Loose and Easy (11 page)

“I keep up enough,” Dax assured her. “You tell Duce you’re with me. That dude owes me from way back. He won’t have forgotten.”

“Sure. If it gets to that, I’ll drop your name.” She wasn’t going to ask what Baby Duce owed him for, but she didn’t doubt the debt was real, or that Baby Duce would remember both it and Daniel Axel, Dax, Killian. All the time she’d spent being good in school and keeping her ducks in a row, Dax had spent running wild and making a name for himself. Dax’s ducks wouldn’t have known a row if it had snapped up and bit them in the butt.

“Have you called Isaac Nachman?”

“He’s next on my list. Trust me, there won’t be any trouble. He wants the Meinhard. You know how he is about his paintings. Me being even an hour late isn’t going to change anything or put us out of the running.”

“Call me when you get to Mama Guadalupe’s.”

“Can do. It should be about eleven,” she said, keeping her eye on the young Loco. He smiled at her, showing off two rows of pearly whites with his incisors capped in gold—vampire-style.
Geezus.

“If there’s any trouble, any at all, I want you—”

“Nachman knows the drill,” she interrupted. There wasn’t going to be any trouble, not with Isaac Nachman. “Dad’s done amazing work for him over the years. Geez, Dax, Dad’s the one who tracked down Nachman’s Renoir. In sixty years, no one else even got close to it, and with me on board now, the Meinhard is another clean transaction.”

Disasters and general failures aside, her dad did have a real flair for finding stolen art, especially if it had been stolen by the Nazis, which encompassed most of the Nachman family’s missing pieces. Hitler’s ambassador to France had personally absconded with three hundred and forty-eight paintings and drawings out of the Nachman family vault. To date, one hundred and twenty-three had been recovered, over forty of those by her father, including, as of tonight, the Jakob Meinhard.

“So what’s your ETA?” she asked.

“Ten-thirty to eleven o’clock on the outside. I’m on the back roads in the boondocks south of Denver. The interstate is a traffic jam,” Dax said. “If you get to the bar first, don’t have a margarita. Just wait for me. When I get there, we’ll decide whether or not we need a new plan for dealing with Bleak. And answer your darn phone when I call.”

“Can do.” She started to hang up, but he stopped her.

“Easy, wait.”

“Yes.”

“So what’s the deal with Dom’s little brother? What’s his stake in this? What does he want?” Dax asked.

“I haven’t figured that part out yet. He said he came to the office to hire my dad, but I don’t think that’s it.”

“He tailed you from the Oxford without you knowing it?”

Talk about rubbing it in.

“Yes.”

“And he saw Smollett before you did?”

And that was even worse.

“Yes.”

“And he got you out of there.”

“Yes.”

“Take him to Nachman’s with you.”

No. Her plan was to dump him and catch a cab.

“Dax, I don’t—”

“Easy,” he interrupted. “You’ve got Bleak looking for you, and I’m not there to watch your back. Whatever this guy’s reasons for tailing you, I’d rather you kept him close. Maybe he’ll come in handy. So far he’s made pretty good moves.”

“Dax, I’m sitting in Baby Duce’s backyard with five Locos staring me down.” And one of them was moving in.

“You’re there with Domingo Ramos’s little brother, sweetheart, and that blood runs deep. Ain’t nothing going to happen to you on Locos turf, and this John guy knows it.”

Sure, she knew it, too, except even the oldest gangster in the alley was too young to have run with Dom, and the one moving in on her might not even remember Carlos, and Johnny’s time had run out about a minute ago.

“Well,” she said. “If I don’t make it to the bar at Guadalupe’s, remember, the body will be just off Delgany, behind Butcher Drug Store.”

“If I believed that for even a second, I’d be calling in the cavalry.”

Esme felt herself blanch. “Uh…no. No cavalry. Honest, Dax. I’m fine. You’re right.” The last damn thing she needed was Dax’s idea of Denver cavalry, which could be summed up in two words: Lieutenant Loretta. The woman had been a beat cop long before she’d made lieutenant, and if there was a kid on the street she hadn’t scared straight, that kid had probably ended up in Canon City.

She’d scared the crap out of Esme. One little incident of being in the wrong place at the wrong time had been all the delinquency Esme had been able to handle.

Lieutenant Loretta was a big woman, reddish hair, large nose, amber-eyed, kind of lovely…maybe, if a person wasn’t shaking in her shoes, looking straight up at her. Esme had been shaking like a leaf the night she’d run up against the lieutenant, and she was going to skip the cavalry tonight. Loretta Bradley didn’t forget, ever. That was the urban legend, and Esme wasn’t about to put it to the test.

“Hola, chica.”
The gangster with the gold incisors finally reached the Cyclone and leaned down in the driver’s-side window, all flash and swagger. Two spiders inked into his skin covered the back of his right hand. Not black widows, she didn’t think, not tarantulas, but brown recluses—with fangs.
Cripes.

“Gotta go, Dax.”

“Watch yourself.”

“Check.” She hung up the phone and gave the gold-toothed, spider-inked wonder a contemplative look, wondering how much longer Johnny was going to leave her here, holding down the fort in the damn alley, and whether or not it really was in her best interest to get out of the car and start walking.

Somehow she didn’t think so.

The longer she held his gaze, the wider the boy’s grin got.

“You see somethin’ you like,
gatita
?” he asked, leaning a little farther into the car.

Not really, especially since two of the other guys had pushed off the fence and were heading toward the Cyclone. She didn’t like seeing that at all.

“Maybe.” She smiled back. “Do you like…uh, Vermeer?” She was floundering, making conversation, passing time, and hoping she could just slide her way through the next few minutes without having to make a big deal out of saving her ass.

But these guys weren’t going to touch her. No way. Not when this one was flashing vampire teeth and arachnids.

“Sure,
chica.
” He nodded his head, very cool, very laid-back. “I love Vermeer.
Me gusta mucho.
You got some? You wanna party?”

“Me gusta
Vermeer,
también,”
another of the gang members said, leaning down to look in the driver’s-side window. He, too, had spiders tattooed on the back of his right hand.

“Kiko,” the guy with the gold teeth said, “wasn’t that Vermeer boom we were smokin’ at Rosario’s?”

“Yeah,” the third Loco confirmed. “That was Vermeer.” She couldn’t see his right hand, but her money said he was sporting a spider tat.

“That was good shit, man.”

“Yeah.”

Yeah, Vermeer was good shit. Adolph Hitler had
me gusta mucho
ed it so much, he’d stolen a piece from the Rothschilds in 1941, an exquisite painting done by the artist in 1668,
The Astronomer.
To the benefit of everyone, the piece currently resided in the Louvre.

On the other hand, she was currently residing in this damn Cyclone, and Johnny Ramos was now two minutes late.

“So,
chiquita, cómo se llama?
What’s your name?” vampire boy asked.

Esme didn’t give it a second thought.

“Margaret Mead.” That was the name she was going by in the alley tonight.

“Ah, Margarita.” They all chimed in, charming as hell, and why not? She was no threat to them.

Yes, Margarita frickin’ Mead.

“Arañas, qué tal? Eh?”
She heard Johnny make his way through the crowd around the driver’s door, and all she could think was that it was about time.

“Juanio.”
The boy with the gold teeth greeted him, giving him a sign that Johnny returned.

“Ramos,
your girl.” One of the other Locos made a kissing sound.
“Se me empalmó.”

The other guys laughed. The banter continued, and from the sounds of it, Esme was glad she didn’t speak Spanish.

Behind Johnny, from somewhere in the yard, she heard a guy shout out. She glanced through the windshield and saw the tall, muscular man with all the tattoos—Baby Duce. Within seconds, the Locos had melted back into the alley, returning to their posts.

Crisis averted, thank God.

“You’re late,” she said, when Johnny finally got inside the car.

“And you’re Margaret Mead?” He slid her a highly skeptical look.

“Margarita Mead,” she corrected him.

“Shifting your anthropological research from the indigenous tribes of New Guinea to the inner-city tribes of Denver?”

She lifted one eyebrow, nonplussed. This boy was no gangster. She didn’t care how tight he was with Baby Duce.

“Uh…gang culture is highly regarded as a legitimate field of academic inquiry with a number of direct correlations documented between it and more traditionally recognized tribal customs and affiliations.” It was the truth. More than one dissertation had been published on the subject.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Right. That’s what I’ve been studying for the last few years, too, tribal culture.”

For no good reason, she believed him, even if she did get the idea that somehow they were talking about two different things.

“Well, I mean, of course, aside from the violence of the gangs,” she added, wanting to clarify that she understood there were some inherent differences.

He let out a short, humorless laugh. “There’s no ‘aside’ about the violence, Esme. It’s front and center and always coming up behind you when you’re not looking, and I can guarantee there isn’t a gang in America that has anything on the ‘more traditionally recognized tribes’ when it comes to sheer, mind-numbing brutality. It’s a war zone out there, babe, every day, in every way.”

The casual bluntness of his words struck a chord, giving them a hard validity.

“Voice of experience?” she asked, curious as hell.

In answer, all he did was hold her gaze, clear and steady. By the time he looked away, she had all the answer she needed.

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN

Voice of experience? Sure,
Johnny thought. Tribal culture experienced and studied from the stock end of an M4 carbine in Iraq and Afghanistan—a curriculum otherwise known as war, which, according to Duce, was where Franklin Bleak was headed, if the bookie didn’t get back on his side of the fence and stay there.

Johnny slipped the key in Solange’s ignition, but held off starting her up. Solange the Cyclone—he’d named the car after Quinn Younger’s mother, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. She was fifty-four now, and as far as Johnny was concerned, just hitting her stride in the gorgeousness department. The guys at Steele Street had teased him unmercifully when he’d first started calling his ride Solange—but they knew. Each and every one of those
pendejos
knew Quinn’s mother was hot.

Fast-backed, 4-stacked, and radial-tracked, the 1968 Mercury Cyclone GT was plenty hot, too, but only under the hood. He’d never taken a torch or a hammer to her body. She wasn’t rusted or pitted, so he’d left her alone, let her be the sleeper.

Esme was hot, but he sure as hell hadn’t left her alone. Oh, no. He couldn’t have jumped into the middle of this disaster any quicker if there’d been money in it.

Duce had noticed her, and he’d had plenty of questions about the blonde Johnny had left in the car, especially after Johnny had asked him about Franklin Bleak.

He started to turn the key, then stopped and took a breath.

Had it really only been an hour since he’d been sitting at the Blue Iguana drinking a Corona and minding his own business?

He checked his watch. Barely an hour—
dammit.

Leveling his gaze at her from across the inside of the car, he very seriously asked himself if he needed to back off. She certainly hadn’t asked him to get involved; quite the opposite.

But there she was, tucked into Solange’s passenger seat, and there were a few things she needed to know, whether he backed off or not.

“Baby Duce wanted to know if you were Bleak’s Chicago mule,” he said. “Bringing in a few cakes of ice for this deal Bleak’s got going down tomorrow.”

That got her attention. Her eyes widened and locked onto his.

“I told him I didn’t think so,” he continued. “So then he asked me if you were one of Bleak’s girls, and I told him the whole Dixie-tricks-at-the-Oxford-Hotel scene, and he suggested I call Benny-boy Jackman personally and grease those wheels before anybody had a chance to get themselves all worked up and maybe go gunning for trouble.”

Her eyebrows rose at that, which he considered a good sign. Little Miss Cool as a Cucumber needed to know these guys were heating her up.

“And then he tells me Bleak has been shaking down all his losers for the last couple of months, shaking them hard, hurting a few. A couple of guys have even gone missing, guys who placed bets with Bleak, but bought their blow from the Locos. All bad for business, as far as Duce is concerned. He understands the need to protect profits, and God knows, he’s not above hurting people if that’s what it takes to make his point, but, according to Duce, it’s not like his and Bleak’s customers are stellar examples of humanity, especially Bleak’s, according to Duce. Shit is gonna happen, he says, and a guy who wants to stay in business just has to roll with it.”

For a moment, she just stared at him, and he could almost see the gears churning in her mind, organizing the whole boatload of information he’d just uploaded into her system. He could definitely see the worry suddenly darkening her eyes.

Good. She had reason to worry.

“So what do you think?” he asked.

“I think that’s a…uh, surprisingly philosophical view from somebody who didn’t get past the eighth grade.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I thought, too. And then I thought, hey, maybe Duce is right, maybe Esme’s getting shook out for some bad money.”

When she didn’t say anything, he kept going, pushing ahead.

“So then I ask myself, Johnny, what do you think? You think it’s the ponies she’s running? Or do you think it’s the dogs?”

He saw her slide her hand farther around the messenger bag and pull it closer.

Yeah, he was going to get to the bag in a minute.

“And then it occurred to me that a girl who’d gotten herself in trouble, a girl who didn’t want to turn a few tricks to get herself out of a jam, or a girl who didn’t want to transport a few kilos of coke in lieu of the cash she didn’t have, might take on another kind of job to pay her debts. She might steal something her bookie wanted, like whatever is in that bag you’re so damned determined to deliver to somebody. Except if you’d stolen it for Bleak, and he was your appointment, why in the hell have we been running from his guys for the last half hour? At least that’s what I asked myself, while Duce was asking about you.”

She still didn’t say anything.

“You can fill in the blanks here anytime, Esme. Just go ahead and jump right in.”

Still, he got nothing.

“Did I make a mistake when I got between you and Dovey Smollett?”

No.
She shook her head. He believed it, but she still wasn’t talking.

Okay,
he thought.
Fine.

“Why don’t you show me what’s in the messenger bag.” If it was cocaine, the party was coming to a screeching halt. It was going to hurt. Really, it would, but if Duce had called it right, the best thing he could do for Esme was turn her in before somebody turned her six feet under. He sure as hell wasn’t going to step aside and let a kilo of coke hit the streets and watch her get hurt in the process. No fucking way. That was the Boy Scout in him, and for someone who had never been a Boy Scout, he seemed to have a helluva lot of it.

But,
geezus,
that was going to hurt, if she’d really sunk that damn low.

She looked down at the leather messenger bag she had clutched in her lap—and he waited.

“My partner suggested that I stick with you tonight,” she said after a long, weighted silence, right about when he was going to insist on seeing what was in the bag. “That with Bleak pooching our deal, you were doing a good job of watching my back and keeping me in one piece, and I should take you with me to make my delivery, if you were willing to go.”

Well, talk about a boatload of information.
Geezus.

He sat back in his seat and looked at her for a moment, and for every second of that moment, he only saw one thing: trouble. It was probably tattooed on her ass. In caps.

“What’s your deal with Bleak?” Start at the top. That was the best place.

“I pay him the money he lost on my dad, or he breaks my dad into a couple dozen pieces, a process my dad may or may not survive. It doesn’t matter to Bleak either way.”

Straightforward. Brutal. Predictable.

Fucking perfect.

“And your partner thinks I’m the guy to help you out with this transaction?” What kind of asshole had she hooked up with, to leave her on her own to do a deal with Franklin Bleak?

But she was shaking her head.

“Then what?” he asked.

“My first delivery is up in Genesee Park, to meet a man named Isaac Nachman. He’ll give me the money in exchange for the property I recovered off the German you saw in the Oxford. Nachman’s property. My dad’s been working on this deal for over four years, and I’ve been on it a month, getting everyone in place for tonight, and now I’m running late, about half an hour late, getting to Genesee and getting the money.”

Recovered
—now there was a nice word. Johnny had “recovered” a few things in his younger days, and he wasn’t talking upholstery.

“And when are you meeting Bleak?”

“Five
A.M
., but my partner will be here by then. We’ll do the final deal together.”

“Partner in what?” Crime? Some kind of scam they were running on rich guys living up in Genesee? Out and out idiocy?

“Private investigations. We’re based in Seattle, and mostly do a lot of Pacific Rim stuff, specializing in property recovery and finding people, especially people who don’t want to be found. Sometimes we work in South America, and people who need help down there know to come to us.”

“Private investigations.” That was a nice catchall, and the whole Pacific Rim thing sounded so professional, and she was just so sure of herself, rattling all this information off—and yet, here she was, sitting in this dump of an alley with him, back in the old neighborhood, with a lowlife like Franklin Bleak threatening to bust up her deadbeat dad. “Did you major in that up in Boulder, at the university?”

He wasn’t being a smart-ass about it, really. He was curious. She’d been the best and the brightest, and guys like Franklin Bleak shouldn’t be in her vocabulary, let alone breathing fire down her neck.

“Look,” she said, a bit of an edge coming into her voice. “I really don’t need help delivering the property. I appreciate everything you’ve done, but all I really need is a cab. I can take it from here.”

“Where’s your partner?”

“On his way up from Colorado Springs.”

“You sleeping with him?” That was the question, rude or not. If he was in, he was in, and he wanted to know where all the lines were. A few thin bricks of cash delivered to Bleak? Hell, he could do that in his sleep. Esme didn’t have to be part of it at all. Duce could grab a couple of his crazy spider boys out of the alley, his elite
Arañas Locos,
and the four of them could go over and visit Mr. Bleak. The whole damn thing wouldn’t take more than five minutes. Johnny knew how the street worked, and whatever beef Bleak had with Burt Alden wasn’t going to be worth pissing off Baby Duce, not once the bookie got his money.

And Duce owed him. Duce would always owe him, until the shot caller pulled his last breath. There was no walking away from the places they’d been together.

“No,” she said. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

She was right. It was none of his business.

“Are you sleeping with anybody?” That wasn’t any of his business either, but the question stayed where it lay.

“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” she said, giving him a look that said he was way outside the bounds of propriety.

She was wrong. He and propriety had reached a truce a long time ago—and the question still stayed where it lay.

“Yes, you do,” he said.

And she did. She knew exactly what it had to do with everything. It was why he was sitting here in the dark with her, instead of back on a barstool at the Blue Iguana with a shot and a beer in front of him. It was why at five
A.M
., no matter how she answered the question, he’d be staring across the table at Franklin Bleak with the bookie’s cash lying between them.

“I don’t think…well, think that…”

Yes, she did, and he could prove it.

Without moving from his side of Solange, he lifted his hand and gently cupped the lower part of her face, spreading his fingers across her left cheek and letting his thumb rest on her lips.

Softly, ever so softly, he brushed his thumb across her mouth—and watched her grow still.

He could have stopped there, could have stopped with her eyes darkening under his gaze, with the heat rising between them at his touch. But she was the impossibly not-so-easy Easy Alex, and for this one moment, he literally had her in the palm of his hand.

So he kissed her, simply leaned forward and opened his mouth over hers—and she let him, exactly as he’d known she would. Nothing had ever been finished between them, and
God,
her mouth. She had the softest lips, the slightest overbite, and a taste that went straight to his groin. She didn’t move away, not so much as a millimeter. She held so perfectly still, her breath seemingly caught somewhere between them, her lips parted just enough to allow him entry, a hesitant welcome that warmed with every slow thrust of his tongue into her mouth.

She was sweet, and hot…and careful, exactly as she’d always been. He almost grinned. Somehow, somewhere, sometime tonight, the carefulness had to go. But for now, he’d take her careful kiss. He’d take the soft, hesitant giving way of her tongue to his, take her gentle exhalation inside himself, and imagine what it would take to make her groan.

Not much, he decided, when she made a soft sound deep in her throat and turned into the kiss—but not all the way, still holding back. Still keeping her hands to herself. Still not committing, not submitting—and that’s what he wanted, what he needed. Submission. He knew how incredibly sweet it could be, and he wanted it from her.

God, she’d made him work for it the last time they’d been kissing in a car, too, never giving away too much, until toward the end, when she’d been so close to giving it all up for him.

So close…so close…but then no closer.

Tonight would be different. He hadn’t chased her down to lose out in the end. And that’s exactly what he’d done—chased her down, hooker skirt and all. He’d been sitting in the Blue Iguana, checking out the women, wondering about them, idly fantasizing about a couple of them, and wondering why the old “threesome in the back of the bar” fantasy never seemed to happen to anybody in real life, and at the same time he’d been wondering why he wasn’t putting more effort into at least saying hello.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained in the pickup game. One of the women in the bar had definitely noticed him, smiled even, and still he hadn’t made a move, just watched the crowd, and waited, and wondered what in the hell he was waiting for, an engraved invitation?

No, he realized now. He’d just been waiting for something more, anything more than what he’d seen and felt in the bar. So he’d left and gone out onto the street, and there on Seventeenth, with her ass peeking through torn fishnet and her hair ratted up into a blond pile on top of her head, he’d finally seen something he wanted, and he was making his move now.

Slipping his hand around the back of her neck, he opened his mouth wider over hers, pushed his tongue deeper, and let her know he wanted her, pulling her tighter and sliding his other hand up her thigh, under her skirt, but stopping short of the red lace panties. Her skin was satin smooth beneath his fingers, her half slip a silky drape across the back of his hand.