He had caveman tendencies. It wouldn’t be beyond him to just take the damn scanner and try to ship her out. He wouldn’t get far with getting rid of her, but she could save them both the wear and tear of him finding that out by just keeping her secret to herself.

“Senator Leonard must be paying you one helluva commission.”

“Top-notch,” she agreed.

“Bull,” he said.

“Whatever.”

He held an open bag of chips out, and she reached in and got a handful.

Sharing coffee, eating chips and cookies, they both watched the gallery and the Range Rover and the whores.

“I could pay you more.”

That’s all he said, sitting over there dangling bait, and yes, she knew he could. General Grant was paying her twenty plus tactical support, and Dax had both those and more to offer. He’d done well in his business, whatever his business was-which she was guessing was more than the art-recovery-type investigations he’d done with Esmee. The guy had money.

Without biting on his offer, she handed the coffee back to him and reached for her bottle of water.

“And here we go,” he said, leaning slightly forward in his seat, picking up the binoculars she’d donated to the cause.

Ponce and his boys were coming out.

She looked at each man, carefully cataloguing what she saw, and knew he was doing the same. Neither one of them said a word, until the Range Rover pulled away from the gallery and drove off.

He lowered the binoculars and looked over at her. “What did you get?”

“Nothing.” She shook her head.

“Nothing,” he agreed. “They came out empty-handed. Let’s go.”

Three minutes later, back in the alley behind Beranger’s, Dax started prying open the makeshift security gate someone had attached to the Old Gallery’s delivery door. The sun was going down, the alley was still piled with garbage, and Suzi, Dax noticed, was taking a pen-shaped object out of her fanny pack. After getting a look at it, he lifted his gaze to her face.

Geezus, she was beautiful. Beautiful and, he was sure, guilty as hell-of something, standing there holding the small piece of equipment like it was a wand, pen-shaped, yes, but with a readout display and a couple of pressure switches.

“What is that?” he asked, leaning into the length of rebar he was using as a lever on the iron bars. Walking in the front door, where Ponce and his men had come out, would have been nominally easier, but Suzi probably had the top spot on Ciudad del Este’s Most Wanted list for another couple of hours at least. By midnight, for certain, some other horrendous crime, or probably half a dozen, would have taken place and knocked her into yesterday’s old news. Until then, parading her through the lineup of Colony Club whores and pimps taking over the block and congregating in front of the gallery was not in their best interest, and besides, it just wasn’t all that difficult to get into Beranger’s Old Gallery.

“Well, actually,” the beautiful redhead said, “it’s a scanner…for an, uh, RFID tag.”

To her credit, she dropped that bomb without stumbling around too much, and it was one helluva bomb. Right. A scanner.

He stopped with the rebar in his hands, just holding it between the bars of the gate, and looked at her.

Looked at her hard.

“You’ve been holding out on me.”

“A little,” she admitted.

Sonuva-gee-fricking-bitch. There was only one thing in Beranger’s damn gallery worth tagging with a radio frequency identification chip, the Memphis Sphinx, and sure as hell that was the only damn thing she was searching for in this dump-and the lucky girl just happened to have a scanner for it in her pocket?

Oh, baby, that was a huge can of worms.

“So where’s the chip?” As if he didn’t know.

“On the Sphinx.”

Yeah, she said it with a straight face.

“Excellent. Great.” He pushed on the rebar again, giving it his all, and the rusted-out lock on the gate gave in and busted apart. “So we’ll be able to find this thing in record time and get the hell back out of here, right?”

Her answer to that was an elongated pause.

“Theoretically,” she finally said.

Theoretically.

Absofuckinglutely amazing, and geezus, what a cool piece of action she really was-all this time, in possession of a freaking scanner to pick up the signal off a chip someone had adhered to or embedded in the statue.

And wasn’t that suddenly the biggest mystery in the whole damn day-who?

No art dealer, no antiquities smuggler, that was for damn sure, and he was betting no senator from Illinois either. He’d known she was lying about a few things, but the sheer scope of her subterfuge had just hit cosmic proportions.

And she’d been good at it, damn good. She made him look like an amateur. A smart guy would pay attention to a fact like that, but somehow, he knew he’d been smarter earlier in the day, before she’d shown up-and wasn’t that just the damn way of it.

He pulled a pair of lockpicks out of his shirt pocket and went to work on the main delivery door.

“Theoretically?” he repeated. “What’s the matter? Doesn’t it work?”

“I’m not sure. I got a hit when I was in here with Remy,” she said, and he heard her unzip something-and hell, yes, that was enough to get him to turn around and look.

“Do you want some light on that?” She was pulling a flashlight out of her fanny pack.

Fanny pack, not her pants. Right. He needed his head examined-and he was starting to get real impressed with her kit, what she’d brought, and what she’d not. Everything she’d pulled out had been damn useful.

“Yes.” Geezus. “A hit?” And he was filing that under the day’s nearly empty category called “Good News,” about a hundred steps down from where he’d filed “First Kiss.”

She turned the flashlight on and held the beam on the door’s lock while he slid the picks into the mechanism.

“More like half a hit,” she said. “We were in his Chapel Room, at the bottom of the stairs where you were on the second floor. I thought the scanner was malfunctioning, that it didn’t work, and then just as the cops were coming in, it signaled a GPS location.”

“GPS,” he repeated, and felt the locking mechanism release.

She nodded.

And he swore.

RFID scanners, chips, and GPS, hell, she was light-years ahead of him on this deal.

He opened the door and then just stopped for a second, waiting for the first wave of heat and stench to wash over him. It was bad, old Remy cooking in the heat for a few hours, and if Suzi didn’t lose her lunch in the place, he was going to get her a gold star or something.

“An RFID tag on a four-thousand-year-old Egyptian statue,” he said, pulling his own flashlight out. “I didn’t realize the ancient Egyptians had that kind of technology.” It wasn’t a question, but he sure as hell expected an answer.

“They were very advanced.”

No shit.

“Not that advanced, Sugar.” He slid the beam of his flashlight down the inside wall, found a light switch, and gave it a flip. Nothing happened, which racked up another el perfecto in his day. This wasn’t going to work. “Why don’t you give me the scanner and just wait outside.” Sometimes he didn’t know much about women, and sometimes he knew even less, but he knew she’d be happier if she didn’t go inside the gallery. It was dark, dangerously haphazard with broken everything all over the floor, and it reeked.

The only answer he got was a short laugh, very short.

Okay, she could have it her way-almost.

He looked over his shoulder and met her gaze.

“Remy’s dead, Suzi. The cops killed him when they busted in the gallery this afternoon, and from the smell, I’m pretty sure he’s still in here. Are you sure you’re up for this?”

“Ah, hell,” she said, closing her eyes and suddenly looking very weary.

Yeah, it had been a long day, and poor dead Remy was just one more hurdle-but it wasn’t enough to send her packing, and she should have been running the other way the minute the cops had first busted into Galeria Viejo.