Firebreak

Parker said, 'So you broke in.'

'Hell to find the door,' Wiss told him. 'We really had to pry shit out of that wall. But then there it was.'

'An art gallery,' Elkins said.

'Three rooms,' Wiss said, 'pretty good-size rooms.'

'Oil paintings,' Elkins said. 'What you call Old Masters, famous European artists. Rembrandt, Titian, like that.'

'We're walking through,' Wiss said, 'we're wondering, is this a better deal than the gold toilets, it's a lot lighter, it's worth who knows how much, three rooms of Old Masters.'

'And then we recognize three of them,' Elkins said.

'That's right,' Wiss said, with another laugh. 'All of a sudden, here's three old friends.'

'We stole them once before,' Elkins explained.

Three years ago,' Wiss said, 'out of a museum in Houston, a special European show, traveling through.'

'Very famous paintings,' Elkins said. 'Nobody could try to sell them.'

'Our fence,' Wiss said, 'had a guy, wanted just those particular three pictures, and would pay a lot for them. And it was a guarantee, he'd never peddle them, or deal with insurance companies, or show them anywhere, but just keep them hidden, a little secret stash for him and his friends.'

'Bingo,' Elkins said.

3

'I wasn't there for that part of it,' Lloyd said, and sipped his water. This was the first thing he'd said since Elkins and Wiss had started their story.

Grinning, Wiss said, 'Larry, you'd be back inside if you were there for that part of it.'

'And we nearly wound up inside, too,' Elkins added.

Parker said, 'Just to break in on this for a second. Larry, why were you inside?'

Lloyd looked sheepish. 'Well, mostly,' he said, 'attempted murder. The rest they folded into it, the grand theft auto, the embezzling, all of that.' He shrugged, and offered that nervous smile, and said, 'One little movement becomes fifteen, twenty separate crimes.'

'They like to slice and dice, the law,' Wiss said.

'They slice what you did into little pieces, so they can dice you'

Parker said to Lloyd, 'You're on parole?'

'Yes, I am.'

Nodding at Elkins and Wiss, Parker said, 'How many crimes you committing right now, in this room?'

'About twelve,' Lloyd said. 'When I came across the line from Massachusetts, I was already in violation.'

'So now you're on the run?'

'Not me,' Lloyd said. 'Right after this meeting, I'm going home.'

Wiss grinned at Lloyd like a fond parent, and said to Parker, 'They put an electronic keeper on him.'

With a modest shrug, Lloyd said, 'It believes I'm in a library in Pittsfield right now.'

Parker said, 'That's right, you're the electronics man.' Looking at Elkins, he said, 'And so's Paxton Marino.'

'That's it,' Elkins agreed. 'We broke into that private art gallery of his, and we set off a whole different alarm system we didn't know anything about'

Wiss said, 'Fiber-optic lines in conduit in concrete, under the house, underground down the hill, separate power source, separate alarms, unreachable.'

'You can turn off everything in that house,' Elkins said, 'shut down the electricity halfway down the road, that art gallery's still humming.'

'Which we didn't know,' Wiss pointed out, 'till our partners yelled down to us there's red flashers coming.'

'If they'd of come up quiet,' Elkins said, 'they'd of got us.'

Wiss said, 'They got our partners.'

Parker said, 'How'd that work?'

Elkins explained, 'They thought they could outrun them downslope to the intersection. We didn't. We took the other truck and drove up into the woods, along that road he built.'

'That doesn't go anywhere,' Wiss added.

Elkins shook his head. 'Only to the elk.'

Wiss said, 'We came to the end of the road, and fuck it, we kept driving.'