Donovans 03 - Pearl Cove

impotence while her profane fingers handled his most sacred prayers.
    Outside, the storm struck with the casual savagery of a beast whose womb had been a cauldron of warm water as big as an ocean. Lights dimmed and brightened, then dimmed again. It was early for the monsoon’s battering storms, but the graveyard in Broome was filled with men who had drowned out of season in their quest for saltwater miracles.
    Finally fuses melted and darkness fell inside the shed. Slowly the fans stopped turning. There was no lag time for the alarms on the front door. They died as the lights had, instantly. The electronic lock on the outside door froze. Unless he used the interior manual release, no one could get into the shed.
    Just before rain battered on the metal roof like buckshot, drowning out the ground-shaking thunder, he heard the sounds of metal gnawing at metal. He knew it was a chisel against the hinges of the front door; he knew, because it was what he would have done.
    Someone was out there, gnawing away at the barriers to the Black Trinity.
    Quickly, working by touch alone, he replaced the jeweler’s case and closed up the trays of less worthy but still priceless rainbow pearls. In his haste, he wrenched one tray free of its tracks. Exquisite black rainbows flew in every direction. There was no time to go after them, for he would have to drag himself over the floor like a snake. Swearing viciously, he jammed the empty tray back in, swung the heavy panel into place, and closed up the highest tier of lockers, the ones he wasn’t supposed to be able to reach.
    He didn’t close up the rest of the vault. Instead, he began flinging pearls from the lower locker trays onto the floor of the shed. When the middle tier of lockers was empty, he went on to the lowest tier. He emptied those trays, too, scattering pearls like ball bearings in all directions.
    After he emptied the lockers, he left them open, like square tongues sticking out of the smooth face of the vault. Nor did he close the vault itself. He wanted whoever was hacking his way into the shed to believe that Pearl Cove’s treasure lay undefended at his feet.
    When he was finished, he grabbed a piece of discarded oyster shell, went into the deepest pool of darkness he could find, and worked on the shell until he had a pointed fragment as long as his hand. Then he did the only thing left for a man in a wheelchair to do.
    He waited.

One
    Like grains of sand grinding inside the oyster,
Like pearls being formed from the grains;
Still waiting, though in unbearable patience
Still believing, though almost in disbelief.
    ZHOU LIANGEPEI
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
    November
    A rcher Donovan wasn’t easily surprised. It was a hangover from his previous line of work when surprised men often ended up dead. Yet the unique, peacock-and-rainbow radiance of the teardrop black pearl Teddy Yamagata was holding out did more than surprise Archer. It shocked him. He hadn’t seen a black pearl with such color for seven years.
    That particular pearl had been clutched in a dead man’s hand. Or nearly dead. Archer had fought his way through the riot in time to pull his half brother out of the mess and get him to a hospital in another, safer place.
    Long ago, far away, in another country.
    Thank God.
    Archer had done everything in his power to bury that part of his past. Years later he still was shoveling. But he had learned the hard way that no matter how determined he was, his previous undercover life had a nasty habit of popping up and casting shadows on his present civilian life. The proof of it was gleaming on the palm of Hawaii’s foremost pearl collector and trader.
    Teddy wasn’t in Hawaii now. He had flown to Seattle with a case full of special pearls to show Archer. The extraordinary black pearl was one of them.
    “Unusual color,” Archer said neutrally.
    Peering through the thick, blended lenses of his glasses, Teddy measured the expression of the man who was a sometime competitor in the pearl trade, an occasional client, and an invariably reliable appraiser. If Archer was particularly interested in the tear-shaped black pearl, nothing showed on his face. He could have been looking at a picture of Teddy’s grandchildren.
    “You must be a helluva poker player,” Teddy said.
    “Are we playing poker?”
    “You’ve got your game face on. At least I think you do. Hard to tell under all that fur.”
    Absently Archer rubbed his hand against his cheek. He had given up shaving