Shimmy Bang Sparkle

by Nicola Rendell

  I leaned against the still-warm oven and braced for impact. He was coming for me. And I was ready.

  But when he got to me, he didn’t kiss me. He caged me in and looked me in the eye, and said, “Can I ask you something, now that we’ve got some stuff out in the open?”

  I looped my arms around him and ran my fingers through the short hair at the back of his neck. It was a little bit scary, standing on this precipice between the two halves of my life. But scary in a good way. It did make me a little shy, though, and I lowered my eyes. There, on the inside of his forearm, I noticed a tattoo that hadn’t caught my eye before. It was small. It was black.

  It was a spade.

  The thing was, I didn’t really know how to be with an accountant or a dentist, or, God forbid, a lawyer. I never knew what made them tick, and I’d never been able to be myself around them long enough to find out, either. The tattoo reminded me that we weren’t two people burning up for one another; we were lovers who could also could understand each other in a way that few people could. “Lemme guess. It’s time for Twenty Questions?”

  He nodded, and he pressed his forehead against mine and nuzzled my cheek. “Question one. What the hell is in the bottom of your purse?”

  While we waited for the Chinese food, we sat on the sofa together. He was in his boxers, and I was in a sweatshirt and panties. I had my feet in his lap, and there was a bag of M&Ms between us. In my hands, I held the puzzle box. I tapped on the top right corner and then the middle of the underside, feeling for the almost imperceptible flexing of the brass. “My grandpa gave it to me,” I said as I touched the fifth spot. “And normally, I don’t keep it with me. But someone”—I nudged his abs with my toe—“has had me awfully distracted. You ready?”

  He raised his hands, palms up, and flicked his fingers. “I was born ready.”

  With one final press of the box, the top popped open. Inside, all my little beauties glimmered by the twinkling Christmas lights above the television. My rubies and my sapphires, my pearl necklace. My emeralds. All courtesy of the craft store, patience, and a whole lot of resin. “Ta-da,” I said, and turned the box around in my lap.

  Nick’s mouth dropped open. “Holy shit,” he said, leaning in, laughing the way people did when they couldn’t believe what they were seeing. “Can I?”

  I extended the box to him. “Be my guest.”

  When he plunged his hand into the gems, my pearl necklace spilled out. It reminded me of one of those aquarium treasure chests. He took the pearls and did what everybody did with them—the bite test. They would pass with flying colors.

  He checked each gem on either side. “Are these real?”

  I shook my head, feeling so proud that it gave me goose bumps. “Resin and Roxie’s microbead face scrub.”

  His eyes flashed. “No way.” He picked up a ruby and held it up to the light. “These are all plastic?”

  “Yep,” I said, holding up a sapphire to the light too. “I’m very crafty.”

  “How the hell did you learn to do any of this?” he asked. “I mean you just look so . . . girl-next-door. When I saw you steal that ring, you could’ve knocked me over with a feather.”

  “Aren’t you sweet,” I said, and took my puzzle box back from him. “I learned the gems from YouTube. I learned about stealing from experience and my grandpa. But that’s two questions. My turn.”

  He set his beer down and gave me a flick of his chin. “Go for it.”

  I reached into the bag of M&Ms and took out a small handful, separating out the greens and the yellows, and thought back to his rap sheet. “You got caught.”

  Nick made a throaty growl. “I did.”

  “How?” I asked.

  He blew out a long breath and cringed a little. I thought maybe he would pass, and I certainly wouldn’t have blamed him. But he didn’t. “I was down in Truth or Consequences. It was gonna be a straightforward exchange. Loose gems for unmarked bills. So I’m there, I’m set. I’m on my own. And I show up for the meet. Everything’s going fine. But then I make the exchange and all hell breaks loose.” Nick scratched his eyelid with his thumbnail. “Fucking undercover cop with a four-inch tattoo of an eagle on his neck.”

  “Noooo!” I said, clutching my M&Ms so hard they started to feel a little bit melty.

  “Yep. Fuck,” he said, shaking his head. “And that was that. Seven months later, I’m out. Trying to get straight, watching you steal an engagement ring and up to my eyeballs in gambling debt.” He winced. “Sorry. Not exactly the most eligible bachelor in the 505.”

  What he didn’t know was that with every detail, he was getting more and more eligible in my eyes. Because though I’d never been caught, I understood the struggle. I understood the grind. The gambling somehow fit him, and yet I couldn’t see him hanging around the casinos playing blackjack all day. “Let me guess. Horses?”

  He nodded slowly. “You guessed it.”

  Albuquerque wasn’t a very big town, and if a person wanted to gamble on horses, there was really only one place in town to do it. “The Texan?”

  Again he nodded.

  “God, I hate that man.” I crunched down on my M&Ms angrily. “So much.”

  “Fuck. You do?” He reached into the bag and pulled out a handful. “I’d like to crush up his fucking cheese curls into powder and mace him with it on my way out the door.” He ran his hands up and down my calves. “OK, my turn again. Fill in the blank. There’s a shit-ton of reasons to steal, but you are mostly motivated by . . .”

  It was so unexpected, such a sweet mix of straightforward and devious, that I burst out laughing. “I don’t know,” I said, looking up at the ceiling. “I mean, really? One thing?”

  He nodded. “Short and sweet.”

  Need. Revenge. Putting what was wrong back to right. Helping others. Sticking it to the man. “Justice?”

  He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Yeah. I get that.”

  “What are you about? One word, fill in the blank.” I tossed an M&M up into the air, and it totally missed my mouth.

  He took a second to think it over. “God. I don’t know. Habit, really. I grew up doing it—I never knew much else. So I did what I knew. And kept on doing it.”

  “Are you still in the business, or have you given it up?”

  That question seemed much more difficult for him to answer. It looked as though he wanted to tell me but didn’t quite know how.

  “I guess I want to be done with it all. So fucking badly,” he said, shaking his head. “But like I said, I got debts to pay. If I can pay them honestly, then I’ll do that. But if not . . .” He ran his hand through his hair. “Then I’ll have to figure something else out. What about you? From what Roxie said today, it seems like you guys have something lined up. Or did.”

  “It was going to be our last one,” I said. “Part of me still wants to go ahead with it. By myself.”

  His expression went from flirtatious to serious in an instant. He turned his head slightly, looking somewhere between skeptical and protective. “Alone? What was the job?”

  For the first time, I kind of froze. If I were to do it on my own, I didn’t even have a plan. It wasn’t even for sure. And anyway, if he was trying to get straight, that was the last thing he needed to know.

  Wasn’t it?

  Before I had to give him an answer, his phone began vibrating on the coffee table.

  I’d been saved by the eggrolls. For the moment.

  22

  NICK

  We were on the floor of her living room. On the coffee table was the full spread—enough takeout to last us for days. She sat with her feet tucked underneath her. Each time she undid the flaps on one of the containers and looked inside, she let out an excited little, “Ooh!”

  But I wasn’t going to let her distract me. She’d said they were planning one last job, and she was thinking of doing it alone.

  Which I didn’t like the sound of. At all.

  I knew a thing or two about big job
s. I’d known a guy when I was just starting out, a Bible-thumper with a passion for cheap weed, who had had a theory that every crew did three jobs in their time together. There was the Genesis Job, which a crew did when they were first starting out; the Revelation Job, which made a crew realize what they were really good at; and the Exodus Job, the last one before a crew got the fuck out of the business for good. Or . . . got thrown in jail.

  The Shimmy Shimmy Bangs’ Exodus job wasn’t going to be some princess-cut, two-carat platinum engagement ring taken from a jeweler on Central. It’d be big. It’d be gutsy. And thanks to that brochure that the Texan had tried to use on me as bait, I suspected I might know exactly what it was already.

  I waited until she was deep into her orange chicken before I asked—it would give her no time to prepare, and if her mouth dropped open . . . that’d be my sign.

  As she put a piece of chicken in her mouth, I sprang it on her. “It’s the North Star. Isn’t it?”

  Her mouth did drop open, and a piece of broccoli fell from her fork onto the carpet. She gave me five quick blinks. She plucked the broccoli off the rug and busied herself with her napkin. There was the blush. I had my answer. “Could I . . . have . . . some soy sauce?” she said.

  I shook my head and moved the packets away from her, like I was moving chips on a poker table. “Tell me. What are you planning?”

  She tried to snag one of the little packets, but I was quicker on the draw.

  She bit her lip and flared her nostrils. “Pass. Next question.”

  That was fire on the flames. “The North Star, alone? You don’t get to pass on that one.”

  Now she tried to grab the mu shu pancakes, but I grabbed those too and stashed them between me and the sofa.

  She was looking pretty indignant. A little fire in those eyes. I liked it. A whole lot. “Here’s how I see it. You had a plan, and probably a good one. But now you’re two partners down and still planning to do the job?”

  “That would be bananas.”

  I slid the soy sauce back toward her and put the pancakes on top. “So that’s it, isn’t it?”

  She lowered her eyes. She ripped open the little packet of sauce and drizzled it on her carton of rice. “The more I tell you, the riskier it is.”

  I knew it. But I didn’t play it cocky—I played it calm and careful. “I get that.” And after a few beats, I added, “I don’t want in on your job. I just want to give you a shoulder to lean on.”

  When she looked back at me, her eyes were softer. She chewed her new piece of broccoli carefully and thoughtfully as she studied me. I patted my own shoulder, and she gave me a little smile. I left it with her and didn’t say any more. I dished out some orange chicken on my plate and put some fried rice on hers. I topped up her glass of wine, even though she didn’t need it, and I dug into my beef and snow peas.

  “Do you know anything about hotel jobs?” she asked. Almost shy, almost tentative.

  “How can you be so sweet even when you’re talking about a felony?” I asked.

  She snickered and smiled just enough to show off her dimple. “You didn’t answer the question.”

  Deserts, strip mall parking lots, shady-ass places like Pony Up—that was what I knew about. Hotels, not so much. But theft was theft. “I know a thing or two about not getting caught.” I raised my eyes to her and waited.

  But I could tell from the way her shoulders had begun to lift that she was definitely tightening up on me. So I decided to cut that fucking tension with the oldest trick in the book. “Knock knock,” I said.

  She froze with her fork inside her lo mein carton. “We’re doing knock knocks now?”

  I nodded, deadpanning her. “Knock knock.”

  She rubbed her lips together and shook her head at me, smiling. Like she couldn’t believe this shit.

  Believe it, beautiful. “Knock knock,” I said again.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  Awww yeah. “Dishes.”

  “Dishes who?”

  “Dish is the police! Open up!”

  Her laugh was enormous, it was joyful, and it filled me with such happiness. Fuck. I clicked my tongue and said, “Ba-dun-tssss. I’ll be here all week.”

  She glanced up at me. “All week, huh?”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I said, more serious now. “And that’s not a joke. So you can lean on me, or not. I just fucking like you a lot, Stella. That’s all there is to it.”

  She lowered her head so she was looking into her lap. Smiling, embarrassed almost. That’s when she set down her takeout carton and wiped her hands on a paper napkin. “All right, you. I’ll show you part of the plan. Close your eyes.”

  She was taking a leap of faith, and I wasn’t about to take my eyes off her. So I pretended to close them and watched her through the gap. She got up on her knees and took the puzzle box from the coffee table. She made a series of taps in specific places, and a secret compartment on the bottom popped open. Whatever she was holding, she kept it palmed nice and tight.

  “Hold out your hand,” she said. “And close those eyes tight, please.”

  I bit back a smile and closed my eyes all the way.

  She placed something in my palm that was hard, solid, and about the size of a golf ball. And said, “Open sesame.”

  It was an exact replica of the North Star, so precise in every last detail that it even had the identical internal flaw in the center, a hairline fracture no bigger than a few specks of dust.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, turning it over in my hand. It was the right weight, the right clarity, the right everything. “This can’t be plastic.”

  “It is,” she said, wide-eyed and smiling. “High density, that’s why it’s so heavy. It’s within one one-thousandth of an ounce of the real thing.”

  I had about a million questions. But only one really mattered. “Why? Why this? Why now?”

  She took the jewel from me, rotating it in her fingers. “We’ve had our eye on it for years. When we saw it was changing hands, we started talking about it more seriously.” She palmed it and looked at me. “We all have dreams. And we all want a shot at something better. Something safer. Something saner.” Stella scooted across the floor and lay down, with her head in my lap.

  I understood that in my bones. “The only dream I really care about is yours,” I said.

  She sighed hard. “Me?”

  “Yeah. You.”

  I felt her shoulders rise and fall under my hands. “It’ll sound silly.”

  “Try me.”

  Stella let her head fall slightly to the side. “There’s a ranch in Arizona that always belonged to my family until my grandparents had to sell. It’s called the Big Wide Open.” She turned the jewel another quarter turn, and its facets sparkled. “I’d be able to buy it back. Have some horses, a family even.” She sighed. “Silly, right?”

  Silly? Fuck no. A dream like that was what kept guys going when they had nothing else. A dream like that was everything. “You know what that is, though . . .”

  Stella shook her head. “Crazy?”

  It was crazy—it was my kind of crazy. I could almost see her out there, wherever it was. Driving a pickup, wearing boots. Making her way. “That’s the American Dream.”

  She laughed a little and looked with shining eyes at the icicle lights. “It is, isn’t it?”

  I moved her bangs away from her forehead. “Want to show me what else you’ve got?”

  “Yeah,” she said softly. “I do.”

  She sat on her knees in front of a small table by the sofa. Pulling back the cloth that was over it, she revealed that it wasn’t a table underneath, but a safe about as big as a minifridge. And not just any safe either, but a Safeco 9000, one of my very favorites. She moved the dial to zero and got eye level with the combination wheel.

  A rush ran through me. Until I’d met her, there was no rush like breaking into a safe. But now, to do it, in front of her? Christ. “How about I do that for you.”

&
nbsp; She turned to me, her adorable feet pressing into the carpet. On both feet, two of her toes crossed over each other. “Really?”

  “Really,” I said, and scooted closer.

  She rocked back on her knees and sat on her calves. “Sure. Of course. Ruth tells me this one is really hard.”

  Really hard was an understatement. Pain in the ass was closer. “You wanna learn?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “I’m crap with combination locks.”

  In my head, I called bullshit on that instantly. I was pretty sure she had the touch to do fucking everything, from lasagna to larceny. And the idea of teaching her something new, something she had no idea how to do, was intensely hot to me for some reason. I positioned myself behind her on the carpet, in front of the safe, with my arms around her. It was like that scene in Ghost, but way better. “Maybe you just didn’t have the right teacher.”

  She turned and gave me that little smile. “Maybe so.”

  “Maybe definitely.” I situated myself right behind her, so she was basically sitting in my lap. “Just a heads-up I’m probably going to get hard here in like two seconds, but just ignore it.”

  “I’ll try,” she said, with a snicker.

  “So. Put your hand like that.” I showed her what to do, middle finger at noon, thumb at six. She did as I’d shown her, and I took the opposite position, guiding the dial from above, at nine and three. “First thing you need to know is the safe you’re dealing with. Every safe is different; they don’t always go clockwise.”

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  “You feel it out. So see when we go this way”—I turned it clockwise—“feel how there’s less resistance?”

  She nodded, making her long curls slide against my chest. “So we go the other way?”

  “Exactly. Then you just feel it out. It takes a lot of practice.” I guided the dial and closed my eyes. I placed my chin on her shoulder and focused on what I was feeling with my fingers. It wasn’t easy. What I was feeling with my body, and my heart, was even more powerful than my focus on the safe right then. But I’d done jobs with plenty of distraction, and I managed to tune in to the lock in spite of how badly I wanted her. The resistance got higher and higher, and I knew we’d hit the sweet spot. “Did you feel that?”