the conditions were right, and she always got the wallet.
But she was losing her touch, or getting too big to pass unnoticed, or something, because just like that night with J.T. and Christian Hawkins, this guy immediately noticed something was wrong.
“Hey!” he yelled, and the chase was on.
Jane didn’t look back. She poured on the speed, wondering what in the world would have made her do something so dumb as to pick a pocket and get caught on her way to meet J.T.
Instinct, she knew, pure and simple. She was trained to make the score, to seize opportunities and keep moving.
But hell, J.T. saw her coming as she darted between the pedestrians on the sidewalk and the cars turning up 17th—and he instantly realized what was happening. She saw it all over his face—his very calm, expressionless face. She saw it in the casual glance he cast at the guy and the way he appeared not to notice her.
He was good, and he must have been damn good on the streets.
She wasn’t going to involve him in her current crisis, and, still dodging people, she ran by him—and that was all she wrote. The guy chasing her got stopped cold.
“Get, get out—” The man spluttered, trying to get by J.T.
“Oh, sorry, man,” J.T. said, and she was gone. All she’d needed was a chance, and he gave it to her.
She slipped into a parking garage and didn’t stop running until she was on the third level, and if the guy with the books could get past J.T. and keep up, he deserved his wallet back.
A stitch in her side, the wallet in her hand, she leaned back against a Mercedes and tried to catch her breath.
J.T. wasn’t too far behind.
“Come on,” he said, his hand out. “Let’s have it.”
She knew what he wanted, and against her better judgment, she gave him the wallet.
Hell. What a waste of effort, and she still had a stitch in her side, and he probably hadn’t even noticed the beautiful shirt she was wearing, a stretchy T-shirt in a dozen shades of blue with little buttons up the front. It looked like a waterfall—and it was new, brand-new, never been worn by anyone else, and she’d bought it, paid cash.
Geez, all that work.
“You know this is no good,” he said.
“It usually works out better than that,” she told him.
“Yeah, well, maybe you better rethink your career.”
Career, right; picking pockets wasn’t her career. He sounded so old when he talked like that.
“Come on,” he said. “I’m parked down on the street. With a little luck, we can get this guy’s wallet home before he gets there.”
Oh, hell. What a frickin’ waste.
He flipped open the wallet to check the address, and, after a second, his gaze lifted and locked onto hers.
“Cop,” he said. “C-O-P.”
Oh, hell. Now she’d done it.
The thought barely registered before the sirens sounded.
He gave her a look that said he really did know better—and then they both broke into a run.
She was hard-pressed to keep up. Geez, he was fast. They practically slid down the stairs, one level after another, while the cop car whoop-whooped up the ramp in hot pursuit.
She couldn’t believe it. She’d stolen a cop’s wallet. No wonder the guy had been so quick to notice. And this soldier-boy she was following, he was quick, too. They hit street level, and he grabbed her, keeping her from going out on the sidewalk. She didn’t know where the hell else he was planning on going. There was no place else—or so she’d thought for all the years she’d been working this part of town.
J.T. knew differently. With a move so fast, she didn’t really see everything he did, he jimmied open the maintenance room door and pulled her inside.
Great, she thought. Now they were trapped in a place not much bigger than a closet.
But he kept going, all the way to the back, and slid a metal plate out from under a shelving unit.
And there was a hole in the floor, a big, dark, pitch-black hole into the bowels of the earth.
“Go, go, go,” he said, waving her in.
Hell, no, no, no. She balked, and would have continued balking, except for the sound of running feet and another siren whooping into the garage.
Oh, hell. Down she went, like Alice into the rabbit hole. There was a ladder, and she was scrambling like mad with him coming down above her, and when he pulled the metal plate back over the hole, it was