Taken (Dark Desires 1)

Eddie nodded as he listened. “So, you’re thinking smash and grab?”

Eddie and I had been doing smash and grabs since we were kids. Basically, you run into a place, smash the fuck out of the glass display cases with a hammer or the butt of a gun, and grab whatever the fuck you can and get the fuck out. Smash and grabs worked fine if you didn’t care what you got away with. The Crown hit would not be a smash and grab because I didn’t care about the shit in the display cases. I wanted what was kept in the safe in the office.

“Not a smash and grab,” I said.

Eddie dug a cigarette pack from his shirt pocket and held it out to me. I shook my head and said I was trying to quit. I rolled his window down a couple of inches. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke toward the window, then gave me a sideways frown. “Not a smash and grab. Okay, what then?”

“There is a safe in the office,” I said. “A source I have on the inside tells me that Mr. Crown stores a couple of million dollars’ worth of loose diamonds there at any given time. That’s our target.”

Eddie grinned and poked me with his elbow. “Who’s your inside source? Let me guess, that fat girl you’ve been banging? What’s her name? Doris, Doreen…”

“Dottie,” I said. “And she’s not fat. She’s pleasantly plump.”

“What you call pleasantly plump I call fat, my brother,” Eddie said. “I knew there had to be a reason you were dipping your stick into that one. Not exactly your usual type. So, what’s her connection to the jewelry store?”

“She’s the one who sold me the watch,” I said, wiggling my wrist at him. “Turns out, Dottie is a very lonely, very horny lady. After a couple of hours of banging the shit out of her at the No Tell Motel, she was more than happy to answer all my questions about her place of employment.”

Eddie scratched his chin, which was covered with a scraggly beard he’d been trying to grow since high school. “What’s gonna happen when the cops question Dottie after we hit the store?”

“Won’t be a problem,” I said, shaking my head.

He gave me a sideways glance, then a smirk. “You gonna kill her?”

“I don’t kill people, Eddie,” I said, giving him a hard look that made him turn away. I was a criminal, but I wasn’t a killer. Eddie had killed people. Sometimes, people who didn’t deserve to die, like that poor schmuck at the convenience store a couple of months back. Eddie’s temper got away from him sometimes and people got hurt. Sometimes, I thought he might even like it; hurting people. But he’s my little brother. I love him. I try not to think about it too much.

“So, what’s your plan for her then?”

“I wore a disguise whenever I was with her,” I said. “Dottie knows me as a traveling salesman from Reno named Carl Douglass who wears glasses and a bad toupee. Carl is going to take Dottie on a little trip a couple of days before the job. She’ll be heavily sedated in a motel while we do the job. I have a guy who is going to babysit her for me. When I give him the all-clear, he’ll let her wake up the next day to find a note from dear old Carl telling her he’s gone back to his wife and she should take the bus home.”

“I hope you at least have the decency to give her one more good fucking before you give her a good fucking over,” Eddie said, chuckling at himself. That was another flaw Eddie had: he wasn’t nearly as funny as he thought he was, but I didn’t need Eddie to be funny. I needed him to watch my back, which he’d been doing his entire life.

SANDY

I met Brent Griffin on a chilly January day when I came into the Ford dealership to have my car serviced. My fifteen-year-old Taurus was a total piece of shit, but it was all I could afford, so I had to keep it running.

I’d gotten a coupon in the mail a few days before letting me know that Tuesday was Ladies’ Day at the dealership. I could have my oil changed, fluids topped off, tires pumped up, and filters checked for just $29. I scraped together my spare change and used the tips I’d made from cutting hair all weekend to have the work done.

I pulled up to the large bay door around the side of the dealership. I was number three in line at the service center. I sat in my car with the heater going and watched as a cute service advisor with shaggy brown hair and clipboard in hand leaned in to chat with the drivers seated inside their nice warm cars. When he got to me, he asked my name and did a double take when he glanced into my eyes. It was so cute.

“My name?” I stuttered because he was staring at me, smiling.

His eyes narrowed when he smiled. He had these adorable little dimples in his cheeks. “Yes, ma’am, I need your name,” he said, tapping the pen to the clipboard.

“Oh, um, Sandy Duval,” I said.

“Hi, Sandy,” he said, writing. “I’m Brent. What can we do for your today?”

“Hi, Brent. Um, I want that Tuesday Ladies Special thingy.” God, I must have sounded like an idiot because he grinned at me. He had such a nice smile.

He asked, “You mean the oil change service?”

“Yes, that’s it,” I said, nodding like a bobble-head. I forced my head to stop bobbing when he gazed into my eyes again.

“Can I get your phone number, Sandy?” he asked.

I gave him my cell number. I bit my lip as I watched him jot it down on the form.

Without looking up, he asked, “Would it be okay if I called you some time, Sandy?”