Convict: A Bad Boy Romance (17 page)

“
Y
ou hear
Wayne got thirty days for gettin’ Evelyn pregnant?” Nate says.

“He got thirty days for fucking a fifteen-year-old, not for knocking her up,” I say, tilting my forty back into my mouth. “Ain’t illegal to knock someone up.”

Nate shrugs. Then he puts one fist to his chest, frowns, and belches so loud they can probably hear it in the next county. Two girls come out of the convenience store across the parking lot and shoot disgusted looks in our direction.

“Hold up,” I say, and chug down the rest of my forty. Then I wait for the right moment, clench my stomach muscles, and rival Nate with the loudest burp I can muster.

Nate laughs. The girls look disgusted and walk away, but I don’t care. It’s dark and I’m drunk, but I’m pretty sure I got a blowjob from the shorter one once. It was probably pretty good. Blowjobs usually are.

“I told Wayne that picking up girls by offering them rides home from high school was a bad strategy,” Nate says. “Too bad that idiot don’t listen.”

“Too bad that idiot don’t pull out,” I say. “You need evidence to get convicted, you know.”

We’re sitting in the back of Nate’s pickup truck, an ugly, rusted, huge old thing. He’s spray painted FARM USE ONLY on the back, even though he doesn’t have a farm and the truck’s never spent five minutes on one, to get around having to register it with the state.

The truck is parked by the Quik Stop Mart, where we got the forties. Across the road is a gas station next to Nelly’s, the best diner in Partlow, Georgia. It’s also the only diner in Partlow.

This intersection is about a quarter of the town. Later tonight we’re all going over to another buddy’s to drink beer and probably play video games, but it’s too early right now for anything but drinking in a parking lot.

“You going into the city tomorrow?” Nate asks.

“I might,” I say. “I got nothing else to do.”

As I talk, a car drives up the road. I noticed it because it’s driving cautiously, something strange around here, but also because it’s the nicest car I’ve ever seen in Partlow. Nate follows my gaze and turns around, watching it turn into the parking lot that Nelly’s shares with the gas station.

We’re both silent as the car parks, the light practically sliding off of its smooth, unscratched sides.

What the hell is that doing here?
I think.

It’s a Jaguar S-Type, brand spanking new from the looks of it. Nate and I watch in open-mouthed wonder as it comes to a stop, diagonal across two parking spaces. Three men get out: two big ones from the front seat, and an older, smaller man with graying hair from the back. Even in the hot, sticky Georgia night, they’re wearing suits.

My first thought is,
the air conditioning in that thing must be Arctic
.

My second thought is,
I wonder how fast it goes.

I drain the last few sips of my forty and put it down in the bed of Nate’s truck with a hollow
thunk,
all without taking my eyes from the car. I swear to god it’s speaking to me. Whispering
come on, take me. You can treat me better than those assholes in suits.

I bet it’s got leather seats and you can barely hear the engine even with the pedal to the floor. It’s not a sports car, but I’ve never driven a Jag before, and every cell in my body wants to try it.

“What’ll you bet I can’t jack that?” I ask Nate.

He just laughs.

“You’re a dumbass,” he says.

“Bet me,” I say.

“Come on, man.”

I stand in the truck bed and hop over the side, shaking out my hands.

“Fifty bucks,” I say, my eyes on the Jaguar.

Nate laughs again.

“Sure,” he says. “I ain’t got it and neither do you, though.”

I grin up at him.

“Not yet,” I say.

I feel in my pocket for the two thin wires I keep handy. They’re warm from my body heat, and I grab them as I jog across the street and then duck between cars in Nelly’s parking lot.

The Jaguar is more or less out in the open, but I’m pretty buzzed. I crouch in the shadow of an ancient Chevy and try to plan how I’m gonna get into this beauty, but all I can do is stare. I’ve seen these in Atlanta, of course, but I’ve never gotten close to one. I’ve never
touched
one.

Still crouching, I go up to it. I glance at the diner, the yellow lights shining through the dingy windows.

I’m sure it’s got an alarm, so I pull the wires from my pocket, make the stiffer one into a hook, and run it down the crack between the driver’s side door and the front, feeling for the rubber-bound bundle of wires.

When I find it, I take out the thin-bladed knife I keep just for this, slice through it with a couple of quick saws, then hold my breath.

Nothing.

I move to the other side of the door and make the wire into a loop, the thinner wire connected to one end. It’s easier to maneuver. Kind of like a marionette or something.

After a few tries, my pulse racing faster and faster, I hear the
thunk
of the lock sliding back, and I freeze. Then I swallow hard, hold my breath, and pull the door open.

Still no alarm, and I grin into the leather interior as I slide in.

I go through the glovebox and the center console first. Half the time people leave their valet keys there, and it’s the easiest thing in the world to start a car with a key. No dice this time, though.

I get back out and crouch by the car, then jam my knife into a crack below the steering wheel, working it until I can break the plastic panel off and expose the wires underneath. I didn’t bring a flashlight and it’s dark, but I cross my fingers and hope I can hot wire this thing anyway.

Before I get the chance, there are footsteps behind me, and I turn my head only to get a knee in the face. It sprawls me flat-out on the gravel, stars in front of my eyes, and I’m so dazed I can’t even make myself get up.

Someone grabs me by the shirt and hauls me up, tearing it. I think it’s one of the big guys from the car, but getting kneed in the face has a way of making it hard to know what’s happening.

He shoves me against the car. I try to raise my arms and take a swing, but I don’t stand a chance. He punches me in the gut twice, knocking the wind out of me. Then he steps back, clearly expecting me to go over.

I don’t. Somehow, I stay standing, even as black fuzzes around the edges of my vision, my face and my stomach huge throbbing orbs of pure pain.

“Fucker,” I whisper, just on the edge of blacking out as I try to gasp for air, my muscles simply not responding.

Then it works. I suck in a sweet, sweet breath and without thinking, I lunge for the guy. I get my hands on his collar but he knocks me away again. Everything spins. He slams my head against the Chevy behind us and holds me there, one arm twisted up behind my back, his hand pulling one thumb away from my hand at a terrible angle.

It’s fucking excruciating, the worst pain I’ve ever felt. Both my eyes are swelling shut already, and I kick at the gravel beneath my feet, trying to get him away from me, but it’s beyond useless. I’ve been in a bunch of fights, but it’s obvious this guy is
trained
.

“Don’t break his thumb, please,” says another voice. “I’d like to speak with him first.”

The pressure on my hand lessens, and so does the pain.

“Where to?” the man holding me asks.

“Over there should work,” says the second voice.

The guy jerks me up and shoves me forward. He’s still holding my arm behind my back, and it’s starting to go numb, which is at least better than pain. I stumble, my eyes swollen almost shut, but he pushes me until we’re up against the side of Nelly’s. The lights over here have been broken for years, and it’s dark as shit.

The big guy lets me go, pushing me toward the wall. I spin around, shaking out my arm, and wipe blood from my mouth. I hope none of my teeth are loose.

There’s three men, little more than silhouettes: two huge guys and the other one. The other one seems to be in charge, because he steps forward until he’s only a few feet from me.

Silently, he holds out a handkerchief.

I can barely see, I’m bleeding from a couple places, my arm might be dislocated and I think my thumb is half-broken, but fuck this guy.

I spit blood on the handkerchief, splattering some on him.

He just sighs and drops the handkerchief on the ground.

Then he backhands me with a fist and pain blazes across my face yet again. I stumble but keep my feet, and the second I’m upright, I go after him.

I get a foot before both huge guys step forward and grab my arms again. I stop. There’s proving a point and then there’s asking for broken bones.

“You fucking rednecks are all the same,” the man says, but he says it without malice or anger, almost like he’s weary of this.

I wipe blood from my mouth with the back of my hand.

“Like what?” I ask, then spit onto the ground.

“Twice as brave as you are smart and twice as dumb as you are brave,” he says.

“I don’t have two thugs to do my dirty work for me,” I say.

He waves one hand in the air.

“We’re getting off track,” he says. “Have you ever stolen a Jaguar before?”

“No.”

“I do need the truth.”

I snort. Pain flashes through my skull, and I regret it immediately.

“Where am I gonna find a Jag?” I ask.

“That’s what I thought,” he says, almost to himself. “Well, it was a very good try for a drunk amateur. A few more minutes and you might have gotten it started.”

I’m about to spit again, but I pause. That was
not
what I was expecting to hear.

I squint up at the man, even though I can barely see him in the dark. He looks back at me levelly.

“Just do whatever you’re gonna do to me and get it over with,” I say. I know I could probably run and get away, but fuck running away. I don’t run.

The man chuckles, his voice low and dry.

“If you’re interested, I may have a job for you,” he says.

T
he redhead bites
her lip and leans over the pool table, concentrating every last one of her drunk attentions on the 11 ball. She’s way behind me with almost no chance of winning — unless, of course, she miraculously sinks this and the next four pool balls, all this turn — but it’s cute how hard she’s trying.

I reach out and palm her ass through her cutoff jean shorts.

The girl yelps, the cue ball bouncing wildly off track, then turns to me, her face scrunched into a cute little frown.

“That’s cheating!” she shouts over the sound of Brooks & Dunn blaring through the bar’s speakers.

I grin at her.

“My hand slipped,” I say, and wink at her. “I was just standing here behind you, minding my own business, and it just—”

I put my hand on her ass again. This time I squeeze a little, and she bats at my hand playfully, giggling.

“You’re just trying to mess up my game,” she says. “You afraid of getting beaten by a girl?”

I glance at the pool table. All I have to do is sink the 8 ball and I win.

“Not at all,” I say. “But I’ll make you a bet.”

“What kind of bet?” she asks, looking up at me through her eyelashes.

“You win, we go to your place,” I say. “I win, we go to mine.”

She giggles and looks down, like she’s putting on a show of being demure, but I can tell she’s going to say yes. I’ve met her type before: the upper-class girl who had braces as a teenager and went to college, who’s tired of men who say they’re “entrepreneurs” or “in finance,” so they come to a divey place like Charlie’s looking for a different kind of man.

Charlie’s isn’t a real dive. It’s got craft beer on tap, the bartender has all his teeth, the floor’s not sticky, and if a bar fight starts the bouncer straightens it out in thirty seconds. But it probably feels like one to anyone who frequents a higher class of drinking establishment, because it’s got good specials on shitty beer, pool tables, plays country music loud, and has lots of men in baseball caps and plaid shirts.

I’m here because I’m on call this weekend.
Requests
might come in, so I’ve gotta be available. That means no going to her place or mine, but there’s a storeroom in the back I’ve used to get around that particular obstacle before.

“Okay,” the girl finally says. “It’s a bet.”

We shake hands.

“But you have to let me take my turn again because you messed me up,” she pouts.

“Just this once,” I say. “In the future, you gotta be ready for
anything
.”

She leans over the pool table, and I take the opportunity to check her out again: the cowboy boots, the long legs, the bubble butt in short shorts.

The girl thinks and thinks about her shot, and after a moment, something else grabs my attention: the bartender waving an envelope.

Not now
, I think.
Come on, man
.

I shake my head slightly at him. He just shrugs a little, holding up the envelope. I subtly point at the redhead’s ass, and he shrugs again, this time with an
it’s your neck on the line
flavor to it.

She finally takes the shot. The cue ball doesn’t even hit the 11. She pouts.

“I’ll be right back,” I say. “Take another shot while I’m gone, see if you can hit anything.”

I walk to the bar without hearing what she says. Brandon the bartender hands me the envelope without saying anything, and I can see the small stamp across the seal:

TOP PRIORITY.

Dammit
.

I walk back to the girl and squeeze her ass again to say hello. She yelps.

“I gotta go to work,” I tell her.

She frowns.

“Now?” she says. “
Right
now?”

For a moment, I consider trying to get her into the storeroom before I leave. Maybe just a quick blow job or something to help clear my mind, but I’ve heard about what happens to guys who delay after getting TOP PRIORITY orders.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” I say. “Come back tomorrow, I’ll be here.”

She’s still frowning.

“What’s your job?” she huffs.

“I’m a doctor,” I lie, tossing back the rest of my beer. “I save lives.”

I leave before she can ask any more questions.

* * *

T
he TOP PRIORITY
is a Bugatti Veyron. There are only a hundred and fifty of them in the world, and I’m sure we’ve gotten a thousand requests for one. I wonder who the lucky high bidder is.

I get a ride to Buckhead with an associate and change in the car into my best rich douchebag outfit: designer ripped jeans, a button-down shirt with a skull silk-screened onto it, and an enormous flashy watch. The watch is on loan from my bosses, and the rest I only wear when I need to look rich.

Apparently rich people pay hundreds of dollars for jeans with holes in them already. If only I’d known that everything I wore growing up was worth that much.

He drops me off five blocks from The Verge, a very new,
very
upscale all-penthouse luxury apartment building. It’s got super-secure underground parking and twenty-four-hour security on site.

Lucky for me that Georgia has fire safety codes, because that means ugly back staircases that are rarely as well-guarded as the front entrance. When I’m close, I pull my phone out and stare at it, pretending to text someone, like I’m just another sort-of-drunk rich kid on a Saturday night.

It works. I find the emergency exit in a dark corner of the building, cut some wires, pick a lock, and I’m in. I leave it propped open to make it look like a security guard took a smoke break and forgot to close the door again.

Sorry, security guards. It’s about to be a rough night.

I take the staircase to the third floor, pick that lock and cut the wires to the alarm, then look at my phone again as I walk to the elevator.

I’m still on my phone as I walk out of the elevator in the garage, totally ignoring the security guy who nods at me. He’s watching sports — soccer, I think? — on his phone, periodically glancing up at the row of closed-circuit TVs in front of him.

The Veyron is exactly where my note said it would be, and I get to work.

Shit has come a
long
way since I tried to break into a Jaguar five years ago, and the first thing I do is put a thing the size of a hockey puck on the hood, right over where the alarm system’s battery is. I wait ten seconds for it to scramble the electronics, then get out the next piece of gadgetry and get it going.

The tech wizards at work haven’t been able to crack exactly how to get past Bugatti’s encryption
quite
yet, but they’ve managed to do the next best thing, and devised a way to keep the car from going into lockdown mode. Once I turn this thing on and let it go for a moment, a Bugatti may as well be a Hyundai from the 80s, and
that’s
a car I can get into with my eyes closed.

All in all, it takes about thirty seconds before I’m sitting in the driver’s seat, gadgets back in my pocket.

God
, this is a nice car, so nice it makes my breath hitch in my throat. Over a million dollars, so it’s a shame that I’m about to tear apart the dashboard a little to get it started.

Well, unless...

Someone who drives a million-dollar car wouldn’t just leave the spare key in the glove compartment, right?

I pop it open and fish around inside.

They would.

The engine
growls
when I start it, and I take just a moment to touch everything inside this beautiful, perfect car. The leather’s so soft it practically melts under my fingers. There are dials and gauges for
everything
, like the amount of pressure currently being exerted on the rear shocks. If I tap the gas, the engine purrs like a caged leopard about to be set free.

I take a deep breath and shift into drive, then ease out of the parking space. My heart feels like it might beat out of my chest, because this is both the most expensive car I’ve ever stolen and the boldest job I’ve tried to pull off.

Still on the lower level of the parking garage, I pull alongside a Rolls Royce Ghost, another car worth more than I’ll make in a lifetime, and stop.

Then I rev the Veyron’s engine as hard as I can. The digital readout on my dashboard practically spins, but the Rolls Royce starts shrieking as the vibrations set off its alarm, and I grin.

My tires squeal as I round a corner and see the security guard hustling down the ramp, already talking into his walkie-talkie. He just watches me drive by, his face carefully blank as I pull up to the gate blocking my exit.

I wait for a second, because he has to release the gate, but he’s distracted by the Rolls Royce raising hell.

So I honk, because that’s the kind of asshole move a guy who owns this car would pull. Nothing. I honk again, longer and louder this time, and finally the gate opens noiselessly.

I peel out and head for the interstate.

* * *

G
oing more
or less the speed limit all the way to Savannah might be the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I can’t afford to get pulled over
now
, not while I’m driving a million-dollar stolen car.

I push it a
little
, sure. It’s late, there’s no one else on the interstate, and I get it from zero to a hundred in a couple of seconds. It’s fucking
exhilarating
, dangerous in a way that makes me feel like I’m utterly invincible, like nothing on this green earth could possibly stop me.

I think a couple times about just disappearing with the car, but I know people who’ve tried that. The lucky ones are dead.

At the port of Savannah, I cut the headlights and navigate the mountains and canyons of shipping containers in the near-dark. I’ve done it dozens of times before, so I’ve got a pretty good handle on where I’m going.

Still, I sigh when I pull up to the container that’s been left empty for the Veyron. I run my hand over the steering wheel one last time, touch the gear shift, and think about just driving off in it. I wouldn’t make it too far, but I’d have a glorious couple of days.

I get out, unlock the padlock on the shipping container, and haul the doors open by the light of the Veyron’s running lights.

Then I jump backward and shout, “Shit!”

There’s dozen pairs of terrified eyes staring back at me.

I hold up both hands, the shock still worming its way through my body.

“Sorry,” I say. “Sorry, I didn’t know you were in there.”

It’s the first thing that comes to mind as I try to wrap my brain around this, peering into the container.

I was wrong about the number of people. There’s more than a dozen: maybe twenty, maybe thirty, maybe more. The container smells terrible, and the people all huddle together, away from me and the car.

Then I realize: they’re all teenage girls. They’re whispering to each other in Spanish. My heart drops into my stomach.

This has to be some kind of mistake
, I think.
They wouldn’t... I mean, the Syndicate steals cars, not...

I swallow, still staring.

We steal cars, not people
, I think, and stare back at the girls, open-mouthed.

To my right there’s the sound of running footsteps, and a guy I don’t know jogs around the corner of a pile of shipping containers.

“Hey!” he shouts, waving one arm. “We gave you the wrong container info.”

“Yeah,” I say, still struck dumb.

“The right one’s over there,” he says, jerking a thumb. “Thirty-five forty-seven two-oh-one.”

He glances at the open container, then back at me.

“Don’t worry about this one,” he says.

I nod, trying to seem as nonchalant as I can. I feel like I should do
something,
but I don’t know what. I don’t know
how
. I still can’t believe what I’ve seen.

“No problem,” I say.

I get in the Veyron and drive to the right shipping container. Then I get into the Toyota they left me to take back to Atlanta and drive home, still seeing dozens of eyes in front of me.