The Suit E-Book

Amy Lane

• Herausgeber: Dreamspinner Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Two and a half years ago, Michael Carmody made the biggest mistake of his life. Thanks to the Salinger crew, he has a second chance. Now he's working as their mechanic and nursing a starry-eyed crush on the crew's stoic suit, insurance investigator and spin doctor Carl Cox. Carl has always been an almost-ran, so Michael's crush baffles him. When it comes to the Salingers, he's the designated wet blanket. But watching Michael forge the life he wants instead of the one he fell into inspires him. In Michael's eyes, he isn't an almost-ran—he just hasn't found the right person to run with. And while the mechanic and the suit shouldn't have much to talk about, suddenly they're seeking out each other's company. Then the Salingers take a case from their past, and it's all hands on deck. For once, behind-the-scenes guys Michael and Carl find themselves front and center. Between monster trucks, missing women, and murder birds, the case is a jigsaw puzzle with a lot of missing pieces—but confronting the unknown is a hell of a lot easier when they're side by side.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Blurb

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

Humble Beginnings

By Any Other Name

Unspoken Among Thieves

The Life of Pawns

The Next Job

A Unique Set of Skills

A Game and a Dog

Accustomed Ways

Magic Carpet Rides

A Shift in Expectations

New Adventures

Jet Plane Dreams

Allies and Aviaries

Risk and Escape

Landings Rough and Smooth

Lost Connections

Fortune’s Rescue

Old Ghosts Sleeping

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About the Author

By Amy Lane

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Copyright

The Suit

By Amy Lane

A Long Con Adventure

Sequel to The Driver

Two and a half years ago, Michael Carmody made the biggest mistake of his life. Thanks to the Salinger crew, he has a second chance. Now he’s working as their mechanic and nursing a starry-eyed crush on the crew’s stoic suit, insurance investigator and spin doctor Carl Cox.

Carl has always been an almost-ran, so Michael’s crush baffles him. When it comes to the Salingers, he’s the designated wet blanket. But watching Michael forge the life he wants instead of the one he fell into inspires him. In Michael’s eyes, he isn’t an almost-ran—he just hasn’t found the right person to run with. And while the mechanic and the suit shouldn’t have much to talk about, suddenly they’re seeking out each other’s company.

Then the Salingers take a case from their past, and it’s all hands on deck. For once, behind-the-scenes guys Michael and Carl find themselves front and center. Between monster trucks, missing women, and murder birds, the case is a jigsaw puzzle with a lot of missing pieces—but confronting the unknown is a hell of a lot easier when they’re side by side.

To odd couples everywhere. Mate and I have never looked like we belonged together, but all of our friends say they couldn’t imagine us with anybody else.

Acknowledgments

I READ a LOT of C.J. Box during the pandemic, and he, in turn, was simply fascinated by The Egg Thief. While the “murder bird” plot did not come from them, I was certainly inspired by his description of falconry and the oft-times amoral makeup of those who spend their lives in pursuit of the perfect bird.

Author’s Note

SO AFTER spending a couple of months listening to C.J. Box audiobooks, I really wanted to include falconry in my next Long Con story, but I needed something a little over-the-top and caperish. I stumbled upon a website talking about why we don’t crossbreed falcons and eagles to create super-predator birds. I was as fascinated by the why as I was by the fact that it was totally possible, with a little captive breeding and a little genetic splicing. I just wanted to say that while the murder-bird depictions are completely my imagination, the fact that there really could be murder birds is within the realm of reality so don’t @ me with hatemail about writing murder birds when murder birds could totally be a thing!

Humble Beginnings

Carl in Grade School

CARL COX was nine when he realized his last name was going to get him teased on the playground. That didn’t stop him from doing his duty as a class monitor, though.

“Put that back,” he said, looking levelly at Johnny Clemson, who apparently had a name so unremarkable that he would never get teased about it ever. It didn’t hurt that Johnny had been held back twice and stood head and shoulders above the other kids in the fourth grade—and unlike Topher Garrity, who was naturally genetically huge but had no skill or coordination, Johnny used his advantage to beat up the little kids and steal their lunch money.

Or in this case, taking books from the library without checking them out, then breaking their spines and ripping out their pages. Carl—who really loved reading—was not only the monitor from his class this week, he was also really irritated because Johnny had a book in his hand that Carl had been waiting to read.

“What’re ya gonna do about it, Cox-sucker!” Johnny sneered.

Carl blinked. He knew the swearwords, yes, because he could listen to the big kids use them just like Johnny, but he’d never put two and two together.

He did now and made the sad realization that “suck” was going to be the operative word in this matter and then continued with his mission.

“Put that back,” he insisted.

“No!” Johnny retorted. “Who cares about a stupid book!”

Carl scowled at him. “I do. It’s about birds. Birds are cool.”

Johnny scoffed and held the hardbound cover open like wings, letting the beautiful illustrations flap about in the New England autumn wind. “Then let’s see if this book will fly!” he cackled, and Carl took the only option open to him.

He punched Johnny in the nose and caught the book as it fell. As Johnny howled and doubled over, clutching at his nose as blood spurted, Carl trotted to the library to inform the librarian that Johnny Clemson had tried to steal the book, but Carl was returning it, and he’d like to check it out after school if that wasn’t too much trouble.

The surprised librarian—a sweet-faced older man who had never had children of his own and was often surprised to find other people’s children responding so excitedly to reading—had reclaimed the book and was holding it to his chest when the vice principal strode in, looking baffled.

“Carl!” she said in exasperation. “Did you really punch Johnny Clemson in the nose?”

Carl turned to her and tried a smile. She was a handsome buxom woman in her thirties, sort of momish to the max, but with very stylish suits, and he’d noted that momish women liked his smile. Blond, green-eyed, with a choirboy’s face, Carl could get away with everything from taking extra cookies at lunchtime to getting extra time on his math test by giving a pretty smile.

“He was going to tear the book, Mrs. Stewart. I couldn’t let him tear the book! It’s on birds!” The next thing he said was totally sincere. “Birds are cool.”

Mrs. Stewart stared at him, dismayed because this was not a problem with an obvious solution, and Mr. Patrick, the librarian, held out the book in question.

“He, uhm, just returned it,” Mr. Patrick said hesitantly. “The Clemson boy was in here eating, and I made him leave the library. The book was in the display of science books by the door. I didn’t see him take it on his way out.”

Mrs. Stewart scrubbed at her face with her hand. “Oh, Carl,” she muttered. “What are we going to do with you? Johnny Clemson’s father is furious—you punched his kid in the nose!”

Sadly, Carl did know the penalty for fighting. “Two day’s suspension,” he said glumly. “And you’re going to have to call my parents.”

She let out a laugh. “Maybe not that severe,” she said. She met eyes with Mr. Patrick. “So, uhm, you like that book?”

“Yeah. I didn’t want him to tear it up,” Carl said.

“Well, how about Mr. Patrick checks that out to you, and you can read it in my office this afternoon. It will count as one day’s suspension, and we can skip tomorrow’s. How’s that?”

“You mean I get out of PE?” Carl asked excitedly. Johnny and his friends would be there, and he was pretty sure his new nickname was going to make the rounds.

“Don’t sound so excited, Carl,” Mrs. Stewart said dryly. “People might believe this isn’t a punishment.”

Carl nodded soberly, but inside he was beginning to see the benefits of this law-and-order thing.

And spending the afternoon with the book still left him thinking that birds were cool.

Carl in College

ALAS, BIRDS were not cool enough to let him get a degree in ornithology, although if his college had had a good program, he might have gone for it anyway. But he did get to indulge his other fascination, spawned in part by looking at big picture books with antique illustrations—art history.

“Carl, baby, it’s a very nice BA and all, but what are you going to do with it?”

“Get a law degree!” Carl said.

“Like your Uncle Roger?” his mother asked. “He makes good money.”

“Like international law,” Carl told her. “So I can be an art dealer.” He had in fact completed his first semester of law school at Georgetown. He had grants, loans, and letters of recommendation. It seemed prestigious to him.

She shook her head, unimpressed. “Uncle Roger sues people. This other stuff I don’t know about.”

“Ma, it’s a good degree, and I got lots of grants and stuff.”

“So you got a degree in something useless and you’re going to get a bigger degree in something even more useless?” his mother asked him, absolutely baffled. “Why don’t you get your business degree? Then you can be like your cousin Jed! He got a degree in English and then a degree in business, and now he makes six figures.”

Carl stared at her helplessly. Born in New Jersey, his mother had a wig of gold-and-brown hair piled high, a tight-fitting shirt straining around her bust with a fitted jacket over it in a leopard-skin print, and matching tight pants. A lifelong smoker, she had lines in her lips that could be seen in the lipstick prints on her highball glasses. She’d moved with his father to Maine but had refused to leave the accent behind.

Or the New Jersey.

“Because I don’t want a degree in business,” he said helplessly.

“You need to get a degree in something that pays the rent,” she said, pulling hard on her cigarette. He really hated that she smoked, but like so much about his mother, it was something he’d been powerless against. “I’m moving to Florida, Carl. It’s not like you can stay here.”

“But I don’t stay here,” he argued. “I live in off-campus student housing!”

“I don’t give a shit, Carl. You need to do something I can tell your Aunt Bessie about, because this ‘My son’s gonna die a student’ bullshit is not gonna cut it. Do you want me to commit murder in Florida, Carl? Do you want me to? Because I’ll kill that bitch, not to watch her bleed, but to please you because you wouldn’t get a goddamned job to make your mother happy!”

“You’re not gonna kill Aunt Bessie!” he told her.

“Well, you’re gonna kill me,” his mother retorted. They were sitting in the kitchen of the house he’d grown up in, and the yellow tile on the floors may have been cracked and the laminate on the table may have been peeling, but his mother, it seemed, was still as relentless as she’d been when he was a little kid. (“You got into a fight? Are you trying to kill me? Is this any way to repay me for cooking your dinner and buying your clothes?” Oh, he remembered it well.)

“I’m not gonna kill you, Ma,” he said, trying to calm her down.

“If you don’t get a real job for me, could you do it for your sainted father who’s dead, God rest his soul? He wanted you to have a life, Carl. He wanted you to live!”

Augh! There was no arguing with that, because who knew what his father had wanted him to have? His father had been a quiet guy who managed a shoe store until it went out of business and then managed a Walmart until he retired and then spent most of Carl’s recollection reading his newspaper in the middle of the living room, looking up very rarely to grace Carl with an absent smile. But for a guy who had been so very, very absent as Carl had grown up, he was very, very there when it came to throwing his weight in with whatever his mother wanted Carl to do.

In this case, it was apparently drop out of law school and find a real job.

“Fine, Ma. I’ll look for a job in my field,” he said, thinking that no, the only job he could get with a BA in art history was as a master’s candidate so he could get a master’s degree and then go on to get a PhD and teach. Or he could get that law degree and be an art dealer.

So hadn’t he beensurprised a few days later to see an ad posted at the student union for insurance investigators. All he needed was a background in art history and a willingness to take the required course in investigation and law enforcement. So easy! Seemed like a no-brainer. And wouldyalookatthat? Most of those courses doubled with his law school prerequisites.

For one of the first times in his life, he realized that his mother had been right. Getting a job was a good idea.

Three years, one short marriage, and one law degree later, at the ripe old age of twenty-seven…

“CARL, YOU’RE leaving for Europe again?”

Mandy Jessup, the secretary in charge of investigator assignments, smiled prettily at him over her desk. Carl had been flirting with her in a desultory fashion over the past few months, and she’d returned the attention. He’d needed the ego boost.

As it turned out, Serpentus Inc. had been more than happy to put Carl through the rest of law school as long as he worked for them for at least five years after he graduated. Once trained in some criminal justice classes with an emphasis on international relations, he’d been their perfect weapon: the polyglottal investigator with a background in international law and a degree in art history. He hadn’t known it when he’d been going through school, but he had the credentials to be James frickin’ Bond!

Sort of.

The fact was, the more he did this job, the more he wasn’t sure he hadn’t sold his soul to the devil at a bargain price.

A good example of that was the case he’d solved the month before.

Yes, it was true the client had stolen their own painting, but they’d done it to pay the insurance company premiums so their other paintings would be insured and they could keep getting a modest income supplement from in-home display. And they’d known they were in trouble. Hell, they’d offered to sell off the painting to pay the premiums, only to be told that there was a hidden clause prohibiting breaking up any part of the collection, and to do so would be to forfeit the entire thing to the bank. They’d offered to cancel their premiums and then sell the collection, only to be told that the collection was protected by their government as a historical find. They’d offered to abdicate the historical albatross that threatened to bankrupt their family, only to be threatened with prosecution and imprisonment.

In truth, a bit of discreet thievery hadn’t been a bad option.

But Carl hadn’t realized that when he’d seen that the security system was such that it could only be breached from the inside. And the look on the family patriarch’s face when he’d asked, kindly, if perhaps one of the grandsons might have done it had… well, it had ripped Carl’s heart out.

Unfortunately, by the time he learned the entire story, the damage had been done. The claims department had been alerted by Interpol, who had been there to assist in the investigation, and the company had impounded the tiny museum, the family livelihood, and three centuries of tradition to hide in their warehouse and hoard like the unscrupulous dragon they were.

As he’d boarded the plane back to America, his Interpol liaison, a very young policeman by the name of Liam Craig, had told him that the patriarch, Signore Marco Bianchi, had suffered a heart attack and been rushed to the hospital, but the prognosis wasn’t good.

Carl had boarded the plane feeling like the angel of death.

When he’d gotten to his small DC apartment, he’d found the divorce papers from his fleeting marriage to a girl he’d met in law school waiting to be signed. She’d been so excited—two lawyers in the family! Mr. and Mrs. Esquire. She hadn’t realized that he’d signed his soul away to Serpentus and he’d be expected to be on a plane three weeks out of every month as he put his knowledge to work.

So given the depression that had begun to set in, flirting with Mandy had proven to be good medicine. She was cute, didn’t know any of his flaws, and knew he traveled. Win/win, right?

Besides, since she knew the score, maybe it would only be flirting on the table—flirting was free and fun, and it didn’t lead to signing a ream of paper and then hearing your mother tell you that your Aunt Bessie always knew you’d take the one good thing in your life and fuck it up.

“So where are you going to this time?” Mandy asked, giving him that adorable side-eye. She had dark curly hair, big brown eyes, and apple cheeks. Everything about her was adorable.

“France, I think,” Carl said through a yawn. His usual nightly scotch had turned into two or three the night before. Part of him was a little worried because that had been happening a lot, but the other part of him was thinking that at least he’d be able to sleep on the plane. “But it’s a weird one. Apparently the museum suddenly had a priceless statue they’d never had before. Set up on display, no less. And since the statue had been insured by us and then had disappeared, they’re wondering what to do with it.”

“Uhm… thank their lucky stars?” Mandy asked, as baffled as he was.

“You’d think. But there was also a claim of theft,” Carl told her. “From a private collector. When the museum said, ‘Uhm, it turned up, but our provenance is the last to be notarized,’ the private collector stopped talking. Anyway it’s a mess, and they need someone who can look at stuff and sign things, and that’s me.” He gave a playful wave. “The stuff-looker and thing-signer.”

Mandy giggled and waved him on his way.

When he got to France the next day, his first stop had been the private collector, who had been pouting his way through trying to make a claim. He’d filled out the paperwork—and even paid his premium—but the collector, a dour old man with no hair and a lip pulled up in a permanent sneer, could not be pinned down for a straight answer about where the piece had come from, or even who the artist was.

“So you don’t have provenance?” Carl had asked finally, out of patience.

“I didn’t say that!” the old man barked in French. “Here!” Stumping on his cane, he made his way to a giant dusty monstrosity of a desk and pulled a file from one of the drawers. “Here! Here is my provenance! See? It is signed by someone from your own company! Mr. Thomakins.”

He practically threw the file at Carl, who leafed through it, eyebrows raised. “It looks in order,” he said weakly—and it did. Every i dotted, every t crossed, right down to the watermark his company used to document provenance.

But Carl worked in a specialized field with relatively few players, and Carl had never seen the name Thomakins before.

Besides… it sounded like something from a “Puss in Boots” story.

“I told you—”

“Wait,” Carl muttered. “Wait. It says here the piece was a twenty-inch terracotta model of a John Flaxman memorial piece—the Virgin Ascends. But you weren’t keeping it anywhere heat and humidity controlled. What, were you trying to age it like a pot?” He knew that keeping terracotta pots somewhere warm and damp was a great way to get the clay to change colors and appear vintage, but who wanted to do that to an expensive piece of art?

“That Thomakins guy complained about it too,” the old man sneered. “But it sat in my solarium like it sat in my father’s. I don’t see the problem. He signed off on it, didn’t he?”

Yeah, Carl thought resentfully. Right before he stole it and took it to the museum.

He didn’t say that, though. Instead he smiled politely and went about getting as many details about “Thomakins” as he possibly could.

Then he looked at the setup and wondered why this man hadn’t just put a “steal me” sign on his property. The pedestal looked great: marble, with a cushion of black velvet on which to display the statue. It had some mild security—motion detectors on the glass bell jar that protected the thing from dust and standard break-in security to the man’s villa in general, but other than that? Any reasonably competent thief with steady hands could lift the bell jar without setting off the alarm.

And a man who had been inside to assess the security would have been in a prime position to insert a piece of tinfoil over a couple of window breakers to fool the basic system.

The only real wrinkle would have been the pressure point under the statue, but apparently their light-fingered thief had replaced the statue with a counterweight without even a hiccup.

Carl frowned, remembering that. “Can I see what they used as a counterweight?” he asked. There was almost always a clue in that—something in the soil if it was rocks in a bag, something in the fabric itself. Even carefully gathered lead balls held secrets of origin that could lead Carl to the perpetrator.

But when he saw what the man held in his hand, Carl’s voice squeaked. “That?” The thing in the man’s hand was so undignified.

“Bastard was laughing at me,” the old man snarled, and Carl couldn’t argue.

The counterweight was terracotta as well but obviously a more recent work, done by an immature if not juvenile hand.

“It’s some sort of cartoon character,” the owner snapped, and Carl nodded. He didn’t have nephews or nieces, but the cartoon was everywhere. Even he recognized the Squidward character from SpongeBob SquarePants.

“That will be very helpful,” he said dryly. “May I keep it?”

“Oui.”

Carl took the thing, noting its weight, its texture. It really had been formed from terracotta, no matter how inexpertly, and it was almost perfect in dimension.

This Thomakins, whoever he was, was a very clever, very unusual thief.

CARL’S NEXT stop was the museum in which the original statue had appeared. Or reappeared, as it were. The Musée du Quai Branly in Paris was a creative mix of the traditional and contemporary, right down to the architecture. Half of the building was ivy-covered brick and glass with wide curving windows, and the other half was a colorful hodgepodge of various room-sized “boxes” rising from a wooden-shingled wall. A small strip of gardened walkways graced one side, but the aspect that faced the street was the dramatic contrast of new and old, chaotic and ordered.

Carl was more of a sucker for the Louvre, himself, but that was because he was never there on business. Quai Branly was not a small venue—but that’s what made it so perfect for breaking into.

Which was where Carl’s mind was supposed to be as he walked up the steps, only to fall in line behind two uncles, he assumed, helping a small boy up the wide steps.

They were singing together, in French.

It was the theme song to SpongeBob SquarePants.

Carl’s heart thundered in his ears for a moment, that adrenaline-fueled thrill that meant he’d cracked a case, but he had to make himself sit for a minute. Could it be? These two perfectly nice men and the little boy between them were singing a song that literally millions of children around the world knew. It would be like accusing someone of theft because they knew the theme song to Friends. Even people who hated that show knew the song. It was a supremely dumb way to make a connection.

Then they started singing it in Italian.

And English.

And Spanish.

They hopped sideways on the steps as they sang, as though this was a game they played all the time. As Carl neared the front door, the boy began speaking in a patois of all three languages, and Carl felt secretly resentful. He’d studied languages since he hit high school, and he’d never be that good.

“Your mother will be out in a moment,” the smaller of the men said in flawless French. He was… arresting looking, with curly brown hair, vulpine features, and teeth that were slightly crooked in the front. European! Carl thought, because Americans, it seemed, were the ones who stressed so much about slight imperfections in the smile.

“Where would you like to go for lunch?” the taller man asked. Bold and blond, with a radiant handsomeness and perfectly straight teeth, he spoke English with an American accent.

The boy began to babble. A series of café names bubbled out of his mouth until the smaller man told him laughingly that they would eat at the first place that served peanut butter and jelly and the boy would like it.

“Yes, Uncle Danny, I would like it! Make sure the bread is crusty, and there is butter too.”

The two men exchanged glances—not of worry, so much, but of planning.

“Go,” the taller one instructed. “Get food. I’ll see what’s taking so long.”

“Oui,” the shorter one said, and then they shared a touch—brief as it was—of hands.

And Carl rethought everything he knew about them again.

He had no excuse to linger on the steps, so he breached the door and stood for a moment, orienting himself and wondering how to speak to the head docent. As he was scanning the various corridors and displays, looking for the standard “offices” or something similar, he saw an exquisite woman rushing by, dressed in a pencil-thin black skirt and a red sweater, with her blond hair swept up almost like Grace Kelly by design. She turned a brilliant smile over her shoulder and spoke a quick patter of French, thanking the docent manager for being so very, very kind.

The man in turn called out, “Mrs. Thomakins, you and your husband may return any day. We are always so pleased to meet a donor.”

She cast another dazzling smile at him and, as Carl watched, blew outside to snag the taller man by the hand. Together they rushed after the other man and the boy, off to find a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in a Parisian café, and Carl turned to the docent manager in a dream.

“Did you say Thomakins?” he asked the little man with the incredibly earnest face who was swishing his handkerchief after the exquisite blond woman with something like worship.

“Oui! Their family is so very gracious. They found a lost Renoir. Can you imagine that? They donated it to our museum. It will be ready for display in a matter of weeks!”

“That’s, uhm, generous,” Carl said, his mind racing. “I’m, uhm, Carl Soderburgh. From Serpentus?” They’d given him a cover name, and he used it whenever he was in Europe. He wasn’t sure exactly what it did to keep him safe, but, well, company policy. “I’m here to look at your John Flaxwood statue, but would you mind if I looked at that Renoir as well?”

Both the statue and the Renoir were 100 percent authentic, although only the statue’s right to be there was contested. Carl wasn’t able to pay the client who’d contested, though. As he’d thought, nobody named “Thomakins” existed at Serpentus.

Carl was able to interest the company enough to give him some investigative leeway, which was where his obsession with the “Thomakins” family was allowed to take root and flourish.

Even after the trip to rehab and the sad, doomed affair with Danny Mitchell, fox-featured master thief who could sing the theme to SpongeBob in four languages to occupy a little boy, he would forever be grateful to the four thieves he’d seen at Quai Branly that day.

They helped make his life extraordinary.

By Any Other Name

CARMICHAEL CARMODY had never liked his name—even when it was shortened to “Car-Car” since working on cars was what he did best.

Now that he had a new life, a new job, a new him—an out and proud gay him, working for people who gave zero shits about the gayness—he wanted a new name.

And he really wanted to try it out on a new person.

A specific person.

A tall blond-haired green-eyed Viking who wore sportscoats and spoke formally and always smiled at him and nodded when he borrowed the cars or boarded the planes that Car-Car… erm, Carmichael—wait, Michael—tended and kept ready to use.

Should the tall blond-haired green-eyed Viking ever smile at him specifically and say his name, Car-Car—Michael—wanted to be able to suggest the name change easily, as if it was butter and rolled smoothly off the tongue.

It didn’t quite happen that way.

“Got your bag packed, Car-Car?” Chuck Calder asked as he wandered through Michael’s end of the hangar, the part that housed Felix Salinger’s planes and some of his other vehicles. Part of Michael’s job was to make sure all the vehicles at the mansion were in top form. He tended to rotate them out once a month to service them—there was always something to do. If nothing else, the trip from the mansion in Glencoe to the airstrip in outlying farm country took up nearly an hour, and Michael had nothing to do there but drive those nice cars and let the breeze blow his hair back, listening to classic rock played at top volume.

It was like a little vacation at work.

He didn’t need to go any of the places the airplanes went to be happy.

“Nobody needs me to fly to Belgium,” Michael told Chuck. “Besides, I don’t even know what you’re doing there.”

Chuck grinned. He was a handsome, raw-boned good ol’ boy with a wicked smile and a divot in his chin. He and Michael had been lovers once, but that was long over, and now? He was a friend, which was good. Michael had grown up in Texas, and now that he was trying to make a new life in Chicago, he could use all the friends he could get.

“Honestly, they don’t need me either,” he confided. “They need Carl and Liam Craig. You don’t know him. He’s from Interpol. But Carl didn’t want to go alone. I get the feeling he’s spent a lot of alone time in Europe, and he’s over it.” Chuck shrugged, the action drawing his T-shirt tight against his broad chest. “Since my boyfriend is off making trade deals with China this week, I volunteered. That’s what friends do.”

Michael bit his lip. Chuck still felt like he owed Michael for some shit that went down a long time ago. Nothing could be further from the truth, but boy, Michael wouldn’t mind cashing in on a little of that goodwill now.

“Uhm, Chuck?” he asked, smiling prettily. His teeth were the faintest bit crooked, but he knew he had big limpid brown eyes and an appealing smile. His ex-wife had told him often enough that he could get all sorts of things for the smile alone. Sadly he hadn’t wanted those things from her, but she was such a sweet girl, she’d given him pointers for how to use that smile to get someone he could love the way he couldn’t love her.

“Car-Car?” Chuck asked, as footsteps sounded on the far side of the hangar.

Oh, Michael knew those steps: firm in hard leather-soled shoes, with a long, solid stride. He’d been hearing them echo through his hangar for the last two months, ever since he’d started working for the Salingers and had gotten to know the other people who worked for them—or with them—as well.

“That’s sort of what I wanted to talk to you about,” Michael said, wincing. “See, Car-Car is someone you knew in Texas. Someone who went to jail. And he was… well, sort of a wreck. I was wondering if you could, you know, maybe call me something else?”

Michael. Call me Michael!

“Sure!” Chuck sounded all easygoing, but then he had to go and ruin it all by calling to the owner of those footsteps. “Hey, Soderbergh, get over here. We gotta find Car-Car a new name.”

Carl Cox—Michael had no idea why people called him Soderbergh—changed the direction of his stride from the plane, which sat near the hangar’s opening with the staircase descended, to the back of the hangar where Michael’s area was neatly arranged, including an office toward the rear with a bathroom, a shower, and a little sleeping area he used maybe three times a week when he worked late and didn’t feel like driving back into the city.

After his last accommodations, thanks to the state of Texas, the idea of having an entire airplane hangar without another soul nearby was almost like having God rock him to sleep on the sweet soft palm of his hand.

But having Carl coming back to this little personal area? It felt like he’d been called into Michael’s living room, and Michael… well, he’d dreamed of inviting Carl to his place, the city apartment that their bosses, the Salingers, let Michael use. Not this little bachelor pad he’d carved out of an airplane hangar.

“Oh wow!” Soderbergh had cleared the cubicle walls set up to keep the office area private. “You’ve got a little apartment back here. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude!”

Chuck blinked as if this had not occurred to him. “Are we intruding, Car-Car?”

“No,” Michael said shortly. “But don’t call me that.” He realized that he sounded defensive and tried to make up for it. “Would anybody like a beer? I’ve got a mini fridge with snacks, water….”

“Water, thank you,” Soderbergh said.

“Me too,” Chuck said. “That’s mighty kind of you.”

“You flying too?” Michael asked Soderbergh, trying to make conversation.

Soderbergh shook his head and perched on the arm of the gently used couch. “Nope. I just don’t do beer after a stint in rehab.”

It took Michael a moment to get that. “You went to rehab?” he asked, thinking he couldn’t have heard right. Rehab was where his family had gone when they’d gotten hooked on meth. It never took.

“Drank too much.” Soderbergh shrugged, and while it seemed to be an old wound, Michael could sense a story there.

“That was a while back,” Chuck commented. “That was before you and me met, wasn’t it, Carl?”

“Yeah, ’bout eight, nine years ago.” Soderbergh—Carl—gave Michael a smile, obviously hoping to turn the conversation. “So what did you want to ask me?”

“Car-Car here wants to reinvent himself,” Chuck said, “and he was wondering about a name—”

“Call me Michael.” Oh God. He’d said it. He’d actually said it. He’d promised himself that this job, these people, his new life would all be about reinvention. And he’d just taken his first step.

“Michael,” Carl said, giving him a sweet smile. He had a square chin with only the hint of a divot, a square jaw, an almost Roman nose, and weary green eyes. A “sweet” smile was like a gift in that solidly male face. “Nice name. Well chosen.”

Chuck let out a snort. “Are you sure? I mean, Car-Car has some character to it, right?”

“Car-Car has some jail time on it,” Michael said, exasperated. “I… you know, want to be respectable.”

Chuck grimaced. “You always were respectable, Car, erm, Michael. The jail time was mostly my fault.”

Michael rolled his eyes. “The jail time was my stupid brothers’ fault. They were the ones who’d hero-worshipped two assholes who were planning to shoot us all dead. And it was my fault for saying, ‘Yeah, sure, I’ll help you idiots rob a bank. Just don’t beat the shit out of me like you been doing my whole damned life.’” He turned to Carl, wishing they were having a different conversation. Dammit, ever since he met the big broad-shouldered businessman, his dreams were always very… smooth. Very suave. Very urbane. Very not the redneck hick trying to reclaim his life. As he fetched the bottles of water from the mini fridge and gave one each to the guys, he reflected unhappily that this impromptu party in the hangar apartment was not what he’d planned.

“I’m sorry,” he said resignedly. “I just wanted to know if, you know, I could make ‘Michael’ work.”

Carl gave him another one of those incongruously winsome smiles. “I think it works great,” he said. “And you know what? Making a fresh start in your life is nothing to be embarrassed about.” He cracked the lid on the bottle with a wide-palmed hand. “Here’s to fresh starts.”

He said that like he knew what those were about.

“Here’s to fresh starts,” Chuck said, sinking into the couch. Michael had bought the furniture secondhand, but it was pretty comfortable, and he’d arranged everything in the “apartment” on area rugs. In a way, watching Chuck stretch his legs in front of him and yawn was sort of a compliment. He’d done his best to make the place homey.

“I’m sorry,” Chuck added, after a long draught from the bottle. “I got in pretty late from Lucius’s place last night. I know Hunter’s got the first shift flying when he gets here but….” He yawned.

“No worries,” Michael told him. “Look, I got to go around back and take care of my birds. How about you two rest here, okay?”

“Sure,” Chuck said, yawning, but Carl, after giving Chuck a good-natured look, shook his head.

“I’ll leave you to sleep.” Carl stood up. He left his luggage, Michael noticed, but took his water with him. “What birds?” he asked, following Michael into the hangar. It was a good walk past the vehicles and the waiting plane toward the vast door of the hangar. Carl kept up with a long, swinging stride, which was something Michael had always found really sexy in a man. It had been Chuck’s swagger that had attracted Michael to him three years earlier, and it had been Carl’s easy hip-swinging walk that had made Michael look twice the first time he’d eaten at the Salingers and seen Carl “Soderbergh” Cox striding up the walkway to the Salingers’ Glencoe mansion.

“A couple different kinds,” Michael told him. As they cleared the door, the wind hit them, only softened a little from its journey across Lake Michigan, with a late September bite. Michael shivered in his hooded sweatshirt. “Wow, it’s cold. Does it get much colder than this in the winter?”

Next to him, Carl choked.

“Oh my God, yes. Winter in Chicago is like seven layers of icy hell. Did nobody warn you?”

Michael grunted. “Well, winter outside of Austin is a lot like this. So no. Nobody warned me. I’m gonna have to get heaters for the hangar, aren’t I?”

“The place should be heated already,” Carl said. “But it’s big and badly insulated, so that’s not going to work so well. But if you tell the Salingers you’re overnighting in your little apartment there, they’ll probably spring for some space heaters and insulation and maybe even some swamp coolers for the summer. I don’t know how you survived late July and August in there.”

Michael gave a humorless laugh. “You kidding? There’s big ol’ fans in there, and even a cooling unit. Compared to my garage back in Texas, it was Shangri-fuckin-la.”

“You don’t miss it there?” Carl asked as they circled around the side of the building.

Michael had actually planned for this question—he had. He was going to say something smooth and urbane like “Not my kind of place, old son. No, I find Chicago far superior.”

What came out of his mouth was not that at all.

“I’d live in seven layers of icy hell to fuckin’ not go back there again,” he said, with such deep loathing his voice shook with it. He took a breath and tried to rein it in. “And now that my ex-wife and kids are safe in Ohio, I won’t have to. If I don’t set foot in Texas again through my next six lifetimes, the seventh will still be too goddamned soon.”

He heard a bark of laughter next to him and wanted to wilt into the shorn brown grass that hugged the hangar.

“Wow, Michael, tell me how you really feel!” Carl laughed through his fingers. “That was heartfelt.”

Oh shit—way to impress this man with his style. “I’m sorry. I… you probably love Texas.”

“Not particularly,” Carl told him. “Although I save that level of pure hatred for Florida.”

“What did Florida ever do to you?” Michael asked, lightening up a little. It didn’t sound like he’d put the guy off any, so that was something.

“Nothing personally, although the humidity in the summer is sort of like being mugged by a sweaty manure truck worker with bad breath. But my mother moved to Florida so she and my Aunt Bessie could make each other miserable, and I’m telling you, I avoid the place like a shit-trucker’s armpit. No. Just no. That much bottled vitriol is a bad thing.”

Michael cackled outright, liking this moment very much. “I gotta work on how much I hate Texas,” he said. “’Cause that’s funnier than anything I’ve got right now.”

Carl’s laughter this time was warm: kind. And sort of rumbly: personal. It was personal laughter, for Michael alone. “I’ll be sure to ask you when we return,” he said. “Be prepared. I’ll say, ‘How much do you hate Texas?’ and you’ll have to say something funny back.”

Michael looked at him from the corner of his eye. He had an open, happy expression on his face, and Michael’s stomach tightened. Oh. Oh wow. This was even better than he’d imagined. Now they had a thing.

“Oh!” Carl said as they rounded the corner for the back of the hangar. Since the hangar faced the small airstrip, the acreage out back was mostly long grass. Michael could see some of it had been seeded as hay, and someone had come to mow and bale in early September. But that was a good mile away. The square mile behind the hangar was sage and prairie grasses, with a small grove of oak trees about two hundred yards behind the hangar itself. Michael had been drawn to the area when he’d first come to work; he’d taken his breaks behind the big building and had noted the rich wildlife population. He hadn’t wanted to ask the Salingers, but he’d wondered if it was on purpose. A small stream, perhaps an irrigation ditch, wended its way through the trees and into the distant seeded farmland, and the result was a riot of fauna. Coyotes, prairie chickens, hawks, jackrabbits, feral cats—all of the creatures lived, mated, hunted, and died in this stretch of land, and Michael got to be an observer of it all.

He’d grown up on two hardpan acres in Texas and spent much of his adulthood working on the cracked pavement of a tiny town way outside of Austin. To him this sort of teeming animal sanctuary was something of a miracle.

“Nice, right?” Michael said with satisfaction.

“It’s surprisingly wild,” Carl said, smiling out into the prairie. The lines by his eyes crinkled when he did that, and his face softened a little, making him look like a young, blond George Clooney or a broad-chested Brad Pitt. This man knew how to smile, Michael thought, but he did it quietly and inside.

Carl looked back against the hangar and spotted the little shelter Michael had built for himself. Solid wood, it shaded him from the sun and kept out some of the wind. He’d built a cot that also served as a bench and a small bear-proof icebox to hold his lunch or dinner, a little wooden box to hold books and other essentials, and brought a camp chair because the cot got hard on the back. “I can see why you’d want to spend time out here. What’s this structure here, next to—”

From inside what amounted to an eight-by-eight-by-eight wooden crate with a steel mesh front came an imperious shriek.

“Is that a bird?” Carl’s voice took on awed tones, and Michael smiled, pleased. He’d been crushing on Carl something awful, but until this moment, the idea that they might share the same interests had only been a hope.

“It’s a peregrine,” Michael said, tugging on the sleeve of Carl’s sport jacket to pull him in front of the mews. “See? I found him flopping out here, trying to scream his way past a coyote. Tore the shit out of my hand before I sacrificed a sweatshirt.” He held up the hand that still sported a large bandage on the back, up past his wrist.

“Ouch!” Carl caught his hand for a moment, evidently to take a better look at it, and Michael almost pulled out of his grip.

Then he realized that this was the whole purpose of luring the good-looking guy in the businessman’s suit to the back of the hangar.

He allowed Carl to peel back the bandage briefly to inspect the gashes—halfway to healing though they were—and for some of the warmth in Carl’s big, well-manicured hand to seep into Michael’s smaller, rougher one.

“They’re getting better—I wear gloves when I work to keep them clean,” he said shyly, warmth curling in his belly, and Carl shook his head and looked from the back of Michael’s hand and wrist to the bird in the cage, currently wearing a toeless nylon stocking to hold his wings next to his body.

“Yes, but that’s quite a sacrifice,” Carl said gently. He rubbed his thumb along the knuckles and then lowered the hand but didn’t let go. “The stocking’s a good idea. Where’d you get that?”

“A bird-rescue site online,” Michael said. He sighed. “They told me I should have hooded him, too, but by the time I got to that part, he’d started getting really ruffly and happy when he saw me, because he knew food was coming. I hope I haven’t ruined his chances for going back into the wild.” He liked having the falcon there, and he was proud of his part in helping the bird survive. But Michael had lived in a cage of his own for two years. He knew where that bird belonged, and it wasn’t behind a load of pig-wire and plywood.

Carl studied the creature, frowning, and again the change in his energy when his expression altered was formidable. That frown could darken the heavens, although Carl didn’t appear to know it.

The bird stood not quite twenty inches tall, and his breast plumage, visible through the stocking, was pretty—speckled black and white while the base of his sharp curved beak was an arresting yellow. His eyes, bright, passionless, analytical, studied everything about the two humans looking into his territory, and he opened his beak and shrieked, probably looking for food. Peregrines ate about 20 percent of their body weight every day. Michael kept a terrarium of field mice behind the mews, letting one or two loose on the feeding tray at a time so the bird could hunt even though grounded. But today he had a treat—for the falcon at least. Hadn’t been so much fun for Michael, but then, he existed as a conduit for falcon food at this point, so he couldn’t complain.

“Scuse me,” Michael said, reluctantly freeing his hand from Carl’s. First, he reached into his essentials box and donned a pair of Teflon gloves, the kind ladies wore to prune roses, he’d bought after the initial rescue—after the bird had ripped his hand open, of course. Then he went back to the critter-proof icebox and pulled out a dead jackrabbit he’d spotted off the service road that led out to the small airstrip.

“This here’s super gross,” he told Carl, apologizing. “You don’t have to look if you don’t want to.”

Holding the rabbit carcass in one hand and opening the side of the mews with the other, he threw the rabbit on a big stainless-steel platter he’d affixed next to the falcon’s perch, before dodging back outside. The bird shrieked and dove in, ripping at the jackrabbit and slashing with his beak, shrieking approval.

Carl made an eww sound and stepped back. “Damn,” he said. “That’s… that’s terrifying.”

“Yeah, I know.” Michael shrugged. “I mean, I guess a bird’s gotta bird. I like watching ’em fly, and even hunt, but still…. I’m kinda glad he’s not doing it to the prairie chickens that live out back too.”

“Prairie chickens?” Carl frowned. “Aren’t those endangered?”

Michael held his hand out, palm down, and rocked it side to side. “Comes and goes. I looked it up, and this place out back is sort of protected acreage. I think that’s why they don’t hay it up like the rest of the area. I wonder if the Salingers did that?”

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Carl said, suddenly thoughtful. “It’s something they’d do, you know?”

“I know they’ve been nice to me,” Michael said. Chuck had called them his new “crew” and had gotten Michael a job with them, but so far Michael hadn’t seen anything crewish about them. They didn’t seem to be bank robbers or thieves. In fact, Felix Salinger and his husband, Benjamin Morgan, were almost local celebrities. Felix ran a cable network of news and movie stations, and Benjamin—whom Michael had heard called “Uncle Danny”—was a docent of some sort at the Art Institute. They lived together in a mansion with Felix’s ex-wife, Julia, which would have seemed strange if you hadn’t met the three of them. Julia was like the sister the two men had never had, and the young people who flocked to Julia and Felix’s son, Josh, had been taken under Felix, Julia, and Benjamin’s wings like fledgling birds.

Even Michael had been “adopted,” he supposed. He’d been asked out to the mansion to eat four or five times in the past two months, and everybody at the table had treated him like a friend.

In a way it had been intimidating, all these rich people, all of them pretty, some of them even sort of famous—Torrance Grayson was a YouTube phenom, and he was there all the time—but it had also been… sweet.

Everybody had talked, their voices rising and swelling in a tide of chatter, and every voice had been welcome. If it hadn’t been for the one thing that hung over the mansion like a pall, Michael would have said it was Camelot.

But there was that one damned thing.

“The Salingers are nice to most people,” Carl said. “But, you know, not so nice to bad guys.”

Michael gave a humorless little grunt, thinking about the day Chuck had saved his and his brothers’ lives and gotten them arrested at the same time. The guys who would have killed him had been left dead on the bank’s marble floor, and it was an image Michael would live with for the rest of his life.

But he couldn’t get over the idea that he’d heard them plotting murder. He’d even seen proof that they’d been planning to sabotage the job and get out of it with the money. Michael’s brothers had been dumb and willing, but Michael had been desperate. He’d had a wife and three kids, and the bank had been about to foreclose on his garage and then probably take the house his children lived in. Part of that had been because his brothers kept stealing from his business and he’d been too afraid of them to do anything about it, but another part had been that Michael had been in over his head in the business department.

He was so glad to get a second chance, and he couldn’t regret having to walk over the bodies of the two guys on the bank floor to get it.

He had to side with the Salingers on this one—bad guys need not apply.

“Well, someone needs to get the bad guys, you think?” Michael asked, and was relieved when Carl nodded.

“It’s hard to know who they are,” Carl said, “but once that’s clear, I think you’re right.” He let out a sigh. “You said birds? Your, uhm, savage friend here is only one.”

The falcon was still ripping apart the jackrabbit, and they both winced at the sound of a particularly loud cracking bone.

“Yeah, well, the other ones are the prairie chickens. Look out there and you might see a few.”

Carl turned so he could scan the empty acreage, and Michael heard his surprised chuckle as one of the distinctive round birds with striped plumage and red faces broke cover and ran, pell-mell, for a little huddle of shelter on the ground.

“Oh wow,” Carl said, sounding charmed. “They’re all over. That’s amazing!”

Michael was so proud of this. “I sort of dug a little trench out from the irrigation ditch. You see?” He pointed toward the oak trees. “And I put some big pieces of plywood in the middle of the field on top of big prairie grass hummocks, like lean-tos for the birds. I figured if I could bring a little water to the area and give them protection from assholes like this,” he nodded at the falcon, “I could make their protected land a little more protected.”

Michael had been exposed, and he’d been helpless. Even when he was a kid and his brothers and mother put a crossbow in his hand and told him to go find something—bird, squirrel, something—for dinner, he’d always had more of an affinity for the hurt creature than the hunter. The first thing he’d vowed when he’d held his children had been to keep them safe. It was such a relief, here in this new home, to be able to care for hurt things, to show kindness to those silly chubby birds, and not to worry that it might get his ear boxed or his eye blackened because “real” men shouldn’t be kind.

Something about Carl’s smile, the way his eyes crinkled in the corners, the way they got shiny and bright, gave Michael more than approval—it hinted at sadness as well.

“That’s wonderful,” he said. “That’s… that’s so smart. It’s….” Carl bit his lip and took a long, deep breath.

“What’s wrong?” Oh. Things had been going so well!

“It’s good to see people being kind for the sake of being kind,” he said, his voice gruff. “Let’s hope that’s catching.”

Michael frowned. “Why? What are you talking about?”

Carl grimaced. “Gah! I shouldn’t have said anything.” He shook his head and looked away, but inadvertently he looked to where the falcon was still savaging the poor dead bunny. He turned his gaze back to Michael almost like he was running away. “It’s sort of confidential,” he said, grimacing. “And there are enough sketchy things about it for me to not want you to know anything, okay?”

Michael scowled, hurt. “You know, I’m not a fainting flower. I did two years in prison. You know that, right?”

“Yes, I know that,” Carl retorted. “And Chuck made it very clear to everybody that you were to be left absolutely in the land of ‘plausible deniability.’ Which I’m trying to do.” Some of his irritation seeped out of him. “But the important part isn’t the sketchy details anyway. The important part is that Josh Salinger isn’t doing well, and we’re hoping that the results of this trip to Belgium that Chuck, Hunter, and I are taking might save his life.”

Michael sucked air through his teeth. “Oh. Oh no.” Josh Salinger, Felix and Julia’s son, had been the bright and brilliant light that attracted so many people to their house—including Chuck and therefore Michael. Michael had seen him declining in the past two months in spite of everybody’s hope after each treatment for leukemia. Michael was always very grateful for the invitations to the house, partly because he realized that people were so damned worried about Josh, it seemed like Michael should be the last person on everybody’s mind.

“Yeah,” Carl said, the skin around his eyes tight. “I… I knew that kid as a little boy. I’m really hoping this thing we’re doing works out.”

“Will it hurt anyone?” Michael asked worriedly.

Carl shook his head. “No. No. Essentially what we’re doing is asking an estranged family member for some bone marrow. Chuck and Hunter can fly, so they get to go, obviously, and I’ve got the law degree, so I’m going to negotiate.”

“What about Hunter’s boyfriend?” Michael asked curiously. Dylan Li—aka Grace—fascinated him, much like squirrels or bunnies were probably fascinated by cats. Grace was self-absorbed and rude sometimes, but he was also fiercely loyal to Josh and the rest of the family.

“He’s staying here,” Carl said. “He and Josh are… uhm, brothers, I guess. Best way to explain it.”

“Yeah, but real brothers. My brothers are assholes I’m glad aren’t talking to me. Grace and Josh sort of speak the same language.”

“They do.” Carl’s attention was diverted by a black SUV pulling onto the service road to the airstrip. “And speak of the devil, that’s probably Hunter.” He turned back toward Michael and gave a tentative smile. “Thank you. For showing me this. I was not looking forward to the next couple of days, and this is damned cool. It’s totally brightened my day.”

Michael was so happy, he thought he might be glowing. “Birds are cool, aren’t they?” He’d always thought so, even when he’d been hunting them. Falcons, hawks—sometimes they’d just spread their wings under the sun and ride the wind. He’d never had that kind of freedom in his life. Ever.

“I have always thought so.” Carl’s eyes crinkled warmly at the corners before he turned away and started for the front of the hangar. Michael made sure there was water in the little fountain he’d set up for the falcon before closing up the cage and following him, thinking the whole time, He liked it. He smiled at me. He held my hand!

And he’d called Michael “Michael”during their whole conversation.

Oh yes. Reinvention was possible. If only they could get the Salinger kid better, things would be looking up.

Unspoken Among Thieves

MOST OF the people in the Salinger “crew” had day jobs. Pulling gigs with Felix and Julia Salinger and Danny “Lightfingers” Mitchell was fun—and surprisingly fulfilling from a philanthropy standpoint—but it didn’t pay the bills, and if they were scamming all the time, they’d be too recognizable to pull any good cons.