NICK
I let her get ahead of me on Central, but I never lost sight of her. On either side of us, decrepit motels alternated with adult toy stores, ancient strip malls, and prefab-home display lots. The Mexican groceries shifted to Vietnamese ones and back again. The heat snakes and setting sun did me a favor, so even if she did see me, I’d be nothing more than a dark smudge in the afternoon traffic.
As I followed her, I went through the paces of the con she’d pulled, rewinding and replaying every step in my head. One thing was for damn sure: that wasn’t the first thing she’d ever stolen. A con like that took practice, care, and a perfect sense of timing. Timing the theft to coincide with doing the inventory was strategic; a change of routine was good as a distraction, and she’d played it perfectly.
Everything taken together told me she was an experienced thief, smart and careful. And so sexy it made me grind my goddamned teeth.
She was, without a doubt, the very last woman I should’ve been chasing across Albuquerque. There I was, a jewel thief fresh out of jail—a moth heading right into the goddamned fireplace. But it wasn’t like I was proposing, for fuck’s sake. I had her phone, and I was going to give it back to her. I was just going to do her one favor and then get the hell away from the flames.
Her hair whipped in the wind as she sped along with the sun setting behind us. Even the way she drove marked her as a pro. Straight as an arrow, no texting-and-driving bullshit. She stayed under the speed limit and stopped for yellow lights. Legal, all the way. She wouldn’t have hit the radar of a single upstanding citizen or New Mexico State Police officer, which meant that she hit my radar like an incoming cruise missile.
We got past the toughest stretch of the War Zone, and she took a left on a side street by an abandoned A&W; the road was like every other one in town, with a bleached-out street sign and tumbleweeds in the gutters. I stayed a good fifty yards back and watched her take a right into the parking lot of a nondescript strip mall. To keep my cover, I took a left into the gas station across the street. I came to a stop next to an old tire pump with an OUT OF ORDER sign stuck to it with what might have been grape bubblegum, making greasy, sticky purple blotches on each corner. As I put my feet on the pavement and cut my engine, she got out of her Jeep with her purse over her shoulder and walked with hips swaying and curls bouncing into Big Ed’s Super Pawn. From the window flashed a sign saying WE BUY GOLD! WE BUY JEWELRY! Though I was across the street, I was close enough to see her talking to someone at the counter, until she went farther into the store and disappeared.
I pulled off my helmet and waited. Two La-Z-Boys flanked the pawnshop’s window. In between was the usual array of pawnshop goods. Lamps. Medical equipment. A dress form. A stuffed deer head. Outside was a carved wooden bear, with a sign that said COME ON IN looped around his neck.
Within minutes, she came out of Big Ed’s. She wasn’t leaving with the same swagger she’d gone in with, and she definitely wasn’t acting like she had a purse full of cash. Instead, she pushed a wheelchair in front of her. On its seat was stacked all manner of incomprehensibly random shit. It was like she’d ransacked a garage sale in a retirement community. There was a big-brimmed Stetson, a huge cuckoo clock, a cane, a very obviously used toaster, dented on the sides. And a super weird lamp.
I rubbed my jaw. I’d been involved in a lot of bizarre criminal stuff in my day. I’d seen the good, the bad, and the very badly planned. Never in my life had I seen someone pawn a diamond in exchange for assorted random shit.
Behind her followed a guy who had to be the security guard, a thick-necked brute whose clothes didn’t fit him right anywhere. He pushed something along in front of him, something oversize, square, and mechanical, with an electrical cord tagging along behind it. He humped the thing over the threshold, and the door swung shut just in time to catch the electrical plug in the jamb and send him whipping around like he was on the wrong end of a set of nunchucks. As he lunged for the door, he stumbled on the cord and collided with the carved bear. A direct hit to the nuts. I growled to myself as he doubled over in the universal man-sign of Gonna need a minute here!
“Be careful!” Stella barked over her shoulder, totally unaware that the bastard had just nutted himself. “You break it, you replace it, buddy!”
“Yes, ma’am!” he said, staggering like he was dazed . . . or like getting a shellacking from a woman who looked like her was all he’d ever dreamed of for his entire life.
I couldn’t keep the smile off my face. He was probably twice her weight and a foot taller. He was packing heat in a barely hidden ankle holster, and his balls would probably be aching for days. But she was on a mission, and nothing was going to get in her way.
What mission involved a wheelchair, a toaster, a hat, a cane, that machine, and that huge lamp . . . I had no idea at all. But I was damn sure going to find out, so I put my helmet back on and got ready to throw her into gear.
Together, she and the guard got all the shit loaded into the back seat. The guard hoisted up his pants and closed her door for her. She put her sunglasses on her head and smiled at him. She said something and gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder. She peeled out of the parking lot with her hair whipping behind her, while the guard watched her zoom away with his hands over his heart.
And I took off after her.
Again.