Their name was part of their legend. Old guys said it was a nod to Little Anthony and the Imperials; older guys said Nancy Sinatra. Nobody really knew. The Shimmy Shimmy Bangs walked that line between unknown and notorious like only real pros can. Before I’d gone to jail, I’d even seen guys toast them, grizzled old pros at biker bars, talking about the three women who were Robin Hooding their way across the Southwest.
They were just the kind of underdogs that a guy like me rooted for. They left no trace—not a fingerprint, not a broken window—except for one single slipup. It had been half a footprint in a patch of desert dust. The cops got nothing from it, because it was the edge of the most common shoe in the world. The print had been . . .
I stared at Stella’s feet.
. . . from a woman’s size nine Converse.
Fuuuuuuck.
Every job they did was smart, impeccable, and flawless. They were notorious. They were infamous. They were an urban legend. And I just knew, thinking of the three of them together, that Stella was the head of the crew. Crews followed patterns, and she’d definitely be at the front. I studied her from across the hospital room; I felt like I was seeing her for the very first time. If I hadn’t seen her steal that ring, I’d never in a million years have imagined she was capable of it. Even now, staring at her, knowing that she had to be the head of the Shimmy Shimmy Bangs, I damn near couldn’t believe it. Which was exactly the genius of the whole operation.
About five months back, I’d heard they’d taken two loose emeralds from a wholesale jeweler outside Las Cruces. I remembered hearing details about the job; how they’d swapped out memory cards in the security system, replacing the ones that had recorded their faces with new ones full of cute animal videos. They used old-school skill to break into the safe—no drill, no noise, no bullshit. Just an expert touch, a carefully planned and incredibly simple job. No violence, no racket. Smooth as silk. And just like that, the gems were gone. Poof. No calling card. No nothing. They locked up behind themselves, reset the security system, and vanished. They didn’t attract attention, and they didn’t go over the top. The Shimmy Shimmy Bangs didn’t go in hard; they went in sweet. They flipped the tables, leaving everybody they robbed disoriented and fucking amazed. In awe. They played it safe and smart. Never greedy, never cocky.
When I’d heard about the Las Cruces job, I’d thought, Whoever is running that show must be a total badass.
I now knew it from firsthand experience. She was.
I leaned back on the sofa, stunned. As I did, I must have moved my hand just enough to get one flicker of reception, and a text popped up on my screen. From my goddamned parole officer.
Our meeting started ten minutes ago, Norton.
Don’t make me come looking for you.
Awww fuck. The minute Stella had texted me about coming to grab her ass, I’d forgotten everything I’d needed to do that day. Goddamn it.
But as I stood to go, it hit me that the text was proof of concept—she was a tornado, and I was getting sucked in. She made me fucking lose my head. Forgetting about my parole meetings was just the start; before I knew it, she’d be talking about loose diamonds and sapphires, I’d be volunteering to drive getaway, and I’d be 100 percent, old-school, straight-up fucked.
There was no way in hell I’d be able to stay straight feeling like I did about her, Stella Peretti—not just a thief, but the head of the Shimmy Shimmy Motherfucking Bangs. It was time to get the hell out of her way. For my own good.
But I couldn’t resist one last hit for the road. For a long second, I let myself memorize the color of her hair, the way the curls got caught in intertwined spirals down her back. The way she blotted her best friend’s tears. The way she made me feel. The joy I got from just being near the center of her hurricane.
I forced the fucking words out of my mouth. It felt like some other guy was saying them. “Stella, I gotta go.”
She turned over her shoulder and looked at me, her eyebrows pushed together. “Are you OK?”
I didn’t know what the fuck I was, but I most definitely wasn’t OK. I didn’t let her see it, though. “Yeah, but I gotta go.”
“OK,” she said tentatively, searching my face. “Talk to you later?”
I didn’t answer. Instead, I leaned in and placed my hand on the small of her back and put a kiss to her cheek. Everything about her pulled me even closer—the softness of her skin against mine, the way she leaned into the kiss. I savored her for those last few seconds, before finally stepping away.
By the time I got to the elevator, I felt like a douchebag. By the time I got to the parking lot, I felt like an idiot. By the time I left my parole officer’s place, I felt like the King of the Assholes. Because I left Stella to face a shitty day in a shitty place, all by herself, and all because I’d spooked like a horse in the starting gates.
My apartment still smelled like her. I dropped my keys on the counter and splashed my face with water from the kitchen sink. I opened the fridge and grabbed a quart of orange juice. Unscrewing the lid, I downed a few big gulps. It tasted like it might’ve passed its drink-by date, but I didn’t give a fuck. I supposed there was some sort of unwritten dude code that said when you felt like this, you should go get shit-faced or hit a heavy bag or whatever. But I didn’t have the energy for any of that, because I wasn’t angry—I was just fucking bummed. I headed for my bed and lay facedown on the mattress. When I inhaled hard, I could smell her lotion, her perfume, her. And then I felt something under my arm.
I opened one eye to look at whatever it was.
Her panties, in a hot-pink ball.
Fuck. Tornado or not, the way those panties made me feel told me the truth: I didn’t want to step away from her. It didn’t fucking matter if it was a bad idea. Superman knew it. Kryptonite was a force of its own.
I rolled onto my back and unfurled her panties, untwisting the lace. The shiny fabric glistened in the sun, and I ran my thumb along the delicate scalloped edge. Who the fuck knew what came next for her. Maybe stealing that engagement ring had been her last job.
Yeah. Right.
But the truth was, I didn’t fucking know because I hadn’t asked. And if I turned away from her now, for good, without giving her a chance to say her piece? New me was going to be a lot of things, but chickenshit wasn’t going to be one of them.
Dropping her panties on my chest, I pulled out my phone, opened up the browser, and typed in her name. What came back at me was so cute, so nice, so damned lovely that it made me groan.
In spite of all I knew about her so far, Stella was worlds apart from me in every way. On the internet, like in person, she was wholesome, adorable, and yet naughty underneath. I thumbed through her public Facebook photos. In one, she was standing on a mountain ledge, at the summit of a hike maybe. She had her arms spread out wide on either side of her, and she was beaming at the camera. The wind had caught her hair, and on her face was pure joy. In the next, she was holding Mr. Bozeman’s Priscilla, who was kissing her, and Stella had the nose-wrinkle laugh going strong. As if all that wasn’t heart-wrenching enough, the next one was a photo of her in a Halloween costume—a Playboy bunny, complete with fishnets, ears, and a puffy pink tail. She was looking over her shoulder at the camera, one hand on her hip.
Fuuuuuck.
Holding my phone up above me in bed, I thumbed back and forth through the photographs again and again, before backing up into the search results. The next link down was for a pet sitting service called Pawfully Cute. Somehow, the website felt like she’d designed it herself. Clean, organized, bright, and cheerful. I clicked on the ABOUT US link, and up popped three photographs. Ruth, Roxie, and Stella.
I clicked on Stella’s picture to enlarge it. There was a sparkle in her eyes that made me smile immediately and gave me a throb of warmth and joy. Like a reflex hammer hitting my heart. She was an enigma, and I wanted to get the chance to take every petal off that rose. But it would all be built on a house of cards if I kept on pretending I didn�
��t know what I knew.
So I went back to our chat window and tapped the telephone icon to give her a call. With every ring, my heart pounded harder. Three rings, four. It rang through to her voice mail. I listened to her kind and happy voice tell me to leave a message, followed by that long and ominous beep.
I inhaled hard. If I confronted her, I knew I’d lose her. But if I met her halfway, I might have half a shot. “Hey. It’s me. It’s Nick.” I knotted her panties around my fingers. “Do me a favor. Go to Google and look up Nicholas Adam Norton. If you’re still interested, give me a call. If not,” I said, and let her panties fall to my chest again, “I totally understand.”
17
STELLA
There was a voice mail from Nick on my phone, but the reception in the hospital was so bad that every time I tried to listen, I lost the call. The red notification circle taunted me all day as I went with Roxie to radiology, holding her hand tight and handing her tissues, until they wheeled her off for X-rays in a lead-lined vest. It teased me as I held Ruth’s hand too, as the doctor talked about a compound break and pins and surgeries. It felt like a hot little coal in my pocket while I asked the doctors nine hundred questions, while Ruth slowly put her hoodie up again, and while she stared silently at images of her jagged bones on the computer screen on the rolling cart.
The notification was with me for that whole exhausting day. Roxie was emotional and tearful; Ruth was stoic and quiet. I stayed strong for my girls, but inside I was in knots of anxiety, worry, and uncertainty. Over it all was a looming shadow of disappointment. Without Ruth and Roxie, there was no chance we could pull off our plan to steal the North Star.
Waiting in the hallway for Ruth to get done with yet another set of X-rays, I thought back to the day we’d first begun to think of the plan. It had been a strange sort of kismet—like the planets aligned.
It was a hot afternoon in July. I’d been putting away groceries when my phone had buzzed in my pocket. It was my dad. “Stella!” he said, in his usual whisper-yell, like he was calling me during a hostage situation or from inside a movie theater; his new wife, whom I referred to in my head as Wendy, the Wicked Witch of the West, wasn’t a fan of mine. Or the fact that I looked exactly like my late mom. Judging by the echoes and faint noise of running water, I was fairly sure he always called from the bathroom. It was probably the only time she left him alone. It also meant that I usually only got calls at seven in the morning. But this time, it was late afternoon. Highly irregular. “Dad?”
“Stella, the Big Wide Open is for sale,” he whispered.
I froze with a bag of mini carrots in my hand. The words transported me back to the very spot itself. The Big Wide Open was a horse ranch just outside Flagstaff, Arizona. It was also home, more so than anywhere I’d ever lived. It had always belonged to my family, until my grandparents had been forced to sell in order to pay for their medical bills. And for my mom’s, as well. But that had been years ago, and I’d pushed it out of my mind. It was too painful to revisit, even in dreams—so full of nostalgia it almost made me woozy. “You’re kidding me.”
“No!” he whispered back. “I’d buy it if I could, but . . .”
“Rogerrrrrr!” came a shrill scream from his end of the line. “Are you constipated? Did you forget to eat your prunes? What is going on in there?”
“Gotta go! Love you, sweetheart!” my dad had whispered, and ended the call.
As the line went silent, Ruth came out from her room. I turned to her with the bag of carrots in one hand and my phone in the other. She took the carrots, ripped a hole in the side of the bag, and ate one. “If I were to open a yoga studio for low-income women and do like career counseling and meditation and stuff, do you think that could be a thing? Ten-dollar haircuts? Free meditation classes? I’m thinking I could call it Ohm Sweet Ohm.”
Before I’d even had the chance to answer any of her questions—which I would have answered, in order: That could totally be a thing; Yes; Yes; Ten out of ten on the name!—Roxie arrived home, stomping into the foyer in her heels. She ripped off her Jackie O glasses and said, “My attorney says I won’t have a prayer of joint custody unless I have a yard with grass. Can you believe that bullshit? This is Albuquerque! A yard?”
Ruth handed me the bag of carrots and I ate one, chewing slowly in a kind of daze. All the new developments had left me a little bit gobsmacked. A ranch. A business. A house. So many things, but so far out of our reach.
Roxie kicked off her heels and grabbed the remote from the kitchen table. She was just punching some numbers into the remote when Ruth snatched it from her and pointed at the television. On the screen was a segment from the local news. And to the right of the anchor’s head was an image of a jewel that I would have recognized anywhere.
The North Star.
Ruth turned up the volume, and the anchor’s brassy accent filled the apartment. “One of the largest diamonds in the world has been sold at auction. The North Star, which weighs in at a staggering five hundred eighty-nine carats, has been purchased by Sheikh Saud ibn Nejd al-Aziz . . .”
An image of a somewhat swarthy and youngish-looking guy popped up on the screen.
“Fortunately for all you gemophiles, the new buyer has agreed to leave it on public display at the Gemological Institute of America through November 1. You might want to sneak in a road trip to California before that pretty baby disappears for good!”
In unison, Ruth and Roxie turned to me. And I dropped the bag of carrots onto the kitchen floor.
That was how it had started. And now here we were. But with every X-ray and conversation, it became more and more clear that our dreams and hopes were about to fade away and that our plans to steal the North Star were as badly broken as Ruth’s leg and Roxie’s arm. The planets had aligned to make us think we could steal the North Star. Now it felt they’d spun out of orbit completely.
Worn out and tired of keeping a smile on my face, I left the hospital when the nurses told me that visiting hours were over. In the elevator, where I still had no reception, I looked at myself in the shiny stainless doors. Standing there alone, I was transported to how I’d felt with him standing next to me. And how reassuring that had felt. I’d gotten used to being the shoulder to lean on. But it had been awfully nice to have him there beside me. Even if only for a little while.
As soon as I stepped out of the hospital, I hit play on the message. The brief and wonderful calm that came over me when I heard his voice was immediately replaced by an impending sense of doom. Because though I may not have been as experienced as Roxie when it came to men, I knew that if they asked you to Google them, it was probably a very, very bad sign.
The bus that would take me home pulled up just as I began to walk across the street, so I made a run for it and caught it just in time. As the bus lurched and bumped along, I toppled into an open seat across from an elderly lady with a set of worry beads in her hand.
“Hi,” I panted. “God, that was a close one!”
That was when I realized it wasn’t an elderly lady. It was a nun.
She looked at me sternly and moved a bead on her rosary.
I put my purse in my lap and tried to compose myself. She was still giving me the eagle eye, and I slunk back a little farther in my seat. And opened up my browser.
My dating history was hardly extensive. I’d dated an accountant and a dentist and a very nice if somewhat odd biologist who specialized in a rare minnow. All my relationships had fizzled out like a wet firework—none of those men could have handled knowing what I really was.
But as soon as the search results populated, I realized that Nick Norton was unlike any other man I’d ever dated. The first image that popped up wasn’t a professional head shot—it was a mug shot. I gaped at the image and said, “Holy shhhhhhh . . .” I looked up from my phone to find the nun staring at me with her rosary swinging. “. . . shhhakalakalaka,” I whispered.
Ignoring her terrifying repent, my child! glare, I focused on my phone wit
h all my might. The image led me to Nick’s rap sheet at mugshots.com. I scrolled down past a crazy-making litany of tattoos, recorded in minute detail under Distinguishing Characteristics, until finally I got to the charge sheet. He had a few old misdemeanors for breaking and entering when he was much younger, each noted with a period of parole—but no jail time. But at the bottom was a felony charge for possession of stolen property, worth over $5,000. It had the federal statute linked on one side, but I didn’t have to click it. I was up on my felonies; it meant he had been convicted of willfully possessing the goods, knowing that they were stolen. I backed up to the search results and clicked on the “News” tab. There was a short article from the Albuquerque Journal about his arrest. For possession of five rough-cut diamonds.
It hit me like a Whac-A-Mole hammer on the forehead.
I knew him. Or more precisely, knew about him. The year before, I had heard about a fence with a reputation for being low-profile and discreet, specializing in jewels. We’d been about to seek him out when he’d gotten picked up by an undercover cop in a sting. It had been around about Halloween, I remembered, because Ruth and Roxie and I had discussed it when we were doing our costumes in the bathroom. Roxie had said she’d heard he was yummy. Ruth had said she’d heard there was no safe he couldn’t crack. And I’d heard that along with being a fence, he was a thief.
Just like me.
I dropped my phone in my lap and watched Albuquerque whiz by in a million shades of beige. He wasn’t just some hunky guy who got me all hot and bothered. He was a guy who, for better or worse, could relate to my crazy, unconventional, decidedly not-the-girl-next-door secret life. He was a guy I could actually be myself around.
God, what a relief that would be, I thought, as I slumped back in my seat.
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