Donovans 03 - Pearl Cove

after tray of pearls, enough wealth to make a saint covetous.
    Even though he knew he was alone, he couldn’t help looking over his shoulder again. Again, nothing was there but the long shadow of his own suspicions. He turned back to the vault.
    Now came the difficult part. Everybody knew that he could no longer come to his feet without help; therefore, he couldn’t reach higher than a sitting man’s head. No one would believe that he could get to the top lockers by himself.
    When they searched in darkness for his cache of pearls, they always looked low, not high.
    With a grim smile he wiped his hands again, reached up, and grabbed the highest handle he could. His legs might be pipestems, but his arms and shoulders were heavily muscled. He dragged himself up the ten-foot-high wall of lockers in a series of one-armed chin-ups. Once his hand slipped on its own sweat. Before he caught himself, the odd stainless steel ring he wore on his right index finger clanged and scraped steel. The fine scratches blended with many others, silent testimony to the number of times he had climbed this very personal mountain.
    Breathing hard, he grabbed the handle of the top center locker with one hand and worked its combination with the other. A latch gave way somewhere at the back, toward the wall. Click. Click. Then, slowly, a final click.
    Quickly he let himself down the cabinet until he could take the weight off his arms. Then he grabbed two handles at random and gave them simultaneous yanks.
    The front of the bank of lockers shifted. Slowly, with elephantine grace, a thick steel panel swung open on concealed pivots. The lower lockers weren’t quite as deep as they seemed from the front. Behind them, cut into the vault itself, lay a series of narrow, shallow, locked drawers. He fitted the spiky steel edges of his oyster ring into the holes at the front of the left-hand drawer, turned, and pulled gently.
    The drawer slid out.
    For the first time he hesitated. Looking quickly over his shoulder to assure himself that he was still alone, he pulled a long, flat jeweler’s case from the drawer. With the reverence of a priest taking communion, he opened the case.
    The Black Trinity glowed against velvet the color of dawn.
    Though he had seen it many times, the unstrung triple necklace made his heart squeeze and his breathing quicken. Undrilled, untouched, as natural as the day he had eased them gently from their cool, slippery wombs, the pearls were like no other on earth.
    Each pearl came from a genetically singular strain of Pearl Cove oysters. The result was a black pearl with unique orient, utterly distinct from the familiar Tahitian gems. The harvest from Pearl Cove’s special oysters resembled a black opal as much as a pearl.
    That difference alone would have made the triple necklace recklessly valuable. But the Black Trinity was value piled on value, rarity on rarity. Each strand was made up of a single size of pearl. The shortest necklace held twelve-millimeter pearls. The second, longer necklace, had fourteen-millimeter pearls. The third and longest strand was made up of incomparable sixteen-millimeter gems. Each pearl was round. None had any obvious imperfections. The color match between pearls in each strand was very, very close, which added immeasurably to the worth of the necklace as a whole.
    Yet it wasn’t wealth that had urged the man to claw hand over hand up a steel wall. Nor did beauty goad him. Like a medieval alchemist or a bloody penitent, he was driven by the hope of transcendence. A miracle. Something unspeakably valuable replacing the ordinary dross of life.
    He opened drawer after drawer, scanned the oddly radiant black pearls within, compared them to the Black Trinity, and moved on to the next drawer and then the next and the next until none remained.
    Frowning, he glanced from the shimmering Black Trinity to the last drawer of Pearl Cove’s unique midnight-and-rainbow gems. No matter how closely he looked, none of the new harvest offered a better match or a more perfect pearl for the triple strands than any of the gems already chosen.
    A chill went through him, a panic darker than the blackest pearl. The Black Trinity was complete.
    But he was not.
    No! It needs better eyes, that’s all. Her eyes, damn her. Damn her to hell for her strong legs and unnatural eyes.
    For seven years he had needed her almost as much as he hated her. He would have to take the new harvest to her and watch in seething