St Kilda Consulting 02 - Innocent as Sin

regulations to ask a few questions.”
    “Questions?” Elena’s expression hardened. “You’re a banker, not a police official.”
    Kayla sighed. It wasn’t the first time one of her clients had bristled at being questioned. It wouldn’t be the last.
    But the law was the law.
    “Look, I’m not wild about the rules, but I can’t change them,” Kayla said briskly. “If I don’t follow the rules, American Southwest’s compliance department will be all over me like dust on the desert and I’ll lose my job.”
    “It’s too late to worry about your job,” Andre Bertone said behind Kayla. “Worry about your freedom instead.”

7
    North of Seattle
Friday
9:36 A.M. PST
    R and McCree dabbed at the yellow paint he had just drooled onto the dark green oilskin of his Barbour coat.
    “Hell,” he muttered without conviction.
    It wasn’t the first time he’d splashed oil paints on himself. It wouldn’t be the last. There was a vivid stain across the shoulders of one of his favorite shirts that looked like a Jackson Pollock abstract. He’d acquired it when the wind blew a wet canvas off the easel and slammed it into his back while he was peeing against a nearby tree. Just one of the hazards of painting outdoors rather than in a studio.
    Once he and Reed had laughed about their spattered wardrobes. Not any more.
    Don’t go there, Rand told himself. Reed is dead and I’m not. Life’s a bitch and she’s always in heat.
    All I can do is what he asked me to—paint and live enough for both of us.
    He rammed the easel into the wet, cold earth. The meadow at the edge of the old Douglas fir forest had been a favorite subjectfor three generations of McCrees—grandmother, mother, and twins. The daffodils his grandmother and mother had planted in the meadow had grown from a clump of sunshine to a golden glory the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Wind, cold, and rain were the flowers’ favorite weather. The coastal Pacific Northwest provided plenty of all three.
    With a pencil Rand sketched a few lines on the white grounding of the fresh canvas. First was a waving line a third of the way down from the top to establish the horizon, then another line a few inches lower to show the edge of the cliff. That left three-fifths of the canvas for the meadow and the windblown shout of yellow that was daffodils.
    He looked at the proportions and realized he needed an element on one side of the picture to force the viewer’s eye across the meadow, out over the water, and on up toward the sky, which would be the intense light blue that only came after an early-morning spring rain.
    With the pencil he moved a fir tree thirty yards across the meadow, creating the effect he needed. That was the joy of the canvas. It let imagination and artistic necessity rule over a world that was full of brutal, unchanging, and often ugly reality.
    Before Rand could finish mixing the daffodil colors on his palette, he heard the faint, nasty snarl of a small helicopter. With the eye of a hunter he scanned the horizon off to the east, in the direction of Seattle. The aircraft came in low over the water, rose a hundred feet as it approached the island, and headed straight for him.
    Rand held his breath, weightless as the wind, feeling himself spinning away. He’d seen helicopter strafing runs before. The last one had been while Reed lay wounded on the floor of a St. Kilda helo. They’d taken off just as another helo strafed them. Rand got lucky with an AK-47, bringing down the attacking helo as it went by on its second strafing run.
    But he’d been lucky too late. Bullets had stitched through Reed, leaving him bleeding from too many wounds. Dying.
    Dead.
    Get a grip, Rand told himself fiercely. That was five years ago. Nobody gave a damn but me.
    The helo slowed its approach but came straight in. Fifty yards away it flared and settled onto the meadow Rand had been painting. The little craft’s landing skids crushed daffodils as well as grass.
    Rand waited, willing himself to breathe again.
    The side door popped open. A tall, lean man in blue jeans and a Gore-Tex windbreaker stepped out.
    Though Rand had walked out of St. Kilda Consulting five years ago, he still had friends there. He recognized Joe Faroe instantly—Faroe, who had come close to dying last year in a shootout with a drug lord on the Mexican border.
    Reflexively Faroe ducked his head, avoiding the helicopter’s rotor. As he did, he realized he was walking on the perfume of