Matt lumped stacks of thick bound notes onto the green moss of the pool table. Because they were mixed and used, they were crumpled and sized differently. He shoved four each toward Ben, Engo, and Jake. Light poured in from the ground-level windows looking out across the deck toward the pool area. Only twenty feet away, Matt’s daughters sunbathed while their father split his crew’s takings.
“It’s a hundred k each, after the fees.”
Nobody said anything, because Jake needed whatever he could get to stop the loan sharks from slashing his Achilles tendons, and a hundred grand would keep Engo deep in hooker pussy and moonshine until the next job, and Ben was wearing a fucking wire. There was a bit more than a hundred left stacked in the bag Matt drew the funds from, and Ben assumed the fence had already taken his cut. Then there was the laundry man, and whoever Matt had needed to pay not to look too closely at how both fires started in the fabric store.
“Half the nation’s chiffon supply went up in flames so you could waste that money, gentlemen, so be wise.” Matt zipped up the bag. “Try to hold on to it through the weekend, Jake.”
“What in the hell is chiffon?” Engo squinted.
“It’s a fabric, dumbass.”
“And how do you know that?”
“I got one daughter through prom already and two more on the way.” Matt jerked a thumb toward the windows. “How do you think?”
“I also know what chiffon is.” Jake shrugged.
“What? How?”
“Project Runway.”
Ben raised a hand.
“What! You’re fuckin’ with me,” Engo balked. “You too?”
“I surprised a woman with a dress once,” Ben confessed. “Put it on the bed before we went out. Left a note. Like they do in the movies.”
Engo sighed. “Surrounded by fuckin’ homos here.”
“Did it work?” Jake asked. “The dress thing.”
“Oh, it worked all right.”
“Enough. We need to talk,” Matt said.
“About the new job?” The hope in Jake’s voice was unmistakable, even though he was still counting his take.
“No. First things first.” Matt pointed the Finger at Ben’s chest, right at the button cam, which made his balls shrivel up into hard little pellets. “We all know the story about you getting jumped by a bunch of pricks over in East Orange is bullshit. You’re not an idiot. You’d see a crew of stickup punks coming a mile away.”
Ben said nothing.
“Luna’s brother-in-law’s gone legit. He just bought into a bar there.” Matt widened his eyes, waiting, daring Ben to try to hold out. Engo had his thumbs in his suspenders, was looking down his nose at Ben like he was some TV sleuth, like Sherlock Holmes or whoever would be caught dead in suspenders stained with cocktail sauce and tan shorts.
“I had no idea about the bar,” Ben conceded. “Neither did she. We just got unlucky that it was Edgar’s place. Seriously unlucky.”
“There’s a lot of bad luck going on in this relationship,” Engo mused. “Anybody would think you’re trying to do your best impression of Jake at the greyhounds.”
“She’s just a black cloud,” Jake said, calling on the old firefighter metaphor about people being white or black clouds. Attractants or repellents for bad luck and big fires. He was still counting his money. “Not me. I just won ten k at the greyhounds last week.”
“So Edgar and his people spotted you in the bar,” Matt said. “Took you out the back and rolled you?”
“He was pissed to see me out with someone else so soon. He figures I must have had something to do with Luna and Gabe going missing.” Ben let his shoulders slump, tried to look helpless. “So either he had nothing to do with her going missing, or it was a hell of an act.”
“How did he know you and Andy were together, though?” Engo said. “Why couldn’t you have just been work buddies?” He didn’t let Ben answer. “See. You two were all over each other in that bar. I knew it. More lies, Matt.”
“Is that true?” Matt asked Ben. “Are you two still on? Because not ten minutes ago she stopped me upstairs and said—”
“We’re not on.” Ben glared at Engo. He knew Engo was taking the piss, but he felt real danger coming off Matt; pulsing waves of heat. He needed to act. But it felt like his face was moving of its own volition, not backing up what he was saying. He couldn’t keep his hands still. He hoped to pass it off as nerves as his crew members grilled him.
As close to the truth as possible.
“Ben—”
“I like her, okay?” Ben focused on Matt. “She’s hardcore. Tough. She’s been through some shit in her life. I could tell that about her, even that first night, when we basically didn’t talk at all. But last night at the bar, before Edgar spotted us; she told me some things. Like what happened in San Diego.”
“What happened in San Diego?” Jake asked.
“Shut up,” Matt snapped. “He’s not done.”
“I think Andy’s really cool.” Ben shrugged. “And she needs a break right now. So we talked about it and we figured maybe, you know, down the road … she could transfer to another station. Quietly, so it doesn’t look like she got the boot. And then maybe, after that…”
“You could be together.”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“This is so romantic.” Engo tried to put his hands over Jake’s ears. “Stop, Benji, you’re gonna make Jake cry.”
“I don’t even know if it’ll pan out,” Ben said. “We just know we’re holding off for now, like we said we would. That’s the truth. I don’t know what Edgar picked up between us. But we’re holding off.”
“What does she think happened?” Matt asked. “To Luna and Gabe?”
“She thinks the same thing as me,” Ben said. “Nothing. No fucking idea.”
Engo squinted. “Are you telling me this whole situation isn’t a giant turnoff for her? Jake said that Luna and Gabe’s stuff is still in your apartment.”
“I sold it like Luna walked out on me.”
“What do you mean, you ‘sold’ it to her like that?” Matt took one of those heavyweight boxer’s half steps toward Ben, which put him within swinging distance. Ben’s throat felt tight. “That’s what happened.”
Ben said nothing.
“I’ve always had other theories,” Engo said. He snapped his suspenders, deducing. “Could be she’s in witness protection. She got wind of this thing we’re doing, and she’s in a safe house somewhere. And the cops are about to come down on us like a ton of bricks.”
“Do you think that’s possible?” Jake looked pale.
“Look.” Matt was trying to keep it cool, but his teeth were flashing a little too much between his lips. “We can’t be in a situation here where you don’t trust us, Benji, and we don’t trust you.”
“I know that.”
“We can’t have you lying to us,” Matt said. “No lies. Not even about something as trivial as whose puss you’re in.”
Matt reached out and poked Ben hard in the chest. The Finger of Death, just an inch to the right of the button cam. Ben concentrated on staying upright. He could think of nothing else. When the big guy backed off it was like someone had taken a boot off his sternum.
“All right. Agenda item number two,” Matt said. “The next job. Hold on to your helmets, gentlemen. This is a big one.”
Andy appeared beside Ben as he stood at the edge of the pool, just beyond the huddle of men at the barbecue. He was watching Matt and Engo argue over when to flip the steaks. The flames danced gold on their shiny red faces, happy demons searing blooded flesh. The sun had started going down. Ben was holding on to his drink like it was a life buoy and chasing one long breath with another. The moment in the cellar, when he’d hung back and slipped the GPS tracker into a pocket on the side of Matt’s black duffel bag, played over and over in his brain. Because that was it, now. He’d completed his first assignment in his bargain with the devil. If Matt found that tracker before, or during, or after he’d taken the bag wherever he was going to take it, he’d know someone in his crew was a rat. Ben felt sickened by the cleverness of it, the skill and experience it had taken Andy to know to give him the tracker before he went down to the cellar. The bag would go to a couple of meetings with Matt’s people, revealing who they were to Andy and her people, and then it would presumably go to where Matt kept his stash, thereby revealing and closing off his runaway route.
Ben wondered where in his own life Andy had placed trackers, because surely she had. To look at her now, standing beside him with her sexy linen thing hanging off her unscarred shoulder and her hair loose and falling down, a little tipsy, or so it seemed, from the white-wine deep’n’meaningful session with Donna—she fit perfectly into the scene. A chameleon. All her wicked plans were coming to fruition.
Ben asked himself who the real devil at the barbecue was.
“Enjoy your little meeting of the gentlemen’s club?” Andy asked him. “Anything I need to know?”
“You can watch the tape,” Ben said flatly. He’d disconnected the button cam from his shirt and shoved it now into her hand. They passed a look between them, and she covered it with one of those perfect smiles.
“Well, that was fucking stupid.”
“I’m running dry on patience,” Ben said. “You need to get—”
“Smile, would you?”
“No, I’m not gonna fucking smile,” he leaned in and murmured in her ear. “You need to get moving on Luna and Gabriel. All this shit about the heists. You’re wasting your time. If you don’t find them, I won’t cooperate with you. You’ll have us for the jewelry store, and that’s it.”
“It’s all connected, you idiot.” Andy’s smile had turned hard. “I’m working both cases at once here! I’m—”
“You’re too focused on making your case.”
“I have to make my case, or I—”
Donna called Andy. She threw him a look and she wandered away, and Jake came up beside him, said something about her. That she was cool, or the like. Ben didn’t hear it, didn’t take it in, because his ears were throbbing, the pressure of the secrets forcing their way upward from the bottom of his belly. He’d said what he said next before he even realized it. It was up, and out of him, and in the air, uncatchable, before he could stop himself.
“She’s not who she says she is,” Ben said.
The two men looked at each other. Jake confused. Ben stricken, stiff. The smell of seared steak burned suddenly in Ben’s nostrils and he thought for a moment of all the charred bodies he’d seen in his career, the way people curled up like spiders or burst open down the middle like overcooked hot dogs.
“Are you lookin’ at my daughters, Jake?” Matt asked.
The chief was standing by the younger man, a plate of meat resting on his palm. Jake looked up, then back the way he’d been staring—toward the poolside where Matt’s daughters were lounging in the last of the sun. House cats on a stoop.
“What?”
“You heard me. Were you checking out my daughters just now?”
“Wha— I— No, Matt. No. Absolutely not.”
“‘Absolutely not’?”
“No way.”
“Why?” Matt cocked his head. “You don’t find them attractive?”
Jake’s mouth opened and closed. He looked at Matt’s daughters. Tore his eyes away. Shielded them with his hand. There was nowhere safe to look.
“You’re trying to tell me my daughters aren’t hot enough for you?”
“Matt, lay off the kid, huh?” Ben said.
“My own daughters? You would ‘absolutely not’ check them out? ‘No way’? They’re that hideous?”
“Matt.”
“Jake, answer the fucking question,” Matt said.
“They’re beautiful.” Jake’s voice was gravelly, forced through a shrinking windpipe. “Really beautiful.”
“How would you know that unless you’d been checking them out?”
“I-I-I just— I just— I just—”
Matt’s face broke into a grin. He wrapped his free arm around Jake’s neck, crushed the probie against his chest and kissed him on the top of the head. “Jakey, I’m just fucking with you. Get a grip, would ya?”
Matt released Jake and drifted away to where Donna and Andy were setting the outdoor table. The probie put his hand out in front of himself, the fingers spread wide. Ben could see the hand was trembling hard.