She moved close to me again, her hips nearly brushing my jeans, and looked up at me with a smile that was meant to fool anyone watching us. “There’s something going on,” she said.
“Oh yeah?” I picked up my shot. “What?”
“I don’t know.” She licked her lips and continued to gaze up at me. She was a very good actress. “People have been coming and going. People we usually don’t see.”
“People like who?” I asked.
She shrugged, licked her lips again, pouted a little. “People like Craig Bastien.”
Fuck. Gray was unpleasant, but he was basically a petty criminal, hitting the easy money. Craig Bastien was into drugs, and hard. I wafted my shot under my nose, then downed it. “Okay,” I said.
“I think whatever job is going down is one of Bastien’s,” Amy said. “Gray is looking a little scared.”
“Got it.” I put down my glass. I’d have to think of a strategy. I could drive a few packets here and there, but big-money drugs weren’t my thing. “Thanks for the warning.”
“Don’t do it, Dev,” Amy said, still looking flirtatiously at me. “Whatever it is.”
“I may not have much of a choice.” I patted her arm, disengaging it from around my waist. “Thanks again. Now, I need to go see him. He’s waiting.”
“I get it.” But she moved closer still, running her fingers down my chest and my stomach. “You know, I keep forgetting how hot you are. God, all these muscles. You should take me back to the dressing room sometime.”
I frowned. I’d never fucked Amy, or any of the other girls in Pure Gold. I had nothing against strippers—some of them liked a good hard fuck, just like other women—but I hadn’t had any woman in a while, by choice. “Maybe sometime,” I hedged.
Her fingers dropped to my belt buckle and toyed with it. “I haven’t had a cock in weeks,” she complained.
She was starting to make my dick hard, I admit it. I’m a man, and we’re wired to respond to hot strippers in schoolgirl outfits coming on to us. But I’d been unenthused about mindless, quick-fuck sex for a while, though I couldn’t explain it. I told myself it was just my mood, but I’d never done this self-imposed celibacy before. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, and I didn’t want to think about it.
Besides, Gray was waiting, and—maddeningly, unaccountably—my neighbor’s image came into my mind again. The dip of her clavicle, the line of her mouth, her graceful hands. Shit, she was cockblocking me, and she wasn’t even in the room. Still. “I’m sure you can find one anytime, a sexy girl like you,” I said to Amy, and then I walked away. “Thanks for the drink,” I called over my shoulder.
Gray had another of the girls, Irene, in the VIP room with him. She was sitting in his lap, wearing a bikini, while he talked on the phone. When I walked in, he dismissed Irene and hung up in short order. “Wilder,” he said.
Gray was one of those guys whose face is just a little off, and you can’t pinpoint where. He was in his thirties, with salt-and-pepper hair and the beginnings of a gut. He was wearing a warmup suit, as if he thought he was Rocky, though if Gray ever warmed up for any exercise in his life I’d eat my jacket. The VIP room was dim and dingy and smelled like spilled beer and old come. I wanted to get out of there as fast as fucking possible.
“Listen,” Gray said. “There’s a thing happening. I need you in.”
I stayed standing, since I didn’t want to touch the velvet seats. I may be dirty, but even I draw a line somewhere. “When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“I’ll check my schedule.”
“You’ll free up your fucking schedule,” he growled, looking at me with his flat dead eyes. “Or I pay your friend a visit.”
I felt my jaw clench, my muscles tighten, like they did every time he did this. I stared back into his eyes. “You know, one of these days I’m going to call your bluff.”
“Try it, shitsack,” Gray returned. “I dare you.”
I held his gaze for a second, but that was the problem with Gray. I didn’t really know what he would do. And Max was too important to risk.
I’d only ever had one person in my life I could call a friend, and Max Reilly was it. Born on the same streets as me and my brother. Living some of that same life. He’d helped me through the worst time in my life—the time that was the reason I hated LA and would never go back—and I owed him for it. Instead of taking the path I took, or taking off like Cavan did, Max had enlisted. He’d been deployed for three years, most of them in Afghanistan. He’d come home bearded and haunted, his right leg gone below the knee from an IED, trying to pay for his pain meds and PTSD therapy from his veteran’s pay. He was living in LA, cleaning out his dad’s apartment, since his dad had just died. I was working on getting Max an apartment in Shady Oaks so he could come to San Francisco.
Max was the reason I took jobs with crazy assholes like Gray. I could live alone on my mechanic’s pay—Shady Oaks was cheap, and who the hell cared if I wore the same jeans every day? But I needed extra money to help Max. And the worst day of my life was the day that Gray had, somehow in his devious network of rats, discovered it.
If I turned down work for Gray, I not only lost out on the money that would help Max. I also put my shit on Max’s doorstep, because in a certain mood, Gray would like nothing better than to make my friend pay for my disobedience. And Max had enough problems.
“Fine,” I said to Gray now. “What is this thing?”
“TV’s,” Gray said. “Flat screens and such. Place called Mickey’s in West Oakland.”
I nodded. I’d heard of it only vaguely, since I didn’t own a TV.
“I have good intel,” Gray said. “The guy who owns it is close to retiring. His eyesight isn’t so good and neither is his memory. Sometimes he doesn’t arm the alarm properly.”
“Sometimes?” I asked.
“He won’t arm it properly tomorrow, when my inside guy messes with the code,” Gray said. “That’s all you need to know. I’ve got good guys on this. Danny, Westerberg, Jam.”
Those were experienced heist guys to bring in to take down an old man’s TV store. “So you want me to drive?” I said.
Gray looked at me and gave a short, humorless laugh. I realized that beneath the bravado he was scared, just like Amy had said. What the hell was he scared of? “Of course I want you to fucking drive,” he said. “You think I want you for your pretty face?”
I ignored that, satisfying myself with the mental picture of me punching his teeth in. “What am I driving?”
“Panel van. Automatic.”
Fine. “Where do I show up?”
“Behind Natty’s Grill in West Oakland at eight. Your cut of the take should be about a thousand.”
A thousand bucks for an evening’s work. “I want half in advance.”
“Fuck you, Wilder. You get a hundred.”
I shook my head. “I’m not showing up for a hundred measly bucks. You can stuff that in Irene’s bikini.”
Gray’s nasty, blank eyes looked calculating for a minute, and then he said, “Fine. Go get it from Henry at the bar.”