Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

looked up from the TV and so never saw the man who sold him out.

    Stuart rolled over in the lumpy hotel bed and picked up the ringing phone, letting it crash back down without ever bringing the handset near his ear. Damn wake-up call.
    It rang again. If he’d been suffering from his usual hangover, he would have buried his head under the stale-smelling pillow and let it ring, but he never drank when he was working. This time he lifted it to his ear. After a pause, he let it crash onto the receiver without ever having spoken a word.
    He jumped into his pants, grabbed his room key and his weapon, and pointed his car toward Wally’s Marina. Indian Boy had finally surfaced.

    The grill was still deserted, except for one pony-tailed customer, and Liz leaned on the counter, waiting for something to happen. She’d sold the boy two more bags of chips, but that was probably his limit. He’d had to dig deep into the leather bag at his waist for the money, and he’d mostly come up with pennies. She noticed that the eight or ten pennies left over after he paid for the chips hadn’t gone back into the bag. He’d put them in her tip jar, then settled back down in front of the TV.
    Within fifteen minutes, the goon showed up, pretending to be a Fish and Wildlife officer. He stomped over to Joe and asked, “Been doing any fishing lately?”
    “Yeah,” said Joe.
    “Got a license?”
    Joe’s baffled face broke Liz’s heart. She wondered if the boy knew what a fishing license was.
    “Come with me. Let’s take a look at your boat and see if you’ve been doing anything else you shouldn’t.”
    Joe listened, but he didn’t have anything to say for himself. He was just going to follow the man outside. It seemed to Liz like the innocents of the world were the ones who got tangled up in life’s cobwebs and eaten by spiders.
    The cost of hiring a goon and paying for days of room and board while he located his quarry would be steep, and criminals were notoriously stingy with their money. Somebody wanted this boy bad.
    Her heart went out to the young man as he threw his three empty Doritos bags in the trash and followed the so-called officer out, pausing only long enough to hand her his empty coffee cup and say thanks. Damn. Now she’d have to take action. In her day, she’d waited on thieves, wife beaters, and drug runners like her dear departed husband. She’d found many of them to be attractive and well groomed. Even polite. But she had never yet met a bad guy willing to bus his own table.
    Liz dipped a big potful of hot grease out of the deep fryer and followed Joe and his escort out onto the dock.
    “Where’s your badge, Officer?” she asked in a voice that stopped just short of a bellow.
    “You’ve got no authority here, lady,” the impostor said, hustling Joe along.
    “Your ID, your badge, your uniform, anything. Just show me and the boy here something that proves you have a right to treat him this way.”
    “You want ID? I’ll show you ID,” he said, reaching under his windbreaker.
    Liz had never heard anybody say that Fish and Wildlife officers carried concealed weapons, but the action was unmistakable. With one foot, she swept Joe’s feet out from under him. Once he had landed on his butt, safely out of range of her sizzling ammunition, she gave the pot in her hand an underhanded sling.
    Hot grease slopped over the goon and his gun. It thumped to the dock and bounced into the water as the man staggered back and ripped at the soaked jacket and shirt holding the scalding grease to his body.
    “Get away from here, boy,” she said to Joe. “This place ain’t safe for you.”
    She watched Joe navigate his little johnboat deep into the salt marsh, where no shooter would ever find him, especially not one nursing third-degree burns. Then she headed back to her kitchen to call the sheriff, swinging her empty pot and striding like a Valkyrie.
    When he arrived, the man was gone.

Chapter 13
    An anomalous low-pressure system hovered off the coast of Central America. It had dumped enough rain on Honduras and Nicaragua to generate localized mudslides but, because there was no loss of life, Americans had paid scarcely any attention.
    When, at long last, the storm steeled itself for a move into the open waters, it was finally rewarded with an upgrade to tropical storm. Powerful things gestate slowly.

    Faye had spent the last ten minutes perusing Wally’s candy aisle, far more time than she usually spent in the