Carla uses her thieving past for good. Hired by retailers to test the effectiveness of their security systems, she makes a good living, despite her felony conviction. But when she runs into the detective who busted her years ago, and finds out he, too, works in the loss prevention business, she does some digging. What she finds could dredge up her past and threaten her future.
“Asset Protection” by World Fantasy Award winner Kristine Kathryn Rusch is free on this site for one week only. The story’s also available as a standalone from Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, iTunes and other ebook sites.
Asset Protection
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
HE HAD A FIEFDOM—at least that was what Carla called it. Grady’s fiefdom. He didn’t even know she was thinking about it. Thinking about him.
But she hadn’t stopped thinking about him since she’d gotten the nickel for burglary. Be grateful, he’d said as the deputies led her out of the courtroom in handcuffs. It could’ve been 25 to 30. Because I don’t think you know what good behavior is.
She knew. Her nickel turned into a penny—a single year, thanks to good behavior (screw you, Grady), back in the days when California released people because they behaved, not because they were non-violent offenders whom the state could no longer afford to house. Now all kinds of scumbags got a pass for no reason at all.
She wasn’t a scumbag. She was an artist.
And Grady, in his fiefdom, would soon realize that.
***
Carla first saw him in Florida of all places, in one of those cookie-cutter chain hotels that catered to the convention crowd. This particular event was a retailers’ Loss Prevention Conference, which made it sound grander than it was.
Loss Prevention was a euphemism for theft, which didn’t get called “theft” in the world of gigantic retailers, it got called “shrinkage.” Built into the budget, readily acknowledged as part of the industry. And yet it drove the retailers nuts, hence “loss prevention.”
The hotel was done up in its post-New Year’s glory—lots of flowers and fresh fruit and other enticements to remind the poor schlubs from places north why people without stock in Disney moved to the Sunshine State.
Carla went to all the Loss Prevention conferences, mostly so that she could drum up work. Her job was to find flaws in security systems by acting like the criminal that she had been. And she usually found flaws. She had done this for years now, often with local teams who knew the area. Mostly she handled her own client bookings these days, but Colin Whitaker, head of the Loss Prevention Association, still threw the odd job her way now and then.
The fact that she stood in the mezzanine of the hotel when Russell Grady showed up had been sheer happenstance.
Her heart did a little pitter-patter as she saw him bent over the conference registration table. He wouldn’t recognize her—how could he? She looked different. She wore a tasteful designer suit that left the right things to the imagination. Her hair was auburn now, not mouse-brown, and she’d done just enough work on her jawline to make the jowls disappear.
And that was assuming he remembered her. She was certain that to him, she was nothing more than a name on a file. A small victory in a career that needed victories. A day’s work.
She remembered that day’s work, from the extra twist he’d used when he cuffed her to the painful pinch on her nipple outside of camera range as he moved her toward interrogation. Even in interrogation, he managed to brush parts he legally shouldn’t have had access to. And he put his doughy face too close to hers, breathing garlic on her from his cheap lunch, some of which was still stuck in his crooked teeth.
He wore a bad suit back then, but he wore tailored now, something that took twenty pounds off his middle and made his sallow skin look a little healthier. But he was still a mean son of a bitch. That was evident in the smile he gave to the woman behind registration. The smile was narrow, and it never reached his beady little eyes.
Carla watched from less than a yard away. She stood where she could see him from all angles—thank heavens for the hotel’s obsession with mirrors. She watched him take his conference badge and alligator-clip it to his lapel. That little movement, which could catch a thread and ruin a suit coat, told her that he had money now.
She waited until he left with his little plastic bag of goodies before she approached registration. She made sure she looked just a bit flustered as she hurried over.
“I’m sorry,” she said, relieved that no one else was registering at the moment. That gave her an actual opening. “But was that Russell Grady? I haven’t seen him in years.”
The registrar, a middle-aged woman with graying hair, sighed.
“Yeah,” she said. “He doesn’t miss these things.”
And her tone told Carla that the registrar wished he would.
“Really?” Carla said in her best isn’t-that-amazing voice. “I didn’t know the LAPD had an interest in loss prevention. And here I heard in the workshops that the cops don’t have the funding to deal with our crimes.”
“Oh, he’s not LAPD,” the woman said as if she couldn’t believe he had ever been LAPD. “He’s the guy who designed the infamous McGuire’s Asset Protection Program.”
“Infamous?” Carla asked—and this question was real. She hadn’t heard of it, and she’d been on the fringes of this business for years now.
“Oh, yes,” the woman said. “He breaks half the rules we set up, but he gets results. McGuire’s has the lowest shrinkage of all comparably sized department stores.”
“Really?” Carla looked over her shoulder as if she could still see Grady. “Will he have a presentation?”
“Hell, no,” the woman said. “Grady doesn’t share his methods or his information with anyone. But he sure uses what we teach. Sometimes I think he’s the biggest thief of all.”
***
So Carla tracked him. And learned that all of Grady’s colleagues hated him.
What a surprise.
Then she went home, which at the moment was Des Moines, and tracked McGuire’s online. The chain might’ve had a great in-house security system, but its online presence was easily hackable.
She saw Grady’s little fiefdom for what it was: an impressive police state. She’d never seen so many cameras in a department store, each with a 360-degree rotation (and obviously hidden in one of those “invisible” glass ceiling bubbles that all good thieves knew to look for) and each with more data storage capacity than she had ever seen outside of a high-end Las Vegas casino.
But that wasn’t the impressive part. The impressive part was a two-fold set-up. The first part, in the shadowy back corridors of the flagship store, were the expected camera viewing rooms, the security equipment rooms, and most important of all, the interrogation rooms.
The interrogation rooms made her shiver. But the rooms in one of McGuire’s warehouses in Compton gave her even worse chills. This particular warehouse didn’t store goods; it operated as its own police department.
The rooms built into that warehouse housed a complete forensics department, with a fingerprint and DNA lab, an operating center with images of potential perps, and something that looked frighteningly like a cell.
Finally, there was the cyber unit. She had a real start when she found that, afraid that they’d be tracking her as she hacked into their system.
If she had gone in through McGuire’s store website—the one you could order off of—then the cyber unit would’ve caught her. But Grady, in his arrogance and (most likely) his ignorance, had no idea anyone would want to break into the security side of the business. Just like no one would ever want to break into police headquarters.
And in that, of course, he was wrong.
When she wasn’t working on her other jobs, she monitored McGuire’s. She watched interrogations, saw squirrelly little shoplifters get left for an hour or more in that fake jail cell, saw the occasional grope, usually by good old Grady himself. Of course, no one would call the cops on him because no one dared: All the gropees had been caught in the commission of a crime.
Oddly, though, Grady didn’t seem to be involving the police. No one, so far as Carla could tell, got charged with a crime. Not that it would’ve mattered. In California’s revolving-door prison system, a shoplifter would’ve been in and out in less than 12 hours.
So clearly, Grady was working another angle here to reduce shrinkage. And some of these angles, Carla could easily observe.
Toward the end of February, she saw something that surprised her. A gorgeous little celebrity who had gone from the hottest starlet in Hollywood to a loser on Dancing With The Stars tottered into the flagship store on platform shoes that ruined her balance so badly she looked drunk. Maybe she wanted to look drunk, because she lacked certain tells. Her reflexes were too quick, her eyes too sharp.
She would catch herself on a rack of sunglasses or designer scarves, and something would fall into her suitcase-sized Prada bag. The starlet wasn’t that good, but she was good enough that she could have claimed it was all an accident—if it weren’t for the perfume.
The perfume wasn’t even expensive, not by Hollywood standards. Maybe $200 an ounce, not even enough to be put into one of the locked displays. The perfume couldn’t be brushed into the bag; it had to be set in the bag. And if the former starlet had been truly good, she could have pulled it off. Instead, she had to use a thumb and forefinger, and gently set the perfume inside an inner pocket.
Carla tensed when security surrounded the starlet, but they didn’t touch her. They talked gently to her, moved her to the back with an ease that spoke of long practice. Carla’s tension increased, expecting the starlet to get trucked to that camera-less room in Compton or maybe get felt up in the camera’s blind spots in the flagship store.
Instead, security brought her to a beautifully apportioned room, which Carla had always thought of as a practice showroom for high-end furniture, with its white couch, mahogany tables, and upscale art. The starlet sat inside, looking uncomfortable as one of the security guys ran off to get her a beverage from the nearby in-house café.
He came back just as Grady showed up. Grady let the security guy go in first, then Grady followed, looking big and blustery and very cop-like, even in his bespoke suit.
For the first time, Carla wished she had audio. She watched like a voyeur. She knew how this would play out, even if Grady was smart enough to keep his hands off the starlet.
The LAPD would show up at any minute and remove the starlet in velvet handcuffs. There’d probably be paparazzi outside, but even if there wasn’t, someone inside the store would use a phone camera to get grainy video of the arrest.
That video, along with the security video of the shoplifting itself, would show up on TMZ and maybe even Extra or Entertainment Tonight. The LA prosecutor’s office would have to press charges, and there’d be a celebrity court watch, for everything from the bail hearing to the actual trial itself. There’d be a plea bargain (if the starlet was lucky), and some kind of public service, and then either a visit to Betty Ford or maybe a stint on Celebrity Rehab, particularly if the starlet’s ego wouldn’t let her do real rehab work—only work she got paid for.
But this interview wasn’t following the script. Grady had moved one of the matching white chairs in front of the couch, his knees not quite touching the starlet’s. She clutched her hands in her lap—security had confiscated her suitcase-sized purse—and she was shaking.
He seemed gentle, almost apologetic, his body language almost submissive. His hands opened the way someone’s did as they explained something.
The starlet began to sob.
Grady did not try to comfort her. Instead he watched, like a disappointed parent, one who knew this storm had to pass. Then he spoke again.
The starlet wiped the tears from her face with her thumb. Her fingers were shaking. Real tears, then. Real fear. Not some kind of performance.
She took a deep breath, glanced at the security guy standing near the door as if he held the answers, and then rubbed a hand over her mouth. Considering.
Finally, she gestured to the security guy, and he brought her purse over.
Carla frowned. She hadn’t expected this.
Grady took one of those handheld credit card devices that upscale restaurants had started to favor out of a drawer in the coffee table. The starlet removed all of the stolen items from her purse and put them on the tabletop.
Carla frowned. She had no idea what Grady was doing.
Grady touched each item, clearly adding up the cost. Then he spoke to the starlet, giving her some kind of total. The starlet reached into that bag a final time and removed a wallet. From the wallet, she took a black American Express card. No limit. How nice.
Grady’s eyes lit up when he saw it, but his expression didn’t change.
Carla’s did. She leaned forward. Something wasn’t right here.
Grady kept talking as he ran the credit card. Then he handed the starlet her receipt. She signed it. He held onto the AmEx.
When the starlet finished, she gave him back the receipt.
He did not return the card.
Instead, he shook the card at the starlet, then swiped it in the little device a second time. The starlet watched, biting her lower lip hard, but not hard enough to stop the trembling.
This was the important transaction. This was the one that Grady wanted and the starlet feared.
He peeled off the receipt and gave it to her, still holding the card. She took a deep breath, and signed. Then she handed the receipt to him, trembling so hard it looked like she might come apart.
Thank you, he said, this time the words visible even to a non-lip reader.
He returned the card to the starlet, and she stuffed it in the bag as if she was the one who had been the victim of a crime.
Grady took the two receipts and his device, and left, pausing at the door to say one more thing—whatever that was. Then he walked out, followed by the security guard.
The starlet stayed on the couch, her head buried in her hands, her shoulders shaking.
Crying. Sobbing, actually. And not a performance, because there was no one to perform for. Except Carla, whom no one knew was watching, and probably Grady himself in some other room.
But the starlet probably wasn’t smart enough to figure that out. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, then gave up and used her shirt. When she finished, she collected the items she had stolen and put them back in her bag.
She paused at the perfume, as if it had bitten her. Finally, she left it on the table. She got up, slung her bag over her shoulder, and walked out of the room, pretending at dignity, and almost pulling it off.
Carla shrank that image and looked at the other camera footage, the ones showing the starlet leaving the store unmolested. She walked out, no trace of the tears, and hesitated just one brief instant before going out the front door.
Where no one waited for her. Not paparazzi, not police, not anyone at all. She walked down the sidewalk until she was out of camera range, like the famous woman she had once been.
Carla returned her attention to that room. The perfume bottle remained. No one returned to pick it up. The room looked abandoned, and probably was, at least for the day.
Carla leaned back in her own chair, contemplating. She knew how all of this was supposed to work. There were rules, and Grady had missed most of them.
Rule Number One of Asset Protection: Let the subject leave the store with the items to prove that she was actually shoplifting, not carelessly (accidentally) dropping things in her suitcase-sized purse. Have security pick up the subject. Call the police.
Grady never ever called the police.
But if he was going to call the police on someone, the starlet was the one. Because the police couldn’t avoid charging her. Since the case would be all over the media, they’d have to act.
And McGuire’s would get the publicity, none of it bad, because 1) it was good enough for a celebrity to shop there and 2) it handled the criminals in the right and proper manner.
Rule Number Two of Asset Protection: Never let the subject pay for the merchandise. That muddied the waters even without an arrest.
But of course, in this transaction, paying for the merchandise hadn’t been the important payment.
The second payment had been the important one. The second payment which had gone—where? Grady’s pocket? It would explain the expensive suits, the comfort with money.
But it wouldn’t explain how he failed to get caught. The security guard should’ve reported him. One disgruntled celebrity talking to management and the entire house of cards would fall apart.
All the starlet had to do, after all, was contact AmEx, and their investigation department—their asset protection department—would discover the bogus charge, accuse Grady, and get him dismissed.
After all, no retail outfit wanted an employee to extort the customers, particularly customers who could control the press.
Carla tapped her front teeth with her thumbnail. She narrowed her gaze, wondering how to play this.
Because she couldn’t let it go. She’d never been able to let Grady go, keeping him front and center in her brain for a year, and now that she rediscovered him, tracking him almost daily.
It wouldn’t take too many clicks of her mouse, too many incursions into databases she had no business in, to figure out exactly what was going on.
***
Fifty thousand dollars. The second charge went to McGuire’s, just like the first, only the second was for fifty thousand dollars.
And none of that went directly into Grady’s pocket.
Which surprised Carla. Somehow she had expected the second charge to be some kind of shell company, some kind of dummy organization.
It seemed Grady was smarter than the average extortionist.
Or maybe something else was going on. She felt a little tingle of apprehension as she stared at those numbers. She was missing something; she was sure of it.
It took her a while to figure out what that something was. Her latest job took her from Des Moines to Boise, although she ended up in the same cookie-cutter hotel chain that had housed the Loss Prevention convention in Orlando. She rather liked cookie-cutter; she knew what to expect from her bland hotel rooms.
It was while she was in the hotel’s exercise suite on a ridiculously high-end elliptical machine that she realized where she was going wrong.
Grady had made both charges in McGuire’s offices, using McGuire’s equipment. Grady wasn’t dumb: He knew that he was on camera. More than that, he knew that even the watchers got watched.
She couldn’t wait to get back to her room and change. She forced herself to have some restraint; she didn’t use the chain’s cheesy Wi-Fi. Instead, she went to Boise State’s main cafeteria. She sat among the masses in their ridiculous bright blue-and-orange school colors, and did her illegal searching with the school’s Wi-Fi, among all the data noise that only scholars could provide.
She hacked into McGuire’s bookkeeping system, using that back door she found, and looked at those transactions of Grady’s.
They had shown up—both of them. The restitution for the shoplifted items, and the $50,000. And they both had a matching accounting code.
Like any large retailer, McGuire’s had a code for everything. Departments had their own codes, and so did employees. Each item should have had its code as well—almost a tracking number—except that the items the starlet had stolen weren’t listed by their code.
They had that weird number, which Carla was beginning to love. She downloaded McGuire’s accounting records for the past two years, and then logged off. She left the campus altogether and went to one of the trendier restaurants in Boise, specializing in steak and a view of the river.
She made certain not to log onto any Wi-Fi there. She ordered the most expensive item on the menu, as she searched the download for that number.
It always showed up in pairs. The first charge was smaller, although rarely less than a grand. The second charge was significantly larger, almost embarrassingly huge. The $50,000 that the starlet had paid was one of the lesser amounts. In the past year alone, the chain had brought in over a million dollars from the secondary payments.
She followed those numbers, making note of the credit cards that paid them. It took a bit more digging into the employee side of McGuire’s accounting department to find out what Grady got out of all of this.
He got a commission. A 25% commission, which seemed ridiculously high. It wasn’t until she tracked the credit card numbers back to their owners that she realized what he had done.
He had set up a system in which light-fingered celebrities paid for silence. During that hour the starlet spent by herself, nervously looking around that upscale room, Grady had been looking at her financials. He figured out just how much she could afford. He clearly wanted enough to sting, but not enough to bankrupt.
And it seemed to be a one-time charge, although Carla wasn’t certain about that. She hadn’t gone back far enough in the records to see if there were repeat offenders.
She doubted it. Celebrities liked their money, almost as much as they liked their privileges. These celebrities would know they were being watched from the moment they entered McGuire’s and that any misstep would cost them another ridiculous sum of money.
They would avoid the charges by avoiding McGuire’s.
And of course, they wouldn’t report the extortion, because they were the ones who initiated it. They were the ones who broke the law.
Although they were all too stupid to realize that Grady really had nothing on them.
Because he hadn’t followed the rules of asset protection.
He was being overconfident.
So she needed to shatter that confidence. She needed to show Grady just what it was like to lose.
***
It took a while to plan this job. She hadn’t been back to LA in a decade, not since the California penal system dumped her on the street with a few dollars and the clothes she’d arrived in. But she still had contacts in LA, and she needed them. Because, unlike almost everything else she did, this wasn’t a solo job. This job required a team.
And the most important member of the team was a minor celebrity with a little larceny in his heart.
Fortunately, she knew just the right person.
She’d known Séamus O’Toole back when he was plain old Jimmy Thomas. He’d been gorgeous even then, with that untamed flop of brown hair that fell just over the scar on his forehead. His official biography claimed the scar came from a street fight that he won when he was just out of high school, and that was almost true.
The fight happened in jail when he was twenty, and he lost when one of his cellmates rammed his pretty face into the iron bars. He passed out, and came to with a shiner, five fewer teeth, and a face covered in blood. The shiner went away, the teeth got fixed by a studio that hired him to play the lead in the bad-boy romance that made his name, but the scar never completely faded.
Neither did the tendency toward larceny.
Back in the day, she and Jimmy shared an attorney. They met in the attorney’s office, and cemented their relationship in the back of Jimmy’s van outside that office. Carla showed Jimmy how to toughen up his résumé so that even the most inventive of paparazzi couldn’t find his real past, and Jimmy got Carla into all the best parties, with all the best marks.
They drifted apart as Jimmy rose to the height of his fame because he was afraid that her presence would lead the paparazzi to his attorney, which would then destroy the Séamus O’Toole fiction that she’d helped him build.
She hadn’t minded that much. She hadn’t liked the party scene. She’d gotten momentarily wealthy off the marks, and she had been in that self-delusional place where she believed the good times would never end.
They’d ended all right, but not for a year or more, and not at one of those amazing parties. But in a wrong-place wrong-time jewelry store heist that had nothing to do with her. Still, it got pinned on her because the moment Grady ran her prints, he found a gold mine of unsolved crimes. It didn’t matter that she’d just been a customer in the store during the armed smash-and-grab. What mattered was all the other stuff he thought he could pin on her.
That he hadn’t been able to build an airtight case on some high-end in-home robberies had frustrated him. It had emboldened her. She should’ve taken the plea—it was just probation. Instead, she thought she could con a jury.
She should’ve taken her probation, used the tricks she’d taught good ole Jimmy and left the Great State of California right then.
But she hadn’t. And that led her here.
Full circle.
To a place where she needed the services of a not-so-famous celebrity, like Séamus O’Toole.
***
He surprised her by being happy to help. He needed, he said, just a bit of excitement in his life. He hadn’t worked in more than two years, not for lack of offers, but for lack of offers that he wanted to do.
She checked him out: He’d actually been smart with his money. He owned his house free and clear, he had a small fortune in the bank, and investments that actually paid off.
Sometime in the last decade, Jimmy Thomas had decided to put that prodigious brain of his to good use.
Carla arrived in LA on a Monday afternoon in the middle of May. She had forgotten how pleasant the City of Angels was in the spring. The temperatures were perfect, the best flowers were in bloom, and the heat of the summer hadn’t yet turned the air into smog soup. Of course, the traffic noise was everywhere, there was no shortcut from here to there, and in the bright unforgiving sunlight, everything looked just a little too tacky.
She stayed in a suite at the Roosevelt, eschewing her chain hotel because it was too far from the action. Besides, the Roosevelt was the in-spot these days, which she found funny because more than a decade ago, the Roosevelt looked like it was on its last legs.
Just off nearby Hollywood Boulevard, she found a diner that had managed to both survive the tourist onslaught and embrace it. The new money allowed the place to get more comfortable booths, to buy a refurbished juke box, and to expand into a neighboring space, but the food was just the same as it had been fifteen years ago—authentic diner food with a touch of New York deli.
She used that as her meeting site with the team, keeping them separate from each other so that she remained their only contact. Besides, she didn’t want them to see Jimmy.
He arrived on Wednesday afternoon in chinos and a polo shirt, looking like any other male hopeful in the city—a bit brighter than everyone else, with that extra edge of sparkle only the charismatic could pull off.
The only concession he made to his celebrity was a shock of hair falling across his famous scar. He bussed her cheek as he slid into the booth, then smiled at her.
The smile was real. She still knew the difference between a Jimmy-smile and a Séamus-smile. A Séamus-smile was broader, brighter, with a glint in the eye that seemed ever-so-genuine. A Jimmy-smile was a little reserved and just a bit sarcastic, as if he couldn’t believe that there was anything in life worth smiling for.
“I missed you, babe,” he said, brushing a hand over her cheek just like he used to do.
The touch made her heart rate increase, just like it always had. “Looks like you’ve done well for yourself, Jimmy.”
“Séamus,” he said softly, the smile fading.
“I thought you wanted to be incognito, my friend,” she said.
He grinned. “How about we dispel with names altogether?”
She shrugged, hoping he would take that for agreement. Such a silly rule. No one cared about him any more. If they did, he’d have to show up in Celebrity Disguise (usually sunglasses and baseball cap), trailing paparazzi. They both knew it, and she was going to remain polite enough not to say so.
“Looks like you’ve done pretty well for yourself,” she said.
“You know better than that,” he said.
“Depends on where you’re looking,” she said. “You might not be Tom Cruise, but you’ve got more than enough scratch, the house is paid for, and you never have to work again if you so choose.”
His gaze flattened, clearly shocked that she knew so much about him. Then he blinked and shook his head. “Same old Carla.”
“No names,” she reminded him, more as a needle.
“Hell, we both know it doesn’t matter,” he said. And he was back, 100%, her Jimmy, with no trace of Séamus at all.
“Oh, it matters,” she said. “Fame settles on you like gold dust, my friend. And it attracts all kinds of people.”
“That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?” he asked. “What’s left of my reputation?”
“Actually, no,” she said, leaning back and placing her arm casually on the side of the booth. “This is about revenge.”
There. She said it. She hadn’t been sure if she would admit it to anyone on the team. But Jimmy had the right to know: He was taking the biggest risk.
He raised his eyebrows, then grinned. “I thought this was about money.”
“Oh,” she said, “you’ll get money.”
“Enough?” he asked, and there was Jimmy again, dark and intense and just a bit dangerous.
She shrugged again. “Depends on what you mean by enough.”
“We’ll talk price after you tell me about the job,” he said. “You were vague on the phone.”
“Of course I was vague,” she said, wondering how much of his edge he had lost.
“So what’s my risk?” he asked.
“Two days, maybe three, of bad publicity,” she said.
He raised a hand to stop her. Bad publicity for an actor was worse than no payment.
But she bulldozed on. “And then everyone’ll find out what really happened, and you’ll be a hero. Interviews, talks, where-did-you-get-the-idea discussions, that sort of thing.”
“And I don’t have to mention you?” he asked.
“It’s better if you don’t.”
“Sounds too good to be true,” he said.
“I thought the same thing,” she said. “And then I realized that everyone has the same problem.”
“What’s that?” he asked.
She smiled slowly. “Success makes us all cocky.”
***
She told him what he needed to know about the job, more than she’d told the others that she hired. He knew a little about Grady, not by name, but by reputation and by her bruises. She had called Jimmy after the arrest, asked him for bail money, which he declined to provide.
Can’t do it, babe. I’m being tailed by guys with cameras and they’ll wonder how I know you.
No one bailed her out, but someone paid for their mutual lawyer and the defense attorney he partnered with. Not that it mattered. She still went away. She still had to endure Grady’s hand on her arm, his garlic-breath in her face, saying Be grateful for the stupid sentence.
Be grateful.
Yeah. Gratitude was her main default emotion. Not.
She told Jimmy that Grady would take him to a really swank back room and sweat him. She didn’t tell Jimmy that Grady would extort him. Jimmy got jobs because he was pretty, not because he was going to win an Oscar some day. She didn’t want to rely on Jimmy’s acting skill.
But she did tell him that Grady wouldn’t physically assault him and that Grady wouldn’t call for back-up from the LAPD. There would be no arrest, and nothing would go on Séamus’s very clean record.
That was enough for Jimmy.
“So,” he said, “you’re my producer, you’re developing a script, and this is the equivalent to my ride-along.”
It took her a minute to understand him. He was putting it in Hollywood terms. They’d teamed up on a specialty project, and as she gathered funding, he was going to do research.
It wasn’t a half bad idea—if she was in the movie-making business, which she was not.
“Whatever makes this work for you,” she said.
He gave her the Séamus-smile. “So, when do we do this thing?”
“In a week or two,” she said. “I’ll call you with the exact time.”
“I can’t be flexible?” he asked.
She shook her head. “We have to know Grady will be onsite. No sense in going through all of this if the Big Bad is on vacation.”
“Good point,” he said. “Very good point.”
***
It took her nearly the entire week to put everything into place. The only hole in the plan was that she didn’t have a cop in her pocket. In every other city she worked in, she had a contact in the police department.
She didn’t have one here, having never expected to return to Los Angeles. The job’s timetable didn’t give her any ability to find someone who might be amenable to her way of doing business, so she didn’t even try.
Either she was going to have to trust a friend’s connections or she was going to have to fly solo.
She preferred flying solo. There were too many hands in this pie already.
Besides, Grady was a former cop, and cops were unpredictable about one of their own, even when that one of their own was a lot less than honest.
She picked a Thursday for the big day, because Thursdays were relatively slow at the flagship store. In this case, she was being double- and triple-cautious. She wanted it to go well (better than well, if she told the truth), so she made sure that everything had a back-up.
Everything except Jimmy, because it was hard to find a celebrity with a bit of larceny in his soul—or at least, one who was willing to use it in service of her good cause.
She had given him three different bugs. One filtered the sound to two team members in a van just outside the store. Another sent her the audio through a Skype-like service. The audio would be chancier here, because something might interfere with the wireless connection. The third sent everything to a capture device she’d placed near the entrance to the store, just so that she’d have a back-up.
Then she had given Jimmy one more device. A tiny little recorder built into a ring he’d placed through his nipple piercing. If nothing else, that thing should record anything and everything said. She couldn’t vouch for quality, but then, she wasn’t going for quality.
She locked herself in her hotel room, half wishing she had given the hotel staff permission to barricade her in here. She was afraid she’d run to Jimmy’s rescue if something went wrong.
This was the part of the job she hated the most. She hadn’t been able to think of a way to bring herself into the middle of the action. She had no direct involvement here. She had to trust the team, and she never trusted a team.
Most of her people were in place at 8:30 a.m. One of her guys moonlighted as a plumber. One of the women created a plumbing emergency with tampons at one of the doctors’ offices at the end of Rodeo. The doctor’s office called in the problem at 8, the truck showed up at 8:20, and the plumber went inside. He was instructed to drag the repairs until 3, and he said it wouldn’t be a problem at all.
Inside the van, in the midst of all the metal snakes, plungers, and weird chemicals, sat the surveillance part of her team, using their laptops to record whatever Jimmy brought them.
And Jimmy, well, he was late, like actors usually were, because some fan actually stopped him for an autograph at the Starbucks a few blocks away. He didn’t mind the delay. Carla could almost hear him defend it: You wanted authenticity, babe. I give it to you in spades.
He strolled to McGuire’s and by the time he hit their first outdoor surveillance camera, he looked like a man with too much time on his hands. He wore torn blue jeans and a loose fitting cotton top, as per instructions. But he added a blue-and-gold scarf for color and Carla had to admit that was a nice touch. The scarf would hide anything he shoved inside of that oversized shirt.
He also had a leather computer bag over one shoulder. Inside, he had an iPad (also per instructions) and little else.
As she monitored McGuire’s various surveillance cameras, she literally sat on the edge of her uncomfortable wooden seat. Her fingers were digging into her palms and that was when she realized she’d clenched her hands into fists.
She made them open, bracing the fingertips on the edge of the desk, watching Jimmy’s image as he made his way through the store.
He touched everything—a shirt here, a jacket there, and then would often just put a hand on the top of his computer bag. He was so good that she didn’t even realize he’d opened the bag until it gaped slightly as he walked into the men’s accessories aisle.
Jimmy knocked two iPod cases into his bag, accidentally dropped some really gaudy Kindle cases inside, and somehow managed to get a few thumb drives in there as well.
So far, no one seemed to notice. He smiled just a little, and worked his way farther back. Some ties, an expensive handkerchief, and still no one noticed.
Finally, he wandered over to the jewelry aisle and lingered over some necklaces. Bold as he could be, he asked one of the clerks to help him with some that were under glass. As she turned her back to get the key, he palmed a few of the display items on the countertop, and conspicuously dropped them in the bag.
That did it. A security guard sidled up beside him, and spoke softly, then peered into the bag. He asked Jimmy to come with him.
“I’m planning to pay for everything,” Jimmy said with admirable offense, his voice coming through Carla’s in-room system perfectly. “Haven’t you heard of cloth shopping bags?”
Then he emitted one of those empty, patronizing chuckles that the rich often used. “Although,” he added, “this bag is leather, so I can see how it would throw you off.”
Brilliant. Just brilliant. The right sense of entitlement.
“Still, sir,” the security guard said, “I need you to come with me.”
“Sir?” Jimmy said. “Sir? Don’t you know who I am? I’m Séamus O’Toole. I just don’t go into backrooms willy-nilly with strange security people who have some kind of stick up their ass.”
The security guard straightened as if he did just get a stick up his ass. He nodded to the clerk behind the counter, who hit some kind of button. Two other security guards ran from the back of the store.
“If you don’t want a scene, Mr. O’Toole,” the guard said as if he had no idea who Séamus was, “then you’ll have to come with me.”
He grabbed Jimmy’s arm. Jimmy shook him off. Carla held her breath. She didn’t want Jimmy to play this too tough; she had no idea what would happen then.
The two other guards flanked him. They made Jimmy look small. He tilted his head—so Séamus O’Toole—and grinned.
“You guys are going to make this tough, aren’t you?” he said.
“Just come with us, Mr. O’Toole,” said one of the other guards as he took Jimmy’s arm.
Jimmy looked down at the hand, one eyebrow raised. “I do have lawyers, you know,” he said. “They can be rather vicious.”
Carla bit her lower lip. She hadn’t expected the lawyer comment. In fact, she didn’t want the lawyer comment. She wanted everyone there to think Jimmy was on his own.
“But,” Jimmy said, almost cheerfully, “I guess I’ll see what you boys want.”
He let the guards lead him to the back. They took him to the fancy room—the Green Room, she’d been calling it to her team, even though there was nothing green about it. She was using the show-business term for the place where performers waited before they went onstage. She wasn’t sure if it was apt or not, just that this was the place Grady put his high-end victims before he put the squeeze on them.
After fifteen minutes, Jimmy squirmed—turned out that latte he’d bought made him uncomfortable. The security guard who remained in the room actually accompanied Jimmy to the men’s room, which seemed to freak Jimmy out more than anything.
“Am I a prisoner here?” he asked as the man pushed open the bathroom door.
The security guard didn’t answer.
Carla’s heart pounded. She had planned this job on only a few pieces of data. She hoped that she had interpreted the information correctly. If she hadn’t, the person who would get hurt wasn’t her; it was Jimmy.
He made it back to the Green Room in only a few minutes. Another security guard brought him some kind of mocha something, which Jimmy seemed to consider before drinking. Carla didn’t know if he was worried about poison or just another bathroom visit. No matter what it was, Jimmy didn’t end up drinking anything.
It took more than an hour for Grady to join him. Carla couldn’t monitor Grady’s office, but she did have an eye on the computer systems owned by McGuire’s. Someone—presumably Grady—had done a thorough background check, using everything but fingerprints.
(Carla had been worried about the fingerprints side of this, considering McGuire’s warehouse came with a lab, but apparently Jimmy’s Séamus identity was still airtight.)
She smiled as the same someone found the remnants of an arrest record for the young Séamus O’Toole—the pre-Hollywood record for the guy who didn’t really exist. She had warned Jimmy she would add that, and that it would disappear when this was all over.
Besides, to the average reporter, the records looked like they were expunged. To a former cop, there was just enough information here to make Grady think that Séamus O’Toole had light fingers from way back.
Finally that same someone (Grady) had done a full credit check, including a long lingering pause at all of the credit that Séamus had at his fingertips. Which, considering how well Jimmy had handled his Séamus earnings, was quite a bit.
Then Grady let himself into the Green Room, and like before, let one of the security guards stay. This was a different security guard from the last time, which surprised Carla. She would have expected the old bad-boy team to stick together.
“Mr. O’Toole,” Grady said. “I’m Russell Grady, head of McGuire’s Asset Protection Division.”
He stuck out his hand, but stayed far enough back that Jimmy had to half-stand to shake it. Which Jimmy did not do.
“I don’t appreciate being held prisoner in a department store, Mr. Grady,” Jimmy said.
“Actually,” Grady said with an oily smile. “It’s Detective Grady, retired. I used to be with the LAPD.”
“How the mighty have fallen,” Jimmy said, as if he were making the comment to himself.
In spite of herself, Carla grinned.
“The mighty actually have quite a few advantages here,” Grady said as he grabbed the same chair he had used on previous occasions. “I can do a few things I couldn’t do when I was with the LAPD and yet, it would be good of you to remember that I still have friends there.”
“Oh, really?” Jimmy asked. “Why is that?”
“Because shoplifting is a crime, Mr. O’Toole.”
Jimmy laughed. “I wasn’t shoplifting, Mr. Grady. As I told your clerks, I was shopping and using my shopping bag, being green and all. If you folks provided carts or some kind of carry-all like most places do, then I wouldn’t have had to resort to using my own.”
Jimmy looked at him as if expecting to get a pass. Carla clenched her fists. Jimmy was always too combative and if he fought too hard here, she had no idea what would happen.
“After all,” Jimmy added with the right amount of nervousness, “I didn’t leave with your things without paying for them. You’ll note I’m still in your store and I have told you that I expect to pay.”
He said that last with the right amount of bravado. Carla unclenched her fists—again.
Grady didn’t respond.
“And,” Jimmy said, his voice trembling just a smidge, “even if I had accidentally tried to take something out of the store, that sensor thingie you have by the door would have prevented it.”
Grady smiled. A real smile. “Except that it wouldn’t have, would it, Mr. O’Toole? Your bag has tinfoil under the lining. In the trade, we call that a ‘booster bag.’”
“Brilliant,” Carla whispered. She hadn’t told him to do that. Jimmy had come up with that on his own. Tinfoil inside a bag fooled the sensors.
Jimmy straightened his shoulders as if he was shaking the accusation off. “I’m not responsible for what some manufacturer put inside his bag.”
“Nice try, Mr. O’Toole, but manufacturers don’t put tin foil in bags and then clumsily sew the lining over them. Why would a man like you be so serious about your shoplifting? Have you thought about what the paparazzi will say? Because they’ll be brutal when they see your booster bag.”
Jimmy bit his lower lip. Carla had a hunch this fear reaction wasn’t faked.
“You know this is a misunderstanding, right?” Jimmy said. “You know—”
“That you’re going to blame this misunderstanding on your housekeeper or your gardener or someone who sold you this lovely bag on the street, right, Mr. O’Toole?” Grady’s smile seemed almost feral now. “That’ll play well in the press. Séamus O’Toole blames staff for his own shortcomings. Some folks might actually buy that, until we release the fingerprint evidence.”
Jimmy stiffened. So did Carla. She hoped he didn’t blow it here. She knew Grady hadn’t run Jimmy’s prints. But Jimmy didn’t know that.
“I’m sure the press will be much more vicious if you blame your housekeeper and it turns out that your fingerprints are all over that tinfoil.”
Jimmy sat very stiffly, not responding, not moving.
“So, why don’t you own up like a real man?” Grady said, “and we’ll see what we can do.”
Jimmy still didn’t move. Carla held her breath. She hoped he knew it was make or break here.
Finally, he said, “What do you mean?”
“Well,” Grady said cheerfully, “you said you planned to pay for the merchandise. I think it’s time you do so, don’t you?”
“O-Okay,” Jimmy said. “Let’s go back down to the floor. I’ll pay for everything in my bag.”
He sounded like a man grasping at straws. Carla nodded encouragement even though she was blocks away.
“We’ll do that here,” Grady said. He snapped his fingers at the security guy, who opened the door, and grabbed the bag from one of the other guards. Then he handed it to Grady, who emptied it on the coffee table. Grady separated the merchandise from everything else.
Then he totaled it up, out loud, grabbed the handheld credit card device, and extended a hand. “Pay up,” he said.
“Here?” Jimmy asked.
“Here,” Grady said.
Jimmy frowned, clearly confused. He wasn’t sure what to do, and Carla hadn’t told him to get real reactions. This was the only place that strategy backfired. She wanted Jimmy to grab onto the offer like a lifeline, instead he just stared at Grady.
“That’s it?” Jimmy asked nervously.
“All I need is your credit card,” Grady said, deftly avoiding the answer.
Carla knew Jimmy had noticed. She also knew that Jimmy was going to ignore the avoidance. He grabbed his wallet off the table, opened it, and pulled out a MasterCard.
“You sure there’s enough on that for all this?” Grady asked. “You do spend a lot, don’t you, Mr. O’Toole.”
Actually, he didn’t, but Carla had urged him to charge things on his cards for the past week, things he normally paid cash for, just to make this part of the con look real.
Jimmy hesitated for a minute as if he wasn’t prepared for that, and then grabbed his black AmEx. He had told her he hated using that AmEx, that it terrified him, and sure enough, his hands were shaking as he cupped it.
“Mr. O’Toole,” Grady said gently, unable to hide his pure greed.
Jimmy took a deep breath, then handed him the card. Grady ran his fingers over the embossed numbers as if they held the secret to the universe. Then he slid the card through the machine, printed out the paper, and put it in front of Jimmy to sign.
Jimmy grabbed a pen and signed. Then he held his hand out for his card.
“Not so fast, young man,” Grady said. “You need your items first.”
The bastard sat there and watched as Jimmy put all of the formerly stolen items in his bag. Then Jimmy set the bag beside him, wallet on his lap, and extended his hand for the credit card again.
Carla was holding her breath and leaning forward, praying that the audio wouldn’t cut out here. Her heart was pounding as if she was in the room with Jimmy and Grady.
“You want your card back?” Grady asked. “Then we have to have a bit of a discussion.”
“I’ve paid for the items,” Jimmy said. “You have nothing on me.”
“Except your propensity for shoplifting,” Grady said. “I saw your juvenile record. So sad.”
Jimmy jolted as if he actually had a juvenile record, which he did not.
“And,” Grady continued, “I have a video of you dropping items into your bag. My staff will attest to the fact that you tried to leave without paying for those items. We caught you outside. Thank you, by the way, for using the bag. Because no one can know what’s inside without looking, so we don’t even have to doctor a photograph. Everyone will simply assume that you had the items in the bag when we caught you.”
Jimmy swallowed visibly. “I thought you were LAPD retired.”
“I am,” Grady said.
“Then you know this isn’t right,” Jimmy said, his voice rising. “You can’t do this. My lawyer—”
“Will have to clean up a mess. Because all I have to do is invite a few paparazzi here and they’ll photograph you leaving. One of my men will grab your arm, and wow, we won’t even need the photo of you with your closed bag. Because we’ll have the bag with the items in it.”
“And a receipt,” Jimmy said.
“That thing?” Grady asked. “Did you look at it before signing? Nothing was itemized, and the date is wrong.”
Jimmy grabbed the receipt and looked at it. His mouth gaped open. Carla had a hunch that part of his reaction was very real too. “You son of a bitch. What the hell are you doing?”
“Teaching you a very expensive lesson,” Grady said. “Be grateful. Other department stores would have you under arrest by now.”
Be grateful. Asshole. A shiver ran through Carla as she listened to him.
“But you’re not going to arrest me,” Jimmy said, more as a statement than a question.
“Why should I, when there are much more effective deterrents?” Grady said. “You worry about negative publicity. I can provide negative publicity. The LA County Prosecutor will make an example of you, you know. If I call the paparazzi, this is a year-long story about your fall from grace.”
“And if you don’t call them?” Jimmy asked nervously.
“Well, then,” Grady said, “you have to promise to stay out of all McGuire’s stores.”
“Done,” Jimmy said too quickly.
“And,” Grady said, “you have to pay a one-time fee for your malfeasance.”
“One-time?” Jimmy tilted his head. “How do I know that it’s one-time?”
Grady’s grin grew wider, the bastard. Carla twisted her hands together so that she wouldn’t pound on the keyboard. She made herself watch.
“You don’t know,” Grady said. “And, honestly, it’s not a one-time fee if you come back into McGuire’s—any McGuire’s. We’re going to assume that you are there to shoplift, so we’ll charge you our shoplifting tax.”
“That’s what you call this?” Jimmy asked. “A tax?”
“Sometimes. But mostly, I consider it a consulting fee. I’m consulting with you on the dangers of shopping. If anyone asks, in fact, I’ll say that we were consulting for a new role of yours. I was teaching you the ins and outs of asset protection.”
“Has that worked in the past?” Jimmy asked. Carla could’ve kicked him. That wasn’t a victim question. That was an information question.
But Grady didn’t seem to notice. “Many times. And as a few lawyers have learned, there’s no way to prove otherwise.”
Jimmy shook his head, then ran a hand over his mouth. The hand was still shaking.
Grady watched, infinitely patient. Carla watched, barely able to stay in her seat.
“Finish it, you jerk,” she said to Grady. “Just finish it.”
She wanted the job to be done. She wanted Jimmy out of there. Probably not as much as he wanted to be out of there.
Jimmy sighed, still shaking his head. Then he looked up at Grady. “So what is this one-time consulting fee?”
“For you, Mr. O’Toole? It’s one-hundred thousand dollars.”
Carla whistled. So Jimmy was worth more than that starlet had been. Amazing.
“Excuse me?” Jimmy asked.
“You heard me,” Grady said.
“I don’t have that,” Jimmy said.
“Nonsense,” Grady said. “Your lovely house is paid for. You have more money in the bank than should be allowed. You’ve made some wonderful investments. I’m sure your financial advisor has told you that even if you never revive that flagging career of yours, you’re set for life.”
“I don’t have an advisor,” Jimmy mumbled, which surprised Carla. She thought he would have objected to the phrase “flagging career,” not “financial advisor.”
“No advisor?” Grady asked. “That makes this so much easier. You tag this as a consulting fee and it’s deductible. You’re covered with the IRS and you don’t have to explain to anyone else what you’re doing. How good is that?”
“A hundred thousand dollars,” Jimmy said, and looked up. Carla realized he was looking for the security camera. That last wasn’t for Grady; it was for her, and it was a complaint. She had told him that he would be charged a large sum on his AmEx. She hadn’t told him how large.
“It’s either that or a year in court and on TV, Mr. O’Toole,” Grady said. “I think you’re getting off easy. After all, you stole from us.”
“Not technically,” Jimmy said, but his protest was clearly a reflex. “Can you write me something guaranteeing that this is a one-time fee?”
Grady laughed. The sound was mean. Carla shivered, and Jimmy just looked miserable.
“You’ll have to trust me, Mr. O’Toole,” Grady said.
Jimmy glared at him. “One hundred thousand dollars?”
“Non-negotiable,” Grady said.
“Fine,” Jimmy said, waving a hand at Grady. “Just do it.”
“With pleasure,” Grady said. Then he smiled. “But first, let’s change the date on the machine, shall we?”
Jimmy rolled his eyes and shook his head, then he turned away, clearly unable to watch.
Grady cheerfully ran the card another time. Carla rubbed her thumbs together so hard that they ached.
The card ran the amount with no problems. Carla let out a small sigh of relief.
Jimmy’s face was pale.
“I need a signature, Mr. O’Toole.” Grady said.
Jimmy signed. Then Grady handed him the card. Jimmy reacted as if it was radioactive. He set it inside his wallet, and dropped it all in his bag.
“We’re done here, Mr. O’Toole,” Grady said standing. “I’d love to see you here again, but I doubt that will happen, so let me be the first to say, this was an absolute pleasure.”
“Screw yourself blue,” Jimmy said and launched off the couch. He hurried toward the door, bag in hand. “There better not be press out there.”
“Oh, there won’t be, Mr. O’Toole,” Grady said. “Have a nice day.”
“Have a nice day yourself, you bastard,” Carla said and leaned back. “Because we got you. We got you cold.”
***
If, of course, she did the next part correctly. She had to make sure all the various vids and audio were backed up. Then she had to make one particular video, with a lot of angles, like a movie production, just for one client. And she had to do it fast.
But she wasn’t moving fast enough. She hadn’t even called off the plumber team before there was a knock on her door.
She peered through the spy hole, saw Jimmy—sweating—breaking all the rules. He wasn’t supposed to see her until tomorrow. It was her own damn fault for telling him what hotel she was in.
She pulled open the door.
“One hundred thousand dollars! Are you kidding me?” He slammed the door behind him and tossed the bag onto a nearby chair. “You said a large amount on my AmEx. You didn’t say some asswipe’s entire salary.”
“I didn’t know how much,” Carla said. “I just knew it would be a lot.”
“A lot. A lot? Jesus, you need to pay me for this. It’s not coming out of my pocket.”
“I know,” Carla said. “Tomorrow we call AmEx and reverse the charges.”
“Today,” Jimmy said as he stalked farther into the room. “We cancel it today.”
“That’s what Grady’s waiting for,” Carla said. “And then everything will hit the press, and we’ll have to do a lot more repair on your reputation.”
Jimmy went all the way over to the windows and looked down on Hollywood Boulevard. “Why the hell did I agree to this? I’m never going to get my money back, am I? I signed that damn receipt.”
“Under duress,” Carla said calmly. “Or maybe that’s not your signature. If AmEx gives you problems, we’ll solve it.”
“I don’t believe you,” Jimmy said, and he was furious. She couldn’t ever remember seeing him this mad. “You don’t have one-hundred thousand dollars. You’re in on this with him.”
That last stunned her. “I am not.”
Jimmy turned toward her, hands on his hips, eyes narrowed.
“Just settle down,” she said. “We have a few things left to do. I told you this would cost you money, and it would initially be a publicity risk. Had you forgotten that?”
“No,” he said sullenly.
“Good,” she said. “Because you seem to have forgotten everything else. You’re not supposed to be here. I have a lot of work to do to finish this job, and your presence here gets in the way of that. Did you make sure you weren’t followed?”
His lips thinned. “Yes. I’m not stupid, you know.”
But she was certain he hadn’t been looking for Grady’s men; Jimmy had been looking for paparazzi. Still, he probably would have noticed anyone who followed him from the store.
“At least you did that right,” she said. “Now get out and let me finish.”
He sighed and stalked back to the door. He had his hand on the knob when he added, “I’m not happy about this,”
“Noted,” she said.
She watched as he let himself out. Then she shook the tension out of her shoulders. This had to work.
It was all up to her now.
Usually she liked that feeling. But not today. Today it felt too risky.
Today it felt like she had made a big mistake.
***
Eight years before, Carla had taken a class in video production for the courtroom, and even though it had cost a mint (it had been for legal assistants and other lawyerly types), it had been worth every penny. She knew what to leave in a composite video, what to leave out, and how to show that she hadn’t tampered with the original in any way.
She had video from every one of McGuire’s security cameras, and enough audio to make every word spoken in that gaudy little room crystal clear.
She made several composite videos—one without sound, of the starlet and of Jimmy spliced into each other. It was amazing how similar both cons had been. Then she made a video highlight reel (at least that was how she thought of it) of the best parts of the conversation between Jimmy and Grady.
She had a third disk, of the conversation in its entirety. And of course, she had the originals.
She made several backups, then downloaded the highlight reel, the composite, and the entire conversation onto two thumb drives. She put everything else on an iPad that had nothing else on it—no specialty apps, no nothing. Just the videos.
She was good to go.
***
The setup the following day was almost identical, except that she wouldn’t be in her hotel room, monitoring the audio feeds. She had to trust that the feeds would work like they did the last time.
The plumber’s van had returned—seemed there was yet another problem at that doctor’s office, poor things. And she wore as many different microphones and recording chips as she had originally given Jimmy. The only differences this time were the extra small video cameras she carried. A couple of them recorded everything onto a chip and a few of them followed the audio feeds, including one inside a button on her blouse: she had a hunch that Grady would cut off the security feed when he realized what she had done, and she still wanted a visual.
Then, at precisely ten a.m., she sent herself to McGu