chopper blades whipping at his hair and flaring his white lab coat like a superhero’s cape.

Kate had created the man of her dreams when she was twelve,
and she’d hung on to the image. The dream man had soft brown hair, intelligent brown eyes, and a boyish grin. He was six feet tall with a slim agile body. He was smart and sexy and playful. So it was with terrible irony that over the course of the last couple years it dawned on Kate that Nick Fox was the living embodiment of her dream man.

“Dr. Scholl?” Kate yelled over the chopper noise. “Really?”

“It’s a very respected name in medicine,” Nick yelled back. “Glad to see you’re wearing sensible shoes.”

Nick knew she always wore Dr. Scholl’s gels in her black Nikes. It was one of the many things he’d learned about her over the last couple years. Most of what he’d learned intrigued him. Some of it was downright scary. The scary part was offset by a physical attraction to her that he couldn’t explain.

Her brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and her flawless skin had a slight sheen from her dash across the parking lot and up the stairs. Sexy, but he suspected the fantasy the sheen inspired was better than the reality. She was the job. Probably wore Kevlar to bed. End of story. Still, he did enjoy playing with her. He liked her big blue eyes, cute little nose, slim athletic body, and her earnest dedication to making the world a more law-abiding place. It made his dedication to crime much more interesting.

“You’re under arrest,” she shouted.

“How do you figure that?”

“Because I’ve got my gun on you, and I’m a great shot.” She took a step toward him.

He took a step back. “I’m sure you are, but you’re not going to shoot me.”

“Frankly, I’m surprised I haven’t shot you already.” She took another step toward him.

“Still upset about those Toblerones?” He took another step back.

“Take one more step, and I’ll put you down.”

“You can’t,” he said.

“I can shoot the testicles off an eagle from a hundred yards.”

“Eagles don’t have testicles.”

“I may suck when it comes to metaphors, but my aim is excellent.”

“You can’t shoot me because I am unarmed and not presenting any threat of physical harm.”

“I can shoot the helicopter.”

“And risk it crashing into a hospital full of children? I don’t think so.”

“The hospital isn’t full of children.”

“You’re missing the point.” He stole a glance down at the parking lot to see scores of FBI agents rushing toward the building and then looked back at her to see she’d advanced two steps closer. “It was really good seeing you again, Kate.”

“It’s Special Agent O’Hare to you,” she said. “And you’re not going anywhere.”

He smiled and bolted for the chopper.

“Damn!” She holstered her gun and charged after him.

Even after racing up four flights of stairs she was still faster than he was, and she took a lot of pleasure in that. She was quickly closing the distance between them, and she was pretty certain that she’d get her hands on him before he could climb inside the chopper.

Apparently the pilot and Nick’s crew shared her optimism, because the chopper suddenly lifted up and out over the edge of the building, leaving their ringleader behind. Nick picked up
speed and kept running as if the rooftop extended another hundred yards instead of just a few more feet.

With mounting horror, Kate realized what he intended to do. He was going to jump. And this time, he didn’t have a parachute.

“Don’t!” she yelled, launching herself at him, hoping to take him down with a flying tackle before he could make a suicidal mistake. Too late. She missed him by inches, and hit the concrete hard just as Nick leapt off the building toward the hovering chopper. Her heart stopped for a couple beats while he was in midair, and resumed beating when he latched on to the helicopter’s landing skid. He held on with one hand, blew her a kiss, and the chopper veered off toward the Las Vegas Strip.

Within seconds of his escape, Kate was on the radio, trying to get a police chopper into the air and patrol cars on the ground to chase Nick’s helicopter. Kate knew it was a waste of time and effort, but she went through the motions anyway.

There were half a dozen identical Las Vegas Aerial Tours choppers in the airspace above the Strip, and even though only one of them had a man hanging from a landing skid, by the time she got the word out Nick’s helicopter had disappeared. It didn’t help that in all the excitement, she’d failed to note the chopper’s tail number and had nothing to give to air traffic controllers so they could track its transponder. Not that it would have mattered. The helicopter wasn’t actually part of the tour company’s fleet. It had just been painted to appear as if it was.

Kate sped straight from the hospital back to the room she’d booked at Circus Circus, the least expensive hotel on the Strip. She approached her door quietly, one hand on her holstered gun. She slipped her key card into the lock and slowly eased open the door,
hoping Nick Fox had been arrogant enough to pull the same stunt twice, hoping to catch him in the act.

No such luck. The room was empty and smelled like a freshly chlorinated swimming pool. She sat down on the edge of the bed and sighed. Not her best day. And she knew she’d catch a lot of crap for letting Nick get away instead of finding an excuse to shoot him. She certainly had plenty of them, the latest one being the picture of “Dr. Eunice Huffnagle” that she’d managed to snatch off the wall before anyone noticed it.

Kate stared glumly at her reflection in the mirror and started to take off her Kevlar vest. And that’s when she noticed it. She didn’t believe it at first, and had to look over her shoulder to confirm it, but there it was: a Toblerone bar on her pillow.

When the average person accumulates more stuff than he can fit into his house, he’ll haul everything to a rented cinder-block storage unit, stick a cheap padlock on the roll-up door, and immediately start buying more junk. If you’re someone as old and rich as Roland Larsen Kibbee, you build a museum for it all, carve your name in marble out front, and charge admission so everybody can admire your stuff and, by extension, you.

Not only does opening a museum free up some room in your mansion, it has the added benefit of being a great status symbol, one that’s hard to top even in an age when billionaires are launching rockets into space. Roland’s collection of paintings, sculptures, and jewelry was acquired with the fortune he’d earned snatching up distressed California farms, kicking the owners off their properties, and harvesting their crops using the cheapest labor
possible, thus becoming one of the state’s largest employers of illegal immigrants and a pillar of Mexico’s economy.

Of course he didn’t build his museum in Mexico. He established the Roland Larsen Kibbee Art Collection in San Francisco, in a massive Pacific Heights mansion, modeled after a French château.

Roland’s business practices clashed with the liberal ideals of his twenty-six-year-old curator Clarissa Hart, but her master’s degree in fine arts wasn’t getting her any work, she had $97,000 in student loans to pay off, and if she had to live another day with her parents, she’d smother them in their sleep. So she swallowed her ideals and took the paycheck each month from Roland. And while the Kibbee wasn’t the Guggenheim or the Getty, and the artwork, most of it nudes, made Clarissa feel like she was a hostess at the Playboy Mansion, she took solace in the fact that she was still a museum curator.

The collection of paintings and objets d’art was displayed in hallways and intimate salons to make the visitors feel as if they were guests in Roland’s home, though the eighty-five-year-old agribusiness magnate had never lived there. He lived in Palm Beach, Florida, with a twenty-two-year-old stripper named LaRhonda who was waiting for him to die. After he breathed his last agonizing breath she hoped to get her hands on the Crimson Teardrop, a rare two-carat red diamond that was his latest acquisition.

The Teardrop was also the Kibbee’s best shot at wide recognition, and in anticipation of the Crimson Teardrop’s opening-night display, the marble floors were being polished, the paneling was being restained, and the leather couches and armchairs were being replaced with new models. Clarissa was playing tour guide to SFPD Inspector Norman Peterson, who’d shown up to talk with
her about traffic control during the exhibition and to make sure the museum had taken adequate security measures to protect the diamond.

“I’ve driven by this place a thousand times and never noticed there was a museum here,” Peterson said, rubbing a mustache that looked like a very large caterpillar taking a nap under his bulbous nose.

He wore his badge on a lanyard around his neck in what Clarissa assumed was an unsuccessful attempt to cover his big belly and the mustard stain on his tie. She placed him in his mid-thirties, though he wouldn’t see forty if he didn’t change his eating habits.

She was right about the age, but wrong about everything else. Inspector Peterson was actually Nick Fox, padded to look fat, his face disguised by layers of expertly applied prosthetics and makeup.

“We’re a boutique museum,” Clarissa said as they made their way around the crew that was putting the new furniture into place.

“What’s that mean?”

She could have said that it meant they were smaller, more intimate, and more carefully curated than larger museums, but something about him, and his absolute lack of pretension, changed her mind.

“It means that people drive by this place a thousand times and never notice us.”

“That’s a shame, because you’ve got some good stuff here.” Nick stopped to look at a life-size five-hundred-year-old marble statue of a naked woman sitting on a tree stump and clutching her left breast. “You’d think she’d have brought a pillow or a blanket to sit on.”

“She was beyond those kinds of concerns.”

“Nobody wants to get a splinter in their butt. Who was she?”

“Aphrodite,” Clarissa said.

“Don’t know her,” Nick said. “But keep in mind, you’re talking to a guy who walks through the Wax Museum on Fisherman’s Wharf and doesn’t recognize half of the supposedly famous people on display.”

Clarissa gave him a look, just to check if he was teasing her, and decided that his remark was genuine. She’d never visited the Wax Museum but knew they probably got more visitors in a day than the Kibbee got in a month.

“She’s the Greek goddess of love, Inspector. Her origin story is interesting. The young and envious Titan Cronus wanted to dethrone his father, Uranus, ruler of the universe. So Cronus cut off his father’s genitals with a scythe, threw them into the ocean, and Aphrodite rose up out of the frothy waves.”

“And she symbolizes love?” Nick said. “That’s brutal.”

“You could say that’s the theme behind every piece in the Kibbee collection,” she said, though she doubted there was any theme at all to Roland’s collecting of artwork, or wives, besides an obvious breast fixation. “The dark side of love. That’s also the allure of the Crimson Teardrop.”