Elizabeth Lowell - Blue Smoke and Murder

“That’s it,” he said. “School’s out.”

A few seconds later Jill found herself naked and on her back next to the fire. Zach went to his knees between her legs, slid the condom into place, and tested her heat with his finger. Her liquid response and the scent of her arousal made him glad he was already on his knees, because sure as hell she would have brought him there. She was slick and hot and tight, her skin flushed with passion, her hips lifting to meet his touch.

He tried to push gently into her, but it was too late. She was way too hungry for any more play and so was he. He flexed his hips and entered her in a hard thrust, filling her.

Jill’s breath came out in a throaty cry that made Zach go completely still.

“Too soon?” he asked through clenched teeth.

When she didn’t answer, he started to withdraw. Then he felt the rhythmic contractions of her release around him, caressing him, taking him with her over the edge of passion. He thrust hard, deep, fast, then shuddered, pumping into her until the world went black.

Zach didn’t know how long it was before he became aware of the fire crackling nearby, the feel of Jill’s palms stroking his back, the softness and strength of her body beneath him.

“I’m crushing you,” he said.

She laughed breathlessly. “Yeah, but I like it. Good thing, because there’s a lot of you to like.”

He nuzzled against her throat, then rolled onto his side, taking her with him, still buried inside her. “Sorry. Usually I’m not so quick off the mark.”

“I rarely get off the mark at all,” she said, stretching out against his chest with a sigh. “I’m still wondering what happened. And how to make it happen again.”

Lazily he ran his fingertips down her spine and between her tight, sexy cheeks, then lower, where she was still hot and wet.

Her breath broke. “Zach?”

“Mmm?”

“Isn’t it too soon?”

“Not for you.”

She started to ask what he meant but found she couldn’t breathe. She could only respond to the sleek probe of his fingers, the pressure, the rub and glide and tug, the fire burning up from his touch to consume her whole body.

He smiled at the feel of her climax. When she finally stilled and lay like a steamy rag against him, he slid slowly out of her.

She made a grumpy cat sound.

He laughed and hauled her to her feet. “Time for bed.”

She yawned. “I like it here better.”

“Come morning, you’ll be thanking me.”

“I’m thanking you all over the place right now.”

Zach grabbed his jeans, scooped out more condoms, and looked at her. “Hope you’re not too sleepy, because I’ve got some tasting and licking in mind.”

Jill gave him a sideways, lazy kind of smile. “Where?”

“All over the place.”

TAOS

SEPTEMBER 15

11:07 P.M.

Garland Frost sat surrounded by paintings, brooding over the collection. Dunstan’s catalogue raisonné was open on the desk. As comparisons went, the photos were nearly useless, but it was all he had to work with besides his own two paintings.

The more he looked at the unsigned canvases and the catalogue raisonné and his two Dunstans, the more convinced he was that Jill Breck’s canvases were indeed Dunstan’s work. Despite the female figures, despite the Indian Springs painting with its now-quaint gas station, despite the lack of signatures.

The paintings simply had to be Dunstan’s work, or the work of a forger so brilliant that there was no meaningful difference between forgery and art.

An artist’s true signature was in the brushstrokes, the energy, the choice of colors, the feel of space or the lack of it, the feel of peace or the lack of it, all the thousands of small artistic decisions that added up to one uniquely Dunstan canvas.

These were Thomas Dunstans.

All Frost had to do was prove it.

Exhilaration bubbled through him, giving him the kind of charge that he thought he’d lost to age. But it was all there, all waiting, needing only the introduction of something worthy of interest into a life that had slowly gone stale.

He felt like waking up Zach and hugging him. But he suspected Zach wouldn’t welcome the interruption.

Smiling, Frost did what he’d done many times in the past few hours. He picked up each canvas in turn and examined it front, back, and sides. He was missing something important. He knew it.

He just didn’t know what it was.

With an impatient sound he opened the laptop that he used for research. He scanned again the mentions he had found of Dunstan, the old photos of his work, the learned words describing the indescribable.

“Idiots and fools,” Frost muttered. “Especially Lee Dunstan. Man no more knows art than horseshit knows heaven.”

Absently Garland ran his fingertips lightly over the side of the Indian Springs canvas, thinking about Dunstan and art and life and the unknown. When he realized that his fingertips returned to the same spot on the canvas stretcher again and again, he stopped, then repeated the light movement, this time conscious of what he was doing.

Definitely a different texture.

He flipped the canvas so that it was bottom side up to look at what he’d felt. It could have been just an extra-thick bit of paint that intrigued his fingertips, but he couldn’t be sure in this light. He took the canvas over to his desk, angled the bright light, and frowned over the bottom edge of the canvas wrapped around the stretcher, a part of the painting that wouldn’t show after the canvas was framed.

He switched to black light and turned off the desk lamp. He looked at the result for a minute, then began going over the bottom edge of each painting with the black light.

Halfway through the examination, he was grinning. By the time he was done, he was laughing with the sheer exuberance of having discovered something fresh and wonderful at a time in his life when everything had seemed old and flat.

“Zach, my boy, you’re going to kiss me on all four cheeks in the morning, and what’s more, you’ll thank me for the opportunity.”

Still grinning, Frost started nailing down the truth with some online research.

TAOS

SEPTEMBER 16

1:07 A.M.

Score finished peeing into the empty bottle of Gatorade, capped it off, and set it next to the other one on the floor of the passenger side of the van. When he left town later tonight he’d do what long-distance truckers working on piece rates did-throw the urine-filled bottles out the window along the Interstate.

He checked his computers, found nothing useful on the Breck woman’s phone bug, and decided it was time to go to work. Past time, actually.

The smell of gasoline was making him sick.

He slid out of the van, just one more shadow in the night. As he walked the block and a half to Frost’s place, a spring-loaded sap made his jacket pocket sag and bang against his hip. His silenced pistol dug into the small of his back. The bottle of gasoline he carried in a paper bag did what it had been doing for the past hour-it stank. The shredded Presto log that cushioned the bottle inside the paper waited to help the party along.

Nobody noticed him go up and over the adobe wall.

He walked quickly to the Dodge, saw that the shipping boxes were still inside, and smiled. He gave the rear window a swift, expert smack with the sap. At the impact, safety glass crumbled to glittering pebbles, just as it had been designed to do. No sharp edges to cut flesh.

The alarm yelped in the few seconds it took to light the makeshift fuse on the gas bomb and throw bag and bottle inside the vehicle.

The flash of flame was so fast and so violent, it nearly burned his face.

Mother. Next time I won’t use that much of the log.

But he’d wanted to be very sure that this fire caught and held. He stood beside the wall for a few more seconds, making certain that the flames wouldn’t fizzle.

They burned with a ferocity that cast shadows like a small sun.

Suddenly the front door opened. Score saw a flash of silver hair, yanked out his pistol, and took aim.

Frost’s pistol boomed an instant before Score fired.

TAOS

SEPTEMBER 16

1:11 A.M.

Zach had yanked on his jeans and was running for the guesthouse door before he consciously registered what had awakened him.

“Zach?” Jill asked, her voice husky from sleep.

“Stay here,” he commanded on the way out the door. “Gunshots.”

From the front of the compound, a car alarm barked urgently.

Zach shut the guestroom door and raced barefoot across the courtyard and through the house. His weapon was where he should have been-in the upstairs guestroom.

The front door stood open. Frost was down, red blood glistening in the hall light. A big revolver lay a few inches beyond his right hand.

Fire leaped in the driveway, engulfing the rental car and giving everything inside the adobe wall a hellish glow.

A bullet sang off the metal bell six inches from Zach’s head.

Silencer.

Zach snapped off the lights as he went down hard on the floor next to Frost. With one hand Zach felt for a pulse.

Fast, but there.

He picked up Frost’s revolver, took a two-handed grip, and aimed for a man-shadow that had paused at the top of the adobe wall.

Flames gleamed on dark metal in the shadow’s hand.

The sound of Frost’s gun thundered a second time, then a third, shattering the night. The revolver kicked hard against Zach’s hands, but he’d been expecting it. Frost always said that a gun that didn’t kick like a mule was for girls.

A cry, a curse, and the shadow disappeared over the wall.

Zach came to his feet in a rush and punched in the gate code. As he did, he heard bare feet running down the hall behind him, heard Jill yell his name.

“Call 911,” he shouted over her voice. “Frost is hurt. Stay out of the light. Could be more than one shooter.”

Zach ran to the gate, heard someone running away, and risked a fast look through the slowly opening gate.

A bullet screamed off the metal bars.

He dropped to his stomach and elbow-crawled forward just enough to see that the man was running again. Zach triggered two more closely spaced shots, a double explosion of sound.

A hesitation, then the shadow ran around the corner of the block and vanished.

Zach was on his feet and through the gate in a coordinated rush. Within three strides he was running flat out, chasing the deadly shadow.

TAOS

SEPTEMBER 16

1:12 A.M.

As Zach disappeared through the open gate, Jill dropped to her knees next to Garland Frost. She wanted to scream at Zach to be careful, but it was too late. He was gone and all she could do was try to help Frost.

Even without street or porch lights, she could see that blood was spreading out from above and to one side of Frost’s belt buckle, dripping onto the Navajo rug that warmed the tile floor.

Too much blood.

She snatched the cordless phone off the hall table, punched in 911, and tucked the phone between her ear and shoulder. Before it even rang, she was opening Frost’s shirt, trying to see the extent of the damage. She barely noticed the rental car burning, the stink of plastic, paraffin, particleboard, and raw gasoline. She was wholly intent on Frost.

The operator answered in a calm male voice. “Taos 911. What is the nature of your emergency?”

“Gunshots fired, one man down, a car fire burning out of control,” Jill said. “Garland Frost’s house, Taos. We need an ambulance and we need it now. Fire truck, too. A friend is pursuing the shooter. Both men are armed. I don’t know the address.”