A Touch of Minx (26 page)

"You look good," she decided, stifling a grin. "I can see a future for you in the carpet-and-curtain-cleaning industry."

"As long as we don't actually have to do any cleaning."

"And watch the accent. You're a Florida native this afternoon."

"Right, y'all," he tried.

It wasn't bad. Not great, but not bad. As Stoney walked over to hand him his black curly wig, she studied the body language between the two of them. No, they weren't friends, but they didn't hate each other, either. That was something, she supposed.

"Why can't Aubrey have the Shirley Temple hair, and I'll be the redhead?"

"Because curly hair looks just dreadful on me," Aubrey drawled.

"May I point out that this isn't a fashion show?" Stoney said, tugging the front of Rick's wig forward another quarter inch. "You guys are just lucky I had three sets of coveralls and wigs handy. Sam didn't give me much notice."

"And hats. Don't forget those." She looked down at the name tag embroidered on her chest. "A. Ramirez. I'm Alice, I think."

"P. Humphreys? I don't suppose I could be Pierre." Aubrey angled his hat a little to the left.

"Paul," she decided.

"And what is the C in C. Daltrey?" Rick asked. "And please don't say Chuck."

"No, I don't think you could pull off a Chuck," she agreed. "Charles, though. You could be a Charles if you had to, couldn't you?"

"A British Charles, yes. A Florida Charles, I'm not so certain."

"Try it again, Charles."

"Bloody hell," he muttered. "Hey, call me Charles, y'all."

"Is that how I sound?" Aubrey asked. "Because it's not very suave, which is how I've been picturing myself all these years."

They were both being laid back, or pretending to be, but she could hear the tension in both of their voices. Aubrey's especially. He'd done himself proud during the lunch with Toombs and then the house tour, though, so she wasn't too worried. He'd carry his weight.

"Be a little less suave right now, if you can, Aubrey. Your voice is pretty recognizable."

"Heck, little darlin', I'll hick it up if y'all want me to."

Stoney rubbed his hand across his eyes. "We're doomed."

She walked over and kissed him on the cheek. "I'm glad you came back yesterday, so you could help me with this. It would have been a lot harder to pull off without your gear and the van."

"Yeah, well, I wish I'd come back two days ago, so I could have talked you out of this."

Two days ago they'd thought the break-in at Toombs's would have been the end of this. She pushed away the image of that creepy room again, and of the idea that she'd be sharing a rather ultimate dinner with Wild Bill in just a couple of hours.

She needed to focus now, and not just for her sake; Rick had done this kind of thing a couple of times, but not a straight-up fake out. Aubrey was a total newbie, and he would follow her lead. So for now it was loose so he wouldn't get overstressed. In the van she'd sober them up and go over the details again.

"Everybody ready?" she asked, settling the Wayne's C & F Cleaners hat so it rode low over her eyes. The glasses obstructed her peripheral vision a little, but since this wasn't a stealth job, it didn't matter. The disguise was more important today—for all of them.

Rick nodded, while Aubrey gave her an overly enthusi-astic thumbs up. Stoney rolled his eyes, but followed them out to where he'd parked the Wayne's van on the front drive. Since there was no Wayne's C & F Cleaners in actuality, she could only hope that none of his contacts had used the same ruse to break any major laws. He'd said they were clean, from an old movie prop place, but that didn't mean somebody else hadn't had the same idea first.

While Aubrey climbed into the back of the van, Rick caught her elbow. "You're certain about this?" he murmured. "We can still call Frank."

"For what? Castillo can't do anything. They've had the armor long enough now that it's legal. Going in and getting it is technically against the law. So are you certain you want to be involved with this? You have a lot to lose if it goes south."

"I have a lot more to lose if I don't go in."

She shook her head. "No, you don't," she whispered. "Maybe I'm crazy, but I wouldn't think any less of you if you decided you didn't want to break the law with me today."

He tilted her chin up and kissed her. "This might be breaking the law, but it's for a good cause. And in for a penny, in for a pound, as they say."

Mm. Kisses before a B and E were so… intoxicating. Samantha gazed at him for a moment in his unglamourous costume and dopey hair, then shook herself. Focus, dammit. "You're driving, curly,"she said, tossing him the key as she climbed into the passenger side.

As they headed out, she picked up the clipboard of work orders she and Stoney had put together. A couple of adjustments to the Picault job, and she would have figured it was legitimate herself, if she hadn't had an exceptionally paranoid and suspicious nature.

She glanced back at Aubrey to see him fiddling with his goatee. Total weirdness. In her entire cat burglary career she'd worked with a crew maybe half a dozen times, and here she was, leading two amateurs right through the front doors, letting everyone in the house see them, and coming out with stolen goods. Hopefully.

"Okay, guys. Let's go over, this one more time,"she said, mentally crossing her fingers, her toes, her eyes, anything that could be crossed. For somebody who'd never had much use for luck, she was definitely counting on it today.

Sunday, 5:33 p.m.

"How did you do that?" Richard asked, a half-dozen hoses over his shoulder as he followed Aubrey and Samantha into the Picaults' dining room. "You got us in here faster than you can pick a lock."

"I can pick a lock much faster than that," Samantha returned in a low voice, still using the light Cuban accent she'd adopted for the afternoon. She sounded remarkably like Reinaldo, but then that was probably where she'd picked it up. "I just did the usual. Had Stoney call here fifteen minutes ago and tell them we were on the way, running ahead of schedule, then threatened to just go on to the next job if they didn't let us in. We are working on a damn Sunday to catch up on appointments, after all."

"The parlor's just across the hallway," the frazzled housekeeper said, gesturing. "And you promised to be out of here by seven. We need to set the room for a dinner party."

"No problem, ma'am," Aubrey returned in a more restrained drawl than he generally used. "We'll set out the driers while we do the parlor."

"Thank you. Just hurry."

"Poor thing," Samantha murmured, following the woman to the door and shutting it behind her. "This is not going to be a good day for her."

Richard glanced at Samantha as she pulled the small vacuum cleaner out of the larger canister and plugged it in. The housekeeper would probably lose her employment, and Samantha knew that just as well as he did. She might not like killing bugs, but some of the things she was comfortable with made him uneasy.

"Ready?" she mouthed, looking from Aubrey to him.

He nodded, and she turned on the vacuum. For something so small it was surprisingly loud, but he supposed that was the point. She'd decided the armor was either in the ground floor conservatory, or in the basement where she figured they kept the rest of their larger pieces, though how she'd eliminated the rest of the house he had no idea. A thief thing, most likely. Even if she had a good idea where the armor was, however, getting to it was another issue.

"Okay," she said, motioning them closer. "You guys keep up the conversation in here. Football, or something. I'll be back in a minute."

"Even if you find it, how are you going to get sixty pounds of armor and two swords back in here?" Richard asked.

"Piece by piece." With a swift grin she returned to the door, cracked it open, then slipped through and shut it again.

"Amazing," Aubrey said, pushing the vacuum around. According to Samantha, clean vacuum marks did wonders for making people believe you'd done what you said you were going to.

Bloody fearless, she was. And he was inside somebody else's dining room, cleaning. He had people do that for him at his own house, and yet there he was, dusting curtains. "Who's playing tonight?"

"Uh, Oakland and somebody. The Bills, maybe."

"So you don't follow the sport, either."

"I've tried." Pendleton grinned. "You'd think a fellow like me would enjoy watching sweaty men crash into each other and slap each other's bottoms."

"Not necessarily," Richard muttered, most of his attention attuned to any sounds beyond that door—as if he could hear anything over that bloody vacuum cleaner.

"No?"

"I happen to think that you're not precisely what you imply you are."

The door cracked open. "There's no way the Raiders can rely on their running game," Pendleton contributed, shifting a chair for effect.

The housekeeper stuck her head in. "Where's the other one? Alice?"

"At the truck," Richard answered in the drawl he'd been practicing.

The door shut again. "Speaking of not being what we say we are, Charles, you should unlatch the big canister," Aubrey said.

"Right." He mentally shook himself. Just because he was nervous about the woman who'd vanished somewhere into a strange house probably owned by thieves didn't mean he needed to start a discussion about pretenses and motivations. Aubrey was sticking his neck out today, too, and for less reason than he or Samantha had. "Thanks, Paul."

"My pleasure."

He knew the drill; whatever else might be going on, they needed to keep up the pretense that they'd started out with. And so he had to stay right there. Dammit, he wanted to be where Samantha was, to watch her back if nothing else.

The door opened again. "How did Madden even coach without a monitor to scribble on?" he ventured.

"Good one, curly," Samantha said, slipping back into the dining room and once again shutting the door.

"Did you find it?"

Her smile could light up all of darkness.*"Oh, yeah," she said softly. "But I could use your help."

Why did it feel like he lived to hear her say things like that? "Where to?"

"Paul, can you handle it in here for a minute? Charles's schedule tomorrow is messed up, and dispatch wants to clear it up with him."

"I'm good, Alice. This room is surprisingly not clean."

"All the better for us."

Richard fell in behind her as she ducked back out of the room and into the hallway. Putting a hand to her lips, she gestured toward the stairs, where she could hear a female conversation about an episode of Grey's Anatomy. They continued toward the rear of the house, then through a door and down a narrow, shabbier staircase. The old servants' section of the house, no doubt.

At the bottom of the stairs she stopped him again and listened for a minute with her ear against a plain white door.

Then she turned the latch and pushed it open. "Ta da," she said softly.

Seven full pieces of samurai armor stood at attention in front of him, arranged on metal frames in various positions of battle. They were all magnificent, even to his jaded and experienced eyes.

"This was just sitting down here?"

"Well, if you call something that's double padlocked and secured in an alarmed, temperature-controlled room just sitting, then yes."

And she'd gotten through all that in about five minutes. "How did you know it was down here? You couldn't have spent much time searching."

"Come on. How many flimsy old doors at the bottom of plaster-peeling staircases are double padlocked and alarmed?"

She was leaving something out, but they didn't have time to debate her considerable skills at the moment. He took only a brief look around before he walked up to the armor in the center. It looked just like the photos Samantha had gotten from Viscanti.

Along the back wall a small but period-appropriate collection of swords, shoes, knives, bridles, and saddles were grouped behind each of the samurai. "Wow," he said quietly.

"Now these people know how to display their ill-gotten gains," Samantha agreed. "I wonder if all of them are stolen."

"Does it matter?"

She shrugged. "No. Just curious."

It probably didnt matter to her; for her entire life she'd seen the dark side of wealth and what it could buy. He was probably one of the few people she knew who didn't steal items to enhance his own collection or ego. "What do you need me to do?"

"The keiko cuirass is fastened. I can open it, but it's pretty delicate. If you can keep it from falling off the frame, then we can get it back upstairs."

Yoritomo Morimoto's armor was stunning. The sana scales that made up the plated armor were hardened leather, coated with orange and yellow lacquer, the colors still bright even after a thousand years. Gently he grasped the cuirass, holding it in place while Samantha undid the leather fastenings on the right side of the armor.

"Ready?"

"Ready."

She untied the last fastening, and the cuirass came loose from the frame. Forty pounds of metal and leather settled into his arms. As he adjusted his grip, being as careful as he could, Samantha lifted the helmet, the ikabashi kabuto and the underlying eboshi-style cap, off the stand. "I'll come back for the thigh protectors and the swords," she whispered, moving back to the door.

Now if they got caught, they couldn't claim they'd just gotten lost in the house. Now they were the carpet cleaners who'd made it through that door without setting off the alarm. His heart beating faster, he kept close to her as they returned up the stairs and crept through the main part of the house.

With a party only a few hours away, the staff would be moving in to prepare any minute now. The delay she'd created by pretending to clean the dining room wouldn't last much longer. And their luck wouldn't last much longer, either.

They made it back into the dining room. As soon as the door closed, Pendleton gave a low whistle, barely audible above the noise of the vacuum. "Amazing."

"Open the canister, will you?" Samantha instructed, all business now.

He did so, pulling out the cloth they'd stored in there and helping Richard wrap it gently around the cuirass before they set it inside the metal container, the wrapped helmet going in after it.

Richard checked his watch. "We should move on to the parlor," he said. "I'd hate to have to stay and clean it after we already have what we came here for."

"You guys haul the canister. Don't make it look any heavier than you did before." Samantha hoisted the hoses over her shoulder, took the three metal hose tubes in her hands, and waited while Richard opened the door with his free hand.

As he did so, the housekeeper appeared in front of him, so close to the doorway it almost made him jump. "How much longer?" she asked brusquely.

"Give the dining room about another ten minutes, and then it's all yours," Pendleton said.

Ten minutes. That meant ten minutes until the staff started bringing in utensils and plates and otherwise filling up the hallway in front of the parlor. Ten minutes for Samantha to finish removing Yoritomo's armor and accouterments from the cellar and get them back upstairs.

"Fine." The housekeeper stalked back toward the front of the house.

"You might have given us more than ten minutes," Richard snapped, keeping his voice low.

"Sorry," Pendleton returned, frowning. "I just thought we were getting a little close to sunset."

Richard looked out the window. Aubrey was correct. They weren't just fighting the household staff. The Picaults hiked until sunset. Ten minutes might even be pushing it. He gave a tight nod.

They quickly set up everything in the parlor again, and Samantha headed for the door. "I'm going with you," Richard decided abruptly.

"No, you stay—"

"It'll go faster."

From her glare she wanted to dispute that, but she knew just as well as he did that they didn't have time to argue. "Let's go then, Chuck," she snapped.

Ignoring the moniker, he followed her back into the hallway and down the narrow stairs. At this point he wasn't certain whether this house and Toombs's were just under-protected, or if Samantha was so good at what she did that she made it appear that way.

No wonder regular security installations bored her. Back in the cellar room they detached the thigh and shin guards, and Samantha pulled the tanto and daitu swords off their rack. Reverently she half pulled the blade of the longer daitu sword out of its scabbard and examined it. "This is amazing," she breathed. "Over thirty-two thousand layers of steel, and less than a millimeter at the edge. The hilt's made of stingray skin."

He gazed at her for a moment. Was that why she'd wanted to come down here alone—to enjoy what she was taking? He knew she studied the provenance of every item she contracted for. "We need to go," he said softly.

Samantha sighed. "I know."

"At least this will go back to Japan for display. You can see it again."

"But not touch it." She visibly shook herself. "Okay, I

get it. No playing with the priceless artifacts. Let's go." Outside the door she took a minute to relock the padlocks and reattach the door sensors, and then they returned to the main floor.

Upstairs they placed the rest of the armor in the canister, and Samantha carefully wrapped the swords and pushed them into the metal vacuum tubes. They helped Pendleton clean the curtains and the rest of the floor, then headed out just as the staff started to decorate the dining room.

"Thanks for letting us get this done today," Samantha said, offering the work order for the maid's signature. "I can't believe we're so backed up at this time of year. We'll be here before ten on Tuesday to do the rest of the house."

They loaded the canister, hoses, and tubes back into the van, and headed down the drive. And just like that, they'd done it.

Samantha dialed her cell phone, her gaze still on the suit of armor currently laid out on the library work table. Even Rick had seemed a little disappointed that they had to return Yoritomo's armor. It would look so nice in his warriors' gallery. Technically, though, it was stealing from a museum, and she didn't steal from museums. Ever.

"Hello?"

"Dr. Viscanti?" she returned. "It's Sam Jel—"

"Jellicoe," Viscanti finished, his voice sharpening. "Do you have any news for me?"

"I do. Arrange to be at work by ten o'clock tomorrow morning, and I'll have a crate delivered to you."

"Oh, thank God. Thank God," the curator muttered. "You have no idea—"