“What? Like a crazy zealot?”
“I’ve loved you for years, Francine. Five long years.”
She shouldn’t speak, since this man was obviously out of his mind, but part of her felt she had nothing to lose.
“Well, just so you understand, I love Raphael and only Raphael. When he looks at me, I see that he loves me from his soul. When you look at me, regardless of what form you take, I only see your fervor in attaining a long-sought prize.”
He grimaced. “You’re wrong. We belong together. I know we were meant for each other.”
“I’m not wrong. You don’t care about me. You merely want to revel in your attainment of me. I’m not some prize you can put on a pedestal and gloat to the world about. Hear me when I tell you that I will not be treated like an object deposited on a shelf so that others can praise your powers of acquisition.”
Edgar frowned. “That is not true,” he said, but she saw the accuracy of her claim in his gaze.
“Yes, it is. Raphael knows the definition of what a priceless treasure is and treats me accordingly. You do not.”
He put a hand on his gun, as if to threaten her to behave or else.
“Raphael would never shoot me with a tranquilizer gun, or change my hair color against my will, or knock me out and shove me in a trunk.”
Edgar took his hand from the dart gun and looked down the road. “Well, as you’ve established, I’m not Raphael.”
Francine closed her eyes. He’d spoken the truth. She suspected that didn’t bode well for her. Perhaps she should have played along.
He drew the gun quickly and ended the conversation and any retort she might have made with another dart to her midsection.
Raphael was both alarmed and relieved to find the trunk empty. He searched the cargo space carefully, finding only a couple of blond hairs stuck on the mat, but no other trace anyone had been inside. In the fake hologram of Francine, her hair had been blond. He didn’t care what color it was, he just wanted to find her.
He noticed a set of footprints on the passenger side of the vehicle. One, not two, which worried him. He followed the trail away from the parked car and around a bend about a quarter of a mile to where another vehicle had obviously been parked. The footprints ended and a different set of tire tracks continued. Another half mile down the dusty dirt road was a main street and it was blacktop. Not as easy to follow or discover what direction the unidentifiable vehicle had gone.
Raphael tamped down the roiling worry in his gut. Every moment without Francine was agony, but he would not stop until he found her. Scanning the area, he noted the darkening sky.
The only thing he could do was head in the direction of the stakeout, where Indigo and the mystery shifter thought the gold ingots were located. He was intrigued to discover how they planned to extract their treasure. It wouldn’t be easy.
Raphael ran Ichor-Delta fast toward the Alienn, Arkansas, water tower, where Maxwell the Martian dangled one handed from the edge of the spaceship shape. The Greys initially planned to hide the gold ingots inside the water tower, right in plain sight, just like the Grey brothers and their family did everything else.
He found Diesel’s vehicle hidden in a grove of trees a hundred feet from the water tower, but with a good view. Lucy sat in the front passenger seat, so he opened the back door and jumped in next to Wyatt.
“Anything thrilling to report?” he asked once he’d softly closed the door. They didn’t seem startled by his appearance.
“Nope. Nothing yet,” Wyatt replied.
“How will they attempt to get the ingots out of there?”
“No telling,” Diesel remarked, sounding intrigued.
Raphael scanned the base of the water tower supported by four metal legs, each with a ladder built in to climb to the top if need. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence on three sides, with the fourth side sporting a chained gate secured by a big lock.
He couldn’t think of an easy way to get heavy gold ingots out of the water tower.
Raphael asked, “Is that why you decided not to hide the ingots in there? Too difficult to haul them all up the ladder? I mean, ingots aren’t lightweight.”
“That is exactly why we didn’t put them there. It was a good hiding place in theory, but not in practice. As we discussed the plan, it became clear we’d have had to call in all manner of heavy equipment and establish some sort of steep conveyer belt system to accomplish the task.
“Not to mention, dropping them one by one into a metal water tower, one clanking into another, would have been loud enough to wake the dead in another galaxy. It would have taken forever to get the whole treasure up there. Would have been a big pain in the patootie, as my aunt Dixie is fond of saying.”
“So where is the treasure?” Wyatt asked.
