Money Shot

by Susan Sey

  Yarrow flaked off a big chunk of black polish from her thumbnail and glanced at Maria from under heavily mascaraed lashes. She flicked her gaze to Einar, then back to Maria. “Are we done here?” she asked. “Is confession time over?”

  Maria purposely didn’t follow her glance to Einar, just kept her eyes steady and cool on Yarrow’s. “You tell me,” she said softly.

  “I don’t have any other crimes to barf up, if that’s what you’re asking.” She picked at her cuticles until Maria was afraid she’d draw blood. “So? You planning to arrest me or what?”

  “Not today.” She reached toward the girl’s forearm to deliver a comforting pat, and Yarrow jerked back as if Maria had threatened her with a dirty hypodermic needle. “I’ll discuss this with my superiors, have them fact-check your story with a few key people, and we’ll figure out what to do next. In the meantime, just stick close, hmm?”

  Yarrow cast a pointed glance toward the frozen lake out the window. “Where the fuck would I go?”

  “Good point,” Maria said evenly. “Well. You know where to find me if you think of anything else. Or if you just want to, you know, talk.”

  “Yeah, because this has been so much fun.”

  Then Yarrow was on her feet and through the swinging kitchen doors without a backward glance. Maria turned to Einar, who sat watching the doorway that had swallowed up all that anger and tightly wrapped pain.

  “She just, what, turned up at your door and laid all this at your feet?” she asked.

  “Who else could she talk to?”

  “What about Lila? I mean, if you’re going to cop to an unauthorized jaunt into black magic, surely the island’s high priestess would be the logical choice for a confessor?”

  Einar shook his head. “Lila’s pretty stern when it comes to the darker side of our religion.”

  “And you’re not?”

  He pursed his lips and made a so-so motion with his hand. “Paganism is an old religion, Maria. One of the oldest. It way predates this idea that a deity has to be purely good.”

  “It’s about balance,” Maria said impatiently. “I know. Good and bad, dark and light, male and female. Lila explained.”

  “It’s about more than neat little pairs of attributes marching up the plank to Noah’s ark, though,” Einar said. “It’s about embracing all the aspects of the human experience, light and dark.”

  Maria sat back and studied him. “You think Lila’s a fairweather pagan? Only practicing the parts she likes?”

  “That’s not a bad way to put it, actually.” Einar leaned forward, warming to his subject. “It’s not as simple as good and bad, light and dark. There are multiple faces to Our Lady. Faces Lila doesn’t want to acknowledge, or if she does, only in the most cursory way. Lila wants to focus on the gentle, forgiving mother goddess. The wise, all-knowing crone goddess. She glosses right over the angry, sexy maiden goddess that runs roughshod over—and through—so many teenage girls.”

  “And that’s the goddess Yarrow was calling on? Sacrificing to? The goddess of hot sex who might help her bring a bad boyfriend to heel?”

  “Why not?” Einar gave her a rueful smile and spread his hands. “It’s a very primal female weapon, an old and essential one. Lila doesn’t like to talk about that incarnation of the goddess, though. She’s too messy.” He leaned back, shook his head. “But, damn, she packs a punch.”

  “The kind of punch that’s been short-circuiting men’s higher-order thinking since time immemorial,” Maria observed.

  “Yep.” He grinned. “Our circuitry holds up better as we get older, though.”

  She gave him an if-you-say-so face.

  He leaned in, suddenly intense. “That face of the goddess? That petulant, moody sexuality? It’s the least interesting and least powerful aspect of Our Lady.”

  “Is it?”

  “Of course. Men—real men—know how to look beyond the face and body, and into the heart. Into the mind. Into the true power.” He reached out with one finger, touched her hair, her cheek. She held her breath, willing him to forget himself in the moment, to say something—anything—that would clue her in to what the hell was going on here.

  “You’re incredibly powerful, Goose,” he said, his eyes dancing over her face, over the bounce and sway of her unstraightened hair. “I see all of Her in you.”

  “All of who?”

  “Our Lady. The maiden, the mother and the crone. Sex, love and knowledge, all wrapped up in one compelling package. You’re really quite extraordinary. You deserve somebody with a bit more depth than Rush.”

  Rush. Maria’s heart galloped into triple time. “What does this have to do with your cousin?” She let a mild interest and a hint of guilt color her eyes. Enough to let him think he’d nailed it, nailed her. Let him think he had her all figured out.

  “Not that Rush isn’t a perfectly nice guy,” he said, keeping up the soulful eye contact. “He is. But you? You’re not ordinary. You need somebody who’ll talk to you, Maria. Who’ll care enough about what’s inside you to go after it. Somebody strong enough to hold the burden of your secrets when they get too heavy, somebody who can understand what it means to love a woman of your depth and strength and power. Somebody who can engage your mind, your body and your heart, all at once.”

  “That sounds . . . impossible,” she said. But it wasn’t. Rush was all those things. Deep without being weighty, smart without being intellectual, strong enough not to feel the need to prove anything to anybody. Strong enough to carry his own burdens, and understand that she’d have some, too. Strong enough to make her look at them before she decided to carry them any further.

  He was everything she’d ever wanted. And everything Einar would never be. She thought about pointing that out, then shrugged it off. What was the point of explaining something to somebody who wasn’t equipped to understand?

  “You raise some excellent issues,” she said to Einar. “I’m going to have to give that some serious thought.”

  He smiled, leaned back in his chair.

  “Take your time,” he said. “No pressure.”

  “Thank you.” She stood.

  “What will you do?” he asked, bobbing to his feet as she did. He held up his hands in surrender at her sharp look, laughing. “About Yarrow.”

  She chewed the corner of her mouth. “I don’t know yet,” she said. “Talk to her, I suppose.”

  “In terms of legal action, I mean. If she’s going to need a lawyer, I ought to make some phone calls.”

  “I’ll have to talk to my boss, but I don’t think we’ll arrest her.” Maria sighed. “That’s the last thing she needs. More legal action.”

  “Thank you. A lot of people in your position wouldn’t understand a girl like Yarrow.”

  “I doubt she’ll thank me.”

  “But I will. I do.”

  But something in his eyes, something under that layer of concern, made her wonder.

  “Yeah,” she said slowly. “No problem.”

  MARIA COULDN’T claim a great deal of experience with parenting, but it seemed to her that the best parents seldom blamed their kids when something went wrong. They blamed themselves, and Lila was no exception.

  “Yule is tomorrow,” she said when she’d stemmed the tears. “I’ve been so busy with it.” She crushed a Kleenex in her hand. “But how could I not have seen? How could I have failed the child so badly?”

  “I’ll take care of her,” Maria said, leaning forward to grip the woman’s hand. “Trust me to do that much. If everything is as she’s said, I’ll do everything in my power to make sure she’s treated gently. But, Lila, Yarrow’s a complicated kid.”

  Lila managed a weak smile. “Tell me about it.”

  “And I strongly suspect that what she’s told us isn’t the whole story. Or even a true story.”

  “You think she’s lying?”

  “I don’t know what she’s doing. All I know is that there are holes in her story I could drive a truck through.”
/>
  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean she’s only been on-island since August, and the supernotes I’m tracking started trickling into the Federal Reserve midsummer. Which means they were passed earlier yet.”

  “Which means Yarrow couldn’t have been involved in getting them there.” Hope brightened Lila’s face. “Or at least not all of them.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And the Stone Altar? The black magic?”

  “I don’t know, Lila. All I can tell you is that my gut says Yarrow’s lying. Now, I’ll protect her as much as I can, but I spoke to my boss a few hours ago. He wants to interview her himself.” Lila blanched. “He’ll do it here, with you present if you want. But if I’m going to help her, I need to get the truth out of her—or more of the truth anyway—before he gets here.”

  “When will he arrive?”

  “Day after tomorrow, most likely. Which doesn’t leave us much time to get through to Yarrow.”

  “She doesn’t talk to me,” Lila said helplessly. “I don’t know how to make her talk to me. But maybe she’ll talk to you.”

  “I’m hoping she will.” She paused. “I may have to be harsh with her, Lila. Scare her.”

  “Do what you need to. I trust you.”

  “Can I talk to her now?”

  Lila stood. “She’s gone to ski the ice bridge. Left not five minutes before you arrived. You’ll likely find her there.”

  Maria stood. “Thanks, Lila.”

  “Bring her home to me.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  She kissed Maria’s cheeks. “Blessed be, child.”

  Chapter 31

  HALF AN hour later, Maria finally caught sight of Yarrow. She didn’t care what the kid said about hating the ski team—she skied like she’d been born on the snow. It had taken three miles of flat-out sprinting before Maria had even glimpsed the girl’s parka—black, of course.

  By the time the warming hut came into view, the sun was already heading for the mainland’s granite cliffs. Trees packed the shore like crooked gray teeth, and she had to squint to find the little hut among them. The weekend’s storm had scoured away any landmarks Maria might have used to orient herself. If she hadn’t been skiing in Yarrow’s fresh tracks, she might not have found it at all. She’d heard that the islanders hauled their old Christmas trees out onto the frozen lake come January to use as guideposts, an oddball fact that hadn’t made much sense until now. A girl could lose her bearings out here.

  A motion at the shoreline caught her eye. A figure came out of the warming hut, head down, backpack on, and slipped into the trees. Yarrow, she knew. The girl disappeared disconcertingly fast into the woods, and there was something furtive in the dip of her head, the clipped movement of her body, that had Maria lengthening her stride. She didn’t know what she was hurrying to, only that she needed to hurry.

  Two minutes of hard skiing later, she glided up to the warming hut, still carefully inside the tracks Yarrow left there. She kicked off her skis and slid them through the loops on her backpack. The weekend’s storm had dumped a good amount of new snow and Yarrow’s boot prints were plainly visible. She stepped silently into the prints, and followed them into the woods.

  The forest’s half-light engulfed her as she moved slowly forward, praying fervently to stumble across Yarrow peeing behind some tree any second. It would be a mortifying moment, yes, but better than the alternative.

  Which would be, she wondered, what exactly? What did she think she might be walking into here that had her subconscious on red alert and her nervous system pumping out the adrenaline? She didn’t know, but whatever it was, it made intruding on a bathroom break look like a best-case scenario.

  A sharp hiss broke the silence of the forest. A zipper, Maria realized. A backpack being ripped open. She froze. Stopped moving, stopped even breathing, as if the white puff of her exhale might give her away. She edged closer to the sizable tree in front of her and tipped her head the barest inch or two that allowed her to see past it.

  Yarrow was kneeling in the snow at the base of a dead tree maybe twenty yards away. At least it looked dead to Maria. Hard to tell in the winter. There was something sinister about the naked branches, black and bony against the gray sky. Or maybe it was just what she was seeing that gave the whole scene an evil vibe.

  Because while in one hand Yarrow held a perfectly benign gray backpack, in the other she held a plastic-wrapped bundle. A bundle that looked really, really familiar to Maria. She stuffed it into her pack, reached into the husk of the tree and pulled out another. And another. And another.

  Maria didn’t wait around to see how many it took to fill up that innocuous-looking pack. She retraced her steps, careful to stay inside Yarrow’s original prints, and headed for the frozen lake.

  By the time Yarrow emerged from the woods, Maria was kicking off her skis as if she’d just arrived.

  “Hey,” she said, and bent at the waist, breathing hard.

  “Hey,” Yarrow said with her usual lack of enthusiasm.

  “Damn, you’re fast,” Maria said. “Lila said you’d left to ski the bridge like five minutes ahead of me. I’ve been skiing like hell and never even saw your jacket.”

  “Yeah, well.” Yarrow clicked into her skis. “You’re old.”

  Maria huffed out a laugh. “Aren’t you a charmer?”

  “That’s me,” Yarrow said, adjusting the straps on her pack. “Little Miss Sunshine.” She gave her skis a testing wiggle. “So, what do you want?”

  “Want?”

  “You chased me four miles across a frozen lake for something.”

  “I spoke to my boss this afternoon.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And Lila.”

  Something ghosted across Yarrow’s hard little face. Sorrow? Guilt? Regret? Then it was gone, stuffed behind that brittle shell of hers. “Bet that was fun.”

  “My boss says he’ll be here as soon as he can arrange a flight. Day after tomorrow, probably.”

  Her eyes went wide. “He’s arresting me?”

  “No. Not yet, anyway. But Peter Harris is nobody to screw with, Yarrow. He’s a powerful guy and he’s not exactly famous for his mercy or his sense of humor. If you need to amend, extend or in any way clarify the story you told me this morning? Now’s the time. It’s one thing to screw with me, but you do not want to play this man for a fool.”

  Yarrow shifted her pack into a more comfortable position. “I know what I’m doing, Agent di Guzman.”

  “Do you?”

  She gave Maria a long, cool look. “See you back on the island.” Then she put her skis in the tracks and kicked off.

  Maria waited until Yarrow was nothing but a vague shape on the horizon. Then she put her feet back into Yarrow’s original prints—just to be on the safe side—and headed into the woods again. The light was moving from gray to purple as Maria arrived at the dead tree where Yarrow had knelt, but there was still enough sun for her to confirm with her eyes what her instincts had already told her.

  Yarrow’s dead tree was stuffed with bricks of cash.

  Maria hefted one in her gloved hand, the weight and shape of it as familiar to her as an infant’s face to its mother. She’d spent nearly a decade chasing down counterfeit cash for the U.S. government; she knew exactly what stacks of money felt like. What they smelled like. She pulled off her glove and carefully peeled back the plastic wrapping to liberate a single bill.

  She rubbed the hundred-dollar note between two cold, shaking fingers. She prayed that she was wrong but knew she wasn’t.

  This was no genuine American hundred. It was a Korean supernote. She was positive of it. Oh, she could be wrong. That was the beauty of a supernote. Only Federal Reserve banks had the tools to tell for certain, and even they were sometimes fooled. But Maria knew, knew in her gut, that she was holding a fake of the highest quality. A fake the likes of which was created only when a true artist, backed up by enormous resources—usually those of an entire governme
nt—lost sight of his moral compass long enough to perfect his trade.

  A fake that made Yarrow’s lies look one hell of a lot like the truth. A fake that made the truth screaming inside Maria that much more implausible.

  What the hell was she supposed to do now?

  “YOU ACTUALLY saw her with the counterfeits?” Rush asked. He sat at the counter in the Ranger Station, his eyes pale and steady, his hands calm and still. Must be nice, Maria thought, eyeing him. She herself had eaten off her lipstick hours ago, and her hair had abandoned all dignity back on the ice bridge somewhere. But she didn’t want her blow-dryer or fresh lipstick. None of her old tricks brought her order or calm anymore. Only Rush did. So she’d gone to him, thrown herself on his mercy and barfed out the whole baffling story.

  “I saw her all right.” She slumped onto the stool across from him. “I backtracked after she’d left and found the rest of the stash, too. The details didn’t exactly match up with her original story—she didn’t meet anybody, and who knows what she’s planning for a pickup—but she definitely skied a shitload of supernotes from Canada to the U.S.”

  She dropped her head into her hands, and curls spurted through her fingers. “Rush, what am I going to do? My boss is coming here tomorrow—tomorrow, I just got the voice mail—to grill the kid, and I caught her red-handed doing exactly what she said she’d been doing.”

  “But you still don’t believe she’s doing it.”

  “No.” She rocked her head back and forth. His hand came to rest on her curls, warm and solid and reassuring. “I don’t. I just . . . I don’t know, Rush. She gave me this look, and it was almost apologetic. ‘I know what I’m doing, Agent di Guzman.’ ” She tipped her head to meet his eyes. “She knows what she’s doing? Not ‘Get off my back,’ not ‘Fuck you and your white hat.’ Just ‘I know what I’m doing.’ There’s more to this, Rush. She’s not a dumb kid. But what’s the goal here? What’s the endgame? What does she think she can possibly gain by playing chicken with the Secret Service?”