A Brilliant Deception (3 page)

“Yes, hello, I need vehicle 356A right away,” I said when the valet answered the phone, reading the number off my ticket.

I poked my head out of the closet and, seeing a clear path, flew down the corridor. Before turning the corner I glanced over my shoulder and saw both men come flying out of the spa, the security guard talking urgently into his walkie-talkie.

Damn.
They hadn’t spotted me yet, but they’d either discovered Olivia, or the breached safe, or both.

There would be more armed guards in the lobby, guards with walkie-talkies who would now be alert to the crime in progress. So the lobby was out; I needed an alternate escape route.

Attempting to reach the nearby stairwell would mean revealing myself to the guards. But I knew there was another stairwell, down the far end of this corridor. I set off for it at a sprint, and made it without being seen. The instant I lunged into the stairwell I heard thundering bootsteps coming up.

I spun and reentered the corridor. There was nowhere to go.

Just then, the elevator bonged, halfway down the corridor. I raced for it, dashing inside before the doors slid closed. “Whew! Just in time,” I said. I eyed the one other passenger inside—who had not made any effort to hold the door open for me, I noted. It was the bitchy starlet from the poolside bar, texting furiously on her cell phone.

As the elevator went down, I caught my reflection in the mirrored interior and realized something unfortunate: I still wore the pink wig.

I squeezed my eyes shut. I had no way to hide a wig—no bag or purse or anything, as I’d abandoned everything in the linen closet. I searched the elevator for somewhere I could stash the wig, and in doing so took another look at my elevator companion.

She smelled even more strongly of margaritas now. She flicked a glance at me without any sign of recognition in her face; I was not important to her in the least. Which gave me a glimmer of an idea.

I cleared my throat and said, “You know—your coloring is perfect for pink hair. Have you ever considered it?”

She shrugged, looking unimpressed and pouty. The elevator descended another floor and I kept talking. “My stylist sent me this wig and it looks terrible on me, washes me right out—but it would be perfect on you. You’ve got the right cheekbones and full lips to pull it off. Do you want to try?”

Three minutes later, the elevator doors slid open at the lobby and I exited the car. I slowed myself down, crossing the marble floor. Behind me I heard a ruckus. I looked back and watched as two guards tackled a girl wearing bright pink hair.

I suppressed a smile and kept walking, ever closer to the front door.

“Did you find your agent?” asked one of the doormen kindly, as I walked through.

“No, he never showed.” I sighed and shook my head. “Oh well, time for some retail therapy. Ta-ta!” I lifted my head high and walked straight out the front door.

I scanned the driveway; the valet hadn’t arrived with my car yet. My stomach tightened.

At that moment, an elderly woman called out, “Oh, someone please stop him!”

I spotted a little white dog darting away. The dog was headed for the driveway, chasing a squirrel. A Ferrari was coming up the driveway, driven by a valet who was roaring up the slope fast. He wasn’t going to see the tiny dog in time.

Reflexively, I sprinted. I lunged and grabbed the dog and rolled out of the way.

When I stood up, a small cluster of stunned expressions greeted me. I smiled and brushed off my dress. “I, um, I’ve been training,” I offered, clearing my throat. “Action movie. They want me to do my own stunts . . .”

I handed the fluffy little dog back to the woman. At that moment, a valet arrived in a convertible Mercedes—my car.

As I pulled away from the curb I squinted at the rearview mirror. The armed bodyguard and two security officers strode out of the hotel. Before they even glanced in my direction they beelined to the valet stand, presumably to shut down the exits while they searched for suspicious characters.

I reached the road and roared smoothly away, unheeded and unfollowed.

The convertible top to the Mercedes retracted at the push of a button and I drove away, fast, down the winding hills of Sunset Boulevard. The wind whipped my hair as I continued along palm tree–lined boulevards under the sparkling LA sun. An exhilarated grin threatened to split my face as relief washed over me, and the warm tingle of a job successfully done spread throughout my limbs.

Once again, it never ceased to amaze me how shockingly good it felt to behave so spectacularly bad.

 

Several minutes later my phone rang. I glanced down, still driving, and saw a familiar number flash on the screen—Templeton, my handler at AB&T, the Agency of Burglary and Theft. I answered the encrypted call and put it on speaker. “Templeton, you must be clairvoyant!” I said, laughing. “I just finished the job, you’ll be happy to know. It’s in hand, in all its sparkling glory.”

There was a moment’s hesitation. “I beg your pardon?” he said, then mumbled and answered his own question. “Oh, the Briolette. Yes, jolly good, my dear.” My eyebrows knotted slightly. He sounded distracted, and—something else I couldn’t place. “But that’s not why I’m calling,” he said.

A bristle of warning traced up my scalp.

“Petal, you need to come home right away. Your mother is in the hospital. She was hurt.”

My chest collapsed inward as all the air left me. “What? How?”

“I’m not sure how to tell you this—”

“
Templeton.
Tell me. Now.”

A moment’s pause. Then, “She was shot. Because . . . well, you see, Catherine—she tried to stop a burglar.”

I
got back to Seattle as fast as I possibly could. The flight was brief but agonizing, and I went to the hospital straight from the airport. I arrived just after 8 p.m.

The antiseptic environment of the hospital—smelling of industrial cleaner and vomit—slammed into me as soon as I walked in. The fluorescent lights didn’t help my growing headache. But I ignored the pain. It didn’t matter; I only cared about getting up to the trauma ward.

I arrived at the doorway to my mom’s room. She was as white as the starched sheets that covered her. She gazed out the window at the darkening sky, the tubes and wires running out of her to various IV poles and monitors clustered around the bedside. It was all so—invasive-looking. One of the machines was bleeping. Another was making a whirring sound. A white-coated doctor—a resident, maybe?—stood by the bedside, making notes on Mom’s chart. He looked impossibly young, as well as tired. The greens under his white coat were creased and rumpled, like he’d been sleeping in them. He looked up at me—through glasses with smudge marks on the lenses—forcing me to enter the room before I was ready.

A panicky feeling crawled up my throat as I crept in and stood by the foot of her bed. The room smelled of bleach. Her gaze turned to me, an oxygen tube under her nose. My heart squeezed at the sight of my mother like that.

As she saw me, her face softened into a weak smile. “Cat. Darling, I’m so glad you’re here.” Her voice was hoarse.

I wanted to say something but didn’t know quite what. So I settled for smiling back at her and hoped I made it look convincing.

“It looks like your mother is going to be fine,” the resident said, clicking his pen and sliding it back into the breast pocket of his white coat. “The surgery went well, there should be no permanent damage. Recovery will take some time, of course.”

“How much time?” I asked. “Did you get the bullet out?” I peppered him with a million other questions, barely giving him time to answer, until my mom reached a cool hand out from under her sheets and gripped my hand.

“Sweetheart,
stop
. Everything will be fine. Let the doctor go see his other patients. There will be time to talk later.”

She was right. I glanced apologetically at the resident.

“I’ll be here in the morning,” he said. “I can answer more of your questions then.”

I nodded. “Thank you, Doctor.”

“I’ll leave you two alone,” he said and strode out, his sneakers squeaking faintly on the polished floor.

“Do you need anything, Mom?” I asked, pulling up the blanket that was rumpled at the foot of her bed and tucking it around her. “Are you okay?” I wasn’t talking about physically, and we both knew it. “How do you feel?”

She sighed and took a few deep breaths. “Well, I feel rather stupid, for one thing. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Templeton told me what happened,” I said.

“I thought I could reason with the thief,” she confessed.

I looked down at the bandage covering her left shoulder. I cringed, thinking of a bullet ripping through my mother’s flesh. Templeton had filled me in on what had happened, exactly, as I’d raced to the airport in LA.

My mom had been at a museum after hours, helping clean up after a benefit dinner, when someone detected a break-in. Instead of calling the police, like normal people would do, she went to investigate, and see if she could stop it.

In the process, the perpetrator shot her.

“Who was it?” I demanded of Templeton. My first thought was someone with Caliga Rapio, the ruthless organization of unscrupulous, violent thieves. The thought of it made my stomach curdle.

But it was worse than that. Much worse.

“He was one of ours,” Templeton said. “He works with AB&T.”

“
What?
”

“Apparently it was self-defense. He was startled. You might have done the same thing, Catherine.”

Those words echoed in my ears now, looking down at my mom in the hospital bed. It was a punch in the stomach. A small part of me wondered—was it true?

I was a criminal, too. I was part of the underground world that produced people who shot unarmed fifty-nine-year-old women who interrupted their crime-in-progress.

Being a thief was the one thing in the world that made me feel truly special. It was my unique talent in the world, and it made me feel alive. And I had always justified my choice of profession by keeping a set of ethics—my Thief’s Credo. Besides, I was merely playing a role in what I call the Secret Sport of Kings. Stealing one another’s goodies has long been a pastime of the überrich. Right or wrong, it’s part of the fabric of our society.

But now—well, that justification felt rather thin.

“Why would you do it, Mom? Didn’t you think of the danger?”

“No, Catherine. I didn’t.”

I was desperate to understand. Why would she take such a risk? One possibility had occurred to me, and it was gnawing away at my insides. Had she grown overconfident in the past year, because of her involvement in my line of work?

The trouble was, my mom considered herself my business manager, which probably made her feel overconfident, like she was part of the criminal world. I had allowed this little fiction because she seemed to get so much pleasure from it, and it gave her something to do. I imagine she felt like she knew criminals. She understood burglars, and how they worked.

But while
I’m
aware of the dangers in my chosen profession, I’m not sure if my mother is. Or was. Maybe I hadn’t done enough to warn her of the very real risk. I didn’t routinely carry a firearm, but there were many thieves and criminals who did. Had I neglected to make sure she knew that?

It all added up to one inescapable truth. This incident was my fault.

The world tilted and my head swam as the guilt threatened to overwhelm me. I hadn’t protected my mom from this. I’d let her become involved with my little underworld. It was careless and stupid.

I gazed away from my mother to stare at the bleeping machines next to her, pretending to study the lights and the flow of fluid through the IV tubes.

“There’s something more,” my mother said. A cloud of worry and unhappiness moved across her face.

“It’s okay, Mom, we don’t need to talk about this stuff right now. You need some rest.”

“No. This is important.”

I put my hand on hers. Her skin felt cool, her bones delicate and thin underneath mine.

“When the shot went out, a terribly clichéd thing happened,” she said. “My life flashed before my eyes. And it was a good life, Cat, very good. But there was something missing.”

I had an unpleasant feeling I knew where this was headed.

“It was grandchildren,” she said. “I wanted to see grandchildren there.”

I closed my eyes. This was well-worn territory. Why did she have to bring it up now? I tightened my fists inside my pockets. My mother had almost died—and this was what she was thinking about? My mouth grew thin and hard. It was the last thing I wanted to discuss now.

“I want you to be happy, Catherine,” she said. “You are my only child. And . . . I can’t help feeling that my life will be left incomplete unless I see you happily married and with a gorgeous, healthy baby.” A tear slipped down her face.

In spite of myself, my frown softened, just a little.

“I don’t want you getting all upset about this,” I said, squeezing her papery hand. “Let’s talk about this later. You really should rest.”

She was tired, obviously, because for once she didn’t fight me on this. I settled my mom back down on her pillow and turned off the lights. I went to the window in her room and stared at the streetlights, the brake lights of the cars on the freeway.

Marriage. Children.
For the first time, I actually rolled the idea around in my mind. A small ache centered in my chest. Maybe it was something I wanted, too, after all.

Once my mom was breathing steadily, asleep once more, I left the room. In the corridor my father was returning with coffee from the cafeteria.

“Is she asleep?” he asked, handing me a steaming Styrofoam cup. I nodded and we sat on the orange vinyl chairs in the small waiting area for families, and sipped the weak hospital coffee.

We didn’t discuss the details of what had happened. I was afraid of what my dad would say. He was not in favor of my chosen profession. He had learned the truth much later than my mom had, and though she had been on board, he had decidedly not been. In fact, for a long time he really didn’t want to have much to do with me, after he learned the truth. Penny, my sister, had always been his baby, but I was “Daddy’s girl”—his partner in crime. We had been inseparable, until he learned my secret.

I wondered if things would ever be the same between us.

Somehow, I found myself telling him what my mom had said about grandchildren. For a long time he said nothing, staring into his coffee cup.

“Well, Kit Kat, maybe you need to think about it. When your mother was your age, we were already married. And you were on the way.”

“Really?” I frowned into my own coffee cup, processing that.

Even if this
was
something I wanted, there was one big, glaring problem. No boyfriend. No viable candidates. It wasn’t lost on me that as of a few months ago, there had been not only one highly qualified, exceptionally desirable contender, but two. Until I’d decided I needed some time to be alone to find the truth in my heart.

Now I’d lost them both. There would be no marriage on the horizon for me anytime soon.

My phone vibrated and gave a brief chime. I glanced down to check the message, relieved for the interruption. It was from Templeton.
Meet me at The Pacific Summer Fair for the handover. Ferris wheel.

I sighed. This was normal procedure. After a theft, I always met Templeton in a public place to transfer the spoils and debrief. It was the last thing I felt like doing now, but I didn’t have a choice. The Briolette was still on me.

“I, um, have to go, Dad.”

He watched me with suspicion but said nothing.

“Something I have to do.” I couldn’t explain to my dad where I had to go. But he knew I was choosing my job over my family. I stood and walked away down the corridor before his look of suspicion could turn to one of disgust.

It is my job,
I reminded myself. Right or wrong, it was the path I had chosen, and for now I had an obligation to see it through.

Trouble was, at that moment, I felt the same degree of disgust at myself that he did.