Sting

  March rubbed his forehead. He felt the pressure of the decision building in his head. He didn’t like these odds. It was what Alfie would call a “walk away” situation. Still, the knowledge of what they’d lost was pounding inside him. Without money, where would they go? How far would the proceeds of one broken-up sapphire take them?

  He knew the answer: not far enough.

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” he said. “Too much security, too much I can’t predict. Plus snipers.” He was about to add but we need to think about it when Jules jumped in, a relieved look on her face.

  “I’m with March,” Jules said. “I vote no.”

  Darius shrugged. “We can’t do it without you two,” he said. “So …”

  Ham crashed back against his chair. “Well. That’s that.”

  “Hey!” Izzy sprang to her feet. “What about me? Don’t I get a voice?”

  “Of course you do, Iz,” March said. “It’s just that you never … usually … vote.”

  Izzy lifted her chin. “Well, I’m voting. I say let’s do it.”

  Everyone turned and looked at Izzy. She had never spoken up like that before.

  “But first, I’m hungry,” Izzy said. “Ham, can you get some Cuban sandwiches? I’ve always wanted to try Cuban sandwiches. Even though I’m Puerto Rican. I don’t know what time it is in France, but it feels like dinner.”

  “Excellent idea!” Hamish grabbed his keys. “Darius, give me a hand?”

  Darius looked at Izzy, confusion on his face. “Uh, sure. We’ll be right back. Don’t discuss anything while we’re gone.”

  As soon as the door closed behind them, tiny Izzy strode toward March, her hands on her hips.

  “Why are you hesitating? We have to do this job,” Izzy said.

  Jules unwound herself from her position on the couch. “You’re right, Iz,” she agreed.

  “I know,” March said. “Because we’re broke.”

  They exchanged that look that girls do when they silently agree that boys are stupid.

  “I’m not doing it because of that,” Jules said. “I’m doing it for Darius.”

  Izzy nodded. “He needs to do this. He needs to get the money back.”

  “The money’s gone, thanks to him,” March said furiously.

  “We get that,” Jules said. “So does he. Especially since you keep mentioning it!”

  “I don’t think I can mention it enough,” March said.

  “Look, I’m upset, too. We all are, but I’m not punishing him.” She held up a finger. “And don’t tell me he deserves it. Nobody deserves what you’re dishing out. He didn’t mean to do it!”

  “What’s the difference?” March asked. He slumped on the couch. “It’s still gone.”

  “There is a difference,” Izzy insisted. “He was trying to do a good thing, not a bad thing. That’s when you need to forgive people! You called him stupid,” she added softly.

  March winced. He wished he could take that word back. He wished he could take back the memory of Darius’s face when he’d said it.

  “His father called him stupid all the time,” Izzy said. “I know you didn’t mean it. But now he feels like he’s useless. We have to make him feel better. And the only way is if we get our money back. I’m scared we could lose him. I mean it.”

  The girls stood in front of March, a jury of two. “Okay, I get what you’re saying, but I’m supposed to be not mad anymore? He lost my father’s legacy!”

  His hands balled into fists, and he squeezed as hard as he could, trying to stop the tears that suddenly pricked his eyes. His face was hot. When he thought of Alfie picking out that apartment, dreaming of a life he could give his kids, he wanted to howl.

  “Our father,” Jules said quietly.

  Izzy sat next to him and, to March’s surprise, put her arms around him. She hugged him hard, and he felt the tears he’d been holding back fill his eyes.

  “I know,” she said. “So does Darius.”

  “Why can’t he say he’s sorry, then?”

  “Because sometimes sorry is too big to say.”

  The next day, the gang sat around the pool, drying off in the sunshine. They had slept long and hard, and the fog of jet lag plus shock was lifting. March and Darius were speaking again, but it felt like a struggle. Would they ever be able to get back to their easy friendship? March remembered fun afternoons that seemed to last forever. He’d taught D how to pick a lock and alter a passport without detection. Darius had taught him how to make a fart noise with his hands, a necessary part of his education that Alfie had missed.

  Jules disappeared into the house and reappeared with a dish of pickles, a bowl of potato chips, and a saucer of ketchup.

  The noise of a weed-whacker came to them faintly. Dimmy had shown up with it, saying he’d noticed Mikki’s lawn needed help. His face fell when they told him that Mikki was out, but he brightened when Izzy added that this way, the lawn cleanup would be a surprise.

  He flung out his arms. “Americans, they love surprises! In America, surprises are always happy!” His face deflated. “In my country, they are always bad.” He put on his noise-canceling headphones and sighed.

  “Have a chip, Dimmy,” Jules said, patting him on the back.

  “WHAT?” he yelled.

  Now Jules put a slice of pickle on a chip and finished with a dollop of ketchup. She caught March’s look. “Don’t judge. So, now that we’re in, what’s the plan?”

  “Know your mark,” Izzy said. “Alfie’s rule number one.”

  “Exactly,” March said. “Know his routine, know what he likes for breakfast, know when he gets his mail. Know when he takes a walk, know when he picks his nose.”

  “Gross,” Jules said.

  “You’re eating chip-pickle sandwiches, and you call that gross?” March snatched a chip and crunched. “Look, basically, thieves trip up in a million ways, but the main way they screw up is planning. Most people have routines. They go to work at the same time. They go to the gym, they go for a jog … usually at the same times.”

  “Except for guys who are wanted in five countries,” Jules said.

  “Exactly. He knows if people are after him, he has to mix it up. Not do the same thing every day at the same time. Send out decoy cars. He’s used to living that way.”

  “That café where Trini sometimes goes after yoga? I mapped it online. Not good. On a dead end,” Izzy said. “Only one way out. And a police station on the next block.”

  Deep in thought, March took a chip and added a pickle with ketchup. Crunch. It wasn’t bad.

  “You see? You gotta trust me,” Jules said.

  “I trust you. I just don’t trust pickles. They belong on the side. They’re a sneaky veg.”

  “They aren’t a vegetable, they’re a condiment.”

  “Right. And I’m not a thief, I just borrow things without permission.”

  Izzy pushed her tablet across the table with a satellite map of the golf club. “Here’s the prob — the club is super private. One entrance with a guard and a gate. Employee entrance on the side with what looks to be a key-card entry. Surrounded on three sides with an electric fence concealed by a twenty-foot-high privacy hedge. One side fronts a river. Plus it’s so exclusive their website doesn’t say anything. I can’t get a staff list or any email addresses. And I could only find a few photographs on the web.”

  “We can’t go into that place blind,” March said. “We’ll get picked off in two minutes.”

  “So what do we do?” Jules brightened. “Pull a Blanchard and parachute in?”

  The rest of them rolled their eyes. Ever since March had told them the story of Gerald Blanchard, who had parachuted onto the roof of a palace in Austria and made off with the diamond and pearl Sisi Star, the most famous jewel in Austrian history, Jules had hoped for parachuting glory.

  “Outside my skill set,” March said. “Sorry.”

  Darius tapped the tablet. “We could do an Orange Vest with a twist.”
r />   “I know about Orange Vest,” Jules said. “That’s the guy who put the ad on Craigslist for construction workers. Said to show up in an orange vest. A bunch of people showed up. So after he pulled off the heist, he just put on a vest and got away in the crowd.”

  “Right,” March said. “But what would a whole bunch of people show up for in Miami? To a golf course? Maybe if we throw in a Joe Loutsenheizer …”

  “What’s a Loutsenheizer?” Izzy asked.

  “That’s what Alfie called acting like a loudmouth for a diversion,” March said. He tapped the table, thinking hard. “Lots of problems with this one.”

  Izzy straightened. “Hey, it’s like what that guy said … who was the guy, the politician in World War Two, the British guy?”

  “Patton,” Darius said.

  “The Red Baron,” Jules said.

  March dropped his head in his hands. “We really need some homeschooling.”

  “Churchill!” Izzy said triumphantly. “‘Never, never, never give up.’ That’s what he said. That’s three nevers, so you know he meant it.”

  Darius put his finger on a twisting blue line. “Remember how Orange Vest got away?”

  “Right,” March said. “Not a bad idea.”

  “Amazing that I thought of it,” Darius mumbled.

  The buzz of Dimmy’s weed-whacker was gone. Maybe it had been for a while. He was planting something not far away and gave a cheerful wave. The quiet of the afternoon descended on March, soft and easy, and he heard birdsong. He swatted at a lazy fly circling his head. The fly dive-bombed into the ketchup.

  Break it down.

  First. Get them where you want them to be.

  Second. Diversion.

  Third. Lift the stone.

  Fourth. Getaway.

  March grabbed the bowl of chips and placed it in the center of the table. He laid out two pickle spears in a line on one side.

  Jules, Izzy, and Darius looked at him hopefully.

  He pointed to the bowl. “That’s the club. Here’s the river,” he said, pointing to the pickle spears. “Orange Vest could work. The thief got away on an inflatable boat. But we have a bigger problem than the getaway. We’d have to have an exact time they’re at the club, ahead of time. That’s our only shot. And that’s impossible.”

  “Maybe not,” Izzy said.

  Izzy spun around her tablet. She reached over and expanded a photo on a tabloid site. “Her wrist.”

  March and Jules leaned over. “Bracelet?”

  Izzy shook her head. “One of those fitness trackers. I’ve been looking at all the photos I can find, and there are three things she never takes off — that necklace, her wedding ring, and the tracker.”

  “Well, we know she’s serious about working out.”

  “I’m more interested in the information on that thing.”

  “Wait a second, Izzy.” Jules grew suddenly intent. “Are you saying you can hack into a fitness band?”

  “Well, I need some parameters,” Izzy said. “It syncs with her mobile phone, right? So, if we identify the brand, and the info is set in cleartext, and she visits the same café regularly and uploads info on Wi-Fi — which we can kind of bet on, because it probably paired in the past — and if I’m there, I can run my software and load Wi-Fi traffic onto my computer, compress it, upload it, isolate the Mac address, strip out the Ethernet packets —”

  “You can cut to the chase any time now, genius girl,” Darius interrupted.

  “— I can get inside and get all her info — when she wakes up, goes to sleep, works out, calories burned, maybe even what she eats and how much water she drinks —”

  “You can get the time of her workouts at the golf club?” March asked.

  Jules nodded. “Maybe there’s a pattern; we just don’t know it.”

  Izzy shrugged, her usual yes answer to a hacking job that seemed perfectly simple to her.

  “Just get me within ten yards for about ten minutes,” she said. “That’s all I need.”

  The café was filled with what appeared to be a tribe of supermodels. The women spilled in, chatting and laughing, in their spandex and yoga gear. They held conversations while constantly flipping their hair, taking selfies, and checking their phones.

  Trini Abbo sauntered in, chatting idly with her companion, who was also wearing yoga clothes and was equally gorgeous. Even from here March could see the star sapphire around Trini’s neck. The diamonds flashed in the lights.

  March took a bite of his doughnut. It tasted like a sponge. He was too nervous to appreciate food. Jules had already demolished one doughnut and was starting on her second.

  Trini grabbed her coffee and made her way to a table in the corner, which her bodyguards had already staked out. They gathered up her yoga mat and sat at a nearby table. March knew that behind their dark glasses, their gazes were constantly roaming the place and checking the street outside. At the curb Trini’s black SUV was pulled up in a loading zone, the engine running.

  March glanced at Izzy at another table. She had her earbuds in and was tapping on the keys. A textbook called Our Shared Heritage was on the table, but he knew she was intently downloading as much information as she could get from people surfing the web on their phones. Somewhere in that information they would get the key to Trini’s schedule. Izzy’s head bobbed to the music supposedly in her ears.

  Outside, Darius sipped on a juice, pretending to wait for a bus. He was there just to ensure that everything went smoothly. March always felt safer when Darius was nearby. He had an instinct for trouble, and he knew how to avoid it. Why had he failed so badly and trusted a crook?

  “It’s funny how I always depended on D to keep trouble away,” March said. “Then he delivered it right to my door.”

  “That’s a lot to depend on someone for,” Jules said, munching on her doughnut. “Trouble makes up its own mind. You know what I was thinking? Hamish is right. It’s easy to lose a fortune. I mean, when you’re a thief. The only thing that can cut a diamond is another diamond. The only person who can scam a thief is another thief. Hard against hard, right? Darius got taken, but it could have happened to any of us.”

  “What? It wouldn’t have happened to me.”

  “Not that way, maybe,” Jules admitted. “But think about last year. We didn’t know how to handle what we had. We were trying to hide, but we bought that whole building. That attracted too much attention, right off the bat. How long would we have gotten away with it? How many times did that nice guy in the bakery ask about our parents? What about the realtor who kept coming around? And the neighbor who asked all those questions when we put in the lap pool? We weren’t as smart as you think.”

  “So it’s okay that it’s all gone?”

  “No, it’s bad that it’s all gone. It’s scary. But maybe next time we’ll be more careful. We’ll get it really right.”

  “We had it right,” March said. “Alfie made it right.”

  Jules brushed crumbs off her lap. “Let me tell you something. I think it’s great that Alfie had a dream to reunite us. I think it’s terrific that he finally tried to put his kids first. But he died before he could. How do we know it would have worked out?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “How do you know he wouldn’t have run out of money again? How do you know he wouldn’t have invested in a crazy scheme to double his money? How do you know he wouldn’t have lost everything? He did it, over and over, your whole life. Are you forgetting that?”

  March felt as though Jules had driven a spike through his heart. He couldn’t breathe for a minute. “I’m not forgetting anything!”

  “Hey, be chill,” Jules warned. “People are looking.”

  “You’re wrong,” he whispered fiercely. “Alfie would have hung on to that diamond, and the safe house. He was going to go straight.”

  Jules choked on a laugh. “Is that what you think?”

  “That’s what I know.”

  Jules blew out a breath. “
What you remember and what’s real … it’s like two different things. Alfie left you in Paris for two weeks, you don’t know whether he’s alive or dead, and you’re only ten? Come on. Not to mention he left me for ten years. Or that time in Hong Kong when he pulled off that big deal and then placed the whole amount on a roulette spin? What makes you think that would have changed?”

  “It would have. I know it. He died for that moonstone. He did it for us. He would have gone straight because this time we would have all been together.”

  Jules let out a short bark of a laugh. “You don’t know that! And it doesn’t even make sense!”

  “Just because things don’t make sense doesn’t mean they’re not real.”

  “Now, that doesn’t make sense.”

  March balled up his napkin. “When you give me what’s real, I know it. That’s the difference between you and me.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  Just then Izzy stood and stretched. Then she shoved her computer in her tote bag and walked out.

  “We’ve gotta go.” March bundled up their trash and shoved it hard into the bin. He tried to catch his breath.

  Jules was wrong. She was always hard on Alfie.

  Izzy and Darius met up with them at the corner.

  “She logs every workout, every calorie,” she said. “She eats a papaya every day.”

  “The golf club?” Jules asked.

  “She swims there twice a week. There is a pattern. One week it’s Tuesday and Thursday; one week it’s Wednesday and Friday. It’s a Wednesday-Friday week.”

  March frowned. “That’s the day after tomorrow.”

  Izzy nodded. “It’s always at ten a.m.”

  “We’ve got a lot to do, then,” March said. “Anything else?”

  “After the swim — twenty minutes — she gets a smoothie. It’s logged in every time after the swim, so she must go to the restaurant at the club.” Izzy regarded him, her eyes narrowing. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Do you have a plan?”