“Oh Donny, they’re all so gorgeous!”
“Yes, ah, they sure are, darling. We’ll make the final choice together, but I want you to come up with the possibles.”
Donny moved farther down the counter with a slight head-jerk. Josh followed. The girl was so engrossed in the locked display case of rings that she barely noticed them.
“My fiancée’s name is May,” Donny said in a low voice.
Josh almost said, And the month is May. So? But he merely kept his expression of polite interest. Donny was impatient.
“She was born in May. Her birthstone is the emerald.”
The light dawned. “You want to get her an emerald ring.”
“No.” Donny made a quick negative gesture. “May will be using her grandmother’s diamond wedding set, but I want to surprise her with an emerald. A good emerald.”
“All of our gemstones are of excellent quality,” said Josh, thinking of one they had in the safe that looked wonderful but that... well... according to Mr. Petrick, had some hidden flaws not apparent to Josh himself. “I have something in the office that I think might be exactly what you’re looking for.”
A relieved and boyish smile lit up Donny’s features.
“Cool. I’ll be looking at rings with May.”
The emerald was impressive and big — 15 carats. Josh kept an eye on the surveillance camera as he extracted it in its chamois bag from the safe, but May and Donny were heads-together over the diamonds, oblivious to all about them.
Donny said to Josh, “We can’t make up our minds over three of these, so if we could see them together...”
Josh unlocked the cabinet, set out the trays with their choices. He kept keen-eyed watch as May examined the rings with awe and wonder on her face.
“Can we... can you set aside... ah... hold all three of them for us until I can get my mom in to help us decide?” Anxiety filled her face and voice. “I mean, if you sold one of them before Mom saw them, well, then I’d always wonder if...”
“We will put them safely aside for you, madam.”
“May darling, you’ll be late for the bridal shower if—”
“Oh my God!” She hugged Donny, kissed him so quickly that she got the air an inch from his face rather than his lips, and careened out of the store on her teetery high heels, one hand holding her ridiculous red hat on her head, calling behind her, “That little bar off the St. Francis lobby at five o’clock.”
Donny leaned eagerly toward Josh. “Okay, let me see it!”
With the solemnity of a medieval bishop bringing out a local saint’s miracle-working gallstone, Josh removed the chamois bag from his pocket. He opened the drawstring. The 15-carat emerald slid out across the felt on the glass top of the display case to lie winking like an idol’s eye in a Sax Rohmer novel.
“Is it all right to pick it up?”
Josh gave him a calculatedly condescending chuckle.
“Certainly. Body acid from your fingers cannot damage a gemstone.” Donny had laid it reverently on his open palm. “It has a typical emerald cut — rectangular girdle with truncated corners. But...” Josh took the stone back, turned it over so it looked like a tiny Aztec pyramid. “See the cuts like steps from the girdle, the flat top of the stone, to the culot at the point? A Portuguese step cut, giving the maximum number of facets when you look down into the stone. Most unusual.”
Josh had expended his emerald expertise. He didn’t know that the low price his boss put on the stone was because of a slight yellow tinge and an occlusion hidden within its depths. But his scanty knowledge seemed all that was needed.
“How... ah, what does it cost?”
Mr. Petrick, Josh knew, would be delighted if he could sell the stone at $12,500 retail. But if Josh could move it for more, Mr. Petrick needn’t hear of the extra money.
“Twenty-five thousand dollars,” he said decisively. “As is. Of course a setting would cost—”
“No, no setting,” exclaimed Donny with a sort of alarm, “I don’t want it made into a ring or anything. Just the emerald itself. So May can choose exactly how she wants to wear it.”
Josh could barely keep the glee and greed from his voice.
“Then you wish to purchase it?”
“Do I... Oh, yeah, sure! It’s so great!”
Josh would not only collect commission on the $12,500 of the sale he was going to tell Mr. Petrick about, but also pocket the entire $12,500 he wasn’t. Now came the sticky part.
“How did you wish to...”
Before Josh’s astounded eyes, Donny jerked up his shirt to show a canvas money belt strapped around his lean middle. From its pockets he began pulling great wads of fifties and hundreds.
“We’ll take the money over to your bank so you can make sure it isn’t counterfeit...” He paused, obviously struck by a thought that alarmed him. “You do gift-wrap, don’t you?”
Fourteen
By day, Woodside wore a much more benign, bucolic aspect than on a dark and stormy night. Green and rolling fields stretched forever, white-fenced, dotted with expensive show horses and rambling homes like English country estates.
Everything bucolic except Larry Ballard’s big mouth.
“I can’t wait to see where you got shot in the rear,” he said from behind the wheel of his truck, not for the first time.
“That’s ear, not rear,” gritted Bart. Man, it would almost have been worth it to walk down here from the City to retrieve his car, rather than have to listen to Ballard.
“But the blood on that Ferrari’s leather driver’s seat suggests you were sitting on your wound—”
“Slow down, slow down, it’s right up here,” snapped Bart.
The Bear Gulch sign seemed quite visible by daylight. A BMW convertible was just turning in. Larry put on his blinker.
“In the inky darkness the owl of death hoots. Blood spurts from Curt Hero’s shot rea—”
“I’m warning you, Ballard.”
They followed the BMW through the opened gate and up the road. Bart’s eldery DKA Ford Taurus was still in the turn-off beside the road. Larry pulled in behind it.
All four tires were flat.
Bart sighed and started to get out. “Don’t say anything, okay? Just call me a tow truck.”
“Now?” Larry got out and punched the Triple-A button on his cell phone. Then he told Bart, “Okay, you’re a tow truck.”
“Hyuk, hyuk, hyuk.” Bart crouched to examine the tires. He straightened up. “Tell Triple-A we’ve got four slashed tires and only one spare. Tow truck driver’s gonna have to bring an extra wheel so he’ll have two tires to tow it in on.”
“How the hell did they know it was your car?”
Bart grimaced in near-agony. “I left Giselle’s hotsheet in plain sight on the front seat.” Before Larry could open his mouth, he added, “Don’t even think about saying it.”
“It,” said Larry, and started laughing so hard he had to repeat everything twice to the Triple-A road service agent.
Never ever live this one down. Never in a thousand years.
Trin Morales plunked himself down across Kearny’s desk from Giselle. Hadn’t slept worth a damn last night.
“What do you have for me?” asked Giselle crisply. She liked Trin a bit better now that some of his cockiness was gone.
“Colton Lewis has skipped from the Russian Hill address,” he said. “No wife, no kids, he was renting furnished.” He made a fly-away gesture with a stubby brown hand. “Vroom. Oklahoma stickers on his suitcase.”
“I doubt that. If he’s driving one of those classic cars, Lewis will be lying doggo somewhere in the City with it. I bet Big John Wiley still thinks of all of those demos as his.”