Category: Action/Thriller Publisher: Alien Buddha Press
Type: Fiction
Pages: 290
Copyright: October 22, 2024
ISBN-13: 9798339479352
Two friends in Cincinnati expose an art-theft ring in New Orleans and find themselves on the run from alligators in bayous and bad guys everywhere they turn.
Karissa Scott is a thirty-year-old woman, flamboyant in dress and attitude toward life, but she’s in crisis. Her career in a downtown Cincinnati art gallery is going nowhere. She convinces her friend J.J., a chess prodigy and computer geek, to accompany her to New Orleans where she plans to kickstart her abandoned journalism career by investigating art thefts, thanks to an inside tip from a friendly detective. When she discovers a rococo masterpiece in a hidden room of a former slave plantation mansion, she thinks she’s on the verge of a Pulitzer. Guy Devereaux, the mansion’s owner—and the ringleader of a gang of art thieves—has other plans for her. The next two weeks of her life on the run with J.J. takes her through alligator-infested bayou to sleazy motels in the New Orleans
Excerpt
PART 1: CINCINNATI
CHAPTER 1
“C’mon, Karissa,” J.J. said; “perk up.”
“That a pun? If so, if stinks.”
The two friends, so opposite in character, dress, mannerisms, and just about every way two people of the opposite sex could differ from each other, sat in glum silence in their favorite coffee shop downtown. Yet another blizzard raged outside the windows, creating a gauzy film of condensation. The chirpy weatherman on the TV over the counter said it was the third this week.
Karissa Scott, thirty-years-old and dreading the decade ahead, reached across to an empty table and nimbly fetched the Enquirer from between a soiled napkin and a partially eaten glazed donut.
J.J., as worried as his companion also in his third decade and climbing the greasy pole of academe as an ABD working in the University of Cincinnati’s robotics lab, was silent, working out a math problem on napkins. He’d used his and taken hers and filled both up with Greek letters and symbols.
“Great, J.J.,” Karissa said, looking up from the fold in the newspaper. “I pour out the grief of my broken heart to you and all you can think about is drawing stupid squiggles on a napkin.”
“Those aren’t squiggles.”
“That one is.” She placed a carmine fingernail in the middle of his equation.
“That’s the Levi-Civita symbol for—never mind.”
“No,” she said. “Now I’m curious. It must be crucially important for you to ignore me at a time like this so I really want to know.”
“Oh God, okay, here goes. This is the antisymmetric symbol for the wave function of a proton, see? By using the color states and that symbol, in each case, we can determine whether the cycle is positive or negative. If the color flows with the cycle, its value is one. If it flows against, it’s minus one.”
“The point being?”
“It has to do with the spin of quarks in a proton. How protons and neutrons stay together in the nucleus. The strong force . . .”
. . . stay together . . . the only words that registered behind her eyes, he could tell. What was this anyway, he wondered, the fifteenth or sixteenth breakup of Karissa and her longtime boyfriend in the last three years?
“No wonder you’re single.”
“You asked, remember?”
“Look at this,” Karissa said, handing him and pointing to an article in the paper she’d been reading.
His eyes followed a lazy S down the sidebar. He didn’t skim it. His reading speed and comprehension were Mensa caliber.
“Art thefts in New Orleans in the homes of the city’s wealthy. Big deal.”
She grabbed it back, reading a passage: “’Police are suspicious this could be the work of an organized ring, but they have no suspects.’”
“Thank God, they’ve finally cut that Christmas music,” J.J. said. “If I hear ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ one more time, I’ll commit harry karry.”
“Hara kiri, you mean,” Karissa said. “You didn’t hear a word I said.”
“Of course, I did. Some young thieves are ripping off paintings. Cops are baffled. What of it?”
“Oliver Twist,” she said. “Fagin and his gang of boy thieves. Charley Bates, the Artful Dodger—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” J.J. said, checking his watch.
“I’m not being ridiculous,” she said. “There was a real Fagin. Dickens knew a guy named Ikey Solomon from the boot-blacking factory of his youth, a notorious London fence.”
J.J. knew better than to take the bait. Karissa was spoiling for a fight the moment she arrived, nose and lip studs winking under fluorescent lights, her leather boots stomped the mat until every head in the coffee shop had swiveled once to take her in. Brushing a wispy veil of snow from her fiery red hair, she cut her eyes to the tables and customers in search of him. Before she whipped off her thin, belted coat to sit opposite him, he knew from the scowl on her broad face that he was in for a rant.
J.J. usually had to mentally sorted through the rolodex of her recent complaints. Not this time. Riding solo at the top of the list was the nefarious Bryan, the on-again, off-again boyfriend J.J. despised.
“All right, so Bryan dumped you again,” he said, hoping to get the tirade over and done with. “Let’s hear the gory details. Don’t spare my delicate sensibilities, as you call them.”
He had his lab hours scheduled at the university and his time was limited, especially in the crawl of traffic on Clifton outside the window. Now and then, a driver’s head swiveled toward the fogged windows. J.J. wondered if they could see the customers, like goldfish in a filthy bowl.
“I didn’t tell you we broke up on the phone. Who told you?”
“A shrewd guess,” J.J. said. “Your eyes take on a certain luster”—he almost said glitter—“when you walked in.”
Their last two meetings around the campus were a dismal precursor of what J.J. expected to hear about her boyfriend from this rupture. He’d already slid from being a “typical male lacking empathy” to a further degeneration downward as “a wimpy mama’s boy.” Bryan must have earned a capstone to his most recent performance to send her as low as she appeared.
“I suppose I’m a local joke now,” Karissa complained. She twisted her pinky ring, a sure sign of inner turmoil.
J.J. waited for the inevitable avalanche to befall the witless Bryan. He figured he might as well prod it into motion and be done with it sooner rather than later.
“By this time next week,” he started, holding a forearm dramatically over his eyebrows, “the whole town will have to decide whether they’re on Team Bryan or Team Karissa.”
“Don’t make fun of me, J.J. He hurt me bad this time.”
This was new. Self-pity in Karissa Scott was as rare as snow leopard sightings. For as long as he’d known her, she had never succumbed to maudlin feelings, no matter what emotional bruising she took in love’s affairs or her up-and-down career as a gallery assistant. Karissa had no reverse gear; it was all forward, and generally speaking, at top speed. Her hair, studs, pink lipstick, and parrot-blue eyeshadow were as understated as she ever got in drab Cincinnati winters. Beneath the flimsy coat and layered sweaters that hid generous cleavage and a spackling of scattershot tattoos, the real Karissa smoldered like a dormant volcano. She wouldn’t trade in her outlandish garb for sack cloth and ashes no matter how deep the predicted snowfall.
“That . . . that scoundrel, that brute, cad . . . bounder,” she fumed between sips of mocha coffee. Stoning him with popcorn. She was still mulling Dickens in her mind. J.J. despised Dickens for his ludicrous coincidences and slapdash characterizations. “I’ll believe in your tarot cards before I trust one of his novels.”
“Let it out, Karissa,” J.J. said. “It’ll do you good. Try ‘that prick,’ ‘the rotten bastard,’ or ‘worthless son of a bitch’ instead.”
He cut his eyes to the small wall clock between the Chinatown and Psycho posters. It was made from an old 88-rpm vinyl record and featured characters from The Nightmare before Christmas. Janet Leigh in lingerie stared back at him from one wall. A door-sized poster of Marilyn Monroe bunching her white dress in front of her on that New York subway grate greeted every male heading to the lavatory. A similar one was taped to the inside with Tom Ewell looking on in approval, but it was slathered with fulsome compliments to that idol’s beauty; the ones in crabbed, hasty penmanship were more risqué.
“Oh, am I keeping you? So sorry.”
“No, no, Kariss. It’s just that I have to be in the computer lab in forty minutes.”
“Et tu, Brute?”
“Come on, you know I’m here for you.”
The syrupy cliché from every nitwitted facebook posting about “tragic love” or “romantic breakups” produced that familiar squinch of eyebrows, puckered lips, and narrowing of eyes on her. He thought of a color photo of a coiled water moccasin in a nature magazine that time he sat in the dentist’s office for his root canal appointment.
“You have no idea what I’ve endured for that man . . .”
Better Bryan than me, he thought.
J.J.’s doctoral thesis was giving him fits at the moment. The coding of non-convex optimization problems in machine learning was formidable. He pasted a noncommittal expression on his face and heard Bryan’s evisceration from an ever-increasing distance like breaking waves over a rocky beach until Karissa’s rant declined toward a normalized sine-cosine wave of English phonetics. Fewer clicks of diphthongs against the palate, softer syllables for the bittersweet reminiscences of the Good Bryan’s past before the Bad Bryan of the present took him over like one of those alien seed pod invaders on the poster of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
He risked another furtive glance at the garish wall clock and was pleased to see that twenty minutes had passed while he cavorted among the linear calculus and theorems scribbled on his napkins.
She was saying something about how Bryan’s mother kept interfering in their relationship—
“You’re not listening to me,” she complained.
“I swear to you I heard every word you said.”
“You had that look on your face when you’re deep in a chess match,” she said, still suspicious but not certain of his betrayal.
“I pour out my heart’s anguish to you,” she griped, sniffling, and all you can do is think about your lousy math or your humanoid robots.”
“That’s not true, Kariss.” She might not be big on self-pity, he knew, but she knew how to fashion a big stick to beat her own back—and his, if he failed in some way that modeled Bryan’s bad behavior. Making an elaborate show of checking his wristwatch, he said: “Hey, wow, look at the time, will you? I have to be in the lab in twenty.”
Stony-eyed, she watched him tuck his scarf beneath his coat and button it to his neck. The icy wind downtown was funneled like a canyon wind between buildings. His car was a block away. A trek across the Gobi in this weather. He was contemplating the proper goodbye that would be least offensive when she scooped up the paper, read a few words with an intense silence.
“J.J, my God, check this out,” Karissa said, tapping a finger on the horoscope column. It was bordered by tiny astrological signs.
“Karissa, I really have to run if I’m going to make it. You know Kevin will dock my pay if I’m so much as ten minutes late.”
“It says, ‘Your need for a vacation before the new year commences is urgent. Between Jupiter rising and Venus descending, the time is maximized for the best remedies to what ails your heart and mind.’”
The look on her face worried J.J. He’d seen it before. He knew the head winds he would face outside were nothing compared to what she’d confront him with if whatever it was took root and burrowed deep. Karissa made impulsive decisions the way yo-yo dieters scan a refrigerator’s contents.
“JJ., look. The windows.”
She said it with such exuberance that half the customers within earshot swiveled their heads at the same time. He saw nothing unusual. Windows frosted by the collision of extremes: heat and cold molecules fighting for dominance between a pane of glass. Their collision produced a lacy filigree decorating the bottom of the plate glass from one end to the other.
“What?”
“The windows, the frost created fleurs-de-lys,” Karissa said.
“It means it’s cold outside.”
“No, it doesn’t,” she replied. J.J. didn’t like the sparkle in Karissa’s eyes—another sign he knew too well.
“Kariss, what? I’ve got to go, really—”
He hoped to make it to the door before she spoke again. Thumb on the lip of the old-fashioned doorknob, he figured he made it. She could stew in her own juices. Bracing for the first blast of ferocity that would slam into him, like a pilot ejecting into fierce headwinds, he had half his body out the door before she said it—a measly two words. Two steps into the full force of the freezing air, he gave into temptation to look back through the plate glass where she watched him. Her face lit by the first smile he’d seen since she sat down.
New Orleans . . .
“Not such a bad idea right now,” he spoke into the wind, surprising himself. “Not a bad idea at all.”
He knew she’d still be smiling long after he was out of sight. Karissa was one of those people who got an idea and shook it like a rat terrier with a squeak toy in its mouth.
* * * * *
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