Read Rarities Unlimited 03 - Die in Plain Sight for Free Online

nodded.
    “I’ll eat the sales tax,” she said.
    He glanced at his watch. There was just enough time to make Susa’s plane and still buy the poster. “Bon appétit,” he said, smiling. “Check or credit card?”
    Lacey blinked. There it was, slow and warm and so gentle it had to be seen to be believed. A smile like that should be registered as a lethal weapon. Mentally she shook herself and focused on the business at hand.
    “Local check?” she asked.
    “If Upland is local, I’m local.”
    She hesitated. Upland wasn’t exactly local, but it wasn’t that far away, either. And she really hated giving the credit card barons two percent of her hard-won sales.
    “Pleased to meet you, neighbor,” she said, holding out her right hand. “I’m Lacey Quinn, half owner of the shop.”
    “Ian Lapstrake, neighbor at large.”
    He shook her hand. Its competent feminine strength reminded him of Dana. He released Lacey’s hand before she could feel uneasy about her humorous gesture of “neighborliness” when they actually lived one to three hours apart, depending on how clogged the freeways were.
    “Will you be taking the poster with you or do you want it shipped?” she asked.
    He glanced at her left hand—freshly scrubbed, no visible rings or ring marks—and decided he would come back for the poster. “Could you hold it for a day or two?”
    “Sure.”
    He pulled a folding checkbook out of his jacket pocket, and braced it on his thigh. “Can I borrow your pen?”
    She patted her jean pockets. “I don’t have one.”
    “How about this one?” Deftly he pulled a pen out of the curls dancing around her right ear.
    “What are you, a magician?”
    “Only in my dreams.” He wrote swiftly, tore out the check, and tucked the pen back into its nest of curls before she could react. “I didn’t know hair came in that many shades of dark and gold and almost red. It’s beautiful.”
    Before the compliment registered, he was on his way out the door.
    “Who was that?” Shayla asked from the stairway.
    “I was wondering the same thing myself.”
    Lacey was also wondering if she had really seen the outline of a shoulder holster beneath the denim when he bent over to write the check, stretching the cloth across his back.

Over Moreno County
    Tuesday afternoon
7
    I t was the type of sunny January day that made people in the Blizzard Belt pack their cars and head for southern California. Though Seattle rarely had any snow to flee from, it did have a thousand shades of winter gray. Susa Donovan was happy to see the sun again, even through an airplane window.
    Sitting in the comfortable cabin of a Donovan International executive jet gave her an uninterrupted view of the coastline far below. These days she rarely painted humanity’s marks on the landscape, but the contrast between the wild fluid blue of the sea and the pale man-made grid of subdivisions, freeways, and industry made her hand itch to hold a paintbrush. Viewed from a distance, the image was abstract and dramatic, like a human storm poised on the edge of breaking over the endless ocean.
    Yet if she almost closed her eyes, she could see the land as it once had been, green ravines and velvet shadows of eucalyptus, orange and yellowevenings, a young woman’s smile as she painted her lover holding out his hand in silent offering.
    Sometimes it was hard for Susa to believe she’d ever been that young, but she had. Years before it became fashionable in the late sixties, she’d abandoned school and home for an unconventional life of late nights, exotic cigarettes, the smell of turpentine and sex; and painting, always painting, more important to her than all the rest of it put together.
    She’d been born much too late to participate in the glory days of California Impressionism, yet she’d known some of the great painters, had learned from them, had heard them talk over endless bottles of wine about the glories and scandals of the Painter’s Beach art colony at