Once.
Twice.
Thrice. It won’t budge.
“Shit,” I whisper, yanking frantically. Like a Chinese finger trap, the harder I pull, the tighter it gets. “Shit, shit, shit, shit.”
It’s not coming off.
I look at Frank, desperate and panicked and with another woman’s ring on my finger. “Frank,” I say, like the dog can help me at all. “Help.”
I hear Nash’s truck pull into the driveway, and I nearly black out.
Frank’s next bark sounds like a laugh.
Twenty-Five
I’m already sweating when I cut the engine outside the chain-link fence.
One hand taps fingers on the steering wheel at the same over-worked rhythm of my pounding heart while the other hand—the one wearing the ring that doesn’t belong to me—hides in my pocket the way it has all afternoon.
But the stolen ring isn’t my concern now. Off a dirt road in the middle of nowhere as the twilight sky hangs on to the last minutes of light, breaking into a historically preserved tree is all I can focus on.
“We ready, fam?” Sunny belts out from the back seat, making me jump.
“You betcha,” Cap responds with too much enthusiasm.
Nash, who insisted we needed Sunny for this, looks at me from the passenger seat, mouthing,you okay?
I nod—slightly—meeting Sunny’s eyes in the rearview mirror. They narrow sharply between bites of the shrimp dinner she’s eating from one of the two Styrofoam boxes on her lap.
“You want some shrimp, honey child? You look sick.”
I shake my head, nauseous from both the smell of her fried seafood in the small quarters of my car and the tree trespassing I’m about to commit.
“Suit yourself,” she says. “Nash? Cappy?”
Nash waves her off, angling his head to look at the tree—our future crime scene—but Cap says, “I love shrimp.”
In the rearview mirror, Sunny puts a shrimp into Cap’s mouth, prompting him to moan.
Jesus.
I wring my hand around the steering wheel and eye the security sensors we spotted while casing the joint earlier. I declared them unworking deterrents—I’ve seen antique store owners do this when they don’t want to spend the money on active systems. Now, with bolt cutters and flashlights in the trunk, I’m not so sure.
“Maybe this is a bad idea,” I tell Nash. “Maybe?—”
“Uh-uh,” he says, opening his door. “We’re doing this.”
Outside the station wagon, Sunny puts the Styrofoam boxes on the hood and pulls a cellphone out of her bra to fire off a text. When she catches me watching, she purses her lips. “Can I help you with somethin’?”
“Um.” Even with a shrimp in one hand, I’m terrified of this woman. “No?”
“Oh, sweet summer child,” she sings out. “Do you ever relax?”
Nash chuckles, gesturing for me to open the trunk where we assess our tools on top of my suitcase.
“Why’s your luggage in here?”
