Total pages in book: 90
Estimated words: 86450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 432(@200wpm)___ 346(@250wpm)___ 288(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 86450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 432(@200wpm)___ 346(@250wpm)___ 288(@300wpm)
My first instinct was to hold up my hands and insist he keep it to himself. I didn’t want to know what Finn was into. I didn’t want that knowledge or the responsibility that came with it.
But then I saw it in his expression.
Trust.
He trusted me to do the right thing, whatever that might be.
“I met Connie on the streets when she was sixteen and I was seventeen. I was selling stolen iPhones on a corner, and she was a runaway with a stepfather who’d done her wrong six different ways.”
“Oh,” I murmured, an unfathomable well of sympathy for that poor, young teenage girl.
“The man I worked for at the time took her on. Put her up and gave her work. She was smart and she was hungry and she was loyal to the bone because she had been waiting her whole life for someone to be loyal to. She latched on to me because I was the one who pulled her off the corner and I have spent eighteen years being the person she fixated on. She’s been at my side through every hard thing I’ve done in my adult life. I’ve trusted her with everything. With my crew. With my boat. With everything.”
Finn paused. He looked at the rug again. “And tonight she offered to give your name to a man who slits women’s throats.”
A shudder ripped up my spine.
“I’m telling you this because you need to know what I’m dealing with. And because of what I’m about to tell you next.”
I swallowed hard. I was ready, or as ready as I could ever be to hold Finn’s secrets.
“I move art but not the gallery kind. The other kind. Paintings with complicated provenance, antiquities that were looted decades ago and no one’s looking for anymore, pieces that buyers want to acquire without paying the tax man or filling out customs forms. I work clean and I work careful. I don’t move drugs. I don’t move weapons. I don’t move people. But I do know people who do, Voronin being the big one. And for nine years, we’ve stayed in our own lanes. That was the arrangement.”
He’s an art smuggler.
I mean… I knew he smuggled something illegal, and one fear I had was drugs, but somehow knowing he smuggled art relieved me.
“Um… how exactly did you go from selling stolen goods to smuggling art by water?” I asked, because yeah… I was very curious.
“When I came to Seattle, I met a man named Jim Price. I mentioned him to you once. He found me on the docks in Ballard when I was eighteen, trying to find a hustle job. He gave me a sandwich the first day and a job the second.”
“What kind of job?”
“Put me on one of his boats and taught me all there was to know about waters between Vancouver and Washington. Started out scrubbing decks and then climbed the ladder from there.”
Finn smiled, almost fondly. “He was in his late fifties, no wife, no kids. He’d grown up in foster care and built a life out of nothing. I never had anyone to look up to, and he never had anyone to leave his legacy to. He taught me everything. Numbers. Documents. How to read a buyer. How to read a room. How to read a person. He gave me books to read and made me finish my GED. He paid for me to take community college classes in art history just because I was interested. He treated me like I was his.”
Finn’s voice went rough on that last sentence and without thought, I slipped my hand in his because he was talking about Jim in the past tense and I knew it was a loss that hurt deep.
He cleared his throat. “He had a heart attack in his kitchen and I’m the one who found him. I tried to do CPR, but he’d been there too long.”
“Finn.”
His gaze came to mine and he squeezed my hand. “He left everything to me, The Quartermaster being the one thing that could assure that I continue in his footsteps. I built my own crew. Brought Connie on, found Marcus… there are others, of course.”
“So you smuggle art,” I said, almost reverently rolling it on my tongue. But a thought struck me. “Why? You have the gallery now.”
Finn’s smile was without light. “I do it because I’m good at it,” he said quietly. “I do it because the money is incalculable. I do it because I came from nothing and now I have everything. It’s such a shallow desire, but it’s the truth. And I’m sorry if it makes me a bad person, but there isn’t one part of that money I regret making.”
I leaned over, put my head on his shoulder. “You’re a good man, Finn. Not a bad person at all.”