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Chapter Text

Chapter 1/? - Forgeries, Pretty French Girls, and Priceless Art

There was not enough coffee in the world to entice Neal into going to work on a Saturday.

If he had had a job- something fun, like robbing a museum -then it wouldn’t have mattered. All the days tended to blend together in the adrenaline of a well-planned heist and it wasn’t really working, but going into the office? For the government? No sir.

For this reason, he was already in a bad mood when he reached the bureau at 10:00, an hour and a half after Peter had called him and told him to come ‘as soon as possible.’ Big case, he had said. Unavoidable. When he saw the unfamiliar men and women wearing badges that said ‘INTERPOL,’ it took everything in him not to turn around and walk out.

Scowling, he marched right past his desk and into Peter’s office, where the agent was frowning down at a thick manilla envelope.

“You’re suppose to warn me when we’re going to be working with Interpol,” he grumbled. “So I can pretend to be sick.”

“You’re late,” Peter said without looking up from his files, “and we don’t give you sick days.”

Neal sighed and took his hat off, resting it on his knee as he sat down across from Peter’s desk. “So what’s so important that you had to drag me in on the weekend? Counterfeit soap bars? Embezzlement at the pretzel factory? Or did you guys finally figure out the Mona Lisa’s a fake?”

“Are you familiar with The Concert by Vermeer?”

Neal just stared at him for a few seconds, waiting for more. This was surely a joke or some kind of corny metaphor, because it could not be leading where he thought it was leading.

When Peter didn’t elaborate, he shifted in his seat and tapped his fingers in a quick burst of impatience on the arm of the chair. “Of course I’m familiar with it,” he said. “It’s one of the most famous art heists in history.”

“It is.” Peter nodded and finally looked up, an excited gleam in his eyes as he slid the file across to Neal. “And if Luke and the rest of Interpol played their cards right, it’s coming to New York.”

Neal palmed at the papers in the file and lifted the corner of the first page with his thumb to glance at it. They had the whole story neatly summed up in a few paragraphs: painted by the Dutch master, Vermeer, The Concert was on display until 1990, when a group of men pretending to be police officers broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and stole it, along with several other priceless works of art. There hadn’t been word of it (in the FBI’s ears anyway) since then, but rumors abounded in the underworld.

According to the Interpol’s intel, the painting had been used as collateral in several high-value deals between various criminals for decades. At some point around 2005, it was thought to have wound up in the hands of a mysterious Parisian businessman named Jean Roux, who used it to negotiate with, of all people, the IRA.

Interpol suspected that Roux would loan them the painting in exchange for a fee, and then the group would use it in deals to buy weapons- a 250 million dollar painting can help keep heads cool in negotiations like that. Keeps people from doing anything stupid, and it is a promise to the sellers that if the deal goes south or their buyers run out on them, they wind up with something valuable at the end of the day. Very valuable.

Once the IRA had the money, they would exchange it back for the painting, take their guns, and return The Concert to Roux. This went until Roux died last year (he had one too many hits of cocaine) and the painting fell into the hands of his daughter, Marie. Young, rich, and generally uneducated in the ways of art theft, Marie was everyone’s hope for the painting’s return. Interpol went right undercover, and there was a note scribbled at the bottom of the page by the man they sent in dated from only last week:

- Pigeon to move goose to NYC and connect with buyer. Need $200 Mil in cash or bond and Neal Caffery - MK

Pigeon was a mark- in this case Marie - and a ‘goose’ was a criminal’s way of talking about something valuable, a la ‘golden goose.’ And MK… Matthew Keller. Neal pinched his face into a tight frown and pushed the file back to Peter with a raised eyebrow.

“‘Need 200 million dollars in cash or bond and Neal Caffery,’” he recited. “Well that’s certainly a hell of a way for me to start the weekend.”

A small smile played at Peter’s lips. “I thought you’d like that detail.”

“The only thing I don’t like is there person who wrote the note.”

“Yeah.” Peter glanced down at the file for a half second with a long exhale through his nose but when he looked up, he just shrugged. “Luke says he’s been keeping Keller on a tight leash. No trouble. He assures me the whole operation has been closely monitored…”

“He was closely monitored when he escaped from federal prison,” Neal reminded him, “via kidnapping you.”

Peter turned his palms up in an expression of helplessness. “You know I hate him as much as anyone,” he said, “but this is a lost Vermeer. We may never get a shot at this painting again…I don’t think we can afford to pick and choose who’s involved.”

If Keller decided he would be better served stealing the painting than recovering it they may never see it again either but Neal didn’t argue that point. Peter was right; they had very little control over who stuck their hand in this honey jar. Beggars could not be choosers.

He glanced over his shoulder through the glass doors of Peter’s office down at the bullpen bustling with activity. Diana was busily trying to house a coffee while comparing notes with a lanky Interpol agent with big ears, and Jones was hanging up pictures of various players in this game on a white board with their names beneath. Marie Roux. Freddie O’Reilly. Dean Schwartz. Jean Roux with an ‘X’ over his face.

“Is he here?” Neal asked.

Peter gave him a grim nod.

“What does he want with me?”

“Keller’s set the whole thing up to convince Marie that the IRA is trying to steal the painting from her and she has to get it off her hands,” Peter explained. “He got her to believe that he can help her dump it on an American antiquities dealer in legal trouble hoping to use the painting as leverage with the FBI to avoid prison time.”

His face twitched a little and Neal couldn’t tell if he was trying not to laugh or trying not to grimace. “Apparently he thought you’d be perfect for the role,” he said.

Neal rolled his eyes. Leverage with the FBI to avoid prison time…it was a bit on the nose, probably intentionally.

But he had to admit, the whole thing was interesting. More than interesting. The Concert and the thieves that stole it was a legend of his time; he remembered being a teenager and reading about the case in newspapers at the grocery store until the clerk yelled at him to put it down or buy it. He even snuck it on the television a few times in between his mom’s soaps and her boyfriend’s football games.

“What the hell is this shit?” Hank would grunt, snatching the remote out of his hands with a sneer of disdain at the coverage as he clicked the Rams game back on.

“They stole a painting worth hundreds of millions of dollars,” Neal murmured, mostly to himself, “and got away with it.”

And as a kid, drowning in St. Louis and poverty and boredom, it looked to him like fun. 

So he grinned at Peter over the desk and leaned back in his chair. “An antiquities dealer in legal trouble,” he mused. “I think I can pull that off.”

“I’ll bet you can,” Peter snorted, closing the file. He paused and blinked back up at Neal with a cautious expression on his face. “What was that you said before about the Mona Lisa?”

**************************************

Keller never seemed to change in appearance. From the moment Neal had met him, he had the same short, slicked-back hair, clean-shaven face, and black shark eyes as he did now, sitting at Neal’s desk with his feet up, twirling a pen in his fingers.

“I hear you couldn’t live without me in Paris,” Neal said in an even voice, stuffing his hands in his pockets. “Asked for me all the way across the world.”

Keller cocked his head at the pen and clicked at the bottom so the tip came out and back in. Out and back in. “I was in Monaco most of the time, actually,” he drawled. “Got me nostalgic.”

Neal refused to take the bait. They met in Monaco, 100 years ago when Keller was young and reckless and Neal was even younger and more reckless. There were so many unsuspecting rich people to roll at the Backgammon Series that they were bound to overlap on someone, and thankfully that day Keller didn’t feel like killing the competition.

These days was a different story.

“Is this the real thing?” Neal asked, leaning against the desk next to him. Ridiculous. He shouldn’t be standing by his own desk, in his own office.

Keller nodded. “I’ve seen it.”

“And you know it’s real?”

He finally took his attention off the pen to glare at Neal from the corners of his eyes. “I can spot the difference between a fake and an original, too, ya know,” he said. “Yes. It’s real. Oil on canvas, 28.5 inches by 25.5 inches and as gray and boring as the rest of the Dutch Golden Age shit that I know you love.” He tipped his head in the barest acknowledgement, one professional to the other. “Figured you’d wanna get in on it.”

“I do,” Neal admitted, crossing his arms. He looked over at where Jones was still arranging faces, spotted his and Keller’s under Marie’s. Keller had been undercover as ‘Mark Whitman,’ and he’d signed Neal up as ‘John DuBois.’

“What’s my angle?” he asked.

“You’ve been indicted for forgery and you wanna cut yourself loose by tipping off the FBI to the location of the painting,” Keller said. “Marie doesn’t care about it…she’s not a criminal or an art lover. She’ll just as soon see it launched into space as sold off or given back to Boston, as long as she makes money off of it.”

“Two hundred mil,” Neal agreed. “It’s worth two fifty. How’d you get her to agree to down-selling it?”

“She’s really not too bright,” Keller chuckled. “Once I got her to trust me, it wasn’t hard to convince her of anything.” He winked at him.

Neal curled his lip up in distaste, trying not to imagine what ‘anything’ might include. “Get off my chair,” he said finally, kicking at the wheels. “I have work to do.”

“You sure do,” Keller said. He made no move to stand up. “I need you to forge something. I may have promised Marie a gift from the antiquities dealer in exchange for lowering his selling price.”

Neal blinked. “I thought you said she wasn’t an art lover.”

“She’s not, but she is scared of the Irish. To hold them over,” Keller shrugged, “I told her we’d give her a forgery to give to them.”

“Of…” Neal shook his head, ran a hand through his hair, and dropped his voice an octave, “of The Concert? Are you crazy? I can’t forge a painting like that in three days.”

“Two days,” Keller corrected him. “And yes you can, I’ve seen you do it.”

“This is why you needed it to be me,” Neal hissed. “You want a forgery and Interpol would never give you one…it would make it too easy for you to steal the real thing.”

“I wanted to ease Marie’s mind…”

“Are you planning to steal it?” Neal demanded. “You gonna make me an accessory?”

Keller fixed those black eyes on him and slowly stood up out of the chair. He made a show of it- pulling one leg off the desk, then another, and rising to his feet all with that cold, smug look on his face. When he took a step forward, Neal could not help but listen to instinct and lean back.

Keller smirked at him. “No,” he said, in nearly a whisper. “I’m not gonna steal it. I’m just doing things a little off the book to make it easier, and you’re going to help me, because this is my set-up, and Interpol’s operation. FBI knows they’re lucky to be invited…they’ll throw you on a plane to Dublin to meet with the head of the IRA himself if I tell them that’s what I need.”

Neal held his stare for several seconds, trying to appear cool and unruffled, but Keller was right. Against a priceless stolen work of art, he was the expendable asset, maybe not to Peter but to the FBI brass and certainly to Interpol. If they had to let Keller take the lead to get the painting back, they would do it. Check and mate.

He ran the calculations in milliseconds in his head: he could do what Keller told him to and run the risk of helping the other con get away with the second greatest art heist in modern history, or he could refuse and risk Keller finding some terrible way to force him to comply. This, he knew from experience, was asking nicely.

“Fine,” he snapped, and shouldered past Keller to sit at his desk. He rearranged the papers and pens the other man had carelessly strewn about, wiped a bit of dust from Keller’s shoe off the surface.

“Don’t look so tense, Caffery,” Keller laughed, slipping his hands in his pockets as he turned to saunter away. “Forgeries, pretty French girls, priceless art…this is what we were made for, you ’n me. It’ll be fun.”

It was that last part that turned Neal’s stomach sour despite the prospect of seeing a Vermeer masterpiece in the flesh. Of painting it. He could swallow his pride for a few days and loan himself out to Interpol if Peter wanted him to, but what he really dreaded was Matthew Keller’s idea of fun.

Chapter Text

“I think I should take an art class.”

Neal squinted at the canvas smeared in ochres, grays, and muted browns. The colors were correct- a straight match for the various reprints of The Concert he had laid about on the floor around him -and the figures were outlined exactly as Vermeer had painted them, but something was not right. Something about the lighting, or the mood…he couldn’t tell.

That’s why he liked the Dutch, he thought to himself as he spat out the paintbrush he had held between his teeth while he muttered to Mozzie, and dabbed it in the water. They painted such ordinary things- a trussed up duck prepared for dinner, a goldfinch in a cage, a harpsichord with three people gathered around it in a dimly lit room -and yet they managed to convey such vague and unnameable feelings with it. For Neal, looking into a Vermeer always made him feel like he had been there before. With his recreation, it felt foreign.

Mozzie walked up behind him and guffawed over the rim of his wine glass. “If you need art classes,” he said, “then I need a drinking class.”

He handed Neal his own glass of cabernet, filled almost to the top. Neal took it with a grateful smile and turned away from his work, leaning his back against the wall with a sigh.

“There’s something I just don’t have, I don’t know. These guys,” he waved his hand listlessly at the Vermeer prints and sipped at his wine, “they saw something that I don’t see; I only copy it. It’s like learning a song you’ve never heard by the notes only. If you don’t hear the music first,” he shrugged, “is it the same?”

Mozzie gave him a thoughtful look, swirling the wine around in his glass with his hand cupped underneath it. “‘To the untrained palate, every swine liver is a choice cut,’” he recited. “Your paintings are exact copies in every artistic dimension…that’s enough for almost everyone to not tell the difference. Unless,” he tossed his head back and forth as if deep in though, “you want Vermeer himself to be fooled.”

Maybe he did.

Neal cocked his head at the prints, each different in their own way, and wondered what they saw when they looked at the painting, those other artists tying their names to the old master. Granted, they probably had the advantage of looking at the original in person, back in the ‘90s, but did they have doubts too? Did they feel unworthy to paint in the brushstrokes of giants?

“Who said that?” he asked. “About the swine liver and the choice cut?”

“Plato,” Mozzie said with a confident nod.

“Wha…Plato didn’t say that, Moz.”

“He did!”

“No he didn’t. If you don’t know, just say that. Or if you made it up…”

“I…”

A sharp knock on the door cut them off. They both paused and stayed still for a moment, listening for Peter’s dry mumbling, the soft trill of June’s voice, or even an ‘FBI, open up!’ but whoever it was didn’t announce himself. Mozzie looked back at Neal, eyebrow raised.

Neal pulled himself to his feet and set the wine down on the side table next to him. “Who is it?” he called.

“It’s me, Caffery, lemme in.”

Mozzie looked stricken, gaping like a fish, but Neal just rolled his eyes and walked briskly to the door. Keller shrugged right past him when he opened up into the hall. With a scowl, Neal pushed the door shut behind him- hard.

Mozzie scrambled away into the kitchen, putting the island between himself and Keller as he pinned the other man down with a wary glare. “You know,” he said to Neal, “I never thought I’d wish it was the suit at your door.”

“Hey Moz,” Keller said in a dry voice. “Glad to see you’re still out and about and unmedicated.”

“What do you want?” Neal asked. “I don’t have any beer and the painting’s not finished so there’s no reason for you to hang around.”

“Don’t tell me you guys don’t enjoy the pleasure of my company,” Keller chuckled. He cocked his head down at the half-finished painting with his hands in his pockets and peaked one eyebrow up with a doubtful look back at Neal. “Taking your time with this one or just not into it?”

Neal’s face flushed and he walked back to the side table to pick his wine back up and take a long sip. “This is what you get for giving me a project with a 48-hour deadline,” he snapped. “I don’t have time to get all the right paints, there’s only…decades old prints to go off of, and oh, you’re here. Bothering me.”

Keller nodded to the glass of wine. “Yeah you look real busy,” he said. “Sorry for the interruption.”

“Ever heard of a lunch break?” Mozzie sniffed.

“It’s 7:30,” Keller sighed. “Look kid, I’m not tryin’ to mess up your process here but I’ve spent four months on this case and I can’t have it sidetracked because you can’t draw a picture in two days.”

There was no use arguing with him that it was more complex than ‘drawing a picture.’ Keller was a forger, and a gifted one, but he didn’t have the passion for paintings…in fact, he didn’t have the passion for most of it, just a penchant for nice things, a good eye, and a crazy streak. So instead of picking a fight, Neal just drank more wine. Usually made things better anyway.

“I’ll have it done,” he said. “It was you who said I could do it in less, wasn’t it?”

“Don’t prove me wrong.” He drummed up just enough menace in his eyes to get the point across and then strutted to the kitchen counter and picked up the bottle of cabernet. “Get me a glass, Moz,” he said.

Mozzie make a choking noise and flared his nostrils. “I will do no such thing!”

Neal drained his own glass, puffed his cheeks out in an exasperated huff, and crossed the room to the cabinets to grab another. When he passed it to Keller, the other man only flashed a smug smile at Mozzie and poured himself four fingers’ worth.

Mozzie gave him a careful look, and Neal knew he would have to explain later why it was wiser to pick your battles with Keller, but he had gotten the message. He kept quiet.

“I don’t need a babysitter,” Neal said, glancing at Keller’s glass, calculating the time it would take him to finish it. Thinking things only ever got worse once Keller started drinking.

“Clearly not,” Keller chirped, waving at Mozzie. “You’ve got the crazy uncle watching over you. I think I’ll just stay for a little bit, though, catch you up on some things, have a glass. What are friends for, right?”

Right. Friends that made sure other friends didn’t get out of line. Neal refilled his glass and settled back in his spot on the floor in front of the window, bent over his half-painting and the several little-more-than-half paintings printed around him. It was clear Keller was just rooster-ing- puffing his chest out and being loud to show he was in charge -and if Neal fought him it would do nothing more than show Keller he’d ruffled his feathers. Better to be productive about it.

This was the opportunity of a lifetime, he reminded himself. He was going to lay his hands on a lost Vermeer.

“The sky isn’t right,” Keller said with a yawn.

Neal paused with his paintbrush angled towards the canvas and drew his eyebrows together in bafflement. “There is no sky,” he said. “The painting is of a room.”

“The painting in the painting,” Keller insisted. “On the left. The sky’s too blue. The real one’s a little bit…grayer, I dunno. It’s always gray with the Dutch.”

Grayer. Neal squinted at the reprints on the floor and picked out the shades of cornflower, cotton white, purple, and even some pinks and yellows to make up the edges of the clouds but none of the other artists had gone very gray on this one. The painting within the painting, set just above the head of the woman playing the harpsichord, was so dark in the center anyway that there needed to be a little bit of color to set the sky apart. But Keller had seen the real thing.

And if he leaned back and looked sideways at it, the sky in the miniature painting did look a bit too bright. It took the focus off the main scene, where even the blues and yellows of the ladies’ dresses were somewhat muted.

“Could you be more specific?” Neal muttered, dabbing his brush in a small drop of charcoal-colored paint. “Bluish gray or…gray-gray?”

“Greenish.” Keller appeared at his side, only a few inches away. He bent down and took Neal’s wrist between his thumb and forefinger, like the pincers of a crab, and pulled it lightly away from the canvas with a disapproving click of his tongue. “Not that,” he said. “Make that lighter and add some brown to it.”

Neal snatched his hand away from him but he obliged. He squeezed out a glob of umber brown, added white and mint greens to the gray paint, and swirled over what he’d already done on the tiny scrap of sky in the tiny painting within a painting. Details, he knew, were important.

Keller took a step back and considered it over the rim of glass. Even Mozzie, still sheltering in the kitchen, craned his neck over the counter to see.

“Better,” Keller said with a nod. “See? I needed to be here after all.”

“Huh!” Mozzie snorted from the kitchen.

Keller turned to him as Neal returned to correcting the paint, bent so close to the little drawing room scene that his nose almost brushed the still trying drop of the harpsichord player’s head.

“You’ve been awful quiet,” Keller observed. “Plotting my death again, Mozzie? Or are you fresh outta stolen Degas?”

“I’m just thinking about how I wouldn’t be able to work with you hovering over me the whole time waiting to snatch the painting away the second it dried and take it back to your…your lair.”

“Well it’s a good thing you don’t ever seem to work.”

“That’s what I want you to think.”

“Uh huh. Hey, Neal, you didn’t slip anything to the FBI did you? You know how we talked about keepin’ things…discreet.”

Neal rolled his eyes and leaned back a little to take in the finished tiny painting. It did look better. The colors blended in more with the walls of the room and stole less of the focus from the musical trio in the middle. He washed the brush and moved on to the rugs in the corner. “I didn’t,” he told Keller, “but whatever you think you’re doing, you’re gonna get caught.”

“I’m not planning anything,” Keller mused. “But if I was, that advice would sound a little funny comin’ from the guy who stole a U-boat worth of treasure.”

“I seem to remember you confessing to that, actually,” Neal said.

“Lucky you.”

“You still have that bullet in your knee?”

He wasn’t sure, but he might have heart a bit of an edge to Keller’s voice when he fired back, “Lucky shot. You still got splinters from that Raphael in your head?”

Neal flinched a little. “Sacrilege,” he grumbled.

“Look I’ll leave you to your work in a minute,” he said, leaning against the couch. “I came by to warn you that there might be some people around who’ll make you nervous…Irish guys. Apparently one or two of them followed me to New York after sniffing around Marie’s flat, wanna check me out.”

A jolt went through Neal’s gut at that, but he kept his hand steady. Always steady. “I swear, Keller, if you get the IRA after me…”

“They’re not IRA,” Keller objected. “They’re…IRA adjacent.”

“Whatever they are, I don’t want them around me. I don’t wanna end up…splattered on the sidewalk or something if they decide to blow me up in a car.”

“This is Manhattan,” Keller said. “Just walk. Or take the subway.”

“Keller!”

“See? I knew you’d get nervous. They’re not gonna blow you up; in fact, they shouldn’t be a problem at all, I just wanted to give you the heads up. If they poke around and come asking questions, you’re the same crooked antiques dealer but you’ve never heard of Marie Roux, you’ve never heard of me, and you don’t care for Vermeer.” Keller rounded to stand in front of Neal, just behind the canvas and the paints set up on the floor, and bent down a little to look him more head-on. “And you call me,” he said in a soft voice. “Not Burke. You understand?”

Neal shook his head. “You’re gonna get caught.”

“I asked you if you understood me.”

His ears burned. Around the paintbrush, his knuckles went white and the smallest streak appeared in the corner he was painting. Steady. He had to stay steady.

“I understand,” he pushed out through his teeth.

“Good boy,” Keller sneered. He stepped over Neal’s paints and made his way towards the door, finishing off the rest of his glass. “Thanks for the wine,” he called over his shoulder, then tossed the glass on the floor beside him to shatter before he slipped back out of the apartment.

Mozzie spent the next twenty minutes rambling, fuming, practically frothing at the mouth as he cleaned up the broken shards of glass and went on about just how stupid Interpol was for letting Keller run around the world unchecked, how someone should have gotten him in prison. There was still time, he reminded Neal, to find another object of value and put a higher hit out on him.

“Why are you listening to him?” Mozzie demanded, shuffling over in quick, short steps to Neal. “Getting him a wine glass, changing your colors!” He waved at the painting. “You don’t have to listen to him.”

“He was right about the colors.”

“He needs you Neal. Whatever insight he might have on the color gray, he clearly can’t forge the painting himself or he wouldn’t have had you do it!” Mozzie crossed his arms and the wine sloshed a bit in his glass, threatening to pour over onto the floor. “At least make him tell you what he’s planning…you have enough bargaining power for that. Why are you acting like it’s you who’s out of options here?”

“Because!” Neal threw the paintbrush down and turned away from his work, then caught Mozzie’s startled expression and blinked. He hadn’t meant to snap that loudly. He ran a hand through his hair and shook his head down at his blurry, burgundy reflection in his wine. “It isn’t a good idea to play games with Keller if I don’t have to,” he said. “If it’s just a simple case…”

“It’s never simple,” Mozzie warned. “Not with you two.”

“He’s practically running the case on this side of the law, Moz, and Interpol’s running it on the other. I’d have bargaining power if this were an actual job but it’s all tied up in the feds now…he’s playing that.”

Mozzie gave him that hard look- the ‘I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed’ look -and picked up Neal’s glass to bring it back to the kitchen for a refill. It wasn’t even half empty. “So you’re not going to tell the suit?” he called.

Neal picked his brush back up and swept over the streak of paint he’d slipped up on before. “Are you crazy?” he snorted. “Of course I am.”

Chapter Text

There was something especially familiar about Peter’s door at night. For some reason, it didn’t look the same in the day time. Neal thought it must be the same for Peter and Elizabeth; to them, he was always someone who came at night, shrouded in darkness.

Peter answered the door only a few seconds after he knocked, wearing a loose flannel and an unsurprised expression. He didn’t see anything, just nodded and stepped aside for Neal to come in.

“El made pot roast,” he said. “We have leftovers, if you…”

Neal waved him off and flopped on the couch, patting Satchmo on the head by his feet. “That’s fine,” he said. “Not hungry. If you have wine though…”

“Beer?” Peter gave him an apologetic shrug.

“Anything works,” Neal grunted.

Peter disappeared into the kitchen, and Neal could hear the sound of the fridge door opening against the distant honks and shouting of New York City. “Rough day?” he called.

Neal ran a hand through his hair. “Any day where I have Keller, a deadline, and the IRA to deal with is a rough one.”

He came back with two Budweisers and cracked one open to hand to Neal. “How’s that going?” he asked with a cautious look. Peter was always careful not to be too direct. That’s what Neal’s liked about him since the beginning, since he was on the run and Peter was chasing him. He never insulted himself or Neal by pretending things were simple.

Neal grimaced at the beer- Budweiser was particularly unpleasant in his book, but he needed to keep his head flowing with alcohol or he might start stressing, and stress wasn’t a good way to make a good painting. He tipped the bottle back and downed as much as he could before he had to take a breath. “Keller’s planning something,” he grunted as Peter sat down across from him. “I don’t know what it is yet, but he has something up his sleeve and he’s taking extra care to make sure I report everything to him before you.”

Peter frowned over the neck of the bottle. “What makes you think he’s planning something?” he asked. “Specifically.”

“He’s having me forge the painting, for starters…”

“What?” Peter leaned forward and set the beer down. “And you’re doing it? What possible reason…”

“He claims it’s to reassure Marie,” Neal muttered. “And yeah, I’m doing it, because you sold me to Interpol for this case and I have very little choice.”

“Ok, I did not sell you. Interpol already established a connection with Marie and an understanding of the case, so I had very little choice but to agree that Keller take the lead on your end. Now if there’s some kind of problem…”

Neal took another sip of beer. “He says he wants the forgery so he can give it to Marie and she can feel better about selling around the IRA. But he also stopped by earlier to warn me that the IRA might be sniffing around, he’s told me a few times now that I shouldn’t be telling you this, so I’m sure there’s something else to it.”

“And he won’t say?”

“Not to me.”

Peter nodded slowly and lifted one leg to cross his ankle over his knee. “I can’t bring it up to Interpol,” he reasoned, “because we both know Keller’s handlers trust him too much. They’ll tell him and then he’ll…” Peter trailed off, watching Neal, waiting for him to finish the sentence.

But Neal did not finish the sentence. The truth was, he didn’t know what Keller would do if he found out he was talking to Peter, and that was the problem. Keller was unpredictable, despite all of Neal’s taunts to the contrary.

“Are you afraid of him?” Peter asked softly.

Neal bristled. “Of course not,” he scoffed. “I’m just trying to play this the right way.”

“I can pull you off this case…”

“No way.”

Peter sighed. “Sometimes I forget,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“That you’re a con.” He shrugged. “That you were in prison. You feel like you need to act like this…puff your chest out. I’m sure it helped you out inside, helped you on jobs.”

“Oh please.” Neal rolled his eyes. “Spare me, Dr. Phil, I’m just trying to give you a heads up and see if you want me to do anything. If I was really scared of Keller, I wouldn’t have come here and put myself at risk.”

“Alright.” Peter leaned forward and tapped his bottle against his knee. “Here’s what you’re gonna do then: paint the picture, do what he says. I’m gonna get a tracker- one of the small ones, microchip kind, and you’ll find a way to hide it in the painting so that whatever he does with it, we can follow. Can you do that?”

Neal chewed on the inside of his cheek and finished off his beer. “How long will it take you?” he asked. “Keller wants the painting done by tomorrow.”

“Well,” Peter made a sort-of wincing motion and scratched the back of his head, “do you think you could stall?”

Now it was Neal’s turn to wince. “I could,” he muttered. But it would be ugly. There would be hell to pay. But he couldn’t have Peter thinking he was some kind of coward sniveling in fear of someone like Matthew Keller. No complaints. No excuses. Cowboy up.

“I can stall,” he said, with more confidence. “I’ll tell him there was a…an issue with getting the paints. Something unavoidable.”

“Ok.” Peter was giving him a hard look, hadn’t touched his beer in a minute or two. “I should be able to get the chip by tomorrow night, then you just have to find a way to work it in without him knowing. You think you can do that?”

“Yeah.” Neal took a deep breath and glanced down at Satchmo snoozing on the carpet. “Yeah. You got another beer?”

******************************************************************************

Neal knocked on the third floor office, looking right, then left down the dingy hall. Back the way he came were two separate law firms advertising in Spanish for legal help to undocumented immigrants, charged by the hour. McDonald & Schmidt and Puloski & Puloski. In the other direction was an unmarked door through which seven or eight different men passed in an out of carrying televisions and boxes of high-heeled shoes. Across from the elevators, there was the office of a waste management company that looked like no one had set foot inside in five years.

Through the glass door of suite 304, Neal could see an unmanned front desk piled high with wooden crates, some draped with cloth. The light was on in the back, and a shadow froze when he wrapped his knuckles agains the glass, then bobbed slowly closer.

Alex poked her head around the corner and peered at him down the hall. For just a moment, she raised her eyebrow in surprise, then shuffled around boxes and crates and paintings leaned against the walls into the hall, and made her way towards him.

“How’d you find out about this place?” she asked in a flat voice, pulling the door open for him in the same movement as she turned her back and started to walk back the way she’d come.

“Mozzie,” Neal said. He stepped around a beaten file cabinet pushed halfway into the middle of the hall and spotted a freezer bag full of rubies in the top drawer.

“How did Mozzie find out about it?”

“Um…Davenport, I think.”

She scowled and slipped back into an office room halfway down the hallway where a white tarp lay spread out on the floor with three huge coins atop it. They were crusted in green oxidation, but Neal could still make out the silhouette of a Roman bust on each. 

“Are those…?” he started.

“Don’t worry about what those are. I told Davenport to keep his mouth shut…he’s such a rat.”

Neal put a hand to his chest in mock offense. “Hey, I’m no fed. I just…spend a lot of time around them. You could have told me where you set up shop once you came back to New York.”

“You just spend a lot of time about them, hm?” Her mouth twitched in an attempt not to smile. “You know what they say about laying down with dogs, Caffery.”

“You could’ve told me.”

She sighed and sat down in front of the tarp with a paintbrush dipped only in water. Or what looked like water. “I didn’t keep you in the dark specifically,” she said, “I just…I’m trying to stay on the down-low since getting back. Things haven’t calmed down completely…I’m sure you heard what happened last year.”

Of course he had. Rumors had abounded last March when a Picasso showed up in an antique shop in Brooklyn, and the ensuing investigation revealed that almost a third of the shop’s goods were stolen. In a panic, a paranoid fence burned the whole shop down rather than risk the feds finding any written proof of who the shop owner was dealing with. If a black book did indeed exist, it was reduced to ashes along with rooms full of priceless art.

Some proprietors of the black market were fine with this, happy that their names had been kept out of what surely would have been a massive round-up. Others saw the cash lost in the fire, and they wanted their money back.

The fences were the first targets- thieves lined up all over the city trying to figure out what happened, looking for assurances that they wouldn’t be arrested and in, some cases, looking for more money on the sales they’d made through their fences. Alex, along with several others, shut down her New York operation and disappeared for months. God knows where.

Neal crouched down at the other end of the tarp and studied the coins as Alex gently brushed a solution over them that ate at the oxidation, restoring the metal to its gleaming iron. “I need to ask a favor,” he said.

She looked up at him with cautious interest. “You’ve stolen something?”

“Not this time.”

Alex puffed her cheeks out in a huff and returned to her coins. “You’ve gotten so boring.”

“Well, this may cheer you up because I’m pretty sure I’m about to participate in stealing a lost Vermeer.”

Alex’s hand froze in its angle over the coin she was working on. Her eyes stayed down towards the tarp, but she had a sharp look in them that certainly wasn’t focused on the plastic. “Which one?”

“The Concert.”

She took a sharp breath in. “Neal,” she whispered.

“I know. It’s a case I’m working on for the feds…”

“Neal!” Her face twisted in outrage.

“I know, but listen. You know Keller’s working for Interpol now?”

“Yeah.” She rolled her eyes. “They just let anybody work for law enforcement these days.”

“Tell me about it.” He grinned at her. “Keller has an in with the daughter of some French conman who has apparently had the painting for years as collateral. Well now he’s dead, and his daughter wants rid of it, so Keller’s convinced her to sell it in New York…to me.” He put his fingers up to make air quotes. “‘Me’ being an imperiled forger who wants to use the painting to get a deal on a conviction. He’s also convinced Interpol that he’s going to give them the real painting when it’s all over.”

Alex snorted. “They can’t be that stupid.”

“They are, and he’s trying to convince me that the forgery he has me working on is just to ‘put Marie’s mind at ease’ and not to swap for the real thing.”

She cocked her head, chewing on the back of her paintbrush. “If it was that simple and he just needed the forgery to give to the girl, he’d have done it himself.”

“Exactly.” Neal nodded. “He needs me because he needs the painting to be perfect- pass an inspection by a museum curator.”

“You should be flattered,” Alex said. “He’s finally decided that you’re better than him.”

Neal lifted one shoulder into a shrug. “He knows I’ve always been the better forger. It’s…other techniques we disagree on. And he hates Dutch art.”

“What do you want from me?”

He flicked his eyes over her, silently debating whether it was worth the risk to get her involved. There was not just the FBI to grapple with this time, but also Keller. If she got caught up in whatever fallout would come of this, it could mean being arrested, or it could mean being killed.

But Alex had never liked it when he tried to protect her.

“I don’t want Keller to end up with this painting,” he said slowly, “and I don’t want it either; it’s too hot. Somehow, the IRA is involved in all this, and I’d be hard pressed to find anyone willing to buy it. I’m going to have Peter put a tracker on the fake, try to catch Keller out, but it’ll take an extra day and Keller wants it tomorrow. I need a reason I won’t be able to finish the forgery on time.”

She sat back on her haunches and dropped the paintbrush to the tarp. Her face said she already knew the direction this was going.

“I heard you’ve been dealing in paints.”

A good fence didn’t just sell the stolen things a thief brought her; she also sold supplies to the thief. A wise thief or forger took time and careful planning- and usually a lot of money -to collect his things. Can’t buy it all at one place or one time or you might leave a paper trail or arouse suspicion. No FBI agent could ignore it if you bought specialty lacquer, aged wood, cloth canvases, and lead-based paint all in one sitting.

So fences capitalized on the thieves’ desire to buy these things underground, and they stocked up on the specialty lacquer and the aged wood and the cloth canvases and the lead-based paint. For a slightly increased price, forgers like Neal could put aside their concerns at being caught and save a little time buying paint from someone like Alex.

“You want me to say I’m out of paint?” she guessed.

“Just grey,” Neal said. “It’s an important one in this painting…”

“In most Dutch paintings.”

“…so without it, I won’t be able to finish it on time. If he were to come by and see me trying to buy from you, the con would sell.”

“The con will sell because the color grey won’t,” she mused. “What do I get out of it?”

Classic. No such things a free favor. “You’ll get the forgery,” Neal said.

She furrowed her brows. “What good is a forgery of a painting everyone knows has been recovered?”

“I have an idea,” he said with a wink.

Alex laughed. “You always do. Alright, Caffery, I’ll bite. It’s a date.”

Chapter Text

Things had to be done carefully. Move too quickly, too eagerly, and Keller would easily spot the ruse. Move too slowly, and the ruse wouldn’t matter.

Alex leaned against the terrace wall and smiled out at the city skyline, her hair waving in the wind over her shoulders. Neal tried not to look too long. Part of him still felt loyal to Sara, and another part realized that perhaps Alex didn’t always align with his best interests.

Perhaps.

“What are you doing?” she asked without turning around.

“What do you mean?”

She lifted one shoulder into a shrug. “Most people, when they’re pretending to go straight, do it by playing house. White picket fence, nice girl, kids and a dog…they do that like a drug addict moves states. Flip to the opposite life so they’re not tempted but you,” she spun around, leaning her back against the terrace wall, and wagged her finger at him, “are living in a high-end apartment in Manhattan with a beautiful view and a fence in your house, and not the white picket kind. So what are you doing? Are you trying to go straight or not?”

Neal scratched the back of his head and ambled to his kitchen, resisting, in this talk of addicts, to reach for the wine bottle. “What is straight?” he asked. “I’ve got rules and I follow them, always have. I’ve never hurt anyone. I’ve never stolen from someone who couldn’t afford to be stolen from. I’m…trying…to live a life that is less likely to get me sent to prison.”

“So you’re lying to yourself?” she mused. Suddenly, Alex was right next to him, her breath close enough to warm the side of his neck, and Neal looked down at her face and saw a glint of mischief in her hazel eyes. Once, years ago in Paris, he had fallen for those eyes.

He smirked at her and turned so he was facing her head on, only inches apart. “What kind of con would I be if told the truth?” he murmured.

“Oh you know the old saying as well as I do, Neal. The best lies always have a little bit of truth in them.”

He wasn’t exactly sure what they were talking about anymore, but he wasn’t exactly sure that all he wanted to do was talk either. Each second moved by too slow, like they were drenched in honey; one and he reached out to brush one hand lightly against her waist, two and Alex had her eyes nearly closed, three and he moved his lips closer, so close that they brushed against hers and he could smell the cherry flavor of her chapstick…

and then the doorknob to his apartment jiggled. The sound was abrupt and rough with no patience for locks. He didn’t have to ask who it was.

Alex stepped away from him with a pinched frown at the door. “Don’t let him bully you,” she advised.

“Easier said than done,” Neal muttered, and strode over to let Keller in.

He was in a bad mood; that much was obvious right away. Instead of cracking a joke at Neal’s expense or pretending to be nice, Keller only leveled a flat, black gaze at him and asked, “You have it?”

Neal shook his head, keeping his face just as impassive. “It’s not finished,” he said, and took a precautionary step back from the door and any possible loose thread in Keller’s temper.

Keller’s eyes turned stony. He didn’t move. “What do you mean?”

“Couldn’t finish it without the right paint. Ask her about it.” Neal nodded back behind him at where Alex was perched on one of the kitchen stools. She curled each finger in a slow wave in Keller’s direction.

Despite himself, Keller gave her a tight smile as he walked in and shut the door behind him. “Alex, sweetheart,” he said, “long time no see. Is this supposed to be an ambush?”

“Why, Matthew,” she fluttered her lashes at him, “whatever could incite me to ambush you? Certainly not the fact that you stole my score of a lifetime only to get caught and hand it over to Vladimir Putin…”

“Well I’m sure your boyfriend here has told you it was a little more complicated than that.” He flicked his eyes briefly to Neal. “What’s this about paint?”

Alex sighed and spun around a bit on the stool. “Grey is in short supply. It’s not coming in until tomorrow.”

Keller furrowed his brow and tossed his hands out. “It’s grey. You can make it with literally any color.”

“Not this kind,” Neal pointed out. “I need the pewter color as a base or it won’t look right.”

“You’re telling me that you, Neal Caffery, can’t make a pewter paint on your own?” Keller demanded, raising an eyebrow at him. “You have lead-based black and lead-based white, right? I mean, are we in preschool right now?”

“Black and white make storm cloud grey,” Alex chipped in. She crossed one ankle over the other and twirled a lock of hair around her pinky. “Not pewter. ”

“Plus it wouldn’t have the right chemical make-up,” Neal added, which was only partially true but sounded like exactly the type of thing he and Keller would normally argue about. The best lies, of course, always have an element of truth. “It’s less the coloring that I need and more the silver oxide.”

“It’s only a one day delay,” Alex said with a shrug, “as I was explaining to Caffery before you barged in. I even offered a discount.”

“Oh so you don’t have a friends with benefits price deal?” Keller asked in a dry voice. “Too bad. You know what? Whatever. Just get it done as soon as you have your silver or pewter or whatever you need. I gotta talk to you, Caffery. Let’s take a walk.”

Neal blinked. That wasn’t part of the plan. ‘Taking a walk’ was almost always a euphemism for talking serious business that wasn’t going well at best- a ploy for murder at worst. But he had the distinct feeling he had pushed his luck with Keller pretty close to the edge already today, and if it got him farther away from Alex and June and this apartment, so be it.

So he rolled his shoulders and nodded to Alex, who was watching him carefully. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll see you around,” he told her. “Call me when you get the paint.”

They stepped outside into the muggy summer morning. Keller lit a cigarette on the front steps, shaking the ashes out into June’s bushes, and squinted at the sun.

“What’s wrong?” Neal asked, his voice short, as they walked along the traffic on sidewalk. “Am I in trouble already?”

“No, but you will be if you’re trying to pull something with this paint thing.” Keller waved his hand vaguely back towards the house.

“I’m not up to anything, Keller,” he scowled. “You know, sometimes I really think you should get your paranoia checked out. It can’t be healthy.”

“If you’re not up to anything, I’ll be disappointed in you,” Keller sighed, “but that’s besides the point. You remember I mentioned those Irish guys?”

Neal glanced around just in case someone in a tweed cap or Celtics jersey was following them. “Yes,” he said. “Should I be worried now?”

“Slightly,” Keller grunted. “I set this all up to Marie by telling her the IRA would steal The Concert from her, trying to scare her into selling, you know? But it seems the IRA is actually trying to steal the painting from her.”

“Ah.” Neal side-stepped an older woman with a cat in a stroller and waved off someone trying to hand him a religious pamphlet. Good old New York. “Well I’m told the best lies have an element of truth in them.”

Keller squinted at him. “Yeah. Except this particular truth turns out to be a little sticky. They took her.”

“What…Marie?”

He nodded. “I went to her hotel this morning and her door was wide open. Phone still on the dresser. They must have followed her back from the airport and taken her in the night. God knows where.”

If Neal wasn’t mistaken, there seemed to be just a little bit of worry in Keller’s voice at that last part, perhaps the cause of the bad mood, but he didn’t chase it. “They have the painting?” he confirmed.

“No. Marie’s manager has it, but without her I have no way to contact him and he has no way to find me.” Keller stopped to blow out a puff of smoke and steered Neal around a corner onto street of bookstores, organic grocery shops, and a few financial offices. “So the only thing Marie has to bargain with right now,” he glanced over at Neal’s face, “is you.”

“Me?”

“Their competition,” Keller said. “You’re the other buyer for the painting that they want. They’ll come find you.”

“Well, Marie doesn’t know where I am right?”

Keller pushed him into a dingy-looking antique’s store and flipped the sign over on the door so it read ‘CLOSED.’ On all the shelves were old and dust bits of glassware, rusty signs with little kids eating candy from the ‘50s, and terrifying dolls. The perimeter was all broken chairs and one potentially valuable chippendale desk.

“Get lost,” Keller said to the old man behind the front desk, sliding him a fifty dollar bill. The man didn’t waste a second in obeying. He pocketed the cash and left out the front door without ever even glancing in Neal’s direction.

Keller spread his arms out like he was welcoming a foreign visitor to a grand kingdom. “This is your store,” he said.

“I’ve fallen on hard times,” Neal sniffed with a doubtful glance at one of the dolls.

“Because of your legal troubles,” Keller agreed. “It’s the best I could do. Now, when the Irish get here…”

“Whoa.” Neal snapped his head over to the other man, eyes wide in alarm. “What are you talking about? You want them to find me?”

“The middleman’s in the wind,” Keller stressed. “Along with the real painting. To get the IRA out of the picture, we need something to hand over to them so they release Marie and stay off our backs while we get the real one. You’ll say you already have it- they don’t know that Marie’s manager couldn’t find you without her, and hopefully she won’t say anything about it.”

“And then what?” Neal demanded. “They kill me?”

“I won’t let them kill you,” Keller assured him. He was putting on his nice-guy voice now, dropping his tone so that it was almost gentle, if such a thing were possible. This was how he’d always convinced Neal to go along with terrible ideas in the past, when they used to be able to stand each other enough to pull jobs together. Neal had been young then, freshly run away from St. Louis and still unsure how to make a living off his particular talents, and Keller had a way of making things sound like advice or reassurance, when really they were orders.

“They won’t be able to kill you if you don’t tell them where the painting is,” Keller pointed out. “They’ll come here and…bluster a bit, but you’ll be prepared for negotiation. Ask for money. Offer them a deal and sell the forgery to them, and they’ll be out of our hair. Then we get Marie back and find the real one…it’s the same thing we planned, really,” Keller shrugged, “just backwards.”

Neal frowned and surveyed the room again- the busted antiques, the loose papers on the front desk, the chippendale. Did this really look like the kind of place run by the kind of guy who could successfully buy and hide a legendary stolen painting and then bargain for it with the Irish Republican Army? He didn’t think so. He thought it looked like the kind of place run by someone who was in terribly over their head, and that the Irish guys would surely pick up on that right away.

“Doesn’t have to be money,” he muttered.

“What?”

Neal turned back to Keller. “My guy’s in legal trouble, right? And the IRA is hardly going to be willing to spend two hundred thousand on a painting they think they can probably beat out of me.”

“They might if they want to be quick,” Keller offered.

“Would you?” Neal asked, arching one eyebrow.

“Nah I’d probably try to beat it out of you,” Keller admitted.

“Right. And if I was already in the red, I wouldn’t want to give up the painting for less than I paid for it so money makes it too complicated. But if I get them to, say, intimidate the prosecutor going after me for fraud into dropping the charges, and in exchange I offer the forgery…”

Keller’s eyes lit up in understanding and he cracked a small grin. “They’d gladly do the favor for the painting,” he finished for him. “We’d just need a fake prosecutor willing to get roughed up a little.”

“Mozzie could do it,” Neal said. “He can play someone who’s…easily intimidated.”

“He’s also a weasel,” Keller said, his face souring a bit. “I haven’t forgotten the little gift he gave me with that Degas. The last thing he needs is another priceless painting to try and kill me with.”

“Who would you have?”

Keller shrugged again. “Alex. She’s around, and we know she needs the money. I mean, if she’s hocking paints, she’s gotta be in deep and I heard all about the Picasso disaster in Brooklyn…”

“No way,” Neal said in as hard a voice as he could scrounge up. “I don’t want her involved in this any more than she has to be.”

“And why is that?” Keller took a step towards him. “She’s already helping with the forgery, right? Worried about something?”

He was fishing, trying to prompt Neal to slip up. Of course he’d want Alex around, especially if he already scented treachery back at the apartment. She was insurance of good behavior on Neal’s part.

Neal swallowed. “I’m worried,” he said, “that she’ll end up floating in the Hudson because the Irish get too carried away.”

“She’s a big girl,” Keller snorted. “She can take care of herself. I’ll be nearby when they go talk to her and that way if anyone gets out-of-line, I can step in.”

He ran the calculations in his head- Alex was an adult, and she had agreed to help at least this far along. Presumably, if she could handle herself against Neal and against the IRA, she could also say ‘no’ to Keller if he asked her to play their prosecutor.

But he had promised her the forgery in return for her help, and of course, Keller wanted the forgery. He had to, right? Neal had thought he needed the fake to present to the FBI so he could sneak off with the real one, but Keller seemed awfully unconcerned about the prospect of losing the forgery to the Irish. Whatever plan Neal assigned him in his imagination was beginning to fall apart, so knowing Keller, it couldn’t have been the plan to begin with.

Keller clapped him on the shoulder; it was a bit too hard to be purely friendly. “After you make the deal with the Irish, you finish the forgery,” he said. There was that fake advice tone again. “They’ll keep their end up by scaring Alex, then you’ll keep your end with your fancy paint. Yeah?” He tipped Neal’s head back with a light smack under his chin.

“Yeah,” Neal said.

“That’s my boy.” He released him and began to saunter away towards the door of the antique shop. “Oh, and Neal?”

“What?”

Keller glanced over his shoulder at him. “I might not be able to kill you with the feds and Interpol always looking over our shoulders,” he said, “but if you pull something to mess this up, I’ll break both your wrists and you’ll never paint another picture again.”

Neal only snorted at him, but in his gut, the pain was starting. Anxiety about all the infinite ways this could go wrong was clawing at his insides and making him nauseous, and all common sense said that he should back out now. But the tingling taste of adrenaline on the back of his tongue, like sugar poured straight into his mouth, had always been stronger than the fear. If he got away with this…

He had to try. This was what that kid on the couch in St. Louis could only dream about.

Keller didn’t wait for his answer anyway. He tossed his cig on the floor and stomped it out before leaving, the bell on the door ringing into oblivion after him until he disappeared into the July New York crowds.

*************************************************************

They came at night. Neal was ready for them, having changed into an old brown jacket of Byron’s that looked conceivably like it could have been an antiques dealer’s. There were patches on the elbows, which had always struck Neal as a stuffy academician type thing. Honestly, he was surprised it belonged to Byron at all; if June’s remnants of his wardrobes were to be trusted, the man had impeccable style.

He also had his old pair of fake glasses, just for an extra touch. They were a little too big for his face…it would be best to have the Irishmen think he was as unthreatening as possible.

Three of them appeared outside his shop door at 9:30. One stayed outside, pacing with his hands in his pockets, while the other two brusquely ignored the ‘CLOSED’ sign and walked in, one after another. The first was an older man with clipped, greying hair and a drooping frown so that he looked almost like a basset hound, and the other was clearly the muscle- six foot four at least and dressed, incredibly, in a Celtics jersey and sweatpants that were block-colored in green, orange, and white stripes. Across his forearm was a tattoo that read ‘Resistance is Not Terrorism’ with two Irish flags crossed in an ‘X,’ except the flag posts were machine guns. He looked like he was quite possibly trying to get arrested for association with the IRA.

Neal was bent over a stack of papers under a desk lamp pretending to do work and looked up at them with a dazed blink, like they had wrenched him out of deep thought. In reality, the papers were old sales slips from the real owner of the store and a few vaguely threatening letters from the IRS that Neal was scribbling on the back of. He had been sketching a woman’s face with curly hair and smirking lips, and telling himself that it wasn’t Alex.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the Basset Hound and Resistance is Not Terrorism. “We’re closed. If you’d like to come back tomorrow, we’ll be open at nine am.”

“We’re not in the market,” the Basset Hound said in a heavy brogue. “Not in the traditional sense anyway.”

Neal frowned and pretended to be confused, flicking his eyes between the two goons in front of him and the man outside guarding the door. “I…I don’t understand,” he said slowly. “Is there something else I can help you with?”

“Are you John DuBois?” the Basset Hound asked.

“Yes,” Neal said. “Listen, I’m sorry fellas, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave and come back another…”

Resistance is Not Terrorism opened a smartphone and laid it out on the desk. On the screen was a photo of a young woman tied to a chair in what appeared to be a bathroom somewhere. Her eye makeup was streaked down her face from crying and a cloth gag had been tied around her mouth, but other than the obvious distress she looked unharmed. That was good.

“Who is this?” Neal asked softly.

“We think you know,” said the Basset Hound.

Neal offered them a sickly sort of smile and pushed the phone back to the Celtics Warrior. “I think you have me confused with someone else,” he said. “Please, gentlemen. If you don’t leave, I’m afraid I’m going to have to call the police.”

“Oh now, we wouldn’t want to do that,” the Basset Hound chirped. Beside him, Resistance is Not Terrorism lifted his jersey to reveal a gun in his waistband. “Not with your history. I’m sure the police would be real interested in learning that a man with your pending charges has been asking around about a stolen painting.”

Neal raised his hands next to his head, keeping one on the gun, and stepped back from the desk. “Alright, alright,” he said, pitching his voice up in false panic. Mostly false. “No need for the police then. You’re right. What is it you want?”

“Isn’t it obvious, laddie?” The Basset Hound leaned over the desk on his elbows and crossed his arms. “We want The Concert. And seein’ as you also want it, there’s unfortunately goin’ to need to be a compromise on your part. We have the girl. She’ll lead us to the paintin’…eventually…and when she does, I don’t want a crooked art dealer in my way tryin’ to sweep it out from under me. The less people who know about all this, the better. You understand. Miles.”

He nodded to Resistance is Not Terrorism, who raised his gun and leveled it at Neal’s head.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Neal waved his hands out in front of him and backed all the way into the shelf behind him. “Hold on, fellas, if it’s the painting you want, I can get it to you. I have the painting. Marie’s already sold it to me.”

Miles the gunman paused and gave the Basset Hound a sideways look. Basset Hound held up one hand to stop him.

“What’s this now?” he asked softly.

“Yeah.” Neal bobbed his head in a frantic nod. “She had a courier take it into the country, since Interpol’s watching her, you know? That’s what they told me anyway. I met him this morning and bought the painting off him…it’s all been scheduled for months.”

“Where is it?” Miles demanded, jerking the gun in a brusque, impatient motion.

“Well I,” Neal gulped and lifted his shoulders in an apologetic shrug, “I can sell it to you.”

“Sell it?” Basset Hound’s droopy face melted into an incredulous expression. “Boy-o, we’re not in the purchasin’ mindset. Tell us where that painting is or things’ll have to get nasty.”

“Right,” Neal said slowly, looking at Miles’s gun and then back to Basset Hound, “but, you know, there’s the fact that only I know where it is. So really, you may not be in the purchasing mindset, but this is a store, and I’m a businessman.”

Basset Hound laughed and turned to Miles, who upon seeing his boss laughing also started to snicker in a mean sort of way but didn’t seem to know what he was laughing at. “A businessman, eh?” Basset Hound confirmed. “We’re businessmen too, you know. I know how much that paintin’ is worth. You think you’re goin’ to get a quarter of a million dollars off of us?”

“The price can be negotiated,” Neal cut in smoothly. “I’ve, ah, run into some legal trouble, as you mentioned. I would be willing to give you the painting for significantly less than it’s worth if the charges against me could be…taken care of.”

Basset Hound and Miles exchanged a baffled look.

“I know your organization has connections,” Neal said. He was slowly allowing his voice to sound more confident, steadier, because this was the phase when he couldn’t be seen as a fool to be taken advantage of. “The prosecutor for my case works for the federal government…honestly it’s better for everyone if she’s no longer looking my way too closely, right? It’s like you said: the less people who know about all this, the better.”

Basset Hound raised an eyebrow. “Federal prosecutor…that’s bound to be high profile if somethin’ happens to her.”

“Oh no nothing like that,” Neal shook his head quickly. “I’m not talking about,” he dropped his voice into a scandalized whisper, “murder, but if you were to just, you know…scare her. I think that would be all it took. They’re all crooked up there anyway, right? I just need her off my back, you understand. I’m facing 20 years. If you can help me with this, the painting’s yours for…well, much less. Maybe 80,000.”

“No money,” Miles snapped. “Not if we’re doin’ you a favor.”

Neal winced. “The price can be negotiated,” he mumbled again.

Basset Hound twitched his lips into a wry smile and wagged his finger at Neal. “I like you,” he chuckled. “It takes some balls to run this kind of a racket. I respect that. Tell you what, we’ll steer your lady lawyer off your scent for you, but then the paintin’s ours. No eighty thousand nothin’, you hear? You’re lucky to be walkin’ away from all this.”

It was probably not worth the argument, though anytime Neal could escape with a little money was always worth a try. He nodded, relenting, but added in a timid voice, “And the girl?”

“What’s it matter to you?” Miles growled.

“Shut it, Miles, the lad’s clearly a gentleman,” Basset Hound said, winking at Neal. “The girl’ll be let go once we get the painting. She’ll keep her mouth shut to avoid goin’ to jail, and it would be more trouble than it’s worth to kill her anyway. We’d never hear the end of it. Now,” he slapped his hand a few times on the desk, “what’s this barrister’s name?”

They parsed out the details quickly, with Miles never taking his eyes off Neal or letting his gun slide out of view. For his part, Neal tried to make John DuBois look pretty relieved; this was all probably a bit too much for him anyway. He succeeded in making himself just likable enough that Basset Hound found him endearing, but also stupid enough that he felt bad for him and figured he could rip him off for the painting without too much trouble, and certainly without having to kill him. Poor lad’s not a threat anyway.

When they finally left at half past ten, Neal couldn’t believe it had only been an hour. He allowed himself a long exhale, pulled the glasses off his face, and shrugged out of Byron’s old jacket. Running a hand through his hair, he crossed the shop in a few steps and shoved the door open…he didn’t bother to lock up. There really wasn’t much in there of any value.

It was cooler now outside, but his heart was beating too fast for him to really be cold. The sweat was still coating his palms and he couldn’t help but smile from the rush. One group fooled, now was just Keller to trick and he’d be home free. Peter, too, technically, if he was going to find a way to give Alex the painting but Neal didn’t like to count ‘keeping things from Peter’ as ‘fooling Peter.’ It was never for the high of adrenaline or predatory if he had to lie to Peter, only to protect him.

Tomorrow, Peter would come by and place the tracker on the painting, and hopefully when all the dust settled, the feds would be able to catch Miles and the Basset Hound along with recovering the real painting. Surely it would be believable for the forgery to slip through the cracks, especially if Neal let it slip to a few ears that it was a forgery, just before the takedown, too soon for the Irishmen to do anything about it, but there was no con without the big reveal. Then the FBI would just assume the Irishmen got rid of it upon realizing it was worthless.

Confusion is created, rumors abound about which painting is real and which is the forgery, different versions of the story get out, and then Neal and Alex are in for a payday. As the real painting loses worth because it might be the forgery, the forgery will gain worth because it might be real. They would have no trouble finding a John DuBois type to buy it.

So he was feeling quite pleased with himself when he got back to June’s apartment. He left Byron’s old jacket on the back of her dining room chair, then headed up to his suite, ready to finish the forgery and head to bed, but when he reached his door, he stopped.

The light was on inside. Was Alex still there? His heart skipped a beat and his face flushed at the thought…she had been waiting for him. Maybe, then, he could finish the forgery tomorrow. More important things to do tonight.

He pushed the door open with a small grin on his face…

and froze.

It was not Alex.

Keller sat at one of the stools instead, a glass of wine in one hand and a knife in the other. He didn’t look up when Neal came in, just took a sip.

“Came back earlier to see if Alex was still here,” he said. “Wanted to tell her about plan. She was gone, but your landlady’s granddaughter was here with her dog…little thing had gotten into your paints while you were away, so Cindy…is that her name? Cindy?…she wanted to make sure this got back to you. You wouldn’t believe what color it is.”

Neal paled. With a long sip to finish his glass, Keller stood up and turned to face him, holding up a plastic container of grey paint labeled ‘pewter.’

“I think you and I,” he sighed, spinning the knife around his fingers, “need to have a talk.”

Chapter Text

There were several options.

He could run, but that would be undignified. Keller would catch him halfway down the hall and drag him unceremoniously back to the apartment.

He could fight, but that would be even worse. He knew how it went when he and Keller came to blows; Neal never came out on top. Any damage he would do to his opponent would only serve to make him angrier.

He could lie. He could always lie. If it were Peter, or Alex, or almost anyone else, he might be able to spin a lie crafty enough to worm his way out of this, but it was Keller. Keller knew his lies because they were the same lies he told, the same lies he had been expecting to uncover this whole time. Even if Neal was innocent- and he was never innocent -he couldn’t convince Keller of it now.

So he went with option D. He shut the door behind him with a sigh, walked across the room, and fell into the chair across from Keller at the center table. “You put me in a bad position,” he said in a dull voice.

“Is that right?”

“Peter was bound to find out something was wrong,” Neal pointed out. “He knows me too well.”

“Your fault for getting chummy with a fed.”

“Maybe.” Neal shrugged. “Either way, he would have found out.”

“Yeah?” Keller leaned over the table and tapped his fingers on the glossy surface. The knife was still tucked between his palm and his thumb. “So you just…told him, huh? Just got it out of the way?”

Neal shot him a glare. “I do work for the FBI, not you,” he muttered, then glanced at the knife and rolled his shoulders. “But no, I didn’t just tell him. He made a surprise visit, found the forgery.”

“You expect me to believe that?” Keller demanded. His fingers raced across the tabletop. Tap, tap, tap. “You managed to hide an entire u-boat of Nazi treasure from this guy, not to mention dozens of other little scores to keep your funds up. But one little painting and boom! Caught. That’s how it went down?”

“You didn’t give me enough time to plan.”

“You’re lying.”

He said nothing.

“You know,” Keller mused, “I do respect it. Once upon a time, Neal, you were this loyal to me.”

“Never,” Neal growled.

“You’re right.” Keller picked up the knife and began to twirl it again. “You would never have tried to hide a u-boat of treasure or dozens of little scores under my nose. You wouldn’t have gone around behind my back because, well, we both know what happened the one time you tried.”

He gave him a pointed glance, and Neal tried not to shudder at the memory, their last job together, when Keller had shot John right in the head for the passport mishap…of course he knew it wasn’t a mishap. John had planned to run away with the whole score and had his false passport doctored into a new alias that Keller wouldn’t recognize, planned to cut both Keller and Neal out of the deal and break for some faraway island. Neal thought he had caught John first, thought he was being smart by blackmailing him and convincing him to split the money. Two ways was better than three, and then it would be both of them betraying Keller and not just John putting a target on his back alone. Neal told himself he’d seen too much in Keller…the temper, the mean streak, the impulsiveness…and he wanted out. But really, he just got greedy.

And he got sloppy. He assumed that if Keller had known about John’s plan to cut and run, he would have told Neal, his partner. Stupid. Keller knew even before Neal did, so when he killed John and looked into his bag to find not the entire sum of cash but only half, well, that just left one other person to divide by two with.

And they both knew what happened then.

“You did say that if I wasn’t up to anything, you’d be disappointed,” Neal drawled.

Keller nodded. “I also said that if you pulled something to mess this up, I’d break your wrists.”

“Break my wrists and I won’t be able to finish the painting,” Neal pointed out. “Besides, it isn’t messed up yet.”

He laughed without any humor, without even parting his lips. “Always one to drive a bargain, Caffrey, I’ll give you that. Fine. Your wrists go on to live another day, but you’re finishing that painting right now, right here.” He stood up in one, brusque motion and grabbed Neal by the back of his shirt, hoisting him up from his chair and pushing him towards the almost-finished masterpiece. The maneuver did not hurt him, but the message was the same as if he had thrown him to the ground and started kicking him: I am stronger. I can move you around and there’s nothing you can do about it. Don’t you forget it.

“I’m not leaving until it’s done,” he said.

Neal, with Keller’s fist still clenched around his collar, swallowed and nodded at the streaks of grey on his canvas. “Understood,” he muttered.

So Keller gave him one last shove and retreated to the table and Neal crouched down in front of the painting and stared at the unfinished corner with a dull look. Maybe he could still stall, draw this out so that Peter would show up and catch Keller in the act. The deadline had always been tight- though not impossible -and it wouldn’t exactly be unrealistic if he acted like he simply couldn’t finish it in the few hours that Keller wanted.

Neal had been playing with fire a little too carelessly, he thought, and he was starting to sweat, but he resolved himself to paint as slowly as possible anyway when he picked up the brush, if nothing else than just to piss Keller off. So he painted, one grey stroke at a time, and he remembered.

When the bullet hit John, he’d looked just as shocked as Neal felt. His face started in the very beginnings of surprise, and then he fall back onto the concrete floor with his eyes forever wide and his mouth slightly agape. It took a few more seconds for the blood to start to come out, surrounding his head like a halo. Neal had never liked John…he was an idiot, a liability, and too cocky, but he couldn’t help but feel sorry for him now. To die like that, without ever knowing what hit you…he didn’t have a chance.

“What…” his voice choked and he gaped at Keller. “What did you do?”

Keller walked coolly over to John’s body and knelt beside him, but he did not put his gun away. “Didn’t know where his passport was,” he said with a small shrug. “Can’t have somebody like that on your team. It puts everyone at risk.”

“You killed him,” Neal said. His voice felt like it was coming from outside himself. His fingertips were tingling with panic. John was dead. Keller had shot him. It was the first time he’d ever seen a man die.

Keller reached into John’s pocket and pulled out the navy blue cover of a passport, then tossed it aside with a smirk. “Oops,” he mused. “There it is.”

“You’re insane,” Neal hissed. “You just shot a man in cold blood and he didn’t even cross you! Do you understand we could go away for murder now? Not to mention what people will think! No one will work with us if…”

He stopped abruptly, cutting himself off, because Keller had started to unzip John’s bag.

What was supposed to be in the bag, of course, was a set of tools for the job and all their changes of clothes. Just like what was supposed to be in Neal’s bag was a stack of fake documents for getting them out of potential trouble and the supplies they needed for when they reached the states.

Instead, John’s bag held the same thing that Neal’s did, which is to say a quarter of a million dollars of what was, for all intents and purposes, Keller’s money.

Keller thumbed the bills with a thoughtful expression, and though he looked like he was lost in absent thought, Neal knew he must have been counting.

Play dumb! Play dumb! Deny, deny, deny!

“He was going to run?” Neal confirmed in a flat voice. “Did you know?”

Keller ignored him, cocking his head at the money he held in his fist. “You know,” he said, “this looks like less than half a mil.”

“Alright so he wasn’t going to steal all of it then,” Neal said, and glanced over his shoulder pretending to be nervous. “Call it a change of heart. We have to get out of here, Matt. Someone’s bound to have heard that shot.”

“If he was gonna steal from me, why wouldn’t he have stolen all of it?”

Neal felt a twinge of annoyance at the wording- steal from me. Not from us. At the end of the day, he knew that Keller only viewed him as a helpful tool, a seal you threw fish to when it did the right tricks. That was why he’d gotten himself into this mess in the first place: he was sick of fish.

“I don’t know,” he snapped, “but we have to go. You just put us both in far more trouble than this job was worth, and I’m not going to prison just because…”

“Open your bag, Neal.”

He froze. His mouth went dry. “What?”

Keller sighed and stood up from John’s body with a hard look, leveling his gun at Neal. “Open your bag,” he ordered. “Now.”

Run! Run! Run! But he couldn’t. There was nowhere to go but the flight he was supposed to be on with Keller- and John -in twenty minutes.

He dropped the bag, numbly, mechanically, and stooped down to pull the zipper back. As a last resort, thinking maybe he could at least appeal to Keller’s deep-seated sense of good competition, he kicked it over to spill the money out and looked up at his partner with a shrug.

“What can I say?” he asked, fighting to keep his voice level. “I couldn’t have lived with myself if I let John get away with all the fun.”

Keller actually tipped his head back and laughed. He didn’t even blink at the bills scattered on the floor. “Shoulda known it would end like this,” he said. “Weaselly little brat…I’m almost impressed.”

Almost. “When did you find out?” Neal asked him.

“About John?” Keller snorted. “Right away. A week ago. He wasn’t acting right and I found two copies of his passport in his room…shit he needed to get away from me, not just the feds. I was waiting for him to catch himself out to make my move. He was always too stupid to get away with something like that, but then he didn’t. He was careful. He stuck around. He came and did the job even though he planned to run off with my money right afterwards and I thought to myself, now who’s smart enough to come up with a plan like that and help even old Johnny Boy get away with it? And who’s young and dumb enough to actually try it?”

He stalked closer until he was only a few feet away from Neal, then looked down at the money carpeting the floor around them with an almost regretful frown. “You got brains, Caffrey,” he said, “but if you had any guts, you’d’ve killed John yourself and taken all the money,” he dragged his eyes up to meet Neal’s, “and then you woulda killed me.”

Neal set his jaw. “I don’t need to kill people to get what I want,” he said.

“Mm.” Keller cast a doubtful glance around the room- at the money, John’s body, and the gun he held pointed at Neal’s head -and raised an eyebrow. “You sure about that?”

And then he answered the question for both of them and fired. Once. Twice. Neal felt his body twist right, then left, then fall flat on his back on the cold concrete.

He couldn’t breathe. He could open his mouth, like a fish, but no air would come through. All the wind had blown straight out of him.

When he managed to cough- a wet, pitiful sound -it split his gut open like a hot knife and sent blood dribbling down his chin. He gasped, then grunted from the pain it caused him, then gasped again.

“Don’t worry,” Keller said in an easy voice, strolling over to him with his hands in his pockets, “someone’ll find you. It takes a while to bleed out from the abdomen, even with two shots. That’s one for trying to take my money and one for doing it poorly. I’d have put ‘em in your head but,” he shrugged, “it’d be a waste with so few people around that are this fun to play with. You grow up a bit, learn some stuff on your own, and maybe I’ll make a worthy rival out of you yet.”

He planted his foot over Neal’s stomach and pressed down until blood rushed down Neal’s side and he nearly blacked out from the pain. Was that him screaming?

Keller smirked and leaned his face in closer to him. “And don’t ever steal from me again,” he whispered, pressing the gun lightly between his eyes, “or I’ll make you wish I killed you.”

One bullet for trying. One for failing. It was Neal’s first true lesson in the life of a con: if you’re going to pull something, make sure you get away with it. Looks like he had failed again. A few centimeters in from his ribcage, he felt a dull and nagging ache.
“What was Burke even gonna do with this, hm?” Keller asked from the table. “Use it to haul me in and get my handler to put me in timeout?”

Neal squinted at the line he was following and traced his brush through a cloud of yellow. “Put a tracker on it,” he muttered. “Find out what you were up to.”

Keller chuckled. “Smart,” he admitted. “I’m afraid the answer isn’t as interesting as you or him are hoping, though.”

“No?” Neal raised an eyebrow at the unfinished painting. “Lot of trouble then for a boring job.”

“It’s not a job. It’s a favor.”

Neal risked a glance at Keller’s reflection in the window; he was still twirling the knife in his fingers but he frowned at it now like he wasn’t really looking at it. There wasn’t enough amusement in his eyes for it to be his typical scheming face, but there wasn’t really enough of anything else either.

He didn’t move his gaze from the reflection when he said, “You don’t do favors.”

Keller looked up from under his lids, spinning and spinning the knife in a slow, constant rhythm, and met Neal’s eye with a crooked smirk. “I think you’ve got two bullet holes in your gut that might disagree with that statement,” he said.

With a scowl, Neal returned to his work. Some favor that was. He’d lost pints of blood and had to get his spleen removed in an emergency surgery in a foreign country, then escape the police who, of course, had plenty of questions about why he was found next to a dead body the day of a robbery. He slummed his way back to the US with hardly a cent to his name and no idea if or when Keller would come back to finish him off. No idea if Interpol had gotten enough information on him to track him down.

He did not feel lucky, and he certainly didn’t feel like Keller had let him live as some kind of gesture of respect, as though he truly couldn’t rid himself of an equal opponent. He felt like a scrawny fish someone had accidentally caught and then thrown back. Not worth the effort of eating for dinner.

So now, of course, he was supposed to have grown up. He was supposed to have learned a few things but still, Keller always managed to get one over on him.

He paused, took a deep breath. Too much emotion would leak into the painting. He had to be blank, let his hand be possessed by some dead and worthier artist.

An hour passed. An hour and a half. Keller got up to pace, stepped outside to make a call, and fished around Neal’s fridge for wine but did not leave him alone. True to his word (for once), he stayed well into the night like some kind of demon haunting the apartment, until the painting was finished.

Neal leaned away from it with a frown; it was a perfect replica, of course, and would serve Keller well. Too bad. He glanced at the clock and saw that it was almost three in the morning, then stood up and sauntered over to the open bottle of red Keller had in front of him. It was already half empty.

Keller raised an eyebrow as Neal grabbed the bottle and got himself a glass from the kitchen, pouring out a healthy amount.

“Done?” he confirmed.

Neal nodded. “It has to dry.” He glanced at the table and the knife still open, still spinning under Keller’s fingers, and nodded towards it. “You gonna put that away?”

“Maybe,” Keller said with an insolent shrug. He picked it up and pointed it in Neal’s direction. “Maybe I’ll cut your fingers off, now that you’ve finished the forgery for me.”

Neal said nothing, just took a long sip of his wine and stayed where he was, keeping the kitchen counter and a few feet of space solidly between them.

“How much did Alex know about your little plan here, huh?”

“Nothing,” Neal lied. “I just told her I’d need an excuse not to finish the painting on time. She didn’t know why.”

“What a good friend,” he said dryly. “Are you sleeping with her again?”

“No,” Neal snapped. “It doesn’t always have to be that, you know. Sometimes friends just do each other…”

“Favors,” Keller said with a nod.

Neal paused, at a loss, then threw back the rest of his wine glass, refilled it, and went to sit across from Keller. “Are you sleeping with Marie?” he countered.

“Yyyyep,” Keller drawled, letting the ‘p’ bounce off his lips with a pop.

Of course he was. He shouldn’t have asked. “Well,” Neal said, “great. And your favor is…?”

“I show the forgery to the IRA, tell ‘em I’m going to turn it in for the prize money to keep the feds off the scent while I give them the real one. Then, I give the real one to the feds but give the Irish the forgery. Bit of reverse psychology.” Keller tapped his head with the tip of the knife. “Feds are happy with their painting, Irish are happy with their painting. They won’t question the news that the painting’s been recovered because they’ll think it’s the forgery.”

“But really they have the forgery,” Neal muttered with a frown. “That’s…”

“Stupid, I know.” Keller nodded and sipped on his wine. “But it might be stupid enough to work.”

“All this as a favor to some girl?” Neal asked.

Keller snorted. “You’re one to talk.”

“I know, but you’re usually so,” Neal waved his hand through the air, “not me.”

“Thank God for that.” He leaned back in his chair and, finally, put the knife away. “I dunno,” he sighed. “Maybe she’s just different. Maybe I’m different. Gettin’ older now, Caffrey. Things change.”

And oddly enough, Neal believed him. There was something about the slightly sad look in his eyes, the distance as he glanced out at the New York night skyline, that reminded him of other drunken nights when they’d stayed up too late covered in paint or ink or bruises and either celebrated some victory or another, or plotted the next one. At the bottom of the bottles, they always found brief and fleeting moments of honesty with each other. There were probably things Keller knew about him- if he remembered them -that Neal hadn’t told anyone else, and vice versa. It was alway reassuring for them to know that they didn’t trust each other sober, so when the morning came around, they would never speak of it.

Neal swirled the wine around the bottom of his glass. “If it helps,” he said, “I don’t think you’ve changed much at all, so it must be the girl.”

Keller laughed. He held his wine glass up and they clinked them together in a half-hearted cheers. “It’s always a girl, isn’t it?” he said. “One day, Caffrey, these girls are gonna take us both out.”

Neal reached over and grabbed the bottle to refill his glass with a grunt. “You first.”