Page 92 of The Picasso Heist

“GO FASTER, YOU’RE losing them!” barked Elise Joyce from the back seat.

She was not supposed to be riding with him in the first place, so the last thing she was going to do was sit in the front seat and risk being seen.

“I’m not losing them,” said Skip calmly. “And this is the right distance.”

“Yeah, until we lose them,” said Joyce.

Skip gave her a glare in the rearview mirror. “For the record, I’ve done this before.”

“And I haven’t. That’s the whole point. We can’t screw this up.”

“Which is exactly what happens if we get too close,” he said.

That shut Joyce up for a few blocks. With her baseball cap pulled down so low on her head, all Skip could really see was her disapproving clenched jaw.

A few blocks later she was back at it. “Why is it so damn quiet?” she asked. “Is the volume up? Did you mess with the dial?”

Skip pointed at the dash. The radio of his sister’s Jeep Cherokee was broadcasting her wire transmitter via the link to his phone. “The volume’s fine.”

“Why isn’t anyone talking, then?” she asked. “They talked on the street when they took her, so why not now?”

“They have her. What more is there to talk about?”

“They’re mob guys, they’re always going on about something.”

“Maybe if they were alone,” he said.

“What do they care what Halston hears? They think they’re about to kill her.”

Skip wanted to remind Elise Joyce that this wasn’t The Sopranos and that not all mob guys engaged in witty banter while on a job. Of course, the irony was that Nikolov’s men, in the same kind of Cadillac Escalade that Tony Soprano drove, were about to cross the Manhattan Bridge over to New Jersey.

Until.

Joyce shot forward from the back seat and yelled practically in Skip’s ear, “What happened? They didn’t turn.”

“No, they didn’t.”

“That was the turn for the bridge—they should’ve turned,” she said.

“You’re right.”

“Why didn’t they—”

“Sit back,” Skip told her.

It was the way he said it—the tone, the edge. He was no longer talking to the chief of the criminal division at the US attorney’s office. From that moment on, from the very second the mission went off script, Elise Joyce was a civilian. And as she sat back without saying a word, Joyce knew it.

Skip sped up. To hell with keeping a proper distance.

“What are you doing? Stop! Get your hands off me!” his sister was suddenly yelling, her voice blaring through the Jeep’s speakers. The volume was definitely up and working.

Then came the sounds. Rustling, static, a struggle… ending with an abrupt silence.

“Shit. They found the wire,” said Joyce.

Skip shot her a look over his shoulder: You think?