Hell of a Mess (A Love and Bullets Hook-Up, Book 4) by Nick Kolakowski
About Hell of a Mess:
The heist should have been a simple one: infiltrate the top floor of a luxury New York City penthouse, steal a server with compromising data from under the noses of the unsuspecting guards, and slip back out. Fiona, master thief and occasional assassin, has pulled off similar jobs dozens of times. But with a massive hurricane bearing down on the East Coast, the timing is tight and the escape routes are limited—and that’s before she discovers something horrific in the penthouse’s master bedroom.
Now Fiona’s on the run, trying to stay one step ahead of rising floodwaters and an army of hired assassins. Her husband Bill, the finest hustler between Florida and Maine, can’t help her: he’s been kidnapped by a group of dirty cops who want the secret millions left by his former employer. The night will take the two of them from the heights of money and power in Lower Manhattan to a haunted island in the East River where no secrets stay buried forever.
It’s going to be one hell of a night… and one hell of a mess.
Excerpt:
Confronted with an epic natural disaster, most people would load up on survival supplies: batteries and flashlights, gallons of distilled water, first aid kits, hand sanitizer and wet wipes, multitools and multipurpose bags, a couple hundred bucks in twenties, dust masks and glow sticks. They would stuff those supplies into a backpack beside the front door and hope they never had to flee for their lives.
Bill was not most people.
As the tropical storm in the Atlantic coalesced into the hurricane bearing down on New York City, he had opted to stock the kitchen and pantry of their borrowed townhouse with cases of wine and cigars, baguettes and prosciutto and jamón ibérico, prime cuts of raw salmon, cute glass jars of roe, and—this was the pièce de resistance—a bottle of 1995 Krug Clos du Mesnil Blanc de Blancs Brut. Even if they lost power for a week or more, they had plenty of protein and alcohol, and what more did anyone need, frankly? It wasn’t as if he paid for any of it.
Standing at the kitchen counter, he helped himself to a full glass of wine and a thick wad of prosciutto. The wind hummed against the windows, paired with the backbeat of rain.
He was worried about Fiona.
Why had she taken the job? Sure, his idea for a score was complicated, and they would need to wait until well after the storm passed—but it was doable, with the tantalizing possibility of millions at the end of it.
But Fiona was impatient, as usual.
Don’t worry, sweetie, she’d told him on the way out the door. Anything goes wrong, I got the gun!
What about not killing? he’d retorted—because she was trying to become more Zen, right? Kinder and gentler and all that other crap?
I’ll just shoot them in the kneecap! she said before the door slammed behind her.
His wife had a funny concept of Zen.
At least she had Fireball on this delightful caper. That guy was crazy as an outhouse rat, but he was a wizard when it came to cracking passwords and slipping into databases. He had found this cute house for them, in fact, scanning the emails and texts of rich marks until he stumbled onto a hedge fund manager who was out of town for the next five months. The manager might have graduated from Harvard (as he reminded everyone in almost every message), but he was dumb enough to include the front door’s unlock code in a text to his lawyer.
Even better, Mister Big Money Guru had left a fancy black titanium credit card in a bedroom drawer. Would he notice enough food charges to restock a high-end restaurant? If the prospect made Bill a little nervous, hey, what was life without a little uncertainty?
“Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke,” Bill muttered as he checked his phone for the fiftieth time in the past hour. No new messages or emails or missed calls. He flicked to his weather app, the screen filling with a big red sawblade chewing up the New Jersey coast. The wreckage of Atlantic City was halfway to Europe at this point. As someone who had once taken a couple hard punches to the kidneys in the bathroom of that fabled metropolis’s shadiest casino, he considered such destruction no great loss.
Damn, why hadn’t he volunteered to go along with Fiona?
The answer, of course, was simple: She was the bigger badass. While he had engaged in his share of fisticuffs, but he would never match Fiona’s skill at annihilating bad dudes. In any tense situation, he would likely become a bullet magnet.
Still, he would rather tag along with her. You never knew when you needed a conman who was slick at cards and talking his way through security.
Wine glass in one hand, phone in the other, he stepped around the counter separating the rustic kitchen from the living room, which was decorated like a Russian Tsar’s hunting lodge: bear pelts on the hardwood floor, elk and deer heads on the rough white walls, furniture so lacquered he could see his reflection in it. It could have been the 19th century if not for the enormous television screen facing the leather couch. At the room’s furthest edge, a narrow flight of stairs descended to a steel door opening onto 23rd Street.
A doorway to his left led to the dim bedroom, which featured more pelts and expensive wood and a four-poster bed large enough to fit a conquering horde. He flicked on the light and stepped inside. The earnest part of him—and yes, it existed—was always pleased at the framed photographs on the walls: gaggles of children and dogs tumbling down endless lawns. The kids seemed so happy, and why not? They were a couple decades away from life delivering its punches—death, disease, car payments.
Would he make a good father?
Pros: He would finally have someone to impart all his life’s lessons upon, including how to pick a pocket in a Times Square crowd without getting beaten to a bloody pulp. If you could pull off a small-time hustle, you could literally do anything in life.
Cons: Would Bill’s lifetime of questionable decisions—combined with some less-than-stellar genes—screw over Bill Junior before he reached adulthood? All kids deserved to start off with a clean slate.
No, having a family would mean giving up their fabulous criminal lifestyle. A clean break. Fiona had told him that before, and she was right. After this North Brother caper, he would hang up his championship belt and retire for good.
His phone beeped. His brand-new smartwatch buzzed, and he tilted his wrist to check the tiny screen and its flashing message:
Boat secured. Maybe after the storm’s over, yeah?
He tapped the little microphone icon beside the message, said, “Where are you now?”
Another moment, another message: Riding out this bad boy in the Newtown Creek YEEE-HAW.
Well, provided the boat didn’t sink, his little island heist was coming together nicely. He returned to the kitchen, where a beautiful leather folder on the counter held his prep materials. If this was indeed his last job, it would be one for the ages.
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About Nick Kolakowski:
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