Page 15 of The Honeymoon Heist

Amena ran to him and he hugged her, saying, “I can’t believe you ran out on us. Talk about no loyalty.”

And Jennifer realized he thought she’d been a coward. “No, wait, I wanted to...”

Pike laughed, this time with real humor. “I know what you were doing. Good call, because it gave me the drop on this guy.”

Jennifer said, “What the hell is going on here? These are the guys that were at the White Grotto.”

“Yeah, and they were in our restaurant tonight.”

“What? They were? And you didn’t say anything?”

“I didn’t want to cause a panic, and they weren’t posing a threat. I just saw them.”

“So that’s why you took Amena’s seat?”

“Yeah, it is. But I really didn’t think it was anything.”

“What should we do?”

“Go to bed and get back to what we were doing.”

Amena scowled and Jennifer said, “Are you insane?”

Pike chuckled again and said, “I guess we call the police. What else can we do?”

Chapter 10

The sun was well above the horizon by the time the local Italian police decided they’d gleaned enough information, with crime scene guys and uniformed policemen questioning each and every one of us over and over again. Finally, they’d removed the bodies and said we were free to go, with the hotel staff stumbling all over themselves to help us, petrified about the Tripadvisor review we’d give them for this.

View is incredible, and the staff is pretty nice, but we shouldn’t have to pay extra for the two men who tried to murder us in our room.

Luckily there was no blood splashed across the floor, meaning cleaning the leftovers from the fight was relatively simple. I couldn’t say the same about the pool area—it was probably a mess. The hotel had offered us a different room, but there was only one other two-bedroom suite on the grounds, and it was occupied. The best we could get was a single with a pullout couch, and that wasn’t going to work for the rest of our honeymoon. Once the police had left, I’d told them we’d just stay where we were. That made them ecstatic, and they’d promised all sorts of free perks as they walked out the door. Finally, we were alone again.

I looked at my watch and said, “We can still make that meeting if we hurry.”

Jennifer, her eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, said, “What meeting?”

“The church. We can still make it and pay for this trip.”

Jennifer sagged and said, “I don’t think I want to go look at that church now. I think we should just go home at this point.”

“Go home? You mean the United States?”

“Yeah, Pike, that’s what I mean.”

“Are you serious? It’s our honeymoon.”

Exasperated, Jennifer said, “We just killed two guys here, and we have no idea why. We’ve been cleared by the police as if it’s some sort of home invasion, but we know that’s not true. Those guys were at the grotto. Let’s just go home.”

I looked at Amena, and she said, “That might be for the best.”

I said, “I’m not going home because of some idiots who happened to enter our room looking for Rolex watches or computers to steal.”

“Pike, come on. You know that wasn’t what they wanted. They asked that weird question about Caravaggio paintings—and that’s the exact artist who was in the grotto. The one on Amena’s phoneandthe one in the art gallery.”

Which was true. I said, “Well, why should we give up our honeymoon? We’ve already paid for everything.”

“You really want to stay in a room where you killed a guy that came in with a gun? Seriously?”

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