FIVE

LISA LOOKED THE same as ever. Her clothes were black and well-tailored. Her hair was cut short. Platinum bracelets adorned her arms, and a platinum chain hung around her neck. Her smile looked like a wolf’s. With Lisa Wan, there was no question who was in charge.

“You deserve a better party for getting out of jail,” she said. “But there will be plenty of time to celebrate once we’re done.” She turned to the man with the gun. “Ali and Dean are old friends of mine, Max. You don’t need to point the gun at them. Unless they try to leave.”

The man in the gray suit nodded. He tucked the gun inside his suit jacket.

“What happened to Monster?” I asked.

“An unlucky accident,” Lisa said. “He’ll be away for four more years. Max is doing just as well. That was him you talked to on the phone.”

Max smiled at me. His hair was gray, and his eyes light blue. He looked much older than Lisa. I wondered how he’d come to work for her.

There were red marks on Dean’s wrists, but he seemed to be all right. “I need to get my brother home,” I told Lisa.

“Soon enough. Let’s talk for a while. You can sit down, if you like.”

“I’m not talking with you,” I said. “We have nothing to say to each other.”

“We have so much,” she said. “Like your brother’s debts. Let’s talk about those to start.”

“Dean doesn’t have any debts. His credit line is at zero.” I turned to Dean. “Right?”

Dean looked down at the floor.

“He owes me $17,000,” Lisa said. “To be more accurate, he owes Ajax Credit $17,000. Can you pay that debt for him?”

“How is that even possible?” I asked.

“It’s my fault,” Dean said. “I had some bad luck, and I made some bad decisions.”

“Your brother is quite the gambler,” Lisa said.

Dean still wouldn’t look me in the eye. “I don’t know how it all happened,” he said. “I got a tip to bet on this race. I was winning, and I thought I could buy a new stove and fridge for the restaurant. Then I started to lose. I don’t remember much after that, but when I woke up, I saw the paper I’d signed.”

Lisa pulled a paper from her pocket and unfolded it. “A promissory note,” she said. “Dean Kidd agrees to pay the sum of $17,000 to Ajax Credit.”

“It’s a scam,” I said. “A trick.”

“No,” Lisa said, “it’s a legal document.”

Dean had never gambled, as far as I knew. Someone working for Lisa must have tricked him. I’d seen it before. A man offers you a tip on a horse race. A sure thing, he says. You bet a few dollars, something small. Surprise, surprise, you win. Your five dollars is now a hundred. When the man comes back, you trust him enough to bet large.

That is how they get you.

Still, Dean would never have bet as much as $17,000. As far as I knew, he’d never even seen that much money. Lisa was an expert at making people do things they wouldn’t normally do. Somehow she’d convinced Dean to bet money he didn’t have, and to think that it was his own fault.

Lisa folded the paper and put it back in her pocket. “It doesn’t matter how it happened,” she said. She always seemed to know what I was thinking. “All that matters is your brother owes us.”

“They’re going to take the restaurant,” Dean said. Tears were forming in his eyes. Kidd’s wasn’t just his business or the place he’d grown up. It was his childhood, it was Aunt Jessie, it was where he felt comfortable.

“No crying now, Dean,” Lisa said. “We don’t want to take Kidd’s from you. We don’t want to see you or your sister out in the street. Nobody wants that, do they?” She looked at me.

“What do you want?” I said.

“Nothing unreasonable, Ali. I just want you to come back to work.”

As much as I hated her at that moment, I had to admit that Lisa Wan was a genius. A sick genius, but a genius nonetheless.

She knew I would never work for her again without a compelling reason. The only way was if Dean was in trouble. Ajax Credit was an even better front for her criminal business than the pawnshop.

Dean and I could try to fight it. Refuse to pay and take Ajax Credit to court. But Dean had signed the paper, and the court wouldn’t care how he’d built up a gambling debt of that size. We might lose the case. Or we might win, but the lawyer fees would cost us more than the debt.

I thought of calling Phil Kushida, confessing everything. He’d been after Lisa Wan for years. I trusted Phil. But I couldn’t trust him to outsmart Lisa or to make sure Dean wasn’t harmed in the process.

Lisa had planted evidence to put me in jail. Now she was telling me she wanted my help. In both cases I had no choice. I had to look out for my brother. If there was another solution, I couldn’t see it.

Or maybe I didn’t want to.

“What’s the job?” I asked.

“A piece of art. A photograph.”

“That doesn’t sound so hard.”

Lisa smiled. “It’s impossible, Ali. Why else would I come to you?”

A few days after I’d started my sentence in prison, Lisa told me, an elderly woman came into Lisa’s pawnshop with a box of old photographs and postcards. Lisa paid the woman five dollars for the whole box. She put the box of photos in a corner, wrote $1 each/3 for $5 on the front of the box and went back to her desk.

Six weeks later a man came in. He was blond and handsome, though his nose had been broken before, and he was missing some teeth. He looked around the store and started sifting through the box of photos.

Lisa was thinking about other things. She didn’t worry too much about the man. The next person to enter was a beautiful woman, who walked over to see what the man was doing.

“Find anything, Ty?” she asked.

“Maybe.” The man was trying not to sound excited, but Lisa could tell he was fascinated by the box. He was too careful with the photos, treating each one like it was precious.

“Ty, I want to go,” the woman said. “I’m hungry.”

The man took his time walking to the counter. “Three for five, huh?” he said to Lisa.

“That was the old price,” Lisa said. She didn’t know what the box was worth, but the man was too interested in the photos for them to be junk. She decided to overcharge him, then look up what the photos were worth much later. “New price is $500. All or nothing. Take it or leave it.”

She knew she’d made a mistake when the man smiled.

“Deal,” he said, slapping five $100 bills on the counter. He walked out, happy, with the box under his arm.

“What’s so special about a bunch of old pictures?” Lisa heard the woman ask him. The two were holding hands as they left.

“These are Jane Brick photos,” the man said. “Originals. They’re beautiful—and worth a lot of money.”

I didn’t know anything about photography—or painting or anything else—but I’d heard of Jane Brick. She’d done wonderful photos of city streets in the 1960s and ’70s. Now her photos fetched high prices, were featured in museums and private collections, and were sold as posters and greeting cards. She’d had a very sad life and passed away young.

Lisa explained that Jane’s mother had talked about a “missing” collection of Jane’s photos. Ten shots taken around her home. When Jane’s mother passed, a distant cousin cleaned out their house. She was the one who had sold the box to Lisa. She hadn’t known or cared what they were.

Lisa had made $495 on the box without doing anything. But she talked about it like the man had stolen millions from her.

The man who’d bought the box was named Ty Collins. He was thirty-four years old and retired. A former hockey player, he’d won the Hart Memorial Trophy and made the playoffs twice. Now he collected art. Photographs mostly.

COLLINS SCORES IN OVERTIME WITH PHOTO FIND read the headline in the local paper. Collins had paid to have an expert look at the photos to verify that they were taken by Jane Brick. The reporter mentioned Collins’s “remarkable eye” for spotting the similarities between the pictures and Brick’s other work.

Collins was having each photo framed. They would be displayed in his penthouse suite for one year, then donated to the city’s art gallery. “I’m just happy to bring these photos to the world,” he was quoted as saying.

Lisa Wan was furious.

“That dumb ape got lucky and cheated me,” she said.

“Let me get all this straight, so I understand,” I said. “He bought these from you for a hundred times what you paid, and now you want me to steal them back?”

“That’s only part of it,” Lisa said. “I want the photos, yes. But I want him to be embarrassed. He needs to know he’s not smarter than me.”

“So you don’t want me to steal the photos?”

“You’re not just going to steal them,” Lisa said. “You’re going to replace them.”