“Would you shut up and pay attention?”
He laughed. “What is that?” Spiker pivoted toward a reconstructed Titanis. “This thing looks like a peacock reptile.”
“It’s a dinosaur.”
“With feathers?” He snorted, then closed in on the exhibit, mixing into the fray of another school group.
“More than two meters tall, too.” Vanka caught herself and crossed her arms, annoyed that she was so easily distracted by his question and that she still didn’t know what happened earlier, not to mention his head-in-the-sand attitude. The man spent too much of his free time loafing around on his boat and not enough appreciating the world for what it had to offer.
The school group moved on. A gaggle of tourists angled for their spots. Spiker didn’t move from the exhibit other than to slide right a few feet until he had another placard to read next to another reconstruction or fossil that he’d likely belittle.
Five minutes passed. Two elderly men had outpaced Spiker’s progress by several yards, and Vanka couldn’t see the school group he’d initially finagled his way through. Was this some kind of punishment for derailing their day to learn about where they’d been? She couldn’t see his hands. If he was playing a game on his phone and waiting her out, she’d wring his thick-muscled neck.
Another tour group of students approached, and Vanka had had enough of Spiker’s game. She hurried ahead of the docent and reached his side before they were surrounded. “What are you—”
“You knew dinosaurs had feathers?” he confirmed without a drop of irony, and then returned his focus to the small print on the exhibit placard.
She studied his curious behavior. “Yes.”
“And that,” Spiker continued, “birds are descendants of dinosaurs?”
His awestruck tone threw Vanka a curveball. “Well, yes.”
Spiker pursed his lips and lifted his hands in apparent frustration. “You were right.”
“Sorry?” Vanka blinked. “What?”
He moved to the next exhibit placard as if it had a string tied around his waist, reeling him in. “They didn’t teach this in American high schools.”
Vanka didn’t know how to read this situation. “Are you messing with me?”
Spiker had the nerve to look as if she were the one acting out of character. “And the colors? Man, these things look like parrots.”
“Peacocks and parrots.” She kept to his side. “Didn’t know you were such a bird aficionado.”
“Look at this thing.” He gestured at the Phorusrhacos. “You can’t tell me that’s not a parrot on steroids.”
She couldn’t. Nor would she join in with her opinion that its neck made the Phorusrhacos look far more like an ostrich. No need to get into nuance when what she really wanted to do was show him how underwater marine life ended up on top of mountains. “Sure. I see it.”
“You’ve seen this before?”
She lifted her shoulders. “Once or twice.” Or a thousand times. “What difference does that make?”
“I haven’t seen any of this,” he added with a heap of bewilderment and a touch of disappointed annoyance.
“If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t learn about it in school.”
His lips quirked. “Don’t start lying to protect my feelings now, princess.”
“Scout’s honor.” She held up her hand and then gestured to the front of the exhibit hall where they’d bypassed hundreds of factoids that he probably wanted to read. “Besides, scientists only recently had the technology to analyze fossils for color.”
“After high school then?” he asked.
“Post-secondary. Think like in the 2000s, maybe 2010s.”
His grin solidified, and Spiker surveyed the exhibit hall, soaking in as much as he could. “All right.” Then, just as abruptly, he focused on her as though he wouldn’t allow himself another glance. It was like he’d had a vision of his beach holiday and watched it vaporize. “Show me why we’re here.”
There was so much they could see first, and wasn’t that one of her most important tenets? Appreciate, protect, and respect the past so that we’re not doomed to repeat it. But she respected that he wanted to get the job done. Vanka needed to remember that and vowed not to leave this building before she found something that would tie into their Robin Hood caseload.
CHAPTER SIX
Life comes at you fast. That triteness had always annoyed Spiker, but today put the cliché in a whole new light.
Canceled sabbatical? Check.
Temporary housing? Check.
An eye-opening museum visit? Oddly enough, check.
Spiker had learned more about Vanka in the last two hours than he had in all their years working together. Uncertainty needled him as they drove out of Washington, DC. As if he needed more of that in his life. But this was a new irksome layer that he didn’t know how to describe. Who cared if Vanka was an archeology buff? He should’ve picked up on that when they were in Idaho.
She decelerated the Audi, and Spiker glanced from the blank screen on his phone, just noticing that they were headed in the wrong direction. At least he wasn’t the only one driven to distraction.
Vanka slowed on the roundabout exit. “You’re quieter than normal.”
Spiker pocketed his phone. “I could comment on your driving.”
“But you can’t.” She shifted into the roundabout’s outer lane. “There’s not much to say.”
“More like I value my life . . .” The left lane redirected traffic onto the northbound highway but stayed to the right and deposited them on a well-landscaped suburban street. He glanced in the sideview mirror. Not one hundred feet behind, he could see the industrial cement barriers and mounted overhead highway signs. His eyebrows arched. “Another field trip?”
She laughed at his joke. “Maybe another day.”
“Yeah . . .” Spiker grunted. “Maybe. What are we doing?”
Vanka turned into a neighborhood. Dogwood and cherry blossom trees lined the sides of the streets, engulfing his field of vision in a picturesque view of everyday life. Of normal people—people he never saw in his world of crime families and despots, laundered money and extrajudicial governmental assassinations.
“Going home.”
He frowned. “Home’s NYC.”
Vanka’s head tilted; bemused laughter made her smile. She drove like she knew the area. The Audi didn’t push a hair over twenty miles per hour. Parked cars, driveways, and portable basketball hoops dotted the street. “Since when?”
“Since always,” he insisted.
The turn signal clicked as Vanka applied the brakes with habitual familiarity. A moment later, they were parked in a driveway. Before unfastening her seatbelt, she tried to get a read on his face. “You know I don’t live in New York.”
Did he? Spiker couldn’t swallow with the dry knot in his throat. He grasped for straws. She lived in the city; she consistently traveled to and from LaGuardia airport; she was a walking, talking, tough-as-nails, New York City fashionista.
Vanka had Virginia license plates, but everyone at GSI had Virginia plates. Buck had explained once that the Commonwealth was a buyer-beware state. Spiker wasn’t sure how that mattered in their line of work, but Buck owned it like a fast pass to do what he wanted with vehicles. Spiker hadn’t brought the topic up again.