STELLA
The Shimmy Shimmy Bangs were back in business. And miracle of miracles, so was my beloved Jeep. It now had a black hood and a blue side panel, but it ran, it had heat, and with the stereo roaring, Ruth, Roxie, and I headed east on Lomas.
We did a blow-by of the strip club that the Texan owned to get the lay of the land. Ruth was in the back, so she could keep her still-booted foot up on the bench seat. Roxie rode shotgun. She smelled like the perfume counter at Macy’s and had her hair pulled back in a tight, neat bun.
Pony Up wasn’t open for business yet. Aside from a small cluster of raccoons tearing apart a garbage bag, there was only one thing in the parking lot: the Texan’s Cadillac, now with a slightly larger and more obnoxious pair of horns.
“Guys like that give men a bad rap,” Roxie said to her reflection in the visor mirror, with a smack of her matte fuchsia lips.
“Guys like that give everything they touch a bad rap,” I said, and took a left into a mostly for-lease strip mall just down the street. So as not to appear suspicious, I pulled up in front of the nail salon in the corner space.
A little Asian lady appeared at the door. “You want a mani-pedi?” she hollered at absolutely the top of her lungs. We could hear it crystal clear over the heater on full blast.
“Oooooh!” cooed Roxie. “Now there’s an idea.” She wiggled her already perfectly manicured fingers. I assumed she wiggled her toes too, but they were impossible to see in her black suede stiletto boots. From my purse, I pulled a pair of elbow-length black satin gloves, and Roxie slid them on like she’d been doing it every day of her life.
“The mani-pedi can wait. Carrot second,” I told Roxie as I killed the engine.
“Stick first,” Ruth chimed in.
“Copy that,” said Roxie, and swatted at her own knee. With a riding crop.
About ten minutes later, I got a text from Roxie. I stared at it for a second, but it made no sense whatsoever. It was like a hieroglyph. So I showed it to Ruth. In another time, another place, she’d have been hired to crack codes in some top secret location. Surely she could figure out Roxie’s emoji salad.
“The pig face has been shirt and tie,” Ruth read aloud.
“A simple Done would’ve been fine,” I said, trying to piece together the pictogram. “Or a kissy face. Or the A-OK fingers. Or even confetti! I’d have gotten that one right off the bat! But no, instead we get a pig and a shirt.” Whatever it meant, though, it certainly seemed like it was good news. It wasn’t like a cop car and a frown or something. So I put my Jeep in reverse and waved to the little lady at the nail salon. I headed across the empty side street and around to the back entrance of Pony Up. The back door was emblazoned with a PRIVATE ONLY stencil in spray paint, and the door was wedged open with the riding crop.
“The pig has been dressed?” Ruth said, cocking her head at the text.
But when I looked at it again, I had it. “The pig has been tied.”
Which Ruth answered with a sudden, never-before-heard laugh-snort. I turned to her with my mouth slightly open. “Did you just . . . laugh? Out loud?”
She looked at the text again, and it happened again. “What, is that funny?” she said through a wonderful giggle.
“I have no idea,” I said, marveling at her. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard her laugh. “But it’s really nice to see you look so . . . happy.”
Still smiling, she handed the phone back to me, reassumed her cucumber-calm exterior, and slid out of the back seat with all the grace of a dancer, in spite of the boot.
The back hallway was quiet and only lit by the dismal green of the exit sign above. I dislodged the riding crop from the hinges of the door and ran the wrapped leather cane end through my mittened palm. We went down the hallway toward the next patch of light. And there, inside the office, we found Roxie and the Texan.
He was shirtless and tied with a few different silk scarves to the office chair. His chest hair formed sparse tufts in very random places, like a badly cared for Chia Pet. His ankles were bound together with the robe tie from the naughty kimono and cuffed to the leg of his desk. He was blindfolded and had a bright-red ball gag in his mouth, and his belt was undone. But not his pants. Thank you, sweet baby Jesus. Also, in his ears were a pair of earbuds that we’d picked up at the gas station—none of us had been willing to put our earbuds in the Texan’s surely dandruffy ears, thank you very much. They were bright pink and attached to one of the burner phones we’d bought for the job.
Roxie sat cross-legged on his desk, eating none other than the cheese curls. She looked like a professional dominatrix taking a quick snack break between sessions. She poked the screen to advance the playlist in the Texan’s ears. It was loud enough to hear from where we stood, and I’d have recognized “Back in the Saddle Again” even if I hadn’t put it on the phone myself. As I’d expected, he loved it, and he sprawled in his chair like a sunning fat walrus as Roxie occasionally teased him with a cheese curl or her satiny fingertips.
Ruth got straight to work on the safe, sitting down with one leg tucked under her and her booted leg out, and put on her latex gloves. I slipped off my mittens and put on gloves too, then considered the security camera setup that the Texan had in the far corner. Three flat-screens, and cameras that recorded continuously onto memory cards. The first and second cameras were no problem, but the third one was pointed squarely at the back door. I rewound and hit play. Roxie was talking to the Texan, laughing and touching him on his fleshy shoulder. Her mouth made the words, I’m here to apply for a job, and she unzipped her hoodie to reveal all her Domme Roxie glory. The Texan opened the door and let her in. For a few moments nothing happened at all, until the door cracked open and the riding crop emerged. I pressed fast-forward and saw Ruth and me at the door.
That card, the one that showed all of us, I ejected and replaced with one that was full to the tippy top with kitten videos and GIFs. I locked the overwrite safety on the side of the card and put it in the reader; the status light next to it lit up red, to say it was out of memory.
A single click from the safe made me turn to check on Ruth. She nodded at me to say we were in business. I crouched down beside her and slipped off my sweatshirt, which I used to muffle the sound of the safe latch opening. Before I actually opened it, though, I signaled to Roxie. I pointed to my ears and made a thumbs-up gesture. She nodded, and Patsy Cline got a bit louder.
And then I took a deep breath, said a little prayer to Johnny Cash, and turned the handle on the safe.
The Man in Black was with us. He definitely was.
Inside, there were stacks of saran-wrapped bills—more than I ever imagined there would be. Ruth peeled back the plastic on one of the stacks, looked back over her shoulder, and mouthed, “Clean hundreds.”
By the volume, I knew it was at least a million. A million easy. And next to that I saw half a dozen notebooks and a ledger.
Ruth placed stack after stack of the cash in two reusable shopping bags we’d brought, while I thumbed through the betting books and the paperwork. I knew that if anybody upstanding got ahold of these books and these documents, things would suddenly get very difficult for the Texan. If the cops found this stuff, he’d be facing money laundering charges, embezzlement, evasion, and a whole slew of other very, very inconvenient things. Fraud. Racketeering. Predatory lending. Bookmaking. Things that would add up. Things that would bring him down.
But behind the ledgers, I noticed something unexpected in the safe.
Three cans of cheese curls.
It made no sense at all—he had a wall lined with the things, but here were three spares behind his cash and accounts. It reminded me immediately of my trick with the bottle of glitter and the dog poop, except I suspected they were hiding something a lot more intriguing than homemade fake IDs or a spare key. I picked up one of the containers and found I was exactly right. The bottom had been cut out, and underneath the cardboard can was a gold bar, sitting upright. I gasped and heard Ruth inhale sharply next to me. I lifted the other two cardboard cylinders. Three gold bars. Four hundred troy ounces. Half a million apiece.
Oh. My. God.
Ruth pressed her knuckle to her mouth and stared at me. I turned and looked at Roxie, who popped another cheese curl in her mouth and beamed.
I placed one of the bars in my purse, one in Ruth’s backpack, and one in Roxie’s bag. I offered my hand to help Ruth to her feet and hoisted my purse over my shoulder. Roxie slid off the desk, still with the cheese curls in hand, and grabbed the riding crop from where I’d put it beside her. Ruth and I moved into the darkened hallway, and I watched Roxie take the earbuds out of the Texan’s ears. As her fingertips touched his cheek, he kissed the air, a series of blind, searching smooches that turned my stomach. Roxie was unflappable; she didn’t flinch and didn’t step back, but said into his ear—loudly enough for us to hear—“Give me just one sec. OK, baby?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered, his voice honey-thick with desire.
“I’ve got a treat for you. Just you wait.”
And then she turned and made her way down the hallway, with the second bag of cash in hand. Her heels didn’t clack even once. We slipped out of the back door and got in the Jeep without a word. Not a sigh of relief. Not a giggle. Not even a snort. We were $2.5 million richer, but we weren’t done yet. The Shimmy Shimmy Bangs had one more thing to do, and we were heading to Santa Fe to do it.
For as long as I’d had my eye on him, I had known that the sheikh’s second-favorite place, next to the Ritz in Laguna Niguel, was a Japanese spa just outside Santa Fe called Ten Thousand Waves. It was absolutely the only thing I agreed with the sheikh about. Because Ten Thousand Waves was indisputably, undeniably fabulous. He went there every year in mid-February to celebrate Valentine’s Day with his current squeeze. And we’d followed him there.
Roxie, Ruth, and I left the women’s dressing room wearing the soft, complimentary kimonos that had been waiting for us in our lockers. They smelled like fresh laundry, and the fabric felt crisp and cool against my skin. We had reserved the Waterfall Pool, but first we had a stop to make. At the men’s changing room.
We could hear the sheikh laughing, and the sound of a champagne cork cut through the cold winter air. Sparse snowflakes had begun to fall, and the steam from the hot pools all around us made the air heavy and warm. Each pool was enclosed in its own unique way—with a coyote fence or an adobe wall or a Zen-inspired sculpted barrier made of river stones—so that everything was private, except for the walkways. In front of the men’s changing room, we waited and watched. I poked my head inside and saw nobody in the anteroom where the guests’ shoes were lined up in neat rows. There, in the midst of the boots and sneakers, I saw them. The golden Crocs.
Ruth stood as the lookout outside the room, and Roxie and I went inside. She took her place by the tiled hallway that led down to the showers and gave me the thumbs-up.
I slipped on a thin winter glove and grabbed the North Star from my kimono pocket. The diamond sparkled back at me, and for the first time since I’d laid eyes on it, I let myself get caught up in its sparkle. The North Star had taken us on a roller coaster. But every roller coaster came to a stop. I palmed the diamond and knelt down. I said a few hopeful words to Johnny Cash and Tom Petty and my grandpa too. To all the rebels and all the thieves. Then I placed the North Star into one of the sheikh’s gold Crocs. It was harder than I expected to let go of the diamond and all the money we could have gotten from it. But as soon as I did, I felt free.
I snapped a photo of the diamond in the sheikh’s shoe on my burner phone. I gave Roxie the signal, and we joined Ruth outside. Together, the three of us headed to the Waterfall Pool. I locked the gates behind us, and Roxie and Ruth slipped off their kimonos and got in the water in their swimsuits. They turned to me, waiting and expectant. Snow fell into the water with a hushhhh. Ruth had her palms matched up together in a steeple shape in front of her lips. Roxie pressed her hands to her cheeks like a little girl.
On the burner phone, I opened Instagram and logged into the account I had made that day. @NorthStarRising. No followers, no posts. No history. No trace.
I uploaded the photo from the changing room and brightened the contrast to make sure the gem inside was sparkling and clear. And to that, I added the caption:
Hey @The_Sheikh_Dude . . . Come and get it! oxox
Once I saw that it had uploaded, I felt a rush of hope and relief for the first time in months. I pulled off my kimono, tossed the burner phone into the water, and cannonballed into the pool to the sound of Ruth’s laughter and Roxie’s squeals. I bobbed back up to the surface and wiped the water from my eyes.
And one pool over, the sheikh hollered, “Holy shitballs!”