She's On the Money by Stephanie Feagan

Author:Stephanie Feagan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Silhouette
Published: 2005-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Thirty minutes later, after Mom drove me to my ransacked apartment so I could change into dark clothes and retrieve my little Bobcat, we parked a few blocks from the old building that houses the Salvation Army. I’d been there lots of times to drop off old stuff. The building is on the southeast edge of downtown, just south of the railroad tracks, in a warehouse area that’s completely deserted at night. Except for the occasional vagrant.

“I’m hoping my box of stuff is still in the back so we don’t have to go inside. Picking locks isn’t my forte.”

“Me, neither. But Mom, won’t the stuff all be inside the building? They wouldn’t leave it outside, would they?”

“I don’t know, but every time I come down here, there’s an enormous amount of stuff on that loading dock, and the receiving room inside is always crammed full. I can’t imagine they move the stuff in every night.”

“Wouldn’t it get wet when it rains?”

Mom slanted me a look. “This is Midland, remember? Average rainfall of ten inches, and we get it all in three days. But there is an overhang above the dock, if it makes you feel better. Anyway, I thought we’d look there first, and if we can’t find the box, then we’ll figure out how to get inside.”

“It’s a lame plan, Mom. Sam would fire you at the FBI.”

“Yeah, well, this is sort of spur of the moment. If I plan a bank heist, I’ll give it a little more forethought, okay?”

At the back of the building, we hesitated around the corner because a light illuminated the loading-dock area. “Uh, Mom, we could probably get a tan, that light’s so bright.”

Without saying a word, Mom reached down to the ground, picked up a golf ball-size rock, aimed and hurled it at the light. I couldn’t believe it then and I can’t believe it now, but she nailed that sucker dead-on. With the soft sound of lightbulb glass hitting the pavement, the loading dock was blanketed in semidarkness, now just dimly lit by a streetlight some twenty yards away. “Whoa, Mom! How’d you do that?”

“Used to have to chuck rocks at snakes when I was a kid growing up on the farm where my dad was a hand. Daddy wouldn’t get me a slingshot, because I was a girl, so I learned how to hit ’em without one. You didn’t get a second chance with rattlers. If you missed, all it did was piss them off, and they’d bite you for sure.”

“Wow, Mom. You rock.” I grinned at her.

“If there was a law against bad puns, you’d be doing time.”

We moved toward the dock and stopped at an eight-feet-tall chain-link gate. “Mom, how long’s it been since you climbed a fence like this?”

“Not long enough.” She slipped her hand into the pocket of her denim jacket and withdrew a pair of wire cutters.

“My, my, aren’t you the well-prepared burglar?”

“Gimme a hand, will you?”

I bent each section back as she cut through, managing to nick my hand in several different places in the process.

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