Cutting Loose

by Westlake, Samantha

  “Sorry to have ruined the gala,” Eastman commented to me. “Hopefully you still get paid.”

  “Are you kidding?” I answered, noting the gleaming eyes on the faces of many of the glitterati as they were interviewed by the police en route to their vehicles. “This is probably the best ending to a party that I could hope to pull off. They’re going to be talking about this for years! Of course, in their stories, they’ll have fought a hand-to-hand duel against the master thief and valiantly knocked out several of his minions before he managed to escape with all the stolen art. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them are hiding a painting or two under their dresses or jackets, even.”

  “You think that little of them?” he asked.

  “I was one of them, for a long time,” I reminded him. “I know how they think. I’m glad to be out.”

  “And your mother…” Eastman lapsed off, but I could tell what he was trying to feel out.

  “She’s going to be fine, once she realizes that I’m not backing down,” I said. And amazingly, I believed it. I’d built Constance Melton up into such a scary figure, a boogeyman in my head, that I’d completely convinced myself that she would stop at nothing to drag me back into her arms, under her control.

  Now, I felt like the wool had been lifted from my eyes. My mother would never do such a public thing, knowing what sort of reaction it would generate from her peers. They’d all gossip and murmur to each other about how hard I was to control, how that reflected badly on my upbringing – and on my mother. Instead, she’d grit her teeth and let me go, while telling everyone who would listen that it had all been her idea, that she wanted to encourage me to get out of the nest, or spread my wings, or some other bird-related metaphor.

  We reached the van, parked inconspicuously on a side street. The van looked pretty plain for something Sawyer would borrow, and I remarked on this to Eastman. “Plain white? No funny bumper sticker or anything? He would have at least sprung for the leather seats, or some fuzzy dice to hang from the rear-view mirror.”

  “Inconspicuous is exactly why he’d pick it as the getaway vehicle for a heist,” Eastman countered. “The flashier he looks at the heist, the less suspicious a plain white van would appear. Now, the keys.”

  “Don’t I get to open it?”

  “You’re not the trained FBI agent,” he reminded me, holding out his hand.

  I huffed, but I handed over the keys. He walked carefully up to the van, pressed one hand against the back door as if checking for a pulse. We’d been joined by a couple other agents, both wearing FBI windbreakers, who watched as Eastman slowly inserted the key into the lock on the door.

  “Fits,” he called as it turned and clicked.

  One of the other agents, a man, reached for his sidearm for a moment. The other agent, a woman, reached out and laid her hand on his wrist. “You gonna shoot the van?” she asked.

  Eastman opened the back door – and then stood there, staring into its contents. I couldn’t see, so I waited for him to call out what he’d found inside. He didn’t speak for a moment, driving me crazy.

  “Well?” I finally said. “Is the art there or not?”

  “Yeah,” he answered, as I stepped around to look into the back of the van. Eastman sounded stunned, like he’d just seen a unicorn. “It looks like it’s all here.”

  He was right, as far as I could see. The back of the van had several large wooden crates anchored in place with cross-beams, stuffed mostly with straw for cushioning. In between the straw were canvases – dozens, by my rough approximation. A sheaf of papers sat on the narrow walkway that led further back into the van’s interior.

  Eastman beckoned to the female agent, who stepped forward and snapped on a pair of rubber gloves. She pulled out one of the smaller canvases, ran an eye over the apple painted on it. “Looks authentic to me, although we’ll have to test them in the lab to make sure he didn’t swap in any forgeries,” she said.

  I, meanwhile, had my eye on that stack of papers. That didn’t look like art. It looked more like a contract of some sort, dense legalese crowding the page. But as I reached for it, a new sound cut through the air – a scream, high and piercing. It came from behind us, back at the Institute.

  I recognized it. “My mother,” I said to Eastman. “That’s her.”

  We both turned, sprinting back to the museum.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  * * *

  I had a new reason to be annoyed with Eastman by the time we arrived back at the Institute. He looked barely out of breath at all after sprinting three blocks. I, meanwhile, felt as though both my lungs were filled with rough, bottom-shelf alcohol. I wheezed as they burned, guessing that I looked anything but attractive.

  We didn’t need to do much searching for my mother. She hadn’t screamed again, but she was clearly raising hell, her voice carrying out over the crowd from where she sat in the back bay of an ambulance, several police officers hovering nearby as if too scared to approach any closer.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, once I was able to suck in some breath for anything beyond delivering precious oxygen to my poor, overworked muscles. “What’s she screaming about?”

  A nearby police officer looked over at me and shrugged. “No idea. She keeps on shouting at us, but she won’t explain.”

  “Sounds about right.” I moved in closer, Eastman following behind me. “Mother, would you stop? What in the world is wrong?”

  My mother, still sitting there, a bandage half wrapped around her hand, glared at me with such intensity that I worried I might burst into flames. “This is all your fault!” she seethed.

  That didn’t answer anything. “What’s my fault?”

  She held up her uninjured hand, pointing to her neck. “Look at it! Look!”

  “I don’t see…” I trailed off as I realized what was missing. My eyes flitted over her, and I realized why she’d suddenly started screaming.

  I remembered that, when my mother had shown up, she’d been decked out in all her most expensive bits of jewelry. Gemstone studded earrings, half a dozen rings, and a massive, chunky necklace that was too ornate and egregious to be fake. Now, all of that jewelry was missing! She looked a little smaller without it, a little more plain, and I knew that she hated it.

  “What happened?” I asked again. “Did you take it off?”

  She waved her hand towards the general direction of the front of the ambulance. “It was that male nurse! They’re always scheming and stealing, every one of them! He told me I needed to take it off so they could bandage me, and then there was all this confusion with alarms or something going off in the building, and then he ran off with it! Dirty thief! Lower class ingrates! This is what happens when you let all these liberals get their way…”

  I tuned out the rest of her ranting. I spotted one of the paramedics, standing off to the side and looking somewhere between bemused and horrified about the whole situation. “Do you know what she’s talking about?” I asked him, when my mother briefly paused to suck in breath.

  He shook his head. “No idea. My partner’s in the front of the ambulance, but he’s been there the entire time. And neither of us took any of this crazy lady’s jewelry.”

  “Hey, boss!” The call came from one of the cops, standing near the front of the ambulance. He’d called out to Eastman and now held something up in the air. “You might wanna see this?”

  Eastman and I both hurried over. The cop had found a shirt, very similar to the one that the paramedic was wearing. “It was on the ground here,” he explained. “Maybe the thief dropped it?”

  I glanced at Eastman, and I knew he was thinking the same thought that lurked in my head. “Sawyer, or one of his accomplices,” he growled. “He must have doubled back after he landed, instead of continuing on to the van. He decided to give up the art, but he wasn’t about to leave here empty-handed.”

  I nodded. It felt right, felt totally fitting with the man that I’d come to understand over the last couple mont
hs. Sawyer always believed himself to be an agent of karma, the guy whose actions balanced out all the good and evil in the universe. He’d decided to do something good, by giving me the keys to the van full of art instead of making off with it – but he also apparently decided that my mother was evil and needed to be punished with the loss of her jewelry.

  He couldn’t have picked a better way to rankle her, I considered. My mother loved her glittery baubles, sometimes more than I think she loved her daughters. Losing those, especially on the same night that she got egg on her face from her public fight with me, was a hell of a one-two punch.

  Eastman looked at the abandoned shirt in the cop’s hands for another minute, and then sighed and shrugged his shoulders. “Go try and get her statement,” he told the officer. “Not much that we can do, but we’ll add it to the long list of suspected crimes against the thief.”

  “That’s some thief,” the policeman said as he nodded, heading back towards the ambulance. My mother had again run out of breath and ceased yelling, but I suspected that she was brewing up a fresh tirade that would erupt momentarily. “Pulls off an art heist, and then has the balls to double back for some old lady’s jewelry? Must have been pretty fancy stuff.”

  “Yeah, or he had another motivation,” Eastman said, looking over at me. I found myself blushing as his eyes examined me.

  “I couldn’t have known that he was going to do this,” I protested, as Eastman stepped over to me once again.

  “Sure, but you don’t look too unhappy about it.”

  “What, am I smiling?” I reached up and patted my cheeks. He did have a point. Try as I might, I couldn’t bring myself to feel any sympathy for my mother. If I saw Sawyer now, I’d probably be more inclined to hug him than to punch him.

  Well, maybe I’d punch him – after the hug.

  Eastman drew closer. “You’re going to need to work on that poker face,” he commented, looking down on me. “I’ll have to teach you how to not give everything away without saying a word.”

  “I’m not giving anything away!” I protested.

  “Oh?” He raised an eyebrow. “Are you thinking about me right now?”

  I hadn’t been – but now that he asked, I suddenly wondered, vividly, what he’d look like without a shirt, maybe bending me over and giving me a spanking as part of his lessons. “No,” I insisted, feeling my face redden further.

  “Liar.” He didn’t seem at all unhappy about that. “What are you thinking about me?”

  “I’m picturing you fully clothed and acting totally professional,” I lied.

  Those eminently kissable lips of his quirked upwards. How had I ever considered him to be surly and unapproachable, instead of smoldering hot? “You know, every time I’ve found a new crime that Sawyer pulls off, I’ve been furious afterwards. Kicking myself that I didn’t stop him, that I couldn’t close every security hole, pissed that I let him get away. Know what I’m feeling now?”

  “Like you might get a new perspective on this case if you knocked off early tonight and went out for a drink instead?” I tried.

  The little upward twist of his lips widened into a full grin. “Precisely that. Although I could make it a work thing.”

  “How so?”

  How did those blue eyes of his transition so quickly from cool to burning hot? “I’m thinking about all the times I’ve failed to catch Sawyer,” he answered. “Maybe the problem is that I just can’t get into the guy’s head. It would be really helpful if I had an expert on the guy, someone who could work with me and act as an advisor on how I can apprehend him next time.”

  Was Eastman talking about me? “Is this a paid position?” I asked.

  “I’m sure that the Bureau can agree to some sort of compensation deal.”

  One more question, which I hoped I could ask without my voice cracking. “Does it matter,” I asked, “if the consultant happens to be pursuing a romantic relationship with one of the agents on the case?”

  That drew the rarest of reactions from Eastman – a full-on laugh. “I think there’s a form that we have to fill out,” he said. “Probably no more than a page or two. Shouldn’t pose an issue.”

  He slipped his arm around me, pulling me in towards him. “Wait,” I exclaimed, despite the protest from the majority of my brain that wanted very much to kiss him. “What about the form? Don’t we need to do that first?”

  “You’re not hired yet,” he countered. “Nothing wrong with me kissing a private citizen.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” I said, deciding that it was enough of an answer for me to accept. And I very, very badly wanted to accept. I turned the rest of the way into him, rose up on my toes, and met his lips with mine.

  It was a very good kiss, but I still had one last thought bothering me. I didn’t want to say anything, but Eastman must have sensed something in my slight hesitation. “What is it?” he asked, when we broke apart.

  “It’s that sheaf of papers that Sawyer left sitting in the car,” I said. “What did they say?”

  “They’re probably being checked into evidence now,” he replied, but my curiosity had been ignited. I groaned at the thought of what I had to do next, but forced my tired, aching legs to start moving again.

  Eastman, of course, had no trouble jogging alongside me and easily keeping up. “Where are you going?”

  “I need to see those papers,” I insisted, forcing the words out between breaths that didn’t seem to contain enough oxygen. “They must be important, or he wouldn’t have left them there for us to find!”

  He reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. “Stop running. I’ll call ahead and ask them to hold the papers for us.”

  “Oh thank god.” I let my legs slow, walked the rest of the way back to the van.

  True to his word, Eastman had one of the other agents standing next to the van, holding the stack of papers that had been sitting inside. Other members of Eastman’s team swarmed over the van, running all sorts of fancy tests that I didn’t understand. Most of the paintings had already been removed, probably headed off to an FBI lab to make sure they weren’t fakes before being brought back to the Institute.

  I reached out for the papers, but Eastman’s hand arrested me. “Gloves,” he murmured, handing me a pair of blue rubber ones.

  I slipped on the gloves and then leafed through the papers. “It’s one of the policies from the Institute,” I said as I peered at them. “Do you still have that flashlight?”

  Eastman turned it on and aimed it at the pages so I could read the dense legalese. I flipped through them, looking for some indication of why Sawyer would leave these sitting out in such obvious view-

  Something on one of the pages caught my eye, and I flipped back to it. Somebody had pasted a smiley face sticker on one of the pages, next to a paragraph! I held the pages closer so I could read the words.

  “Finder’s fee,” I read out. “As incentive to encourage the return of missing Objects, Insurance is hereby authorized to pay out a compensatory fee (e.g. Finder’s Fee)…” I trailed off, confused. What did Sawyer mean to tell me by leaving this here?

  Eastman, however, figured it out. “Keep reading,” he said, looking suddenly alert.

  I resumed where I’d left off. “Insurance is hereby authorized to pay out a compensatory fee (e.g. Finder’s Fee) to any group or individual who is able to provide significant help in recovery of the Objects. This fee is nominally declared at one percent of the value of the Policy, and will be adjusted as necessary based on incurred costs and other factors deemed relevant.” I stopped, looking up at Eastman with my eyes wide as it clicked for me. “Does this go to me?”

  He shrugged, but didn’t look like he disagreed. “I think you’d have to argue a bit with the insurance company, but it certainly seems that way. If you weren’t involved in this, Sawyer wouldn’t have returned the paintings. You’re the one who talked him into giving up the keys. As witnessed by a federal authority,” he added, tapping his chest with a finger. />
  One percent finder’s fee. The paintings, I remembered, were worth millions of dollars – each. There’d been dozens of them in the back of the van. “If each painting is worth a million dollars,” I said, working it out aloud, “that’s ten thousand dollars apiece. Ten thousand dollars, times twelve paintings-“

  “Twenty-eight of them,” called out one of the crime scene techs, who apparently had been listening in.

  “Twenty-eight,” I corrected. “That makes… almost three hundred thousand dollars!”

  “More, if the paintings were worth more than just a million each,” Eastman added. He winked at me. “Looks like you won’t have any trouble paying to get your car fixed, or any need for your mother’s money.”

  The night wasn’t over there, of course. The FBI had to get my official witness statement, and I had to stick around and help close down the gala. Eastman looked like he didn’t want to leave my side, but his duties pulled him away. He promised to check in with me as soon as he could, but several hours later, I found myself headed back to Sawyer’s apartment – now my apartment, I guessed, although the FBI wanted to come in as soon as possible and sweep it for potential clues. I knew that they wouldn’t find anything. Sawyer was too crafty and careful to be caught that way.

  I thought that I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep, but after all the excitement and the roller-coaster of the night I’d experienced, I lost consciousness seconds after my head hit the pillow.

  Epilogue

  * * *

  One month later…

  I looked up from the binder as I heard the key slide in the door. From my spot on the sofa, I just had to turn my head to see the man enter, his tousled hair sticking up from above the upturned collar of the trench coat I insisted on buying him as a present. He’d protested loudly how much he didn’t need it, how stereotypical he felt wearing a trench coat, but I couldn’t help but notice that he never went a day without sliding it over his broad shoulders.