He headed for the stairs to the second level and climbed them. We got a beautiful three-quarter view, his body angled, his legs taking the steps, his ass in his jeans. He climbed stairs as easy as taking a breath, then strolled down the corridor toward his door, flipping his keys loosely around his finger, his mind somewhere else. I could have watched him all day. I had grown up in LA, a place full of beautiful people, and I had never seen a man like Devon. I didn’t even know his last name.
Gwen let out a breath as he closed his apartment door behind him. “Okay,” she said seriously. “If you don’t ride him, I will.”
She didn’t mean it, but it was still alarming. I didn’t think I was a bag lady by any means, but it was hard to compete with a blonde in a skimpy cowgirl outfit. “Touch him and die,” I said, deadpan.
That made her laugh. “Okay, fine. I have to get to work. Some lucky guy is getting a strip-o-gram at his retirement party.” She grabbed her keys and purse from my counter. “Seriously, Liv. That”—she gestured to the window—“is a gift. I think you should take it.”
“I don’t think he’s a nice guy,” I said, remembering what he’d said about driving and drugs and dead bodies. Like an Uber, but a fuck of a lot more shady. “He’s sort of dangerous.”
“Danger is sexy,” she said. “You’re not marrying him, or becoming his old lady, so who cares? Or, you know, you could just sit here and pine while some other smart girl gets on.”
“Right,” I said.
“Right. See you, sis.” She left, leaving the smell of her perfume behind as I sat in the dark, staring at the window. But this was Gwen, and she couldn’t leave it alone. Fifteen minutes later, I got a text.
Save a car, ride a mechanic.
I laughed, tossed my phone on the sofa, and went to the kitchen to make dinner.
Chapter 5
Devon
I thought maybe I’d see sexy-as-fuck Olivia after I fixed her car, but I didn’t. She didn’t come to my door, or bump into me strategically in the corridor. I shouldn’t have been disappointed—a woman like that should have nothing to do with me. But I was.
I wasn’t even sure what it was about her. True, Olivia was a knockout—flawless white skin, intelligent dark brown eyes, dark curls that made you think of sex, a hot body under her dowdy office clothes—but it isn’t that hard to find a good-looking woman. My boss works from a strip club, for fuck’s sake. I’m not the kind of guy who has to put his dick into every woman he sees, but if the need gets bad enough, I can usually find a woman who wants what I’m giving out. Or at least, I used to.
When I’m not subjecting myself to one-handed sex, I prefer women who like it a little bit rough. Olivia did not seem like that kind of woman.
Or maybe she was. The fact was, from the first time I saw her, I wanted to find out.
An artist. A graphic designer. Living by herself, in a place like Shady Oaks. She wasn’t a kid, either—she looked the same age as me, and I was twenty-six. So what was she doing here? Why wasn’t she married to some nice guy and having kids somewhere? Why was she in a dump like Shady Oaks, a sweet plum little target for a dirty guy like me?
I wanted to pull off her shirt, peel off her jeans, get her on a bed and spread her legs. I wanted to lick her skin, put my hands on her. I wanted to fuck her until she was screaming my name and calling me God. Then I wanted to ask her.
I’ve never claimed to be a nice guy.
But I had to put Olivia out of my mind. I had Gray’s driving job to do. The electronics store, the TV’s. The job that had something—no one knew what—to do with Craig Bastien, the drug kingpin.
At eight o’clock, I was at the rendezvous on time. So were my teammates. I’d met them all at one time or another. Danny was a black kid, about twenty, who did a lot of work for Gray. Westerberg was older, about forty-five, with prison tats on his arms and hands. Jam was new, but he was known to be an electronics wiz, the guy who could disarm an alarm or hack into a wi-fi signal. He thought he was hot shit, but so far he’d shown he had the skills to back it up.
The panel van was there, and they were all in it. The sun had sunk below the horizon, and the dark was rising. I drove the van through the shitty end of West Oakland to the electronics shop and waited. The guys went in the back door. There was quiet for a while, and then they started coming back out again, hauling TV’s. I helped them load the back. There was no sound, and we exchanged no words. When we were done loading, we all got in the van again and I started to drive.
That was when it all went to shit.
I wasn’t six blocks from the place before I heard sirens behind us. Westerberg, in the passenger seat next to me, gave a shout, and I sped up, ducking down back streets. The van needed a tune-up, and the automatic was grinding gears like it was a hundred years old, but they didn’t hire me to drive for nothing. I made it work. I kept us moving. It should have been easy.
The cops fell back, and then they were on us again, the sirens a few streets away. Any good driver would be able to project where I was going and cut us off, so I switched direction, heading for the harbor. Then I got on the freeway and stayed on it for twenty minutes, driving back past the outskirts of Oakland while the guys watched out the back window. So far I was just a few minutes ahead of them and I couldn’t lengthen my lead.
It was Jam who called it first. “We’re fucked,” he said. “We have to bail.”
He meant ditch the van, with the stolen cargo, and run.
“We’re fucked anyway,” I shouted, heading for an exit and ducking into an industrial park, abandoned and shut down for the night. “Our fingerprints are all over this thing.”
“Then we ditch the cargo first,” Westerberg interjected. “Less fallout.”
“We don’t have time to ditch them all,” Jam argued.
And then it hit me. The three old-style TV’s that were part of the haul—not flat screens, but the old square CRT kind. Clunky and heavy as fuck, and probably worth nothing. We’d put them with the others, as instructed. But suddenly I knew why.
“The three CRT’s,” I said. “We ditch those. They’re loaded.”
“Are you kidding me?” Westerberg shouted. “How do you know that?”
“An educated guess.”
I pulled over into a weedy ditch and stopped the car. Danny was out of the van almost before it stopped moving, opening the back doors and pulling out the big old TV’s. His face was grim, all business. I jumped out of the driver’s seat and helped him. I grabbed one of the suspicious TV’s and dumped it, and when it hit the ground it broke open.
I looked down in the ditch at the answer to my questions. This was why Gray had called in a crack team for a few TV’s. This was why Craig Bastien was involved. This was why Gray was scared. Why he’d hired me to drive.
White pills spilled out of the TV case and down into the grass. I wasn’t about to take one, but my best guess was Oxy. Thousands of them. Three TV’s full. On the street, this haul was probably worth twenty grand.
Fuck.
We dumped the Oxy TV’s, then we got back in the van and drove again. It was starting to rain, which was good. The cops would be slowed down a little. The spilled pills might start to wash away. I took us deeper into the industrial park, down another side road and another, never pausing, never stopping. I knew exactly where we were. We passed the airport, and finally I got us on the San Mateo Bridge, back across the bay and up toward San Francisco again.