Fool Me Forever (The Confidence Game 2)

“I’m not even sure I could describe them accurately enough to the police, and they’re long gone.”

“I meant with Cookie Jar.”

She swiveled on her stool to face Halsey. “I thought you said your family couldn’t help.”

“There’s no one who has time to run a major sting right now.” He lifted his glass and studied the last slurp as if it were the answer to some question she hadn’t asked. “Except me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t do that kind of work. It’s people work.”

She clinked her glass to his. “Let’s hear it for Spreadsheet Man. Confounds them with calculations, wrecks them with sums.”

He was facing forward, but his smile was unmistakable. “I prefer Excel Boy. Like Hellboy but with numbers.”

And who knew she was as susceptible to Excel Boy’s dry sense of humor as she was to his true blue eyes and his steadying touch.

He tossed back that last mouthful. “But you could.”

“Me?” She almost gagged on that.

“You could do the parts I’d fumble. If you were with me, maybe I wouldn’t fumble. I never saw myself as the kind of guy who would take on a knife-wielding mugger and win.”

And yet, he’d given the impression he was a good friend of The Punisher.

“You think we could work together to bring down Cookie Jar?”

He looked at his empty glass and signaled the barman, who bought them fresh drinks. “He’d never see us coming.”

“No,” she said so loudly the barman raised a brow at her and she had to wave her hand and point to her glass, so he didn’t leave her pour out.

“It’s just a thought,” Halsey said.

They sat at the bar with the fake impressionist paintings and the fake book wallpaper, and real blood drying on Halsey’s knuckles. The kitchen was on hiatus until dinner, and it was too early for the after-work drinks crowd; they had the place entirely to themselves.

She should go. Any minute now, her adrenaline crash would meet her alcohol consumption, and the fact that she ached to lean into Halsey and have his arm at her back would feel like a good idea again.

“How?” she asked, pushing the ripple of desire down.

He grimaced. “You don’t really want to know.”

What the hell, Excel Boy? “I didn’t really want to get mugged or give money to a charity that would misuse it. I really want to establish myself as an honest, reliable, heart-in-the-right-place person who can be trusted. I really want to restore my family name.” All reasons she shouldn’t want to sit on a barstool beside him, let alone develop a craving for his touch, a hunger for his kiss. “Right now, I want to know how you’d do it.”

He put his glass down on a coaster and rotated it slowly between his thumb and first finger. “The way to catch a crook is to know what motivates him and help him be motivated. Once he believes he’s smarter than you are, that’s when you can lead him to where you want him.”

What he was doing with the glass was making her wonder what it would feel like if his big, capable hand was on her bare skin and not politely at her back. Stop it! “Give me an example.”

“The knife guy didn’t want your purse. He wanted money, credit cards, anything he could sell. Instead of hitting him, I could’ve paid him to go away.”

“But he would’ve won.”

Halsey took his hand off the glass and that was somehow as disappointing as his example. She’d thought it would be like the plot of a casino heist movie.

“And the next time he tried, you’d say, ‘Wait, I have to go get the money, I don’t have enough on me.’ You’d go together, and you’d pay him, and he’d go away thinking what a fine business he had with you.”

This was an appalling story line. “And he wins again.”

“And the next time you lead him to the ATM, the police are waiting. And you’ve established a pattern for his crimes that’s impossible for him to wiggle out of. He goes down. You’ve taken him off the street.”