As the taxi cruised down the strip, memories good and bad leaped out at Dionne like ghosts on a fairground ride. They were from another life. She was not the same person. Or so she kept telling herself. Maybe if she had started out somewhere else, her life could have turned out differently.
Her father was a good man in the wrong place at the wrong time. His life could have been different too. There was no point thinking about that now, though. She already had enough regrets, thanks to things she should have controlled – there was nothing to be gained in piling on more for the sake of it.
She’d been a grifter and good at it, very good in fact. Her crew had arguably been the best of the best. Vegas had been a base of operations as much as anything. They’d done some stuff here, but they’d always been careful. It wasn’t a place to draw attention to yourself. The casinos took a very dim view of anyone except them taking money off suckers. Still, it was here that Dionne had started and learned the ropes.
At the age of seventeen she’d managed to work a grift to save her dad from taking a dirt nap for owing Gerry Rancone fifty large, and that had been her. She had found her calling. For sixteen years they’d got themselves in and out of scrapes. Made money and spent money. There were an awful lot of happy memories mixed in there.
Then, she’d had a brutal epiphany and everything had changed. She’d tried to walk it off, get over it, but nothing had worked. Suddenly, the life she had loved had become a noose around her neck, and she could only see one way out of it.
They’d just ripped off the Lone Star Bank in Fort Worth. She made sure that her crew were all free and clear, and then she walked in and joined the queue for the teller. They’d slammed on the cuffs when she was next in line to be served. The next day the local sheriff had been in the paper, bragging about it, as if her arrest was the result of some kind of sting operation. There were con artists on both sides of the law.
That had been the way she had drawn a line under her old life. How she’d punished herself. Most people went for a deep cleanse or on a Buddhist retreat, but Dionne had gone for three years behind bars. Then, in her last week, unexpectedly, Sister Dorothy had come calling with a chance to take her questionable skillset and do some good with it. Here she was, twelve years later, still running jobs, but this time on the side of the angels.
Although, given that they were reluctantly working for the Ratenda Cartel, that line had blurred an awful lot. Maybe the whole thing was coming full circle? She’d got into her old life to save a loved one, and now she was back where she started, bending morals to the breaking point again, to save a couple more loved ones. Play for long enough and the house always wins.
A sign on the door of the museum read “closed for private function”. Dionne hesitated. Tatiana had given Freddie a burner email address, and she’d let him set the meeting time and location. It had to be that way or else he wouldn’t have turned up. The date, time and a picture of the museum had been the only information in the email she received, bar the word “copasetic”.
She couldn’t even remember where it had come from now, but back in the day, that had been their in-joke. One of many. Dionne had been the head of the crew, with Freddie an on-again off-again member. Usually he was there for the big jobs because that’s when you really needed him. He was very good at what he did.
His membership of the crew wasn’t the only thing about their relationship that had been on-again off-again. It had been all passion and fire, but they’d never found a stable state. Always on the way to I love you or I hate you, and neither of them had been able to stop it. Hard to find a moment of truth in a relationship between two people who were world-class liars. He was the last man on earth she wanted to see right now, but the situation didn’t leave her a choice.
As soon as she’d seen the Celestial Church of New Hope on the TV, she’d had that horrible sinking feeling. She’d done some research, hoping against hope that she was wrong but knowing she wasn’t. The whole thing followed the exact game plan she’d laid out for the ultimate ongoing grift – the one that would keep on giving.
She remembered it well. She and Freddie had been in bed on a weekend away in wine country when she’d first explained it to him. In five years, he never remembered her birthday, but this he had recalled in perfect detail. Murphy’s Law.
A woman inside the museum saw Dionne hesitating at the door and rushed over to open it. She beamed a smile at her that was possibly brighter than any of the signs. “Ms Featherstone?”
Dionne hesitated. It was an odd moment. That was her name, but it had been so very long since she’d been called it.
Dionne gave a practised smile of her own. “Yes.”
The woman ushered her in. “We’ve been expecting you. Your fiancé is right out back.”
Dionne nodded and kept the smile on her face to hide the effects of the sucker punch. Fiancé. She wasn’t sure, given how many times it had been on and off, but maybe she and Freddie were still engaged. Damn it, she hadn’t even seen
