He didn’t say anything to that. He just stood there, smiling.
She was just full of surprises.
After a moment she looked up at him, saw the expression on his face, and her own grew serious. Gently, she laid the guitar aside, then turned back to him once more.
“Come on back to bed, Abe,” she said, her voice soft and throaty.
He dropped the towel and his memories and did so. Yesterday was great, he’d had a full life and a lot of wonderful times to look back on, but he would not trade this—this woman, this moment, this here and now—for any of them.
After dinner, Marissa directed Thorn’s driver to take them to a street address a couple miles away from the restaurant.
Thorn said, “Where are we going again?”
She said, “We’re going to the Robb Art Gallery to see the Byers show.”
Thorn said, “Who?”
She smiled. “Do you ever read a paper, Tommy? Watch the news? Mike Byers, he works in glass. Stained, etched, fused—and the fused stuff is where he shines. After thirty years at it, he was ‘discovered’ a couple years ago and is now the hottest artist in the medium since Dale Chihuly.”
“Who?”
“You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?”
Actually, he was—he’d seen Chihuly’s fantastic glass sculptures. Though, he recalled, those were collaborations, Chihuly had been the director and motivating force behind them.
He smiled at her. “A little.”
She shook her head, raising her eyes heavenward. “The man made a joke. Not a great joke, but nonetheless, it’s progress.”
The Pamela Robb Gallery was a place of tall, vaulted ceilings and lots of windows arranged and angled to offer sunlight to the pale walls. It being night and dark out, they had to make do with artificial light, but care had been taken in the selection and placing of that, too. There were a fair number of people milling about inside, but the place was laid out in such a way that it didn’t feel crowded when you went to view the art. Some of it was hung on the walls, some propped up on easels.
Thorn wasn’t an art expert by any means—but he found that the abstract glasswork was more emotionally evocative than he would have expected. A lot of it was black glass, geometric shapes with different-colored overlays. Some of them had pieces of copper or bronze mixed in with them. One in particular that caught his eye was called “Fuhoni-te,” three black squares set slightly apart, with a vein of red and one of blue running through them. There was another one called “Seeking a Lower Orbit,” of glass and copper. There was one named “Thebes,” another named “In the Dream Time,” a “Timebinder,” and one called “Death in Somalia.” Colorful names, for sure. His favorite title was “The Physiology of the Eleventh Dimensional Cloned Feline.”
Many of them were small—he remarked on this to Marissa.
“These things have to be fired in a kiln, between thirteen hundred and fifteen hundred degrees. Bigger is harder to work with, and needs a larger kiln. Most of his early stuff was small. Once he got the feel for it, he started stretching.”
“How do you know all this?”
“If you’d looked as we came in, you’d have seen it printed out on a card by the door.”
“Oh.”
They came to a larger panel, one that looked almost like slightly misshapen piano keys, with eighteen segments that were skinny, narrow not-quite-rectangles, all done in different iridescent hues, with black spaces between them and three thin lines of black across the bases. The second-to-last shape on the right had a small red dot of glass on the bottom. The whole thing looked to be sixteen, eighteen inches wide, two-and-a-half, three inches tall, framed and matted so that the entire piece was maybe a foot by two feet.
“I like this one a lot,” Thorn said. “Called ‘Chromatic Sequence.’ ”
Marissa looked at the price tag. “Six thousand dollars,” she said. “But it’s already sold.”
“Too bad. I could see that hanging over our fireplace.”
“We have a fireplace?”
“If you want one.”
She shook her head.
He reached into his jacket pocket and took out the velvet-covered box. “Oh, I almost forgot. Here.”
She knew it was jewelry—the size and shape of the box was a giveaway—and she almost certainly knew it was an engagement ring. But she didn’t know. . . .
She opened the box. “Oh, wow!”
The ring was simple, a fairly plain band of yellow gold, with a diamond-cut emerald inset into it. He’d had it made by a jeweler in Amsterdam and couriered to him when it was done.
“How did you know?”
“I asked your grandmother.”
She slipped the ring onto her finger. “Perfect fit. You never asked my size.”
“Grandma Ruth has your high school ring in a box at her house. She says you haven’t gotten any fatter since then.”
Tears welled in her eyes. “Thank you, Tommy. It’s gorgeous.”
“Not as gorgeous as you.”
She hugged him.
Life felt pretty good at that moment.
Carruth had a pretty good gun safe, a five-hundred-pound Liberty, that would hold a dozen long guns and twice that many handguns, though he didn’t have that many on hand. The safe would protect his hardware from bad guys, mostly, but if somebody kicked in the door with a search warrant, that would be the first place they’d want to look. They’d be able to get it open sooner or later, so putting the BMF there wouldn’t help. If he was going to keep it, it had to hide somewhere else.
The problem was, cops had seen just about every kind of hiding place there was in a house—toilet tanks, the freezer, under the fridge. Dope fiends apparently got very clever about their stashes—hung down inside walls behind light-switch plates or electrical outlets, inside fake cans of Ajax or hollowed-out books. Cops would move furniture, look behind drawers, under loose floorboards, inside stereo speakers or television cabinets. The only way to hide something as big as the BMF in a house would be to put it somewhere nobody would ever think to look, and that wasn’t likely with detectives who’d been on the job for ten or fifteen years. They had seen just about every place. He was still thinking about a spot they wouldn’t look—under the safe? outside, up in a tree?—when the latest throwaway cell phone chirped.
“Yeah?”
“We need to meet. At the new place. Tomorrow, six A.M.”
“Trouble?”
“Just be there.”
Well, wasn’t that just dandy? What this time? Another terrorist?
For now, he stuck the gun back into the safe. He’d figure out a hiding place later.
