3

THE GUARD DOG

(Nineteen Months Ago)

“We’ve got a problem.” Riker slid into the booth where Jordan and I sat having lunch, the pair of us lingering over expensive coffee and miniature desserts, trying to eke out as much time as we could from a single shot glass of crème brûlée.

The overpriced bistro with metal stools instead of chairs wasn’t an ideal setting for a long-term stakeout—as my butt could attest—but it had one important benefit. The view of the high-rise apartment building across the street was crystal clear. Oz currently stood balanced on a rope-suspended scaffold outside the fourteenth floor, pretending to wash windows as he snapped photos of the interior.

His job was hard; ours was easy. He was in charge of reconnaissance, risking life and limb for a glimpse of the apartment layout. All Jordan and I had to do was create a diversion if anyone in a position of authority happened to notice an out-of-place window washer and decided to call it in.

Diversions have always been my favorite part of the job, even though I rarely get to do them. The secret is to make sure there’s plenty of backstory in place in case someone ends up asking questions they shouldn’t. In this particular instance, I was prepared to run outside and start pulling Jordan’s hair in a catfight over a cheating boyfriend we’d decided to call Manfred. Manfred was a jerk of the highest degree, a verbally abusive manwhore, but he was a football player, so we could hardly be blamed for our infatuation. Women have been known to make silly decisions over that particular brand of athlete.

As I would soon come to learn.

“Is that you, Manfred?” I asked. Riker didn’t look at all like a football player, with his formfitting jeans and cut-glass cheekbones, but we’d been sitting there for two hours and were mightily bored. “How dare you show your face at a time like this? We’re on to your double-timing schemes.”

“I’m serious, Pen. I was just scouting the catering company so I could check up on things, and guess who was there?”

“Were you the one who invited this bastard to lunch?” I ignored him, turning my attention to Jordan instead. “I should have known you’d go back on our mutual vow of chastity. It was a ploy to keep him to yourself all along, wasn’t it?”

Jordan just compressed her lips to hide a smile and shook her head. She knew better than to poke Riker when he was in a high-and-mighty mood—or to indulge me when I did the poking—so she made the wise choice to back away slowly. It helped that her level of tolerance for us was at an all-time high at that point. She and Oz had been with our team for just a few weeks, so Riker and I were still charming instead of annoying.

We’d known Jordan and Oz for years, of course, but we’d only recently reconnected to indulge in some light larceny together. These sorts of things happened all the time in the criminal world, believe it or not. We’d been after a certain gold-plated statue; they’d been after a certain gold-plated statue… In the end, it was deemed wisest to split the profits four ways and form a partnership.

I know. It might seem odd at first, this implicit trust among thieves, but you have to understand that the four of us had practically grown up together. Oz and Jordan ran away from their foster home when they were about thirteen. I found myself abandoned and broke at the tender age of fifteen. And Riker was pretty much born on the streets. To hear him tell the tale, he’d been raised by feral cats in a back alley somewhere.

The homeless teen crowd in New York is a surprisingly small and tight-knit group. Like an unprepared militia called up for war, we went through the same kinds of rites and hardships, suffered the same injustices. You didn’t come out of that sort of thing unchanged. We certainly didn’t.

“Would you stop playing around for five minutes and listen to me?” Riker asked. “We’re going to have to call it off. You-know-who was there.”

I felt a flutter in my stomach that had little to do with the five cups of espresso I’d just consumed. “Oh, really?”

“Yes, really. And he was asking all kinds of nosy questions.”

“Maybe he needs a caterer.”

“Right. Which was why he wanted to know how they transport the food, arrival and departure times tonight, if he could look at the list of waiters they have on payroll…” He trailed off ominously. Riker has always loved to do things ominously.

Jordan made the motion of a question mark with her spoon.

“Don’t ask,” I suggested, but of course she did.

“Who are we talking about?”

Riker savored the moment of suspense, extending his pause while a bored waitress refilled our coffees and shuffled off again. “Agent Emerson.” He nodded as if those two words were all that was needed to incite riots of fear and panic across the globe. “Our nemesis.”

One of Jordan’s brows lifted as she glanced back and forth between us, playing into Riker’s drama like she was born to it. “We have a nemesis? How has this not come up before?”

“We don’t like to talk about him,” Riker said.

Oh, for crying out loud. I could have sworn that inside his hard-edged exterior lived a little girl who never got enough attention from her father. Since I’ve been a little girl who never got enough attention from her father, I’m allowed to make qualifications like that.

“Nemesis might be pushing things. Are you sure that’s the word you want to use?”

He set his jaw. “Yes.”

“Don’t listen to him. Agent Emerson isn’t that bad. He’s more like an annoying puppy who keeps getting in the way.”

Then I pictured him, that mountain of a man who’d become our shadow, the heady rush of adrenaline I got when I realized he was once again on our trail, and I added an amendment. “Okay. Maybe he’s more like a guard dog—one of those K-9 units they use to sniff out bombs. Yeah, that’s better. He’s a big, strapping K-9 unit who could destroy us using only the force of his pecs.”

I could practically feel Riker’s nostrils flaring at me from across the table. Whatever. He was just mad I never complimented his pecs.

“We have a big, strapping guard dog?” Jordan’s other brow came up to join its neighbor. I probably should have mentioned that—Jordan has the most expressive eyebrows I’ve ever seen. She could hold entire conversations using them, like Groucho Marx with a better wax job. “I repeat—how has this not come up before?”

“He’s hardly a guard dog. He’s a federal agent. One, I might add, who has the uncanny ability to know exactly when and where we plan on striking next.” Riker looked at me as he spoke, as if I were personally responsible for the slip in our security, simply because I’d noticed the man had Batman-suit-quality musculature.

It wasn’t my fault. I dared any hot-blooded woman not to notice.

“Stop overreacting.”

“I’m not.” Riker shook his head. “We’ve been made. There’s nothing we can do but pull out.”

At that, Jordan’s eyebrows plummeted, my confidence doing much the same. As fun as it was to rile Riker up by pretending not to care about our federal tail, I wasn’t keen on losing Jordan before we had a chance to give this partnership a real test run. It was great having an explosives expert—as in, really great, a sign of us moving up in the world—but even better was the female companionship.

Jordan was so calm, so nice, so real. Already, she’d taken me shopping two times and showed me a secret chemical formula for peeling paint off walls. I didn’t have so many girlfriends in my life that I could afford to throw them away.

“How long has he been following you guys?” she asked.

I waved my hand airily, hoping to assuage her fears. “Oh, just a few months. He’s not as big a deal as Riker is making him out to be. You have my word on that.”

Riker smacked my hand away. “Don’t listen to her. Pen has always refused to see what’s right in front of her face. It’s like she has a pit where common sense should be.”

“I have common sense, thank you very much. I’m practically drowning in it.”

“Oh please,” Riker said. “You didn’t even know how to tie your shoes until you reached puberty.”

Sadly, that was true. “I’ve always preferred slip-ons.”

“You thought the hazards of mixing bleach and ammonia was an urban myth.”

Unfortunately, also true. “They’re both cleaning solutions! I assumed it would double the potency.”

Riker took that as proof positive of my incompetency, which was mean of him, if you asked me. He knew very well my childhood hadn’t been a conventional one. When other kids had been chanting bunny ears, bunny ears, playing by a tree as they learned to loop their shoelaces, I’d been out lifting wallets and breaking into safes with my dad. Instead of a kind, gentle mother teaching me which cleansers worked best on bathroom tile, I’d had an evil stepmother who cared so little about me, she’d bailed less than a month after my dad disappeared.

Forgive me for having a few lapses in my soft skills.

Riker leaned over the table to focus on Jordan. “The best we can tell, Emerson’s been after us for about a year. He first got onto our rig after we botched a job down on the wharf last summer.”

By we, of course, he meant me, which was totally unfair, given the circumstances. We’d miscalculated the tide coming in, and even though Riker swore I wasn’t in any danger of drowning inside a cargo box at the edge of the dock, I still had occasional flashbacks whenever I passed by a sushi restaurant.

“He wasn’t onto us then,” I countered. “I’m pretty sure he was there for a drug bust the next warehouse over. If you ask me, those docks are becoming an unsavory place to do business.”

Jordan tried not to laugh, hiding her smile behind her hand.

Riker wasn’t so easily amused. “Regardless of how long he’s been following us, it’s too dangerous to keep going with this job. If we’re being watched, the Jaeger-LeCoultre isn’t worth sending you up there.”

On the contrary, the half-million-dollar watch was worth sending me up there, which was why we planned to steal it in the first place. The man currently in possession of the diamond-encrusted timepiece was an egotistical windbag and even more of a criminal than we were. If he was stupid enough to throw a tax evasion party up on the fourteenth floor while wearing his new pride and joy, then he deserved to be relieved of its burdensome weight.

“Would you relax? I’m sure Emerson’s presence has nothing to do with us—there’s no way the FBI knows or even cares about our plans. If anything, they’re after the bastard we’re robbing. The FBI loves catching bad guys on IRS charges. It makes them feel like they’re bringing down Al Capone all over again.”

“You’re so naive,” Riker said, but his heart wasn’t in it the way it had been a few minutes ago. He obviously hadn’t thought of that before—there being better, higher-profile criminals for Agent Emerson to pursue. “If he’s after the host of the party, why bother with the caterers at all? He could just waltz up there with a warrant and call it a day.”

There was some truth to that. We’d gotten Oz hired as a bartender for the night so he could smuggle me upstairs inside an empty beer keg, making us the most likely targets of Emerson’s investigation. Still, I didn’t think this was the catastrophe Riker made it out to be. There was no reason for the FBI to expend this kind of manpower to hunt us down. I was pretty sure I had about twenty parking tickets they could have hauled me in on had they really wanted to.

Jordan was looking pretty worried by this time, her eyebrows doing a wobbly dance of alarm, so I decided to pull the clincher.

“Think about it, Riker. If the men in black had actual hard evidence, they’d be doing everything in their power to stay out of the way today. They’d let us get the heist all set up, have Oz send me upstairs in a barrel, and arrest us only after we had the goods in hand. The fact that Emerson’s there, snooping around in plain sight? That’s good news, not bad. He doesn’t know who or what he’s looking for. He’s just guessing.”

My triumph was stolen by a sudden burst of movement at the apartment building across the street. We turned to watch as Oz finished with his reconnaissance and lowered his rig so he could wash the thirteenth-floor windows in earnest. Part of his amazing ability to blend in was his commitment to the cover story. He wouldn’t stop until the entire building gleamed.

“I should go tell him not to bother,” Riker said, mostly to himself. “Damn. We really needed this win.”

We did need this win, and I was convinced there was no reason why we couldn’t still have it. The day I let one measly FBI agent dictate my actions was the day I gave up a life of crime. I was born to this kind of thing. Literally.

“Don’t say anything to Oz. Not yet.” I slid off the stool and surveyed my attire. I was already in the tight black leggings and running bra I favored when I had to bend my body into a pretzel for a few hours, which would serve my purposes just fine. “I want to check something first.”

Riker rose in an attempt to regain his height advantage. “What are you going to do? This isn’t a good idea. We need to lay low, maybe even move to Chicago or D.C. for a bit. New York is too hot for us.”

On the contrary, it was the exact temperature I preferred: a little warm, a little sultry. “Give me two hours, that’s all I’m asking. I want to find our little puppy dog and say hello.”

“You are not talking to that man. He’ll arrest you.”

“It’s not illegal to flirt.”

“I swear to God, Penelope, no good can come of this.”

“Wanna bet?”

Jordan’s eyebrows were high as she took in the sight of Riker and me squaring off in the middle of the bistro, but there was nothing to be afraid of. Not now. Not when I’d already won.

And I’d won. There was no question of that.

Poor Riker. Few things were worse than having your weaknesses laid out for the world to see, to know that one word would have you ricocheting off in a tailspin. All that man had to do was hear the word bet, and all bets were off. Last I’d heard, he owed about twenty thousand dollars to a loan shark who operated out of something called the Wire Cage.

It was wrong of me to take advantage of him like that, pushing him even closer to the brink, but I had limited options. If Riker walked away from this job, it could be months before we managed to pull together another one. We’d lose Jordan. We’d lose Oz. We’d lose the small bit of momentum we had, and I was so freaking tired of losing all the time. My mom, when I was born. My dad, so many times when the next big job took priority over me. My world, my life, my future, when he disappeared for good.

Just once, it would have been nice if someone stuck around long enough to matter.

“What are the stakes?” Riker asked. He transitioned from surly harbinger of doom to efficient junkie in less time than it took Jordan to blink. “I’ve got five thousand that says you get arrested the second you saunter up to him and bat your eyelashes.”

“You don’t have five thousand. I doubt you even have five hundred. How about we make this a gentleman’s bet instead? A wager of pride?”

Some of the light went out of his eyes. “You’re not a gentleman.”

“Neither are you.”

“At least I have the right parts.”

“Then use them for a change and man up.” From the look on Jordan’s face, concern and regret binding her brows into a firm line, I could tell I needed to make this count. “How’s this? If I can’t succeed at wooing Agent Emerson with my feminine wiles, then we’ll end the job here. No bartending, no beer keg, no five-hundred-thousand-dollar watch.”

“And if you succeed?”

“Easy. If I succeed—and I will—he’ll be asking me out for dinner and drinks tonight as far uptown from this place as we can get. It’s going to break his pec-popping little heart when I turn out to be a no-show, but at least we’ll know he’s not about to make the bust of his life.”

It wasn’t Riker’s favorite kind of bet—he wasn’t happy unless someone’s kneecaps were into danger of being broken—but it was clear he was wavering.

“We’ve got nothing to lose at this point,” I added. “Either he knows enough to throw a wrench in our plans from here on out, or he doesn’t. I say it’s better if we find out now.”

I knew I was in when Riker’s scowl almost took over his entire mouth. “What makes you so sure you can seduce him, anyway? Maybe you’re not his type. No man wants to be saddled with a thieving hellcat who can’t take anything seriously.”

I laughed out loud at that. “Are you sure? I remember a time it worked just fine for you.”

Riker snorted as Jordan muffled a laugh. That’s when I knew I’d won, for better or for worse.

Funny how these things turn out.