Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

than she was. Sheriff McKenzie had a good track record. She’d assumed he’d find the students’ murderer just like he had so many others, but as far as Faye could tell, he’d never even had a real suspect. What had made her assume she and Joe could safely remain at Joyeuse?
    Faye changed course, steering her skiff back to Wally’s. She needed to return Magda’s call.

    Wally waved at Faye as she hung up the phone, waiting for her to leave before he went back into his office and closed the door. Nguyen sat in the chair where Wally had left him fifteen minutes before.
    Nguyen waited better than most people—alert, ready for anything, but giving no sign of impatience. He worked with the same deliberation. Working with Nguyen was often a frustrating endeavor; sometimes Wally regretted going into business with him. Wally’s usually flaccid body was capable of great bursts of activity. When he dug for artifacts alongside Nguyen, Wally always felt that he was working harder, moving more dirt, hurrying more to box up his finds and load them on the boat.
    Yet at the end of the day, the pile of dirt Nguyen had shoveled out of the ground was always bigger than his. Nguyen’s finds were more numerous and more valuable. His crates were more efficiently packed. His work was carefully thought out to minimize effort and so were his words.
    “So what’s happened to the cash flow?” Nguyen asked.
    Wally squirmed. “I’ve sold everything we uncovered this summer. We’ve still got a warehouse full of things I stored on my friend’s island east of here last year while we were looking for buyers, but I’m having some trouble this week, er—I can’t get our goods out of storage right now.” Nguyen drummed a single finger on Wally’s desk.
    How was he going to explain his dilemma to Nguyen? Faye’s live-in stud might make life peachy for her, but he complicated Wally’s life to no end. He needed to get into the shed on Joyeuse Island. He needed to get in there bad. But he needed to do it without anyone to witness what he pulled out of the shed and loaded on his boat. And as far as he could tell, the big Indian hadn’t left the island since Liz scalded the phony Park Services guy.
    Fate was conspiring against Wally these days. First, there was the resort being built in the Last Isles. It would bring tourists and heavy pleasure boat traffic to his marina, but Wally’s more lucrative business thrived in the shade. It wouldn’t survive the onset of civilization, although thanks to those two dead kids, civilization was being delayed a bit.
    But there’s never any rest for the wicked. The coming resort—and it would come, dead kids or not—filled Wally with an unaccustomed urgency. He needed to make money while he still could and that meant he had to get private access to Faye’s island, which didn’t used to be so hard.
    For years, he had relied on Faye’s hermit tendencies. He should have realized that even hermits need sex, as evidenced by the big dumb brute haunting Faye’s island. Shit. He should have thought of it sooner. If it was sex she wanted, he could have given her that.
    Nguyen’s steely voice sliced into his sexual fantasies. “And exactly where are our goods stored?”
    Wally, who was shrewd enough to know that the man who has no valuable secrets is expendable, avoided giving him a precise location. “On an island east of here owned by somebody I know. She doesn’t know the stuff is there, but she comes ashore regularly. When she’s here, she can’t be there, so I get in my boat and pull some of our stock out of inventory. If I know the coast will be clear for a long time, sometimes I meet a client on the spot. They like that—it’s too easy to be seen here at the marina.”
    “So why can’t we go out there, right now, and pick up something worth selling?”
    Wally chose his words carefully, but it was hard for him. Nguyen was the deliberate one. “My friend has a roommate now. I can’t risk letting him know what we’ve got stored out there—he could clean us out—and he almost never comes ashore.”
    “I say we bribe him. Or we hurt him.
    “He doesn’t look like someone who cares much about money. And he’s big, so if we go to hurt him, we better do it right the first time. Look at the size of him.”
    He fetched a stack of photographs from his liquor cabinet.
    As Nguyen shuffled through the photos a second time, Wally said, “This guy’s no rocket scientist. I can figure out