“The only bad taco is the one you didn’t get to eat.”
Anna Collins
He stared at me. “You found one? What does that even mean? You found a print of Madam Auguste Manet?”
“Not a print,” I whispered. “It didn’t come from here, though.” I’d almost said that I didn’t steal it, but he was close enough that I could smell his shampoo, and his scent filled my memory with truth serum. Not being able to lie to him was a serious problem.
“A copy of a Manet. You found a copy.”
I stood up and away from him in hopes of finding little bits of my broken filter and using them to cover the naked parts of me. “People copy the old masters all the time. My mom’s an artist, and she spent her whole youth training in the old master art techniques.” It was a diversionary tactic that could never work with someone like Darius Masoud. I knew it, he knew it, and yet he let the diversion hang in the air as a docent emerged into the loggia to tell some other guests that the museum would be closing in ten minutes.
He stood and met my eyes. “And you’re here to look into the Gardner heist?” It almost sounded like he was trying to convince himself of something.
That question was easier, and I didn’t even have to evade any part of it when I answered. “Honestly – I did ten minutes of online research after Junior tried to use it to get me to let him go, and I couldn’t not come here to see for myself.”
I cast a longing glance down the corridor as we made our way toward the exit along with the other stragglers. “I’ll be back tomorrow to poke around the Dutch Room and the Short Gallery, in case you’re still following me then.”
Hope and fear had a fierce little battle in my chest as the words left me, and the expression on his face turned thoughtful.
He followed me to the coat check, and it wasn’t until the guy behind the counter came back with my things that I remembered I’d checked both my messenger bag and the portfolio.
Darius eyed the portfolio but said nothing about it as he held the door for me and we stepped out into the cool night air. The Fens beckoned to the north, and I had the momentary impulse to disappear among the trees, but then he finally spoke.
“Do you paint?”
The question startled me until I saw his eyes stray to the portfolio slung on my messenger bag. I still couldn’t lie to him, and I was too tired to try to evade the question. “I never learned how. I was too busy climbing and running and jumping and generally acting like a wild thing. I like colors though, and patterns. I like putting colors together in ways that tell me a story.”
He cast another look at the portfolio, and we walked in silence for a minute.
“Is Colette actually an interior designer?” he finally asked.
“Yeah, she does a lot of apartments for people who want to look fancy and rich,” I said.
His mouth quirked in the smallest smirk, and it felt like a reprieve to see his expression shift away from its usual thoughtfulness. “Not the actual fancy and rich people, just the ones who want to look that way?”
I grinned. “Exactly.” We began walking down the street, away from The Fens, and it felt a little like making a choice. Darius’s stride was casual and matched mine easily.
“How does one choose bounty hunting as a career?” I could hear the vaguely European accent of his youth in the carefully worded question.
“One generally doesn’t choose to become a bail fugitive recovery expert, one falls into it, or almost falls.” I looked at the scars on my hands for a moment before pointing one out to Darius. “I got this from a rock face in California when a piece of the boulder I was hanging from broke off and I had to grab at a scrubby manzanita brush to keep from splatting. There was a guy on the ground with another climbing group, and he said he needed someone with my skills for a job he had coming up in San Francisco. I’d graduated from college and was just doing odd jobs to finance my travel habit, so I said yes. Turned out he was a bail bondsman, and the bounty who’d skipped on him had holed up in a brick warehouse he’d fortified like a prison. He wanted me to climb the outside of the building and then open the front door from the inside. It was an easy way to make a couple of hundred bucks, and now it’s an easy way to travel and see the country.”
He scoffed. “I imagine you see some pretty unsavory parts of the country in your work.”
I shrugged. “Some. But I can always find someplace green and something interesting to see. It’s not all fugitives and criminals.”
He glanced at me, then at the portfolio, and back at me before he came to some sort of decision. “I’d intended to take you to dinner the last time we saw each other. May I do so now?”
I hesitated. My reasons for not seeing Darius were still valid – there was no way I could lie to the man, and telling the truth put much more at stake than just my own freedom. He continued before I could say no. “I won’t ask about Gray’s painting, I promise. I just want to get to know you a little better.”
His eyes had lost all the flinty edges they’d flashed at me earlier, and I felt myself wishing I could sink into his gaze.
“Depends,” I said as I tried desperately to cling to whatever self-preservation instincts I had left.
“On?”
“Whether the restaurant you choose happens to be shaped like a taco truck.”
He burst out laughing, and the damn butterflies winged into flight.
“Are you parked someplace secure?” Darius asked as we waited at the light.
“Sure. It’s a crappy rental. Why?”
“Because I’m staying just here,” he said as he pointed to an apartment building on the next block, “and it’s a good place from which to plot our tour of the museum tomorrow.”
Our tour? I was in sooooo much trouble.
“That’s convenient. It’s not really a taco truck area though, is it?”
He smiled. “You let me worry about hunting down the tacos.”
We actually found an excellent taco truck parked outside the lot where my rental car was, so we grabbed the tacos to go and went to Darius’s apartment.
“You got this place for a week?” I said as I looked around the fairly spacious one-bedroom, modern-style apartment. “Why?”
“I thought you didn’t want to discuss the Gray theft,” he said as he held up a bottle of red wine. “Would you like a glass?”
I glanced at the bottle and nodded. “Sure, but what does Gray have to do with Boston?”
“Markham Gray is from Boston, and much of his fortune was made here.”
“So?” I dropped my bag and the portfolio on a chair and parked myself on a barstool at the counter as Darius pulled the cork on the bottle.
“I have some questions I’d like to ask Mr. Gray about the origins of the painting that was stolen from his panic room.” His eyes remained on me as he poured two glasses of red wine.
My heart hammered in my chest, and I felt sure he could see my pulse beating in my throat. Or maybe he was one of those shapeshifter princes whose animal senses let them hear the blood rushing through someone’s veins. Would he be a dragon prince, or maybe something lupine or feline? He was definitely a predator of some variety – the question was, what kind of creature was I? Predator? Prey? Non-binary? Other?
I suddenly realized he was still watching me, waiting for me to take the wine glass from his outstretched hand. “Where did you just go?” he asked me quietly.
“I wondered what kind of animal you shapeshift into,” I said with forced cheerfulness, in hopes that a smiley tone would cover for the still-pounding heart.
“What kind of— what? No,” he seemed to shake himself. “Never mind.”
Whew. I raised my glass to him. “Cheers,” I said, taking a sip.
He drank from his own glass, and I thought I heard him murmur, “Jaguar.”
That did it. The fact that he could play with the sheer nonsense I came up with was the battering ram that took down the last piece of self-defense I had. I exhaled, winced at myself for what I was about to do, and then said the words that had been pushing their way forward since we’d left the museum.
“Want to see something cool?”