Hot Rocks by Nora Roberts Page B

come back, and hopefully meet Ms. Tavish. Thanks for your time, Mrs. Burger.”
    “Jenny. Come back anytime,” she added as he walked to the door.
    When they were alone in the shop, Jenny poked Vince in the belly. “You looked at him like he was a suspect.”
    “No, I didn’t.” He gave her a return, and very gentle, poke in her belly. “I’m just curious, that’s all, when I see a guy in a slick-looking suit hanging around the shop the day after Laine’s house is broken into.”
    “Yeah, he looked like a rampaging burglar all right.”
    “Okay, what’s a rampaging burglar look like?”
    “Not like that.”
     
     
     
    His name was Alex Crew, though he had proper iden tification in the name of Miles Alexander—and several other aliases. Now he walked briskly along the sloping sidewalk. He had to walk off his anger, his quietly bubbling rage that Laine Tavish hadn’t been where he’d wanted to find her.
    He despised being foiled, on any level.
    Still, the walk was part business. He needed to get the lay of the land on foot, though he had a detailed map of Angel’s Gap in his head. He didn’t enjoy small towns, or the burgeoning green view of the surrounding mountains. He was a man for the city, its pace, its opportunities.
    Its abundance of marks.
    For rest and relaxation, he enjoyed the tropics, with their balmy breezes, moon-washed nights and rich tourists.
    This place was full of hicks, like the pregnant sales-clerk—probably on her fourth kid by now—and her ex- high-school football hero turned town cop husband. Guy looked like the type who sat around on Saturday nights with his buddies and talked about the glory days over a six-pack. Or sat in the woods waiting for a deer to come by so he could shoot it and feel like a hero again.
    Crew deplored such men and the women who kept their dinner warm at night.
    His father had been such a man.
    No imagination, no vision, no palate for the taste of larceny. His old man wouldn’t have taken the time of day if it wasn’t marked on his time sheet. And what had it gotten him but a worn-out and complaining wife, a hot box of a row house in Camden and an early grave.
    To Crew’s mind, his father had been a pathetic waste of life.
    He’d always wanted more, and had started taking it when he crawled through his first second-story window at twelve. He boosted his first car at fourteen, but his ambitions had always run to bigger, shinier games.
    He liked stealing from the rich, but there was nothing of the Robin Hood in him. He liked it simply because the rich had better things, and having them, taking them, made him feel like he was part of the cream.
    He killed his first man at twenty-two, and though it had been unplanned—bad clams had sent the mark home early from the ballet—he had no aversion to stealing a life. Particularly if there was a good profit in it.
    He was forty-eight years old, had a taste for French wine and Italian suits. He had a home in Westchester from which his wife had fled—taking his young son—just prior to their divorce. He also kept a luxurious apartment off Central Park where he entertained lavishly when the mood struck, a weekend home in the Hamptons and a seaside home on Grand Cayman. All of the deeds were in different names.
    He’d done very well for himself by taking what belonged to others and, if he said so himself, had become a kind of connoisseur. He was selective in what he stole now, and had been for more than a decade. Art and gems were his specialties, with an occasional foray into rare stamps.
    He’d had a few arrests along the way, but only one conviction—a smudge he blamed entirely on his incompetent and overpriced lawyer.
    The man had paid for it, as Crew had beaten him to bloody death with a lead pipe three months after his release. But to Crew’s mind those scales were hardly balanced. He’d spent twenty-six months inside, deprived of his freedom, debased and humiliated.
    The idiot lawyer’s death was