I whirl on him, fixing my glare in the center of his forehead. It’s a long way up, and I try not to gulp when he moves away from the desk to showcase a physique that makes Grant look like Tiny Tim.
“You calm down,” I tell him and almost lose my steam in a fit of nervous giggles. “And tell that manwhore to get down here where I can see him.”
“I think you might—”
Another woman marches through the sliding glass doors at the entryway, her finger pointed at me like a fury. Jordan is barely recognizable in a miniskirt that makes her legs look about fifteen feet long and a pair of hoop earrings that rival Saturn’s rings, but one could say the same of me. These fishnet tights aren’t exactly my normal attire, and I’m wearing one of Jordan’s push-up bras, which means I can almost lean down and lick my own boobs.
“You bitch,” Jordan snarls. She launches herself at me, fingernails and teeth bared. “I told you to stay away. I told you what would happen if I saw your Little Orphan Annie face sniffing around him again.”
It’s all I can do to hold her back and not laugh at the same time. I love that Orphan Annie is the biggest insult she can come up with. She’s too nice to call me anything that might hurt my feelings. Fortunately, following the plan becomes easier when she pulls my hair in earnest.
“What are you doi—?” I begin, but then she jumps me—as in, actually jumps me from behind, knocking us both to the ground for the most glorious of catfights—and there’s no need to finish my sentence. I know what she’s doing. She’s making this count.
“He loves me, you ginger floozy,” she says.
“Oh, you did not just call me that, you long-legged prude.” To cover another laugh, I fight back with everything I have, slapping and pulling and rolling her underneath me until she’s pinned against the cool marble tiles. Jordan’s in pretty good shape, but she has nothing on my daily running and dancing regimen, even if I have been slacking lately.
“You two need to take this outside,” the guard-slash-receptionist says. He grabs me around the waist, ready to yank me off Jordan and end the fight. “You have the wrong place. There’s no one in this building named Manfred.”
“What’s going on out here?” Another gruff voice joins the fray, but I don’t have time to assess the second guard’s threat level. Instead, I catch a flash of movement near the front doors. Oz needs just enough time to slip in and dump Jordan’s failed chemical experiment from last week—the one that smelled like poison but did no harm—into one of the elevators. If it’s half as bad as I remember, the plan should work perfectly.
But only if the security guards don’t notice him, which means there’s only one thing to do. With a silent apology for Jordan’s pretty purple camisole, I reach down and rip hard enough to give the guards a free peep show.
Her gasp of outrage is mostly laughter, but the trick works like you wouldn’t believe. The man holding me lets go and quickly steps back, allowing the fight to continue unabated. Jordan tears at my clothes in retaliation, but I fend her off with a tube of lipstick, which she gleefully smashes into my forehead. We could probably go on like this for hours, but we still have a job to do, so I fall back in a pant and a groan of feigned agony.
There’s no sign of Oz, which means his job is done, and we need to get out of here before the toxic smell takes hold. Jordan says it takes about ten minutes to neutralize and reach its full potent scent.
“You can tell Manfred I’m done,” I say, climbing to my feet with as much dignity as I can muster. Her hair and makeup are a mess, her clothes askew and a trickle of sweat dripping down her cheek—but I can see her trying to hide her smile with an appropriately angry face. “He’s all yours. I hope you have hundreds of skanky babies together.”
“You wish your babies could be as skanky as mine.”
One of the guards coughs and grabs me by the arm. He hauls me to my feet and enjoys himself a little too much in the process, if you know what I mean. I make a good show of digging in my heels and protesting the treatment, but I’m happy to find that the other guard busies himself lifting Jordan. His eyes never leave her exposed cleavage as he forces a similar retreat.
“I repeat, there’s no one in this building named Manfred,” my guard says. He flashes me a toothy smile that’s missing two incisors. “But if you ladies want to tussle over me…”
I yank my arm away. “As if. Manfred could crush you with one hand tied behind his back.”
“Manfred is ten times the man you’ll ever be,” Jordan adds with a jeer.
And then we hightail it out of there before they get it into their heads to challenge Manfred—or us—to a duel.
* * *
We’re suited up and ready to head in on cue. Jordan and I have shed our trashy trappings—though I’m keeping the push-up bra until further notice—and we now swim inside matching yellow rubber suits and masks. Neither of us thought to question Oz on the procurement of these, but they sure look like the real deal. Riker is similarly attired, but we plan to leave Oz on the outside to intercept any authentic emergency personnel who might show up to assist.
For what we can only assume are extreme security measures, the elevators in the building don’t go up to the tenth floor. According to the blueprints, however, the elevator shafts do. Which means we just need to shimmy up to the tenth-floor access panel and break in from there. With the toxic smell doing a convincing job of scaring the security guards at the reception desk, we should be able to have them turn the elevators off and leave us alone with our hazmat suits and carefully concealing plastic walls. Riker and I can spend as much time as we need on the top floor while Jordan gives the appearance of industriousness below.
It’s not a foolproof plan—mostly because neither Riker nor I know what we’ll find once we reach the top—but it’s the only one we have. Just knowing I’m in the same building as Grant, making an effort to reach him, is a step in the right direction.
Toward him. That’s where I’m headed. Not hiding behind some stupid black mask, and not pretending a wedding ring is all that’s needed to make a relationship work.
I hope I’m not too late.
“Are we ready?” Riker asks as he secures his mask. I flash him a falsely confident thumbs-up, and that’s all the sign we need to get going. He taps Jordan on the shoulder, and she floors the white van we’ve skillfully “borrowed” for the afternoon. She tears around the corner to the office building so we can pull to an impressive stop out front—which is exactly what we do.
I’ve never actually seen a hazmat crew in action before, but I doubt any of them have been as terrifying as us as we hop out of the van to unload supplies. We didn’t have time to pull together an authentic set of tools, so it’s mostly old buckets, tarps, and an air compressor with Danger: Hazard stickers plastered on it. It’s all we need. Grant was right—no one looks at you very closely when you’re decked out in full hazmat gear. They mostly turn around and run for their lives.
Riker motions with his hand for us to head inside. With a nod he probably can’t see, I pick up a bucket with one hand and something I’m pretty sure is an amp with the other. It’s heavy, and it looks good, so I’m going with it.
My enormous security guard friend is at the door when we arrive, looking relieved to see us, which goes to show you how noxious Jordan’s compound is.
“You guys are fast,” he says and jerks his head toward the elevators. “We shut down the north elevator and put up a sign directing everyone to the stairs for now.”
“Good. Has anyone gone in there since the substance was first detected?”
“No, but the lady who found it is pretty shaken up.” He points to the reception desk, where a matronly woman in a red cardigan coughs heavily—and, if you ask me, unnecessarily. The second security guard, Jordan’s peeper, is doing his best to calm her down. It’s not a job I envy, and I’m the one about to climb up an elevator shaft. “She was comi
ng down from the sixth floor for her lunch break. Is she going to die?”
“There’s no saying,” Riker says. He moves toward the elevator, his steps wide and sure. He almost never takes on these roles—the kind in the trenches—and I forgot how convincing he can be when he puts his mind to it. “If the spill is contained, we should be able to seal off the area without interrupting your regular business.”
That’s my and Jordan’s cue to start taping up the plastic walls that will conceal our movements. We roll out the supplies and get to work, grateful the gas masks hide our faces. In the background, Riker continues to issue orders.
“Tell anyone who asks that it’s routine maintenance—or that someone got sick inside the elevator. That usually does the trick. The woman needs to be kept quarantined until we identify the substance, and it’s probably best if you minimize your contact with people. You washed your hands?”
We don’t hear the guard’s reply, but we can guess what it is when Riker issues a curt, “Do that first, and don’t eat or drink anything until you hear from us. Try not to worry. Nine times out of ten, it’s just someone who spilled nail polish remover in their bag. I’m sure it’ll be nothing.”
I don’t know if allaying fears is the best way to guarantee us the privacy we need to get to the top floor, but it works. The guard accepts Riker’s calm assurance as a sign that he knows what he’s doing and leaves us to finish taping off the plastic walls around the elevator doors.
The second our area is sealed, I whip off my rubber mask and breathe the sweet, nontoxic fumes of Jordan’s genius. The first part of the plan has gone off without a hitch, which means we’re that much closer to getting where we need to be.
Riker does the same, quickly unzipping his suit and stepping out of it so he can unscrew the emergency panel at the top of the elevator. He pauses for a moment to catch my eye, his left-side smile bigger than I’ve seen it in a long time. “This was a pretty good idea, Pen. Time to work, privacy to work in, and a security guard eating out of our hands. We might have to try it again sometime.”
It’s almost more than I can take. Grant is still trapped upstairs with scary, gun-toting men, and he may never forgive me for all the lies I’ve told, but for the briefest moment, I feel like everything might be okay.
Because that man right there? Fearless, confident, and prepared to journey to the depths of hell by my side? I’ve missed him even more than the father who disappeared ten years ago.
He’s my ally. He’s my equal. He’s my friend.
And I know with absolute conviction that he’s not going to stop until my husband is safe in my arms.
26
THE BREAK-IN
From a logical standpoint, worming my way up an elevator shaft should cause less anxiety than sitting inside a ventilation system. This metal tube is substantially bigger, and I can feel a cool breeze whistling up either side of the elevator car. I’m also more active in this scenario, my feet searching for each foothold in the metal framework as my hands grip the cable like my life depends on it.
Which, technically, it does.
Ten stories might not seem like much when you take the stairs, but let me tell you, when you gain every inch by the force of your strength and willpower alone, it’s a heck of a long climb.
“Do I need to include a weight-lifting regimen in your workout?” Riker jokes as he leaps from one wall of the shaft to another. In all our time together, I’ve never seen him in action like this before, and I can barely believe my eyes. He’s like Spider-Man, putting me to shame with how easily he manages to scale the passageway.
“I can make it,” I say through gritted teeth. Upper body strength might not be my greatest asset, but determination is. “I haven’t met a back entrance I can’t handle yet, and I don’t intend to start today.”
“Good girl,” Riker says, genuine encouragement in his voice. “Just think of the prize waiting at the end.”
If he’d have dangled Grant as an incentive a few days—heck, even a few hours—ago, I wouldn’t have believed he wanted me to make it. But I know that he means it now. We have to keep going to get to the end. The prize. My husband. A man who may not love me but who I love with everything my black, thieving little heart possesses.
Which, as it turns out, is quite a lot.
“Race you to the top,” I call. “Last one up has to lure out any guard dogs.”
Riker responds to my challenge by swinging impressively from one side of the shaft to the other, but he’s got nothing on me. His fancy tricks might look good on the outside, but I’ve been doing this sort of thing a lot longer than him. When it comes to breaking and entering, the motto is always slow and steady wins the race.
That would be another of my dad’s maxims. No matter how tempted we might be to look for shortcuts or blast through walls, it’s always better to let patience rule the day. Crack the safe’s code with a stethoscope and painstaking care. Sit in the air vent for eight hours before you strike. Put one hand over the other and pull yourself up all ten flights of the elevator shaft.
Which is why I make it to the top first.
“You cheated,” Riker grumbles but with a good-natured air. “I want a rematch.”
“Sure thing. I’ll just need about two weeks to recover from that climb first.”
Panting only slightly, I extract a multi-tool from my belt, which Oz had the foresight to acquire along with the hazmat supplies, and start removing the bolts to the access panel. I’ve done this enough times that I’m able to make short work of it, carefully tucking each bolt in my pocket in case we need to replace them later.
I lift the panel away and hand it to Riker, poking my head out just enough to make a quick initial assessment.
“It’s clear,” I say, dropping to a whisper, “but we’ll have to be careful about cameras. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a separate closed video feed just for this floor.”
“Or lasers,” he adds.
I stare at him. “Lasers?”
“You know, alarm lasers?” he says. “The ones that detect movement?”
“Those aren’t a real thing. In all our years of breaking and entering, have we ever seen security lasers?”
“Well, no,” he admits. “But we will someday, and when we do, you’ll be glad I know what I’m doing.”
Feet first, I swing through the panel, landing in a silent crouch on the other side. From there, I make a survey of our surroundings.
The elevators are located at one end of the floor, in an alcove that shields us from the main hallway. Beige carpeting silences our footsteps, but there isn’t anything to hide behind, which makes the silence a moot point. There are no large potted plants, no conveniently located snack machines, not even box windows with a few inches to spare. The second we round that corner, we’ll be in plain view of whatever awaits us.
To make matters worse, there’s a slight shadow shading the carpet near the wall, and my heart sinks at the sight of it. That shadow looks decidedly human, which isn’t a good sign. We’d have a better chance getting past lasers.
I turn back to Riker with a finger on my lips. “I think there’s a guard posted at the end of the hallway. We’ll need to find a way to distract him.”
“Distract him how?” he asks.
I don’t know. My mind runs over a list of possibilities, but we didn’t plan for a distraction. We can’t cut the lights, and we don’t have any of Jordan’s smoke bombs on hand. Equally out of the question is running screaming into the hallway to divert his attention, as that would alert any other guards to trouble.
I’m still mulling over the problem when Riker steps forward.
“Make some noise,” he whispers.
“What kind of noise?” I whisper back.
“Any kind.”
“Why?”
“Because I know how we’re going to get past him
, that’s why.” He cracks his knuckles and crouches against the wall. “Now.”
“Riker, are you sure you can—?”
“Just do it.”
“But what if you can’t—?”
He glares at me. “I might not be a heap of brainless muscles like your husband, but I’m not without my uses. Trust me.”
It seems like people are asking me to do that an awful lot lately.
It also seems like maybe I should heed their advice. If I hope to get out of this hole I’ve buried myself in, I’m going to have to take someone’s hand. One fortifying breath and a wordless prayer later, and I shake the panel Riker removed. The wobbling clang of the metal sounds too loud to my ears, primed as they are for any sort of movement, but Riker nods to show his approval.
I press myself as flat against the opposite wall as possible, tempted to close my eyes against the inevitable. Unlike that day at Paulson’s, however, I keep my eyes wide open.
I’m not hiding anymore.
It’s over so fast, I barely see it happen. The guard rounds the corner to investigate the noise. Riker’s hand shoots out, and the side of it catches the guard in the throat to silence him. The man gives a strangled gurgle and reaches for the gun strapped to his waist, but Riker knees him in the stomach with an alarming show of efficiency. Sympathy pains weaken my knees as the man doubles over, at which point Riker brings his elbow down on the back of the man’s head.
That’s it. The guard, who is easily forty pounds heavier than Riker, crumples to the ground with a barely audible groan, knocked out cold. Grabbing the man’s gun and sticking it in his belt, Riker jerks his head for me to follow.
“Holy shit,” I whisper. “Where did you learn to do that?”
His sharp look is all the answer I need. Riker, it seems, goes a lot deeper than I’ve given him credit for.
“Stay behind me. I don’t think there’s anyone else in the hallway, or they would have investigated. It must be clear.”
I nod and take a few tentative steps around the unconscious man, prepared to follow Riker and his mad ninja skills to the ends of the earth.
Stealing Mr. Right Page 26