Chapter Twenty
Twenty
At first, the road wasn’t too bad. We drove through a dense forested area and then across a field of wildflowers. Chloe and Emma were on the right side of the vehicle and got the best view. However, when we started to climb up the mountain, the road narrowed and the trees became taller and thicker. We lost the sunshine and then cell service. Our road turned into a narrow, bumpy, single-lane path. When I looked out the window, all I could see was a sheer drop so far, I couldn’t see the ground.
“Oh God.” I sucked in a sharp breath and stared straight ahead. “There’s nothing there, Jack. No guard rails. No logs. No stones. No barrier. And it’s barely wide enough for the truck. If even one of your tires goes off the road, we’ll fall over the edge.”
“That’s the beauty of off-roading.” Jack grinned. “Pure adrenaline.”
“What if someone is coming from the other direction?” I asked. “There’s no room to pass.”
“One of us will have to back up until there’s room.”
My breath left me in a rush. “Back up down a winding, twisty, narrow, bumpy, sharply inclined gravel trail full of potholes and cut into the side of the mountain with what looks like a one-thousand-foot drop on the other side? Are you freaking kidding me?”
“It’ll definitely be a challenge.” Jack was still smiling. He’d been smiling since we’d started on this insane off-road adventure. I’d been busy drafting a will on my phone to ensure my collection of plants would find a good home.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Chloe moaned.
“I wouldn’t suggest opening your window,” Vito said. “You might fall to your death.”
“You might survive if your fall is broken by some of the many trees in the valley below,” Jack said cheerfully. “ Pinus pungens , Pinus rigida , Pinus virginiana …”
Chloe sucked in a sharp breath when the truck tilted precariously as we rounded a sharp corner. “You can take your Pinus and shove it up your—”
“There are over sixty-three hundred plant species in the region,” Jack said, cutting her off. “The Appalachian Forest is one of the great floral provinces on earth. It’s very exciting to see such incredible biodiversity. It’s hard not to get distracted.”
“Try and make an effort.” I couldn’t hide the sarcasm in my tone. “I don’t want to die because you saw a rare giant Pinus in the bush.”
“I’d drive over a cliff for a giant Pinus .” Emma snorted a laugh. She’d been loving the thrill ride, even daring Jack to drive faster, but I wasn’t in the mood for jokes.
“I’m not interested in going over the cliff. No one knows where we are. There are no signs of human life. No telephone poles or electrical boxes. No cell signal. We would be lost in the wilderness and they’d never find us.”
“We’ve got everything we need to survive,” Jack assured me. “Tent, camp stove, sleeping bags, canoe, and you and your survival skills. We’ve even got a fishing rod, so we won’t starve.”
“That’s not as reassuring as I’m sure you think it is.”
“I can’t eat fish,” Vito said. “I’m allergic. I’ll have to eat one of you.”
Gage slammed his fist into his palm. “You freaking try to eat me and you’ll get a fist sandwich that goes all the way through.”
“Food won’t be a problem,” Jack assured them. “There are many edible plants and fungi: blackberries, chicory, dandelions, thistles, chanterelles, of course, and a wonderful fungus called chicken of the woods, but that one you have to get fresh, or you find maggots.”
Chloe retched. Gage growled. He’d been doing a lot of growling and clutching his bag of guns. I’d planned to make him put them away, but Emma had whispered that they were his “support guns” and we should let him keep them close. An overprotective alpha male trapped with the woman he loved in a dangerous situation where he had no control was a recipe for disaster, she said, unless he had something to soothe him, and since we didn’t have any blankies or binkies, a bag of guns it had to be.
One sweaty, heart-pounding hour later, the road widened slightly, turning inward and away from the cliff. Jack tried to keep up our spirits by attempting to identify as many of the sixty-three hundred plants as he could. He was so focused on the flora, he didn’t see the cloud of dust ahead of us until we were completely engulfed.
“What the hell?” He didn’t slow down, of course, because that would have made sense.
“There are two cars ahead,” I said. “A beat-up red sedan followed by a blue pickup truck. They’re driving very slowly.”
“Jesus,” Gage said. “Who would drive a sedan on this road?”
Jack shook his head. “Probably an ignorant city dude who thought he’d be cool and avoid the roadblock without learning anything about the road.”
Gage leaned over the seat, peering into the cloud of dust. “I’m amazed he’s made it this far in that piece of junk.”
“He’s slowing everyone down,” Jack muttered. “That truck must have been following him for a long time. He needs to get off the road and let the off-road vehicles pass. It’s good etiquette.”
“Where could he go?” Chloe asked. “There’s barely enough room to drive.”
“He could drive into the bush. We’d be able to squeeze past.” Jack pushed the accelerator as we went up a hill, and the engine roared. He waited a few moments and did it again, bringing us closer and closer to the blue truck.
“What are you doing?” I shouted over the roar of the engine.
“Letting the sedan know we want to pass.”
“That’s pretty aggressive,” I said. “You’re just going to make him angry by menacing him.”
“If he’s going to off-road in a sedan, he should at the very least learn the rules.” Jack revved the engine again. “He’s not just slowing us down. The blue truck must be getting impatient, too. I’m surprised he isn’t honking his horn or tailgating that moron.”
We followed the vehicles for another five miles before the sedan finally pulled off to the right side of the road in a small clearing beside the forest. The blue truck pulled up behind him. For a moment I thought the driver of the blue truck was going to get out and say something to the driver of the sedan, but as we got closer and no one got out, I got a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“I think they know each other,” I said. “They were traveling together, and you menaced them both. Just pass them and keep going.”
“I want to check out the guy in the sedan,” Jack said. “What’s he doing on this road in a car like that?”
“It’s none of our business. Just drive.”
Of course, Jack didn’t drive. Instead, he pulled up beside the sedan and opened the passenger window beside Emma. Only then did I notice that the sedan’s windows were tinted. I couldn’t see anything until the driver’s window lowered slowly and a thick, muscled arm emerged to rest on the door.
If the full sleeve of ink—mostly skulls, snakes, swords, and daggers—didn’t raise the alarm bells, the spiked iron bracelet and the missing baby finger certainly did. Behind me, I heard a soft click as Gage unholstered his gun. Sweat beaded on my forehead and I sank down in my seat between Emma and Jack, willing the ground to swallow us up.
“Hey, bud. How’s it going?” Jack shouted over me and Emma. “Never imagined I’d see a sedan on this road.”
A scarred and heavyset face emerged from the window. The dude was bald with tattoos on his head, spacers in his ears, and four piercings through his left eyebrow. Despite the morbid accessories, he was handsome in a sinister and menacing way, with piercing blue eyes, a chiseled jaw, and the kind of full lips I would have died for—or maybe I would.
“ Deliverance or drug dealers?” Chloe whispered to Gage. “What do you think?”
“I think we need to get outta here before they start shooting up our car,” he muttered. “They’re clearly locals and they won’t want us here in their territory, especially if we’re asking questions. Guys like that don’t like questions. Makes them suspicious.”
“You doing some touring?” The dude’s voice was rough and gravelly, as if the knife that had left the scar across this throat had done some deeper damage.
“Just taking a detour to Bloomsburg and enjoying some off-roading.”
The dude said something to the people in his car, and I heard laughter. He flicked something in his hand that looked suspiciously like a knife. “Nice truck. Maybe we should check it out. See what you’ve got under the hood.”
“Please just go,” I whispered under my breath. “Please just go. Please just go.”
“Don’t worry.” Emma patted my knee. “I got this.”
“No…” I trailed off when Emma leaned out the window and I realized she wasn’t scared.
“Nice ink,” Emma called out. “It looks like Kirk Styles’s work.”
“He did the skull.” The dude gave her an appraising look. “You know him?”
“Kirk did my ass, and yes, I mean that in all ways an ass can be done.”
A grin tugged at the corners of his mouth. “What you got on your ass, babe?”
“What I’ve got in the back is nothing compared to what I’ve got up front.” Emma leaned farther out the window. “Have you heard of Tex? He inked Rihanna, Bieber, Drake, a couple of Jenners…”
The dude nodded. “I know Tex. Tried to get on his list, but it was a three-year wait.”
“Not for me. He saw my tits and he wanted them right then and there. You should see his work. They are a goddamn masterpiece. I’m donating them to the Louvre when I die.”
“What are you doing with that bunch of city slickers?” He thumped his door with his four-fingered hand. “Come ride with me.”
“Looks kinda cozy,” Emma said, peering into the passenger window. “But we’ve got somewhere we need to be. Another time.”
“You got a name?”
“I put it on my tramp stamp. You get the privilege of the stamp, you get the privilege of the name.”
His grin spread wider. “Damn, woman. You want to find me, look up Nick’s Autobody. Ask for Axel.”
“Will do.” Emma looked over her shoulder at a stunned Jack and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Drive. Now.”
“Nice meeting you.” Jack raised the window and hit the gas.
I waited three whole seconds before I shouted at Jack, releasing all my tension in one burst. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“I was curious.”
“There’s a saying about curiosity and cats,” Emma said. “And I can tell you from experience, it might not get you killed, but it may land you in the hospital with your life force coming out both ends.”
Jack floored the accelerator and the truck bounced and skidded down the trail at twice the speed we’d been going before.
“You’re driving pretty fast,” I pointed out. “Are you worried they’re going to come after us?”
“Just want to make sure we catch up to the semitrailer truck,” he said as we careened wildly around a corner.
“I still don’t understand why you stopped to talk to them. They were very clearly up to no good. Why else would they be in the middle of the wilderness looking the way they looked in vehicles that had likely just been pulled out of the junk pile? Did you notice they had no license plates? Or that the windows were tinted? Or that the dude was missing a pinkie and had what looked like gang tattoos on his remaining fingers? I think they were hiding out from the law.”
Jack looked over at me and shrugged. “I’m a friendly guy. There’s nothing wrong with being friendly. You need to trust me on things like this.”
“I’m trying,” I said. “I was very impressed with your mad driving skills, and I trusted you to keep us safe, but when you stopped to chat with the terrifying mountain men in the middle of nowhere, it was a challenge to keep the faith.”
We didn’t talk for the rest of the way down the mountain. We didn’t talk when Jack took the wrong fork in the road and the trail led to a pond in the middle of a dark forest. We didn’t talk when we finally emerged onto a paved road, and we drove in silence all the way to a gas station in Bloomsburg, where our cell phones suddenly came back to life.
That’s when things really went wrong.
“I’ve got five missed calls from Garcia,” I said, frowning as we walked around the parking lot to stretch our legs. “Maybe he’s got some information for us.”
“Maybe you’re a suspect,” Emma said. “He likes to accuse you of things.”
“Or maybe he talked to the same witness Clare talked to and he’s already tracked down the truck and we can all go home.” Chloe leaned against the truck, her eyes half-closed while Gage suffered in silence beside her.
“The witness won’t talk,” Vito said.
I didn’t want to know, but I did. “What do you mean ‘he won’t talk’? Please tell me you didn’t kill him, threaten him, or tie him up somewhere.”
Vito shrugged. “Okay, I won’t.”
I took a deep breath and then another, but my attempt to find some calm in the storm was shattered by another text.
“Milan says they cleared the roadblock in twenty minutes and now they are way ahead of us.” I glared at Jack, who was busy pumping gas. “We didn’t have to take the long, windy, dangerous road up a mountain pass with the Deliverance -style drug dealers on it. All we needed was a little patience.”
My phone buzzed again, and I answered when I saw Garcia’s name on my screen.
As it turned out, Emma was right. He wasn’t calling about a break in the case. He was calling to accuse me of murder.
“Where are you?” he demanded without so much as a hello.
“Bloomsburg.”
“You need to get back here, Simi. Detective Johnson wants to talk to you again. A witness said he saw Peter talking to a woman in the garage before he died. She had dark hair—”
“Lots of women at the party had dark hair. Vera said he just got his fifth Bugatti. I’m sure he showed it to lots of people.”
“You’ve just run away in the middle of a murder investigation. It’s not a good look.”
“We didn’t run away.” I tried to keep my voice steady while my heart drummed in my chest. “I told you. We’re on a camping trip, and for your information, Chloe is with us. Like you said, I would never leave her behind.”
“You need to come back,” he said quietly. “Right away. I shouldn’t even be talking to you because you might be a murder suspect—”
“Do you seriously think I would take a job and then slit the host’s throat in the middle of the event and run off with an entire museum full of erotic sex toys?” I was beyond irritated. “What kind of business would that be? I’d run out of clients.”
“I don’t understand how you keep getting mixed up in these things.” His voice tightened. “It’s him, isn’t it? I was right this afternoon.”
“Who?”
“Jack. Is he there with you? You need to stay away from him. If he’s got something on you, I can protect you.”
I’d spent my whole childhood wanting to hear those words, to feel that cared for, that seen, that cherished. My parents had done their best, but they’d been utterly overwhelmed by my rambunctious brothers, struggling to manage them and their sports while working full-time and trying to make ends meet. I’d faded into the background, trying not to make waves and burden them further, but it just meant I’d been forgotten and often unseen.
“I don’t need protecting from Jack. He’s never put me in danger.” I glanced over at the dust-covered truck, the window Jack had lowered to talk to the men on the mountain, which he was now squeegeeing clean. “I’m perfectly safe and FYI not a murderer or a thief.”
“Come back, Simi.” Garcia’s voice took on a pleading tone. “Please don’t make me put out a warrant for your arrest.”
Our detour had cost us precious time. Not only that, but Clare’s engine had overheated, and she was stuck in a small town ahead of us trying to get it fixed.
“Did you turn off the air conditioner and turn on the heat?” I asked over the phone. “If there is steam coming from under the hood, don’t open it for at least thirty minutes. When did you last have the radiator coolant checked and the belts and hoses swapped out?”
“Nothing sexier than a woman who knows her car engines,” Jack whispered as he drove past a U-Haul truck. “Maybe we should make a quick stop in a densely forested area, and I can show you how much it turns me on.”
“I’m still trying to recover from our last Pinus experience,” I whispered, my cheeks heating, and not just from the compliment.
“Now we definitely have to pull over.”
“No one is pulling over when we have a lost diamond to find, no matter how badly you need some,” Emma said, interrupting our quiet moment. “Although I still don’t understand why the thieves would want the entire collection if most of them are fake.”
Annoyed at being interrupted from a deliciously flirtatious conversation, I sighed. “The erotic artwork is real.”
“But it doesn’t add up,” she insisted. “If they’re sophisticated enough to override all the security and clear out the museum in the middle of a party, how do they not know which pieces are fake?”
“How do we know which pieces are real?” Chloe lifted her head from Gage’s shoulder. “Maybe Peter really did find some lost treasures. Both you and Clare believe he found the real diamond. And if the diamond is real, who is to say some of the other pieces aren’t, too?”
“Vera checked with De Beers,” I said. “They told her the diamond had been cut down in 1918. The stone I saw in the case hadn’t been cut. It was an exact replica of the one in the museum in Vienna.”
“I would have heard about lost treasures being found,” Jack said. “Just like Clare and I heard about the diamond.”
“He had more than enough money to keep it secret,” I pointed out. “Maybe someone just slipped up. De Beers would have known about the diamond and so did the art shippers who had to assess the collection for transport. And probably some insurance broker as well. Or maybe he was betrayed by a friend.”
“I think we should be focused on planning what to do once we retrieve the diamond.” Gage caught my gaze in the rearview mirror, glanced over at Vito beside him, and drew his finger across his neck.
“We’re a long way from that moment,” I said. “We have to assume the semitrailer truck will get there before us, so we’re going to have two problems: first, getting past security and into the shipyard, and second, finding the container.”
“We’ve got the container number so we should be able to get an exact location if I can get into their system,” Chloe said. “But we’ll still have to deal with CCTV and whatever security they have on-site.”
Anil called on video chat to let us know they’d fixed the car and were only about thirty miles ahead of us. He’d done some research on the shipyard and confirmed that in addition to CCTV, they had security guards patrolling the premises 24/7.
“We can just take out the guards,” Clare said over the chat. “That’s the easiest solution. Then we’ll have unfettered access to the shipyard and the control center.”
“We’re not ‘taking out’ anyone,” I said firmly. “This is a ‘no deaths’ heist. If we need access to the command center, then Vito can create some kind of distraction.”
“When I got my PhD in chemistry, I never imagined I’d be paid to use my skills to blow up a shipyard,” Vito said. “I couldn’t find a job when I graduated and was working a side gig with a demolition company when Clare found me. She said I could do so much better.”
I wasn’t sure if working as a paid assassin slash demolitions expert counted as “better,” but I knew what it was like to be overeducated and unemployed. I gave Vito the briefest nod in solidarity and turned to Jack, only to find him leaning out the window.
“Something wrong? Do you need some air? Emma can take over if you want a break.”
“Not driving this piece of crap,” Emma said. “I have a rep to protect. Who does a getaway with a camper in the box, a canoe rolling around on the roof, and bikes rattling in the back? They’ll spot us a mile away.”
“It’s all we’ve got unless you want to drive with Clare in the Elantra.” I was getting tired of Emma’s excuses. She was the driver. Her job was to drive regardless of the state of the vehicle on offer.
“Fuck that piece of tin.”
“I heard that,” Clare said over the phone.
Emma grabbed the phone from my hand and brought the screen up to her face. “Good. I was worried I would have to repeat it.”
“Think of it as hiding in plain sight,” I assured her. “If we do have to run, they’ll be looking for a speeding sports car and not a lumbering camper truck. I’m sure it will all be fine.”
Looking back, I wonder if I’d jinxed us with that statement, because no more than two minutes after the words had dropped from my lips, Jack said, “I think we’re being followed.”