Kate looked at her watch for the hundredth time. Why wasn’t Jessup calling her? Did he realize time was ticking away? She could hear the band playing twenty floors above her, and half a block away she had two vans filled with agents playing craps and catching up on their Twitter accounts. She went inside the Windsong Building and approached the mountain of a man who was guarding the elevators. She flashed her badge and identified herself.
“I need to go up,” she said.
“I bet.”
“I’m serious.”
“Nice try. Merrill Stubing, the wedding planner, warned me about you.” The guard held up a photograph of Kate that had been lifted off her sister’s Facebook page. “He said the paparazzi might show up pretending to be feds.”
Kate looked past the guard and stared at the bank of monitors behind him. A uniformed female caterer was standing at a loading dock in the underground garage. The woman was handing bulging plastic bags to a guy who leaned out of the open rear end of a panel van that said YUMMY GOOD CATERING on the side. One of the bags split open, but the guy caught what was inside before it hit the floor. The object in his hands was a golden head about the size of a honeydew melon. On the monitor, two more caterers emerged from the service elevator and climbed into the van. The back doors of the van closed, and it pulled away. Another Yummy Good Catering van took its place from somewhere else in the garage.
“Robbery in progress,” Kate said into her Bluetooth earpiece. She was 98 percent sure. “Seal all exits.”
She turned and ran from the lobby and around the corner of the building to the back alley just as a van was heading for the street. Kate slipped into the garage before the roll-up door could drop down and seal the ramp. The van drove off. The door closed behind her.
She hurried down the ramp, slowing as she neared the first parking level. The woman was still on the loading dock and was now passing bags to a man in the second van.
Kate stepped forward, gun drawn. “Halt, FBI.”
At that same instant the elevator doors opened. Four more caterers came out, saw Kate, and froze.
“Run!” someone yelled.
Everyone took off in different directions. Kate couldn’t chase them all, and she couldn’t lawfully shoot any of them, so she shot out the tires of the van instead to make sure it wouldn’t be going anywhere. The Yummy Good Catering van slumped to the ground like a weary cow. The gunshots echoed through the garage.
Special Agent Gunter was in Kate’s earpiece. “What’s going on down there? I’m in the lobby, and I just saw you shoot a catering truck.”
“They aren’t caterers. They’re thieves. They’ve scattered in the garage. Detain anyone who tries to leave.”
Kate stepped into the service elevator and pressed the button for the penthouse.
Nick placed the blasting caps in the Semtex putty and emerged from Milton’s office just as “The Look of Love” was ending and the last of the crew members slipped out the front door with their bags. He glanced at his watch. They’d pulled off the heist with eleven seconds to spare. He walked across the living room and checked on the progress of the wedding ceremony outside. Caroline was radiating sex at the altar, and Milton was beaming.
Nick felt his cell phone buzz with a text message from his crew leader. “The FBI is here! They’re everywhere!”
Nick calmly went back to Milton’s office, passed the safe rigged with plastic explosives, and strolled out onto the empty, city-facing side of the penthouse deck. He looked over the edge and saw the task force vehicles on the street. The building was surrounded.
The elevator opened at the penthouse, and Kate stepped out into a short hallway. Two caterers rushed at her, knocking her out of the way. They jumped into the elevator, the doors closed, and the elevator descended. Kate walked through the living room and peeked out at the rooftop garden, where the ceremony was coming to an end. She scanned the crowd for Nick.
“Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?” a jowly, black-robed minister asked the bride’s cleavage.
“I do,” she said.
“By the power vested in me by the State of Illinois,” the minister said, “I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride.”
The bride and groom kissed. The band and the singer belted out “Sweet Caroline.” Fireworks erupted over Lake Michigan, and the penthouse shook.
Kate knew it wasn’t fireworks that rocked the building. It was a blast that came from the other side of the penthouse. She hurried across the living room, slipped on a splotch of spilled cocktail sauce, and clipped a tray of canapés that had been left on a serving table. Kate and the canapés went down to the floor in a clattering mess of tiny meatballs, avocado and spinach dip, smoked duck in soy sauce, and prosciutto cheese balls.
“Freaking fudge!” Kate said. “Damn. Mother fornicator.”
She scrambled to her feet and limped into the short hall that led to the master suite. Smoke was spilling out from under the closed and locked mahogany doors. Kate kicked the doors open, saw the scorched wall and the blown-open safe, and knew why Nick had planned a finale of fireworks. It was genius, Kate thought. You had to admire the man’s style.
French doors opened off the master suite onto a balcony on which Kate could see Nick Fox facing her. He was sitting on the four-foot-high masonry balcony wall, his back to the city skyline. He smiled at Kate and gestured to her shirt.
“I see you tried the canapés,” he said. “I made them myself.”
Kate looked down at her splattered jacket and shirt, swiped up a glob of green and white goo and tasted it.
“Avocado and spinach dip,” she said. “Needs salt.”
“You’ll have to let me cook you dinner sometime.”
“I’ll pass on that. I’m not crazy about prison ingredients.”
“Neither am I.” He glanced over his shoulder at the twenty-story drop to the ground.
Kate didn’t like what the glance implied. “Don’t do it, Nick.”
“Would you miss me?”
“Yes!”
“How much would you miss me?” he asked her. “A lot?”
“Don’t push it.”
“Admit it, deep down inside you like me. You think I’m cute.”
Kate narrowed her eyes. “Are you going to jump, or what?”
Nick smiled, sent her a little wave, swung his legs over the wall, and disappeared from view.
Kate felt her heart give a painful contraction. “No!” she shouted. “You idiot! I didn’t really want you to jump!”
She crossed the balcony to the wall and peered over at Nick in time to see his customized handheld parachute open. She watched him for a minute as he glided toward the skyscraper canyons of downtown Chicago, ate a meatball that was stuck to her jacket, and then called Gunter. Next in line was a call to Jessup.
“I tried calling you,” Jessup said, “but you weren’t picking up.”
Kate filled him in. “Gunter is coordinating a chase with cooperating local law enforcement,” she said.
“If you need help with follow-up, I can send someone,” Jessup said. “Cosmo, maybe.”
“No! Not Cosmo.”
The FBI, the Chicago Police Department, and the Cook County Sheriff’s Office all put choppers in the air, but they couldn’t find any sign of Nick or his parachute. Kate led a search of the surrounding neighborhood, but she knew it was futile. There was too much ground to cover, and Nick had a head start. So she armed a bunch of agents with copies of The Complete Directory of Episodic Television Shows and sent them off to look for TV characters trying to leave town by planes, trains, or automobiles.
Somehow all of Nick’s crew had managed to slip out of the building, but a third of the golden idols were left behind on the loading dock, so it wasn’t a complete loss. And Kate had the satisfaction of knowing that her instincts had been 100 percent right.
She straggled back to her hotel just as the sun was coming up. She was exhausted, and done with smelling like cocktail meatballs. She wanted to shuck her food-stained clothes, take a hot shower, and wash the spinach dip out of her hair.
She unlocked her door, stepped into the room, and froze. There were Toblerone wrappers on the bed, room service dishes on the table, a bouquet of roses, and an unopened bottle of champagne chilling in a bucket of ice. Her first thought in her sleep-deprived state was that she’d walked into the wrong room. She was about to double-check the number on the door when she realized that a pink handkerchief was tied like a ribbon around the champagne bottle. She’d seen the handkerchief before … in the breast pocket of Nick’s white tuxedo.
Un-freaking-believable, she thought. While she’d been dragging her butt all over town looking for him, the jerk had been in her room ordering room service and raiding her minibar. She had to give credit where credit was due. The man had Volkswagen-size cojones. Really big brass ones.
She drew her gun and looked under the bed, in the closet, and in the bathroom. No Nick. But he’d for sure been there. She sat on her bed and plucked a card off her pillow. In a masculine scrawl she’d come to recognize, Nick Fox had written Looking forward to next time.