Owen had nudged Jonathan with the little wisecrack about having a packed bag and passport in the car. As it so happened, he did. The meeting with Owen, Jonathan knew, was either a beginning or an end. Depending on how things went, he knew it might’ve even meant leaving straightaway from the restaurant.

Going for the Anningers had been both risky and also the only thing he could think of. Selling the painting for pocket change to someone who didn’t know what it was, and what it was worth, was pointless after all he’d done, after all he’d been through.

If he’d known about the Flinck at the outset, he would probably have settled for a slice of the FBI reward and a pat on the back. And he’d have an entirely different life now.

But here he was. Here they all were.

So Donna and Carly didn’t know it, but he’d said his goodbyes back at the house, paying attention to everything that had been part of this brief new life. He’d looked carefully, loading the house, the light, their faces, into his mind for use in memory. Just in case.

He was glad he had.

Right before Carly had intervened in the conversation with Owen, Jonathan had caught a whiff. When he’d gone too far, he could actually smell it. Several times in his life everything had depended on it—with a psychotic bully he’d once taunted in school, with his dad’s drug dealer on a bad day, at Roy’s first pistol shot in the alley that night.

There at the end of the confrontation in the restaurant, there’d been a change in Owen’s demeanor. Jonathan hadn’t noticed it outright, but something signaled to him in a faint smell coming off his own skin like fresh raw meat and warm metal. Somehow his body knew the danger, warned his survival instinct when his mind had run ahead of it, reckless and unheeding.

Real or imagined, he took the omen to heart. Sitting there in the booth across from a man he was now convinced would kill him when the timing was good, Jonathan was glad of the suitcase in the car.

Except for he had lied about the painting. He’d claimed it wasn’t in his house. But it was.

He’d tried to move it for safekeeping, but every place he’d tried to leave it had made it impossible for him to function. Having it in the trunk of his car made him sweat every lane change and intersection. Millions of dollars could be reduced to splinters—and ones that could still land him in prison—in a single fender bender.

He’d rented a small storage unit and tried putting it there. That lasted nine hours.