Next, he pulled a long, clear plastic tube out of his briefcase and slipped it through the hole. The dog almost immediately began tugging on it, and Asprey was about an inch from losing the whole thing before he caught the stubby end.
“Next time, extra tubing,” he muttered. “Check.”
He affixed a bright red funnel to his end, securing it swiftly with duct tape—a beer bong of the finest craftsmanship known to mankind. After taking a long pull from the bottle of gin he grabbed from the briefcase, he began slugging the alcohol through to the other side.
“Vile stuff,” he said, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “I don’t know what is wrong with you, dog. At your mommy’s income, at least have the decency to prefer a nicely aged scotch. Or even a stout ale.”
The tugging came a little fiercer now, which Asprey could only assume meant the dog was chugging the stuff fast enough to make his frat brothers proud. About half the bottle in, he stopped, not sure if the dog would continue lapping it off the floor until he fell into an alcoholic stupor—also much like his frat brothers—or if it preferred a nice ceramic bowl handcrafted from Spain or something.
A noise from the end of the hall startled Asprey into shooting to his feet, yanking the gin bong with him. He’d just tucked it behind his back when a door pulled open and shut again, a newspaper making a quick disappearance from the doorstep.
Crisis averted.
But that was only the first one. From inside the apartment, a series of sharp yips signaled that the plan was already working. Asprey grabbed the wooden plug Poppy had whittled down to size and stopped the hole, careful to cover it with another plug they’d cut out of wainscoting of a similar hue.
He kicked at the carpet to brush away the last of the debris and stood. It looked pretty good.
With a cheerful hop and a whistle, he made his way to the end of the hall. The plan was working.
He hid himself on the far end of the floor, in a small, offset bay window that looked out over the park. Anyone paying attention would see a man in a suit taking in the sights of the round of deliveries and security guards arguing down below. But he was counting on no one paying attention—at least not right away. He needed to use the flexibility garnered through his years of yoga to wedge himself up against the window when—plan willing—Mrs. Partridge came out to inspect the noise.
That happened exactly six minutes later. It was a wonder it took that long—he could hear the dog barking from all the way down the corridor. Poppy hadn’t been lying when she said that creature had a voice.
After stepping carefully onto the window frame, Asprey flattened his body against the cool glass, using his arms on either side to stabilize him. His face pressed against the window, increasing his range of vision enough so that he could see the window washer’s scaffolding set up outside, the frame of it set within reach of Cindy’s window. If he strained just so, he could also see a streak of black moving through the far end of the park. Poppy. There was no way in hell Tiffany had that kind of speed.
“Jasmine, precious!” Mrs. Partridge’s shrill cries were almost as bad as the dog’s. “Are you having a bad time, little dear? Did Mommy go out and leave you all day for her big office downtown?”
The jangling of keys and some low mumbling were like music to his ears. Thank the gods of robbery for good neighbors and single women. And for Poppy laying all the groundwork.
Asprey’s neck was getting a kink, so he adjusted it a little. The dog’s barks had lost some of their volubility, and he could no longer hear Mrs. Partridge cooing, so he carefully lowered himself to the floor, being careful to grab his briefcase. With a quick, furtive glance, he scanned the hallway. It was empty.
But not for long.
The original plan had been to walk by the hopefully open door to the apartment and slip a cover over the deadbolt frame so that it couldn’t fully lock when Mrs. Partridge exited with or without the dog. It was risky, and there were quite a few things that could go wrong with that plan, but the fates that ruled over heists must have been smiling down on them. Just as Asprey was about to get the deadbolt cover in his palm, Cindy’s dog dashed out the door and made a beeline for the elevators on the other end of the corridor.
Mrs. Partridge followed at a clipped pace, her arms outstretched.
Asprey moved, unwilling to lose the moment. He ducked into the open door of the apartment and took a quick survey. All but a few drops of the gin remained, the dog having done a fairly good job of cleaning up. There was a fairly substantial pile of sawdust, and Asprey took a moment to scoop it up and kick his foot over what remained.
The bedroom seemed like the safest place to go, so he followed the mental map he’d created from Poppy’s blueprints. Dropping to his stomach, he slid underneath the bed, tucked his briefcase by his side, and prepared to wait.
“You naughty little puppy.” Mrs. Partridge’s voice returned to the apartment, and Asprey could hear the keys jangling again. “We’ll keep you cozy until Mommy gets home, how about that?”
The door slammed shut, and the lock clicked. It was almost too easy.
It
was
too easy.
Asprey knew the painting was in the kitchen, and he made his way there as soon as the coast was officially clear. As Poppy had described, the rest of the apartment was almost sterile in its cleanliness and lack of décor, but life actually touched down in the kitchen’s interior. Some kind of half-eaten, freshly baked pie sat on the counter next to an empty plate and a cozy mystery that bore the inevitable creases of use. The smell of morning coffee still filled the air, and a table with hand-woven placemats stood at a half-cocked angle under the enormous Pollock.
He stopped.
He’d seen a Pollock before, of course. And Caravaggios and da Vincis and Monets and Manets and any number of modern artists who had yet to reach the same kind of distinction. It came with the art appraisal territory and with the life of privilege Poppy liked to constantly rub in his face.
But this painting was something else—it was something more. Maybe it was because most of his experience of fine art was in museums and the sterile homes of the wealthy, not unlike the rest of Cindy’s apartment, but the warm kitchen, with one wall almost entirely taken up in the dizzying pattern of reds and browns, rendered him speechless.
So that’s why she keeps it in the kitchen.
It felt like home here.
Swallowing his pang of regret, Asprey pulled out the razor blade tucked carefully in his back pocket and stepped up to the painting, running his hands along the outer edge.
Even though he knew the painting was a fake, it seemed wrong to stab the blade into the canvas. The only way he could get it out of there was to shred it in a series of ten one-foot strips. He’d roll each one up as tight as it would go and toss them down the garbage chute on his way out. If all went well, they could get to the garbage dumpsters to collect and hide the evidence before anyone caught on.
Bracing himself for the first rip, Asprey took a deep breath, allowing himself to take in the painting one last time. The colors were typical of Pollock in the forties, bright but also muted, the fractal patterns providing most of the brilliance, the colors secondary to the technique. On a fake like this one, the colors were probably pigments that hadn’t existed prior to 1950, and the layers of carefully controlled paint splatters not quite the mathematical genius that had made Pollock so famous.
It was an incredible forgery, though. Asprey leaned closer, allowing his fingers to graze over the painting, the raised surface of decades-old oil paint grounding him to the spot.
Something isn’t right.
He peered closer. Although he didn’t have any of his equipment on him, there was a telltale crackling to the paint, where time and age had broken down some of the largest raised surfaces. It was possible to fake that, of course, especially with a high-end forgery that applied heat in the right proportion—and even more easily here in the kitchen, where additional moisture would do its damage. But that kind of warping was always too systematic, too controlled, a lot like a Pollock in its own right.
This was natural warping. This was too close to similar paintings he’d examined in the past, always looking for signs of authenticity.
This wasn’t a fake.
Asprey tucked the razor away, surprised to find his hands were shaking. He couldn’t be a hundred percent sure, of course—not without a lab and a thorough examination somewhere with better lighting. But if he was asked to make an initial guess, stick with his gut reaction, he’d say this was the real thing.
Reading people, reading paintings—those were the two things he could do.
Or so he’d always thought.
Asprey reached for his cell phone, unsure who, exactly, he was supposed to call. Cindy? Winston? The college professor who had first introduced him to the postmodern abstracts? For some reason, the voice he most wanted to hear at that moment belonged to Poppy, a woman who knew nothing about art but who could make him feel a thousand times better about his unerring faith in humanity.
“I’m so sorry, Asp.” A familiar voice behind him caused Asprey to whirl, his phone clattering noisily to the ground. “I didn’t think you’d get this far. You’re better at this than I thought.”
The last thing Asprey thought before a heavy cudgel came crashing down on his head was that surprise was an emotion they both shared in that moment. Probably the only one.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“It’s taking too long.”
Poppy and Tiffany watched the apartment building from the far side of the park, using their ridiculous twin ninja suits to blend into the shrubbery. Heavy rain clouds obscured what was left of the setting sun, replacing the gray sky with an encroaching, inky blue.
At least that’s one benefit to dressing up like kids at Halloween
. Unless someone was looking explicitly for them, they were hard to spot.
“Maybe he had a hard time getting into the apartment or something,” Tiffany suggested. She scanned the park, and Poppy could see the other woman’s doubt in the small opening where her eyes peeked through. “We haven’t seen any cops or heard sirens yet, so no one has called the police. That’s a good sign.”
Poppy shook her head and ripped off her mask. It was getting suffocating in there anyway. “Cindy will be home any minute—we can’t risk her walking in on him in the middle of the job. I think I should go in. The doorman knows me. I might at least be able to get up to the floor, find out what’s going on.”
“No way.” Tiffany tore her mask off too, offering Poppy an apologetic smile. “Asprey made me promise that no matter what else happens, you’re not allowed to go inside. I’m supposed to use force to restrain you if I have to.”
Poppy couldn’t help laughing. “What kind of force did he have in mind?”
“He didn’t get that far. But I’m pretty inventive. I think I saw some poison ivy over there.”
“I’ll be good and save you the trouble,” Poppy promised. “I just wish there was some way to know if he was still inside or not. I’d try calling his cell, but for all we know, he left the ringer on. That wouldn’t go over well in a compromising situation.”
“Well…” Tiffany’s face flushed and she wrinkled her nose. “There might be one thing we can do.”
Poppy grabbed Tiffany by the shoulders, stopping just short of shaking her. Maybe she was more wound up than she realized, but she hated being so ineffective. The last time she’d let her partner go in on the job alone, things hadn’t ended well—and Bea was a professional.
“What is it?” Poppy asked, reining herself in.
“You know how you got all mad the other day and said we couldn’t bug you anymore without your permission?”
She didn’t like where this was going. “Ye-es.”
“Well, Asprey might have asked if maybe I’d do it one more time. Just to keep you safe during the heist. You know, in case something happened.”
“Where is it?”
Tiffany pointed at Poppy’s wrist. “He had me sew it into the hem of your ninja suit.”
“Fucking Asprey.” Poppy ripped at her sleeve, not stopping until a tiny round piece of metal not unlike a watch battery fell out. She was about to drop it and crush it under her heel when Tiffany plucked it out of her hand.
“It’s a really nice bug. Please don’t.”
Poppy crossed her arms and did her best to look intimidating. “I can’t believe you let him talk you into that—I thought we were
friends
. And how is my being bugged going to help us right now?”
Tiffany smiled and inclined her head to the back entrance of the park, where they’d parked Poppy’s car with all their equipment. “I thought it wasn’t very fair, us keeping tabs on just you—especially after you asked us not to. So I planted one on Asprey too. To make it even.”
Poppy could have kissed her. “Are you serious?”
Tiffany sprang to her feet and began climbing out of the bushes. Poppy followed suit, and they both tried to appear normal as an elderly couple took one look at their strange, unmarked clothes and veered the opposite direction.
“It won’t give us all the answers, but at least we’ll know where he is.”
Poppy breathed a sigh of relief. She didn’t need all the answers—she’d probably never have those. She just needed to know that Asprey was safe.