Page 69 of The Picasso Heist

I WALK HALF a block south from Bergamo’s offices, turn the corner, and stop at the back of the large delivery van parked at the curb, a repurposed UPS truck that’s been painted white.

I knock three times—twice fast, pause, then once.

The doors split open immediately and I step inside, right back where I started. I’m a human boomerang.

“Did you get it?” I ask.

“Yeah,” says Devin, the tech who wired me up. He’s at the console wearing a backward Yankees cap, fidgeting with some knob. “We got it.”

“The hell we did,” says Elise Joyce.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.

“You know exactly what it means. You could’ve gotten more from him. A lot more.”

The fact that the chief of the criminal division of a US attorney’s office is taking part in a field mission—that she’s holed up in a surveillance van, no less—tells you all you need to know about how much Elise Joyce wants Dominick Lugieri’s head on a platter. I can understand her impatience.

I just can’t give in to it.

“More? More? You now have Bergamo on record saying he cleans money for Lugieri,” I say. “He even said how much the next drop will be, eighty million.”

“Yeah, but we don’t know when and we don’t know where,” says Joyce.

“That’s right, we don’t. Not yet. That’s what comes next.”

“It could’ve come today.”

“Bergamo’s a lot of things, but he’s not an idiot,” I say. “All it takes is me asking one too many questions.”

Devin, the tech, had outfitted me with a blazer that had a mic hidden in a button and the transmitter sewn into the lining.

I take off the blazer and hand it to him while Joyce watches me with a suspicious eye.

Already she’s revved up her PR machine—a little tidbit of an online story here and a profile in the Times lined up there, an attempt to catch a massive media wave of attention that will propel her to the governor’s mansion once she finally brings down Lugieri.

Female crime fighters make the best political candidates. Just ask any focus group. Elise Joyce sure has.

“If I didn’t know better, Halston, I’d think you were stalling,” she says.

“Thankfully, you do know better.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I,” I say. “Believe me, no one wants this to happen more than I do. You understand that, right?”

It’s not my words that linger in the air, it’s what I don’t say.

The subtext. The reason I came to Elise Joyce in the first place.

This is a quid pro quo. I’m giving her what she wants in order to get what I want.

It’s Dominick Lugieri’s imprisonment in exchange for my father’s release. The sooner the better.

But if Bergamo’s no idiot, neither is Joyce. She’s right, I am stalling. Just a little.

When you have only one shot at doing what should be impossible, the timing has to be perfect.