It doesn’t mean I’m not constantly looking over my shoulder, half expecting Neal to be lurking behind me with a switchblade in hand. I don’t discount the threat at all.
Now we’re back in London and tonight is the night we make our move on Throb. Neal and I had parked the car we’d rented several blocks away, and we’re walking toward the nightclub. Sin is already inside.
“What’s your real game, Bellinger?” Neal asks as he chews on a toothpick.
I keep my strides long and purposeful. Neal, who is much shorter than I am, has to practically trot to keep up with me. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I think it’s weird how you showed up on the scene after getting pinched working with Sin and me. Are you here for revenge?”
I don’t even bother looking at the guy, keeping my tone bland. “I’m here for the money, Neal. That’s it.”
He makes a scoffing noise. “Got my eye on you.”
“How about keeping your fucking eyes on the job and we’re good?” I growl.
We’ve reached the block Throb is on and without another word to me, Neal peels off to the left and heads for the alley behind the nightclub.
I continue walking down the sidewalk near the edge of the street as Throb comes into my line of sight. There’s a lengthy line of luxury cars parked there, all through the valet service. I reach in my pocket, pull out a tiny silver orb, and press a button on the side. Nonchalantly, I drop it so it perfectly rolls off the edge of the curb and under a black Mercedes G550 parked right in front of the club. Veering off, I head toward the entrance.
I don’t even bother getting in the long line that feeds out the front door. Instead, I pull out a fifty-pound note and hold it up to the doorman. Eyeballing the cash, he gives me a curt nod to let me know it’s okay to skip the line. He pockets the money without an exchange of words.
Once inside, I grab a drink and sit at the edge of the bar. I engage in some brief flirtations with a woman there, but I let my eyes continually scan the crowd. A pregnant woman in a black, formfitting dress comes out of the woman’s bathroom. With silky dark hair down her back, she’s rocking four-inch heels despite the fact she appears ready to give birth at any moment.
No one seems to think it’s odd there’s a pregnant woman in a dance club since no one seems to be paying her any attention.
That’s good.
Because that’s Sin under that wig and rounded belly.
I have to admit… she’s fucking sexy pregnant. I’d often thought about her growing large with my child, and I wondered how beautiful she would look. Now, I know I wasn’t wrong in those fantasies.
Sipping my drink, I talk to the woman beside me. I grit my teeth when a man breezily flirts with pregnant Sin. The idea of it is absolutely abysmal, and I want to bust his face open.
But I have a job to do. I check my watch, calculating that a big commotion should be starting soon.
And then it happens.
There is subtle motion at the entrance. The doorman comes rushing in, looking around frantically. Once he finds the closest security guard, he starts telling him something while his hands flail about. The security guard blinks in surprise, then starts to move through the crowd until he reaches the man who guards the hallway closest to the back office. He tells him something with animated hands, which causes that guard to take off running to where Jason Brandis presumably is since I don’t see him out in the club.
The guard blows right past Sin, who is still letting the man flirt with her. She doesn’t pay any attention to what is going on.
Not five seconds after the security guard disappears into Brandis’ office, he comes flying back out with Jason Brandis on his heels. Both men appear panicked.
Brandis is still as cautious as I would have expected, though. He pulls his office door shut behind him, then rattles the knob to make sure it’s locked. In the times William had cased the joint, he’d noted the man never left his office without locking it behind him. We hadn’t expected that to change, and it doesn’t foil our plans. We came prepared to deal with a locked door.
Roughly, the security guard and Brandis push through the dancing crowd, which appears oblivious to anything being amiss. Within moments, they are out the entrance of the nightclub and I start moving toward his office.
As I clear the edge of the dance floor, Sin stands and makes up some excuse to the man she’d been talking with, moving into the hallway ahead of me. We’re blessedly alone for a few moments as her hand moves to her small clutch purse and comes out with a lock-pick gun. My body is hopefully obscuring enough of her, but we both move with confidence as if we have the right to be where we are. Brandis is stupid enough to have nothing more than a standard keyed lock on his office door, so he deserves it when Sin deftly glides the lock-pick gun into the lock and pops it.
By the time I reach the door, Sin already has it open and has slipped inside.
Without pause, I move past the office door to the exterior exit. With a quick flick of the small knife in my hand, I reach up and cut the alarm wire. I push on the bar that opens the door and just as smoothly, Neal’s hand reaches in from the outside to hand me a nylon bag. I turn away without a word and slip into Brandis’ office, closing the door and locking it behind me.
It has taken less than thirty seconds for this to go down.
At this exact moment, I imagine Jason Brandis is out in front of his nightclub having a meltdown of epic proportions because the Mercedes G550 he loves so much is now a raging inferno thanks to the tiny explosive I’d rolled under his car. It should keep him occupied far longer than what we need.
Sin is already at the safe, attaching an auto-dialer to the lock. She looks affronted to be using technology when her lock manipulation skills are the best in the business. But we need to be as fast as possible and this particular safe was poorly designed. It needs to be cracked by technology instead of her dexterous hands, so that’s the method we decided on.
I watch the second hand on my watch, and she has the safe open in about twenty seconds.
Sin gives a low whistle as she peers inside.
Stacks of sterling-pound notes are neatly bundled. William had told us that he estimated Brandis had close to five-hundred-thousand pounds in the safe, the byproduct of the bustling drug business he runs out of the club.
I had wondered why Mercier would bother robbing a lowlife drug dealer for that amount. Don’t get me wrong… it’s a lot of money. But Mercier doesn’t need it.
William never gave me a good reason, but I suspected it wasn’t the amount of the money as much as it was the actual person we were robbing. There’s no way Brandis is going to report this theft to the police because he would never be able to explain having that amount of money on hand in his nightclub. It’s almost like a victimless crime, which is the perfect opportunity for Mercier to test how well we do as a group.
Sin snaps her fingers, and I toss the nylon bag to her. I keep myself positioned at the door as she starts to fill the bag. When she’s done doing that, there are still a few bundles left in the safe. Grinning, Sin hikes her dress up over the fake belly she’s wearing, then unzips the side of it. She starts stuffing more cash in there. When the safe is empty, she closes it and re-engages the lock. After she straightens, she pulls her dress down and gives me a sly wink.
I wink back.