The empty eyes of his horse’s head sculpture bubbled to the forefront of her mind, too. How had she not noticed the correlation between the two?
Wariness prickled along her spine.Come on, Nick.“I take it you didn’t get to go to art school.”
“Despite having earned it, no. That was you, wasn’t it, gallivanting off to New York in my place? And why do you think they chose you, Haseya?”
She frowned. “Because I earned it, too.”
He shook his head. “They gave you that grant because you have Navajo blood running through your veins.”
“No. They gave it to me because they thought my paintings were as good as your sculptures.”
“You’re deluded,” he laughed. “The state of Utah wanted to send an Indigenous girl off into the big wide world with a generous grant because it made them look good. Because it made them feel good about all the opportunities the Utah Territory and the US Army stripped the tribes of all those years ago. They didn’t send you to New York based on merit. They sent you because your ancestors were oppressed and they felt bad about it.”
“You’re the one who’s deluded,” she shot back. “I worked my ass off for the recognition, just like you did.”
“No,” he said firmly. She saw the flash of his teeth, though he was no longer grinning at her. “You don’t know what I went through, whatshewent through, to get the executors to sit up and pay attention, only for our money to be stolen away by some ridiculous small-town girl nobody had ever heard of. When that grant didn’t come through, ask me what I did to keep us off the streets.”
“Did it have something to do with cocaine?” she ventured.
“I became a small-time drug dealer on the streets of Moab,” he confirmed. “I sold cocaine, pills, whatever I could get my hands on. Whatever paid the bills. Whatever kept my mother comfortable. And you know what? She went into remission. Her hair started growing back. She began to put weight back on. I saw her smile again. Heard her laugh. She went back to work because she wanted to start putting money aside for art school again. Despite everything, she never gave up on me. Then the cancer came back for her.”
Sassy automatically went back on her heels when he advanced a step. The strain on her wrist from holding the weighted nail gun made her grit her teeth.Keep him talking.“That’s terrible.”
“The only way for her to get better was to undergo a bone marrow transplant,” he continued. “To pay for the procedure, I got careless. I got caught,” he said, the words speeding into one another. His emotions were starting to take over. His eyes were wet. “After I was locked up, she went forward with the transplant. There were complications. Her body rejected the donor cells, and she died. I did everything I could to be released when she told me she’d found a match and the doctors had scheduled the procedure. I begged everyone I knew to vouch for me so that I could see her for a few moments, just a few moments, before they put her under. I even wrote to the executors of the grant. They claimed not to remember who I was. They lied again to make themselves look better. I wasn’t allowed to say goodbye to my own mother.”
Oh, God.“I’m sorry for that.”
“Are you?” he scrutinized. “Sorry? Because you had a charmed life. You had the right ancestry, the right angle, the right grant, the right opportunities, and you still took it all for granted. You gave it all up, didn’t you—painting, art school? Which proves you were never an artist to begin with.”
“Is that why you chose the gallery for the cocaine drop?” she asked. “Out of revenge?”
“I made some powerful friends in the drug trade. They got me out of prison. They helped me get out of Moab and leave Weston Childress behind. To repay them, I had to set up a fresh drop zone. What better place than here out in the boonies? If that two-bit dealer hadn’t shot that undercover cop, they wouldn’t have put half the effort into stopping me.”
“You’re wrong,” she told him. “Remember my friend Nick?”
“What about him?”
“He put it together,” she explained. “He knew you weren’t being entirely truthful about who you were and what you were doing in Dark Canyon. It was a mistake leaving my bracelet on the table at the Bootleg. By that point, he was already on to you. He’s the reason the police were there the night of the auction.”
He sniffed. “Did your family keep the money they earned from my sculpture?”
“No,” she said, feeling at last that justice had been done somewhere. “The funds are being donated to Detective Hatch’s family to help pay for his recovery from the gunshot wound.”
His eyes glimmered with malice. “Was that Nick’s idea, too?”
Sassy couldn’t help it. She smiled. “No. It was Soledad’s.”
His eyes flared with something like pain.
She snorted. “You don’t expect me to believe you actually had feelings for her.”
“I’m not heartless,” he claimed. His gaze flickered over her torso, her hips… “To tell you the truth, she reminds me of a far less negligent version of you. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Same height and build. It wasn’t hard imagining you underneath me when I was on top of her.”
She swallowed the bile rising up her throat. Her hand tightened around the handle of the gun. Was he close enough for the nails to make it past the skin? To stop him?
“She should be running your gallery,” he told her. “Like me, she had it rough growing up. No rich, Goody Two-shoes family to help her along in life.”
“Was it my rich family,” she wondered, “or my ancestry? I’m having trouble keeping up with your excuses.”
