the date are fixed. You’ve done your work, now it gets turned over to operations and they make it happen. They don’t need you to hold a shotgun and look threatening.”
“I know, I know, it’s just that this is the first operation I’ve planned, and I want to see it work.”
“You’d be a liability to operations. They’d be worried about protecting you, and they have more than enough to protect.”
“Come on, Mike,” she said, in that inviting way she had. “Please.”
“Nope.”
“How about if I come around this coffee table, kneel in front of you, unzip your trousers, and take you in my mouth?”
Mike’s heart skipped a beat. “People might talk,” he said.
“I know, but I want to do it so much.”
“As soon as you get back from Atlanta,” he said, “it will be all yours.”
“Yum,” she said, getting to her feet. “You certainly know how to turn a girl on.”
“You’re not so bad at that yourself,” he said.
“At turning a girl on? I didn’t know you were interested in a threesome. Perhaps I can arrange one for us.”
Jesus, he thought. She could make me come right now, without even moving.
“Immediately after Atlanta,” he said. If he had his way, she’d have plenty of girls to choose from at Rikers Island’s Singer Center, the women’s jail.
She made a disappointed face. “All right,” she said, “I’ll let you make it up to me. You’ll have to do all the work.”
“Love to,” Mike replied.
—
Murphy and Anita rode their separate bikes back to the garage and parked them.
“Just a minute,” he said, taking a screwdriver from his saddlebag and handing it to her. “The guy next door would like his license plate back.”
“He noticed?”
“He certainly did, and I don’t want to have to look him in the eye until he has his plate back.”
She knelt, unscrewed and exchanged the plates, and tightened the screws. “There,” she said.
He put away the screwdriver, and they started back toward the shop.
“What did you mean?” he asked.
“About what?”
“You asked if we really needed to call the cops.”
“Did I?”
“You did. Let me tell you something here, because we can’t talk about it at home.”
“Why not?”
“I think the whole fucking building is wired for sound. I think they can hear a pin drop in the shop or in the apartment.”
“You’re paranoid. They wouldn’t waste that much effort on a couple of burglars—or rather, one burglar and one antiques reseller.”
“Is that your job description?”
“Yes, and it’s way down the totem pole for the art squad at the NYPD.”
“Maybe so, but this job that Jerry wants us for is way up at the top. They were cagey when they brought it up, but I could tell they had the hots for it, and I don’t see how in the hell we could help pull it off, collect a hundred grand each, and get away with it.”
“You always lacked imagination, Bill.”
“Okay, enlighten me.”
“I won’t be able to figure that out until we know the job and all the details.”
“Remember, Nita, we don’t get the first half of the money until five days after the job. If we pull it and don’t warn the cops ahead of time, we’d get up again, and the DA would start piling on the charges.”
“What if we don’t come home after the job? What if we nest somewhere else, get a hotel room, maybe, and wait for the delivery of the money?”
“You’re not thinking clearly,” he said. “They’ve got a hundred grand of our money right now.”
“And you think they’ll give it back to us if we tip them off about the job?”
“Beth says that if they drop the charges, as promised, they’ll have to give us the money back. They get our stock, but not the money. It’s a legal thing.”
“I don’t see them giving it back to us.”
“Well, it’s a dead certainty that they won’t give it back if we don’t tip them off, go through with the robbery, and then disappear. Then all we’ll have is our two hundred grand from the job, and what if they fuck us? Or just shoot us in the head?”
“You have a point, kind of.”
“You need to rein in your imagination and play the odds on this thing. We’ll have a much better outcome if we hold up our end of the deal.”
“Maybe.”
“Even if we got our two hundred grand from the job—”
“I wasn’t thinking about the two hundred grand. I was thinking about all of it.”
“All of it? You mean the jewelry?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Then we’d have the