Branson raised the phone and tapped the camera icon on the screen. The screen filled with a picture of his own face. That wasn’t right. He turned the phone around. Now he couldn’t see what he was taking a picture of. He sighed. A few moments more fumbling, and he thought he had it figured out. He raised the phone again.
“What are you doing?” a voice asked from behind him.
He whirled, almost dropping the phone. Stephanie was standing there, looking quizzically at him.
“H-hey,” Branson said.
“Hey,” she answered. “What are you doing?”
“I’m…um…” He thought frantically. “I got a new phone,” he finally choked out. “I’m trying to learn to use the camera.”
“In here?” she said. “With no light?”
“The commercials say it works in low light,” he said. “I’m trying it out.”
“Oh. Okay,” she said. She looked up at the runway. “This is where they’re going to do the big show, right?” she said. “The Birds of Paradise one.”
Branson nodded. “Saturday.”
She made a face. “Those girls all look so phony,” she said. “All made up. And you know none of those boobs are real.”
“I know,” he said. He actually thought the pictures he’d seen of the models who’d be there were pretty hot, but he wasn’t going to say that to Stephanie. A sudden inspiration struck him. “You’re a lot prettier than they are.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he realized that what he’d had wasn’t inspiration. It was just the opposite. It was, in fact, anti-inspiration. He looked at the phone and wondered if they made a death ray app he could turn on himself and become a pile of ash on the floor.
But she just smiled. “You’re sweet,” she said. She walked over to the runway, placed a hand on it, and swung herself up and onto it, as lithe and graceful as a gymnast. She stood up and began strutting up and down in an exaggerated sashay, a parody of the models’ walks they’d seen on television. “Hey, Bran,” she said, laughing. “Get a picture of me.”
He laughed back and raised the camera. He began pantomiming a fashion photographer, snapping picture after picture as she mock-pouted, looking back over her shoulder and giving her hair an exaggerated toss. “Super, dawling, just faaaaabulous,” he drawled in what he hoped was a recognizable imitation of a British accent. For some reason, he just assumed all fashion photographers were British. She giggled. Finally, she tired of the game and sat down on the edge of the runway, her legs dangling over. He knelt on one knee, taking a few last shots of her.
“Let me see,” she said. He climbed up and sat next to her on the runway. She took the phone from his hands and scanned through the pictures, chuckling. “I look like such a goofball,” she said.
“You look great,” he said, and he meant it.
“Thanks,” she said, handing the phone back to him. “Now erase them.”
“What?”
She looked serious. “Really, Bran, we were just goofing around. But you need to erase those. I don’t want to see them turning up on Tumblr or Instagram or something like that, okay?”
“But…I mean I wouldn’t…” He stopped, suddenly tongue-tied again. He looked down at her face on the screen. Sighing, he deleted them one by one. When he was done, she simply said “thanks” and jumped down off the runway.
“Hey,” he said. He felt the moment slipping away from him. “Would you…”
She turned and looked back. “Yeah?”
He swallowed. “Would you like to go out with me? Tomorrow night?”
She shook her head. “I’m working tomorrow,” she said. “Double shift.”
He felt crushed. “Oh…okay.”
“But how about Thursday?” she said.
His heart started beating again. “Thursday’s fine.”
She smiled. “Great.”
“Great.” He stood there looking at her.
“So…” she said. “You know where I live?”
“Um. No.”
“Here,” she said, “give me the phone.”
He handed it over. “Wow,” she said. “This is really nice.”
“It…it’s a present from my uncle.”
“Nice uncle,” she said. She swiped, touched, and performed various actions before handing it back. “There,” she said. “Now you have my address and my number. Call me.”
“I will,” he said. He watched her walk away. When the ballroom door closed behind her, his face broke into a grin. He went back to taking pictures, whistling.
“YOU WANT what?” Rafe said.
“I need an advance,” Bran said, trying to keep his voice steady. He snuck a look at L.B. out of the corner of his eye. The man was looking at him as if Bran had just asked to have sex with his daughter. It was a look of astonishment quickly turning to fury.
“An advance on what, exactly?” Rafe said.
“On the, ah, loot.”
“The loot,” Rafe said, as if he’d never heard the word before.
Bran could feel the sweat breaking out on his brow under the heat lamp of L.B.’s furious gaze, as threatening as the late-summer thunderstorm he could hear in the distance through the open warehouse door. He’d come with his uncle back to Rafe’s base of operations in Macon. He was beginning to regret it. Being on the older man’s home ground, with no way to get back home, except by Rafe’s good graces, made him feel unsettled and unsure. He wondered for a fleeting moment if that had been Rafe’s intention in bringing him here.
“You know,” he said, pressing ahead despite his insecurity. “The take. The swag.”
“You mean,” Rafe said, “the proceeds of our proposed enterprise.”
“Yeah,” Bran said, “that.”
L.B. spoke up for the first time. “Boy,” he said, “have you lost your damn mind?”
“L.B.,” Rafe said. “Let me handle this.” He turned to Bran. “You realize, of course,” he said, “that this enterprise of which we speak is as yet in an embryonic phase, and that there is, as they say, many a slip ’twixt cup an’ lip.”
“What?” Bran said.
“What he means,” said L.B., “is we ain’t decided if there is a job here. Not yet. An’ the fact that those pictures you brought us ain’t worth shit ain’t helpin’.” He had tried to download the pictures onto Rafe’s computer, but they’d come out all blurry and nearly useless. Apparently the “low light” camera wasn’t as good as advertised.
“But I thought…”
“There’s your problem, boy,” L.B. said. “You been thinkin’ when that’s our job. So why the hell do you think you deserve anything more than a swift kick in the ass?”
Bran thought furiously. “Because I’ve got an idea,” he blurted out.
L.B. straightened up. He gave Rafe a look of disgust. “Well,” he said, “ain’t that nice. He’s got an idea. Jesus.” He turned away.
“So tell us your idea, son,” Rafe said.
His voice was jovial, but Branson could see in his uncle’s eyes that he was on thin ice. He looked around. “I need a sheet of paper,” he said, “and a pen.” Rafe produced both from the metal desk.
“Okay,” Bran said. “The main ballroom, where the show is, is right here.” He drew a long rectangle. He sketched in the stage and the runway extending from one side. He drew another, narrower rectangle beside the first. “Next door is another ballroom.” He drew a line that divided it in half. “This back part’s the dressing area. That’s where the girls are going to be changing costumes, doing makeup, stuff like that.”
“That’s where the model, that Cartwright girl, will put the bra on,” Rafe said.
Bran nodded. “Right. They go out the back door of the dressing room, a little ways down this corridor, to the back of the main room, and onto the stage.”
He noticed L.B. had come over to stand over him as he drew. “Okay,” L.B. said. Some of his earlier hostility appeared to have dissipated. “So what?”
“So,” Bran said, “across that
corridor is the banquet kitchen.” He drew a piece of the corridor. “And when you get into the kitchen, there’s a door to the outside. It’s a big door, metal, with two sides that swing open. It’s where the trucks come in that deliver food and supplies and stuff.”
L.B. rubbed his chin thoughtfully. So we grab the item, hustle out that back door, and….” He looked up at Rafe. “We’re gonna need a delivery truck.”
Rafe nodded. “Plenty of those around,” he said. “Looks like this area here”—he tapped the short stretch of corridor where it ran behind the two ballrooms—“is the Achilles’ heel, as it were.”
“They’ll have security there,” L.B. said. “Lots of it.”
“We can make provisions for that,” Rafe said. He looked at Bran. “You know anything about the security?”
Bran shook his head. “It’s by some company called Paragon. There’s this big black guy seems to be in charge. He looks mean.” He pointed at the front half of the divided second ballroom. “They’re setting up offices in there. And they’re putting up cameras all over the place.”
“Cameras we can deal with,” L.B. said.
“So you like the plan?” Bran said.
L.B. looked amused this time. “This ain’t a plan yet, son,” he said. “But it’s a beginning.”
“So, ah, can I have…”
His voice sharpened with suspicion. “What do you need an advance for, anyway?”
I have a date, Bran wanted to say, but something made him stop. He suddenly didn’t want either this guy or Uncle Rafe to find out about Stephanie if he could help it. He looked away from L.B.’s sharp predatory gaze. “I’ve just got some bills that need paying,” he said.
Rafe reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. “Tell you what,” he said, peeling a couple off. “As I said, we’re still in too early a stage of operations to talk about advances or division of ‘swag.’” He chuckled over the last word. “But I can front you a little walkin’ around money. Seein’ as how you’re family and all.” He held the bills out.
Bran took them. There were two hundreds, worn and creased and slightly greasy. Bran abruptly felt the urge to give them back. Only the image of Stephanie’s face, smiling and lit by the candlelight of a nice restaurant, stopped him. “Thanks,” he said. “I owe you.”
“That you do,” Rafe said, and Bran felt a sinking feeling in his stomach at the smile on Rafe’s face. “That you do.”
“YOU WANTED to see me?” Clarissa said.
She stood at the opening of the metal and fabric cubicle that comprised Chunk’s “office” in a corner of the half-ballroom that housed the administrative area for the show. On the other side of the flimsy partition, he could hear barely controlled chaos: shouted questions and answers, murmured phone conservations, the occasional whine of a hand-held power drill. Chunk was used to operating in noisy environments; the Robbery Squad offices back on the job hadn’t exactly been an oasis of tranquility. But that drill always caught him unawares and set his teeth on edge. But he’d insisted on moving down here as the show approached. He needed to be on the floor where he could see everything.
“Ms. Cartwright.” Chunk stood up from behind the folding table he was using as a desk. “I’m Charles McNeill, Paragon Security. Please. Sit down.” He indicated a folding metal chair across from his larger, more comfortable one. The chair wobbled a bit as she sat down. He’d taken the rubber tip off one of the legs to make it a little unsteady. It was a trick he’d learned on the job, a trick that put suspects literally off-balance.
She didn’t lose her poise, however. She sat up straight, hands folded in her lap. Her eyes were wary, but her face was composed. Suddenly, he was the one who felt off-balance. Many models, without makeup, expensive fashion, or photographic trickery, were shockingly plain, at least in comparison to their public personae. But even dressed in jeans and a plain white blouse, her black hair pulled back in a loose ponytail, Clarissa Cartwright could render a man speechless.
He cleared his throat and looked down at his iPad. “We were going through some of the background checks,” he began, “and there was something we wanted to ask about.” He looked up at her, his eyes narrowed. “Mario Allegretti.” He waited, studying her closely for any micro-expressions, any visual cues like subtle thinning of the lips, furrowing of the brows, or other signs of deception. She might be defiant, indignant, angry. She might even turn seductive or flirtatious to try and put him off guard. He’d thought about all of those, and how he might react. But he wasn’t expecting to see those striking blue eyes fill with tears and her full lips trembling. She wiped the back of her hand across her eyes. He studied her a moment, thinking, This is too easy. She’s going to give him up just like that? Well, she’s not a pro.
He decided to play good cop for the moment. It wasn’t the role his face and physique usually suited him for, but he’d learned to be versatile. He took the box of tissues he’d placed on his side of the table and slid it across to her. “Thank you,” she said softly as she took one and wiped her eyes. He let the silence hang for a moment, then asked, in an equally soft voice, “So what was the plan?”
The look in her eyes changed from grief to confusion. “The what?”
“How was he going to get the Fantasy Bra?”
She shook her head as if she was trying to clear water from her ears. “What are you talking about?” She got herself under control.
“It happens a lot, Clarissa,” he said in his most comforting voice. An ex-girlfriend had told him that that voice could woo a cat down from a tree or charm the panties off a nun—so long as neither one of them looked him in the face. She’d stopped returning his calls soon after that. “Guy like that, flashy, rich…he finds a pretty young girl, takes her to all the nice places, tells her he loves her, tells her he’ll do anything for her…then when she’s lost her heart, he tells her he needs her to do just one thing for him…just one little illegal thing.”
Her bafflement was turning to anger. “Wait a minute,” she said, “you think…”
He went on, his voice rising to override hers. “But when the job’s over, and he’s got the jewels, and someone needs to take the fall, who do you think it’s going to be, Clarissa? Assuming he doesn’t just put a bullet in you to keep you from talking.”
She looked at him for a moment, dumbfounded. Then she did another completely unexpected thing: she threw back her head and laughed.
He engaged bad-cop mode, standing up and coming around the table to loom over her. “You think this is funny?” he snarled.
She stopped laughing for a moment, looked up at him, then broke up again. “You think I…you think he…Oh my God, Mr. McNeill, have you ever got it wrong.”
Normally, this was the point where Chunk would grab the chair, get in the defiant suspect’s face, maybe even dump them onto the floor, implying a threat of further violence without ever actually overtly making one. But he stopped himself. This wasn’t an interview room at a police station, and he didn’t have a badge. Besides, something in the woman’s demeanor was planting a sudden cold kernel of doubt in his gut. He stood over her awkwardly as her laughter ran down. Finally, she looked up at him, face composed, and he saw that what he’d been mistaking for the last few chuckles had been tears again. They streaked that perfect face and reddened her eyes.
“I could use another tissue, please,” she said calmly. Chunk hesitated for a moment, then got her one. “Thank you,” she said, and blew her nose. She even looks good doing that, Chunk thought. He went back and sat down.
“Mr. McNeill,” she said, “it’s true, I have been seeing Mario Allegretti. Yes, it was a serious relationship. At least I’d thought it was. But before I got on the plane for the tour, I discovered that he’d been cheating on me.” She blew her nose again, threw the tissue on the table between them. “I dumped the sleazy bastard.” She stood up. “And, since I know what you’ll ask next, I have no idea whether he plans to steal the Fantasy Bra. I can tell you that if he ge
ts close enough to me to try and take it off, I’m going to rip his balls off and have them made into earrings. Maybe a brooch. I haven’t decided, even though”—she smiled a cold smile—“I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” She swept out of the enclosure, her head held high.
Damn, Chunk thought, the feeling of admiration taking him by surprise. That is one hell of a woman. Man who’d cheat on that may be too dumb for a life of crime. A second thought made him shake his head. He knew there was no such thing. No one was too dumb for a life of crime.
“SO WHAT I’m thinkin’,” Rafe Valentine said, “is a quick smash ’n’ grab.”
“I’m listenin’,” L.B. said.
Rafe tapped the spot on the diagram Branson had drawn. “This here area, right here,” he said, “this hallway, is what military strategists call the center of gravity.”
“I thought it was the heel of the killers,” L.B. said. “Whatever the hell that means.”
“That would be the Achilles’ heel,” Rafe said, “and they are not mutually exclusive, my friend.” He tapped the spot again. “When the item passes through here, we divert it to,” he tapped the kitchen door, “here, onto the waiting delivery truck, which we will have commandeered earlier in the day.”
“But not too much earlier,” L.B. said, “or people will be lookin’ for it.”
Rafe nodded. “Correct. Timing will be of the essence, as it so often is.”
“And I suppose no one’s gonna object to this here diversion?” L.B. said.
“They’ll be too busy, Rafe said “dealing with a distraction which we will create elsewhere. I’m still workin’ that part out.”
Branson spoke up for the first time. “When you say divert, what exactly does that mean?”
Rafe held out his hand. “We take the young lady by the hand, and guide her to where she needs to go.”
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