Page 5 of Beautiful Savage
"Yes, yes, sorry —" He scrambles to pack and knocks over the water glass. The water runs across the lower corner of the blockbefore he can right it. The paint there bleeds — the bougainvillea blooms at the edge smear into a long pink streak, ragged at its outer rim. His hands are too shaky to dab at it. The rest of the painting is untouched. He grabs his jacket, brushes, and paint tray. Leaves the block where it sits, the streak still spreading.
"Thank you," he says, though I have not done anything worth thanking for.
He backs toward the gate. Nearly trips.
"Sorry, I won't —"
"Go."
He goes. Fast. The gate clangs shut behind him.
I look at the watercolor block. The streak has slowed where the paper soaked up the excess water — a ragged pink wash across the lower-left corner, the blooms there gone into smear. The rest is clean. The bench structure, the flower cascade, the back wall, citrus tree, all rendered with a precision that makes my jaw clench. The bench with my buried box is now documented.
My hand goes to the block before I have decided why. I pick it up. Water runs off the corner onto the stone. I carry it inside with the coffee. The old man's fear was real, but fear does not mean innocence. Nobody paints this detailed without paying attention to more than flowers.
Logan is at his desk in his office on the mezzanine, one of the security feeds pulled up on his screen. He glances at the watercolor and raises an eyebrow, but doesn't ask. He knows I'm not one for idle chit-chat, and I appreciate that about him.
I set down my coffee, and the painting. The humid morning air followed me in. Jasmine and heat.
"Peytone flagged something you'll want to take a look at, Gunner." He turns the screen toward me. "There's a twenty-three minute gap in the security footage at the loading dock, three nights back. From two-fourteen to two-thirty-seven."
I move closer. The timestamp jumps clean. No glitch. No static.
"It was replaced with a loop," he says, reading from Peytone's notes. "Earlier footage, from the same night."
I grunt.
"Professional job," I agree.
Security for the Delgado operations throughout Miami is my responsibility. Not just here at the club, but at the docks too. And nobody takes their responsibilities more seriously than I do.
I'll have to run the security footage again, looking for buffer level insertion, check for firmware access. Try to figure out exactly what level of professional we're dealing with. And exactly how deep the shit is that we're currently standing in.
Peytone's good at this stuff, but I'm better.
My phone vibrates. Erika Leibnitz from JAG. She never calls me unless she has a damn good reason.
"Yeah," I say.
"Morning, Gunner. How are you?"
I just grunt in reply. She didn't call me to discuss my health.
"I have some bad news, I'm afraid," she says.
"Spill it."
"You asked me to keep an ear out for activity around your ex-Army commander, Morten Hallstein, and his name is coming up."
My knuckles crack as my fist forms.
"And?"
"He's being floated for a new Pentagon advisory commission on military justice reform."
Hallstein? Military justice? That's an oxymoron. Having that man reform military justice is like having an alligator lead a committee on rights for catfish.
I scoff, and Logan looks up sharply. That's not a sound I usually make.
