Dax stood in the front door of the Old Gallery, holding it open, looking in, but not crossing the threshold.
Geezus. The place was a wreck, but that’s not what held him where he stood.
Something had happened here, something beyond the obvious destruction. The police had done a number on the place, broken just about every damn thing Dax could see, and that was no shakedown. That was violence of a different character. He could smell it. Nothing moved in the shadows of the main gallery. Dust motes drifted, but there was no sign of life in the room-only the scent of death rising to taint the air, familiar and unmistakable.
The unfamiliar was harder to catalogue, being no more than a faint, oddly electrical quality in the atmosphere, the aftermath of some kind of disturbance, but he didn’t know what.
Well, hell. He drew his pistol and crossed into the gallery, keeping the gun at a low ready position, just in case there was another “unexplainable” disturbance in his immediate future.
Step by step, he cleared the entrance and moved into the main room, into a deeper silence. It took his eyes a few moments to adjust to the low light, but when they did, he very quickly located the source of death.
Remy Beranger, his small body crumpled on the floor in a pool of blood, the right side of his chest a ragged mess.
Geezus, the cops had killed him.
Pistol raised to the ready, Dax moved forward, but there was nothing, no threat and nobody else on the main floor of the gallery-only Beranger lying on a pile of rubber knives and Galeria Viejo T-shirts.
Dax knelt by the body. He didn’t need to check. The guy was dead. No pulse. No life. Three shots-two in the chest, and one in the gut.
Geezus. Beranger hadn’t been such a bad guy.
Dax let out a breath and checked the gallery again, listening carefully, looking into corners. He didn’t mind being one-on-one with the dead, but to the best of his ability, he was never getting involved in anything that would require coming back to this hellhole called Ciudad del Este.
Immortality, Christ. The damn Sphinx sure hadn’t granted Remy Beranger any immortality.
He checked his watch. It had been twenty minutes since he’d put Suzi in the cab, and in another twenty-five to thirty, he could be at the Gran Chaco.
But first he needed to search the gallery, and the best place to start was with the Frenchman, even if chances were that the Sphinx had been snatch-and-grabbed by somebody on their way out the door, maybe even one of the policemen. If he could confirm that the cops had taken it, maybe Colonel Hanson, the man he’d contracted with for this job, could bring some pressure to bear on the good people of Paraguay and get them to loan him the damn thing until he got the information on the sleeper cell in Texas out of Erich Warner. But unlikely. In Ciudad del Este, the terrorists were up on the cops about two to one any day of the week.
So, hell.
He finished searching Remy’s jacket pockets, coming up with a few scraps of paper, a couple of pens, a little cash. He kept the paper scraps, putting them in one of his cargo pockets, before moving on to Remy’s pants pockets. He hit pay dirt on the front right, a lading document from an import-export business in Virginia dated two weeks previous, addressed to Remy Beranger, Galeria Viejo, one item listed simply as Orthostat relief. Basalt. h. 20 cm.
Right. It didn’t say Occult Statuette, Maned Sphinx of Sesostris III, a.k.a. Memphis Sphinx, grantor of everlasting life. Granite. h. 17.5 cm., but somehow it was close.
Close enough.
And coming out of Virginia, well, hell, that was damned curious.
For whatever reason, and there were probably more than a few good ones, he flashed on Jimmy Ruiz hightailing it off the roof of the Old Gallery with that messenger bag slung over his shoulder just as all the commotion had started. Jimmy swinging back around to pick up his damn Land Cruiser. Jimmy Ruiz who had arrived with the lush and lovely Suzi Toussi and who was currently chasing the lovely Ms. Toussi back to her hotel.
Yeah, there were a lot of coincidences in that little series of events.
Hell, no wonder she’d been so quick to get out the door of the Posada Plaza and insisting that he not accompany her. While he was standing in the Old Gallery with a dead body, a curious-as-hell lading document, and his you-know-what in his hand, she was collecting her contraband and getting ready to go wheels-up back to the States and Senator Leonard. She was going for the win here. She was taking the Memphis Sphinx to Illinois.
The hell she was.
Dax left the gallery at a fast walk, and by the time he hit the alley, he’d busted into an easy run.
Three or four minutes was all it took for him to be sliding in behind the wheel of his Jeep, firing her up, and leaning over to pop open the glove box. He needed two things to get onto the grounds of the heavily guarded Gran Chaco Hotel-a Cuban panatela, just because, and the press pass he never traveled without, from The Daily Inquirer.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
All Suzi wanted was to get the hell out of Ciudad del Este, but from what she was looking at, she wasn’t going to be getting what she wanted anytime soon.
Jimmy Ruiz must think she was a total idiot.
“Twelfth Dynasty, you say?” She looked up from the “Memphis Sphinx” he’d set on the coffee table in her suite, the one he’d taken out of a padded leather bag and carefully arranged next to a thick stack of papers he’d also taken out of the bag. For the record, he looked like hell, even more frazzled than when she’d last seen him at the gallery.
For the record, she knew she didn’t look much better. She’d torn her skirt, lost a button off her jacket, and scratched her face, up high on her cheek, all while getting out of the gallery window. She’d also broken a nail and had barely had time to wash God knew what off her feet before Ruiz had come knocking on her door.
“That must make it…how old?” she asked.
Her beautiful peep-toe pumps, needless to say, had been ruined by their immersion in Paraguayan garbage. She’d lost her hat, and her hair had all but completely fallen out of her French twist.
She felt absolutely straggly. Cripes.
“Hundreds and hundreds of years old,” the young man said with amazingly misplaced confidence.
Try four thousand years old, she thought, refraining from a weary sigh. She’d had a long day, coming off a long night and a long flight, and for a few brief moments, before Ruiz had unveiled his fake statue, she’d hoped her job here was done, and not only done, but done exceptionally well. She wouldn’t have simply located the darn Sphinx, she would have had it in hand, saving Dylan, and Hawkins, and any other wild boy down here running around Paraguay the trouble of stealing it, and from what Dylan had told her when he’d contacted her this morning, she knew there were a couple extra SDF boys in country and headed her way, maybe already in the city, and it was a good chance the two of them would be tagged for the snatch-if she could verify the Sphinx’s location.
Which she had not done.
Dammit.
So much for her moment of mission glory. Ruiz’s fake had sealed her fate. She was doomed to at least one night in Ciudad del Este, and from what she’d seen so far, that was about as sketchy a situation as she’d ever encountered. She was damn glad to have a 9mm. Ruiz at least hadn’t let her down in that department.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, looking at the statue, and that was the truth. The artful amalgamation of plaster, composite something-or-another, paint, and plastic was very sleek, very well executed-except for the flat-out dead giveaway of the bottom of the statue. Anyone who turned it upside down was bound to notice the letters and numbers written in black marker on an unpainted patch of white plaster on the base. This one said GV 3/5, which she was sure meant that Galeria Viejo had ordered five of these babies made. She had to admit that the blue stamp of the Great Sphinx of Giza next to the numbers made the whole thing look very official-if four thousand years ago Sesostris III had commissioned a plaster sphinx.