Owen Haig’s seatback was in the fully upright and locked position and he twisted the clip on his tray table to secure it for takeoff. The latch set home with a satisfying little click that was more felt than heard. Owen was a big man, but trim, and he fit into his economy-class space with no room to spare. He could afford business class, if he were buying. Which he never was. Hell, his boss would be happy to pay for first class, if only Owen would ask for it. But it would be ski season in Satan’s back acres before Owen would float his ass in a plush leather recliner next to someone who had paid for the distinction.
Coach was fine if it got him where he meant to be more or less when he meant to be there. And with his luggage. He did, however, fantasize that people were much less inclined to chatter at strangers way up there in the front of the plane.
Owen wore dark suits with dark sunglasses, even indoors when it wasn’t ridiculous for him to do so. It wasn’t that he particularly liked navy, hurricane gray, or dead-star black for a palette. It’s just what they wanted him to wear. For him, it was nice that it made the dangling cord of the white earbuds more obvious.
At six foot six with covered eyes, blocked ears, and a disinclination to smile, he would’ve thought it might have been enough to guarantee that he’d stay alone in a crowd. But it wasn’t foolproof. Like a lighthouse rising out of the sea of everything, the fools sometimes found him anyway.
Between his employer’s expectations and his own efforts at generating a force field, Owen’s look was fairly specific. The Anningers, especially Mrs. Anninger, preferred their staff to present and act as if they should have a staff of their own—a collector’s set of nesting dolls of privilege. If the butler had a housekeeper, and the chef had a cook, and the personal shoppers all had harried assistants, the Anningers were just that much more buffered from all the sadness and tedious work in the world. Work that they possibly only grasped at the level of fable.
Of course they scheduled inoculations of misery into their itineraries with tours of Mumbai slums and Cambodian orphanages. But closer to home, none of them ever seemed keen to drive from the pavement to the gravel to the dirt in Appalachia, and they found reasons not to set a charitable course through the less manicured areas of Chicago or Dallas. But Mrs. Anninger always told Owen to send checks with the regrets when she turned down domestic outreach events.
They weren’t evil. Not really. Only remote, nearly alien. Owen wasn’t convinced they understood the concept of generosity, but they had to do something with all that money. The Anningers were generations removed from the merely wealthy. They were practically a different species.
Mrs. Anninger would have liked it better if Owen had put more effort into letting everyone know how well they paid him. It would have been good for what passed as a conscience’ sake, but he suspected they also liked the friction of a stubborn employee they could choose to suffer over.
His employers were easily bored, so he was busy. He did for them in capacities secretarial to diplomatic. He researched things; procured things. Sometimes he stood in as proxy to make matters easy for them or to make a point of their absence when they thought it necessary. He was a high-end errand runner.
By looking at him, some people wrote him off as a bodyguard, an enforcer. That was useful at times and it amused his bosses. But his size and his strength and his specific inclination to violence were his own, and as not for sale as his cock. He had applied all of those things adjacent to his professional duties at times, but on his own terms and without comment or suggestion from anyone who wanted to keep on his good side.
He did their bidding as he pleased and tempered it with the bare minimum of the image they wanted. He wore decent suits and bought the Mercedes, a sleek thing that he might have actually loved a little bit, once upon a time. Beyond that, he withstood being the source of their favorite discontent.
His costume made him look like an asshole. Owen had to admit that he might very well be an asshole. He pinged himself at least three times a day to better understand humanity in that regard and got nothing but his own brand of joy. He was an asshole in a world of different varieties of asshole.
Today he had the window seat.
A woman scanned the numbers along the aisle bulkhead and stopped next to Owen’s row. She drew back at the sight of him. He was used to it, if not almost all the way pleased by it.
“Wow! I’m glad I’m little. Bet you’re glad, too. They don’t leave us a lot of room, do they?” She shoved her bag, bright and unscuffed at the corners, into the overhead bin. “If you split the difference between me and you, you’d get a normal-size person out of it.”
She wasn’t that little. Average size. Cute. Curvy. Tight enough in the important spots. But still. You could tell a lot about someone by the yardsticks they used to measure themselves. She was utterly delighted to be traveling.
She kept her lid on until the first pass of the drinks cart. Owen asked for black coffee.
“I’m going to splurge,” she said, leaning into him as if it were the key to a conspiracy. She ordered wine and handed over her credit card.
If a screw-top split of economy-class chardonnay is a splurge, lady, that is also a yardstick.
But he nodded when she declared it not too bad.
In ten minutes, he knew her name was Charlotte (which she felt she had to clarify after introducing herself as Charlie, lest he think she was a Charlene or transgender), and he knew that she was headed to her sister’s wedding. Charlie herself had a wedding band on, but didn’t mention any husband.
Said sister had been married once before. She had three kids from that first marriage and still snagged herself a new man who was financially well-off and, get this, almost five years younger. The new husband didn’t even have any kids himself and treated Charlie’s nieces and nephew just like his own.
“Must be nice,” said Charlie, but she sniffed as if it didn’t exactly smell so by her estimation. The happy couple was making a huge, elaborate production—white dress, sit-down dinner, a string ensemble and everything—and Charlie thought that was fine, because why shouldn’t people celebrate good things?
Owen could only agree out loud and wish an aneurysm on her silently. He started calling her Ann in his mind and wished he believed in wishes. Aneurysm Annie. He fought the corners of his mouth as she blathered on.
Owen pulled a pack of gum from his pocket. He carried some with him when he traveled to make his ears pop on takeoff and landing, but the coffee was lousy and had soured on his tongue. He extended the pack to her.
“Would you like a piece, Ann?”
“Ann? It’s Charlie.”
“Sorry. Right. Charlie.” Owen had been told he had a charming smile, but he wasn’t quite sure how he managed it. “You remind me of an Ann.”
She smiled back, then shielded her mouth with her fingertips. “Do I need gum?”
“No, no. I was only going to have some and didn’t want to be rude. Because I’m going to have to be rude now.” Owen uncoiled the white cord of his earphones. “I have a program to listen to.”
“Oh.” Her face fell into a pout. “Sure.”
“It’s just a work thing.” He twisted the earbuds into his ears. “I need to have this done by the time we land. But it was nice chatting with you.”
“Okay. Thanks. You, too.”
As always, Owen mimed tapping up something on his screen, but he really just opened and closed a couple of apps and slid the silent phone back into his pocket. He never actually listened to anything. He merely enjoyed the peace in those times when the earphones worked as pest control.
CharlieAnn lasted another ten minutes or so, flipping through the catalog from the seat pocket.
She gave him a nudge. He popped out his right earbud and held it in his closed fist so she couldn’t hear all the nothing coming out of it.
“Can you believe they charge sixteen dollars for Wi-Fi? I mean, I didn’t even know you could get internet on an airplane. That’s great. I love it! But sixteen dollars? After what I paid for this flight?”
Owen pressed his lips together and nodded in what he hoped looked like sympathy. He didn’t care if she felt validated, but it seemed a better gamble at getting her to shut up than making a case for $16 Wi-Fi or calling her a cheap, pointless waste of breath and skin.
She drew her shoulders up in a little shiver of naughty glee. “I think I’m going to splurge,” she announced again.
“Go for it,” he said, and worked his earpiece back into place.
For sleeping, Owen preferred dark rooms, no company, and a locked door. He almost never slept on planes. But he was nearly there. He’d drifted numb and weightless, with a dream just ahead, something bright and good, something he wanted to see—
She tapped him excitedly on the elbow and he crashed back into reality. His body jerked against the seat and he swallowed past a nap-dried throat.
“Oh! I’m sorry! I didn’t know you were sleeping. I thought you were just listening.”
Owen was all out of chitchat, and he was also all out of pretending as if there was any more stored away somewhere behind his eyes. So he just let her look at his blank expression and take inventory of the rest of his patience.
She was undeterred. “You’ve got to see this. Or have you already? It’s everywhere. So cool. I love it. It’ll make your day if you haven’t.”
Unbelievable.
And because he literally couldn’t think past the oblivious patter from this woman, this airy, happy, impossibly annoying creature, he let her direct his gaze to her iPad.
“Look at this kid. Watch what she does.”
Charlie was carbonated with excitement—about this video playing on the screen, about the utterly mundane adventure she was on, about life in general when she got two steps out of her routine. It occurred to him that some people would find Charlie irrepressible. It badly made him want to press her until she cried.
Owen had a blister of fury rising in him at all times, chafed raw by each dull stupidity and sparkling inanity in the world that he couldn’t avoid. He didn’t hurt people when he couldn’t get away with it, but he did catalog how it felt in these moments that he really wanted to. He used it for fuel in the times that he could. A few people paid for all the rest of them.
The girl in the video was being dragged by her ankle. In the mood he was in, Owen vaguely approved.
Then the tug on his attention from the edge of the screen.
Oh, you bitch.
Not Ann. No. She’d gone from useless to his new favorite person in two crashing heartbeats.
The painting. Marcelline. You fucking bitch.
“Do you want me to play it again?”
Owen smiled and nodded at—Oh, what the hell—at Charlie. She blushed and reloaded the video.
People rarely tried to get one over on Owen. He knew the recipe for the cooperation he collected. It didn’t take anything away from his success for him to know what it was made of. And it was made largely of money and intimidation. Only the really clever ones realized they probably had nothing to fear from him. Probably.
Marcelline Gossard had been one of the clever ones. From the very first time he’d walked into the art gallery, she always looked him in the face and never once did that measuring-tape thing with her eyes or flinch when he stepped into her sight line. Owen had made a career out of being a walking omen, eclipsing too much light out of everyone’s peripheral vision wherever he went. He enjoyed watching people do the math of what it might mean to find him suddenly there.
But nothing changed in Marcelline’s poise or tone when her attention shifted from him to the regal old woman on the gallery floor who probably wasn’t going to buy anything, to the FedEx driver, to the little boy who couldn’t take the DO NOT TOUCH sign to heart. Owen was no different to her, and it was the most different thing that had befallen him.
The Anningers had sent Owen to the gallery, and by the transitive property to Marcelline, for artwork: four times for themselves, once for a wedding present, and once for a secretive deal with him on loan to a group that Owen was pretty sure was Russian Mafia. He fancied that he and Marcelline had bonded over knowing looks during that transaction.
She was capable in a much warmer way than Owen was, but distanced, a little guarded. There was a barricade of professionalism, but when she smiled from behind the bars, she made you wonder if the fence was there for her protection or for yours.
Before he was scary, before he was cold, before he was brutal, Owen Haig was efficient. Everything about Marcelline appealed to him: from the sleek, short-sheared curve of the crown of her head to the way her ankles didn’t wobble in the four-inch heels as she strode across the polished floor. And Owen had felt damned near noble that everything in between the top of her head and those ankles, he’d counted as equal. All of it.
She was beautiful, but her posture, her voice, her confidence, her expertise, the fast math she could do with no calculator, the astonishing speed of her typing, it all rolled over him like cool velvet across his skin, across his thoughts. She soothed him, instantly and effortlessly.
They’d worked together the half dozen times, then nothing for months. He’d only been a little disappointed when her number rang in on his phone and she only wanted to talk business. No matter. She was still calling him. Work and solitude were mostly all he had, so business was his road to everything that wasn’t.
“Mr. Haig. You told me to let you know if I came across anything interesting that the Anningers might like.”
“I did. The gallery has something good?”
“No. They don’t have it. Not yet, anyway. I have it. Want to talk?”
Did he ever.
The tribe his employers came from was a rare phenomenon in the world. That was a good thing. Too many of that kind and we’d all be back in caves in short order, eating our enemies and making carved keepsakes of their bones.
Some families could never own enough houses or boats. They bought and sold companies, real estate developments, shopping malls, office buildings, ore mines, small dictatorships.
Fleets of private cars and airplanes moved them around. But when it came to the things they could hold in their hands, the ornaments of their fingers and necks and cabinets and walls, they liked a little history with their sparkle. Sometimes the word history was a euphemism for notoriety.
The Anninger magpie was half-vulture.
There was silver in a sideboard that had been stolen in a coup, the aristocrats of that country hanged and burned while their homes were looted. Mrs. Anninger had a brooch, two rings, and a necklace that had been Nazi plunder. There were gun collections that should, by all rights, have been haunted by their accomplishments, and the oldest Anninger son had two goddamned shrunken heads in the library of his favorite house. Artwork that could be traced back through theft and raid was practically commonplace.
But Mr. Anninger Sr. and his only daughter shared a taste for the truly infamous, with displays and stashes of contraband and ghoulish souvenirs that made Owen hate them. It also made him work the hardest for those two in particular. It was a pet project of his. He was curious to see how far they would go. How much money would they burn to warm their boredom? How many dim thugs would they stack into the dangerous spaces, ordering their hirelings to climb over one another to reach the forbidden fruit for their dessert—the only thing left for them to want after their endless feast of too much of everything else.
The painting that Marcelline had acquired was one of a haul from the largest heist of personal property in history. It, along with its gallerymates, hadn’t been seen in more than twenty-five years. But that much legend would only get it to Mrs. Anninger–level unsavory.
The selling point, the sticky bit of trivia relayed to Owen from Marcelline’s perfect mouth—How did she not get lipstick on her wineglass?—was that this piece had more story than the others, and a story that not many people knew, possibly because it might have been bullshit. But rumor was good enough to turn up the want in a certain kind of person. In an Anninger kind of person.
This painting was arguably one of the more minor works stolen from the museum. It wasn’t the most missed or the most sought. But it had been the only one seen, or at least reported to have been seen, in the trophy room of a famous, and famously murdered, music producer. There had been whispers of bragging. There were always whispers of bragging. That was the game. That was the entire point. The long story of the painting was better than the quality of the artwork itself.
Per Marcelline, it was theirs, off the books, and the price was negotiable.
Yeah. If there was a chance of blood on it, Mr. Anninger would want it. Or his daughter.
When the sale had gone completely wrong, and the scrubbed-up tweaker had walked up and opened fire on them all, Owen, to his shame, had looked first to Marcelline. He didn’t care about the money. He didn’t care about the painting. He didn’t care about the Anningers. Disappointment was such a rare, bitter treat for them, he often wondered if they actually loved it best of all. No, he cared only to see if Marcelline had known, to see if she had set him up.
He still didn’t know, even now.
When he’d picked her out of the shadows and the movement in the chaos of that night, she’d been curling toward the pavement, hands clawing at her neck, blood already raining down in a narrow torrent as she folded.
The man who’d come with her was already there at her side. At the start she’d introduced him to everyone as Jonathan, and he’d been the one who brought the painting to the meeting. Now this Jonathan knelt next to her. He leaned in and pulled her hand away from her throat, looking, checking, but no. He took her other hand, too, holding them both away from her thrashing instinct to push against the pour of her blood. He just let it flow. Jonathan rose up, prying her fingers from around his wrist. And he ran. When Owen got to her, Marcelline was fading unconscious, no story to tell.
Owen had let him run, and he also ignored the Anningers’ hired help, some guy and some girl who looked like a guy, neither of whom he’d met before—one clearly dead, one rolling around grunting, looking all but done for. He’d lifted Marcelline, his biceps pressed hard into the wound, her blood invisible as it warmed, then quickly cooled, into his black suit jacket.
He had access to essentially every resource of the Anningers. They never asked him to account for anything. He’d made the call with Marcelline dying against his arm to dispatch two warm and upright retainers to retrieve the two cold, dead ones from the lot.
At his place, a quiet doctor and a couple of see-nothing-say-nothing nurses were easy enough to get. They went to work on her. He’d stopped a nurse hurrying past him in the hallway. She’d held a metal bowl grim at the bottom with blood and bits of bone.
Is she alive?
She is for now. She’s hanging in there.
She needs to make it. Do you understand me?
I’m sure she wants to come back to you as much as you want it. I know you’re worried. But love is medicine, Mr. Haig. I believe it. Hold on to that. Have faith.
You’re not getting it—
Ow. You’re hurting my arm.
She needs to wake up long enough to talk.
We’re doing our best, Mr. Haig.
Then let’s hope that’s good enough. Now, take that shit back into the room. I’ll bring you some bags. I will personally take care of whatever needs to be disposed of. We’re clear?
Absolutely.
And Marcelline survived long enough to shine him on, get strong, and steal his fucking car.
She’d vanished with a thoroughness that could only have been professionally mediated. Or else she’d died before she could slip up. He would have found her if she’d made a mistake.
He got the car back, eventually, but it never felt the same.
Owen couldn’t remember the last time any of the Anningers had specifically brought up the lost money or this particular void in their art collection, but he also couldn’t remember the last time a Do you think you can handle this? sneer wasn’t attached to everything they asked of him.
Now, after years of looking and nothing but dead ends to show for it, the painting was on the wall in that video of a little girl kicking some shithead in the face. Charlie had played it for him three times.
Over the intervening four years, he’d read everything he could find about the painting. He had seen it over and over in articles, and, of course, once briefly in real life. The one in the video could have been a print, but why bother? Who would? It was nothing special to look at, by a guy no one had ever heard of, a half curiosity that it was even taken in the first place.
But it was the first clue he’d had to Marcelline in years—through an accident, by the pestering of a ditzy woman who was all too happy to be out of whatever hidey-hole she called home.
The last place you looked wasn’t ever the end of anything. Found was always a beginning, whether it was your car keys or a lost art treasure. Find it and you start the thing you’d been kept from.
When they landed, Owen convinced Charlie to have a drink with him. It turned into two and a half glassfuls as she chirped and giggled and flattered him until he had to fuck her against the wall of a private room nestled away in the labyrinth of the VIP lounge. She seemed unhurtable, though he tried a little, driving up and into her with a force that knocked her head against the doorframe.
She was flustered and glowing when he was done, chewing the corner off a nervous smile as he zipped up. She was unfathomable, delighted again, with her unmentioned wedding ring and her pristine luggage and her newly mussed hair. He saw the approving up-and-down glance she gave to her reflection in the long mirror on the wall.
Owen meant to walk away without a word, one last dig to make it sting, but she was between him and the door. Of course she was.
Before he could stop her, she took his face in her hands and kissed him, sweetly, her elemental thrill tingling against his lips. He stood, stunned stupid. She pulled out of the kiss first and smiled into his face.
She sighed, a short, happy sound, and patted his charcoal lapels. Charlie was finally out of noise. She took up the handle on her roller bag and walked away.
The clip of her heels faded into the next surge of airport crowd and Owen was finally alone. Confused, but just slightly infected by her excitement, if not exactly kindly so, he flexed his wrists to settle his shirt cuffs and headed toward the parking deck, to find the car he used to love.