Take Me Two Times Read online

  And yet Angeline Le Fevre insisted that it was a goat. She said it was by Picasso, worth millions. And she swore it was made out of bronze, not mud.

  Quinn guessed he was just an uncultured schmuck, but apparently others in the building were, too. Because some joker occasionally stuck a burger or a taco in the goat’s misshapen mouth, and that tickled his funny bone.

  “Buenos dias, Manny,” Quinn said to the round security guard in front of the elevators. “El Chivo looks hungry.”

  “Buenos, señor. Nah, he’s not hungry. I found half a McDonald’s milk shake in front of him earlier, so I figure he’s still digesting a Happy Meal.”

  Quinn laughed. “A milk shake, huh? That’s a new one.” He got into the elevator when it opened, but his smile vanished as his gaze moved again to the empty niche.

  Gwen stared intently at the video screen as she watched the Jaworski surveillance tapes for the seventh or eighth time, focusing in on the two shadowy figures in wool caps. The caps were pulled down low and the collars of the men tugged high, effectively concealing most of their features.

  “There,” she said, pointing. “Stop the tape. D’you see that?”

  “What?” asked Dante. As usual, he wore a black designer T-shirt and formfitting jeans with beautifully crafted Italian loafers. Sheila called him GQ.

  “That glint. Just a tiny silver glint near the edge of this guy’s cap.”

  Dante peered more closely at the screen, then lifted a shoulder. “And what significance does it have?”

  “I don’t know. Looks like the guy wears an earring.”

  “Aha!” Dante teased her. “Now you’re onto something. Only three-quarters of the Miami population wears an earring, bella.”

  Gwen made a face at him and peered more intently at the tiny silver gleam in the grainy picture. “How’s your leg?”

  “Misery is going through a south Florida summer in a cast,” Dante said, grimacing.

  “It’s not summer,” Gwen reminded him with a laugh. “It’s early February.”

  He raised an eyebrow and gestured out the floor-to-ceiling plate-glass window. Biscayne Bay sparkled below under a relentless sun. “I must dispute that statement.”

  He was right—eighty-six degrees with 83 percent humidity was summer, no matter what the calendar claimed. This winter felt like August.

  “Caliente,” he said.

  “So are you ever going to fill us in on exactly how you broke your leg?”

  His eyes glinted under their sleepy lids. “Ask Avy. Ask her about the Berlin job—and how I tried to watch out for her.”

  “Well, that explains it. Avy doesn’t like to be looked after. She probably broke your kneecap just for that.”

  Dante laughed, but the sound was a bit humorless. He grabbed his crutches and headed for her office door. “May I get you something to drink? A Pellegrino? Espresso?”

  Dante drank espresso even though everyone else in Miami was hooked on café cubano. His voice reminded her of a café cubano, though—rich and smooth and sweet, full of character. It had hypnotized more than one woman in Miami. Apparently there’d been a few of those in his two years with the agency, but they were only arm candy, nothing serious. The rumor was that he had an ex-wife in Milan and was still in love with her. Gwen found that romantic, if sad.

  “Dante, why don’t you sit down and I’ll get the espresso? Oh, right. You don’t trust me to make it decently.”

  He winked at her and swung himself to the door. With his head he gestured to the tape, still frozen on the close-up of the man’s ear. “I don’t think that will get you anywhere. Make a list instead of anyone who stood to gain from the disappearance of the mask.”

  “I’ve done that, and it’s a very short list,” said Gwen. “The Jaworski corporation owns it. They’ll get the payout from Chubb if we don’t recover the mask. But nobody else benefits.”

  “So maybe it’s a cash-flow issue,” Dante suggested.

  Gwen nodded. “Possible.”

  “I’ll leave you to it.”

  “Thanks,” Gwen muttered, staring again at the shadowy figure’s ear. Dante was right—she should have the Nerd Corps dig into the backgrounds of the executives at Jaworski. But it stood to reason that a crooked executive wouldn’t do his own dirty work. This had been a smash-and-grab operation: The two dark figures on the surveillance footage had come in through a loading dock and had gone right to the rotunda that housed the corporate art collection. Then they’d immediately headed for the glassed-in niche that held the mask. They’d destroyed the glass simply by annihilating it with a fire extinguisher pulled from a wall on the way.

  Nothing creative about the whole operation. The men moved as if they were following instructions to the letter, and they never deviated from them. They’d acted on orders. They’d been directed to take one piece and one piece only. Why?

  She didn’t have to make a list. There were two possible motives for this crime. One was money. The other was lust for the mask itself. Art lovers could become obsessed with the idea of possessing a piece. Obsessed to the point of stealing it to hoard and admire it in secrecy.

  Gwen hit the eject button on the tape. If she found these men, she’d save herself a lot of guesswork and grunt work. A threat of cops, maybe a bribe—and she’d not only track down the mask itself but find out whom these guys were working for.

  Gwen pocketed the tape. Then she called Miguel in the Nerd Corps to see about possibilities for magnification.

  Miguel looked like a choirboy in his polo shirt, with his neatly combed black hair. His skin was olive brown, his eyes a startling pale blue, his mouth a sweet Cupid’s bow. To all appearances, butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Nobody would ever guess that he was a wizard and spent his days doing highly illegal hacking and research for ARTemis.

  Within twenty minutes Gwen knew the glint on that shadowy figure was indeed an earring, a small silver shark.

  Miguel caught his lower lip between his teeth and tapped the screen. “I know that guy. Vargas? Vasquez? Wait, lemme see. . . .” A few clicks of his fingers on the keyboard and he brought up a database with photos and rap sheets. Gwen had a feeling that it was highly irregular for him to have access to it, but she said nothing as he scrolled through it.

  “Velasquez brothers,” he said. “They’re pretty well-known as muscle for hire. Esteban and Carlos, the one with the earring. They live in east Hialeah. Small-time crooks, petty break-ins and some smuggling, some dealing.”

  “Why would they be involved in something like this?”

  Miguel sat back in his chair and shrugged. “Easy money. You want me to set up surveillance?”

  Gwen nodded. She’d gather as much information as she could before talking to them.

  “Consider it done.”

  In the end, electronic surveillance wasn’t necessary. Gwen herself had no trouble tailing the Velasquez brothers the next day from their house in dicey east Hialeah to a warehouse along the Miami River, where they stowed some boxes and then drove away, the brake lights of their old Chevy Impala winking conspiratorially at her.

  Gwen waited for five minutes to make sure they didn’t come back for anything. Then she got out of her little Toyota Prius, gingerly made her way through the thicket of bushes concealing the car, and picked a trail across the gravel drive leading to the warehouse.

  The structure was a bizarre amalgam of brick, cinder block, wood, and corrugated aluminum, and it looked as if it would crumple in a hurricane. She just hoped the roof wouldn’t fall in on her.

  The door was sealed with a heavy industrial padlock, one that would have discouraged most people. Gwen just lifted an eyebrow and dug into her bag. She bypassed her nail file, her mints, and her wallet for a sweet little set of lock picks in a handy microfiber pouch.

  She never left home without it.

  chapter 3

  Inside the warehouse stood several huge pallets of boxed Cuban cigars and liquor. Gwen easily climbed one. The roof wasn’t an i
ssue, but the security presented a problem: Gwen didn’t expect to be greeted by a sixteen-foot-long reticulated python.

  Maybe she should have—after all, she was in a dark, suffocating, ramshackle warehouse along the Miami River, where dead bodies and “square grouper”—packages of cocaine—washed up on a regular basis.

  After years of her mother’s cocktail parties and dinners for thirty, Gwen could charm admirals and generals with a simple dimple. But this reptile? To say that she was at a social loss was putting it mildly. For openers, she screamed—and it wasn’t one of those ladylike chirps, either. It was raw with fear, loud enough to blast off her carefully applied lipstick and leave an appalled kiss print shimmering in the humid Miami air. Edvard Munch’s Scream had nothing on hers.

  The python struck as Gwen hurtled backward off the tall pallet of boxed Cuban cigars she’d unwisely climbed. As she hit the filthy concrete floor and rolled, she thanked God for Cato’s training.

  Gwen got as far as she could get from the crates and the cold-eyed, now motionless reptile, then pulled the SIG Sauer P-230 that was standard issue for all female agents at ARTemis.

  The cold weight of it in her hand reassured her as she wrestled for control over her breathing and her heart rate. The python, still lording it over the Cubans, did a funny little rhythm-and-blues thing with its head and peered into the middle distance.

  Gwen had always scoffed at the urban myth that those in illegal imports/exports sometimes used snakes to discourage anyone from disturbing their products. Only in Hollywood . . . But it was just her luck that the Velasquez brothers had been watching too much bad television.

  She drew up to her full five feet four inches and squinted at the python while she steadied her shaking, sweaty hands.

  The creature’s ugly, flat, lipless head swiveled in her direction and she shivered. As she forced herself closer and aimed her flashlight at it, she could see the snake’s eyes: black and beady. She took aim right between them.

  Nobody in this dangerous area between Seventeenth and Twenty-seventh avenues would blink at the noise. The shot exploded in the uninsulated, aluminum-roofed warehouse and almost deafened her, but it was well worth killing the snake. The resulting mess wasn’t pretty. No time to think about that, though. She needed to get what she’d come here for.

  At the top of the mountain of Cubans, which towered behind an equally tall mountain of crates of a Peruvian liquor called pisco, was an ornate carved mahogany box, the same one she’d seen in her file. Inside that box should be the stolen Venetian mask.

  Easy. Too easy? If anything, Gwen would have expected to track it down in Europe, among priceless bottles of wine or an aristocrat’s cache of jewels. The Miami River was a bit of a stretch—but it was certainly convenient. Yet maybe the brothers simply hadn’t had the chance yet to ship the mask out of the country.

  She clambered back up the pallet of cigars and gingerly used her foot to push the body of the python off the edge. It fell to the cement floor with a couple of heavy, meaty thuds. She swallowed her bile at the sight and turned her eye to the prize, glad that she was a good shot. She should be, after all the ARTemis target practice.

  The wooden box was heavy under her left arm as she navigated her way down the big pallet with her right one. She set the box down on the ground and squatted in front of it as she lifted the lid. The golden mask with its empty eyes glinted up at her. It brought back memories of a silver mask she’d once worn, memories she ruthlessly threw back down the dark well of her past.

  The slides and photos hadn’t done the Venetian mask justice. Studded with swirls of inset jewels in peacock designs and hues, it almost took her breath away. She traced the cold contours of it with her index finger, stopping at the places where an ornately chased, Florentine leather strap fastened to the edges. It buckled at the back of the wearer’s head.

  As she gazed at it, unease coiled at Gwen’s neck and then slithered down her spine. An image flashed at her: of convulsed, agonized hands trying to pry the mask off, fingers scrabbling hopelessly to unbuckle the strap. A writhing, shuddering body in its death throes. Black betrayal.

  She almost dropped the box. Instead, she quickly shut it, tucked it under her arm, and hitched the handle of her big handbag over her shoulder. She turned toward the aluminum door, which hung a bit drunkenly on its hinges now that the heavy padlock was off, the only thing that had held it on straight.

  Gwen stabbed open the door with her manicured index finger and stepped out into the humid, fetid Miami air, which moistened her skin like the surly breath of an alligator.

  She still couldn’t quite believe that her $5 million assignment had been this easy. Something about this recovery didn’t feel quite right—but then, it was the first one she’d ever done on her own and she didn’t know exactly what “right” should feel like.

  Gwen wanted to savor the moment, bask in the thrill. But as she walked to the Prius, the mask inside the box seemed to pulse ominously. She couldn’t wait to get rid of it.

  Quinn glanced at his watch, impatient for two o’clock to arrive along with Avy Hunt and the Borgia mask. He was impressed that she’d made the recovery in such a short time. Now he could get old Ed Jaworski placated and off his back, while Quinn himself returned to doing what he did best: running the company.

  Any more security breaches and the lab’s investors would scatter like cockroaches before he could get funding for the R & D on a drug with huge potential—it could break the cycle of alcohol addiction. Things were too late for his grandfather, but not for others.

  Quinn’s mouth twisted as he signed a stack of letters. They’d found old Jack Lawson on his sagging front porch with a bottle of Popov still in his gnarled, clawlike hand. He’d died as he’d lived, in shame and squalor.

  It was the shame that drove Quinn still. Never again would he be the object of pity and ridicule, a kid that some old pervert felt that he could take advantage of because nobody would notice—or care.

  If he could get Alaban produced and distributed, he’d leave a mark on the world, and not just a skid mark. He could quit remembering the days when he’d had to apologize for his very existence.

  As Quinn signed yet another piece of correspondence, his phone rang. “Sir,” said his assistant, “your two o’clock appointment is here.”

  “Thanks, Chris. Send her in.”

  Quinn picked up the dark suit jacket he’d tossed on the couch and pulled it on. He sat down in the brown leather chair behind his desk and tried not to be bothered by the oppressive dark paneling and taupe upholstery of his predecessor. He made a mental note to have Chris remove the mounted bear’s head that loomed over the credenza and had been the former CEO’s unsubtle gimmick for intimidating people.

  The rest of it could wait—Quinn was here to get Jaworski’s bottom line healthy, not prance around with some interior decorator or spend whole days playing golf, as his predecessor had.

  Quinn was curious to meet Avy Hunt. What kind of woman spent her days running down stolen art? How did a person get into that kind of profession?

  His office door opened and he got courteously to his feet. Then he saw who waltzed in and he almost fell back into the chair.

  It was her. No doubt about it. Those were the same sweet doe eyes that belied her intelligence. The nose that was narrow at the bridge and widened into an upside-down heart at the tip. The contours of her face, also heart shaped. And the mouth he’d loved until she’d given him the big kiss-off fifteen years ago.

  He didn’t know whether to laugh or throw something. “Unless you’ve changed your name, Gwen, you’re not Avy Hunt.”

  Her face had drained of color and she took a step back, then another. Her mouth formed his name but no sound came out. She shook her head as if to clear it of his image, but he sure as hell wasn’t going anywhere. His journey for the past fifteen years had led right to this desk. It had been spurred by her, people like her. Quinn had seen to it that he’d never feel inferior again.
r />   The silence stretched on.

  It made him angry: He’d worked for years to get her voice out of his head, and he suddenly wanted to hear it again. Why? And still she said not a single word. Damn her.

  Talk to me. Open that sultry, dirty-angel mouth. Or do you need a pen, so you can write me another note?

  Long-repressed, long-forgotten emotion bubbled to the surface in him, simmering like lava under a thin, scarred crust. He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her until she spoke to him, even if only to swear. But he didn’t move from behind his desk.

  “Your hair is different,” he said at last, stupidly, eyeing her short cut with the subtle orange streaks. They were supposed to be rebellious, he figured, but they were oddly elegant. Reminded him of Grand Marnier in a firelit glass.

  She nodded. The expression on her face hadn’t changed since she’d entered, but even after fifteen years, he still knew her well enough to note the small signs of shock she’d exhibited: the quick, subtle double blink, the surge of color in her white cheeks, the small hand tightening on that ridiculously large pocketbook. Her left knee, exposed by the hem of her skirt, quivered.

  So she hadn’t engineered this meeting on purpose . . . or had she?

  He wished he didn’t know what she looked like naked. How she had a birthmark that looked a lot like a chocolate-chip cookie on the inside of her right thigh.

  Hey, Cookie Monster . . .

  The memories were so silly. So juvenile. So bittersweet.

  And so out of place.

  He pushed them away and made a last-ditch attempt to get down to business while Gwen stared up at that stupid, goddamned bear’s head with an expression of polite disgust. He wanted to yell that he hadn’t shot it and hadn’t stuck it up there, but doing so would reveal that she’d eviscerated the famous Quinn “cool,” and damned if he was about to do that.

  “Gwen,” he said evenly, “what are you doing here? It’s great to see you after all these years, but I have an appointment right now. My assistant must have thought you were Ms. Hunt.”