Breaking Loose

He held his last inhalation of smoke in his lungs-longer, and longer, and longer, seconds passing one after another. At a minute, the smoke started drifting out of his nostrils.

He certainly didn’t doubt that he would die-probably badly, considering what he’d seen in Bangkok, considering how Scout’s father, Garrett, had died.

Hopeless.

Hopeless.

Helpless.

If Con could have reached him, he’d have slid a knife up into the back of Garrett’s skull and severed his brain stem, would have given him instant death, anything rather than watch the slow, twisting devastation that had allowed Garrett Leesom to linger and suffer.

But they’d been more than a cage apart, and the man in the cage between them had been dead for days by the time Garrett’s meds had started to fail.

Fuck.

It could just as easily have been him.

Since then, Con had learned how to control his situation, but not without some failures of his own-and the failures weren’t worth the living it took to get to them. So he kept his meds close, and he kept his supplier very close, and he kept his.45 closest of all. The fools who touted “no pain, no gain” didn’t have a fucking clue what pain was all about, or how long it could last.

Long enough to make a man fear that even death wouldn’t stop it-and, baby, that was taking fear right down to the soul. What if… what if even death won’t stop it?

What then, kemo sabe? What then.

Religion, of course.

Con loved religion. It was so damned fearless, not only answering his biggest, scariest question about life but throwing it right back at him, utterly fearless. Pain, pendejo? it said. Live right, or we’ll show you pain, guaranteed everlasting pain, Promethean pain.

No matter what he sometimes thought, pain had not been invented in Bangkok by Dr. Souk.

But it could be alleviated by the pills and by the brujo in Danlí, Honduras, who hand-rolled the cigars for him. A brujo, a shaman, a witch doctor-God only knew what the man put in the things. Con didn’t, but neither did he care. The long filler was dark, almost oily, and the wrappers were faintly green, and whatever blessings Mario Sauza Orlando chanted over the cigars, they worked.

He let the rest of the smoke drift out of his mouth and took another long draw, feeling the sounds of the night wash over him.

Tobacco was a drug-his favorite.

“Con?”

He’d heard her coming, the soft tread of slippered feet on the cool tile floor.

“Scout.”

“I’ve got those names for you from Jo-Jo, the gringos staying at the Posada Plaza, and the intel you wanted on Levi Asher and Suza

She’d been such a lost little wild thing when he’d finally found her, living on the streets of Bangkok, seventeen years old and looking about twelve, but most definitely Garrett’s daughter, with her father’s warrior spirit ru

Jack Traeger wasn’t good enough for her, but Con had a feeling Scout was of a different mind.

What she saw in the hellion was beyond him, except Jack was a lot like he used to be-before Bangkok.

He needed to talk to the boy, set him straight about a few things, let him know that once Scout was his, there’d be no more riding the edges of the rails. And as for all those wild oats Jack had been sowing-well, that was going to come to a screeching halt.

Or maybe not.

Con had a feeling that was the only reason Scout hadn’t given in to the boy yet, and he was all for Scout not giving in to the boy.

“Start with Levi Asher,” he said.

“A well-known dealer in the art world,” she began. “Famous, or infamous, depending on a person’s perspective, for brokering substantially profitable sales. Buyers love him because he knows where all the good stuff is and who’s willing or being forced to sell, and the collectors love him because he always has access to people with money to spend. He works mostly out of Europe and has run some major pieces through Sotheby’s, London.”

“Not our guy. Too high-profile for Warner.”

“More than that,” she said. “Asher has given three pieces of sculpture to Yad Vashem, for their grounds.”

He understood, and she was right. Even if Warner had contacted Asher about the Memphis Sphinx, anyone who donated works of art to the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, would not work for a man like Erich Warner, a man whose political views were decidedly anti-Semitic along with being anti-everything else.

So Levi Asher was off the hook.

“What about the woman?”

“Suza

A damning résumé in this game, and why in the hell that would demoralize him was beyond Con. Beautiful women could be as bad as anybody else on the planet, sometimes worse.

She was definitely still on the hook.

“And the gringos at the Posada?” One of the out-of-towners was Warner’s proxy on the deal. The German had somebody here.

“There are three,” Scout began. “George Teller, a tire salesman from Detroit. The description Jo-Jo got from the concierge-

“Wait a minute.” Concierge? There was no concierge at the Posada Plaza. “Do you mean that pimp behind the front desk?”

“He prefers the term ‘concierge.’” She gave him a look. “And he says Mr. Teller weighs in at two-fifty and about five foot eight inches.”

“Not our guy.” The asshole probably was a tire salesman, down here for the whores.

“Victor Bradley from Sava

“No.” Mamoré’s customers weren’t in the same league as Erich Warner. The German wouldn’t have trusted some low-end hustler to represent him at an auction for the Memphis Sphinx.

“Last, we’ve got Daniel Killian. Jo-Jo says he’s just another gringo looking for a deal and a whore, but Miller says otherwise.”

Con’s money was on Miller.

“What’s the wizard got to say?” he asked.

Scout was still backlit in the doorway, reading from her notes.

“Miller says he’s definitely the guy in the photos you took at Beranger’s. When he slapped the name Jo-Jo got from the Posada onto that picture, he came up with a former U.S. Army soldier, Special Forces, highly decorated. His last couple of tours were in Afghanistan. And Miller wants ten times the normal price for that bit of information. As you can well imagine, he says, tagging an SF guy took a Herculean effort on his part and every favor he ever had coming to him.”

“Ten times?”

“Ten,” she confirmed.

And the wizard was still a bargain.

Con nodded, glad to have the information and highly doubting that Daniel Killian was Warner’s mule. Nobody who’d bled for the flag would roll over and hustle contraband for the likes of Erich Warner, not for something as New Age hocuspocus as a magic statue. Those SF boys were grounded in the real world with a vengeance.

No, Con’s money said somebody else had sent the former Special Forces operator.

“So the DIA wants their statue back,” he said, giving in to a slight grin. They definitely would have sent somebody when they’d picked up the chatter on Beranger’s auction, and they would have definitely picked up the chatter. Hell, everybody else had, and Killian was just the kind of guy they liked-skilled and co