Pros and Cons: A Short Story Read online

  Nick approached Milton and gave him a wide smile. “Showtime! Are you ready?”

  “Good God,” Milton said, not looking all that happy.

  “It’s not too late,” Nick said, nudging Milton with his elbow. “You could walk away from all this and meet me at the bar on the corner. You know what they say: The only difference between a straight man and a gay man is a six-pack of beer.”

  “Get away from me,” Milton said. “Stand on the other side of the room. The best part of this wedding is that I’ll never have to see you again.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes to my original question, so we’re good to go.” Nick said.

  Nick returned to Caroline, ushering her out of the bedroom and through the living room. He signaled to the band and they went into “The Look of Love.” Caroline and Nick paused at the French doors.

  “This is it,” Nick said. “Enjoy the moment.”

  Caroline nodded, gave Nick’s hand a squeeze, and took a tiny step onto the rose-petal-strewn pink velvet carpet that led down the aisle. Everyone turned to look at her. There was a moment of stunned silence, then a collective gasp. Milton’s jaw dropped and his eyes bulged. The lounge singer stumbled over a lyric. The wedding photographer couldn’t snap pictures fast enough.

  This is great, Nick thought. Everyone’s happy. Caroline feels like a total sexpot. Milton is beside himself to be marrying a total sexpot. And the guests are on the edge of their seats, not sure where to look first, waiting for a nipple slip, hoping to catch a glimpse of the bride’s wedding-day taco. And Nick was happy because all eyes would be glued to Caroline for the next four minutes and eleven seconds. He turned on his heel and met his crew coming out of the kitchen with the trash bags stuffed with packing pellets.

  “You have four minutes, starting now,” Nick said, tapping his watch. “Go!”

  The crew split, working room by room, grabbing idols, packing them safely into the bags, and carting them to the freight elevator off the kitchen and then down to the garage.

  Nick went to Milton’s office, removed a nineteenth-century painting from the wall behind Milton’s desk, and exposed a wall safe. The theft of the golden idols would make splashy news, but the real moneymaker for Nick was a flash drive that Milton kept in his safe. The flash drive held all of the account numbers and passwords to Milton’s offshore bank accounts. Nick took a handful of explosive Semtex putty out of his pocket and applied it to the surface of the safe.

  Kate looked at her watch for the hundredth time. Why wasn’t Jessup calling her? Did he realize time was ticking away? She could hear the band playing twenty floors above her, and half a block away she had two vans filled with agents playing craps and catching up on their Twitter accounts. She went inside the Windsong Building and approached the mountain of a man who was guarding the elevators. She flashed her badge and identified herself.

  “I need to go up,” she said.

  “I bet.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Nice try. Merrill Stubing, the wedding planner, warned me about you.” The guard held up a photograph of Kate that had been lifted off her sister’s Facebook page. “He said the paparazzi might show up pretending to be feds.”

  Kate looked past the guard and stared at the bank of monitors behind him. A uniformed female caterer was standing at a loading dock in the underground garage. The woman was handing bulging plastic bags to a guy who leaned out of the open rear end of a panel van that said YUMMY GOOD CATERING on the side. One of the bags split open, but the guy caught what was inside before it hit the floor. The object in his hands was a golden head about the size of a honeydew melon. On the monitor, two more caterers emerged from the service elevator and climbed into the van. The back doors of the van closed, and it pulled away. Another Yummy Good Catering van took its place from somewhere else in the garage.

  “Robbery in progress,” Kate said into her Bluetooth earpiece. She was 98 percent sure. “Seal all exits.”

  She turned and ran from the lobby and around the corner of the building to the back alley just as a van was heading for the street. Kate slipped into the garage before the roll-up door could drop down and seal the ramp. The van drove off. The door closed behind her.

  She hurried down the ramp, slowing as she neared the first parking level. The woman was still on the loading dock and was now passing bags to a man in the second van.

  Kate stepped forward, gun drawn. “Halt, FBI.”

  At that same instant the elevator doors opened. Four more caterers came out, saw Kate, and froze.

  “Run!” someone yelled.

  Everyone took off in different directions. Kate couldn’t chase them all, and she couldn’t lawfully shoot any of them, so she shot out the tires of the van instead to make sure it wouldn’t be going anywhere. The Yummy Good Catering van slumped to the ground like a weary cow. The gunshots echoed through the garage.

  Special Agent Gunter was in Kate’s earpiece. “What’s going on down there? I’m in the lobby, and I just saw you shoot a catering truck.”

  “They aren’t caterers. They’re thieves. They’ve scattered in the garage. Detain anyone who tries to leave.”

  Kate stepped into the service elevator and pressed the button for the penthouse.

  Nick placed the blasting caps in the Semtex putty and emerged from Milton’s office just as “The Look of Love” was ending and the last of the crew members slipped out the front door with their bags. He glanced at his watch. They’d pulled off the heist with eleven seconds to spare. He walked across the living room and checked on the progress of the wedding ceremony outside. Caroline was radiating sex at the altar, and Milton was beaming.

  Nick felt his cell phone buzz with a text message from his crew leader. The FBI is here! They’re everywhere!

  Nick calmly went back to Milton’s office, passed the safe rigged with plastic explosives, and strolled out onto the empty, city-facing side of the penthouse deck. He looked over the edge and saw the task force vehicles on the street. The building was surrounded.

  The elevator opened at the penthouse, and Kate stepped out into a short hallway. Two caterers rushed at her, knocking her out of the way. They jumped into the elevator, the doors closed, and the elevator descended. Kate walked through the living room and peeked out at the rooftop garden, where the ceremony was coming to an end. She scanned the crowd for Nick.

  “Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?” a jowly, black-robed minister asked the bride’s cleavage.

  “I do,” she said.

  “By the power vested in me by the State of Illinois,” the minister said, “I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride.”

  The bride and groom kissed. The band and the singer belted out “Sweet Caroline.” Fireworks erupted over Lake Michigan, and the penthouse shook.

  Kate knew it wasn’t fireworks that rocked the building. It was a blast that came from the other side of the penthouse. She hurried across the living room, slipped on a splotch of spilled cocktail sauce, and clipped a tray of canapés that had been left on a serving table. Kate and the canapés went down to the floor in a clattering mess of tiny meatballs, avocado and spinach dip, smoked duck in soy sauce, and prosciutto cheese balls.

  “Freaking fudge!” Kate said. “Damn. Mother fornicator.”

  She scrambled to her feet and limped into the short hall that led to the master suite. Smoke was spilling out from under the closed and locked mahogany doors. Kate kicked the doors open, saw the scorched wall and the blown-open safe, and knew why Nick had planned a finale of fireworks. It was genius, Kate thought. You had to admire the man’s style.

  French doors opened off the master suite onto a balcony on which Kate could see Nick Fox facing her. He was sitting on the four-foot-high masonry balcony wall, his back to the city skyline. He smiled at Kate and gestured to her shirt.

  “I see you tried the canapés,” he said. “I made them myself.”

  Kate looked down at her splattered jacket and shi
rt, swiped up a glob of green and white goo and tasted it.

  “Avocado and spinach dip,” she said. “Needs salt.”

  “You’ll have to let me cook you dinner sometime.”

  “I’ll pass on that. I’m not crazy about prison ingredients.”

  “Neither am I.” He glanced over his shoulder at the twenty-story drop to the ground.

  Kate didn’t like what the glance implied. “Don’t do it, Nick.”

  “Would you miss me?”

  “Yes!”

  “How much would you miss me?” he asked her. “A lot?”

  “Don’t push it.”

  “Admit it, deep down inside you like me. You think I’m cute.”

  Kate narrowed her eyes. “Are you going to jump, or what?”

  Nick smiled, sent her a little wave, swung his legs over the wall, and disappeared from view.

  Kate felt her heart give a painful contraction. “No!” she shouted. “You idiot! I didn’t really want you to jump!”

  She crossed the balcony to the wall and peered over at Nick in time to see his customized handheld parachute open. She watched him for a minute as he glided toward the skyscraper canyons of downtown Chicago, ate a meatball that was stuck to her jacket, and then called Gunter. Next in line was a call to Jessup.

  “I tried calling you,” Jessup said, “but you weren’t picking up.”

  Kate filled him in. “Gunter is coordinating a chase with cooperating local law enforcement,” she said.

  “If you need help with follow-up, I can send someone,” Jessup said. “Cosmo, maybe.”

  “No! Not Cosmo.”

  The FBI, the Chicago Police Department, and the Cook County Sheriff’s Office all put choppers in the air, but they couldn’t find any sign of Nick or his parachute. Kate led a search of the surrounding neighborhood, but she knew it was futile. There was too much ground to cover, and Nick had a head start. So she armed a bunch of agents with copies of The Complete Directory of Episodic Television Shows and sent them off to look for TV characters trying to leave town by planes, trains, or automobiles.

  Somehow all of Nick’s crew had managed to slip out of the building, but a third of the golden idols were left behind on the loading dock, so it wasn’t a complete loss. And Kate had the satisfaction of knowing that her instincts had been 100 percent right.

  She straggled back to her hotel just as the sun was coming up. She was exhausted, and done with smelling like cocktail meatballs. She wanted to shuck her food-stained clothes, take a hot shower, and wash the spinach dip out of her hair.

  She unlocked her door, stepped into the room, and froze. There were Toblerone wrappers on the bed, room service dishes on the table, a bouquet of roses, and an unopened bottle of champagne chilling in a bucket of ice. Her first thought in her sleep-deprived state was that she’d walked into the wrong room. She was about to double-check the number on the door when she realized that a pink handkerchief was tied like a ribbon around the champagne bottle. She’d seen the handkerchief before … in the breast pocket of Nick’s white tuxedo.

  Un-freaking-believable, she thought. While she’d been dragging her butt all over town looking for him, the jerk had been in her room ordering room service and raiding her minibar. She had to give credit where credit was due. The man had Volkswagen-size cojones. Really big brass ones.

  She drew her gun and looked under the bed, in the closet, and in the bathroom. No Nick. But he’d for sure been there. She sat on her bed and plucked a card off her pillow. In a masculine scrawl she’d come to recognize, Nick Fox had written Looking forward to next time.

  THE END … until THE HEIST.

  Read on for a sneak peek of The Heist

  The first novel in Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg’s explosive new series!

  Kate O’Hares favorite outfit was her blue windbreaker with the letters FBI written in yellow on the back, worn over a basic black T-shirt and matching black Kevlar vest. The ensemble went well with everything, particularly when paired with jeans and accessorized with a Glock. Thirty-three-year-old Special Agent O’Hare didn’t like feeling exposed and unarmed, especially on the job. That all but ruled her out for undercover work. Fine by her. She preferred a hard-charging style of law enforcement, which was exactly what she was practicing on that 96 degree winter afternoon in Las Vegas when she marched into the St. Cosmas Medical Center in her favorite outfit with a dozen similarly dressed agents behind her.

  While the other agents fanned out to seal every exit in the building, Kate pushed past the security guards in the lobby and made her way like a guided missile to the first-floor office of Rufus Stott, the chief administrator of the hospital. She blew past Stott’s stunned assistant without even acknowledging her existence and burst into Stott’s office. The startled Stott yelped and nearly toppled out of his chrome-and-mesh ergonomic chair. He was a chubby, bottom-heavy little guy who looked like a turnip that some bored wizard had tapped with a magic wand and turned into a fifty-five-year-old bureaucrat. He had a spray tan, tortoise-shell glasses, and crotch wrinkles in his tan slacks. His hand was over his heart, and he was gasping for air.

  “Don’t shoot,” he finally managed.

  “I’m not going to shoot,” Kate said. “I don’t even have my gun drawn. Do you need water, or something? Are you okay?”

  “No, I’m not okay,” Stott said. “You just scared the bejeezus out of me. Who are you? What do you want?”

  “I’m Special Agent Kate O’Hare, FBI.” She slapped a piece of paper down on his desk. “This is a warrant giving us full access to your concierge wing.”

  “We don’t have a concierge wing,” Stott said.

  Kate leaned in close, locking her intense blue eyes on him. “Six obscenely wealthy and desperate patients flew in today from all over the country. They were picked up from McCarran airport by limos and brought here. Upon arrival at your private concierge wing, they each wired one million dollars to St. Cosmas’s offshore bank account and immediately jumped to the top of an organ waiting list.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Stott said. “We don’t have any offshore bank accounts and we certainly can’t afford to rent limos. We’re teetering on bankruptcy.”

  “That’s why you’re conducting off-the-books transplant surgeries using illegally acquired organs that you bought on the black market. We know those patients are here and being prepped for surgery right now. We will lock this building down and search every single room and broom closet if we have to.”

  “Be my guest,” Stott said, and handed the warrant back to her. “We aren’t doing any transplant surgeries, and we don’t have a concierge wing. We don’t even have a gift shop.”

  Stott no longer looked scared, and he didn’t look like he was lying. Not good signs, Kate thought. He should be in a cold sweat by now. He should be phoning his lawyer.

  Eighteen hours earlier, Kate had been at her desk in L.A., tracking scattered intel on known associates of a wanted felon, when she’d stumbled on chatter about a certain financially strapped Las Vegas hospital offering organ transplants to the highest bidder. She dug deeper and discovered that the patients were already en route to Vegas for their surgeries, so she dropped everything and organized a rush operation.

  “Take a look at this,” she said, showing Stott a photo on her iPhone.

  It was a medium close-up of a man about her age wearing a loose-fitting polo shirt, soft and faded from years of use. His brown hair was windblown. His face was alight with a boyish grin that brought out the laugh lines at the corners of his brown eyes.

  “Do you know this man?” she asked.

  “Sure I do,” Stott replied. “That’s Cliff Clavin, the engineer handling the asbestos removal from our old building.”

  Kate felt a dull ache in her stomach, and it wasn’t from the Jack in the Box sausage-and-egg sandwich she’d had for breakfast. Her gut, flat and toned despite her terrible eating habits, was where her anxieties and her instincts resided and liked to communicate with her i
n a language of cramps, pains, queasiness, and general malaise.

  “Cliff Clavin is a character on the television show Cheers,” she said.

  “Yeah, crazy coincidence, right?”

  “What old building?” she asked him.

  He turned to the window and pointed at a five-story building on the other side of the parking lot. “That one.”

  The building was an architectural artifact from the swinging ’60s with its lava rock accents, big tinted windows, and a lobby portico topped with white gravel.

  “That was the original hospital,” Stott said. “We moved out of there a year ago. We built this new one to handle the demand for beds that we wrongly anticipated would come from …”

  Kate wasn’t listening. She was already running out the door. The instant she saw the other building, she knew exactly how she and those six wealthy patients had been duped. The man in the photo on her iPhone wasn’t Cliff Clavin, and he wasn’t an engineer. He was Nicolas Fox, the man she’d been pursuing when she’d stumbled on the organ transplant scheme.

  Fox was an international con man and thief, known for the sheer audacity of his high-risk swindles and heists and for the obvious joy he took in pulling them off. No matter how big his scores were, and he’d had some huge ones, he kept going back for more.

  Kate had made it her mission at the FBI to nail him. She’d come close two years ago, when she’d discovered Nick’s plot to plunder a venture capitalist’s twentieth-story Chicago penthouse of all his cash and jewels at the same time that the self-proclaimed “King of Hostile Takeovers” was getting married in the living room.