That was the goal.
But, I thought, as I put half a dozen very generous squirts of my conditioner into my palm . . .
There was also a worst-case scenario to consider. He didn’t want to talk that over, but I had to think it through. And it looked like this: We get caught. Nick and I spend the night in a county lockup, awaiting charges, as Priscilla is, hopefully, returned to Mr. Bozeman. Ruth and Roxie cannot pay this month’s rent and have to move to a less-safe apartment across town. The Big Wide Open goes to someone else. Mr. Bozeman is still in debt, and I can’t be there to help. The magnificent love story of the last little while explodes in a tragic spray of dull embers, and all the happiness we were all so close to having vanishes forever.
All is lost. Game over. Nobody gets their happy ending. Nobody comes out better in the end.
Toweling myself off, I tried to center my thoughts by focusing on a line in the bathroom wallpaper where two flowers were slightly mismatched, but it didn’t help. The worst-case scenario felt like it was right there in that line—the split between what was and what would never be. But I pushed those thoughts out of my head and cleared a place in the mirror to look at myself in the steam. You can do this, Stella. You can do this. You can.
As I stepped out of the bathroom in my robe, I found Nick zipping up both my suitcase and his own, getting them set to go by the door. We’d paid our bill already and arranged for a late checkout. Taking the pile of clothes I’d left on the bed, I shimmied very slowly into my panties and my leggings. We went about our routines in a nervous silence, interrupted only by the ding of my phone. It was a notification from Instagram.
More carats than a bag of carrots. Amirite? #SheikhLife
The image was him with the Ritz pool behind him, and he was holding the stone in one hand. He was kissing the angled edge of the stone. The North Star sparkled in the sunlight, the same sunlight that was shining through our window. The gem was so big, it hardly looked real at all. On the far right of the frame was the guard, in his shiny cheap suit, with his hand to his forehead in the universal sign of, I don’t get paid enough for this. Not even close.
“He’s got it,” I said to Nick, and showed him the image of the North Star.
“Fuck,” Nick replied, and ran his hand down his stubble.
This was happening. We were doing it. And once the plan was in motion, it would be our only shot. I looked at Nick, and Nick looked at me. We held one another’s gaze for so long, my screen went dark. The waves crashed, and Priscilla snored. Butterflies of all different sorts fluttered around in my stomach, colliding and heading off in opposite directions. Until finally Nick said, “You ready?”
“I think so.”
Nick nodded in return. From the hot, sunny windowsill he took the yogurt. It had sat in the sun all day, and now the foil lid was slightly puffy. He took a spoon from the minibar shelf and put it in his pocket. From the bathroom he took two hand towels and tossed one over to me. “You ever wiped a place for prints?”
I stared at the towel in my hand and shook my head. “Never.”
“Then follow behind me,” he said, and began with the handles of the sliding glass door. From there we went to the bedside table. To the lamp switches and the phone. To the minibar, to the closet, to the bathroom. Erasing all evidence that we had ever been there, erasing all the traces of the two of us there together.
Finally, when we got to the front entry area, I hooked Priscilla to the leash and took a deep breath. He took my face in his hands and gave me a long and tender kiss. It was a kiss unlike any other we’d had. One moment it was sweet, the next it was desperate. It was urgent, it was sad. It was joyful, and it was terrifying. And it made me sick because it felt very much like a goodbye, even if neither of us said so. I was too nervous to say anything at all.
Parting from him gave me a terrible pinch in my heart. Because there was a very real chance, if something went wrong, that this was the last time we would ever . . .
I couldn’t think about it. I just couldn’t. With all my strength, I pushed those thoughts away. I sealed them up and shoved them aside. For now. And, hopefully, forever.
Nick opened the door using the towel to keep his prints off the knob and lock. He wedged the door open with the toe of his boot. He leaned out of the room to check that the coast was clear and cleaned off both sides of the knob again, as well as the edges of the door itself and its frame. We tossed the towels into the bathroom and left our room, side by side, as the DO NOT DISTURB sign swung from the knob. We headed for the elevators and waited together in nervous silence, holding hands. The door slid open, and I was relieved to find it empty. We stepped inside and looked at one another in the reflection on the door.
“I love you,” he said softly.
My heart was in my throat, and I was so full of every sort of emotion that when I opened my mouth to answer him, no words came out. I was too nervous to tell him what I needed to say. And so I squeezed his hand as hard as I could, hoping he could feel that everything inside me was saying, I love you too.
38
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.
39
STELLA
In my head I was saying, “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” over and over again, while also listening for what the guard was doing in the bathroom. His feet squeaked on the marble tile, and I heard the towel rack rattle.
I turned to Nick, wide-eyed. Just at that instant, the case popped open, with a very distinctive and cringe-worthy snap. The guard apparently had an ear for that sound, because just as Nick laid his hand on the North Star . . .
The bathroom door began to open.
My heart plummeted down through my body. Automatically, I seized the doorknob and pulled it shut.
Which was when the guard realized he wasn’t alone in the room . . . and he started to fight back.
It was unbelievable. It was terrifying. It was like we’d caged a rabid animal. He began banging and hollering and yanking so hard on the door that I thought my wrist would break. I couldn’t hold him—I absolutely could not hold him. My hands weren’t big enough, the knob was too slippery, and the guard was much too strong.
Like time slowed down, like everything stood still, I became aware only of Nick standing next to me, gripping the doorknob over my hand with his, using so much force and taking up so much area that he crowded me out completely. I clutched Priscilla to me to keep her quiet and focused on Nick’s hand—his knuckles white, his fingers red at the tips from straining and pulling to keep the guard from getting out.
We had to get out of there. Except that was when the reality caught up to my thoughts.
We couldn’t get out of there. Not together.
One of us had to hold the door. Only one of us was going to be able to get out of there.
It was either g
oing to be Nick or me that got out. But not both.
As the guard raised a whole new kind of hell from the bathroom, yanking on the doorknob with a two-handed grip that made me wonder how long the knob could stay in one piece, Nick mouthed, Shhhhhh, and looked me hard in the eye. As though the guard wasn’t bellowing at the top of his lungs, it became just me and Nick there together, alone. “Listen to me.” His whispers weren’t whispers at all. Each word was crystal clear. “Get the fuck out of here.”
40
NICK
I would never have made her happy. I think I’d known that all along. But one thing I could do, right then and right there, was make sure she got a square fucking shot at her dreams. I was going to fall on my sword for her, for the one I loved. Because that was the only way this could end.
I kept hold of the knob with only one hand. The guard was giving the fight his all—he pounded the door with the flat of his hand, and it shivered on the hinges. With my free hand, I reached into my pocket, gave her the diamond, and repeated, “Get. The. Fuck. Out of here.”
She was like a deer in the goddamned headlights. Her eyes were wide, frozen and unblinking. I pushed the diamond into her palm until her fingers contracted around it. She shook her head to say she wasn’t leaving, and her lips began to tremble. “Not without you,” she whispered.
A scene from an old movie I used to love flashed into my head. White Fang. That lone wolf, by himself in the forest, and the guy who’d loved him screaming at him to go. For his own good. For his own fucking safety.
She was smart and she was sensible, but at that moment I knew better. I took the knob with both hands and held tight. “Run,” I growled into her ear. “Run.”
She looked desperate, horrified. Her eyes had become damp with tears. There was panic and pain and all the shit I never wanted to see on her face, never for as long as I fucking lived. But I was digging in my heels. It was either me or her who got out of that fucking room. She was the light, she was the freedom. Everything was out in front of her. I was just an ex-con and always would be. “Never look back. Live your dreams. Forget about me.”
Shimmy Bang Sparkle Page 25