“What’d you find out?” Chuck asked. “Josh, I’ll still love you if you puke in my lap, but you can ask Hunter to pull over anytime.”
Hunter scowled, because they were miles from civilization at this point. They’d passed the wooded area that had enveloped Laslo Hu’s estate, and were in the middle of farmland right now. “Give me notice,” he said, and Josh grunted.
“I’m fine. Now, here’s the thing. You heard Laslo say he had a project due two days before Grace’s opening night?”
Grace grunted and so did Hunter, although he knew where this was going.
“So, he has to have the jewel to Sergei’s henchmen at eight in the morning the day of the gala. He’s given us the drop-off time and place—it’s in the city—and we can follow that thing around all day if we have to. But, if we’re going to keep the heat off Laslo and Gabriel, we need to wait until after Laslo passes it on to make our move.”
“At the gala, like Danny thought?” Chuck asked.
“Bingo,” Josh said. “And lucky us, Laslo knows that there is usually an auction, hosted by Sergei himself. So if we can keep our eye on the jewel, and get Danny’s help to figure out where the auction might be held, we can catch Sergei in the act and give the police enough to arrest him. Danny has contacts with Interpol, I have contacts with the local po-po—if we get the transaction on tape, we can hopefully keep the jewel from going out into the world and hurting anybody.”
“Good,” Chuck said from the back. “Because I’ve got to tell you guys, I think I stayed out of the camera’s eye today, but I’m pretty sure you all are on camera, pretty as you please. There was surveillance everywhere, and while the dogs were easy to bribe from that last trip to Steak ’n Shake, everything else was a mite trickier to evade.”
“Well, I hope you really were off camera,” Josh said. “Because we gave Laslo our word we would leave him and Gabriel free and clear. No reprisals for them—I all but guaranteed it.”
“Josh,” Chuck said, and it sounded like they’d had this conversation before. “I told you not to make promises in this business. Besides being damned hard to keep, they make you sound desperate. Like a con man. And your Uncle Danny taught you better than that.”
“Understood,” Josh said, his voice gruff. “Hunter, pull into that cattle road coming up. I’m not going to make it to town.”
GRACE SLID out when Hunter stopped, going to stand by Josh’s side, hand on his shoulder as the younger man got sick. Chuck was right there with a bottle of water and some napkins, and Hunter pulled a travel toothbrush and toothpaste out of the glove compartment so Josh could freshen up completely.
A few minutes later, Josh walked resolutely back to the SUV, Chuck and Grace on his heels, and they all resumed their seats.
“Too much food,” he said staunchly, settling back into the seat with his eyes closed. Hunter nodded as if he believed him but didn’t say anything. Josh’s face was so pale, it was practically green, and his breathing was shallow. Their conversation died on the rest of the trip back, mostly so they could give Josh a chance to rest.
When Hunter pulled up to the Salinger mansion in Glencoe, Grace gave him a searching look before he got out of the SUV. “You’re parking in the garage, right?”
When Hunter was planning to go back to his apartment, he usually parked in the driveway.
Hunter smiled. “Of course. There’s probably going to be plotting, and I wouldn’t want to miss it. Or you.”
Grace’s smile back was… luminous. Full of glory. Breathtaking. And it was all aimed at Hunter. Hunter figured that smile could keep his heart warm for a full year.
He’d been telling the truth when he told Grace that there wasn’t any competition between Grace and Paulie. But the way Hunter’s heart pounded with that smile alone drove home to Hunter how much truth those words held. Paulie would have been a passing thing. Grace—there was no way Hunter was getting past Grace.
For the thousandth time in the last two hours, he wondered how that conversation with Gabriel Hu had gone.
Grace didn’t look inclined to bolt back to Springfield and back into the troubled young man’s arms, and Hunter was pretty confident that wouldn’t have happened even if Gabriel Hu had been at full “Yeah!” strength. But Hunter was curious. He wanted to know how it had gone, and Josh’s illness had kept that from happening.
“Let me park,” he told Grace. “I’ll be right in.”
Grace bobbed his blue-and-purple-streaked head and turned to scamper up the lawn toward Josh and Chuck while Hunter headed for the separate garage.
JOSH WAS too sick to come down for dinner that night, so Danny led the planning session in the basement afterward.
They were all given maps to the Institute, full of nooks, crannies, and hidden rooms where the illicit auction might happen, along with the plans for the sewers underneath the complex and a blueprint of all the rooms that would be open to the public that night for the debut of the showing.
“Our homework is to figure out where we can plant personnel, and how we can get the people tailing our jewel delivery boys through all the hoops to get into the show as quickly as possible so we have everybody where we need them. I’ll be slightly preoccupied as MC, but that means I’ll be hooked up to security, so I can help you all avoid them. And I can cue Felix and Julia in so they can smooth your way when I can’t. I’ve uploaded a virtual museum tour. See how the rooms are labeled in the schematic up here?” Everybody nodded.
“So, you all need to divvy up the schematic and start looking for places you think they’ll meet. We can be ready for anything, but there will be a few rooms that will call your names, so we can concentrate our focus on those. I’m going to leave you to your studies here and go check on Josh, yes?”
They all nodded, and Danny disappeared, leaving the group to work in an uneasy silence.
“Is it food poisoning?” Molly asked unexpectedly.
“There was blood,” Grace said, surprising them all.
Hunter looked at him. “Ulcer?” Josh’s pallor, the tiredness of the last few weeks, the getting sick—he wasn’t sure what he suspected, but it had been coming for a while.
Grace shrugged. “You all know Josh. He puts too much pressure on himself.”
There was some general murmuring, and then Stirling said, “We can take more of this on.”
“He loves running the show,” Chuck said. “I don’t think it’s an ulcer. He does work too hard—but he loves this. Maybe he just got a bad chicken sandwich.”
“Well, let’s not give him anything to worry about,” Molly said. “Squad goals—we all have a suggestion for where we think the meet will happen before we go to bed tonight. Who’s with me?”
Hunter grinned at her. The girl had management skills. “I’m in,” he said.
“Excellent! Any opposed?”
They shook their heads, bemused, and Molly said, “Break!”
And Hunter didn’t think about Josh again until they’d all figured out a possible room for a group of thieves to break into that wouldn’t get busted by security but wouldn’t be too far off the beaten path.