Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

presence of forty million calories. It wasn’t that she never indulged in a little cocoa comfort; she just usually skated down the candy aisle and grabbed a Hershey bar as she passed. Anything more elaborate than a plain slab of milk chocolate was gilding the lily, as far as Faye was concerned.
    But not today. Today, she needed to hide her face while Wally lied to the guy from the Park Service about the whereabouts of her friend Joe. So she listened to Wally swear he’d never seen a tall, dark man wearing traditional Indian clothing. Perhaps he wasn’t lying; she didn’t think Wally ever had met Joe.
    The agent’s sources had told him that significant artifacts, possibly excavated in this area, had shown up on the black market. The Park Service wanted to question any suspicious characters they could find, and the sheriff had told him that this new guy Joe looked plenty suspicious. And he’d been seen piloting a johnboat around the Last Isles.
    Wally played dumb, making the man explain— at least three times—what a pothunter was, even though he knew exactly how Faye spent her spare time. Wally then denied (again) that he’d ever seen the man in question, proclaiming that he was absolutely shocked that anyone would do such a craven thing. In this case, he was surely lying. Wally was impossible to shock. Besides, pothunting was the kind of victimless crime that Wally could really get behind.
    It took Wally a long time to convince the man that he was honest—no surprise—and that he’d never seen anybody who resembled Joe in the least, so Faye had plenty of time to study the nutrition label on each brand of empty calories. She learned a lot: for instance, twelve bars of milk chocolate provide a full day’s quota of calcium.
    Finally, the agent quit harassing Wally and left. Wally was in Faye’s face before she emerged from Hershey heaven.
    “You’ve got to send that Indian guy on his way. Now the government’s looking for him. If they keep sniffing around, they’re gonna find you .”
    So he had met Joe. Well, every once in a while, even nature boys like Joe got a hankering for junk food, and Wally’s was the closest candy and chips dealer to Joyeuse, by far.
    Liz’s disembodied voice wafted out of the kitchen. “Hang the government. Goddamn taxes.”
    “Listen to the cook in shining armor,” Wally said. “Did you know she saved your friend’s ass this morning?”
    No, nobody had told her a thing. Faye wondered why that surprised her. “Joe can usually take care of himself.”
    “Yeah, but he’s gullible. He believed some thug who claimed to be a Fish and Wildlife agent and nearly hopped in the man’s boat.”
    “What could Joe have done to cross somebody like that?” Faye asked. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
    Wally thrust himself back into the conversation. “Who knows what kind of trouble he was in before he ever showed up here? Women are stupid. You trust that man because he looks like a stud. He’s nothing more than a vagrant, Faye. If he’d showed up at Joyeuse missing half his teeth and all his hair, you wouldn’t have given him the time of day.”
    Wally had a point, but she didn’t want to admit it, so she didn’t answer. She just glared at him.
    “You’ve got to send him on his way, Faye. He’s not smart enough to keep your secrets. You’ve got a lot of them, you know.”

    Liz wiped down the bar while she watched Faye walk out. She knew Faye, because Faye spent more time hanging around the marina and jawing with Wally than most women who had good sense. And now Liz had met Joe, the studly innocent who’d just escaped disaster, thanks to her. It seemed that Faye and Joe lived together and that Wally knew it.
    Liz studied Faye’s back. She saw a slim body clad in a work shirt and khakis, topped with a head covered in short dark hair, and she remembered what she knew about the crook she had just scorched. He wasn’t just looking for Joe, he was looking for his friend, a small dark adolescent boy.
    Liz wondered how long it was going to take Wally to realize that, just a minute ago, he was talking to the missing “boy.” She figured it wasn’t her business to tell him. She wasn’t sure he could be trusted with the information.

    Faye’s Bonneville was a slow ride and the short drive to Sopchoppy would take her twenty minutes to accomplish, leaving her time to stew. She even got angry enough to talk to herself.
    “A vagrant,” she fumed. “Who does Wally think he