“Weird junk.” Socks eyed the pieces. “Gold?”
“Yeah,” Tim said.
“You sure?”
Tim looked at Cherelle, who nodded curtly. He turned back to Socks. “If she’s sure, I’m sure. It’s gold.”
“How do you know?” Socks asked her.
“I know a lot of things.”
Socks couldn’t argue that, so he went back to the gold. “Have to go to one of my uncle’s connections to pawn this. That means Vegas. My Sedona connection only handles things that plug into a wall.”
“Vegas, huh?” Tim said, as though Cherelle hadn’t already been bugging him to leave this dump for the bright action of Las Vegas. “Sounds good to me. I haven’t seen my mama in yonks.”
Socks didn’t give a damn about Tim’s mama. “Pack it up and let’s drag butt out of here.”
“You’ll get a better price if you wait until I can find out more about these pieces,” Cherelle said quickly.
“What do you mean?” Socks said.
Tim started packing up the gold.
“I’ve seen stuff like this in books,” Cherelle said. “It’s worth more than its weight in gold all by itself.”
Socks just looked at her.
“How long until you find out?” Tim asked.
“As long as it takes,” she shot back.
“Listen,” Socks said, “I ain’t waiting until you go back to school and get a fancy degree to—”
“I don’t have to. I know someone who has a fancy degree already.”
“Who?”
Cherelle hesitated. Through the years she had kept in touch with Risa from time to time, but always alone. She didn’t think Risa would approve of having a lowlife like Socks turn up on her doorstep. Especially not now, when she had turned herself into a classy nerd scholar. “Just someone.”
Socks shrugged. “Do what you like. I ain’t waiting for mine.”
She turned to Tim, who looked uncomfortable. “This is our big chance,” she said flatly. “I’m sick of getting two cents on the dollar because Socks doesn’t know a single fence that won’t hose him. Just give me a chance. You won’t be sorry. When I’m done, you’ll have enough to buy a big ol’ bathtub packed full of blow.”
Tim frowned. He hated it when he was in the middle of these two. He looked toward Socks. His friend had a stubborn line to his mouth.
“Tell you what,” Tim said as he pushed two figurines away from the rest. “This is for what we owe you for the blow, plus you’ll get us a few more ounces of pure, okay?”
Socks looked at the gold. “Gimme one more.”
Cherelle made a wailing sound.
Tim picked up an armband and took back one of the figurines. “Here. This is worth two of them.”
Socks sucked on his lower lip and eyed the rest of the gold. “Okay, but you ride to Vegas with me. I’m sick of following that sorry wreck she drives.”
“Sure,” Tim said. “Radio in her car doesn’t work anyway.”
Cherelle watched unhappily as Socks wrapped his two artifacts in greasy napkins and shoved them in his backpack. She really hated letting any of that gold go. Despite her brave talk, she wasn’t certain just how much any of it was worth. She might need all of it to crawl out of the hole her life had become.
Humming, Tim wrapped his gold in shorts or socks or whatever came to hand from the garbage bag that was also his suitcase. As soon as he was finished, he began stuffing his ten pieces of loot into the backpack that went with him everywhere. Eight went in easy. The ninth was a struggle.
“Careful!” Cherelle said. “If you ruin that other armband, it won’t be worth as much. Same for that pin. And—”
“Here,” Tim said, shoving two of the underwear-wrapped packages toward her. “Now get off my ass, okay?”
“Hey!” Socks said unhappily. He already thought of that gold as his own, but he was just smart enough not to say it out loud. Tim wasn’t as easy to lead around as he had been before he hooked up with Cherelle. She was one ball-breaking bitch.
“Relax, buddy,” Tim said with an easy smile. “She’s going to Vegas, too. Right, precious?”
“But now she’s got most of it,” Socks said.
It was too late. Cherelle had already grabbed the two pieces of Tim’s gold and put them in the ratty backpack/purse that doubled as an overnight bag for her. “See you in Vegas, boys. Same place, right? Motel near your mama’s house?”
“Yeah.” Tim grabbed Cherelle, buried his face in her cleavage, and made bubbling noises. “Don’t be late.”
“No shit,” Socks muttered. “The bitch has most of the gold.”
“I won’t,” Cherelle said, ignoring Socks.
Tim scooped up his backpack in one hand and grabbed his buddy’s backpack with the other. “C’mon. Let’s go see that pawnbroker in Vegas. He’s gotta be better than the one in Sedona.”
“But the bitch has most of the gold!”
“C’mon, man,” Tim said. “We do it your way and we have a real catfight. We do it her way and the worst that happens is we get some money now and a lot more money later. What’s your problem with that?”
Socks was still trying to explain his problem when the car doors slammed and the engine revved to life.
Chapter 13
Las Vegas
November 2
Morning
The white-walled, Persian-carpeted room was quiet except for the occasional sound of paper when Shane turned a page in one of the catalogs Risa had given him to look through. There were no framed pictures from her past on the desk, no personal letters stuck in the belly drawer, no forgotten earrings tucked in among the pens, nothing to suggest her life outside of work hours. Her casino apartment was the same. There was nothing of the past she wanted to remember.
She had learned at sixteen that the way to get what she wanted was to shut out all distractions and focus her intelligence on her goal. She didn’t begrudge a moment of her hard work. She had pulled herself out of the kind of southern poverty that made good jokes and lousy lives. Then she had discovered the world of ancient jewelry. It was her own personal paradise, a place where beauty lived and excitement was in every book she opened, every piece of new jewelry that came into her hands.
And if sometimes, just sometimes, she felt the cool, unnerving breath of the past rushing around her when she handled a gold object, she could live with it just the same way she lived with some of her own past’s more brutal memories. None of it mattered in the here and now. Only her work did, her key to a far more beautiful world than she had been born into.
Risa loved her job.
And she was worried about losing it.
Without moving her head, she checked the wall clock. Unlike most of the rooms in the Golden Fleece complex, her office actually had a built-in way to tell time. She knew that clock intimately; she had just spent the longest ninety minutes of her life waiting to be fired because she hadn’t found the kind of crowd magnet Shane needed for his Druid Gold show.
Not that the beautifully made and fully alarmed glass display cases were empty. They held some very good—and even a few exceptional—artifacts from all across the area of Europe that had once supported the artistic style that the twenty-first century called Celtic. For the show Shane wanted to have, the emphasis was largely on objects found in Irish, Scots, Welsh, and English “hoards” through the centuries.
Unfortunately most of the hoards that had ever been discovered had gone to the Crown and from there to the royal smelter to make more coin of the realm. Wars were expensive, the English were ambitious, and antiquities weren’t revered. Through the centuries the hoards that weren’t declared to the Crown had been secretly melted down into anonymous gold ingots.
After the 1700s, when owning antiquities came into fashion, the owner of the land—nearly always an aristocrat—might keep whatever hoards were discovered in his family collection instead of melting the pieces down for their ore. Once collected, the objects might, just might,
end up in a museum for people like Risa to study. More often they simply were passed from generation to generation in familial obscurity.
Her stomach grumbled unhappily. She tried to ignore it. It just growled louder.
Shane glanced away from the auction catalog he had been studying under the fluorescent lights. He would rather look at Risa anyway. Museum quality, but not ancient. Living, breathing, and . . .
“Hungry?” he asked.
“Gee, whatever makes you think that? The fact that I can’t remember the last meal I ate?”
“Yesterday they threw peanuts at us on the flight from L.A.”
“I know. You ate mine.”
“You were asleep.”
She didn’t want to pursue that line of conversation, because she had awakened with her head on his shoulder and him looking at her with hungry eyes. At least she thought it was hunger. Whatever it was had been replaced with his usual shuttered watchfulness before she could be certain.
She really had to talk to Niall about another job. One with Rarities. Then she could get Shane Tannahill out of her system. An affair would be just what the doctor ordered. It had been a long drought for her in the male department. In some dark corner of her mind, each man who asked her out ended up being compared to Shane—and coming up short. Unfair to everyone involved, but there it was. Unchangeable.
When she finally dined on his forbidden fruit, she would find it tasted just like the supermarket kind. Then she would shrug and get on with her life.
“Is that glazed look a yes or a no to my suggestion of fruit?” he asked.
For a horrifying moment she was afraid he had read her mind. Then she realized that he’d been offering her a snack. “Yes. Definitely.”
“Good. A few more minutes and we wouldn’t have been able to hear each other over our growling stomachs.”
While Shane phoned in an order to the chef du jour, Risa prowled around the long room where various gold artifacts lay gleaming within specially built display cases. Technically this room was her domain, but lately every time she turned around, Shane was taking up space in it. Since they had come back from L.A., he had all but slept in her office. He brooded over the display cases like a hen with too few chicks. Then he chewed on her for not coming up with anything better. In the last ninety minutes, particularly, he had made it clear that she had failed to supply him with a showstopper.
The only good news from her point of view was that so far none of his other contacts, formal or otherwise, had done any better.
Not that what she had found for him was inferior. The gorget she had purchased from a private estate sale was a lovely artifact. The decoration—perhaps a badge of high office—was fully eighteen inches wide and three deep. When worn across a man’s chest, it must have been splendid, especially if it had been fastened in place with a magnificent gold brooch on either side. Granted, she didn’t have said brooches, and the gorget itself wasn’t intact, but the pieces that did exist were striking.
And the provenance had been of the highest.
If only better gorgets didn’t exist in Ireland . . . But six or seven that did came immediately to mind. Shane just didn’t accept second best, much less seventh or eighth. Most of the time she admired and understood that hard-driving quality. And sometimes it made her nuts. The past three months qualified for the made-her-nuts category.
Her stomach growled.
She told herself that was good. Her figure was already too lush for anything but men’s magazines. She would much rather have had the willowy size-eight form that all the—male, of course—clothing designers had in mind when they drew their pencil-wide sketches or made slacks of fabrics and colors that fairly shouted, Whoa, d’ya ever see a butt quite that wide?
Unconsciously she smoothed the dark, man-made miracle fiber of her slacks over her hips, wishing they were less round. But they were what they were, round, and that was that. The best she could do was try to disguise the matter by choosing businesslike clothes and making sure nothing was tight or sheer. Loose blouses concealed the breasts that other women envied and she would have given away in a hot second, but only if the hips went with them.
Cherelle had always laughed at her for being self-conscious about a figure that a lot of women would have killed for, Cherelle included. If Risa had wanted a career stripping or dancing nude for hard-breathing men, then her figure would have been ideal. What she wanted was to be taken seriously by men and women alike, which meant toning down the physical and honing the mental. That was precisely what she had done. That was what she continued to do.
She must have succeeded, because Shane hardly seemed to notice she was a woman at all. She suspected that he liked the swizzle-stick-thin model type.
Without knowing it, she sighed.
The small sound broke Shane’s concentration. Not that it was hard to do. When Risa was around, his attention was never far from her. It irritated the hell out of him. Maybe he should have taken Gail up on her offer of sweaty sex.
He dismissed the thought almost before it formed. He didn’t want a bedroom marathon with Gail. He wanted it with Risa.
And he wasn’t going to get it.
“What about Jenkins?” Shane asked curtly.
Risa blinked and brought her mind back from her growling stomach. “Mel hasn’t called.”
“Call him.”
“I did. He’s on a collecting trip in Ireland.”
“Good. When is he due back?”
“Doesn’t matter. He went on Silverado’s nickel. She’ll get first pick of whatever he finds.”
Shane’s mouth thinned. Gail’s determination to beat him to every Celtic gold artifact worth having was becoming a real nuisance. Having her swipe his best Celtic buyer was just the latest in a long string of annoying little tricks. Knowing that she was doing it solely to irritate him didn’t make living with the results any easier.
At least Rarities had turned Gail down, citing a conflict of interest with one of their “core” clients. Having an organization like Rarities working against him would have made acquiring good artifacts almost impossible. That was why he paid them a yearly retainer. If they heard of something good and golden, they let him know. As they had connections around the world, he often had first look at artifacts newly come on the market.
Often, but not always. If the source was the kind that wanted to hide from Rarities, Shane had a standing no-questions-asked reward of ten thousand dollars for information leading to the acquisition of museum-quality gold artifacts.
“Nothing new from any of the auction houses?” Shane asked.
“No.”
Silence grew as he took a solid gold pen from his pocket and began “walking” it across the back of his right hand, weaving it between and around his fingers, turning it end over end with a motion that looked easy. It wasn’t. It was a card mechanic’s trick for limbering up fingers before dealing from whichever part of the deck would do the most good. When the pen reached Shane’s middle finger, the metal made a distinctive clicking sound as it met his gold Celtic ring, which had belonged to one of his great-great-greats on his mother’s side. From the crispness of the incised symbols, he was the first one to truly wear the ring in many, many centuries.
“Mr. Tarlov is still interested in working out a loan for his collection of Romano-Celtic fibulae,” Risa said.
The only answer was a click when gold met gold on Shane’s quick, elegant hand.
“Erik and Serena North agreed to let you display their magnificent gold carpet page from the Book of the Learned,” Risa pointed out. “It will be the page’s first public display. With all the death and mystery that surrounded its discovery, the page is sure to be a crowd magnet.”
Click.
She hadn’t really expected an answer from Shane. He wanted the Druid Gold exhibit to be owned entirely by Tannahill Inc. Insisted on it actually, except for that sole illuminated page. He had agreed to display the heavily foiled, intricately decorated manuscript page beca
use it represented the final flowering of Celtic art. The fact that nothing else like that page had ever been found was the decisive factor for Shane. Nothing better of its type existed anywhere, at any price, and the Norths wouldn’t sell; that left borrowing it for the show. Unsatisfactory, but better than nothing.
“Look,” Risa said, rubbing at the headache that was gathering between her eyes, “what you already have in this room is a collection that a lot of museums would be delighted to find in their display cases.”
He kept walking the pen. His eyes were focused on a horizon only he could see. She knew from experience that he wasn’t ignoring her. Not really. He was simply sorting through available options with a speed, intelligence, and pragmatism that she admired even more than she did his long, athletic body.
Ring and pen clicked against each other once more. Then the pen vanished as swiftly as it had appeared.
She braced herself for whatever Shane had decided.
“If we have to,” he said, “we’ll go with Sotheby’s gilded Late Iron Age helmet. Personally, I don’t think it has enough ‘presence,’ as you put it, to carry a show, but coupled with the gold-inlaid iron sword hilt I bought last year, the two should hold everyone’s interest for a few moments. Pity that the blade is rusted through in so many places. If the placard didn’t say ‘sword,’ no one would know what it was.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“Which? The helmet or the sword?”
“The sword.”
“It’s a delight for anyone who has made a study of Celtic artifacts. For the guy on the street, it’s a frown and a shrug. Guess how many scholars there are in Vegas versus average guys.”
Risa didn’t bother to guess. Though she agreed with Shane’s reluctance to feature the clumsily made helmet with its gold foil more missing than present. She knew that putting the helmet together with the sword from the age of King Arthur would give more impact to both items than either one apart.
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