Confidence Tricks (36 page)

“I don’t want the chair, Winston. I’ve got my eye on a Pollock.”

Winston stepped back. “If you were any other man, Asprey, I’d consider that a threat.”

“And if you were any other man, Winston, I’d consider
you
one.”

Dinghies and Donuts seemed like the most appropriate place to plan the heist. Call him sentimental, but there was something about being in charge that made Asprey want to pull out all the stops. If he thought he could get away with asking the waitress at the diner to put on some Dubstep, he’d have done it.

“Why are we here?” Poppy asked warily. “Can’t we just do this at the hangar?”

“This is probably the only time I get to be in charge, and I intend to enjoy it.” Asprey put his hand on Poppy’s back as he led her inside, nodding at the waitress to bring them a pot of the diner’s infamous coffee.

Poppy didn’t know it, but she had this thing about him touching her in the small of her back. Her body went completely tense for a fraction of a second, and then a low hum escaped her throat. That hum told tales, gave him powers—he probably could have directed her over a cliff’s edge, lemming-style, and she would have purred contentedly as she fell.

“Well, this works for me,” Tiffany said. She lifted the ubiquitous laptop out of her bag and set it up on the chipped, wood-grain surface of the table. “Chances are Winston isn’t watching the hangar, and I did a sweep for bugs, but we can’t be too careful.”

“Speaking of bugs, um, did you take care of the one…?”

Tiffany laughed. “That we stuck on Poppy’s boots? Yes.”

“Seriously, you guys?”

Asprey offered an apologetic smile, though judging from Poppy’s frown, it didn’t stick. “It was when we first met, I swear.”

She threw up her hands in a gesture of surrender. “I’m so tired of playing spy games with you guys. You win. Every time. But I will say this—if you dare to track me after all this is said and done, I will make you drink an entire gallon of this coffee. No more bugs, no more secrets. Promise me.”

Asprey made the signal of an x over his chest and leaned back in the booth, his arm draped just over Poppy’s back. It was a studied calm. He had no idea where Graff was, no idea if they could successfully pull this off and no idea what Poppy intended to do when all this was “said and done”. He’d have even been hard-pressed to pick which one of those worried him the most.

Tiffany began tapping at the keys of her computer. “So, as near as I can figure it, Winston has three guards posted at the apartment. One is working as a doorman and the other two rotate between watching the front entrance and the fire escape out back.” She looked up from her computer. “That’s in addition to the building’s regular security.”

“Why only three?” Poppy asked. “If he knows we’re coming and he knows when, shouldn’t he pull out all the stops? Or call the police or something?”

Asprey shook his head. This, at least, was something he could focus on. “He can’t risk it. He’s not supposed to know what’s being stolen next. That would be admitting there something unique about all the items, which would point a big finger in his direction. It’s why he hasn’t come right out and warned Cindy.”

“So it’s easy, then.” Poppy let out a huff of air. “We’re just going to have to let me do it. I can get an invitation from Cindy to get inside. I’ll have to—what? Tie her up or something? Then I can grab the painting and we go.”

“No way.” Asprey refused to even acknowledge that idea. “She can’t know you’re part of this. Not with your record. One police sketch or fingerprint and you’d be sunk.”

Poppy smacked the table. “So? I’m just a petty thief, a small-time con woman. You saw the trouble I had with Todd. Bigger jobs aren’t my thing.”

“You must have some ideas,” Asprey suggested.

“You’re the one who loves all this heist stuff,” Poppy countered. “Not me.”

Tiffany snorted. “All Asprey knows is the clichés. If it’s been done, overdone and turned into a sequel, he has the answers. Otherwise? Nothing. Face it, guys. We need Graff.”

They all slunk a little farther in their seats, feeling the truth of that statement. A gang of thieves without their leader was just that—a gang. They could smash things and run amok, but the intricacies of this kind of operation were just too much.

Poppy was the first to shake her head. “I refuse to believe that. Asprey—you and Graff have taken dozens of items, and even though I know Graff likes to bark orders, he can’t possibly have come up with all that on his own. He’s militant but not clever. Not like you.”

She thought he was clever? “That sounds an awful lot like a compliment,” he said.

Her eyes sparkled warmly. “As someone clever once told me, it’s not a compliment if it’s true.”

“She’s right, you know,” Tiffany added. “Graff once told me that he hated having to rely on you so much to get things done, but that there was no way he could come up with half the things you did. Of course, he didn’t mean it as a compliment—he said it was all thanks to the hundreds of heist movies you watched as a kid.”

“That’s it.” Asprey sat up straighter, even dared to take a sip of the coffee sludge. It tasted like dirt smoldering over an open fire, but he welcomed the burn of it. “We’re trying too hard to make this something Graff would do—polished and professional. This is our chance to do things my way, which means we need to rely on the clichés.
All
of them.”

Poppy’s brow knit. “Are you serious?”

He leaned over the table, pointing to Tiffany’s computer. “Bring up every heist movie ever made. I want to know what they did to get inside a building, what tricks they pulled to confuse the bad guy.”

“Do you have a plan?” Poppy asked. When their eyes met, Poppy’s sparkled with appreciation and something warmer, but the look turned off before he could do much more than register its presence, which he did on a fully visceral level, stored for future use.
 

“I’m starting to,” he admitted, blowing out a long breath. He might be able to pull this off after all. Maybe he could be more than just a pretty toy. “Now…who do we know who can rent us some scaffolding?”

Chapter Twenty-Four

They parked the van outside Cindy VanHuett’s apartment building at dawn on Thursday. Even though the vehicle was already ominous, what with the black paint and the darkened windows and all, they tricked it out even more. Asprey screwed mesh-type bars over the back window, and Poppy installed a giant antenna to the top that looked like it might be able to reach the moon, had it not been superglued on.

Poppy was responsible for putting the vehicle in place and plunking in enough quarters to keep it there all day. One of the guards posted by Winston, a flat-faced man with the widest shoulders she’d ever seen on a human being, noticed her and reached for his hip—for a Taser or a gun or a walkie-talkie, she’d never know, since Asprey pulled his motorcycle up just then. She hopped on, her helmet already in place to serve as a face mask to avoid recognition.

The deliveries started around eight. Asprey had asked Tiffany to make untraceable calls to virtually every delivery company in the greater Seattle area, placing orders almost at random. Cookie bouquets, flowers, pajamagrams, a singing clown, no fewer than ten sandwich-shop orders, over a dozen pizzas and even the stripper from Bouncing Booty had been bought and paid for. Together, they created a steady stream of various uniformed professionals moving through the building doors, and not even Poppy—who had the master list of their times on a spreadsheet in front of her—could keep track of who was coming and going.

The scaffolding was set to go up around ten. They’d opted to hire the job out to a professional window-washing company, using layers of Tiffany’s encryption to make the arrangements without being tracked. Because of Asprey’s continued insistence that she be seen as little as possible, Poppy was only able to catch a glimpse of the huge wood and metal structure going up along the backside of the apartment building as she and Tiffany drove by in her car. At least they also had the fortune of seeing the other guard, a smaller man with a pointy goatee, arguing with the workers putting it up.

The power started cutting out around noon. Tiffany had the power grid for the entire block set on a random and automatic rotation so that the guards couldn’t predict when or how the building would go dark. Five minutes here, thirty seconds there—but never on the elevator, which Poppy had insisted would continue running no matter what.

“I don’t want people getting trapped in there,” she’d said. “I’m not budging on that issue.”

Asprey had his own issues he refused to budge on.

“That is
not
a cliché. Name one heist movie that includes ninjas,” Poppy had protested when he pulled out the costumes, black harem pants and face masks that left a slit for the eyes.

“The iconic ninja,” he’d retorted, his eyes sparkling, “invokes fear like no other symbol. You of all people should know that.”

Fear was not the emotion she saw reflected in his eyes at that moment. “You’re just putting them in there to get a rise out of me.”

He’d stood up and straightened his vest. “Is it working?”

Yes.
But she wasn’t about to say so. “I’ll let you know. So what are Tiffany and I supposed to do exactly—run around the park in ninja costumes? What if someone asks us what we’re doing?”

“If that someone is a little old lady with a cane, tell her you’re rehearsing for a play. If it’s one of Winston’s security guards, run like hell.”

Poppy grabbed the costumes from him forcefully. The whole plan was ridiculous and juvenile and so much like him she had a hard time keeping a straight face.

Asprey stopped her before she turned away. “We don’t have to do this,” he said. “If you want to stop right now, Tiffany and I can manage. This isn’t your problem, and you shouldn’t put yourself at risk for us.”

She smiled with a brightness she didn’t feel—not because she was afraid of what was to come but because she felt fantastic. A person shouldn’t be excited about breaking into a woman’s heavily guarded apartment to steal her most prized, albeit fake, possession—especially not when the consequences of getting caught were so high. Like Asprey, she delighted in the ninjas and the over-the-top ludicrousness of it all. But while his motivations were rooted in good, hers were simply part of her criminally bent mind. She was seriously disturbed.

“I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” she said. “After all, I’m an old hand at breaking and entering. The question is…are
you
ready?”

His eyes deepened in color. “I’m beginning to think I was born for this.”

Getting in was easy.

Even with the circus going on all around the building—one security guard bouncing between circling the window washing scaffolding and checking the exits every time the power went out, the other with his eyes trained on the van and the flashes of black that wove in and out of the park—Asprey still had to get past the guard stationed out front as well as the regular front desk clerk.

So he did the last thing anyone expected.

He walked right in.

Asprey waited for a lull in the mayhem, when the ninjas disappeared into a pair of portable toilets in the park and the power was all the way on. The van and window scaffolding sat untouched for hours. It was the first time all day that the guards felt sure nothing was going to happen.

“Afternoon, Greg,” he called cheerfully to the front desk clerk. Asprey had dressed in an understated suit and tie, a briefcase in one hand, and otherwise did nothing to hide his appearance. If the guard had been paying the least bit of attention, he would have recognized Asprey and immediately stopped him. It just so turned out that, today of all days, a man walking casually through the door was the last thing on the guard’s mind.

He sauntered to the elevator and pressed the Up button.

“I’d take the stairs if I were you,” the guard called out. “The power’s been cutting in and out and we don’t have time to bail you out if it gets stuck. Oh, shit—is that another flower delivery coming in?”

“Thanks,” Asprey called back, swallowing a laugh. “I will.”

The power cut just as he hit the twelfth floor. He couldn’t have timed it better if he’d tried.

Using a hand-crank awl, Asprey began boring a hole in the wainscoting outside Cindy’s apartment, moving through the layers of wood and drywall at a fairly quick rate. The sawdust and other debris collected in a small pan he laid out on the floor, filling up twice. He had to empty it into his briefcase, which was already crowded with various tools needed for the job.

The awl moved almost silently through to the interior of Cindy’s apartment, and when he finally felt the giving way as he punched through, Asprey leaned down and blew the rest of the dust away. He was left with a clean hole, into which he peered to catch a glimpse of miniature bared fangs and the guttural growl of a dog who suspected danger but wasn’t quite sure of it.

“Here, doggy, doggy,” he called. “That’s a good doggy. You’re a thirsty girl aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

The dog barked a negative reply.

“Not yet,” Asprey hissed, glancing up and down the hall. So far, it was all clear. Hopefully, it would stay that way long enough for him to finish. “You can bark in about two minutes. Three, depending on how fast I can move.”