NICK
As I approached the balcony, I gave her a call. She didn’t say anything when she answered. She had me in her earbuds, and I pinned my burner phone between my shoulder and my ear. I took my position immediately above the spot where the path from the pool met the edge of the lobby. I watched couples pass underneath me. A little girl with pigtails chased a ball, and a white-haired guy talked into a headset, pacing back and forth.
Stella’s slightly nervous breathing filled my ear. She made a little kissing noise. Below me, to the left, I watched Priscilla abandon her interest in a wastebasket and gallop along after Stella, shooting forward with her ears back and her tail wagging.
“Who’s a good girl?” Stella cooed, and Priscilla answered with an open-mouth pant.
In the distance, still poolside, was the sheikh. The crowd had thinned, as we knew it would in the late afternoon. No longer did he have droves of adoring girls to take photos with him and the North Star. Now it was just him, his guard, and a pool maintenance guy trying to extract something from one of the filters.
The sheikh held the North Star up to the setting sun, then turned so I couldn’t see what he was doing. But soon enough I heard Stella gasp in my ear. “He just posted again. ‘Laters, baby,’ it says. He’s the worst.”
From my vantage point, I could just see the guard as he bent over and held the case out to the sheikh to put in the combination. The top of the case glinted in the sun, and the sheikh put the North Star inside, scrambling the numbers. “Guard has it,” I told her.
She said a very quiet, “Yep,” to confirm.
She led Priscilla over to a cluster of rocks that was now in the shade. She shortened Priscilla’s leash and pretended to be busy looking at her phone. The guard shuffled toward the path where she was standing, and I said, “Ready . . .”
Stella stuck her hand into the treat bag, still pretending to be busy with her game of Bejeweled and making like she was completely unaware of Priscilla, now standing on her hind legs with her paws on Stella’s calf, looking longingly at the beef jerky between her fingers.
The guard got nearer and nearer, passing in front of a palm about ten feet away from Stella. “Aim . . .”
As he made the final approach, I peeled back the lid on the spoiled yogurt. Its time in the sun had made it clot and separate. A layer of slightly cloudy water had gathered on the surface. Using the spoon, I stood at the ready with a good-size glop.
The guard rounded the curve in the path, and I said, “Fire.”
Stella tossed the jerky across the walkway, and Priscilla darted after it at exactly the moment that the guard passed in front of her. The timing was perfect, and she snared the big ox in the thin nylon leash. The increased tension confused the hell out of Priscilla, who looped back around toward Stella like a tetherball zipping around its pole. While the guard’s back was turned, Stella tossed the terry cloth bone, and Priscilla zipped after that, wrapping the guard’s legs up into a web.
“Oh no! I’m so sorry!” Stella said, throwing up her hands and moving toward the guard. Priscilla, now totally confused, tried to get back to Stella and entangled both Stella and the guard in another loop of the leash.
Stella, sweet as ever, placed her hand on his shoulder, and I heard her say, “Just stay there. God, I’m so sorry. That’s what I get for playing a game as I walk the dog.”
The guard tried to help out, attempting to lift his foot. Stella played the awkward dog owner perfectly, dropping the leash—with the slack locked all the way out. But the leash was attached to the treat bag, and Priscilla tackled both, sending the leash skidding farther away.
Stella’s nervous, cute giggle filled my ears. She crouched down, attempting to help the poor guy extract himself from the cat’s cradle that Priscilla had gotten him stuck inside. As she lunged away for the treat bag and the end of the leash, I took my chance. I looked down at the guard’s head. I zeroed in on my target. As I was about to rotate my wrist to drop the big, drippy spoonful of warm plain yogurt, he started moving again. In the nick of time, I repositioned the spoon over the container of yogurt.
The guard was actually trying to be helpful, but he was moving all over the damned place. He reminded me of a cartoon version of Rumpelstiltskin I’d seen a million years ago, lifting up bent knees and lumbering around in a circle.
“Get him to stop moving,” I told Stella.
Instantly she said, “Jeez, what a mess! Here, you stay still. I’ll do the untangling.” She smiled up at him, apple-pie sweet. “I got you into this tangle. Let me get you out of it.”
For whatever else the guy was—built like a brick shithouse, slightly prehistoric, totally unable to find a suit that fit him—he did know how to listen to instructions, and he held completely stock-still, hugging the briefcase to his chest with one hand and holding up the other like he was being robbed.
Christ, the irony.
In my ears, Stella said, “Ohhhhkay,” and leaned away.
Which was when I turned the spoon over and let the glop of yogurt fall through the air. Though it only took a second, it felt like an hour, until finally it landed with a magnificent splat, right in the center of his godforsaken nest of charcoal-black hair.
The guard let out a groan and smacked his hand onto the yogurt, compounding the whole mess. “For fuck’s sake! Not again!” he bellowed.
It was my cue to get the hell out of Dodge, and in one smooth movement, I turned, dumped the yogurt in the trash, and headed for the stairs, while Stella, sweet as could be, said, “Gosh, I think there was something very wrong with that bird!”
As I passed the trash can before the stairs, I ended the call. I popped out the SIM card and tossed the phone. Then I opened the door to the stairwell. I bit the SIM in half to destroy it, spitting the fragments out as I jogged up the flights of stairs.
I waited for her in the room with the ice machine on our floor. When I heard the door ding open, followed by the telltale swish-swish of the guard thigh-rubbing his way down the hallway, I leaned out and counted the number of doors he passed. At the fifth one on the left, he dug around for his key card in his pants and let himself inside. The yogurt was a slick patch on his head, and he’d occasionally touch it with his fingertips and give them a sniff.
I leaned back into the ice machine room, listening. About ten seconds later, the elevator dinged again. The sound of the doors rolling open filled the hallway, and I heard Priscilla panting. One second later, Stella appeared.
“That was perfect,” I told her as she stepped into the ice machine room. There, we waited. When a boisterous family began approaching from the other direction, I pushed Stella up against the wall and kissed her, out of sight behind the window, but positioned so that if anybody came in, they wouldn’t stay for long. The kiss was electric—frantic, passionate, and hurried. I packed all my adrenaline into that kiss, into her, into those perfect lips of hers. When I pulled away she was breathless and blushing. She pressed her lips together and smiled, the light from the ice maker making those deep-blue eyes doubly wild. After a minute more, I pulled two pairs of black latex gloves from my pocket, and we slipped them on together. From the outside pocket of Stella’s purse, I took an old credit card that didn’t trace back to me, along with two seemingly unimportant but crucial things, all of which I had already wiped for prints: a rubber band and a roll of Scotch tape, which I slipped into my pocket. When the coast was clear, we headed down the hallway toward the guard’s room. I pretended to be about to let myself into a different room, one immediately across from his, as Stella stopped right next to his door and fussed with her shoe. For all the world, she was just a woman whose Converse laces had come undone.
“OK,” Stella reported. “Shower is running. Good to go.”
She and Priscilla stood with their backs to me on lookout while I jimmied the lock using the credit card. It was an old trick, but it never failed, not if you knew how to do it. When I got the lock open, I found the chain waiting, just as I’d expected. I made a slipknot with the rubber band around the chain, then affixed the rubber band to the inside of the door using a strip of tape. As I pulled the door closed—disabling the door lock with my finger—I felt the rubber band catch on the knob-end of the lock, and the tension pulled it out of the slot. The chain lock slid open, and we were in.
Everything went exactly as planned, and we were as calm and collected as we would have been if we’d done this job a hundred times. Stella stood guard by the bathroom, holding Priscilla and listening. I went for the briefcase, affixed by the metal loop to the leg of the bed, which was bolted to the floor. I sat on the edge of the bed and took the case in my hands. I slowly scrambled the numbers, aligning them to zero.
And then I got down and dirty with thumb wheels. One at a time.
The first wheel was a breeze, four. The second took a little more time, and I had to make two full rotations before I pinned it down to nine. The third wheel was the easiest—a process of elimination starting at zero. It wasn’t one. It wasn’t two. And it wasn’t three.
But just as I was about to move the wheel to four, the gentle hush of the water from the shower went silent, and the sound of the shower door sliding open cut the air.
Fuck.