Keep Reading for an Excerpt fromThe Grifter, Book 7 in The Long Con Series
Long Way Down
JOSH SALINGERpeered over the edge of the fifteenth-floor balcony and hissed.He was low enough that the high-rise forest of Chicago obscured his view of even the most vestigial sky, and his heart hammered with a combination of fear and claustrophobia.
He didn’t feel ready for this jump, and it pissed him off.
In his ear, his comms piece buzzed, and his best friend, Dylan Li—aka Grace—said, “You gonna make this, Recovery Boy, or do we need a Plan B?”
Josh glanced behind him where the darkened “thief-proof” room sat, looking pristine and unmolested as it teased the city beyond its outstretched arms with the treasures contained within.
Thief proof Josh’s still-scrawny ass.He and his team had spentweeksplanning this job.Hacking the temperature control had stumped them for a while, until Stirling had pointed out that instead of trying to pump up the temp to ninety-eight degrees so a human could walk in the room (which would put many of the priceless works inside at risk), all they had to do was account for what the temperature was when disturbed by one human.
And putting the human in a dry suit to contain some of his heat put that difficulty in the bounds of acceptable risk.
Josh had gotten access as an up-and-coming art dealer, his bona fides backed up by Stirling’s excellent hacking and his Uncle Danny’s references.Uncle Danny’s day job was being an art docent for the Chicago Art Institute, so that hadn’t been hard, and Josh had grown up around art, both in America and abroad.He knew his shit, so actuallydoingthe job of an art dealer wasn’t a stretch.Which was good because he had to be doingsomethingto keep his cover up.Besides, he and his family liked art.With his family’s help, he’d spotted a couple of new talents and gotten them coveted places in nearby shows, even offering to showcase paintings and one sculpture at his parents’ home.His father, Felix Salinger, owned a Chicago-based cable network that had gone national.Without his ever asking a broker’s fee, alotof art had been sold because somebody had seen it on the wall in the Salinger dining room.His mother had planned the entire room around doing that.
So yeah.The side gig that was supposed to be his real gig had been satisfying, but what itreallyhad done was give him unlimited access to the private collection of Celeste Buenaventura, heiress, party girl, jet-setter, and, in his mother’s words, “porcutwat.”Looked pretty and sexy, had a thousand ways to make any interaction unnecessarily painful.
Sadly, along with her mother’s billions, the girl had also inherited her father’s ruthlessness and recklessness in business.She ran his enterprises deftly, cheated unions and vendors alike, bought art in quantity and quality to hoard and lord over the masses, and slept with anything that slithered.
She was that rare bird—a person with no moral center but wielding enough imagination to love and appreciate art, even the weird stuff like Otto Dix that made people both queasy and tearful with the horrific nature of mankind at war.
Much of her private collection was stolen; she had a fondness for stuff that had disappeared during WWII after having been confiscated from their victims by the Nazis.
Again, a real porcutwat.
She said it was for “historical significance,” but the majority of recovered art that had been stolen by the Third Reich had been restored to the original owners, or more recently their descendants.With the exception of the United States government, most of the world still regarded the ideals of the Nazis with contempt.
No, Celeste Buenaventura liked to keep stolen art because it made her feel powerful over the poor and unlucky, which made her the perfect person to set up for this caper, which was why Josh had spent the last four weeks pretending to be her art dealer—and keeping one step away from her entitled octopus hands.
Ugh.As.If.
But her much-examined history had shown that Josh, of all the men in the crew, was Celeste’s type, which was unfortunate, because he was also the guy planning the heist and the guy who needed to bebackdownstairs at the party to give coy, shy smiles and dodge neatly out of the way from Celeste’s wandering hands like a champion twat tease.
However, that’s what put him on this ledge right now, attaching the paracord to his carabiner and getting ready to leap three stories, catch his weight on the cord, and then rappel three more floors down to the men’s room he’d excused himself into fifteen minutes ago.
“Josh?Recovery Boy?You ready to go?That’s one hell of a jump.”
Josh blinked.The voice was different—no longer the staccato patter of his best friend, the thief whoshouldhave been doing this if he’d been at all able to people enough to pull a grift.Instead it was the deeper, more gravelly bass of Grace’s boyfriend, Hunter.
“How long’s it been?”Josh asked hoarsely.His bones felt fragile, his muscles weak.Oh God.He was about to blow this caper because he’d pushed himself too far, too fast, and now he was about to prove everybody who loved him right by wimping out at the last possible moment.
Jesus, boy-o, what in the hell are you trying to prove?
Liam’s voice, during their last heated conversation, reverberated through his head.
Josh had scowled and walked away, leaving Liam, curly hair in stunning disarray, freckled face blotched, usually smiling mouth compressed in anger, and, Josh knew in his fragile bones, hurt.
Josh had owed him an explanation, and now, before making a jump that would have been easy fifteen months ago, before the cancer had sucked out his strength and his stamina, he hoped he’d have the chance to give it to him.
God, Liam, I don’t want you to see me as wounded.Is that too much to fucking ask?
But he hadn’t asked, had he?He’d simply gone about and planned the damned op, politely asking his Uncle Danny—who’d been the one to bring Interpol Officer Liam Craig into their painfully intimate circle of grifters, thieves, and muscle—to pass along their planning to “anybody who might need to know.”
Danny had given him a distinctly disapproving look but had done as Josh asked, probably figuring—as most parental figures did when their children hit adulthood—he would eventually pull his head out of his ass and fix this thing with Liam, who didn’t seem to have a petty or bitter bone in his body.
I want to see him again, Josh thought.I need to tell him I’m sorry.I need to tell him why.
