St Kilda Consulting 04 - Blue Smoke and Murder

paintings?”
    “Only pictures I have are family photos and such. What use are they to you?”
    He stepped up so close she had to put a crick in her neck just to see the vague, blurred line of his mouth through the slit in the mask. If he had a neck, it was as thick as his upper arms.
    “Don’t make me hurt you,” he warned. “Where are the paintings?”
    “I’m near ninety. Pain doesn’t scare me.”
    Score smiled slowly. “Yeah? How long will you be able to live here alone with every finger in your hands broken?”
    Modesty made a small sound. Her greatest fear was being hauled off to some state institution to die with strangers puking and screaming around her.
    I’ll walk off a cliff first. But I’ll go knowing that Jillian will be one Breck woman who won’t have to depend on some damn man to survive.
    Those paintings are her future.
    “The only painting I have is the one I sent to an art dealer outside Salt Lake a month ago,” Modesty said. “He wrote me the other week, said he sent it out for more opinions, and some fool lost it.”
    The man’s mouth curled into a small smile. “You told the dealer there were twelve more paintings. Where are they?”
    “I lied. Wanted him to think I’d give him more business.”
    “I don’t believe you.” More important, Score’s client didn’t believe her.
    The grandfather clock in the living room chimed, marking off the hours.
    “Last warning,” he said. The surgical gloves he wore made his fists look huge, like pale bludgeons. “You’re going to get hurt bad.”
    “Won’t be the first time.”
    Score gave her an openhanded slap, not enough to knock her down but enough to make her ears ring. He caught her when shestaggered. She winced when his fingers pressed tendon against bone.
    “Listen,” he said, “I don’t get off hurting old ladies, but I do what I have to. Where are the paintings?”
    “Who sent you?” she asked.
    His smile was as thin as a razor. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”
    “Bet I can guess,” she said.
    “And if you guessed right, I’d still have to kill you,” he said, laughing at the old joke. Then his voice hardened. He smacked her again, carefully, aware of her frail bones and his pumped-up strength. “So cut the crap and tell me where the paintings are.”
    “How do I know you won’t kill me anyway?”
    He stared at her for a long moment, eyes narrowed. “You’d bargain with the devil, wouldn’t you?”
    “I’ve lived my own life on my own terms,” Modesty said, the words stronger than her thin voice, as strong as the fingers biting into her upper arms. “I’m not going to change now. And if you kill me, you’ll never find those paintings.”
    “Now we’re getting somewhere,” Score said beneath his breath. “You admit they exist.”
    “This house was built by pioneers, people who lived alone and protected themselves. They built hidey-holes that even the Paiutes couldn’t find.”
    “No problem. You’re going to show them to me.”
    “The hell I am.”
    “Remember when you’re screaming that I gave you a choice.”
    He released one of her arms and reached into the side pocket of his coveralls. When his hand came out, it held a strip of hard white plastic, like a short, thin belt with a tongue at one end and a locking catch at the other.
    Modesty could see enough to recognize it. She used plastic cableties on the ranch all the time. They were handy and strong, the modern version of baling wire. Real good at tying things together.
    Like wrists.
    Swallowing past the dryness in her mouth, she played her last card. “You’ll never find the paintings.”
    But as she said it, she looked past him to the pantry he hadn’t had time to search.
    Score followed her glance. “Oh, I think I will.”
    Without another look at her, he turned his back and strode toward the pantry.
    Modesty rushed to the counter and jerked open one of the drawers. She yanked out a wood-handled butcher knife that was as old as she was. The blade had been honed so many times that the steel was half its original width. And wicked sharp.
    “What the—” Score began.
    She lunged for him.
    Automatically he threw up his forearm to block the knife. When he felt the burn of steel on flesh, his temper roared. He hit the old lady so hard she flew one way and the knife went the other. She reeled, staggered, tripped over a kitchen chair, and fell. Her head hit the edge of the old iron cookstove. She landed in a boneless