Hot Rocks

now—and her ex- high-school football hero turned town cop husband. Guy looked like the type who sat around on Saturday nights with his buddies and talked about the glory days over a six-pack. Or sat in the woods waiting for a deer to come by so he could shoot it and feel like a hero again.
    Crew deplored such men and the women who kept their dinner warm at night.
    His father had been such a man.
    No imagination, no vision, no palate for the taste of larceny. His old man wouldn’t have taken the time of day if it wasn’t marked on his time sheet. And what had it gotten him but a worn-out and complaining wife, a hot box of a row house in Camden and an early grave.
    To Crew’s mind, his father had been a pathetic waste of life.
    He’d always wanted more, and had started taking it when he crawled through his first second-story window at twelve. He boosted his first car at fourteen, but his ambitions had always run to bigger, shinier games.
    He liked stealing from the rich, but there was nothing of the Robin Hood in him. He liked it simply because the rich had better things, and having them, taking them, made him feel like he was part of the cream.
    He killed his first man at twenty-two, and though it had been unplanned—bad clams had sent the mark home early from the ballet—he had no aversion to stealing a life. Particularly if there was a good profit in it.
    He was forty-eight years old, had a taste for French wine and Italian suits. He had a home in Westchester from which his wife had fled—taking his young son—just prior to their divorce. He also kept a luxurious apartment off Central Park where he entertained lavishly when the mood struck, a weekend home in the Hamptons and a seaside home on Grand Cayman. All of the deeds were in different names.
    He’d done very well for himself by taking what belonged to others and, if he said so himself, had become a kind of connoisseur. He was selective in what he stole now, and had been for more than a decade. Art and gems were his specialties, with an occasional foray into rare stamps.
    He’d had a few arrests along the way, but only one conviction—a smudge he blamed entirely on his incompetent and overpriced lawyer.
    The man had paid for it, as Crew had beaten him to bloody death with a lead pipe three months after his release. But to Crew’s mind those scales were hardly balanced. He’d spent twenty-six months inside, deprived of his freedom, debased and humiliated.
    The idiot lawyer’s death was hardly compensation.
    But that had been more than twenty years ago. Though he’d been picked up for questioning a time or two since, there’d been no other arrests. The single benefit of those months in prison had been the endless time to think, to evaluate, to consider.
    It wasn’t enough to steal. It was essential to steal well, and to live well. So he’d studied, developed his brain and his personas. To steal successfully from the rich, it was best to become one of them. To acquire knowledge and taste, unlike the dregs who rotted behind bars.
    To gain entrée into society, to perhaps take a well-heeled wife at some point. Success, to his mind, wasn’t climbing in second-story windows, but in directing others to do so. Others who could be manipulated, then disposed of as necessary. Because, whatever they took, at his direction, by all rights belonged exclusively to him.
    He was smart, he was patient, and he was ruthless.
    If he’d made a mistake along the way, it was nothing that couldn’t and wouldn’t be rectified. He always rectified his mistakes. The idiot lawyer, the foolish woman who’d objected to his bilking her of a few hundred thousand dollars, any number of slow-minded underlings he’d employed or associated with in the course of his career.
    Big Jack O’Hara and his ridiculous sidekick Willy had been mistakes.
    A misjudgment, Crew corrected as he turned the corner and started back to the hotel. They hadn’t been quite as stupid as he’d assumed when he’d used them to plan out and execute the job of his lifetime. His grail, his quest. His.
    How they had slipped through the trap he’d laid and gotten away with their cut before it sprang was a puzzle to him. For more than a month they’d managed to elude him. And neither had attempted to turn the take into cash—that was another surprise.
    But he’d kept his nose to the ground and eventually picked up O’Hara’s scent. Yet it hadn’t been Jack he’d managed to track from New York