“Don’t even thinkabout it.”

I stopped reading the paper, turned to look over my shoulder, and quirked an eyebrow. Liddy, one of my partners in crime, strolled farther into my living room. “Why? And have you ever heard of knocking first?”

She shrugged, pointing to picture in the newspaper. “It’s the kind of thing that could get us in jail or dead, or worse.” I knew she was teasing—sort of.

Chuckling, I replied, “There’s nothing much worse than dead. Take it from an expert on the subject.”

The ‘it’ she was referring to was an article in the arts section of the paper. Why did it interest me enough to make Liddy say what she did? Because the story was about a new show at the Roger Prentice Gallery—a retrospective exhibit of the works of James Kiefer, a renowned New Orleans painter who had died two years ago. His works are valued in the tens of thousands. Getting our hands on one of them could keep us in caviar for quite a while. Well, if we liked caviar. Personally I prefer my fish fully grown and well cooked.

By the way, I’m Philip Archer. No relation to Lew Archer. I took my most recent surname for a private eye novel I read when it first came out. It sort of struck me as amusing, considering what I do for a living. My given name is a variant of my birth name, Philippe—Philippe Duchamps.

“Spending twenty years in jail could put a big crimp in your feeding habits, Philip,” Liddy countered. “And the exercise yard at noon? Uh-uh. Not a good thing.”

I was about to point out to her I could easily escape, even before things went to trial, when the door to my apartment on the second floor of our building opened again and my favorite cat walked in. Okay, maybe cat is not the bestdescription, according to him. He’s a black panther shifter who goes by the name Duff Logan, and another one of my partners.

Our fourth partner, Robert Traver, a.k.a. Rob, shows up when the spirit moves—quite literally. He’s a ghost. Has been for just over two hundred years—which makes him just about one fifth my age. He died fighting with Jean Laffite during the Battle of New Orleans in 1814.

“Why are we ending up in jail?” Duff asked.

“Unless I’m reading him wrong,” Liddy replied before I could, “he wants us to lift a painting or three from the Prentice Gallery.”

“Oh really?” Duff came over, taking the paper from my hands. “Do we have a buyer?”

“Well…” I smiled wryly. “Not yet, but…”

“You want us to do it on spec?” Liddy asked. “And if we can’t unload it, or them, then what? It does us no good if we can’t sell it.”

“She’s right,” Duff grumbled. “Sometimes, Philip, you seem to forget it takes money to pay the property taxes, utilities, and you know; the things we have to ante up for to keep the wolf from the door.”

I swear, Duff’s a CPA at heart and I’ve told him so more than once. Still, he does have a point. Theft pays our bills—housing, clothes, small things like that. Not something Rob has to worry about but the rest of us…

“I doworry about it,” Rob said, materializing in front of the door to my balcony, which overlooks Saint Philip. The three of us own the building, just up the street from Lafitte’s Bar. All of it, lock-stock-and-barrel. Have since I bought it in 1870, in conjunction with one Dogald Logan, who presumably died at the ripe old age of sixty-nine. His ‘grandson’, Duff, inherited Dogald’s share of the building in 1914. Rob’s the silent owner as it were, since he couldn’t actually sign the papers at that point. Liddy’s a newcomer—and human—so of course she’s not on the title.

“Reading my mind again, Rob?” I asked.

He smirked, turning to look at me. “It’s easy when you leave the link between us open. That said, I don’t want to lose this place because we go after something without having a buyer.”

“We don’t do it that often,” I protested.

“Let’s see, there was that rare vase we co-opted from a sleazy gallery because the owner conned the poor lady into signing it over to him for next to nothing. You just had to make it right for her by switching it out for a replica and giving her back the original,” Duff said. “That took what? Two weeks between planning and then having our favorite art forger make the copy? Which by the way cost us a pretty penny. Two weeks during which we ignored two potentially lucrative jobs. Then there was—”

“Okay, okay, so I like helping victims of scumbags like him when the situation warrants. Shoot me.”

Liddy laughed. “Like that would do any good.”

“Says the only one of us for whom it might be fatal,” I told her.