The Heist

was so bizarre, she wasn’t sure it was real. Maybe she only
thought
she’d had a perfect landing when she parachuted in. Maybe she’d hit her head and she was hallucinating.
    “Out of curiosity,” Kate asked, staring at the aged beams holding up the pitched ceiling, “how long have Jessup and Bolton been here?”
    “They came in yesterday when it was clear you were making your move.”
    “And who came up with this insane plan?”
    “I did,” Nick said. “I thought it was a win-win for everybody.”
    “Except for me,” Kate said.
    “Especially for you.”
    “How do you figure that?” she asked.
    “You like chasing after me, traveling all over the place, kicking down doors, jumping out of airplanes, smashing into cars with buses,” he said. “There aren’t a lot of cases that are going to have the same excitement, danger, and fun. Not to mention you’re living in a box and this gives you a chance to get out.”
    “I like the box.”
    “It’s still a box.”
    “And what’s in it for you, Nick, besides staying out of a cell for the time being?”
    “Time being?”
    She propped herself up on an elbow and looked at him. “You’re a crook. Your fate is inevitable. Even if you honor this deal, which I doubt, in five years you’ll walk away a free man and immediately pull off another big swindle and it will start all over again. I will come after you, and when I catch you there will be no deals. You’ll do hard time.”
    “I might emerge from this a changed man. Or you might become an entirely different woman. You might not want to catch me anymore.”
    “Yeah, right, that’s all not gonna happen.”
    He shrugged. “We’ll see.”
    Kate wanted to punch him, wanted to wipe the smug smile off his face. Then she wanted to punch Bolton and Jessup.
    “Honestly,” she said, “this just isn’t fair. I’m a team player, but this is too much. This is wrong.”
    “It’s the chance of a lifetime,” Nick said.
    “For you.”
    “Yes, but it comes with a price. I’m going to be stuck with you for five long years. And if you want to know the ugly truth, it’s not my idea of the good life. True, I find you strangely attractive, but that doesn’t mean you’re not a huge pain in the ass.”
    Kate perked up at that. She liked the possibility that she could make his life a living hell. And while she was raining on Nick Fox’s parade she might be able to catch some bad guys. Sure there was some risk involved, but risk was always present. Look at Nick Fox: He was driving home from work one day, and he got hit by a bus. Who would have thought?
    Nick stayed awake long after Kate fell asleep. There were practical problems he had to face. To mount his cons and heists, he’d need a crew. He rarely used the same crew twice, but he was loyal to everyone who’d been loyal to him. He wouldn’t betray them by involving them in a hustle that he was secretly running for the FBI.
    And he didn’t trust the FBI much more than they trusted him. If he introduced the feds to his network of fellow con artists and thieves, he’d be exposing them all to law enforcement scrutiny, revealing not only who they were but their methods of operation. The FBI might turn around one day and use that knowledge to arrest them. Nick couldn’t live with himself if that happened. Not to mention if his clever cohorts discovered he was working with Kate instead of running from her, his cover would be blown and his life would be in jeopardy. Nobody in his field liked a rat, which is what they would naturally assume he was even if he wasn’t. And they would justifiably begin to wonder what he’d divulged abouthis past scores, and his past colleagues, and if he’d tipped the FBI off to the Crimson Teardrop job, even though he’d arranged with Bolton for the release of his crew on a sketchy legal technicality as a condition of his participation in this operation.
    So to mount the cons against the big fish targeted by the FBI he’d have to assemble a crew from scratch, recruiting entirely new people and never letting them know who they were actually working for. He already had some people in mind, since he was always on the lookout for new talent, but he knew that bringing in an entirely inexperienced crew introduced a level of risk and uncertainty that could swiftly derail a con and get everybody killed. And no one was more of a wild card in the deck than Kate O’Hare. She was 5′ 5″ of trouble, and he was going to have a