Never Trust A Lady

Her voice came from a distance, with an odd lilt to it. “How did you know?”

“Know what?”

“How did you know I was standing there, in the light, with the gun? I remember you said you saw the other guy running out of my room with the painting. But that was after he’d knocked me down. So, how could you know?”

Hawk silently indulged in his favorite cussword and added every other vile phrase he could think of, for good measure. Aloud he had to content himself with, “Hell, I don’t know, put two and two together, I guess. Wasn’t exactly hard-the damn gun was on the floor and so were you.”

The lie made him squirm, like having an itchy spot he couldn’t reach. He wished he knew why he so hated the idea of her ever finding out that he was the one who’d put her on the floor. It had seemed like the best strategy at the time, and a whole lot more reliable and a lot less painful than slugging her in the jaw. Now, though, remembering the feel of her body struggling, pinned under his knee, and her pulse surging against his fingers…it made him feel sick to think about it.

So, Hawkins, you’d rather have been kneeling in her blood the way you did Loizeau’s, and feeling for a pulse that wasn’t there?

Angry with himself for allowing those doubts, and annoyed with her for raising them in the first place, he snarled, “You want to watch this, or not? Put the damn light where my hands are!”

“I do,” she replied evenly, “and I am.” Something in the way she said it made him feel pretty certain she hadn’t bought his explanation for what had taken place last night in her room. Not for a minute. That was the trouble with nice women who were also people’s mothers, he thought gloomily. They were too damn hard to lie to.

The masking tape was loose-the painting had already been unwrapped once-so the brown-paper wrappings came apart. easily. Hawk quickly folded and laid them aside. He barely glanced at the painting itself, having seen it the night before, but once more turned it facedown across his thighs. It was as he remembered, heavy pinkish- brown paper covering the entire back of the painting, apparently glued to the frame. He hitched himself up and dug in his pants pocket for his knife. He heard her make a small ambiguous sound as he slid the tip of the pocketknife under the edge of the brown-paper backing. When he had it loosened on three sides, he folded the knife and slipped it back in his pocket. He could feel his heart beating. Hell, he could hear it. He wondered if she could, too.

Oh so carefully, he lifted the paper and folded it back. Under it was a pale rectangle of canvas.

“Lemme see that light,” he said gruffly, snatching it from Jane’s outstretched hand.

Then all he could hear was the harsh sound of his own breathing as he bent over the painting and examined every inch of brown paper, every square millimeter of canvas, every sliver and grain of wooden frame. Nothing. He’d expected-hoped-to find a computer disk; unable to accept the truth, he searched now for…something-anything-a slip of paper, a code word, a number. He felt with his fingertips for the slightest irregularity, took out his pocketknife again and probed the wooden frame for hollow places. He peeled off the framer’s label and searched it for some kind of clue, a microdot. Anything.

Finally, ice-cold and light-headed. he raised his eyes and the flashlight beam to Jane’s face and croaked, “Where is it?”

Her eyes blinked at him, silvery and unfocused in the light. One hand fluttered into the path of the beam like a large pale moth, trying to shield her eyes from the glare. He grabbed it, imprisoning her wrist.

“Dammit, where is it?” His teeth were clenched so tightly he thought his skull would split “When did you find it? Last night? You…took it out…you must have put it somewhere. Tell me, damn you!”

He couldn’t hear anything but the roaring in his ears, but he could see her shaking her head, see her lips forming the word, “No, no, no…”

‘It was the terror. in her eyes that got to him, finally. He let go of her hand, throwing it away from him, almost, that small act of violence the only ember he allowed to escape the firestorm raging inside him. Utterly defeated, he leaned his head back against the washing machine and switched off the flashlight.

And now, in the darkness, he could hear her whispering, “I didn’t take anything, I swear. If you’ll just think a minute…”

He shook his head, not wanting to hear anything she had to say, primarily because he knew she was right. She hadn’t taken anything out of the painting. How could she have? The backing had been glued on, and it obviously hadn’t been tampered with. He’d had to remove it with a knife. But he didn’t want to hear her, because then he’d have to face the alternative. He’d have to think about the unthinkable. Accept the unacceptable.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice dull and flat. “I was out of line.”

There was no answer, no sound at all from Jane. He could feel her hurt withdrawal, like a dog he’d just kicked.

He closed his eyes and tried to force his brain to grapple with this new turn of events, but he suddenly felt overwhelmed, exhausted. He’d been following this trail for days now, with little or no sleep, a trail he’d first picked up in Jarek Singh’s ransacked apartment on the outskirts of Cairo. Noticing that slight discoloration on Singh’s wall- that had been his first break. After that, tracking the missing painting to the antiques dealer in Marseilles had been easy. Finding Loizeau dead had been a setback, but then he’d managed to lift the information about the auction from the blotter. Rathskeller’s Lot #187-March 22. He knew he wasn’t mistaken about that. Yesterday-that was the twenty-second, Rathskeller’s auction in Arlington. Virginia.

And this painting-his hands curled, gripping the wooden frame with sudden fury- dammit, this painting was Lot #187. He’d made no mistake about that, either. So where had he gone wrong? He’d lost the trail somewhere, but he couldn’t for the life of him think where. Where, dammit?

A small sound broke his tenuous concentration, collapsing his careful progression of thoughts like a pebble tossed into a house of cards. Jane, clearing her throat. Though her voice was still rusty with uncertainty when she said, “Hmm…Tom? Can I ask…can you tell me what it is, exactly, that you’re looking for?”

He shifted irritably, resenting the hell out of her at that moment, just wanting to be left to his own misery. But he owed her something for the way he’d treated her, grabbing her like that, scaring her to death. He really did regret that-more than he liked to think about-but it was too late to take it back now.

So he tried to soften his tone, and managed a grudging gruffness when he replied, “I’m not exactly sure. Computer disk, probably. Maybe just an access code. I don’t know. Just that it was supposed to be in this painting, Lot #187… What? Did you say something?”

He switched on the flashlight. Her face seemed to float in the light, disembodied and pale as the moon, the tips of her fingers barely touching her lips.

“I just thought of something,” she said, still hesitant at first. but gaining confidence as she went on. “I don’t know if it’s important, or if it makes any sense, but, well, I’m not exactly sure that painting was supposed to be number 187.”

“What do you mean?” He felt a stillness, as though even his heart and all his body functions had paused to listen to her answer.

“When I first saw it, when I marked it down in my catalog, you know, so I’d know which one to bid on… I don’t remember now what the number was, but I’m absolutely certain it wasn’t 187.” She hesitated, waiting for him to comment. But he didn’t trust himself to speak, and she went on in a nervous rush, sensing the tension in him, perhaps, the words tumbling from her like pebbles before an avalanche.

“I think there must have been some kind of mix-up-my friend Connie said it happens sometimes-anyway. I wasn’t expecting it to come up in the bidding until later, and I was just about to go to the snack bar to get something to drink. If Connie hadn’t spotted it just in time, and told me about it, I’d have missed bidding for it.”

“Whoa,” he croaked. “Back up a minute. Some kind of mix-up? Like what, exactly? You mean, a switch?” His heart had resumed beating, hard and fast. Alarm bells were clanging inside his head. A switch. Jeez Louise, one of the oldest tricks in the book.

“Well,” Jane said, “it seemed like it would be easy to do. In the catalog, all the paintings were listed the same- just, Oil Painting. Framed, or something like that-and then the lot number. So I guess if-”

“And the lot number-how was it attached to the painting? Some kind of tag, sticker, what?”

“A sticker-on the bottom edge of the frame. It was pretty small. I remember I had to-