Breaking Loose

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Stakeout-Suzi had never been on a stakeout, but surprisingly, the scene in front of her was very familiar-half a dozen prostitutes congregating on their strip of turf in front of Galeria Viejo, gearing up for the night shift.

“Coffee?” Dax asked, offering his cup.

She’d opted for bottled water when he’d made his recon stroll past the Old Gallery and then slipped into a dive called El Mercado for a few supplies, but a little coffee wasn’t a bad idea. She’d stayed in the Land Cruiser, parked a ways down the street, but in a place where they had full view of the main door and Ponce’s Range Rover parked out front.

“Thanks.” She took the cup and held it to her mouth, blowing first before taking a sip. “So what do you think? Is that the world’s oldest profession?”

“Nah,” he said. “War is the world’s oldest profession, by a long shot, and then comes tax collecting, and then the trick turners showed up to give everybody some relief from the other two.”

She grinned, and when he glanced over, he did, too.

Yes, sir, that was them, just a couple of fun-loving kids with murder and mayhem behind them, and a four-thousand-year-old occult statue in front of them-hopefully.

Ponce hadn’t even left a guard on the Range Rover. All five of his crew, himself included, were in the gallery. Suzi almost hoped he did find it. At least they’d know where it was then, and she didn’t doubt that Dylan and the boys could steal it back, maybe even before Dax could get his hands on it.

“What are his chances, you think, of them finding anything in there?”

“Slim to none, about the same as ours. The place is really torn up inside. As a matter of fact, you might want to reconsider this plan and let me just take you to the airport.” He held a cookie out for her, from out of a bag he’d bought, and she took it.

They’d been an hour on the river road, getting back into town, and were an hour into watching the gallery, and that was the third or fourth time he’d suggested taking her to the airport.

“No,” she said. “I need to get inside, look around for myself.”

She still had the scanner, her ace in the hole, and yes, he was bound to notice when she pulled it out, but until she was in the gallery, she was keeping her technical advantage to herself.

He had caveman tendencies. It wouldn’t be beyond him to just take the damn scanner and try to ship her out. He wouldn’t get far with getting rid of her, but she could save them both the wear and tear of him finding that out by just keeping her secret to herself.

“Senator Leonard must be paying you one helluva commission.”

“Top-notch,” she agreed.

“Bull,” he said.

“Whatever.”

He held an open bag of chips out, and she reached in and got a handful.

Sharing coffee, eating chips and cookies, they both watched the gallery and the Range Rover and the whores.

“I could pay you more.”

That’s all he said, sitting over there dangling bait, and yes, she knew he could. General Grant was paying her twenty plus tactical support, and Dax had both those and more to offer. He’d done well in his business, whatever his business was-which she was guessing was more than the art-recovery-type investigations he’d done with Esmee. The guy had money.

Without biting on his offer, she handed the coffee back to him and reached for her bottle of water.

“And here we go,” he said, leaning slightly forward in his seat, picking up the binoculars she’d donated to the cause.

Ponce and his boys were coming out.

She looked at each man, carefully cataloguing what she saw, and knew he was doing the same. Neither one of them said a word, until the Range Rover pulled away from the gallery and drove off.

He lowered the binoculars and looked over at her. “What did you get?”

“Nothing.” She shook her head.

“Nothing,” he agreed. “They came out empty-handed. Let’s go.”

Three minutes later, back in the alley behind Beranger’s, Dax started prying open the makeshift security gate someone had attached to the Old Gallery’s delivery door. The sun was going down, the alley was still piled with garbage, and Suzi, Dax noticed, was taking a pen-shaped object out of her fanny pack. After getting a look at it, he lifted his gaze to her face.

Geezus, she was beautiful. Beautiful and, he was sure, guilty as hell-of something, standing there holding the small piece of equipment like it was a wand, pen-shaped, yes, but with a readout display and a couple of pressure switches.

“What is that?” he asked, leaning into the length of rebar he was using as a lever on the iron bars. Walking in the front door, where Ponce and his men had come out, would have been nominally easier, but Suzi probably had the top spot on Ciudad del Este’s Most Wanted list for another couple of hours at least. By midnight, for certain, some other horrendous crime, or probably half a dozen, would have taken place and knocked her into yesterday’s old news. Until then, parading her through the lineup of Colony Club whores and pimps taking over the block and congregating in front of the gallery was not in their best interest, and besides, it just wasn’t all that difficult to get into Beranger’s Old Gallery.

“Well, actually,” the beautiful redhead said, “it’s a scanner…for an, uh, RFID tag.”

To her credit, she dropped that bomb without stumbling around too much, and it was one helluva bomb. Right. A scanner.

He stopped with the rebar in his hands, just holding it between the bars of the gate, and looked at her.

Looked at her hard.

“You’ve been holding out on me.”

“A little,” she admitted.

Sonuva-gee-fricking-bitch. There was only one thing in Beranger’s damn gallery worth tagging with a radio frequency identification chip, the Memphis Sphinx, and sure as hell that was the only damn thing she was searching for in this dump-and the lucky girl just happened to have a scanner for it in her pocket?

Oh, baby, that was a huge can of worms.

“So where’s the chip?” As if he didn’t know.

“On the Sphinx.”

Yeah, she said it with a straight face.

“Excellent. Great.” He pushed on the rebar again, giving it his all, and the rusted-out lock on the gate gave in and busted apart. “So we’ll be able to find this thing in record time and get the hell back out of here, right?”

Her answer to that was an elongated pause.

“Theoretically,” she finally said.

Theoretically.

Absofuckinglutely amazing, and geezus, what a cool piece of action she really was-all this time, in possession of a freaking scanner to pick up the signal off a chip someone had adhered to or embedded in the statue.

And wasn’t that suddenly the biggest mystery in the whole damn day-who?

No art dealer, no antiquities smuggler, that was for damn sure, and he was betting no senator from Illinois either. He’d known she was lying about a few things, but the sheer scope of her subterfuge had just hit cosmic proportions.

And she’d been good at it, damn good. She made him look like an amateur. A smart guy would pay attention to a fact like that, but somehow, he knew he’d been smarter earlier in the day, before she’d shown up-and wasn’t that just the damn way of it.

He pulled a pair of lockpicks out of his shirt pocket and went to work on the main delivery door.

“Theoretically?” he repeated. “What’s the matter? Doesn’t it work?”

“I’m not sure. I got a hit when I was in here with Remy,” she said, and he heard her unzip something-and hell, yes, that was enough to get him to turn around and look.

“Do you want some light on that?” She was pulling a flashlight out of her fanny pack.

Fanny pack, not her pants. Right. He needed his head examined-and he was starting to get real impressed with her kit, what she’d brought, and what she’d not. Everything she’d pulled out had been damn useful.

“Yes.” Geezus. “A hit?” And he was filing that under the day’s nearly empty category called “Good News,” about a hundred steps down from where he’d filed “First Kiss.”

She turned the flashlight on and held the beam on the door’s lock while he slid the picks into the mechanism.

“More like half a hit,” she said. “We were in his Chapel Room, at the bottom of the stairs where you were on the second floor. I thought the scanner was malfunctioning, that it didn’t work, and then just as the cops were coming in, it signaled a GPS location.”

“GPS,” he repeated, and felt the locking mechanism release.

She nodded.

And he swore.

RFID scanners, chips, and GPS, hell, she was light-years ahead of him on this deal.

He opened the door and then just stopped for a second, waiting for the first wave of heat and stench to wash over him. It was bad, old Remy cooking in the heat for a few hours, and if Suzi didn’t lose her lunch in the place, he was going to get her a gold star or something.

“An RFID tag on a four-thousand-year-old Egyptian statue,” he said, pulling his own flashlight out. “I didn’t realize the ancient Egyptians had that kind of technology.” It wasn’t a question, but he sure as hell expected an answer.

“They were very advanced.”

No shit.

“Not that advanced, Sugar.” He slid the beam of his flashlight down the inside wall, found a light switch, and gave it a flip. Nothing happened, which racked up another el perfecto in his day. This wasn’t going to work. “Why don’t you give me the scanner and just wait outside.” Sometimes he didn’t know much about women, and sometimes he knew even less, but he knew she’d be happier if she didn’t go inside the gallery. It was dark, dangerously haphazard with broken everything all over the floor, and it reeked.

The only answer he got was a short laugh, very short.

Okay, she could have it her way-almost.

He looked over his shoulder and met her gaze.

“Remy’s dead, Suzi. The cops killed him when they busted in the gallery this afternoon, and from the smell, I’m pretty sure he’s still in here. Are you sure you’re up for this?”

“Ah, hell,” she said, closing her eyes and suddenly looking very weary.

Yeah, it had been a long day, and poor dead Remy was just one more hurdle-but it wasn’t enough to send her packing, and she should have been running the other way the minute the cops had first busted into Galeria Viejo.

“Who are you really working for, Suzi?”

He needed to know, not just for his sake, but for hers. He hadn’t seen anybody in this damn city trying to save her butt except him, but there was somebody out there somewhere who was responsible for her being in this mess, the same somebody who had tagged the Memphis Sphinx and lost it, and of all the damn things, they’d sent Suzi Toussi to Ciudad del Este to get it.

Well, that somebody needed to know that the job had gone south.

“One name,” he tried again. “Just give me a name.”

That was a question, straight out, and the girl straight-out ignored it, opening her eyes and looking at him, but not moving her lips-geezus, as cool and collected as a cube of dry ice, even in the ninety-plus heat.

So he put it another way.

“That name isn’t Skip Leonard, is it? You’re working for somebody else, aren’t you?” he asked, and sweet thing, she ignored him again.

Actually, she did more than ignore him. She shook her head, like he should know better than to ask.

“All right, sugar. Have it your way, but the deal we have is fifty-fifty.” No matter who was holding her leash.

And he was going to find out, guaranteed.

“Fifty-fifty,” she said, not sounding any more convincing than he probably did. Fifty-fifty on the finding was one thing. Fifty-fifty on the keeping was where their deal was going to get sticky.

But fine. He was going to let her have it her way for now. He just hoped to hell she was ready.

“Stay close” was all he said.