by Lori Wilde
She searched the bathroom, found a sewing kit and spent the next fifteen minutes fashioning a toga from a sheet. Once she was certain the makeshift garment would stay on, she opened the French doors and stepped out onto the balcony. She’d give David one last chance to appear before taking matters into her own hands.
Below her window Carnevale was in full swing. Loud riotous music played. Delicious aromas filled the air. Revelers danced in the streets, wearing all manner of costumes and masks. She would fit right in.
Part of her was angry with David, but another part of her was worried. Maybe he hadn’t ditched her. Maybe something bad had happened.
Maybe he’d run across Blanco again.
Either way, she needed clothes. She turned to go back into the room to retrieve her Mastercard from her honey-coated shoulder bag when she saw something in her peripheral vision that rooted her to the spot.
Was that Peyton Shriver moving through the crowd on the other side of the square? Maddie stepped farther out onto the balcony and narrowed her eyes.
Come closer, she mentally willed him.
He must have picked up her vibes, because he did walk in her direction.
Yep. It was indeed Shriver. His plain beige coat amid the colorful Carnevale costumes was what had snagged her eye. She searched for Cassie in the crowd around him, but Shriver appeared to be alone.
She had to get down there, had to follow him.
What if he spots you? What if he and Blanco aren’t at odds as David contends but working together? What if . . .
To hell with what ifs. Where had caution and prudence gotten her? Shriver was out there right now. She had a chance to do something about it. Was she going to stay here and cower in a hotel room hoping David would come back and take care of things? Or was she going to plunge ahead, take a chance and sally forth after Shriver.
Go, Maddie, go. She heard Cassie’s voice, clear as if her sister was standing beside her.
She stared at the crowd, intimidated by the thought of waltzing around in a bedsheet. You can do it. She raised her chin. Yes. She would do it.
Glancing around, she realized she’d lost the beige coat in the mass of humanity. Oops! Where had Shriver gone?
Panicking over the thought that her indecision might have lost her only link to Cassie, Maddie desperately scanned the people for Shriver.
Ah, there he was, going into a church not far from the hotel.
She wasn’t about to let him escape now. Resolutely, Maddie squared her shoulders, marched out the door, down the stairs, through the lobby and into the Piazza San Marco.
She moved through the costumed throng, her gaze beaded on the church where she’d seen Shriver disappear only minutes before. No one gave her a second glance in her makeshift toga, and for that she was grateful to Carnevale.
What she wasn’t so thankful for was the wave of humanity keeping her from her target.
You can’t let him get away.
She elbowed aside a drunken Marco Polo who was leering openly at her breasts and dodged a man on stilts juggling orange glowing balls. The air was ripe with enticing aromas—freshly baked pastries, roasted turkey legs, generously spiced pan-seared fish—but Maddie barely noticed.
She vaulted over a two-year-old sitting on the steps of a shop eating gelato. She zigged past strolling young lovers holding hands and zagged around slow-moving tourists gawking at the sights.
The trip across the Piazza San Marco seemed the longest trek of her life—much longer than any race she’d ever run—although it probably took less than three minutes. Finally, she pushed through the door of the church and blinked against the contrast from the bright sunshine outside and the dimly lit interior.
She stepped away from the door and stood there a moment getting her bearings and letting her eyes adjust. A few people sat in the pews praying. She swung her gaze up and down the aisles.
No sign of Shriver.
He was gone. She’d lost him.
Dejected, she sagged against a pillar.
What now?
And then she saw him pass by the window. He was outside the church. His head was down as if he was talking to someone either shorter than he or someone sitting down.
As quickly and quietly as she could, Maddie padded through the church in her bare feet to the door at the other end of the building, her pulse spiking in irregular blips.
She went through the exit to a narrow walkway between the church and the canal.
A shadow fell across her. She looked up and gasped.
An ominous figure in a long black robe stood before her in the most sinister costume she’d ever seen. He wore a breastplate of mosaic mirrors and he was carrying a large, evil-looking scythe. His head was a skull mask, covered in the same small reflective glass as the breastplate. She could see herself fractured into a hundred tiny, bedsheet-wearing Maddies.
His deep laugh was wicked and menacing.
The Grim Reaper.
She froze, trapped in the surreal moment, wondering if it was a nightmare.
Then the Grim Reaper simply shouldered his scythe and stepped around her, his knee-high black leather boots echoing sharply on the cobblestones as he headed for the Piazza.
Clutching a hand to her heart, she heaved in a shaky breath. The man had scared her. More than she cared to admit.
Settle down. It’s just Carnevale. Forget the guy in the Grim Reaper outfit. What about Shriver?
Still unnerved, she looked to the left where she’d last seen Shriver and spotted a gondola stand but no art thief.
She’d lost him.
Dammit.
But no, wait. There. Out on the canal. Shriver was in a gondola headed away from her. As she watched, the gondola disappeared around a corner.
What to do now? She had no money to hire a gondola to follow him, she was barefoot and in a makeshift toga.
She was defeated. Time for Plan B.
You have no Plan B.
Well, she’d better get one, pronto. Maddie gnawed a thumbnail. She really only had one option. Head back to the hotel and hope David had returned in her absence.
Unhappy with her plan, but not having a viable alternative, Maddie pivoted on her heel to return to the hotel but found herself staring down the barrel of a very wicked looking handgun.
Chapter
TWENTY-TWO
THIS WAS A fine mess.
Cassie sat perched on the toilet, her naked body covered in goose bumps, the rough rope gnawing nastily at her tender wrists as she listened to the echoes of the door slamming behind Peyton. When she got out of this predicament, boy, was she going to make him pay.
In the meantime, how was she going to get out of this?
Think, Cassie, think.
Bad idea. Thinking was not her strong suit. What would Maddie do?
Wrong question. Maddie would never get herself into such a snafu.
Okay, but what if by some wild stretch of the imagination, Maddie had gotten herself into this situation. What would she do then?
Knowing her Wonder Woman twin, Maddie would probably just bust through the ropes with her superpowers.
Ha, ha, this is serious. Concentrate.
She had less than thirty minutes to get free, call David and tell him what happened. Otherwise, when he showed up at the Hotel Vivaldi at five and found no one there, he would think she really was in cahoots with Peyton and had just set David up.
And she’d end up going to jail instead of getting on the cover of Art World Today.
Not good. She would look ghastly in prison stripes. If that wasn’t an impetus to get on the ball, she didn’t know what was.
Think, Cassie, think.
She scanned the bathroom. Her makeup and beauty supplies were strewn all over the counter but what good could an eyelash curler or a tube of lipstick do at this point?
And then she spied her trusty battery-powered travel curling iron peeking provocatively at her from behind a bottle of Opium perfume.
Aha!
Now for the hard part. Reaching it.
David was returning through the Piazza San Marco when his cell phone rang again. He’d just completed a long discussion with Henri and the chief of the Venice police. He had also gotten a new duty weapon issued to replace the one Blanco had stolen. Both the local authorities and Interpol were preparing to join him at five o’clock to raid the Hotel Vivaldi and catch Shriver in the act of auctioning off the paintings.
“I’ve gotcha now, Shriver,” he murmured gleefully under his breath, just as the phone did the Dragnet thing.
He flipped it open. “Marshall.”
“David, it’s Cassie again.” She sounded breathless, anxious.
“Hang on, I’m in the Piazza San Marco and I can barely hear you. Let me get someplace out of the way.” He cornered a church and ducked onto the narrow side street running along the canal. “Go ahead.”
“Shriver caught me on the phone and he heard me talking to you and he made me take off my clothes and he tied me to a toilet and . . .”
“Whoa, whoa, slow down.”
“Can’t. No time. Listen carefully.”
“I’m listening.”
“Shriver gave me the wrong time. The auction isn’t at five o’clock but in ten minutes!”
“What!”
“I know. I’m sorry. Apparently he didn’t trust me so much and fed me the wrong info.”
“Is it still at the same hotel?” David asked, wondering if Cassie was jerking him around. Maybe she’d realized how much trouble she was in and she was trying to get herself out of hot water.
“Yes, yes. At least I think so. I hope so.”
He had ten minutes to get to the Hotel Vivaldi on the opposite side of the city in the middle of Carnevale. Even a superhero couldn’t have made it, but he had to try. He’d spent too many years and too much of himself in pursuing Shriver. He wasn’t going down without one hell of a fight. If he didn’t win this one, he’d become the laughingstock of the FBI.
David’s face flushed with embarrassment. No dammit. He was going to win. He was going to catch Shriver and Philpot and Levy and get his Aunt Caroline’s Rembrandt back.
A woman’s sudden screams drew his attention. Was someone getting mugged?
He jerked his head in the direction of the sound. About a quarter of a mile farther down the narrow street, a bald man was trying to pull a struggling woman—who looked as if she was wearing a bedsheet—into a waiting motorboat.
“Take your hands off me if you value your testicles, bub!” the woman hollered.
There was no mistaking that voice. Or that nerve.
Maddie.
A chill of fear squeezed his spine when he realized the bald man was Jocko Blanco.
“David? David?” Cassie asked from the phone. “What’s going on? You don’t have time to waste. You’ve got to get to the Hotel Vavaldi or Shriver’s going to get away!”
“To hell with Shriver, Blanco’s got Maddie.” He snapped the phone shut and took off at a dead run.
But he was far too late. Long before he could reach her, Blanco had successfully dragged Maddie into the motorboat and they were zipping off down the canal, headed toward the Venetian lagoon.
“I like the toga,” Jocko Blanco said, keeping one hand on his gun and the other on the speedboat’s steering wheel. “And the no-bra look. By the way, your headlights are on. Does that mean you enjoyed our tussle or are you just cold?”
“I’m cold,” she said haughtily.
“Should have thought about that before you decided to go boating in a bedsheet.”
“I didn’t decide to go boating. You kidnapped me.”
“Serves you right for escaping. How did you escape by the way? Shriver said he tied you buck naked to the toilet.” Blanco wagged his tongue lasciviously. “I was looking forward to seeing that.”
What? Maddie stared at him, not understanding one word of what this cretin was saying. She sized him up. Beefy, shaved head, skull and cross bones tattoos on his hand. She’d seen this guy before. At the top of the Eiffel Tower talking to Jerome Levy.
“You’re Jocko Blanco.”
“Ah, babe. Don’t tell me you forgot me already. I thought I made a pretty strong impression on you back in Madrid.” He pursed his lips in a pout. “Now here I find you barely even remember my name. And after all we shared together.”
Oh!
Realization dawned. He thought she was Cassie. Shriver must have tied Cassie up to a toilet somewhere and told Blanco to go fetch her. But why?
He winked at her and clucked his tongue. “Don’t worry, sweetcheeks. I’ll make sure you won’t forget me again. My name is going to be the last one to pass those luscious lips of yours.” He ran the nose of his gun along her jaw and laughed when she flinched. “Put your hands out in front of you.”
“What?”
“Don’t give me no crap, just do it.”
Rolling her eyes, Maddie extended her hands.
He grabbed a roll of silver duct tape sitting on top of a shovel in the bottom of the boat and then wrapped it around her wrists, binding them together.
“Ow, not so tight.”
“Quit whining.”
I’ve got a third degree black belt in karate. I’m not taking this crap.
A week ago fear would have frozen her to the seat, but a lot had changed in seven days. She’d gone without adequate food and sleep. She’d been knocked off a bridge and dunked into a vat of honey. She’d been forced to run nearly naked through the streets of Venice. Frankly, she had reached the end of her tether.
You’ve picked a bad day to mess with me, pox-face. With a well-aimed kick, Maddie planted her foot in Blanco’s crotch.
And made contact with something toe-crunchingly hard.
Yeow! Startled, she glanced at Blanco’s face.
“Special made jock strap with an aluminum alloy cup.” His grin was wicked.
“I take it women kick you there a lot.”
“Provides one hundred percent protection. Don’t believe me?” he bragged. “Go ahead. Kick me again.”
“That’s okay. I’ll pass.”
“Good, then just sit back and behave.”
Yeah, right. Desperate to escape, she searched the lagoon. “Help!” she cried out to a passing vaporetto. “Help!”
“Save your breath. It’s unlikely they understand English.”
“Help! He’s trying to kill me!”
“Lover’s spat,” Blanco sang out to the passengers, smiled, waved and goosed the speedboat faster.
Once they were out of sight of the waterbus, Blanco cocked the gun and pressed it against her temple.
“I could just kill you now,” he said. “Think about it. The only reason you’re still alive is because I don’t want to have to scrub your blood off the boat. I’m lazy that way.”
Maddie tried to swallow, but she was scared spitless. All right, racking him hadn’t worked. What now?
Maybe she could reason with the guy. Find a way to buy some time.
“So one way or the other, you intend on killing me?” she said.
“That’s pretty much the plan.”
“But why?”
“You’re an inconvenience to Shriver.”
“How much is he paying you? I’ll pay more.”
Blanco snorted. “On a museum employee’s salary? I don’t think so.”
Think of a good lie. Come on, come on. Bluff. Be outrageous. What would Cassie say?
“What if I told you the Cézanne and El Greco are fakes,” Maddie babbled, saying the first thing that popped into her head. Cassie was extremely gifted at copying great works of art quickly. It was within the realm of possibility that she could have made forgeries. Cassie loved showing off her talent.
“I’d say you were lying in order to save your hide.”
“But what if I wasn’t?”
He studied her a moment. “I’m listening.”
“It’s all part of a sneaky plot I concocted to outwit Shriv
er.” Maddie was grasping at straws, embellishing as she went along and praying like hell Blanco’s greed was greater than his knowledge of artwork masterpieces. She was probably okay on that score. He looked like a velvet-Elvis-dogs-playing-poker aficionado. “And he’s setting you up as the fall guy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Shriver’s been planning these robberies a long time. He hooked up with me because he knew I could create identical replicas of the Cézanne and El Greco.” Please don’t let him ask me why, Maddie prayed. She really hadn’t thought this thing through.
“Why?”
So much for thinking on her feet.
“Well?” Blanco raised both eyebrows.
“Er . . . umm . . . because Shriver loves the paintings so much he wanted to keep them for himself but he also wanted the big bucks.” Maddie held her breath and tried not to visibly wince at the lameness of her faux explanation.
To her amazement, Blanco nodded. “He does love those damn paintings. Me, I never got the attraction: What’s the big deal about some old dead guys slapping paint on canvas and everyone calling it great art? Personally, I prefer photographs. Much more real.”
“Ansel Adams,” Maddie said.
“Yeah.” Blanco nodded. “He’s pretty good. I like Richard Avedon too, although they have completely different styles.”
“What about Annie Leibowitz?”
“Naw. She’s the one who does all the babies in pumpkins and shit like that, right? Too schmaltzy for me.”
“No, that’s Anne Geddes. Annie Leibowitz photographs celebrities. A lot of her work has appeared in Rolling Stone.”
“Oh yeah. She’s cool.” Blanco snapped his fingers. “Hey, have you ever seen that guy who takes photos of naked people lying down in city streets and bizarre places like that? Now that’s compelling.”
Gee, they were actually bonding. Maddie decided to push it. “You know, Jocko, Shriver’s just using you. Getting you to do his dirty work. You kill me, and then he calls the cops on you. Next thing you know, you’re in the big house marking time.”
The hoodlum chortled, but he looked unsure of himself. “Big house? Marking time? You’ve been watching too many old gangster movies.”
Maddie shrugged, trying her best to appear nonchalant. Her bid to turn Blanco on Shriver had better pay off or else she and Cassie were in deep swamp water.
