The Sapphire Affair (Jewel #1)(12)
CHAPTER FOUR
Ah, dive bars were the best.
Pink Pelican rocked that vibe like nobody’s business. He could picture this spot fitting in perfectly in Key Largo. Hell, he could practically be in the Keys right now. The wood walls were lined with seashells. Jack Johnson played from a stereo system. A dartboard hung on a wall at the far side of the joint. The whole place smelled of beer.
Translation: heaven.
Add in the talkative Marie, and this stop had been nothing but good news. The bartender with a long mess of brown hair braided tightly was friendly and chatty. With a few well-placed questions that didn’t give him away, he learned some key details about the nightclub at the end of the block—info that couldn’t be gleaned online. Jake would visit it later when the moon rose high in the sky and see if he could get a bead on whether Eli was hiding his art there. Hell, the guy might have turned the art into cash already and fed those greenbacks into the club.
Either way, he couldn’t sniff around now at five in the evening. Stopping by a club at this early-bird hour would make him stick out like a sore thumb, so it was break time. Blending in was essential on a job like this on a small island, and Jake did his best to look like a man on vacation in the Caymans. He’d contemplated playing the part of the finance man, but he didn’t seem like a guy who worked in the shade. He was a man who worked in the sun, so he’d decided on the easiest cover-up of all—one that could be true. He was thirty-year-old Jake Harlowe, former soldier, now in the “recovery” business, and here on a fishing trip with his buddies. Marie was an avid fisherwoman, so they’d exchanged tales of the ones they’d caught and the ones that had gotten away.
“Tomorrow should be a great day on the water,” Marie said as she wiped the counter. “I bet you’ll have a fantastic haul. Marlins and groupers galore.”
“Excellent. That’s what I want to hear.”
“What else will you do while in town? Snorkel trip? Dive? Stingray kiss?”
He arched an eyebrow at the last one but quickly answered her, resting his elbows on the bar. “Let me tell you something. I’ve always wanted some island art. Gonna just come right out and admit it,” he said, as if he were confessing, even though he was clearly teasing. “It’s kinda like a thing of mine. Some painting of a fish jumping out of the water,” he said, gesturing to the right, to indicate the art gallery run by Eli’s new woman. He’d wandered past it earlier and gotten an eyeful of unframed canvases of angles, squares, and trapezoids in a showing of modern geometric art by an artist name Lynx. Yup. One of those one-name-only artistic types. A bunch of the frames had SOLD signs on them with a price tag of either $5,000 or $10,000. Too hard to tell from his quick visit if any of those canvases were the ones Eli had ferried out of the United States or, frankly, if said art would even be hanging on the wall at a gallery. But he wanted a local’s opinion on the gallery, and no one was more local than a bartender. “Is that what I can get a few doors down?”
She whipped her head back and forth. “No way. You find that kind of stuff at cheap little tourist shops—” She clasped her hand on her mouth. Her brown eyes widened in embarrassment. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to seem like I’m saying bad things about tourists.”
Jake laughed and reassured her. “You’re all good. You’ll have to work pretty hard to offend me.”
She wiped her hand across her brow. “Phew. I’m always just saying whatever comes to mind,” she said, then dropped her voice to a whisper, since the bar was starting to fill up with other customers. “Not always the best trait for a bartender. Anyway, that gallery is more for fancier things.”
Privately, he wondered precisely how fancy. Like $10 million fancy.
“Like my Renoir?” he asked drily.
She shot him a curious stare. “You better be joking. You don’t really have a Renoir, do you?”
“Maybe I do. He was famous for his fishing scenes, right?”
Marie picked up the baton easily. “I believe the Louvre has some of those, don’t they? Anyway, the gallery sells some fancy stuff, but nothing on that level. If you decide you want to turn that Renoir into diamonds instead, we’ve got plenty of shops for that, too.”
“You’ve got a big diamond business on the Islands, right?”
“That we do. The great thing is when you buy one in the Caymans, it’s tax-free. Business here is booming. All along the main street, and even the little shops on the side streets near the banks. Down on Wayboard Street—those guys have the best deals,” she said, washing some glasses.
“So Wayboard Street is where I should go after I sell my Renoir to the lady next door?” he said with a wink.
“Absolutely,” she said, pointing far off in the distance, as if to show him the street. “You pass this swank restaurant Tristan’s, take a right, take your next right, and”—she stopped to issue a dramatic pause, fluttering her fingers like she was onstage—“and prepare to be dazzled.”
He laughed and filed that data in the mental banks.
A group of new customers walked in, so Marie scurried to the tables, and Jake took out his phone and entered some notes. He finished his beer, tossed some bills on the bar, then some extra for Marie. That woman was a gold mine so far.