Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

were.

    Wally tried to look assured as he sat down next to the boss, but it was hard, because he was so tired. The man liked to schedule these meetings at the last minute, in out-of-the-way places, and early in the day. If he had known the phone was going to ring before sunup, ordering him to get here by nine, he wouldn’t have bothered going to bed at all.
    Wally brought a battered briefcase full of sales records with him, as he usually did. The boss always wanted to know what artifacts Wally had dug up and what price they brought, and that was all that he had ever wanted to know, up to this point. Wally didn’t have an M.B.A ., but he’d kept the marina going for thirty years now. In the process, he’d acquired accounting skills that were at least marginal. He was prepared for the boss and his questions.
    And then the man threw him a curve, asking him whether he knew that the Park Service was looking into possible artifact poaching in the wildlife preserve.
    Wally was inordinately proud of the fact that he hit the curve ball out of the park. Digging deep in his briefcase he drew out an envelope full of photos. They were valuable and they would make him valuable.
    “See these?” he said, fanning out the photographs of Faye touring the Water Island dig site. “This babe’s an amateur pothunter, herself. If there’s ever any danger of us getting caught poaching artifacts, we can use these to pin the whole thing on her.”
    The boss was silent, so Wally pulled out a second envelope. “And see these? I took them day before yesterday with a telephoto lens. They show her digging, and her boyfriend, some Indian-looking guy named Joe, is helping her. Now, she’s digging on her own island, so she ain’t breaking no laws, but you can’t tell it in this picture. I zoomed right in where you can’t see anything but them.”
    The boss was silent, looking at the second batch of photos, one by one. He pulled one of them out of the stack, a close-up of the man leaning over an excavation, while the woman—small, short-haired, with boyish hips—crouched with her back to the camera.
    Wally was proud of his plan and the uncharacteristic foresight that had gone into it. He didn’t understand why the boss, livid, kept shuffling the photos in his hand.

Chapter 22
    The ride to Wally’s was going to be a rough one. Faye had seen this kind of weather before when there was a hurricane in the Gulf. She felt bad for the people on the Texas coast, boarding up their homes and getting out. Her skiff was going nowhere today. It would take the Gopher to get her to shore in this mess.
    Steering the Gopher out of its protective inlet and into open water, she steeled herself for the swells—evenly spaced and more than four feet high—that signaled misfortune for coastal Texans. Her own sky was steel blue and cloudless, so she reckoned she could weather a few swells.
    She didn’t, however, reckon she could stand to look at Wally, so she hoped Cyril would come quickly, before Wally woke up. She ran in to the marina—no Wally, praise God—and called Cyril at his Tallahassee office.
    His secretary answered the phone, cool and business-like, but Faye simply blurted, “Can I speak to the senator? I need—just tell him that Faye would like very much to speak with him.”
    The secretary connected them so promptly that Faye wondered if he’d added her to his list, the list that all powerful men gave their secretaries. Cyril’s list of people that he was always willing to speak to would be short. If she was on it, that was a sign that she hadn’t imagined the things that had passed between them on that lovely evening when they shared a dinner and a moonrise at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico.
    Popular wisdom said that sexual attraction was instantaneous but deeper feelings took time. Popular wisdom was usually right, but maybe not this time. Maybe he cared for her, and she needed to be cared for. Wally had betrayed her in a big way, so she could count one less friend. She had more or less accused Douglass of murder, so that cut out another. Joe was ever-faithful and she trusted Magda, but that was about it.
    Today would be a day for her friends to stand up and be counted. It was time to find out where Cyril stood. “I’m in trouble. I need help, and I thought of you.” She swallowed. “I want to show you where I live.”
    She had dodged his every delicate effort to worm her street address and phone number out of her. He would know