“Tell me,” she said, and was both startled and pleased that her voice sounded so steady. “Was any of what you told me true? About your father, I mean. And…your friend.” She wondered why his answer mattered so much.
Or why she felt such an odd little twinge-relief that was almost like pain-when he answered, with the gravel of sincer ity in his voice, “Oh, yeah, that was true. All of it.”
“And when…” Carefully, carefully, Jane. She began again, now with forced lightness. “When did you, uh, change your mind about me being involved in all this? Or maybe I should ask-”
“Oh, that was last night.” He still sounded hoarse but with a note of anger himself, now. “To be precise, when I saw you standing there in that doorway with the light behind you and that damn toy pistol in your hands. Right then and there I said to myself, nobody’s that stupid. She must be innocent.”
“Thanks,” said Jane tartly, “I think.” Then she cocked her head to one side, listening, trying to catch a replay of the exchange. There was something he’d just said…
But he wouldn’t let her concentrate, plunging on in that newly charged, guttural voice. “Lady, you’ve no idea what you’re mixed up in. There are people who’d kill for what’s hidden in that painting. People who have killed. Do you understand me?”
Her hands, she discovered, were knotted tightly together in her lap. In spite of that, and the fact that all her muscles were quivering with tension, her voice once again emerged with gratifying calm. “Have killed… Do you mean Campbell?”
“I can’t be sure. All I know is, three days ago somebody killed a shopkeeper in Marseilles-”
“Marseilles? France?”
“-by the name of Loizeau. And I have very good reason to believe that whoever did it was at that auction yesterday.”
Jane said nothing, just listened to the words he’d spoken in a tone of such flat certainty, playing them over and over in her head to the accompaniment of the steady thumping of her heart. Funny, she mused, how unbelievable things become quite believable when they are actually happening to you.
Presently she took a breath and said, “Well. Since you’re fairly sure now that it wasn’t me, and since we have the painting right here, don’t you think perhaps we should examine it?”
She felt minute air currents, stirred by his almost silent amusement. “We?”
“It is,” she stiffly reminded him, “still my painting. You’re welcome to remove this… whatever it is that’s supposed to be inside, but I intend to make sure it doesn’t get damaged in the process.”
He snorted and muttered, “Damaged…” Then, grudgingly, “Well, okay, here-hold the light.”
He switched on the flashlight and gave it to her, sending shadows leaping over the mounds of shrouded household belongings and across the ceiling of the van. Jane trained the doughnut of yellow light on Tom’s chest and held it steady while he lifted his arms and swiveled his upper body in order to reach the package he’d placed on top of the appliances behind him. As he did so, the brown leather jacket he was wearing pulled up and bunched across his shoulders, leaving a gap between its bottom edge and the top of his trousers. She made an involuntary hiccuping noise. The beam of light wobbled.
“You have a gun,” she said.
“You bet,” Hawk responded with a muffled grunt. He said nothing more while he lifted down the package containing the painting and placed it flat across his knees. Then he looked for her across the thin stream of light, and his lips quirked sideways in a smile. “What did you expect?”
He could barely make out her features in the reflected glow of the beam she’d pinned to his chest In the deep shadows, her eyes seemed as unfathomable and mysterious as the sea by moonlight. So when she spoke, it was odd to hear her voice sound so normal, as everyday-normal as a housewife discussing roses with the gardener.
“I’m kind of glad, actually. I mean, if there are killers around… What kind is it?”
He had to hand it to her, she was nothing if not resilient. “A Walther 9-millimeter.” he said as he took it from its nest, double-checked the safety and placed it on top of the brown-paper parcel across his knees. She skewered it with the light beam but made no move to touch it.
“I’m afraid I don’t know very much about guns,” she said after a moment. “Real ones, anyway. This one certainly looks, uh, effective. Mine, by the way-” and from the sound of her voice, she had to be saying this with an absolutely straight face “-happens to be a genuine Roy Rogers six-shooter revolver. It fires real caps.”
“Don’t tell me,” said Hawk in a strangled voice, “you brought it with you?”
“You bet. What did you expect? It’s right there in my tote bag.”
Laughter bumped around inside his chest, wanting out. He clamped down on it, made an exasperated hissing noise instead and returned his pistol to its resting place at the small of his back. “Just do us both a favor and leave it there, okay?” he muttered, adding a few choice words and “get us both killed,” under his breath.
There was no response from Jane, no sound or movement at all. He paused with his fingers under the taped edges of the painting’s paper wrappings to glance over at her, wondering about her sudden stillness, and saw that her head appeared to be tilted slightly, as if she heard voices.
“What?” he asked, oddly unnerved. Her shadowed eyes seemed to be staring right through him.
Her voice came from a distance, with an odd lilt to it. “How did you know?”
“Know what?”
“How did you know I was standing there, in the light, with the gun? I remember you said you saw the other guy running out of my room with the painting. But that was after he’d knocked me down. So, how could you know?”
Hawk silently indulged in his favorite cussword and added every other vile phrase he could think of, for good measure. Aloud he had to content himself with, “Hell, I don’t know, put two and two together, I guess. Wasn’t exactly hard-the damn gun was on the floor and so were you.”
The lie made him squirm, like having an itchy spot he couldn’t reach. He wished he knew why he so hated the idea of her ever finding out that he was the one who’d put her on the floor. It had seemed like the best strategy at the time, and a whole lot more reliable and a lot less painful than slugging her in the jaw. Now, though, remembering the feel of her body struggling, pinned under his knee, and her pulse surging against his fingers…it made him feel sick to think about it.
So, Hawkins, you’d rather have been kneeling in her blood the way you did Loizeau’s, and feeling for a pulse that wasn’t there?
Angry with himself for allowing those doubts, and annoyed with her for raising them in the first place, he snarled, “You want to watch this, or not? Put the damn light where my hands are!”
“I do,” she replied evenly, “and I am.” Something in the way she said it made him feel pretty certain she hadn’t bought his explanation for what had taken place last night in her room. Not for a minute. That was the trouble with nice women who were also people’s mothers, he thought gloomily. They were too damn hard to lie to.
The masking tape was loose-the painting had already been unwrapped once-so the brown-paper wrappings came apart. easily. Hawk quickly folded and laid them aside. He barely glanced at the painting itself, having seen it the night before, but once more turned it facedown across his thighs. It was as he remembered, heavy pinkish-brown paper covering the entire back of the painting, apparently glued to the frame. He hitched himself up and dug in his pants pocket for his knife. He heard her make a small ambiguous sound as he slid the tip of the pocketknife under the edge of the brown-paper backing. When he had it loosened on three sides, he folded the knife and slipped it back in his pocket. He could feel his heart beating. Hell, he could hear it. He wondered if she could, too.