CHAPTER 4
Finn
The painting should not be in my house. In the years I’ve been smuggling artwork from Canada to the United States, I’ve never brought items to my home or my art gallery. It’s always handled at arm’s length.
But when I decided to rescue Josie last night, it screwed up the land transfer, and we had no choice but to bring it here.
After we dropped Josie off, it took another hour and a half of navigating the waterways to a public marina where Connie met us.
Luckily, no one was walking the docks and we were able to get the case into her Bronco.
It’s temporarily residing in my home until I can meet up with the buyer tonight.
The de Hooch painting is currently in my study in a custom archival case, and I have no desire to open it up and take a gander.
Despite the fact that I own a fine art gallery and smuggle illegal art, I don’t have much interest in it.
And while I know most everything about the business, I leave that in the capable hands of my gallery director.
No, the thing I understand is money and that people will pay a premium for a three-hundred-and-seventy-five-year-old painting.
And what a journey it’s had. It once hung in an Amsterdam house by a family of Jewish sympathizers.
Their home was raided and the art was confiscated by the Nazis, which was typical.
From there it was mislabeled, misplaced and forgotten amid the chaos of war.
It resurfaced in a private European collection years later with just enough paperwork to look legal but too many missing years to be auctioned off at legitimate houses like Christie’s.
Thus, it sunk into the gray market where it made its way to Canada. To get across the border to the US buyer, my services were enlisted to keep the painting off the books with no customs declarations, no questions.
And now here it sits, waiting for a buyer who has so much money, he doesn’t care if it’s authenticated. He only wants to possess it. Until midnight though, the painting stays in my study.
I exit the room and close the double doors behind me. It’s almost five p.m. and the great room is flooded with amber light.
This house and my ability to buy it speaks to everything I’ve done to claw my way to the top. I’ve spent the past seven years making it the version of itself I imagined when I was fifteen and sleeping under a viaduct off Aurora Avenue.
The kitchen is filled with top-of-the-line appliances, the library is full of the classics I’ll never have time to read. The back wall facing the water is glass, floor to ceiling, and I’m treated to the entire Olympic Mountain Range. On clear days, I can see Mount Olympus.
I pour myself a Lagavulin at the built-in bar and take it out onto the back patio where the heaters are running because October in Seattle is chilly. I sit in one of four chairs positioned around a low cedar table and stare out over the water.
Against my better judgment, I think about the woman.
Josie McAdams.
Lead intelligence analyst for Jameson Force Seattle.
She sat in the cabin last night, wrapped in a wool blanket with her teeth chattering and her eyes the color of the Caribbean Sea.
Despite suffering hypothermia and shock, her brain was running on all cylinders.
Within minutes she clocked my gun, the patrol window charts and the scanner, putting it all together.
Yeah, I think smart women are sexy.
I don’t know what possessed me to send her flowers and I have to give some thought if I’ll do anything else. I can’t deny I wouldn’t mind seeing her again, in a scenario not so fraught with danger. That could be its own form of stupid though, given she’s got close ties with law enforcement.
My security system chimes and I know it’s Marcus pulling into the drive.
I don’t get up because he’ll let himself in and find me.
Half a minute later, he steps out onto the patio, one hand tucked in his jacket pocket, the other holding a travel tumbler of coffee. He nods at the scotch on the table.
“Must be quitting time.” He smirks.
“Help yourself.”
He doesn’t, choosing instead to plop down into the chair on my left. “Nah… still need caffeine to get me back on track from our late night.”
“I never did get any sleep,” I admit.
“You okay to drive by yourself to the handoff?” he asks with concern.
“Yeah… I’m good. The Quartermaster?”
“She’s all cleaned and docked at Shilshole. Washed her down myself.”
“What’s the word on Voronin?”
Marcus looks out over the water. “Mikhail’s asking around. Not loud though. He’ll get a list of possibilities and we’ll be on it.”
“How far down?”
“Not far enough,” he says, his gaze coming back to me. “Did you contact her?”
The question catches me off guard and there’s only one person he could be talking about. “I sent her flowers.”
No sense in lying.
Marcus’s dark brown eyes bore into me. “You’re going to bring her into this?”
“I’m not bringing her into anything.”
“You are.”
I reach for my scotch, take a savored sip. After I set the glass back down, I angle toward Marcus. “I’m a legitimate business owner. She’s a woman. I sent her flowers. Why does this have to be a big deal?”
“All right,” he says after a beat. “I’m not going to fight you on it. I’m just telling you what I see.”
“And what exactly do you see?”
Marcus leans forward, rests his elbows on his knees. “I see a man who has spent almost ten years keeping his life in two buckets and now he’s about to put a federal agent in one of them.”
“She’s not a federal agent.”
“She’s closer to being a cop than she is to being a smuggler.”
He’s not wrong. It’s a risk to even go sniffing around Josie McAdams.
“Acknowledged,” I finally say. It would be smartest to let it go.
My security system chimes again on my phone. That would be Connie, my second-in-command after Marcus. She sometimes handles small runs with her own crew, and this is our weekly get-together to look at future jobs.
She doesn’t come through the house the way Marcus did but rather around the side yard. “Figured you boys would be out here enjoying the sunset.”
I’ve known Connie Modesto since my days living on the street and boosting cars to make a living. She came from the same school of hard knocks that I did, except she’s managed to avoid prison, unlike me.
She’s wearing an old, beat-up leather jacket that she’s had since I first met her. Her dark hair is loose rather than the rope braid she wears while on the water.
She drops into the chair opposite Marcus and kicks her booted feet onto the table. I don’t bother to correct her because manners aren’t all that important to me.
“Everything set for tonight?” she asks.
I nod. “Yeah… we have a midnight meet time.”
“I can do it for you,” she says.
“I know you can, but I need to go. He’s insisting on me.”
This new proprietor of illegally moved fine art will look to acquire more, and he wants to check me out. Which is fine.
“I can go with you,” she offers, crossing one ankle over the other. “Keep you company.”
“No thanks.” I have a few reasons for declining the offer, the most important of which is the danger involved. A close but secondary reason is to keep a bit of arm’s length with Connie. She can sometimes get clingy with me and while she’s one of my oldest friends, I’m not into her that way.
“Why?” she asks and Marcus shifts uncomfortably.
“Because I said so,” I reply, my jaw set in a hard line.
She considers that, shifting a glance at Marcus before shrugging nonchalantly. “Fine.”
The sun has almost fully dipped now, and the patio heaters keep us comfortable.
“Finn sent the woman we fished out of the drink flowers today,” Marcus says casually, and my head whips his way. I shoot him a death glare but he pretends not to notice.
Connie sits up straight, boots slapping on the patio. “You sent her flowers, Finn?”
“None of your business, Connie,” I warn.
But she’s not put off in the slightest. She leans toward me, slapping my knee and not in a playful way. “You pulled a federal asset out of the water—”
“She’s not a federal agent,” I grumble.
“You send flowers to a woman looking to take down smugglers—which is what we do, by the way—and you don’t think this is a problem?”
“Connie—”
“No,” she snaps, standing up and looming over me.
“You shot at one of Voronin’s men while you were pulling this woman out of the water, which put you, Marcus, The Quartermaster, the painting in our hold, and our entire operation in danger.
And then you sent her flowers, which invites a relationship. Did I miss anything?”
“That’s about the gist of it,” I say dryly.
Connie points her finger at me. “You should have left her in the water.”
I’ve had enough and this shit’s going to stop right now.
“Apparently I have a different moral compass than you, Connie.” My tone is dry, sardonic and pointed before it hardens.
“I couldn’t let an innocent person die and if that brings shit down on us, so be it.
But more importantly, I’m your boss and you don’t get to lecture me on decisions that affect this business. ”
She holds my eyes for a long moment, and I can see she doesn’t want to let this go. But then she leans down, picks up my scotch and downs the rest of it.
It’s a message. A way for her to be defiant and intimate at the same time.
I swallow down the anger and decide to let it go. “How about we get down to business, then you two get the hell out of here so I can take a short nap before my midnight run?”
“Works for me,” Marcus says, clearly glad to have the tension defused.
The security system chimes, followed by the doorbell ringing, just as Connie lowers herself back down into the chair.
Marcus and I exchange a look. Who the hell could that be?
I don’t have friends and Marcus and Connie are the only two members of my crew who’ve ever been invited here.
Delivery?
I pull up my security app, tap on the front door camera intent to tell them to leave the package, and I’m stunned by what I see.
Josie McAdams on my front porch.