ANNA

Chapter Three

The day had gone downhill after TK’s heart whatever (the jury was still out on that), but things are never so bad that they can’t get worse.

Vera Keppler, the president of the foundation that ran the museum, had left me a dire message about museum finances that meant she was going to try to shut the place down again.  She pretty much did this yearly, and we had Jason to head her off at the pass—I told you he was uber-competent–so we were probably okay, but it was still a hassle.

At least she hadn’t heard about Jason’s e-mail yet, but everybody else had.  It was the talk of the museum—our college volunteers were ignoring his orders and Bridget told him in front of everybody that he was a putz—but he was Teresa’s problem now, so I was moving on. Although I was still hostile about the Reply All. The e-mail had been ghastly, full of stuff like “I know you’ll get over me in time” and “The heart wants what it wants.” Gracie said he deserved to die for that last line alone. She said she’d thought about getting a pig’s heart and nailing it to his office door and writing in blood underneath it, “The heart knows what it wants, Jason, and it wants your dick in a woodchipper,” but she didn’t think he was worth the sacrifice of a perfectly good pig. I told her I appreciated the thought.

Five o’clock finally rolled around and set me free, so I made sure Gracie had Johnny covered, grabbed my purse, and got in my car, blissfully free of other people for a while.

My car and my purse were the only two things Jason and my mother had agreed on: too old, too beat-up, too not “professional” or “classy.”  But I’d bought the Prius with my own money, my first big purchase, twelve years ago (it was sixteen now, of course I’d bought it used), and it had never let me down.  And my purse had been my grandma’s and I loved it because it reminded me of her every day.  It was vintage leather and a very good bag—it was Prada—and it still had many of the things my grandmother had kept in it, like her tin of Altoids and her small hairbrush and her beaded coin purse with quarters and her hammerless snub-nose .38 caliber revolver with the specially made blue contoured grip Grandpa had given her . . . I still missed my grandma a lot. My grandpa had given me her handbag at her funeral, telling me she wanted me to have it, and I’d cried all over him because she’d remembered how much I’d loved it. And how much I loved her.  I was keeping it.

The drive was long enough for me to decide that Jason was no loss, although revenge was on my mind. Gracie kept saying, “Vengeance sex with a billionaire,” but since I couldn’t exactly swan up to Jason later and say, “I had sex with somebody smarter, richer, and better looking than you” and keep any credibility, that was a no, not to mention the chances of finding somebody smarter and better looking were slim, plus a one-night stand with a stranger would be insanely dangerous.

My phone buzzed and the caller ID came up on my display: OO

I accepted the call.

“Annie?” my cousin Oliver said.

“Hi, Ollie,” I said, confused.  I liked Oliver Olivero a lot, but we didn’t chat, like ever.  He said things like hislovers scream out his initials in bed, which gets old (the saying, not the screaming).  Also he runs what my mother insists on calling a successful car repair business but is actually a chop shop.  I prefer my dates unincarcerated, and it was only a matter of time.

“Annie, our mothers had lunch and decided we need to start dating–”

“What? No—”

“—but that’s not happening,” Oliver finished. “I have a girlfriend and she’s the jealous type.”

“Oh, sorry,” I said.

“It’s okay,” Oliver said. “We have a lot of make-up sex. She screams out—”

“Your initials, I know,” I said. “So Aunt Paulina doesn’t like your girlfriend and she’s trying to break you up using me?”  That sounded like my Aunt Paulina.

“She doesn’t know about my girlfriend,” Ollie said, “so please don’t tell your mother.”

“Oliver, if the only way I can get my mother off my back is to tell her you have a girlfriend, you’re going down.”

“Geez, Annie—”

“Just tell your mother, Ollie. Maybe she’ll be thrilled.”

“She will not be thrilled. Wait till you have to introduce your mom to somebody she’s not going to like.”

“Why wouldn’t your mom like her?”

“She’s a northern girlfriend,” Oliver said.

Northern what? I did not say. “Well, it’s been great talking to you, Ollie, but you should get back to your girlfriend now. Tell her I said hi.”

“Hell, no, I’m not going to tell her about you,” Oliver said. “I have enough problems without her finding out I have a hot cousin.”

“Since when am I hot?” I said, confused.

“Since my mother has decided she wants grandchildren.”

“So knock your girlfriend up.”

“My mother would not be happy about a bunch of little blonds turning down marinara for herring.”

“She’s Swedish?” I said.

“Worse. Norwegian.”

I wasn’t sure why Norway was worse than Sweden, both seemed like lovely countries to me, but I didn’t ask. “I’m sure she’s wonderful. Do not worry about me.”

“If you need anything, yell,” Oliver said and hung up, and I thought about the mixed blessing that family brought.

But first I had to do TK’s courier work, a pain in the ass all by itself. So when I arrived at the casino, I gave my car to the valet, who sneered at it (hey, a sixteen-year-old Prius is a classic), put my grandma’s bag over my shoulder, and walked in.

The concierge was easy to find. I told him that I was from the Keppler Museum and he handed me an envelope. It had a single slip of paper in it.

Room 2008

Just great. I took my package up the elevator to Room 2008 and knocked on the door, and a very nervous, very young blond guy in a cheap suit opened the door and looked surprised. “Yes?”

“I’m delivering a package,” I said, holding up said package as evidence.

Reluctantly he let me in, checked my driver’s license, and gave me a clipboard to sign.  I read through the doc on the clipboard and handed it back to him, unsigned. “This says there’s a Warhol in the package. I do not know that there is a Warhol in the package. Therefore, in order for me to sign this, I will need to see that there is a Warhol in the package.” I had very real doubts that TK could get his hands on a Warhol, and huge doubts that he was capable of knowing the difference between a real Warhol and a fake or a forgery, plus he’d been incredibly nervous handing the box to me and told me not to open it, so I smelled rat. Lots of rat. I am easy-going and cooperative, but I’m not going to take a fall for anybody.

“That’s not necessary,” he said smoothly, trying to hand the clipboard back to me.

You know, it just wasn’t the day for that. “I’m sorry, I see what’s in the package, or I don’t sign.”

“Really,” he glanced down at my name which he’d written on the clipboard, “Miss Jones—”

“Fine. Your choice.” I turned to go.

“Wait,” he said, and when I turned around, he’d lost some of his polish and was glaring at me with his hand inside his jacket.

“Look,” I told him. “You want me to sign that I’m delivering a valuable artwork I have never seen, and if it turns out to be a fake or a forgery or not in that box at all, I’m liable. You wouldn’t sign under those circumstances, so why should I?”

“Your instructions were to deliver the package,” he said, sternly.

“Which I have done. But I am not signing a doc that says I know what’s in the package if I don’t know what’s in the package.”

I thought for a minute he was going to pull out that gun he was implying he had, so I added, “If you’re thinking about shooting me, it would be a really stupid thing to do because then you’d have to get rid of a body, which is not that freaking easy no matter what they tell you in the movies, and you still wouldn’t have a signed document.”

I spent a lot of time with my grandpa when I was a kid. I know things.

He sighed and handed me the package, and I popped the tape on the brown paper wrapping and slid the box out and opened it.

It looked like Warhol’s four Marilyn prints, or it was supposed to. But it wasn’t. It was a painting of four of the same dog, painted on one canvas. Warhol had done lots of dogs, but not a tan dog with bat-like ears and tufts of white fur. Andy Warhol hadn’t painted this.

I had.

It was one of the examples I’d painted of Johnny for the Warhol classes I’d taught a week ago. It wasn’t even the best of the examples (that was hanging on my wall at home). I’d thrown two of them out, and somebody had retrieved one. And now that idiot TK was trying to sell it as a real Warhol. Normally I’d be outraged, but I wasn’t surprised, given it was TK. No wonder he’d had a heart attack.

“This is not a Warhol,” I told the blond guy.

“I was told—” he began, but I overrode him.

“This is not a Warhol. It is somewhat like a Warhol, but it is not by any means a Warhol.”

“But I was told the paperwork was clear that it was,” the blond guy said, rattled now.

There was a thin file folder behind the painting. I opened it and scanned the provenance pages inside, which gave the history of the print, the chain of possession, including a letter from The Museum of Modern Art turning down Warhol’s offer of a print called “Dog.” I’d seen the letter before, we had a copy of it at the museum, the only difference being that our copy described the work as a drawing and said the title of the work was “Shoe.” I turned the letter over and it was stamped with “Property of the Keppler Museum” on the back. Someone had done a very good job copying and altering the letter, substituting “Dog” for “Shoe,” and an equally good job of forging the rest of the provenance.

I really had to get out of here and talk to Vera Keppler so she could kneecap her brother and save the museum before we all went down for art fraud.

“As you see,” he said. “It’s what it’s supposed to be.”

“This art has been faked and the provenance is forged, so I can’t sign the doc. I was told it was already paid for, so the fake Warhol is yours. My signature is not. You have a good night.” I shoved the clipboard back at him.

He took it and blinked down at it, confused, and I kept the letter folded in my hand while he was trying to figure out his next move.

I turned and walked out, feeling validated that I was not a complete loser, waiting until I was in the elevator to stash that faked letter in a zipper pocket inside my grandmother’s purse. Vera definitely needed to see that. Then my thoughts turned to more immediate problems.

I was starving.

So I headed downstairs to the casino. There would be food somewhere down there, they had to keep people at the tables, not wandering off for sustenance, so I was going to wander in search of a buffet while avoiding billionaires and thinking about TK trying to sucker me into transporting and validating a fake that I had painted. The rat bastard had tried to make me an accomplice.

I could forgive my mother for Oliver Olivero, and Gracie for trying to make my life more exciting, they’d had good intentions, but Jason Lassiter and Thomas Keppler were now on my list of people to maim for evil stupidity.

Chapter Four

When I walked into the casino and then to the designated spot in a side lobby, a blonde in a tight red dress, said, “Nathan Sadler?” I nodded and she said, “Agent in Charge Welsh,” and came closer. She was very pretty, but there was no warmth or welcome in her eyes. In fact, she looked annoyed. Join the fucking team. Which I realized was epic irony since I was literally doing that. And who introduced themselves as ‘agent in charge’? I knew that from the freaking text. She oozed insecure.

She leaned in and said, “We think the guy receiving the package is at table four, dark hair, navy suit, in his forties. Alone. Goes by the name Zhidko. We want whoever is delivering to him.”

We think?  What the hell?

The guy wasn’t hard to pick out in that crowd. I frowned, because there was something vaguely familiar about him, but I couldn’t pin it down. She handed me a small radio and earpiece. I clipped the radio inside my belt in the back and put the earpiece in. We did a quick sound check and Welsh gave me a quick run down on the two agents that were with her, Farley Fairfax and Milo Denton.

Fairfax had a red face, indicative of a drinker, looking like he was in his terminal sixties, older than the polished Zhidko. He was at the roulette wheel, rarely betting, obviously thinking about the voucher he’d have to file for the forty bucks or so he was losing. Old FBI being left behind.

Denton was young, Black, and had thick dark framed glasses. He was surveilling but also frowning at the cards at the blackjack table. He was quiet, not doing anything to draw attention like some of the other players at the table, but I did notice he seemed to quietly win more than he lost. He looked the type who would turn in the winnings.

Welsh gave me final instructions. “Watch Zhidko. We’ve got a three-hour window on this. He’s supposed to get delivery of a piece of art. We want whoever is delivering. The window started an hour ago.”

That was it. No explanation, no reading me into the mission, just flat orders. Welcome to the ATF, Agent Sadler, we don’t want you. She sounded irritated I hadn’t wasted the hour with the team doing nothing.

The feeling was mutual.

“If this Zhidko is receiving stolen art,” I said, “isn’t he complicit?”

“Our orders are strict. We want whoever is selling. If you have to choose, follow the seller.”

So I watched the guy with the weird name, which was boring as hell because he never moved from the table. Not even a bathroom break. He was playing poker and it was obvious he was a shark among chum, although he seemed genial enough, smiling throughout, never losing his cool. It was odd because there were no high rollers at the table. Everything about the guy was odd. Nothing flashy about him except a Rolex, one of those you have to be on a waiting list to get. Watches tell you a lot about people. Which is why I wore an old military-issue analog one. It said I was a puzzle, since it contradicted the cut of my bespoke suit. I liked being a puzzle. An enigma, wrapped in a puzzle, hidden inside a labyrinth, kind of lost myself, whatever.

His suit was bespoke, too, Saville Row; my nana would have known which specific shop, probably even which cutter had made it, but subtle. No rings, no gold chains, just the watch. He wore glasses that were the slightly shaded type that adjusted to light and blocked seeing his eyes. He was older than Welsh had said, fifty maybe. He didn’t seem particularly interested in the game, but he was amassing chips. My take was that he was waiting, just like we were waiting. He didn’t look particularly happy to be here, so I felt an affinity for him. You and me, buddy.

And Welsh had been wrong about something else: Zhidko wasn’t alone, he had muscle for protection. They were discreet, but it had taken me about thirty seconds to spot both bodyguards. They were trying to blend into the crowd, but it was obvious, once you focused on it, that they were only interested in the man at the table and the space around him. And there were the slight bulges in their suit coats under the left armpit. The suits were off the rack, not cut to accommodate weapons like mine. I let the team know over the radio where the security was since she and the others had missed it, and that made Welsh even more snappish.

This team might know art, but they didn’t know surveillance. Welsh blended in, sort of, but she was too classy to be a hooker, and she wasn’t hitting on anybody to buy her chips, so she kind of stuck out, too. And she was gambling like it was her social security check on the line and she lived in a one room walkup. Very tense woman, even tenser now that I’d pointed out the bodyguards.

None of this made sense.

I had the feeling Zhidko knew we were there and it amused him. Since he wasn’t the target, that kind of made sense. But still. It didn’t feel right. And there was that something about him that bothered me.

I sat at a bar with a view in a mirror of the suspect behind me and at an angle, nursing a non-alcoholic drink and chatting with the bartender who was regaling me with boring stories of deep-sea charter fishing, his day-time gig. I wanted to tell him it’s easier if you just drop a C-4 charge in but refrained. Yeah, it was going to be a long couple of hours. I was not optimistic about shooting anyone this evening.

Zhidko appeared to be a high roller. Of course, he was in the wrong part of the casino for that. High rollers don’t do the floor in a place like The Xanadu. There were private rooms where the big money was put on the line. So, yeah, suspicious. He might be slumming, but I didn’t think so. Unlike most high rollers, he had no beautiful woman hanging on his arm. Not that women weren’t trying. He’d been approached several times by reasonably attractive women dressed provocatively. The hookers working the floor here knew when they had money at a table. Their version of what we called a HVT—High Value Target—in counterterrorism.

He brushed them off by ignoring them; rude but effective.

I was bored too and I really didn’t care about art, although I did know that sometimes it involved money laundering. That was something I took a serious interest in. Bad guys, terrorists, need money, and often it was dirty money that financed their ops.

At one point, Zhidko’s phone must have rung or he had an incoming text. He pulled it out, glanced at the screen—text—and frowned. He wasn’t happy about the message. But he didn’t leave the table.

Then just about the three-hour mark, something interesting finally happened. A woman with a head full of crazy red curls came to stand not far from Zhidko, her red pointy glasses sliding down her nose and her phone pressed to her ear, not a hooker unless she was trying to feed some fetish for office worker cardigans and rhinestone glasses. She surveyed the casino floor, not even trying to hide that she was looking for something. Both the bodyguards straightened, and one went to stand behind her while she talked on her phone, but a few moments of eavesdropping sent him back to his corner, shaking his head at the other guy.

She didn’t fit in here, and anything that didn’t fit in during surveillance is important. She wasn’t Welsh icy-hot, in fact she was the anti-Welsh, covered up and warm, her face flushed under that wild curly red hair, her crooked smile coming and going as she talked into her phone animatedly to somebody, waving her arm at one point and almost clocking Zhidko as she stood behind him. I was starting to think that she was the one to surveil when Welsh walked up to me. She kept her back to the bar so she could keep watching. I was going to tell her about the mirror, but fuck it.

“Anything?” she said.

“Yeah. That redhead standing behind Zhidko.”

Welsh perked up. “Did she talk to him? Give him a package?”

“Nope. But she doesn’t fit. We should focus on her.”

“My mission, Sadler,” she snarled. “We focus on a package to Zhidko. Time’s almost up.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and went back to watching the redhead, who at that point was the most interesting thing in the casino. Medium tall, nice body, cute with those big eyes and funky glasses, but not happy about something. Interesting. Attractive. Arresting even.

Welsh was wrong.

The redhead was the one to watch.