Asprey didn’t like the look of either one. They had guns in the hangar, of course, and Asprey had handled his fair share. It was impossible to accomplish as many successful heists as they had without invoking the use of some kind of force. He didn’t always like it, but arms were one of the several necessary evils he’d come to accept as part of their trade.
This, though—it went too far. Graff didn’t get to point a gun at Poppy without his permission. He didn’t get to endanger a life that was rapidly becoming to mean more to Asprey than his own.
“Move, Natalie,” Graff ordered. “I know you’re dating this scumbug, but no one cheats against Drago and lives to tell the tale. No one.”
“She doesn’t move an inch, or I’ll blow her head off,” Todd warned, his voice shaky.
“Todd! Drago!” Poppy sounded more like a schoolteacher than a woman with one gun pointed at her chest and the other at her back. “Both of you put the guns down right now. This stupid game isn’t worth anyone’s life. Drago—that includes you.”
“You guys have the wrong idea. Natalie, I need you to reach down, grab my briefcase and hand it to me very slowly.” When she didn’t move, he added, “Do it, or I will shoot you.”
Asprey could hear the same fear in Todd’s voice from the day of the necklace heist, and he felt jolts of warning move through his spine. What had he thought then? That all Todd’s heroics were misplaced, at getting the gun pointed anywhere but toward himself? That Todd seemed like the type who would have gladly thrown Poppy into harm’s way if it meant saving his own skin?
Not if Asprey had anything to say about it.
He moved.
With a quick jab that was more of an automatic reflex than anything else, he hit the gun with his fist. It hurt, a lot more than he expected it to, what with the cold metal against bone and a lot more force than he thought he was capable of, but it had the bonus of sending the gun flying out of Todd’s hand and across the room. Away from Poppy, which was the only thing that mattered.
But gravity was a law even they had to adhere to, and the gun continued flying until it hit the far wall, firing once in a loud burst. The whole room stopped, suspended in time as they watched to see where the bullet tore through. The whole room, that was, except Asprey. Using the momentary distraction to his advantage, he fell into the squat he and Poppy had practiced at the Pit, his right leg shooting out to sweep a wide arc in Todd’s direction.
There was no finesse to it, and there was a second there when Asprey almost lost his balance and toppled sideways to the floor. But it worked, damn it, and Todd fell to the ground in a heap, grunting as he hit his head on the side of the table.
And just like that, it was over.
“Holy shit.” Asprey lifted himself and moved to Todd’s side, placing a hand on the older man’s leg. The body was warm and solid, but it wasn’t moving, and dark, viscous blood slugged into a pool beneath his head. “Did I kill him?”
“For fuck’s sake, Asprey!” Graff cried. “What is wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with me?” Adrenaline coursed through him, hot and insistent. “Todd had a gun pointed at the woman I l—” He broke off, quieter this time, though his fury was still very much intact. “Excuse me if my first instinct was to knock the guy over.”
“He’s breathing and has a good pulse, thank goodness.” Poppy looked up from her squat near Todd’s neck. Her eyes, when they met Asprey’s, were shuttered. “That head wound’s not going to stop any time soon, but we’re lucky it’s not worse. That was a good sweep, by the way.”
A short bark escaped Asprey’s throat, a combination of fear and laughter. “I learned from the best.”
“No,” she said, so quiet he had to strain to hear her. “You learned from the worst.”
Graff pushed Asprey out of the way and used his sleeve to pick up Todd’s gun, which he tossed into the empty poker-chip box. “We’re going to need to clear out—the props, the body, all of it. This isn’t how I wanted it to go down, but I think we can make it work.”
“What are you talking about?” Asprey crossed his arms. “Todd needs an ambulance.”
“What he needs is a good lesson—and that’s exactly what I intend to give him. You think he’s going to stop stealing from people because he loses in a poker game?” Graff laughed bitterly. “That’s just like you, Asprey, seeing only what’s right in front of your face. Poppy, I’m going to need you to wipe up his blood and spread some of it along your chest and back—make it look like the bullet hit right to your heart. The messier, the better. Even put some on your shoes if you can. We’re going to have to dispose of you no matter what, and if we can set it up so it looks like Todd was the one who killed you, we’ll have a better chance of him staying quiet about this whole affair.”
“You had no right to do that,” she said, and even though her words were harsh, they were cool and almost detached. “We had an agreement. My eighty grand and your thirty, and everyone walks away happy.”
Whereas Asprey had suddenly heightened emotions, senses, everything, Poppy looked as though she were seconds away from shutting down altogether.
Asprey stepped in front of her, wrapping one hand carefully around the back of her neck and pulling her close. Her body was so tense he could practically feel her vibrating. “Hey. You okay?”
“No, I’m not,” she whispered. “No one was supposed to get hurt. Not for me.”
“Asprey—we don’t have time for this.” Graff nudged him with the toe of his sneaker. “Get moving.”
Asprey ignored him. It was the only option that let him hold on to the last of his control. “What can I do, Poppy? What do you need?”
“I’ll tell you what I need,” Graff interrupted. “I need you to get out and ask the kitchen staff to take a small break out front. I’d rather they didn’t watch us move a body out the back door.”
Asprey turned to him and snarled. “Give me a minute to make sure she’s okay. I don’t know if you noticed, but a gun went off very near her head just a second ago.”
Graff snorted. “You think an ex-con is afraid of one measly bullet?”
That was enough. He swiveled until he was right up in his brother’s face, the two of them meeting on common ground, even though Graff had the advantage of him in terms of strength. Asprey wasn’t sure what he would have done if not for Poppy’s voice materializing gently at his back.
“He’s right.”
Asprey faced her. The dead, scary look was still in her eyes—but this time, parts of it were directed at him. “A bullet isn’t going to stop someone like me. We need to get out of here.”
Graff didn’t question it and busied himself flipping open the shiny gold panels on Todd’s briefcase and pulling out a stack of hundred dollar bills. He smacked them into Asprey’s chest. “Get the guys out of the kitchen. That should be persuasive enough.”
“Jesus, Graff—how much money is in that briefcase? How much did you tell him to bring?”
Poppy made a quick assessment of the contents. “I’m guessing near half a million—is that about right, Graff?”
Graff growled a few incomprehensible syllables and motioned for Asprey to continue doing his bidding.
Asprey looked at the money and back at Poppy. “You’re sure about this?”
“What other choice do we have right now? Todd is going to wake up considerably poorer and with one hell of a grudge to repay. The more scared of us he is, the better everyone’s chances. Graff is right.”
“No thanks to you two and your ridiculous heroics. I had it covered.” Graff began tossing their props into a few of the empty boxes piled in the corner. “Just clear the back and try not to look so panicked. We’re going to have to get him into the trunk and find somewhere to dump him.”
Who are you? Asprey wanted to ask. They’d bent quite a few laws to steal the forged items from the clients Winston had cheated, but they’d never hurt anyone before. Something inside Graff had shifted, and Asprey had no idea how or w
hen it happened.
He took a deep breath, flipping through the pile of hundreds and invoking whatever was left of Rufio.
“My friends!” Asprey called, moving out the door, his arms raised. Only two cooks sat in the kitchen, both of them smoking over a pot of what had equal chances of being soup or human remains. They’d obviously heard the gunshot, because they both reached for their belts. “It seems my guests have a powerful hunger. No, no—the lady is very particular. If you don’t mind, I’d like to rent these kitchen facilities for the next hour or so.”
The older of the two cooks took a long pull on his cigarette before flicking the ashes on the floor. “We hafta finish this stew. It’s Brunswick.”
That was definitely not what it smelled like. “I’ll stir it faithfully, I swear.” Asprey tossed the stack of bills on the counter. “I’ve always wanted to try my hand at being a cook. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the opportunity.”
The younger cook—who looked halfway normal in a chef’s jacket layered over loose-fitting pants—pocketed the money with a cool efficiency. Without batting an eye, he turned and moved through the swinging doors to the front.
“Take the green pepper out at half past,” the older cook ordered. He handed Asprey the spoon. “Don’t throw it away. I need it for later.”
“Noted. And thank you.”
“Just clean up when you’re done.” He wasn’t talking about the kitchen.
Asprey returned to the back room to find Poppy with the top half of her dress pooled around her waist, her back to the door.
“Um, Poppy?” He took in the soft taper of her back, broken only by the band of her tan strapless bra. “Shouldn’t you, ah, put something else on?”
“We don’t have a whole lot of options, Asp,” Graff said, busy tossing their gangster decorations into boxes. “If we’re going to make Todd think she’s dead without supplying him with a body, he needs something else to convince him. A dress with a bullet hole and plenty of blood should send the right message.”
“But it’s his blood,” Asprey protested. “That won’t hold up in a court of law.”
Graff snorted. “You think Todd’s going to take a bloodied dress with a hole supposedly ripped by his firearm, a gang of underground mobsters and a missing briefcase of stolen money to the cops? No. That bastard is going to leave town as fast as his legs can carry him.”
Asprey blinked. It was a good plan. It was a great plan—and one that fell way, way outside the bounds of what they were used to. Hell, this even had to be a bit of a stretch for Poppy. Forged baseballs weren’t quite the same as making a man believe he’d murdered someone.
Poppy must have agreed because she turned her head a little and paused in the act of removing her dress. “Did you just call him ‘that bastard’?”
“What?” Graff’s voice was rough. “You think you’re the only person he’s ripped off in the past few years? You failed to mention that Washington has been just one of the many stops along his tour. Alaska, Oregon, California, Texas…he left a nasty trail behind.”
Poppy turned in surprise, dropping her hand from where the barest scraps of fabric remained pressed up against her chest, exposing the swell of her breasts over the top of her banded bra. That was the last straw. Maybe it was a ridiculous, last-ditch effort to gain a semblance of control over the situation, but Asprey wasn’t about to let her stand there half-naked while Graff steamrolled everything.
With a possessive growl, he tugged the button-up black shirt out of his pants, quickly working the row of buttons and shrugging out of it.
“Here. This should be long enough to cover most of you.” He handed the shirt to Poppy, his hand brushing along her bare shoulder, trying not to notice the way her skin moved under his fingertips, like ripples of silk. He could have kept going, except he caught a glimpse of blood swiped on her arm—Todd’s blood.
What have we gotten ourselves into?
Poppy’s eyes met his, and there was still a strange dearth of emotion to them. “Thank you.”
Asprey nodded once.
“Can you two speed things up, please?” Graff’s bark caused both of them to jump. “Todd’s starting to come to, and I don’t want to have to hit him again. Asprey—you grab his legs. Poppy, start grabbing boxes. We’ll load him in your car, the stuff in mine. And be careful with Louis.”
There didn’t seem to be anything to argue in that, so Asprey left Poppy to make what she could out of his shirt and leaned down to take Todd’s feet. Graff took the helm, hoisting Todd’s arms and shoulders.
Moving a body was a lot harder than it looked. They shuffled him through the kitchen as quickly as they could, but the dead weight multiplied the strain of Todd’s already solid form. They dropped him twice in the parking lot, and it took several attempts to swing him up before they finally got him inside the trunk.
“Are we sure he’s going to be okay in there?” Asprey asked, adjusting Todd’s head so that it rested on a slightly dirty picnic blanket rather than the jack.
Poppy materialized behind him, a few boxes in her hand. She set them down to study Todd, and the way she looked down on the body in the trunk, without so much as a blink, filled Asprey with a strange sensation. The sensation wasn’t fear, and it wasn’t judgment—both of which seemed reasonable, given this situation. He mostly wanted to give her a hug.
“Always give it back if it turns out they need it more than you do, Todd. Always.” She slammed the trunk down. The shirt he’d worn hit her just at the top of her thighs, and she’d rolled the sleeves up, looking sexy as hell in all the wrong ways. It wasn’t a good time to admire the view. They had a half-dead man on their hands and Asprey was the only one who seemed to have a problem with it.
“I should never have involved you in all this,” she added, her quiet voice offset by a desperate kind of urgency. Her eyes flicked down as she took in Asprey’s bare chest, propelling his body backward in time, to the safety of the bat-room and the passion of two people who were just people—not thieves or con women or millionaires or ex-felons. “We need to get the rest of the boxes and go.”
It only took a few trips to clear most of the stuff out, since they decided no one would care if they left the television set or other large items. The hardest task was cleaning up the blood, but Asprey stood firm and wouldn’t budge until Graff got down on his hands and knees and sopped it up with a load of greasy kitchen towels. This was his mess, after all.
On their way out, Asprey paused a beat. “You’ll have to give me just a second,” he said. He ignored their protests as he ran into the kitchen. Graff might be able to run a backroom poker game and nonchalantly shove men into trunks, but he wasn’t about to desert that green pepper so it continued bobbing in the Brunswick stew.
He wasn’t leaving anything to chance. Not anymore.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Someone needs to give Asprey a shirt.
The scene spread out before them, a perfect tableau taken from a crime scene drama. Todd slumped in an inert heap underneath the docks, the moon barely a glimmer through the clouds. No sound other than the lapping of waves on crusty shores filled the night air, and the unmistakable scent of rotting seaweed surrounded them.
Graff had chosen an isolated spot near a collection of industrial warehouses, so there was no one about—and anyone who might have chanced by would have kept going, head bent, no questions asked.
Farther off, closer to the receding water’s edge, crumpled what remained of Poppy’s white dress, soaked with blood and with a hole clearly ripped open on the chest. One high heel lay spike up; the other bobbed in the waves. As a final touch, Graff tucked the gun—Todd’s own—into the bastard’s hand, so that the first thing he would see when he came to was evidence of his crime.
And yet, with all those touches, almost cinematic in their execution, Poppy couldn’t stop looking at Asprey and his stupid bare chest. He was eerily beautiful in the moonlight, his torso seeming to extend for miles to where it
trailed into the waistband of his slacks, each movement an education in masculine grace.
“What?” Asprey asked, kicking some sand around to cover their footprints. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“It’s cold,” was all she said. No need to let him know how that young, ripped Abe Lincoln look was working on her. She crossed her arms over her chest. “And late. Graff? Are we ready?”
“You guys take your car and head back to the hangar.” Graff jogged up, looking flushed and, dare she say it—happy? The sense of criminal purpose suited him. “I’m going to hide out down by the pier and watch. I want to make sure he understands the full severity of what he’s done when he wakes up.”
“I think you covered it.” Poppy didn’t harbor any illusions about Todd Kennick’s sense of right and wrong. He wouldn’t make a push to see if Natalie was okay, wouldn’t try to contact the gangsters to issue a formal apology. He’d run—fast, and as far as his legs would take him.
And there it was, all cleaned up in a tidy bow. Natalie would no longer be showing up to work at In the Buff. The backroom poker game was cleared and gone. The three of them would disappear, all of Todd’s money in hand—well beyond the eighty grand she’d set out to recover.
The question was why?
Looking over at Graff, pride and maliciousness warring for supremacy in his face—that face so like Asprey’s but without a tenth of his humanity—she was almost afraid to ask. The half million? Simply because he could? Or was it that maybe, just maybe, he wanted to return the money to its rightful owners?
Either way, he was far too secretive about it.
“Don’t you think you’ve done enough for one night?” she asked Graff coldly. “We should all head back to the hangar to debrief. I’m very interested in what the hell that was all about.”
Confidence Tricks Page 24