Grand Theft N.Y.E. Read online

  Grand Theft N.Y.E.

  Heist Holidays

  Katrina Jackson

  Copyright © 2019 by Katrina Jackson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the author.

  ASIN: B07Z268N51

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Editor: A.K. Edits

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Content Warnings

  May

  one

  two

  three

  four

  December

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Other books by Katrina Jackson

  For Kai

  Enjoy this mess!

  Content Warnings

  Mentions of parental illness and death

  May

  one

  The exclusive Kismet Diamonds Kentucky Derby afterparty was just the kind of decadent, ridiculous rich white people event Cleo loved. Some people with her background fretted for weeks about what to wear and how to do their hair, hoping they could sneak into the ultra-exclusive party without incident. She’d seen it happen more than once but it was always easy to find other people like her, the ones who didn’t belong.

  Sometimes she felt sorry for them. She’d pick them out in their outfits that cost more than some people’s annual rent — their clothes always tasteful but boring — and know they’d paid a stylist a small fortune to dress them to blend in, and still they’d stick out. Not because they were wearing the wrong clothes or had too little money, but because they were so worried about not fitting in… that they didn’t. Watching those misfits taught Cleo that it wouldn’t ever matter what she wore or what accent she affected because she’d always stick out like a sore thumb, so she stopped giving a damn.

  Sometimes she pitied the people who had yet to realize how freeing it could be not to care what anyone with too much money in their bank accounts thought about you. She couldn’t imagine going through life hoping to be accepted by people who weren’t better, just richer. It sounded lonely. And pathetic. And that wasn’t her MO at all. So when she stepped out of her cream Mercedes Benz truck in front of the rented mansion in the hills for the Kismet VIP party and handed her key to the valet, all eyes were on her, because where else would they be? She was a five-foot ten-inch thick bitch with a size eleven shoe and an ass that made grown adults’ mouths water; fitting in would be a tragedy when she looked this good. As she walked up the rose-pink carpet toward the front door, she knew there wouldn’t be anyone at this party who looked like her; not by a long shot.

  The mistake she’d watched a whole bunch of new money people make was to try to fit in when the wave was really just to pretend to be too good to be around these degenerate rich fucks. And Cleo definitely didn’t have to pretend on that front because she really was too good to be in a room with these people. And she channeled that certainty into a haughty, but slightly amused, stare as she handed over her invitation.

  It was fake. Like really fucking fake.

  She and her team had planned to intercept an invitation. They’d been planning this job for a year and had marked their target; someone whose life was too chaotic to realize their invitation to the gaudy new money set event of the year hadn’t arrived until it was too late to matter. What they hadn’t been able to plan for was their mark getting picked up and charged on sixteen counts of arson the week before invitations went out. You truly could never tell with the wealthy and ridiculous.

  There hadn’t been enough time to choose and stake out a new target before invitations arrived, so her team had had to scramble. Their forger, Alex, had done her best to recreate the invitation based on past designs and the #KismetKYDerby hashtag on Instagram. But at the end of the day, they’d been running blind, and this was the moment of truth.

  The security guard looked at the invitation, shined a blue light flashlight over it. Then his eyes wandered lazily from Cleo’s eyes down her body and back again. “Name.”

  “Jessica Hare,” she said without an ounce of mirth, even though she and her hacker Brian had laughed for a solid hour when they’d added her to tonight’s guest list.

  The security guard pulled out his tablet.

  This was where amateurs usually fucked themselves. Pretty much all security guards are hired because they’re big, look mean, probably are mean, and are good at looking at people with nothing but suspicion and hostility in their eyes; they were big, dumb intimidation machines.

  But just because the big motherfucker with the wicked scar across his left eyebrow was outside of an event that probably cost millions to throw, didn’t mean he was necessarily any better than the bouncers at her favorite hip-hop club growing up. And what she’d learned from those lecherous jackasses was that big tits, a big ass, and a slightly parted mouth was more than enough to get them to overlook a sketchy driver’s license – or in this case a just alright forgery – and let you inside the venue.

  “Enjoy your night, ma’am,” the security guard said, extending his arm to hand her invitation back to her.

  “Thank you,” Cleo responded, making sure to let just the tip of her acrylic nail trail across his index finger. She watched as his right eye ticked, and his gaze narrowed on her breasts. “You do the same.”

  She turned and walked from the security checkpoint to the front door. Another security guard pulled the door open for her and she smiled at him as she passed.

  “I’m in,” she whispered just loud enough for her earpiece to pick up her voice.

  “Of course you are, we’re not amateurs,” Brian said.

  “Shut up,” Alex hissed.

  Cleo smiled at Alex’s voice. If there was a good cop-bad cop dynamic on this crew, Cleo was absolutely the former and Alex was a bad cop and drill sergeant rolled into one. If she said radio critical, they all knew it meant stay off the airwaves unless absolutely necessary and no one dared cross her. Not even Cleo. Usually. But this wasn’t the time to needle her crew, not when they were so close. And not on a night when Cleo’s job was really so simple.

  Just getting in the house was half the battle.

  The other half… Well, that was sitting across the wide ballroom on a raised dais where the VIPs of all VIPs were playing a high stakes poker game. “Let’s get this bag,” she whispered to herself and her crew and stepped gingerly into the #KismetDerbyExperience ready to do what she’d always done best: rob a rich man for all he was worth.

  Cleo had seen this mansion from as many angles as possible. She and Alex had pored over the blueprints on file with the city, the Architectural Digest’s spread when it was built, and every picture they could find from parties thrown here over the years. But as often happened when her research met her con jobs, she was shocked for a minute at how ugly it all was in person.

  The room was supposed to look like an ancient Roman villa, and Cleo had to work double time to stop from frowning at the fake columns around the room, the gaudy fountains scattered around the perimeter and the fake cobbling on the dance floor. It was good awful and Cleo made sure to commit it all to memory so she never forgot the most important lesson of her vocation: rich people are dumb as fuck with their money!

  “Stop judging the interior design,” Alex said in her ear.

  “But—”

  “Money,” she hissed before Cleo could launch into a diatribe. And she was right.

  She stopped walking and turned in a circle. There were couches and settee
s all over the room, clustered around the semi-precious gem art Kismet was touring around the country at these parties. The traveling art exhibit was an incredibly expensive excuse to get rich people together to… do rich people things, she guessed.

  Cleo had originally considered trying to steal a few of the art pieces. She could only imagine how much she’d get for the intact sculptures in the Middle East. Even just hacking them apart and selling them individually would be a decent payday. But Kismet security was something serious. And why choose the hardest road when there was an easier path to plunder? At least in this version of the plan, she got to dress up.

  When she’d seen this specific dress in Saks, she hadn’t known when she’d need it, but she knew she would. As soon as she’d run the pads of her fingers over the nearly see-through bodice of the trashiest expensive dress in the store, she could imagine it on her body. For a fleeting moment, she pictured herself wearing it on a date, like a real date, not a job, but she’d pushed that image out of her mind and imagined distracting a slightly jowly banker with her breasts while her hands plugged a virus on a USB stick into his computer behind his back. She was more comfortable with the latter scenario. And now that the time had come, she was happy she’d had this dress on deck.

  There was something so wonderful about walking through a party like this in a dress that was barely a suggestion and definitely an advertisement. Hell, it might even, technically, be lingerie since it was made up of equal parts see-through lace and slinky jersey that just barely covered her good bits but gave a clear indication of everything underneath as she moved. A dress like this made her feel powerful and not at all as if she fit in.

  It wasn’t that she couldn’t blend in if the job called for it, but her specialty was understanding how to get the crowd to focus on her. If a moment called for all eyes on the decoy, she was the woman for the job because Cleo – unlike Alex – didn’t have a problem grabbing a room by the balls. And she always made sure to hold on tight until her crew had cleared the place out around them and were on their way to safety. There were few people of any gender who could do that better than her.

  As she turned in a slow circle, looking down her broad nose at the people around her, she knew she’d gotten their attention without even really trying. When she resumed walking toward the poker table, she put in a concentrated effort to make sure all eyes were on her on purpose. She smiled and smirked and sometimes even winked at men ogling her too hard, just for the fun of pissing off their wives. She reveled in her own audacity, which only made everyone else angrier. Her ego soaked up every drop of their annoyance like water. This was why she was one of the best — if not THEE best — at this kind of job: conning wasn’t work to Cleo, it was her calling.

  “Champagne, ma’am?” a waiter asked her.

  She smiled and plucked a flute from the tray in their hand. She didn’t need to flip the silver disc to know that it would be engraved with the Tiffany’s symbol and she didn’t need to see the tag on the waiter’s uniform to know it was Gucci; it was her job to know. Besides, like most of these lavish parties for the disgustingly wealthy, name brands were everywhere, right on down to the $15,000 fur rug she was stepping on with her $45 Perspex heels.

  Cleo brought the glass to her lips and took a small sip, the only indulgence she’d allow herself tonight since she never mixed liquor with work. As she savored the flavor of the best champagne money could buy, she turned in another full circle, ostensibly toying with the room again, but really making sure the pieces of art her team had identified for removal were present and accounted for on the walls around the room. When she was satisfied that all was as it should be, she winked at an older woman and her younger wife who looked like they wanted to do more than stare, before turning confidently toward her target.

  It was time to get down to business.

  She found him exactly where she expected, at the poker table surrounded by other old, drunk, lecherous men just like him. Francis Pugh III technically owned the house where Kismet was ringing in the end of the Kentucky Derby, but that was a temporary reality. Cleo and her team knew he was no more than three months from losing it all. The SEC was investigating him for insider trading; his soon-to-be ex-wife had a team of private investigators looking for money she was certain he was hiding in the Bahamas; and unless he got an influx of cash soon, the bank was going to foreclose on this house before the end of the year.

  As far as Cleo was concerned, Frank was the best kind of target. His financial situation was so precarious and the veil maintaining his veneer of wealth so thin that any cop or insurance investigator would be stupid not to look at him as the possible perpetrator when he filed a police report because his entire house had been cleaned out overnight. And if a dumb cop was inclined to believe him, Cleo knew she could count on Frank’s ex-wife to set them straight and make sure all the heat of an investigation went right back to him. By the time anyone cleared Frank of suspicion in the eyes of the law — but never in the eyes of his wife — Cleo and her crew would be long gone. And, to add another wonderful layer of useful ignorance, not many people trying to solve the case of a high-tech heist would give a second thought to the too tall, nearly naked Black woman in the expensive dress, cheap heels, and fire engine red wig.

  All Cleo had to do was focus and keep her eyes on the prize — the balding man with a fat cigar hanging from his lips — and this job would keep her and her crew set for months. And as it happened, focus was easy for Cleo when money was involved.

  It was why she slowed down as she ascended the stairs. She wanted to feel every second of this moment, to see when he saw her; when his mouth went slack, his lit cigar drooped, and his eyes widened. He looked like a terrible 90’s Wall Street movie; even more reason to rob him blind. She took each step up the dais with deliberate care so Frank had enough time to drink in her curves, to imagine running his sweaty hands over them, to fantasize about her body over his in bed. She wanted Frank and everyone at the table to wonder who she was and become desperate to have her hanging from their arm for the rest of the night. This, too, was a thing she’d learned early: dangling a jewel in front of greedy eyes was a better sleight of hand than an explosion.

  Cleo walked toward Frank, her eyes never leaving his. She gave him the impression that she only had eyes for him, even as she clocked her surroundings in her peripheral vision.

  When she was by his side, he practically pushed the woman perched on the arm of his chair to the ground.

  “Hey,” the woman whined as she stumbled in last season’s Jimmy Choo patent leather platform heels.

  Now in her normal life, Cleo would have offered to help the girl slash Frank’s tires, but she was an actress — of a sort — and couldn’t afford to even let her eyes fall on the other woman while she was in character as the kind of woman who’d find Frank’s gross behavior attractive and flattering. She simply moved past her and settled onto the now unoccupied arm of Frank’s chair. She let her hip rest against his shoulder heavily, just enough pressure for him to feel how soft she was, knowing that his imagination would handle the rest.

  “What do you say, sweetheart?” he asked, showing his hand to her.

  Cleo glanced at his cards. They were terrible.

  He was going to lose no matter what, probably. She could have told him to fold, but in her experience, men like him didn’t want advice from women. So many men hated a woman with opinions — rich or poor — that Cleo had learned not to bother giving any of her actually great advice while on a job. Never mind what well-meaning people said in fake deep poems or inspirational blogs, it was more than emotionally satisfying to watch an asshole fall, especially when you saw it coming from a mile away. Besides, Cleo’s job wasn’t to give her marks her true self. She had to give them what they wanted at all times so they’d let their guards down.

  So instead of answering Frank’s question, she leaned into his side, pressed her left breast into his shoulder and giggled. She didn’t even need to speak. Just a li
ght, effervescent tinkle that made insecure men feel big and strong. Insecure men like Frank.

  He smiled at her cleavage, shifted in his seat — probably to hide his erection — and threw a few cards on the table.

  She looked at his hand again. Those weren’t the cards she might have discarded, but whatever, she didn’t care if he won or lost a little bit of money right now since he was about to lose it all in a few hours.

  “Final bets,” the dealer called.

  While the men considered their new hands, Cleo took the opportunity to look around the table, not because she cared but because she was always on the lookout for more work. A hustler never slept. All of the men around the table looked like Frank, honestly; maybe a little older or younger, but definitely rich, gaudy, and bleary-eyed from alcohol. Easy targets. They didn’t inspire her in the moment, but she catalogued their faces and made a mental note to have Brian get their identities. She could always rob them next year.

  She dismissed each man in turn until her eyes landed on the tall drink of water sitting directly across from her. The minute her eyes landed on him, Cleo felt… something. While the other men were slouched over their hands, a piece of young arm candy perched on the arms of their chairs, this man was the only one sitting alone, back straight and focused. He was also the only person not trying to angle his head to look up her dress. Sure, his eyes darted from the cards in his hand to the crease of her thighs, so it wasn’t like he was ignoring her — and she would have been offended if he was — but he hadn’t been swept away by her. There was something intriguing about a man so in control of himself that she couldn’t fully distract him.