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Sure, it was early, but I hadn’t expected the woman to greet me in her underwear. Most surprisingly, though, was the fact that her face was so genuinely full of relief to see me, so open and alluring, that I hadn’t even noticed her state of undress at first. I think we both realized at the same time the faux pas happening in real time, but I couldn’t help myself, I had to look her over at least once.
I had looked her up before leaving to come to Texas, but the pictures online didn’t do her justice. In the photos, she was still and unmoving, a gorgeous statue. There in front of me she was alive, dynamic, and looking at me like I was the answer to all her prayers.
And I’ll be damned if her legs didn’t go on forever. And that ass. There are just no words to describe how fucking perfect it really is.
I’d like to think myself enough of a seasoned professional that I wouldn’t fall for a honeypot scheme, and the fact that she fled to get dressed immediately, face and neck flushed a cherry-red, led me to believe it was an honest mistake.
I tried to interrogate her, I really did. But the problem was that I had a soft spot for women. It’s one of the reasons I’m in this situation to begin with.
Stone Security is my company and, as I assured Rachel, it was a real, legitimate business. The only caveat being that my services were usually bought by wealthy clients who may or may not be doing business in a not-so-legal fashion. But that was none of my business. I was just supposed to provide security.
If I had to have some of my employees come out and physically remove trespassers sometimes, what of it? Or if they needed a little firearm motivation to leave, that was on them, not me.
All in a day's work.
Stone Security was pretty straightforward, but one thing my employees and I didn’t do is private investigator work. I certainly didn’t put my neck out against huge crime syndicates, but with family involved, what else was I supposed to do?
“How did you get involved with whatever Trevor was involved in?” Rachel asked, after she had finished listing all the off-the-wall things her late fiancé had done.
“It’s a long story,’ I hedged, not wanting to get into it with someone who was potentially uninvolved. It wasn’t a lie, either. Itwasa long story.
Every step of the way, the scale of this problem got bigger and bigger, and now I was in the middle of something that could get me killed.
It all started when my sister Nellie married a prick.
No one in my family liked Geoff, but Nellie was the baby of the family, and if she was happy, then we were happy for her. No one could deny that Geoff went all out for Nellie, either. Big houses, new cars, the works. Nellie never wanted for anything,
The problem was that we had no idea what Geoff did for a living. I’m no stranger to slightly questionable employment, but whatever Geoff was doing had graduated from questionable to against the law. He still kept Nellie pampered and cared for, and did the same for his two daughters when they were born, but my sister saw less and less of her husband as the years went on.
It wasn’t until Geoff was in deep shit and reached out to me that I discovered the depths of what he had gotten himself into, and in turn, now had my sister entangled with, too.
It turned out Geoff, and his business partner Trevor, were art appraisers who worked for one of the biggest drug trafficking organizations in New York City, the Dark Hand Syndicate. The two business partners weren’t working in the drug dealing part of the operation, though. They were both legitimately talented art experts, so their jobs were to buy stolen art from thieves and smugglers, using money from the Syndicate, and then sell them back to unsuspecting rich idiots to hang in their mansions and immediately forget about.
The profit went back to the Syndicate, with a small portion set aside for Trevor and Geoff. It was the perfect way to launder money, and occasionally they came across some pieces that would sell for millions, greatly pleasing the leader of the organization, a mobster called Shadow.
It was a sweet gig, and I couldn’t believe they would be stupid enough to try to cross the crime syndicate that was so generously lining their pockets, but whatever they received in a shipment about a year ago changed something in both of them. It made them greedy and foolish, two things that never go well together.
I didn’t know exactly what the item was, only that it was buried deep inside a straw-lined wooden crate full of nearly-worthless junk. They had been ready to call it a loss and blacklist the seller when they found something wrapped in burlap under everything else.
Geoff recalled that as soon as he undid the burlap wrapping, hefeltsomething off about the relic. It was about a foot long, made of a reflective ebony stone; a statue carved in the shape of Anubis, the Egyptian jackal-shaped god of the dead. The entire headdress that the small statue wore was made of pure gold, as well as the crook and flail in Anubis’s crossed arms.
They had found more spectacular things before, and the Anubis statuette wouldn’t have been all that impressive in the public’s eye, but Geoff and Trevor knew better. They knew this was an ancient artifact, something that had been illegally pilfered from a ransacked tomb decades ago. It seemed to radiate dark energy, Geoff had told me, and while he had been repulsed by the thing on an instinctual level, they both knew that sold to the right buyer, this artifact would earn them enough money to live in luxury for the rest of their lives.
Thinking on their feet, Trevor and Geoff marked off the shipment the artifact had come in as a total loss, and listed it as having been discarded. If the Dark Hand Syndicate ever found out their art appraisers were stealing from them, there would be hell to pay, but they never thought this little relic could ruin their lives.
The two men had only ever been able to find one mention of the artifact, in a journal from the 1920s from a lesser-known Egyptologist of the time. There was a rough sketch of the statue, along with the description,
“This sculpture, barely larger than a foot in length, was found miles out into the desert in the possession of two long deceased graverobbers, now just skeletons in the sand. They had a sack with a few items that had presumably been stolen from a tomb, but for whatever reason, the two men had died with all their arms wrapped around the sculpture.
The relic was an effigy of the god Anubis, carved in black basalt and gilded with gold. We would have taken it back with us, but the local scientists that were traveling alongside us refused vehemently, insisting the artifact was cured. It pained me to leave it out in the elements, so I have marked its location on a map for later retrieval.”
Such an obscure artifact, especially one with a reputation of being cursed, should have been an easy sell. Time was of the essence to rid themselves of the statue. The longer they kept it, the more chances of the Syndicate finding out about their deception. They even priced it slightly under what it was really worth, but to their horror, no buyer would come near the thing.
Egyptian buyers, that usually wouldn’t worry about the legality of such a fine, ghosted Trevor and Geoff as soon as they were sent a picture of the Anubis statue. Buyers in the West were more interested, but every time they were able to get someone in a room with it to negotiate a price, the buyer would immediately lose interest and ask to leave.
To no one’s surprise, this begins to cause tension between Trevor and Geoff. In my opinion, Geoff was the smarter of the two, but a coward, while Trevor was more ballsy, but rash. It was Trevor’s idea to split up, and keep the artifact moving between the two of them so they wouldn’t get caught. They were having to put out feelers deeper and deeper into the shadier areas of the illegal art trade, the cost of the statue dropping week by week. The two men were becoming desperate to get rid of it, and at the same time, both hated keeping the statue in their home.
Then, just as they had feared, one of the members of the Dark Hand caught wind that their resident art appraisers were selling something pretty significant on the side, and under direction from gang leader Shadow himself, was sent to investigate. It didn’t take much digging to determine that the Anubis relic had originally been meant for the Syndicate, and that Trevor and Geoff had stolen it.
