This is an illustration I did for my short story “The Black Cross”. It’s a detective yarn set in San Diego in 1940, with the protagonist (left) being a private eye who is called on to recover a black stone cross from Central Africa that he believes has been stolen by Chinese-American gangsters. But little does he know the true origin or significance of the cross, or what his adversaries really plan to do with it…
As for the woman on the right of the composition, suffice to say she turns out to be connected to the titular cross in an important way.