was hidden. His muscles tingled and tensed. The truck barely slowed as it passed them. All he could think of was how quickly they could get to the coast if he could get his hands on one.
“It worked.” Whitney lifted her head and grinned. “He drove right by us without a glance.”
“Mostly if you give people what they expect to see, they don’t see anything.”
“How profound.”
“Human nature,” he tossed back, still regretting that he wasn’t behind the wheel of the truck. “I’ve gotten into plenty of hotel rooms wearing a red bellman’s jacket and a five-dollar smile.”
“You rob hotels in broad daylight?”
“For the most part, people aren’t in their rooms during the day.”
She thought about it a moment, then shook her head. “It doesn’t sound nearly as thrilling. Now, stalking around in the dead of night in a black suit with a flashlight, while people are sleeping right in the same room. That’s exciting.”
“And that’s how you get ten to twenty.”
“Risk adds to the excitement. Have you ever been to jail?”
“No. It’s one of the small pleasures in life I’ve never experienced.”
She nodded. It confirmed her opinion that he was good at what he did. “What was your biggest heist?”
Though the sweat was running freely down his back, he laughed. “Christ, where do you get your terminology? ‘Starsky and Hutch’ reruns?”
“Come on, Douglas, this is called passing the time.” If she didn’t pass the time, she’d collapse on the road in a puddle of dripping exhaustion. Once she’d thought she’d never be any more hot and uncomfortable than she’d been hiking over the highlands. She’d been wrong. “You must’ve had one big haul in your illustrious career.”
He said nothing for a moment as he looked down the straight, endless road. But he wasn’t seeing the dust, the ruts, the short shadows cast by the piercing noontime sun. “I had my hands on a diamond as big as your fist.”
“A diamond?” It so happened she had a weakness for them, the icy glitter, the hidden colors, the ostentation.
“Yeah, not just any rock; a big, glittery granddaddy. The prettiest piece of ice I’ve ever seen. The Sydney Diamond.”
“The Sydney?” She stopped, gaping. “God, it’s forty-eight and a half carats of perfection. I remember it was on exhibition in San Francisco about three, no four years ago. It was stolen…” She broke off, astonished and deeply impressed. “You?”
“That’s right, sugar.” He enjoyed the fascinated surprise on her face. “I had that sonofabitch in my hand.” In memory, he looked down at his empty palm. It was scratched now from the flight through the forest, but he could see the diamond in it, gloating up at him. “I swear, you could feel the heat from it, see a hundred different pictures by putting it up to the light. It was like holding a cool blonde while her blood ran hot.”
She could feel it, the arousal, the pure physical thrill. Since she’d received her first string of pearls, Whitney had often pinned and draped on diamonds and other glitters. It pleased her. But the pleasure of imagining holding the Sydney was much deeper, of plucking it out of its cold glass case and watching light and life gleam in your hand.
“How?”
“Melvin Feinstein. The Worm. The little bastard was my partner.”
Whitney saw from the set of his mouth that the story wasn’t going to have a happy-ever-after ending. “And?”
“The Worm earned his name in more ways than one. He was four-foot-six. I swear, he could slip under the crack of a door. He had the blueprints of the museum, but he didn’t have the brains to handle the security. That’s where I came in.”
“You handled the alarms.”
“Everybody’s got a specialty.” He looked back, back over the years in San Francisco where the days had been misty and the nights cool. “We cased that job for weeks, calculating every possible angle. The alarm system was a beauty, the best I’d ever come across.” That memory was pleasant, the challenge of it, and the logic by which he’d outwitted it. With a computer and figures, you could find more interesting answers than the balance of your checkbook.
“Alarms’re like women,” he mused. “They bait you, wink at you. With a little charm and the right skill, you figure out what makes them tick. Patience,” he murmured, nodding to himself. “The right touch, and you’ve got them just where you want them.”
“A fascinating analogy, I’m sure.” She watched him cooly from under the brim of her hat. “One might even