1 Through a Glass, Deadly

by Sarah Atwell

  We made desultory conversation as we finished Cam’s sketchy meal. At least it was real food, and we probably needed the energy. It didn’t look as though we were going to get any sleep. In response to a question from Frank, Cam talked a bit about what he did professionally, and then he turned the tables and asked Frank more about the diamond industry. Me, I sat and listened with one ear, while the other ear was waiting for the phone to ring. It didn’t, for a long time. We had finished eating and the table had been cleared when my cell phone finally chirped. I pounced on it, with Cam and Frank breathing down my neck.

  “Hello?”

  “Have you found ’em?”

  Right to the point. “Yes. What about Allison?”

  The thug ignored my question. “There’s an alley behind some buildings on North Sixth, near the tracks and the highway. Be there at three o’clock, and bring them with you.”

  I knew the general neighborhood—perfect for his purposes. I looked at my watch. “Wait—no—look, there’s a little problem with the, uh, things you want.” An ominous silence followed my statement, and I rushed to fill it. “It’s going to take a little while to . . . get them ready for you.”

  A pause. “You’re jerking me around, the woman’ll pay. No cops, right? I’ll give you ’til four. But you’d better be there by then.” He hung up before I could say anything else.

  I turned to Cam and Frank. “Four o’clock, in an alley off Sixth. That’s all he said.”

  “Is Allison all right?” Cam asked.

  I shook my head. “He didn’t say anything. Frank, maybe these guys aren’t too high up the food chain, but they were pretty efficient—no unnecessary info, no mention of the diamonds or the hostage. And they picked the right place.” For them, not for us.

  “Foot soldiers is what they are. They’re just following the drill. All right, then—we’ve got a few hours to clean up the stuff. What say we get to it?”

  It was already close to midnight. “Cam, could you walk the dogs? They haven’t been out in a while.”

  “Sure. And you want me to have a chat with our babysitting cop while I’m at it?”

  That hadn’t occurred to me. “No, I don’t think so. They may think it’s strange that we’re working in the studio in the middle of the night, but that can’t be helped. Just act normal.” Yeah, right.

  Cam gave me a long look, then gathered up the leashes and jingled them. The pups immediately rushed to his feet, and once they were all attached, Cam took them out.

  When the door had closed behind them, I turned to Frank. “You sure this is going to work?”

  He looked somber. “Nothing’s sure in this world. But Allison’s my sister’s child, and I’ll see no harm comes to her.”

  I hoped that was good enough.

  Chapter 18

  flash: to expose a piece of glass to heat for a short time, either in a glory hole or in the furnace (Edward T. Schmid, Beginning Glassblowing)

  When Cam came back with the dogs, I gave him a quick look, but he gave nothing away. He would have mentioned if he’d encountered our police friends, and since he didn’t, I had to assume they weren’t in evidence. I didn’t know if I was relieved or disappointed.

  “Okay, guys, we have to start melting glass.” I led the way back down to the studio and surveyed my domain. I’d left the glory hole on, so we had a place to work. But we needed to sort out responsibilities, so we wouldn’t end up tripping over each other. And since this was my shop, I got to give the orders. It gave me a fleeting sense of control, even though I didn’t expect it to last.

  “Cam—you get the bag of shards. Frank, you check the other pieces on the shelf there, see which ones have embedded diamonds. I don’t know how many pieces Chad made the other day, but they should all be together. They’re the rough, clear ones.” As Frank reached toward a piece, I stopped him. “No, not that one—it’s mine, and I made it before all this started.” What year was that? “You do know what you’re looking for, right?”

  “No worries,” Frank said, and started picking up glass pieces and holding them up to the light.

  Cam took the bag of glass fragments and dumped them out carefully on a stand-alone marver so he could pick through them. “This won’t damage the diamonds, will it?”

  “I don’t think so. The glory hole doesn’t get much hotter than about two thousand degrees, and I think it takes a lot more than that to melt a diamond. Frank, am I right?”

  “More’n six thousand,” he said absently, turning over a rather lumpy vase in his hands, holding it up to the light. He’d already set aside a few others on the nearest bench.

  “How much are we looking for?”

  Frank set down another piece with the others. Lined up, they were a sorry bunch—shapes not quite right, or sitting off kilter. I made a mental note to schedule some time working with Chad—he was getting ahead of himself. But right now, the row of pieces represented a lot of money, locked into the surface of the glass.

  “A double handful, maybe?” Frank cocked an eye at the motley array in front of him. “Can’t all be here.”

  “Don’t forget the loose frit—maybe you can start on that, while we’re melting stuff.”

  “Right, then. These are all the glass pieces I see with stones in ’em. How do you get the gems out?”

  “Stick them in the glory hole until the glass is soft— we only need to soften the exterior. The frit will melt first, so it should be easy to find the diamonds. Then we pull them out with the tweezers, while the glass is still soft. Ready, Cam?”

  Since it didn’t matter if the piece was damaged, I could use the tongs to heat each one up. I started with the shards, to get a feel for the glass—I didn’t want to overheat it and have to fish diamonds out of the glory hole. In fact, in the time we had, I couldn’t—it would take too long for the glory hole to cool. So I had to be careful from the start and make sure I didn’t lose anything. The fact that it was so late, and it had been a very long day, didn’t help.

  For all of that, we fell into an easy rhythm. I would soften the glass, then swing it around to the marver. Cam would be waiting with tweezers in hand to pick out the bits that hadn’t melted—the diamonds. Frank, with his skilled eye, finished sorting through the frit quickly, and, grabbing a pair of tweezers, came over to help Cam. Since I was bearing the brunt of the heat, sweat was pouring off me, and even Cam, well away from the glory hole, was dripping. Frank, on the other hand, looked completely unruffled.

  “Heat doesn’t bother you, Frank?” I gasped, ferrying yet another softened piece to the marver.

  “This? Nah. Far worse out where the mines are.” He eyed the growing pile of stones.

  In the end, it took a solid two hours to extract all the stones we could find. We double-checked all the pieces, whole and broken, but finally it looked like we had gotten them all.

  “Does this look right?” I asked dubiously.

  “You got a scale?” Frank asked.

  “I do.” I kept one around for those rare occasions when I wanted to experiment with mixing my own colors. I retrieved it from its shelf and set it on the marver top.

  Frank tipped the pile of diamonds in and checked the total. “A few short, but close enough. Those guys aren’t about to weigh them on the run—they’ll just have to take your word for it.”

  That was small comfort. I had a vision of the guys handing over Allison minus a finger or two, just to make up for a few missing diamonds. No, I couldn’t think like that. Frank was the expert, and I doubted that our Chicago colleagues could eyeball the weight of a pile of stones. It would have to do.

  “Still, aren’t they going to want to look at them, just to make sure we haven’t slipped them a bunch of glass?” I recalled too many cop shows on television where some lowlife cut open a package of drugs and tasted a bit, just to be sure it was what it was supposed to be and not powdered sugar.

  “Not a problem. I’ll lay odds they don’t know what they’re looking at anyway. How long’ve w
e got before the meet?”

  “Less than an hour. It won’t take more than fifteen minutes to get there, especially at this time of night.”

  Frank nodded, then asked, “What can you tell me about the place they picked?”

  “Not a lot—it’s not the kind of place where I hang out. I’ve probably driven through there by daylight a few times, but I don’t want to know what crawls out of the woodwork at night. Why?”

  “If I’m covering your back, I need to check it out, figure where I can lay low—and fast, since I need to be there before the two of you.”

  “Right,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything better to say. Certainly I had no alternative plan in mind. I scrabbled through a drawer and fished out a box of zip-top baggies. “Will this do for the diamonds?” It seemed a rather undignified container for stones worth half a million dollars, but at least they would be visible through the plastic.

  “Good. Double bag them, though.”

  I did. They made a satisfying, dense package, heavy in my hand. I looked down at myself and wondered what I was supposed to wear to a hostage swap: something that would combine practicality with enough room to stash the diamonds. It wasn’t exactly a fashion issue, but the clothes I had on were sweat soaked, and I thought a dark color would be more appropriate, all things considered. “Cam—I’m going to go up and change. You want anything?”

  “I’ll come with you,” he said tersely.

  I snagged a jacket and tucked the diamonds—now safely double bagged—into my pocket and led the way out the back. Upstairs, the dogs approached when we arrived but then stopped, gazing from one to the other of us. Clearly they were picking up our tension. Heck, anyone could have. We were running on adrenaline and fear.

  Cam brushed past me and picked up a dark jacket from where he’d left it. Then he turned to face me. “Do you trust this guy?’

  I shrugged. “Do I have a choice? I don’t exactly have a lot of contacts within the local criminal community.”

  “There’s Matt.” Cam kept his tone neutral.

  I struggled to answer him, most likely because I had such mixed feelings about drawing Matt into this mess. “Do you trust the Tucson police?”

  “Damn it, I don’t know! I don’t live here—you do. But I know we’re in way over our heads here, and we could use some help. Em, if anything happens to Allison . . .”

  I didn’t let him finish. “I know. You think I want anything to happen to her? But you saw that FBI agent on good behavior—he can be a real asshole, especially when he doesn’t get his way. If we tell Matt anything, he’s going to have to tell the FBI, and then we lose any control over the situation, and a lot of people could end up hurt. Do you want to risk that? I can just see Agent Price and his horde of gray-suited minions charging in with guns blazing, thinking they’re busting a major crime ring or something, the collateral damage be damned. I don’t want to see Allison get caught up in the crossfire.” I wasn’t sure if I was being entirely honest with Cam about why I wanted to keep Matt out of this. It would, at the very least, put him in an awkward position: Either he played it by the book, in his role as Tucson’s chief of police, or he put his career on the line as a favor to me, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to ask for that. “And the reality is, we just plain don’t have time to bring him up to speed.”

  I crossed the room and laid a hand on Cam’s arm. “Cam, I can guess how you feel right now.”

  He shook me off. “Can you? Because I don’t know how I feel. Well, I feel like an idiot, falling for somebody I’ve known for two days—and somebody I don’t know anything about, like the fact she’s got a criminal husband. Had. She could be hiding almost anything, and how would we know? Maybe she’s in on the whole thing. Maybe her story about the last few years on the run is all a fake, and she planned to kill her husband, or she’s part of the diamond deal and her husband got in the way, or . . .”

  I grabbed both his arms this time. “Cam! Do you really believe any of that?”

  He stared at me, and then his shoulders sagged. “No, God help me. I don’t. I can’t. I look at her, and all I want to do is take care of her. And I don’t know how I can. You and I make a great pair, don’t we?”

  Maybe this tendency to adopt waifs was genetic after all. I hugged him, hard. “Well, at least we’re trying. Nobody can count us out yet. And there’s always Uncle Frank.”

  “He’s a piece of work, isn’t he? Which side is he on, really?”

  “His own.” I managed to smile. “I think he cares about what happens to Allison, and he’ll do what he can to extricate her. As for the diamonds—let him do what he wants. It’s none of our business.” I checked my watch and was dismayed at how quickly time was passing. Too late to learn to shoot a gun or take a few karate classes, obviously. “I’m going to change, and then I guess we go. Oh, did you see any sign of a police patrol out there?”

  “No. And I looked.”

  Damn. It appeared I had good reason to mistrust our faithful police department, including the illustrious head of it who had promised to keep an eye on things. Great job they were doing. But at least it made our next step easier: We could slip out for our rendezvous without anyone noticing.

  I stripped quickly and threw on clean jeans, a dark shirt, and running shoes—nothing like being prepared for a quick getaway. Back in the main room I grabbed a Windbreaker with zippered pockets, then found a local street map. “Ready?”

  “I guess.” Cam looked like a very unlikely candidate for either crime stopper or white knight. What he looked like was an overgrown Boy Scout with a case of the jitters. Which he was.

  “Then let’s go,” I said with far more confidence than I felt. “No, pups, you have to stay here,” I told the dogs at my feet, who were gazing up at me expectantly. I gave about three seconds’ thought to taking them along as a diversion, then shelved the idea. This was complicated enough already.

  We went back down the stairs to collect Uncle Frank. In the studio I pulled out the map and laid it out on the marver we had used earlier. “Okay, Frank, we’re here.” I pointed. “We’re going here.” I pointed again. “This whole area”—I waved my hand over an area of several blocks— “is not a place I’d want to linger—it’s the hottest crime area in the city. I’m assuming the bad guys have a car, and we’ll be arriving by car. What is it you plan to do?”

  Frank studied the map. “Buildings vacant or occupied? Any all-night places? What about street lighting?”

  “I can’t tell you much—I think that block is pretty much abandoned. And in case you haven’t noticed, the whole city is pretty dark, to prevent light pollution. I can drop you off here”—I pointed at a corner about two blocks from where we were supposed to meet—“and give you a few minutes to get into position. Will that do?”

  “It’ll have to, won’t it?” He flashed that disconcertingly white grin again. Damn the man—he looked like he was enjoying himself. That made one of us.

  “All right, then—let’s go.”

  “I’m driving,” Cam said. “My car’s less familiar to the locals, and besides, it’s in front of yours in the alley.”

  “Fine. Whatever.” I was getting itchy to just do something instead of talking about it.

  “You got the diamonds?” Frank asked.

  I patted the front of my loose Windbreaker. “In an inside pocket with a zipper. So, Mr. International Expert— what’s the script for these things? Who makes the first move?” Was there a protocol for this kind of thing? An etiquette? An instruction manual? Damn, I hated being so unprepared.

  “They’ll probably hang back for a bit after you get there. Make sure you don’t have company. You just sit and wait, let them take the lead. They’ll ask if you brought the stuff. You tell ’em yes, but don’t let on where. You ask, where’s Allison? Let’s hope she’s in the car with them.”

  Hope? I hadn’t even considered what we would do if she wasn’t there. “And if she isn’t?”

  “They don’t get the diam
onds until you see her, and she’s clear of them.”

  I could see a million ways that this could go wrong, but I refused to think about any of them. “And what will you be doing while all this is happening?”

  “Keeping them honest.”

  “Frank, you know they have a gun. And I know you don’t.” Suddenly I didn’t want to see this quirky man get hurt—or leave us all worse off than when we started. Two bodies in the last week was plenty for me.

  “You let me worry about that, Em. I’ve survived the diamond mines of Australia—I think I can handle a pair of two-bit thugs. Remember, they don’t want Allison, they want the diamonds. They’ll want to make the deal and go home.”

  I hoped he was right.

  Outside in the alley it was dark. And quiet. We all but tiptoed to Cam’s car. I strained my eyes peering into shadows for any sign of our police escort, but I didn’t see anything larger than some small animal sniffing around the Dumpster, and the less said about that, the better. Cam started the engine and we pulled out.

  At this time of night the streets were dark and deserted. I tried to remember if I had ever gone cruising in Tucson at three o’clock in the morning, and came up dry. I’d never been the partying kind, even in my distant youth. I’d been the nose-to-the-grindstone responsible one, in bed every night at eleven o’clock and up with the birds. Nowhere in my resume was there any mention of negotiating with mobsters or bartering with slightly stolen diamonds in the middle of the night. My, life kept bringing new and unexpected treats, didn’t it? I gave Cam quiet directions, but since Tucson is laid out on a grid pattern, for the most part, it was easy. Cam pulled over a couple of blocks shy of our destination, and Frank got out.

  If he’d had a hat he would have tipped it. “See you soon,” he said in a jaunty whisper—and then he faded into the shadows.