St Kilda Consulting 04 - Blue Smoke and Murder

like the paintings.”
    “A lot.”
    “Enough to kill for?”
    “Me personally? No. Someone else? You bet. Provenance will be a bitch, though. If St. Kilda is counting on a piece of the paintings to pay for the op, you could end up with a double handful of nothing.”
    “Jill saved Lane’s life on the river. Ask for whatever you need, whenever and wherever you need it. If St. Kilda has it, it’s yours.”
    Smiling, Zach started making a list.

25
    HOLLYWOOD
SEPTEMBER 15
4:00 A.M.
    S core woke up when the alarm on his computer went off. Every hour on the hour. Slightly more often than the client called.
    He’d stopped answering his phone. Even after a hard workout, he was afraid he’d lose his temper. This client was too important to scream at.
    Rolling over, he eyed the computer on the bedside table. He hit refresh and waited for the computer to show a new readout. A red line and a blinking red arrow recorded Jill Breck’s progress against a map of Arizona.
    Still moving.
    Damn. What are they doing—heading for dawn at the Grand Canyon?
    Do they have the paintings? Or did they stash them in the same place the old lady did?
    He sat up, reached out for a different computer, and hit the digital replay of the sat phone bug, selecting for certain words.
    Thank god for computers. Nothing more butt-numbing than listening to a bug, waiting to hear something besides garbage.
    With computers, he could cut to the good stuff.
    Well, sometimes. Right now there was static…and classic country music playing in the background. Wherever Jill was keeping her sat phone, it wasn’t close enough to do any good.
    Or maybe she and the op weren’t on speaking terms anymore.
    If Score had been the St. Kilda op, he’d have been furious to have a client in his pocket, watching his every move. But it made Jill easier to get to, so Score wasn’t going to complain.
    All he had to do was keep a lid on those paintings until the auction was over.
    Four days.
    He yawned, wished he could go to back to sleep, knew he couldn’t risk it. If Jill had those paintings with her—and he had to assume she did, because it was the worst-case scenario—he needed to steal or destroy them before the auction.
    After another yawn, he called At Your Service’s twenty-four-hour line and began spending thousands of the client’s dollars chartering a plane out of Burbank.
    He could always sleep in the air.

26
    OUTSIDE COLORADO CITY
SEPTEMBER 15
6:00 A.M.
    Z ach drove to the edge of the small airport’s paved strip and parked. The plane he’d chartered should be on final approach. He looked up.
    No incoming lights.
    He told himself to be patient. Headwinds, tailwinds, sidewinds, storms, and the rest of Mother Nature’s bag of tricks had the last word when it came to keeping schedules.
    The small lounge near the tie-down area was dark. None of the private planes waiting patiently in the light breeze were being checked out for an early morning joyride.
    Beside him in the truck, Jill poured coffee from the thermos she’d filled at the ranch and handed him a cup. “You still mad at me?”
    “I wasn’t mad at you to begin with, so there’s no ‘still’ about it,” he said, searching the early-morning sky for signs of an incoming plane.
    “I know you didn’t want me to come along.”
    She looked at the side of his face, shadowed and modeled by the early morning light. He looked unreasonably good. She wanted a taste.
    She settled for coffee.
    “Thanks,” he said as he took the cup. “As for having you along, I just wanted to make sure you were on Faroe’s karma, not mine.”
    “Well, that sounds reassuring.”
    “Your great-aunt is dead, your car is trashed, you have a death threat. You want reassuring? You’ll find it in the dictionary between real and stupid .”
    She chewed on the words and swallowed them with coffee from the thermos. “I don’t scare easily.”
    “More important, you don’t lie worth a damn.”
    “We’ve been down this river before.”
    “And we’ll go down it again,” Zach finished the coffee and handed the cup back to her. “You stay with me and you play a role. Until further notice, I’m the sleaze job and you’re the sweet young thing.”
    “I’m neither sweet, nor young, nor a thing.” She lifted the thermos in silent toast and took another drink.
    “The whole point of an undercover op is to make people believe you’re something you aren’t,” he said.
    “Like sweet, young, and thingy?”
    He