Page 24 of The Devil She Knows
Sam nodded. “Right.”
“But why do we care?” Felix asked. “So, it’s traceable to somewhere in, what—Iran? Nobody’s going to know it came from here.”
“This shit’s expensive because it’srare,” Oslo said, stressing the word. “It falls into the wrong hands and detectives start sniffing around and contacting the processing plant it came from? The company that sold it? You think they’re not going to hand over the buyer’s information? You think the cops aren’t going to take inventory when they get in here, that they’re not going to have a list of all the shit we took? That they’re not going to be watching and waiting for those products to hit the market? They’ll be on our case faster than you can sayRikers. I’m serious.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”
“So we vet our buyers,” Felix argued. “We take our time. We move it a little slower. A few tins here, a few tins there. We don’t flood the market, we don’t raise any red flags.”
“I don’t know,” Javier said, shaking his head. “I don’t know if I feel good about this.”
“We should stick to the plan,” Melissa said. “We don’t have to worry about mushrooms being traced.”
“But we do have to worry about them spoiling,” Emma pointed out. “We’ll have to move fast.”
“Then we move fast.” Oslo shrugged. “We’re good at fast.”
“So, we’re what?” Emma looked around at the group. “Two in favor, three against?”
“Uh-uh.” Javier shook his head. “I never said I was against it. I said I didn’t have a good feeling about it.”
“It’s a simple yes-or-no question, Javier.”
“Well, I don’t know,Emma! I can’t think under pressure!”
“Fine!”
Everyone turned, staring expectantly at Sam.
She took a step back and crossed her arms. “Why are you all looking at me?”
“Because,” Oslo said, and the answer was obvious even if Sam didn’t want to admit it. “It’s your call, boss. Take it or leave it?”
Sam was not indecisive. Choosing whether to top her tarte tatin with a dollop of silky crème anglaise or a spoonful of frothy sabayon infused with a crisp young Riesling? Easypeasy. Sam would be glad to tell you all the reasons why the sabayon was the right move. But this? She was not in the business of making decisions of this kind, nor of this magnitude.
Oslo cleared his throat. “Not to rush you or anything, but we’ve already been down here too long, Sam.”
She closed her eyes. The tins were already in the duffel; dumping them out would only slow them down.
“Just—grab it and let’s get out of here.”
“Not so fast.”
A sudden coldness hit Sam’s core, the hair at the back of her neck standing on end. Slowly, she opened her eyes. The look of dread on Emma’s pale face curdled her stomach.
With careful, heavily telegraphed moves, Javier and Felix dropped their bags and lifted their hands into the air.
Sam’s pulse pounded painfully at the base of her throat as she turned slowly and faced the uniformed police officer standing just inside the vault, gun raised, barrel pointed right at Sam.
“Hands up. You’re under arrest.”
6
ASINGLE BARE BULB with a flickering filament hung over Sam’s head, the only source of light in the small interrogation room.
“I know this looks … bad, but really, this is just ahugemisunderstanding,” she started, and Detective Roscoe, an officer with thinning red hair and an abundance of freckles, snorted into his New York Mets coffee mug, laughing at her. “I’m serious. I am not a—a robber.”
“Sure, sweetheart,” he said in a thick Queens accent. She knew he was from Queens because he’d mentioned it no fewer than four times since placing her in the back of his cruiser and hauling her into the precinct, where he’d booked her and then shoved her into the cold little interrogation room she’d been in for the last three hours, waiting and worrying and watching the clock. And really needing to pee. “A misunderstanding. And I’m the king of England.”
She laughed, not because the joke was funny but because—it was all so absurd. “No, see, you’re not getting it. When Iwas in middle school, we went on this field trip to the museum. It was the, uh, the Louisiana Art and Science Museum. At the end of the day, we stopped at the gift shop, and I accidentally put this, uh, this amethyst geode in my pocket. I swear, I had every intention of buying it, but then my teacher hollered for us to get back on the bus and I completely forgot about that rock until I got home, and I—I felt so sick to my stomach over it that I made my mom drive me all the way back the next day so I could return it. I didn’t sleep a wink that night. So, clearly, I don’t have the constitution for crime.” Sour spit filled her mouth as if to support her point. “The thought of it alone makes me feel like I’m gonna barf.”
