Owen slid into the padded booth he’d been escorted to by the black-clad hostess. The table was a glossy expanse of dark wood that would have adequately seated six. The glass-globed candle burning at the far end was still a stretch away, even for a man with a seven-foot wingspan. The setup would be elbow-room overload for a party of four, an embarrassment of riches in dining real estate for two. But it was the only kind of table they had here, a subliminal suggestion at the outset that you’d already been pampered before they’d served you a single thing.
The whole place was a bit dim and romantic for an appointment like this. A Waffle House would have served Jonathan better. Safer. Owen would have stood out more. But he figured that Jonathan hadn’t thought it all the way through. Jonathan wanted to impress him. With what? His good taste in slick suburban quick-eats?
Another restaurant ninja materialized at his side. “Hello. I’m Courtney and I’ll be taking care of you this afternoon. Can I start you off with one of our craft cocktails or a glass of wine from our Reserve Select collection?”
“Black coffee is fine, thank you. I’m meeting someone.”
“Of course.”
She disappeared without so much as a rustle. The place had the acoustics of a sponge.
Owen took out his phone and sent a text to Jonathan: I’m here. You’re late. He set the phone faceup on the table and waited. He wouldn’t have made it to ten if he’d bothered to count. The silenced phone lit up and shimmied in a fit of vibration. He ignored it.
Courtney reappeared with a glass of ice water. She stopped midway to setting it down as the phone burred like a drill on the table. “Do you need to get that?”
“No.” The call went dead, then almost immediately rang its angry droning again against the wooden continent between them. He looked at the hovering glass of water and back into Courtney’s questioning eyes.
Across her face he read the confusion of a young person who couldn’t comprehend not responding to an electronic summons.
“Is that for me?” he asked about the glass in her hand.
“Oh! Yes. Of course. Sorry.” She put down a napkin and the water he didn’t want.
Courtney was a psychic. She shrugged and nodded, apology already glowing in her cheeks. “I brought that just in case you were thirsty while you waited. They’re brewing fresh coffee.”
“That’s fine. Thank you.”
“Would you like to hear about today’s special features and our boat-to-table catch of the day?”
Owen liked eye contact, and never more than when his focus met up with that of someone who didn’t know what to do with it. It was one-stop shopping for a quick dose of entertainment. Drama, tragedy, horror, comedy. Poor Courtney.
“No. The coffee is all.”
“Oh. Sure. Okay. No problem. That’s fine.” Courtney stammered through every expression of cooperation she could think of while Owen blinked over her efforts.
“Don’t worry. I tip well.”
“No! You don’t have to. I mean, I wasn’t expecting . . . It’s no trouble. Coffee’s easy. No big deal. Really. I’ll just go check and see if it’s ready.”
“Thank you, Courtney.”
She evaporated into the gloom.
The napkin went soggy as the water glass sweated down its sides. The door opened and Jonathan came in, red faced, searching the room for Owen with little birdlike jerks of his head. Owen raised his hand to flag his attention. Jonathan nodded, just an angry up-snap of his chin, and puffed himself smooth with a big, bracing breath. Owen watched him trace the maze through the giant booths. It was hard to do, navigating the murky feng shui and trying to look tough doing it. Owen almost felt sorry for him.
He didn’t get up as Jonathan dropped into the seat across from him. “You son of a bitch—”
“Take it easy.”
Jonathan leaned in to make more out of his furious whisper than it was ever going to be worth. “Don’t you tell me to take it easy.”
“No, seriously, take it easy,” Owen said at normal volume, and looked up over Jonathan’s shoulder. “Hi, Courtney. Thank you.”
The waitress, with Owen’s coffee saucer pinched in both nervous hands, swallowed hard and came on the last few steps to the table.
“Jonathan, this is Courtney.”
The two looked at each other, helpless to go against the rules of introduction. Courtney, so far off script, seemed at a loss for words.
Owen helpfully broke her silence for her. “Can she bring you a craft cocktail? Perhaps the boat-to-table catch of the day?” Owen winked at the girl, whose bewilderment was taking on an edge of real worry.
“Nothing for me, thanks.” Jonathan stabbed at Owen with a glare.
“No? Okay.” Owen leaned back, pressing into the deep padding of the backrest to get his wallet from his pocket. He took out a $100 bill. “Tell you what, Courtney. You’ve been an angel. Go ahead and close out the check. No need to bring it to the table. Or any refills. And keep the change, of course. We’ll just need a little time to talk.”
Courtney took the money, mumbled a thank-you, and fled.
“Think she’ll remember us?” asked Owen.
“What the fuck was that?”
“You seriously need to calm down.”
“And you seriously need to stop saying things like that,” Jonathan said, baring more capped and polished teeth than Owen was sure he was even aware of. Feisty.
People who defied Owen fascinated him. Everyone else made sense. This guy was all loose cork and short fuse. And better teeth than he’d had four years ago.
“Jonathan, let me give you a tip—when I stop saying things like that, you’ve run out of time to try to get it right.” Owen took a sip of his coffee before it went too cool to enjoy. It was delicious. Just about perfect. Transporting, even.
Owen, for everything else he was, had decided a long time ago to be a man of simple pleasures. It soothed him, which made everyone safer. He thought a little kindlier of the silly place. “The waitress won’t forget us anytime soon, and that’s good news for you. I’m just trying to set you at ease.”
“By doing that? And after pulling that bullshit—showing up at my house?”
Owen drank more coffee. A glance over the rim of the cup seemed to dry up Jonathan’s next comment. Owen set the cup down, watching it the whole way, slow and precise, into the ring of the saucer. No clatter.
Owen let a nod stand in for any more warnings. “I know you want to grab this conversation by the scruff of the neck. You’re just squirming to be in charge. And I might let you—if you can give me a good answer to just exactly what the fuck you’re going to do if I get up and walk out right now? As far as I can tell, you’ll be left holding a very expensive, yet functionally worthless bit of paint on wood and looking over your shoulder for as long as you have a shoulder attached to your . . . looker.”
“There are other people who would buy it.”
“And that would solve half your problem.”
Jonathan readjusted his face and his ease in the seat. He wasn’t bad at it. Erratic, but convincing a good bit of the time. He was obviously a practiced chameleon, taking on the look not of his surroundings but of his own desperate will.
“Fine,” Jonathan said. “So you came here to threaten to leave? That’s a lot of work for a hundred-dollar cup of coffee.”
“Not much work at all, really.”
Instead of surrendering and going more unsettled as he should have done, Jonathan kept moving the mood around like stage scenery. He breathed in a satisfied sigh, as if they were finally maneuvered to where he’d been steering all along. “Just to be clear, you didn’t need to pull that stunt. It didn’t do you any good. The painting isn’t in my house anymore. It’s not in my office either. It’s safe. And it’s hard to find. Carly and Donna don’t know where it is either. So all that was for nothing. Sorry about that. You could have just asked me.”
Owen let the little speech hang in the air with only his own wry smile for company. If a guy puts his dick on the table for measuring, there was always the option to go for his own zipper to do dueling inches, but he was more inclined to let a little time pass. It doesn’t take long for most people to realize that pulling their dick out without a good reason is actually pretty embarrassing.
Owen matched Jonathan’s posture. The seat really was nice. The restaurant was growing on him. He wondered if Courtney would cry if he beckoned her back for a reconsidered refill of just-about-perfect coffee. He turned his saucer clockwise in the crook of his thumb and forefinger and listened to the hollow rub of porcelain on varnish.
Jonathan looked comfortable with the standoff for longer than most people would have, but the cracks came. A twitch in the cheek. It looked as if his nose itched. Owen could tell Jonathan was feeling every second of it now, fighting the fidgets, timing his blinks. Not too rapid, but not spread out enough to let his eyes water.
“I think you misunderstand me,” Owen said finally. “I didn’t go there looking for the painting. If it were leaning against your knee right now, I wouldn’t take it from you. I can promise you this: if I ever so much as set a finger on it, it’ll be because the Anningers paid for it, and in an amount you agreed to. I don’t care about the painting.”
Now that made Jonathan uncomfortable. Owen only tried a little not to smile.
“Okay. Great,” Jonathan said. “So can we get on with that, then? Do they still want to buy it?”
“Hang on. I didn’t say there was nothing I wanted in this.”
Jonathan sighed as if his patience were any sort of lever in this exchange. “Then maybe we can get to that. Something. Anything.”
“How much was it they were going to pay before? Six?”
“Seven and a half.”
“Seven and a half. Hmmm. And you and Marcelline were going to split it straight even?”
Jonathan held Owen’s stare. He didn’t like it, Owen could tell, but he was trying to read and stay unread at the same time. He’d lose at both by looking away now. “Yes,” Jonathan said.
Owen stoked the staring contest. “The balance wasn’t tilting a little toward her for the expertise and being able to find a buyer? Or heavier in your favor for having it in the first place?”
“What difference does it make? We talked it out—between us—and agreed on splitting it down the middle.”
“And yet that didn’t happen. Who are you going to split it with now? Donna and Carly? Or do you have a bag and your passport in the car?”
From the collar up, Jonathan’s color deepened. It was too dark in the booth to tell if he was the bright-red or the brick-red type.
“What is that to you?”
“It’s nothing to me. But it’s nothing at all to either of us unless I decide I want to take your offer to the Anningers.”
Jonathan leaned in. “What now? What are you . . .? They don’t even know yet? Are you fucking with me?”
“Come on now, are we already back to take it easy? Why did you wait more than four years to get in touch?”
“What?”
“I’m just curious. I wasn’t hard to find, was I? It would have been just as easy to make the call the day after we last met. Or three years ago. Or two. Or even last month. Why now? Did you just wake up the other day with a seven-and-a-half-million-dollar hard-on? Was that it? Or did something happen to make it seem a little urgent?” Owen smiled at Jonathan, all spoiler, and watched it sink in.
“Okay, so you’ve seen the video.”
“Yeah. Hot potato. Not really all that fun outside of kindergarten.”
“And that’s how you figured out where I live.”
Owen just nodded and drank most of the rest of his coffee. He never drained a cup or glass all the way or cleaned a plate to crumbs. He never left anything looking as if he might have wanted more.
“Mmmm-hmmm.” Owen decided to sip the water, too. Might as well. “So, that night. What do you think happened? You think Marcelline’s man turned on her? For what?”
“Huh? I don’t know. And I don’t know that he turned on her as much as he just lost his cool and shot wild. I mean, he was a basket case. An idiot all the way to the bone. That was obvious. Besides, I thought maybe it was you, that he was your guy, not hers. Although now that we’re sitting here talking, I think probably not.”
“No?”
“You don’t seem the sort.” Jonathan risked a smile as if they might be approaching common ground.
“You make quick decisions, don’t you? That ever come back to bite you in the ass?”
“I do okay, thanks,” Jonathan said. “You, on the other hand, seem to belabor the shit out of everything. Is there a point somewhere on its way anytime soon?”
Owen could practically see the chill of rising hackles trace up Jonathan’s spine, pulling him straighter, more ready. “Are you in a hurry?”
“Oh, enough about me,” Jonathan said, actually out of real patience now, not just the theatrical kind. “Let’s talk about you. Look, I get it. What happened that night is stuck in your throat. Nobody likes getting caught out, to have things go that far off plan. Especially not a guy like you. You were in charge and it fell apart and you had to eat shit for it and you want to try to piece together what happened. You want to know whose neck to break because you lost your bosses’ money and maybe some of their respect for not getting the job done. I get it, but I can’t help you. You lost face. That sucks. I’m sorry for your trouble.”
Owen surprised himself with the delighted sound of his own laughter. It was musical. Loud music at that. Courtney looked around, startled and still tense, from where she’d been inclined in conversation with the bartender.
“Do you have any idea how many double crosses I’ve yawned through? How many times I’ve had to go back and forth because another greedy little fuck gets cute or bold or somehow mistakes a rising burp for a bright idea?
“The Anningers have already bought my time. I get paid either way. I have to do something all day.
“What happened that night was a pain in my ass. But you’re not special. And for them? Right now they’re getting more mileage from the story of losing the painting and the money. It’s almost as good to them as having it. Maybe better. Who can tell?
“Don’t embarrass yourself. You scrabbling around like a squirrel with a golden nut doesn’t make you a high roller. You’ve seen too many movies, Jonathan. You have no idea how these things work.”
The shade of Jonathan now made Owen decide he was probably the brick-red type. Bright red would look shinier by candlelight. But either way, Jonathan surely didn’t like being laughed at.
He was quaking.
Owen pressed on. “So you say you didn’t know her well?”
Jonathan didn’t lose momentum as much as he gave it up freely. He did it so abruptly that Owen felt himself wanting to tip forward into the void of pressure loss. The fury melted out of Jonathan and he relaxed back into the seat, making Owen’s seat just a little less cozy than he’d been enjoying in these last minutes.
“No. I didn’t know her very well.” Jonathan fought, but not really, a knowing little smirk. “Did you?”
“Not really.”
“She was fine as hell, though, wasn’t she? It was a shame to see her cut down like that.”
“Yes.” Owen resisted the tingling in his face that begged for release in a lip curl or a squint.
Jonathan let a quiet beat go on longer than a natural pause. “A real shame, unless it was just that she got caught up in her own plan. That sort of thing is a big risk. And I don’t think she seemed like someone who would have done a lot of that. Do you? She seemed too sweet, I think. And if that sweetness was all just an act, it was probably too easy for her to get her own way with everything else she had going for her. Ooof.” Jonathan let out a slow breath that would have been an appreciative whistle if he’d pursed his lips more. “Maybe that’s why it went wrong, I’m thinking. Some rookie mistake. When I remember Marcelline, I can’t help but think of the whole play with fire and you might get burned thing. I think she made a dangerous choice screwing you over.”
Jonathan had started running his finger back and forth along the edge of the table, but it wasn’t nervous energy, Owen saw. Jonathan was stroking. It was metaphorical, whether Jonathan realized it or not. Something had changed and this guy had gone from deploying scattershot swagger for any kind of advantage in this negotiation, all the way to his being turned on in some fashion.
Owen eased his spine and shoulders to their full spread. “Why did you take the money that night?”
“Why wouldn’t I take it? Somebody was trying to kill me and rob me. It was hazardous-duty pay.”
“I don’t recall that you were anywhere in the line of fire.”
“You know what? I already addressed this. That money will be rolled into the sale price.”
“If the Anningers still want to buy it.”
Jonathan let the smirk go wide. He twisted away and stepped out of the booth. “You know what? This is bullshit. I guess we’re done. Or I’m done at least. You’re fucking with me. This is business. You don’t care about getting the painting, great. And you didn’t care about getting left holding the, well, whole lot of nothing at the original sale. Fine.
“And money, and stuff that people actually find worthwhile, and, I dunno, success in your work, and self-respect—it doesn’t mean anything. You’re just above it all.”
Jonathan put one hand back onto the table and leaned in, not a full-badass lean-in. Tentative. Out of his league, but fired up. Almost that good. This guy was pinging like crazy, lit, all over the place and clearly not yet done, even though he was perilously close to having gone too far already.
“But you’re not really above it all, are you? Not all of it. That’s your car outside, right? The silver one? If you really didn’t give a shit about anything, you wouldn’t put sweet rims and orange calipers on your bank statement and drive it around for everyone to see and yank me every which way for the sad chance to talk about a woman who died before she could disappoint you.”
Owen’s spit turned acid in his throat. “Obviously, you’ve lost your mind.”
“This is pointless.” Jonathan stepped fully clear of the table.
“Sit. Down.” Owen bit the words like meat.
He was relieved to find that he hadn’t lost complete control of the conversation. Jonathan’s knees buckled him back into the bench as if they were on a string that Owen had pulled.
He had to give Jonathan his moment of insight, even as Owen fought to keep from launching across the table and slamming the fancy teeth out of his mouth. Owen shifted his attention from the knots of his fists, clenched under the table, to the air flowing in and out of his nose. Controlled. Cooling.
Jonathan was an amateur, but not without talent. But instead of enjoying and using it to his advantage, the asshole let it get away from him. Instinct had struck a match and made him desperate to blow something up. Reckless. He would almost certainly burn himself down in the end.
Just look at him. Jonathan was still sputtering sparks when he’d gone and poured gasoline all over himself.
Jonathan dripped sarcasm, also flammable, into his words. “Oh, I thought there was a point to you waving around hundred-dollar bills and working up poor Candi over there just about to the point of tears. I thought I was safe. Or was that just conversation, Owen, something to keep me here to give you someone to talk to?”
“Courtney.”
“What?”
“Her name is Courtney.”
“Okay. Candi, Courtney. Whatever. So fucking what?”
Just as surely as Owen had given himself away moments before, the hole in Jonathan’s soul was right there. They were both unused to being seen for their baselines. They’d traded turns getting knocked onto their back foot.
Both Owen and Jonathan had little use for people. But unlike Owen, Jonathan had to work at it. He fought influence—not by his nature, but by his insistence. He was a self-made man on his own island, but not abandoned there. Not stranded. No. He’d hacked it free of the mainland himself. But sometimes he felt bad about it. Clearly, it made Jonathan resentful to feel anything.
Owen’s voice went mild. “So fucking what? The little people, Jonathan, they count. Take yours, for instance. Donna. Carly. I know their names. I wouldn’t call them Dana and Carrie. I’ve met them. Talked with them. I’ve seen them in their own environment. It would be unwise of me not to have paid attention. It would also be dismissive. They don’t deserve that. According to YouTube, they’ve been through a lot lately. And they don’t even know what’s at stake, do they?”
“Are you threatening my family?”
“Would that make it easier for you?”
“Would that make what easier for me?” The warning bell clanging in Jonathan’s head showed, rising into the expression on his face.
“Hmmm.” A sincere hmmm was always a tricky pitch for the batter. “I wasn’t threatening them. I don’t pick on little girls or their”—Owen raised his water glass in a mock toast—“or their superhot mothers. Are you worried that I was threatening them? Or were you hoping for it? You know, looking at you, I’m not sure you weren’t doing just exactly that.”
“Fuck you.”
“That’s fair.”
Jonathan scratched his hands through his hair. “This is getting out of hand. I have the painting that your employers might want, even though you think it’s stupid. I know the price needs to be renegotiated because of what happened. I get that. But the—I’ll admit—impulsive down payment I took was with my head ringing from goddamned gunfire, I’d like to remind everyone. But all this”—Jonathan raked the air back and forth over the table between them—“this isn’t necessary. There’s no reason for it.”
“You forgot to mention that Marcelline is dead in your little recap of history.” Owen watched him closely. Jonathan had spoken of her only in the past tense. But would he flinch, a truth reflex, when Owen did?
Jonathan sniffed, a flicker of a sneer as he looked down at the tabletop. “You’re right. I didn’t mention it. I forgot. But bringing that up seems to be your part-time job, not mine. It’s been four years. Maybe get another hobby.”
There it was, that hostile pout. Jonathan didn’t care that she was dead. But he hated that he was supposed to. According to his story, Marcelline got only what she’d deserved. And why would he think he was supposed to feel anything about that? Because he knew better. The double cross was his.
Marcelline had been telling the truth.
Owen was going to kill him.
The whole revelation, silent and white hot inside Owen, seemed lost on Jonathan. “I wonder why you don’t bring up the other people who got hurt that night? You know, those people you actually came with? Your coworkers. Remember them? The little people, who mean so much to you? But the names stick better if they’re pretty, yeah?”
“Touché. There’s a lot about that night—”
For the second time, a person over Jonathan’s shoulder stopped the conversation. Owen had just said her name no more than a minute before, but it didn’t feel as if it were anywhere within reach for him to remember it now. His mind was emptied of everything by the look on her face. The rest of her was trembling in the struggle to keep the tears to a thin glistening line on her lower lids. Jonathan’s stepdaughter. The girl in the video.
Jonathan followed Owen’s gaze and looked behind him.
“Carly? What the . . . ? Are you . . . ? Why are you . . . ? What are you doing?”
The girl was defiant, her mouth tightened down over a barely quivering chin. “I left my phone in your car.”
She said it plainly, a dare blazing up in her wet eyes for either of them to make it seem like not a good enough reason for her to be standing there in the self-consciously grown-up restaurant in her yellow high-tops and braids.
She was too old to be cute. But Owen was more or less immune to cute anyway. She was too young and furled for him to even wonder what she’d be later. She was in one of life’s middle grounds, adrift on frustration in the sea of not-quite-old-enough-to-know. She had nothing to gain or lose, except to insist that she wasn’t stupid.
“Is everything okay?” She spoke to Jonathan, but she looked sidelong at Owen, and he realized with a little sting what she had delivered expertly in that look was that she would cast her allegiance in the direction of whoever told her the truth. He’d bet his whole wallet on that.
“Honey, here.” John scooped his keys out of his pocket. “Go on out to the car. I’ll be right there.”
“Go home, Jonathan,” Owen said. “I’ll get back in touch with you.”
Jonathan searched Owen’s expression for clues as to what all that could mean.
Owen rolled his eyes. “What?”
Owen looked at Carly. Carly looked at Jonathan. Carly looked back to Owen.
He wondered what she wondered about, how much she’d heard or intuited, then he wondered that he gave any thought at all to what a kid might be thinking. Sometimes people surprised him, and sometimes cheesy restaurants had the best coffee. Strange.
“Keep an eye on him for me, Carly, will you?”
Owen got up and saw in the margins of his vision everyone track his rise toward the ceiling—Carly, Jonathan, the people at the massive table across the aisle, Courtney, still by the bar, and the bartender, too.
Owen snapped his arms straight to settle his cuffs, buttoned his jacket, and walked out.
Once he was in behind the steering wheel, having pointedly avoided admiring the sleek flares that ran the length of the car’s flank, or the sun splashing in the silver flecks in the paint, or the orange enamel winking at him from behind the spokes of the wheel rims, Owen sent Jonathan a text:
Didn’t get around to it four years ago. Didn’t get around to it today. There’s possibly more money in any offer that might come down if there’s useful information about how you came by the Flinck.