An antique picture frame dangled from his left hand. She’d seen the man run back up the museum’s concrete steps and crouch behind the large stone planter like a city rat.
She stopped to offer her opinion. “If you just walk out like yah own the piece, no one ought to stop you. But you actin’ guilty, see? That’ll get you caught. A man don’t hide if he ain’t done nothing wrong.”
“What do you care?” The tall lean black man was skinny as a pencil. “I’m not stealing this…my grandfather painted it…I’m savin’ it.”
“What-ever,” Kim said and took another toke off her lit cigarette and walked on toward the burning inferno ahead. Another man ran off with another painting and two more carried a heavy stone bust from some long-ago icon that no one cared about anymore across the four-lane road as if they were transporting a pretty heavy couch. Their black silhouettes ran across the street against orange flames like fleeing rats from the sewers. It was quite a sight.
Kim put her palms to the darkened sky and blew out a stream of smoke. There was no one there to save art from thieves. The limited emergency crews were too focused on the buildings where all the money was. Perhaps the thieves were saving the art after all. No one else was there to do anything about the eminent demise of the world’s treasures.
It wasn’t too much farther now. The place she was headed was only a few blocks away. Already she saw the car from the blue-eyed man she spoke to earlier. His name was Samuel, Sammy for short. Somehow the name never suited him. Not even when he was a kid. Sammy was the name of a sweet, bright-eyed boy, not this guy. Saul, perhaps, or Clyde. One of those would suit better. Something that sounded more like the sloppy sidekick of a gangster. That’s what he was, after all, when you stripped it down to its essence. There was nothing redeemable about Sammy the snitch. “Hmm…” she chuckled and took another toke off her smoke as she walked, squinting her eyes from all the incessant smolder, and thought that was a perfect name for him after all. “Sammy the Snitch. Few are cleverer than I.” She smiled and kept walking.
Then the distinctive sound of a gun clicked behind her and a familiar voice said, “The truth is, I never loved you.”
She didn’t turn around. She only raised her hands. The cigarette hung from her lips. Its burning tip glowed brightly as she took another puff, blew out the burn, and then smiled and shook her head.
“Stop laughing,” he said.
“You were only an experiment.”
“Stop coming back, Kim.”
“I’ll get what I want, with or without you.” She dropped the cigarette on the sidewalk and slowly turned around to face him.
“You try, and you’ll die.”
“You can’t really blame me, can you?”
He lowered the gun, released the hammer. “How are the kids?”
She didn’t pause. “They’re at Mother’s.”
“Can I see them this time?”
She sauntered past. “They’re yours, aren’t they?”