Free Too Hot to Handle by Aleah Barley Page A

just any Volvo. It’s a Volvo Sport, made in Sweden. Originally designed by a boat builder. Twin carburetors. Three-speed manual gear box.” She talked about the car the way another—less interesting—woman would talk about diamonds. He had the sudden impulse to go out and empty his savings account. A Volvo Sport. He’d never even heard of it.
    “Between 1956 and 1957, there were only sixty-seven made,” she said. “Only a handful survive today. This one was number sixty-seven. I didn’t believe it, even when he—even when Logan told me. I had to check the serial number myself. Number sixty-seven. Rumored to be lost sometime in the sixties. That car’s one of a kind. Priceless. Seeing her in a chop shop in West Hollywood was like finding a unicorn in a glue factory.”
    Maybe it would take more than the contents of his savings account to buy the car. He might have to raid his trust fund.
    “I still find it hard to believe you didn’t drive it.”
    “Not even a spin around the block. I returned her to Logan’s house, collected my money, and went home.” Her leg stilled. “I didn’t even talk to Logan when I dropped the car off. He was busy. I left her in the garage and took the money he’d left on the table. Twenty thousand dollars, just like he said, a nice chunk of change for two days’ work. He was so pleased with my efficiency, he threw in a bonus.”
    “That doesn’t sound like Logan Burrows.” The man was known to spend hours grinding his opponent down during negotiations on even the most trivial matters. He paid people for the job they’d done and nothing more. Logan wasn’t the kind to give anyone a bonus, and he wouldn’t have paid Honey twenty thousand dollars to find a car, no matter how nice the vehicle was. Not when she’d do the same thing for a cool five hundred dollars and a night on the town.
    “Are you sure it was him?”
    “Of course I’m sure. I might not know the man close enough to walk up to him at a party, but he gave the graduation speech my year at the academy. Tall guy, steel-gray hair, big ears.”
    The description was accurate, if crude.
    Jack put a hand to his chest, checking her patchwork. It would do. He pulled his T-shirt back down into place. “Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?”
    It didn’t take a genius to figure out what was going on. All this fuss over a car. He loved the Super Bee, but he wouldn’t kill someone for it.
    “The thief must have set the fires,” he said. “The man who stole the car from Logan originally. He must have been angry when he got back to the chop shop. He didn’t get his money. He didn’t get the car. He got screwed, and he wanted revenge.”
    “See, that’s the part I don’t get. I’m not an idiot. It’s not like I handed out business cards. There are a lot of car thieves in Los Angeles, and they’d all like to get their hands on the sixty-seventh Volvo Sport, but this guy didn’t know what he had. He was planning to chop her down for parts.” She frowned. “It was like the thief stole the car just to have it destroyed. It’d be like torching—what’s that famous painting? The one with the woman in the ugly dress.”
    “The Mona Lisa ?”
    “No, the other one.”
    “ Whistler’s Mother ?” Jack’s mind scrambled, trying to come up with possible paintings. “ Girl with a Pearl Earring ?”
    “Marilyn Monroe. With the colors. Who’s it by? Andy Warhol?”
    “That’s not a painting. It’s a print.”
    For a moment, Jack almost believed the act she was putting on. Just another kid from the inner city who stole cars instead of cracking library books. He caught himself, though. Honey might have shown up to high school with a knack for getting into trouble, but she was smart. More intelligent than most of the trust-fund brats he’d grown up with. And she’d gotten a first-class education at the academy.
    “You know you don’t have to do that, right?” He reached out to smooth a lock of