"Assets Protection," by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, January/February 2014. Rusch is one of my favorite current authors of mystery short stories, and this caper story is a good example of why.
Carla is an ex-con, gone straight after a fashion. She gets hired by businesses to test their security, especially their susceptibility to high-level shoplifting schemes.
At a conference she sees Grady, the abusive cop who arrested her. He is now living high on the hog as the head of security for a department store chain. It doesn't take Carla long to discover that he has a sneaky money-making scheme of his own, and so she sets out to derail him. "She needed to show Grady just what it was like to lose."
To do this she needs the help of a low-level celebrity, and fortunately she knows one, an actor named Jimmy who used to share her lawyer before he got famous. He doesn't need the money, but he does crave a little larceny...
I would enjoy seeing these two in action again.
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