Page 9 of The Best Trick

“Christie's during the recession,” she said. “I mean, 2009, what a year to buy art, right? We've been eyeing his sketches forever, but getting our hands on that one...”

I winced because one of the things you definitely don't want when you're masquerading as something like an art connoisseur is to meet somebody who’s an actual freaking art connoisseur. Odin needed to be here. Odin was an amazing artist, and he knew as much about Rembrandt as he did about introducing chaos into dangerous bank takeover robberies. He was the ultimate Renaissance man.

But Thor handled it with his usual charm. He smiled, confident and breezy. “That's what I call a damn fine investment.”

Sue smiled happily. “Are you looking for anything in particular? Are there any area artists that you’re looking at?”

“No, not really,” I said. “It's just more of a tour, and, if something catches our fancy, we may want to talk to the artist a bit more.”

“You can cut the act,” she said.

“What’s that?” Thor asked, still sounding all breezy, but I could feel his guard was up.

“Oh, I know exactly what you're doing,” Sue said. “I know who you are and what you're up to.”

My heart pounded. “Excuse me?”

“I think you’re here to buy,” she said. “You've identified an area artist who's going to be hot, and you want to buy up their work before anybody else figures it out and snaps it all up.”

“No, that's not it at all!” I said, maybe with too much energy.

Playfully, Sue narrowed her eyes. “So you’re not going to give me any hints on who you’re looking at?”

“Sometimes we like to explore an area without a preset agenda,” Thor said. “It keeps us open to discovery. When you go into a place with fixed ideas, you don't always see everything.”

I grinned up at Thor. This was the kind of thing my guys said about casing a bank for a possible robbery—they preferred to look around without a preset idea of how best to rob it. “Indeed,” I said.

“Yes, indeed,” Thor echoed. We said the wordindeedwhen we were masquerading as the Newsomes. I wanted to take his hand, but he was my father when we were being the Newsomes, so I settled for an appreciative look.

“Mmm,” Sue said, not entirely convinced. She led us onward.

“Preconceived ideas and a preset agenda calcify the mind to hidden opportunities,” Thor said. “Sometimes when you set out to zig, the best thing is to zag. That’s our motto.”

More bank robber talk. I bit back a smile. “Yes indeed, though sometimes both zigging and zagging can be ever so tedious,” I said, with the extra impudence that I knew would get him going.

“Hardly,” Thor said pointedly, another Newsome word. “I can't say that I've ever seen people find both zigging and zagging tedious.”

“Don't worry, your secret’s safe with me,” Sue said.

We headed across the three-season sun porch and out onto the back veranda with plush seating and trellises that overlooked the hillside leading down to the ocean. There was a fence all along the edge of the property, there, no doubt, to protect drunken renters from tumbling down the hillside.

But the main attraction was clearly the hot tub—it wasn’t any ordinary hot tub, but a magnificent in-ground tub lined with colorful tiles that looked as if they’d been collected from all over the world. The thing was surrounded by lush flowering trellises and lots of plush seating.

I was definitely seeing some hot tubbing in my future—hopefully soon, being that I was still buzzing from the car ride.

Was this Zeus’s big surprise? The best hot tub ever?

“Most of our guests spend their time out here. It's a favorite place, a magical place,” Sue said.

“It’s absolutely spectacular,” I agreed.

Sue showed us the control panel, hidden inside a fake rock. By then Zeus and Odin had arrived, oohing and aahing over everything. It was always better for the attention to be off of us and on the scenery or another person, though in this case, there really was a lot to ooh and aah over.

“I guarantee we'll be spending a lot of time in the hot tub,” Odin said, giving me a look. I put on a confused expression.

Sue pointed to a pair of huge, ancient trees with a hammock strung between them and, beyond it, an amazing view of the ocean. Shivers went over me. An amazing hammock with an amazing view where I could sit and read.

Wasthatthe surprise?

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