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Gray had another of the girls, Irene, in the VIP room with him. She was sitting in his lap, wearing a bikini, while he talked on the phone. When I walked in, he dismissed Irene and hung up in short order. “Wilder,” he said.
Gray was one of those guys whose face is just a little off, and you can’t pinpoint where. He was in his thirties, with salt-and-pepper hair and the beginnings of a gut. He was wearing a warmup suit, as if he thought he was Rocky, though if Gray ever warmed up for any exercise in his life I’d eat my jacket. The VIP room was dim and dingy and smelled like spilled beer and old come. I wanted to get out of there as fast as fucking possible.
“Listen,” Gray said. “There’s a thing happening. I need you in.”
I stayed standing, since I didn’t want to touch the velvet seats. I may be dirty, but even I draw a line somewhere. “When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“I’ll check my schedule.”
“You’ll free up your fucking schedule,” he growled, looking at me with his flat dead eyes. “Or I pay your friend a visit.”
I felt my jaw clench, my muscles tighten, like they did every time he did this. I stared back into his eyes. “You know, one of these days I’m going to call your bluff.”
“Try it, shitsack,” Gray returned. “I dare you.”
I held his gaze for a second, but that was the problem with Gray. I didn’t really know what he would do. And Max was too important to risk.
I’d only ever had one person in my life I could call a friend, and Max Reilly was it. Born on the same streets as me and my brother. Living some of that same life. He’d helped me through the worst time in my life—the time that was the reason I hated LA and would never go back—and I owed him for it. Instead of taking the path I took, or taking off like Cavan did, Max had enlisted. He’d been deployed for three years, most of them in Afghanistan. He’d come home bearded and haunted, his right leg gone below the knee from an IED, trying to pay for his pain meds and PTSD therapy from his veteran’s pay. He was living in LA, cleaning out his dad’s apartment, since his dad had just died. I was working on getting Max an apartment in Shady Oaks so he could come to San Francisco.
Max was the reason I took jobs with crazy assholes like Gray. I could live alone on my mechanic’s pay—Shady Oaks was cheap, and who the hell cared if I wore the same jeans every day? But I needed extra money to help Max. And the worst day of my life was the day that Gray had, somehow in his devious network of rats, discovered it.
If I turned down work for Gray, I not only lost out on the money that would help Max. I also put my shit on Max’s doorstep, because in a certain mood, Gray would like nothing better than to make my friend pay for my disobedience. And Max had enough problems.
“Fine,” I said to Gray now. “What is this thing?”
“TV’s,” Gray said. “Flat screens and such. Place called Mickey’s in West Oakland.”
I nodded. I’d heard of it only vaguely, since I didn’t own a TV.
“I have good intel,” Gray said. “The guy who owns it is close to retiring. His eyesight isn’t so good and neither is his memory. Sometimes he doesn’t arm the alarm properly.”
“Sometimes?” I asked.
“He won’t arm it properly tomorrow, when my inside guy messes with the code,” Gray said. “That’s all you need to know. I’ve got good guys on this. Danny, Westerberg, Jam.”
Those were experienced heist guys to bring in to take down an old man’s TV store. “So you want me to drive?” I said.
Gray looked at me and gave a short, humorless laugh. I realized that beneath the bravado he was scared, just like Amy had said. What the hell was he scared of? “Of course I want you to fucking drive,” he said. “You think I want you for your pretty face?”
I ignored that, satisfying myself with the mental picture of me punching his teeth in. “What am I driving?”
“Panel van. Automatic.”
Fine. “Where do I show up?”
“Behind Natty’s Grill in West Oakland at eight. Your cut of the take should be about a thousand.”
A thousand bucks for an evening’s work. “I want half in advance.”
“Fuck you, Wilder. You get a hundred.”
I shook my head. “I’m not showing up for a hundred measly bucks. You can stuff that in Irene’s bikini.”
Gray’s nasty, blank eyes looked calculating for a minute, and then he said, “Fine. Go get it from Henry at the bar.”
I turned and walked out, swallowing my surprise. Gray never gave in that quickly. Instead of feeling triumph, all I could feel was dread.
