Chapter 1
“I don’t get it,” Victor Loshak said, not bothering to lower his voice. He cupped his chin and leaned closer to the floral painting, close enough to see the brush strokes, but careful not to step across the border of rough black boundary tape on the floor. He’d already been warned once by a matronly old bulldog patrolling the museum to admire the art from behind the black line. “I see the vaginas, but I can’t make out the flowers.”
Beside him, Jan snorted loudly, then slapped his arm and hissed, “Vick!”
“I’m sorry, but these are violently vaginal paintings. I get that this, uh, Georgia O’Keeffe is from here in Santa Fe, but…”
Jan’s snort veered into a snicker and Loshak smiled. His ex-wife had always been adorably easy to crack up in public places. One mention of genitalia within earshot of a stranger and she was done for. Two mentions all but guaranteed she’d laugh so hard she would cry, which she was now working toward.
Encouraged by her failure at suppressing the snicker, he took a step back and craned his neck so that he was looking down his nose.
“Is it like a magic eye deal?” he asked. “I have to look through the vagina, and the flower will kind of pop out at me?”
She was shaking with laughter now, one hand over her mouth, trying to hold it in.
Loshak gasped and opened his eyes wide, then shook his head. “False alarm. Thought I saw one for a second there, but it was just another clitoris.”
Jan let out a strangled shriek and wiped at her streaming eyes, face almost as red as the Red Canna-vagina in front of them.
She was the only person still alive that Loshak ever felt the urge to be silly around, mainly so he could see her completely lose her shit. Being here with her, making her laugh like this made Loshak feel warm all over. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed that these past few years. The friendship. Even if they could never be together again, never be husband and wife again, he was glad he’d taken the time off to fly down to Santa Fe and help Jan settle into her new place. Rekindling their friendship was worth the vacation days.
There was a lecture going on in the next hall over, standing room only, so they slipped through the back and headed up the stairs, Loshak cringing internally at every slap of his flipflops. He looked and felt ridiculous in the sandals, cargo shorts, and Hawaiian shirt, but the costume had been necessary. When you traveled all the time for work, it was too easy to go into vacation still clocking mental hours. The tourist getup helped his mind downshift from Special Agent Loshak, FBI profiler, to old guy out on the town with his ex-wife. And, stupid as it looked, the change of pace was relieving. He thought he might even be able to sleep in tomorrow.
Upstairs, they wound up in a debuting exhibition Loshak didn’t have to pretend not to get. The drawings there were just differently colored shapes. They looked like something a kindergartener with a ruler could’ve drawn. When Escher put together a tessellation — or hell, even that lady who always did the black and gray textures on white — there was something compelling about the result. Something that pulled you in and refused to let go until you had to tear your eyes away. To Loshak, it looked like the artist of these abominations had glued a couple construction paper squares onto printer paper and called it a day.
Loshak sidled closer to Jan. “What do you think about these?”
Jan cocked her head at the piece in front of them, a yellow square next to a blue square on white, then glanced around the room.
“You know when you eat a birthday cupcake somebody made you and you can tell that person really loves you, like, you can taste it in the cake and see it in the smeary icing? But it just looks like crap? Then next year you order a cake from the supermarket, and it’s right in all the theoretical ways. Perfect coloring, the perfect amount of sugar, your name spelled right… but it’s completely soulless.” She gestured at the yellow and blue scraps. “They look like a guy named Jim at the bakery department in Walmart cooked them up to order when you asked for Matisse’s The Snail.”
“Sort of—” Loshak made a fist and tried out his partner Darger’s jerk-off sign.
“Exactly,” Jan said.
They were about to move on to the next room when Jan’s stomach growled loud enough for Loshak to hear it. She glanced down at her watch.
“Want to blow this joint and go back to that Mexican place? I’m getting hungry, and I think I’m all touristed out for today.”
They had been at it for most of the day, stopping at the local attractions like the Loretto Chapel, making the short walk up to the Cieneguilla Petroglyphs, even drinking too much craft beer at lunch under the excuse that they were on vacation.
Loshak nodded. “Fine by me as long as we can go to the bug museum tomorrow. I want to see if they have any Death’s-head moths.”
Jan smirked and rolled her eyes at the Silence of the Lambs joke, turning to go.
“Excuse me,” a grating voice snapped.
Before Loshak could look around the room for its source, a black-haired woman in a pencil skirt and print shirt had wedged herself between them.
“Excuse me, but just what do you think gives you any right to roll your eyes at me? If you disagree with me about these paintings being inspired by Manet, then have the backbone to say so to my face.”
Jan glanced at Loshak as if to ask whether this was some kind of joke. “I wasn’t rolling my eyes at you. I didn’t even see you. But I think you’re thinking of someone besides Manet. He was an Impressionist.”
“Well, you just think you’re too cool for school, don’t you?” The little woman planted one hand on her hip, making a duck-like shape with the other and pointing its beak at Jan. “I’ll have you know, I studied art for a semester, missy, and I am a major contributor to NPR.”
“You must be an expert, then,” Jan said in the flat voice Loshak recognized as her screw-off for people she thought were too stupid to catch her insults. If they didn’t get out of here soon, she would get nasty enough for any idiot to understand.
“Let’s all just calm down for a second,” Loshak said, raising his hands to both women.
The black-haired woman looked like she was about to blow a gasket, eyes going wide enough to show white all around.
“No need to calm down,” Jan replied. She gave the woman an exaggeratedly gracious head nod. “We were just leaving. Please, don’t let us stop you from explaining how these squares were obviously inspired by Water Lilies.”
With that, Jan tried to breeze past, but the smaller woman stepped in front of her, blocking the route to the stairs. That little duckhand came back, pecking at the air.
“Only a Palestinian would be so ignorant about something as beautiful as this homage to cubism.”
Jan barked out a laugh. “Okay, that’s either really xenophobic or you mean ‘philistine.’”
“Don’t tell me what I mean!” the woman screeched.
“Molly, come on.” A red-faced guy with a shiny forehead slipped past Jan and tried to take the woman’s arm, smiling this weird little smile.
Loshak noticed the guy was doing the slow sway of someone who’d had a little too much craft beer himself. His eyes were practically crossing.
“Let’s go back downstairs and listen to the pottery guy.”
“No, Paul, I will not be run out of my own museum by some hussy—”
“Your museum?” Paul blinked a few times as if he weren’t sure he’d heard right. “You donated ten dollars to them one time. Like five years ago.”
“I am a lifelong patron of the arts.” Molly stared at Jan while she said it, as if Jan were the one who had contradicted her claim of ownership over the place.
“Come on.” Loshak touched Jan’s elbow, hoping to convey that there wasn’t anything to be gained by arguing with someone who obviously wanted to appear grandiose and in control. To Molly there, this was her world, they were all just living in it. “I think there’s another exit through here.”
Jan nodded and took his arm. “Good idea, Vick. Wouldn’t want to take up any more of the patron of the art’s valuable time.”
For a second, Loshak thought the other woman was going to slap Jan. He was about to step between them when Molly’s glare morphed into a combination of surprise and awe.
“Oh my God, you’re that guy!” Her voice shot up an octave. She fluttered her hand against her husband’s arm. “Paul, it’s that profiler guy from the news! The one who shot Zakarian the Barbarian down in Miami last month!”...
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