Mind Games

Since she’d come from that successful meeting with a very fussy, very high-end client, she wore what she thought of as her Professional Woman look.

She’d rolled her hair back in a smooth twist and wore a sleeveless sheath in deep rosy pink paired with heeled sandals.

Instead of her Working Mother watch, she’d put on the Bulgari John gave her on their tenth anniversary. A ridiculous indulgence, she thought.

He’d had it engraved on the back, with For All Time inside a heart.

She loved it.

She drove from errand to errand with the radio on and a smile on her face.

The market made her think of the kids, and how whenever she or John made the mistake of letting them come along, they always, always ended up with two kinds of chips, two kinds of ice cream, two kinds of breakfast cereal, and God knew what else.

She missed them like crazy.

Not that this time as a couple wasn’t lovely. And restorative. And, oh boy, sexy. But she missed their faces, their energy, even their squabbling.

Still, they talked at least every other day, and when they did, Thea and Rem’s joy and excitement just poured out and filled her right up to the brim.

They loved the little farm, and her mother made sure they had a wonderful two weeks every summer. She paid attention; she showed them love in countless ways.

They’d have more of that love and attention now with the beach and Thanksgiving and Easter wrapped into it.

Those little breaks with family would pay off, for all of them.

With her mind on selecting the right steaks and her heart with her children, she didn’t notice the man with a six-pack of Coke, a bag of Cheetos, and a package of Chips Ahoy! cookies in his basket.

But Ray Riggs noticed her.

He knew a rich bitch when he saw one, and he saw one now.

The snooty hairdo, the square-cut diamond on her wedding ring set, and that way-high-dollar watch.

To his eye, the watch just screamed: I’m better than you, Ray.

He hated her for it.

Dressed up like that to go to the grocery? Probably some rich bastard’s trophy wife. The kind who looked down her nose at people like him.

And that just burned him.

The kind who had a lot of fancy cars and a fancy house. With a lot of high-dollar things, like that watch, inside. Cash in the safe for sure.

And that interested him.

Interested him enough he left his basket where it was and sauntered out of the store and to his car.

His car now, he thought, since he’d had it painted. The attention-grabbing cherry red its previous rich bastard owner had chosen now gleamed a discreet black. He’d switched out the license plate straight off, ditching the Maryland plate for one from Pennsylvania.

You could always find an out-of-state plate at a crap motel along the interstate.

At eighteen, with two solid years on the road, Ray knew about crap motels and disguising a stolen ride.

Now he sat in the black Mercedes sedan, registered to one Phillip Allen Clarke, who, along with his hag of a wife, Barbara Ann Clarke, lay moldering in some grave in some cemetery in fancy-ass Potomac, Maryland.

He’d scored four fancy watches from the Clarkes, and had pawned the man’s Rolex in DC two weeks after he’d acquired it. The old hag had some solid jewelry, but he’d wait, wait a good long while, before he turned all that and the other watches.

Ray Riggs was nobody’s fool.