by Sara Rosett
Zoe had thought it was a good idea to continue the practice. She had left the money locked in the trunk of her car. She slipped the cash into her purse, then went inside and ordered a chai tea.
Before she finished her drink, Barry came in. Without making eye contact, he ordered a coffee. When his drink was ready, he picked it up and walked by Zoe’s table. When he came even with her, he dropped a piece of paper. He stooped. “Is this yours?”
“Yes, thanks.”
Zoe slid a folded napkin closer to the edge of the table.
He pocketed it with an almost imperceptible nod and left. Zoe had placed two crisp hundred-dollar bills inside the napkin. She watched Barry’s steps slow as he exited the building and glanced at the napkin. He tucked the bills into his pocket and walked jauntily back to World Décor Bazaar.
Zoe unfolded the paper. A string of numbers was written on it in black marker. Under the numbers, was a line of text. “Here you go. Tell LeBlanc that Barry sent you.”
Zoe went to her car, cranked the AC, and dialed the phone number.
“LeBlanc here.”
He spoke with a slight accent, but she couldn’t place it. “Hello. My name is Zoe Andrews. Barry from World Décor Bazaar said I should give you a call. I’m looking for a blue butterfly painting.”
“What was that? You’re breaking up. A blue what?”
“Sorry, the connection isn’t good.” Zoe spoke louder and tried to enunciate clearly. “I’m looking for a painting of a blue butterfly by Martin Johnson Heade. Barry at World Décor Bazaar said you were the person I should talk to.”
“Oh, Barry told you to call.” A pause filled the line, then the man’s voice came through. “Pretty difficult…come by, something like that.”
“So you’re familiar with it?”
“Familiar with it? Darlin’, I got it right here with me.” His voice came through clearly for a few seconds with the feel of a ringmaster announcing a spectacular performance on the high wire.
Zoe decided she would overlook the “darling” comment. Just get the painting, don’t get sidetracked, she reminded herself. “I’d like to come see it. I have a buyer who might be interested. Do you have a photograph?” Zoe asked.
“Sure. Let me send you one. I’ll even include something with today’s date so you’ll know I’m not a scammer.” He laughed and ended the call, saying he’d text a photo to her in a moment.
Her phone pinged, and she opened the image. It showed the painting that she’d seen in Artie’s photograph. She zoomed in and checked the details, swooping across the image. It looked the same, and he’d propped it up against a computer monitor with a web browser open to a news article with today’s date.
Zoe called him back. “I’m interested in seeing it in person.”
“Well, come on. I’m out at my camp. I don’t have a physical store. I do all my business on-line, but if you want to see the actual painting you’re welcome to come out.”
Zoe turned the scrap of paper over and grabbed a pen from her leather messenger bag. She jotted down the street address he gave her.
“Is that Florida’s Highway One? I’m in Tampa.”
“Barry didn’t tell you? That’s Highway One in Grand Isle, Louisiana.”
Rbn: I was right. Tailed to and from work today.
Tuck05: That’s bad.
Rbn: They won’t see anything. I’m a model employee. A couple of days of this and they’ll be bored out of their minds.
13
Friday
Another day, another rental car, Zoe thought as she drove through the flat green countryside on a road that traced the same path as the placid water of a bayou. Zoe had booked a flight from Tampa to New Orleans as soon as she could. She had spent most of the afternoon on the flight, then she’d picked up the rental car, and navigated through one of the most interesting cities in the world. She wanted to stop and see the French Quarter, tour Jackson Square, and eat beignets dusted with powdered sugar at Café du Monde, but she was on a schedule. She would have to come back later when she had time to explore the city.
Once she navigated through the congestion of New Orleans, she had the road mostly to herself, except for a black BMW that flitted in and out of her rearview mirror. It had a special vanity plate on its front bumper that caught her eye, a logo of the New Orleans Saints football team, a fleur-de-lis.
The phone, propped on the console, rang, and she put it on speaker. She expected it to be Jack, but the voice on the other end of the line had a touch of an accent. “LeBlanc here. Is this Zoe?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Good. Good. Are you still coming out to the camp today?”
“Yes. I tried to get in touch with you, but couldn’t leave a message.” The recorded message had told Zoe that the subscriber she was trying to reach wasn’t in the service area. She’d wanted to coordinate with LeBlanc about authenticating the painting. She would have rather brought somebody with her today, but since she couldn’t speak to LeBlanc and the authenticator Thacker wanted to use was in Seattle, she’d have to check the painting first, then coordinate authentication.
Thacker hadn’t seemed that worried about authenticating the painting. “Just find it first,” he’d said when he hired her. “Then Kaz will help you set up an authenticator. I have several people I use. It won’t be a problem.”
LeBlanc asked, “What time do you think you’ll get in?”
“Let’s see…” Zoe glanced at the navigation app on her phone, which was in a holder on the dashboard. “I should be there in about an hour.”
“Excellent. I’m sending Phil to meet you. It’s a little tricky getting in here. You can follow him.” LeBlanc gave her the name of a gas station at the corner of two intersections where Phil would meet her. “He’ll be inside, and he’ll be eating something, I guarantee.” He pronounced the word “guarantee” as gar-RON-tee. “Phil’s a skinny little thing,” LeBlanc continued, “about as big as a sapling. Has more hair than sense.”
“I’m sure we can find each other. I tend to stand out. I have red hair.” She could have added that she was wearing a cap-sleeved green top and khaki pants, but she figured the hair color would be enough for Phil to find her.
Zoe hung up, pulled over and reset the GPS for the truck plaza, then merged back into traffic. It was only about twenty minutes away. The low-slung truck plaza was surrounded with families climbing out of vans and cars for a break as well as 18-wheelers, pulling in to refuel at the far side of the complex. As she pulled into a parking space, she noticed that the black BMW with a fleur-de-lis license plate that she had seen so often during the last hundred miles or so had also stopped.
Zoe locked the car and went inside the building that contained a fast food sandwich shop, a convenience store, and 24-hour private showers for truckers. Zoe detoured to the restrooms then headed for the sandwich shop. Several families were gathered around a couple of tables, but there was only one guy eating alone. He looked like he was about eighteen or nineteen. Arms as skinny as rails stuck out of the flappy sleeves of a black T-shirt. He’d pulled back his wiry black hair into a ponytail that reached past the nape of his neck. Hunched over the plastic table, he was scarfing down a meatball sub.
Zoe walked over to him. “You must be Phil.”
He swallowed, and stood, extending his hand. “That’s right. Zoe?”His speech had the same cadence that LeBlanc’s did.
“That’s me.”
“Glad to meet you. Can I get you anything? LeBlanc is cooking up some lunch but it won’t be ready for an hour or two.” His tone implied that an hour or two was an eternity to wait for food.
“No, I’m fine.”
“Do you mind if I finish this?” He motioned to the last half of his sandwich and a large dark chocolate cookie with white chocolate chips.
“No, go ahead. That would be a little messy to eat in the car.”
“Great. It won’t take me a moment.”
“I’ll get a drink.”
Phil wasn’t kidding about being a fast eater. By the time Zoe had bought a ginger ale from the convenience store and made her way back, Phil was devouring the last bites of his sub.
She sat down and popped the top on the can. “Don’t hurry on my account.”
“No worries.” Phil crumpled the sub wrapping paper into a ball and took a long slurp from his drink. He broke the cookie in half and offered part of it to Zoe.
“Thanks, but no. You go ahead,” she said.
“So how did you hear about LeBlanc?” Phil asked after he’d consumed half of the cookie in one bite.
“From a guy in Florida named Barry at World Décor Bazaar.”
Phil’s dark eyebrows crunched together. “Okay. That’s a new one.” He looked toward the parking lot where Zoe’s blue rental car was visible through the windows. “Bring anyone with you?”
“No, I’m on my own today.”
“And you just flew in this morning?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“From where?”
“Tampa.” Zoe glanced around the restaurant, feeling slightly uncomfortable with the questions. Phil certainly didn’t look like a threatening guy with his rather pasty skin and stick-like build. She didn’t have any doubt that if she needed to she could either outrun him or deliver a few swift kicks that would give her an advantage over him. She and Jack had been going to a martial arts class at the gym, which had helped her brush up on her self-defense. But the string of questions seemed odd. “Anything else you want to know?”
“Hey, it’s not me. It’s LeBlanc. He always wants to know who’s coming to visit him, and if anyone’s coming with them. It’s just his way.”
“And which city they’ve traveled from?”
His mouth full of the last bite of cookie, Phil nodded then swallowed. “That too, yeah.”
“Do you escort a lot of LeBlanc’s visitors to him?”
“Some.”
Zoe’s phone rang. “I need to take this. It’s my husband.” It couldn’t hurt to let the rather mild-looking Phil know that other people knew where she was and what she was doing.
Jack’s voice came online. “Hey, where are you now?”
Zoe angled slightly in her chair so that she was facing away from Phil. “I’m in southern Louisiana on my way to see LeBlanc.”
“Everything good?”
“Everything’s good…so far.”
After a pause, Jack said, “You don’t sound one hundred percent sure.”
“I’m not.” Phil mimed that he was going to get a drink refill and ambled away from the table. Zoe waited until he was out of earshot. “LeBlanc has sent someone to meet me, a skinny guy named Phil. He’s asking a lot of questions that seem sort of odd.”
“It seems weird that LeBlanc would send somebody to meet you.”
“I know, but apparently these roads can be confusing down here. But don’t worry, I’m following Phil in my own car, and I have my GPS. If he takes me anywhere else besides Grand Isle, I won’t go there.”
“Do you feel comfortable about this? You know if you don’t, you can walk away.”
“I know that. Alarm bells aren’t going off, or anything like that. It’s just…a little strange. But then it is southern Louisiana. Which is kind of a law unto itself, isn’t it?”
“I’ve never been there, but that’s what I’ve heard.”
“I haven’t been here before either. I wanted to explore New Orleans but didn’t have time today. We definitely need to make a trip there.”
“Sounds good. I’m in.”
“How’s the planning going at One Heritage Plaza?”
“Oh, you know, another meeting. Hopefully, this is the last one this week.”
“Well it’s Friday so that might actually happen.”
“Then it’s off to London for me,” Jack said.
“That’s right. I’d forgotten about that meeting. When do you leave again?” One of Jack’s friends had recommended him to a company in England that wanted him to assess their security set-up.
“Saturday, but I don’t arrive until Sunday. I’ll have the meeting Monday morning, then turn around and come back home that afternoon.”
Phil was returning to the table, his soda in one hand and a set of car keys in the other.
“Time to get back on the road. I’ll call you later,” Zoe said.
In the parking lot, Phil motioned to a white Honda Accord with custom wheels and black tinted windows. “That’s mine,” he said as he sauntered toward the car. “Just keep me in sight, and I’ll take you all the way to LeBlanc’s. Were only about thirty miles out. Shouldn’t take that long.”
As Zoe settled in her rental car and turned on the GPS app, she noticed that the black BMW with the Saints license plate had already left. She wondered if she would see it again. Was the driver going all the way to Grand Isle? Plenty of small towns lined the highway, and one of those could be its destination, but Zoe thought that most of the traffic on the road was probably passing through on the way to or from Grand Isle.
About twenty minutes later, the road swooped in a massive curve, and Zoe knew they were getting close. The land had flattened even more and the bayou had given away to long stretches of water and sea grass. She’d even seen several brown pelicans flying low, their massive wings spread wide as they skimmed over the water.
A car approached on Zoe’s left in the passing lane, and she checked her rearview mirror. It was the black BMW with the Saints license plate. It accelerated, blowing by her so quickly that she only had an impression of a driver wearing a baseball cap. In front of her, Phil continued at his steady pace of four miles over the speed limit.
They crossed over a strait of water, then the road swooped again in another curve as they reached land. They passed a marina, and the map on her phone showed that they were on the straight line of Highway One, which ran the length of the narrow barrier island from west to east.
She cut back on her speed and took in the surroundings. The Gulf of Mexico was to her right, and houses on wooden pylons stretched along the beachfront property, but she couldn’t see the water. A high berm blocked it from view. The houses on pylons ranged from small bungalows and trailers to sprawling homes with observation decks. Each property had a name, and Zoe smiled at some of them: Paradise Found, Land’s End, Maggie’s Place, and Bordeaux Getaway.
Grand Isle felt different from some of the other coastal vacation spots that Zoe had visited, which were glitzy and upscale with high-rise hotels, beach cabanas, and designer boutiques lining the main drag. Grand Isle, with its houses of vinyl siding and quirky names, felt down-home and casual.
After they had gone a few miles, Phil turned on his right-hand blinker and pulled into the driveway leading to a good-sized house that faced the Gulf. The nameplate on the wooden balcony that encircled the whole building read, “The Coast is Clear.”
A couple of cars were parked on the concrete foundation under the raised house. Phil pulled in between two of the pylons. Zoe maneuvered the car into the next slot and parked between Phil’s Honda and a black BMW with a Saints license plate.
Rbn: I think I’ve got a problem.
Tuck05: ??
Rbn: Tail still on me and someone’s been in my apartment.
Tuck05: Searched? Did they find it?
Rbn: Yes, they looked, but didn’t find it. It’s somewhere they’d never think of.
Tuck05: You sure you’re good? What about the original stuff?
Rbn: It was cool enough last night that I had a nice little fire.
Tuck05: Good idea. You should call the police, report a break-in! That might throw them.
Rbn: I refuse to use an emoji, but LOL. Seriously, I don’t want them to know I’m aware.
Tuck05: What are you going to do?
Rbn: Release it tomorrow.
Tuck05: Make sure you’re good to go off-grid after.
Rbn: You know it. I’m about to become a ghost.
14
Phil waved
his arm in a follow-me gesture. At the far end of the foundation, several men were gathered around a picnic table. Zoe locked her car and slipped her keys into her pocket along with her cell phone, then moved through the shadows between the thick wooden support beams. Waves of heat were coming off the surface of a stainless steel grill beside the picnic table. An enormous stockpot sat on an exterior gas burner connected to the grill.
A hefty man in a Panama hat and tropical shirt printed with a repeating pattern of swordfish, held a lid in one hand as he stirred a spoon around the stockpot. The movements pulled at the colorful shirt he wore, and Zoe saw the butt of a gun sticking out of one of the pockets on the leg of his cargo shorts. He replaced the lid and the fabric fell back into place, covering the gun. He saw Phil, who tilted his head toward Zoe. “We’re here.”
“Zoe Andrews.” He shuffled over to her, his hand extended. “Glad you could make it out. I’m LeBlanc.” Under his Panama hat, his face was flushed pink.
“Thanks for having me. This isn’t quite what I expected when you said you had a camp.” And LeBlanc wasn’t the sort of high-end dealer she’d been meeting at art galleries and shows in Dallas, but she refrained from adding, and you’re not what I expected either.
He laughed. “That’s what we call these places down here. You’d probably call it a beach house, but to us it’s a camp. How about some food before we do business? I was about to throw some chicken on the grill. If you’re vegetarian, we have beans and rice.”
“Sounds delicious. I’d love some chicken. And beans and rice, too. I haven’t eaten since I had a package of pretzels on the plane.”
“You know if you come to Louisiana, we have to feed you. It’s a shame it’s not crawfish season. We do it up right. Have you ever had crawfish?”
“No. I’m sorry I missed it.”
A movement in the shadows under the house caught Zoe’s eye. A man leaned against one of the pylons. In the dimness, she couldn’t make out many details about him except that he wore a baseball cap and had a droopy mustache.
