Page 43 of The Woman with the Wallet

“Okay,” she said after turning down the music when I said we were turning down the right street finally. “How about you tell me where we’re going,” she demanded.

The street was like I remembered. A mix of residential homes and businesses. And they were the kinds of homes with too small driveways, so a lot of the residents needed to park on the street, allowing me to snag a prime spot close enough to the building across the street to be able to watch without binoculars.

“That’s the place,” I told her, nodding out the windshield to a long, low gray stucco building. There was only one window out front, and it had bars on it. It looked like a fortress because it was.

“What is it?”

“A diamond processing center,” I told her.

“Why come all the way out here? There’s a whole diamond district in the city.”

“Yeah, but that’s a really close-knit community. Wary of outsiders, given their work. There’s no in there. This is different. The security is still tight, but there are lots of people in and out of here that don’t exactly have a vested interest in its security.”

I’d spent the better part of a year planning this job, researching, schmoozing the right employees, waiting for the right opportunity.

All to have it fall apart because I got my wallet lifted.

“Can I ask something?”

“Yeah,” I said, turning to look at her since there was no activity at the warehouse yet.

“If you know who you were working with, why isn’t someone coughing up blood somewhere yet?”

“Because neither of them fit the description you gave me. I want to see if you spot him here before I start knocking heads. There’s a chance they weren’t to blame. I don’t take joy in hurting people if it’s not necessary.”

“So that thing about the mob having morals is true?”

“To an extent, yeah.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning we will do anything necessary, up to and including some gnarly torture,” I told her, thinking of Brio and the stories of his little ‘adventures,’ “to defend what and who is ours. But we don’t hurt women and kids. We try not to hurt anyone who is innocent. We might be wise guys, but we’re not bad men.”

“And you also don’t want to fuck up any insider you have at a place like this, in case your heist is never found out.”

“There’s that too, yeah,” I admitted. The mob was nothing if not greedy for more well-paying jobs.

“What happens if I don’t see him today?”

“We come back tomorrow for the night shift. Figure we’ll be miserable enough being here all day. Better to split it up. If you don’t see him then, it’s time to go make some visits.”

“While we’re still in this area?”

“Don’t worry. That’s not the kind of shit I’d bring you in on.”

“Why not? I think I might enjoy watching the bastard who fucked up my face get his equally as messed up. Oh, here we go,”she said, leaning forward toward the dash as the first car pulled into the lot.

It was a slow trickle. The ones who showed up twenty minutes before their shifts just to sit in their cars and mentally prepare for their days only climbed out when it was five minutes to opening. The vast majority of the employees showed up with little to no time to spare. And a few were late.

Max fell back in her seat, sighing. Frustrated.

“There are others who come in later,” I told her, trying not to be frustrated too.

Sure, I’d shown her a bunch of the employees whose pictures I’d found on the website, but there were a lot of other random people who apparently didn’t warrant a headshot on the website. The people in logistics, janitorial, security, drivers, etc.

This was a reasonably large operation. That was the only reason I’d been able to pull off the job I had.

“Okay,” Max said, rustling around in the snack bag to pull out a bag of Twizzlers. “So, tell me the job. And don’t try to tell me it’s secret or some shit like that. I’m not going to try to rob a diamond warehouse.”

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