Loose and Easy (21 page)

Eliot was just depositing a limp and unconscious Burt Alden on the floor in the betting room, and from what Franklin could see, it didn’t look like Beth was any too happy to see him.

Wives,
Franklin thought. He hadn’t seen his in fourteen years. As soon as Burt came around, Franklin would bet the whole eighty-two thousand that the guy was going to wish he hadn’t seen his either—not in this place.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE

Harold’s Gas-N-Go was on the west side of Denver, hell and gone in the suburbs, a block off the interstate. Johnny finished pumping gas into Solange’s tank and reracked the nozzle. Esme had gone inside the small convenience store to use the facilities.

He was surprised she’d lasted as long as she had. It was nearing midnight—and Johnny could feel his clock ticking. Five
A.M
. wasn’t nearly far enough away for what he had in mind.

Waiting for his receipt, he checked both ends of the street. It was pure rustbelt, lined with auto parts stores and metal buildings rented out to machine shops and car repair guys. Poorly lit, grim, like a place where trouble happened—like that damn tunnel at Nachman’s.

What in the hell had that all been about? he wondered. He’d never had any trouble coming back from a tour of duty before—hadn’t had any trouble this time, until that damn elevator door had opened.

The receipt rolled out of the gas pump, and he tore it off and tucked it in his shirt pocket, his fingers brushing against the envelope.

Oh, yeah
—the realization hit him. Just like every other time over the last two weeks, he conveniently kept forgetting about the envelope. Except it wasn’t so damn convenient, not when it crept up on him in the dark and made him break out in a sweat.

He hadn’t read what was inside. The actual letter was none of his business. His job was to deliver it. That was all, just deliver it. Take it up to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and give it to a girl, Lori Heath, whose husband was never coming home. He’d made the promise. He could do the deed. He’d almost driven up there tonight, but had ended up at the Blue Iguana instead.

Because there was more than one girl in Cheyenne, and if he got close enough to do his duty by Lori Heath, he had to face the other one, a girl named Cassie McAllister, and there was no neat and tidy letter to hand to Cassie. No, he’d have to talk to her, face-to-face. He’d have to stand there in her double-wide trailer sitting in its patch of dust and tumbleweeds and tell her what had happened to that rodeo cowboy who’d come through Cheyenne a year ago, riding in Frontier Days, his last go-round before he’d shipped out—the one who’d fathered her baby, the one she hadn’t heard from in months, the one who said he’d be coming back.

John Paul Cooperman had come back, and he wasn’t anywhere near Cheyenne, and he didn’t plan on ever getting within a hundred miles of the place ever again, and Johnny was going to have to explain why to a twenty-two-year-old girl with a brand-new baby.

Hell. He wasn’t sure he could explain it to himself. Or maybe he was, and that’s what was keeping him out of Wyoming.

Fuck.

In a couple of days, Johnny promised himself. He’d make the run up to Cheyenne in Solange, and he’d take care of business.

Getting back in the Cyclone, he pulled the car up to the front of the store, then leaned over and knocked the jockey box open. He didn’t smoke very often, but he always had a pack of Faros in the car. He bought them off the bartender at Mama Guadalupe’s, an old guy named Rick. He had to dig deep to find them, and by the time he sat back up in the driver’s seat, another car had pulled up a couple of spaces over.

A few cars had come and gone since he and Esme had gotten there, gassing up or people running into Harold’s for something—but this car was different.

It looked like all the others, a regular late-model sedan, a Crown Victoria, a real tuna boat. It had a couple of guys in it, like any number of the previous vehicles.

But it was different.

It made the hackles rise on the back of his neck, and he never second-guessed that particular buzz of warning.

He pushed in the Cyclone’s lighter, then knocked a cigarette out of the pack of Faros. When he was lit, he settled back into the driver’s seat and waited for somebody in the Crown Vic to make a move.

He didn’t have to wait long.

The guy in the passenger seat, a short, stocky redhead with male pattern baldness, got out of the Vic and headed into the store. The other guy, gray-haired, older, taller, stayed in the car.

Johnny took a long drag off the cigarette, watching the redhead scan the aisles. When the guy started toward the bathrooms, Johnny made his move, getting out of Solange and heading inside.

“Hey, hey,” the clerk behind the counter said. “You can’t smoke in here. Take it back outside.”

Dream on,
cholo
.

Johnny gave him a punk-ass stare and flashed the Locos sign with the fingers of his right hand.

As he passed the counter, he reached out and snagged a couple of candy bars and a lighter.

“You should leave, man,” he said, keeping his voice low. Combined with the hand sign, it was a clear threat, and if it got the clerk calling the cops, so much the better. Johnny knew Loretta wouldn’t want to see him dragged in for smoking in a convenience store and stealing candy bars and a Zippo. When the lieutenant swung her weight around for SDF, she liked to do it for something worthwhile, but if that’s all this turned out to be, fine. He’d take the dressing-down.

It was a short-lived hope.

Behind him, he heard the main door open again.

Perfect.

He glanced back, and sure enough, the gray-haired guy had followed him in. This was starting to look like exactly what Johnny had thought it might be—an ambush.

The clerk had disappeared.

Good. Considering how close Harold’s was to the interstate, the poor guy probably got robbed once a week. He wasn’t going to take a chance on three guys casing his store.

Down at the end of the aisle, into a hallway, Johnny could see the red-haired guy cozied up to the bathroom door, wiggling the handle.

And it pissed him off, royally.

That sonuvabitch
—rattling the door of the women’s rest room, when there was a woman inside, Johnny’s woman.

“Eh! Cabrón!”
he called out. “Back the
fuck
off that door.”

The guy looked up and flipped him off.

Johnny was impressed. The guy had more balls than he would have guessed—more than was good for him, that was for damn sure.

“Come on out of there,” the red-haired guy was saying, keeping his attention focused on Johnny, giving him a look that said he was the one who had better back off.

Right. Like that was going to happen.

“I’ve got some news about your father, Esme,” the red-haired guy continued. “Come on.”

Esme? News about her father?
Oh, man, that guy couldn’t have come up with anything worse to say if he’d had all year. Any doubt Johnny might have had in his mind about the guy maybe being a random pervert was gone—not that he’d had much of a doubt.

The sound of the lock being released from inside drew the guy’s gaze back to the door, and that was all she wrote. In that one moment of inattention, Johnny moved in and decked the guy. One punch, hard, like a fucking pile driver. To his credit, the guy almost managed to block the blow, but no forty-year-old asshole was fast enough to beat a Ramos left hook. The redhead dropped like a stone, out cold, and Johnny leaned down and quickly frisked him for a piece. He found a Beretta 9mm, grabbed it, and turned to meet the threat he could hear coming down the aisle at a run.

This asshole was even older than the redhead, and Johnny would bet his socks that neither of them had ever been U.S Army Rangers.

Hubris.
That’s what hit him, and sent him rocking. The old guy had clocked him.

Geezus. Stars.
Yeah, he was seeing them, but he was still scrambling, still moving, knowing he couldn’t afford to let the old gray-haired geezer lay another hand on him.

Geezus.
He’d lost the 9mm on the floor somewhere.

Okay, that hadn’t been his smartest move tonight—but it was one move smarter than what happened next. The old guy did get ahold of him, moving like lightning. Johnny elbowed him hard and twisted out of his grip, grabbing hold of the old guy and slamming him into the wall. Then found himself facedown on the floor with the old guy on top of him.

Geezus.
What the fuck was this?

He reached back and grabbed a handful of whatever he could reach, pants, shirt, whatever, and jerked hard, dislodging the gray-haired guy enough for him to move and twist—and go totally mannequin on command, just like the old guy.

“Freeze, sucker.”

That’s what she said—
Freeze, sucker,
her voice glacial. And she was backing it up with the muzzle of her .45 pointed straight at the old guy. He couldn’t miss it. From this angle, with Johnny and the old guy close enough that the gun was almost pointing at him as well, the barrel of a .45 looked humongous, like a bottomless pit, a large, gaping black hole leading straight to hell.

For an instant, the old guy looked like he might try something, another move.

“He’s got a gun inside his waistband, right side,” he said.

“Take it, Johnny,” Esme said, moving a step closer, holding the old guy’s gaze. “If you so much as twitch, it’s all over for you. I won’t miss.”

It wasn’t the words, it was the tone of voice that sent the message. She was dead serious. Only a fool would mistake her, and the old guy proved not to be a fool.

Johnny released the guy’s gun from its holster and leveled it at the bastard. “Get off me,
pendejo,
very, very slowly.”

As soon as the old guy was off him, Johnny rose to his feet, and Esme gave him a handful of flex cuffs she’d pulled out of an outside pocket on her messenger bag. It took him and the hog-tying queen of LoDo less than a minute to secure Bleak’s two guys and be heading back out the door.

He grabbed a cold drink as they passed the coolers, and left a ten on the counter.

Hell, he’d been saved by a girl.

“Thank you,” he said as they dropped into the seats in the Cyclone. It was the only appropriate thing to say.

He fired the car up and wheeled her in reverse, until they were heading back out onto the street.

“You’re welcome,” she said.

He cast her a quick glance. She was secretly gloating. He could tell. The
Mona Lisa
smile on her face was a dead giveaway.

“Burt?” Beth said, staring down at her husband. He was practically at her feet, having been dropped there by the Hulk, which is what she’d been calling the guy who’d kidnapped her. “Burt?”

If he was smart, and he could hear her, he’d be wise to answer. Her mouth hurt so badly from where the Hulk had ripped away the tape holding her gag in place, and yet she was so grateful to be able to talk, especially to the man on the floor.

“Burton Aaron Alden?”

This was his fault. She knew it. This wasn’t a random act of violence. This was a not-so-random Burt-Alden-hadn’t-paid-his-bookie act of retribution. She’d seen it a hundred times in their marriage, just never so seriously, never so dangerously. The truth was so demoralizing, it made it hard to breathe.

“Are you okay?” she asked. He didn’t look okay.

“No,” he mumbled, the word barely a breath of sound.

“Is your arm broken?” It looked broken.

“Yes.”

“I’m leaving you for this, Burt,” she said. “I mean it this time. If we get out of this alive, I’m leaving you.”

“I’ll quit,” he said, still so quietly she could barely hear him. “I swear.”

She didn’t even bother to answer. She was leaving him, and this time she meant it.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX

Esme remembered the summer Dax had set the pure stock Plymouth drag title up at Bandimere with an 11.897-second time at 119.46 miles per hour in his Hemi ’Cuda. The two of them had toasted his success with a couple of her mother’s homemade root beers. It had been a big day, sharing a cool moment with her cool cousin.

Today had been a big day, and Johnny had been going faster than Dax coming down out of the mountains. Thank God he had an upgraded suspension on the Cyclone. She didn’t mind fast, and she hadn’t felt unsafe, but neither had she taken her eyes off the road or her hands off the car. Her right hand had been holding onto the door, and her left had been wrapped around the edge of her bucket seat, in case they’d gone airborne.

He’d cut it down a notch now that they were in Denver, and her hands were in her lap, trying not to wring each other. Damn. She knew what made her feel unsafe—a couple of armed and dangerous guys trying to grab her in the middle of a simple bathroom pit stop.

“Who were those guys, do you think?” she asked. “Bleak’s?” They had to be Bleak’s. She was beginning to think that somehow she, and Dax, and her dad had completely underestimated how serious Franklin Bleak was about collecting his money. It seemed a little crazy, how all these guys were after her, chasing her all over the damn state.

“You tell me,” he said, lifting his hips off the seat and pulling two wallets out of his back pocket. He handed them over to her, and all she could do was look at him and be a little amazed.

Then he reached in his front pockets, one after the other, and produced two cell phones, and handed them over.

“That’s…uh, good work.” Why in the hell hadn’t she thought of that? Frisking. She should have thought of that, or at least noticed what he was doing. He’d taken their weapons. She’d noticed that. He’d also unloaded both pistols before dropping them in the backseat. She’d definitely noticed that. He’d been very fast about it, very efficient, like it was something he did all the time.

She opened the first wallet and read the name on the driver’s license. “Mitch Hardon, that was the old guy, the one who almost ate your lunch.”

He cast her a narrowed glance across the car, being such a guy about it.

“He’s got two hundred and fifteen dollars in cash, a couple of credit cards, and stuff,” she said, setting it aside and opening the other wallet. “And we’ve got Leroy Fitzer, twelve bucks, somebody else’s credit cards—some guy named Jason L. Davidson—two condoms, and a Bleak Enterprises business card, listing him as a production manager.”

“Mystery solved,” he said, then cleared his throat. “You were good back there.” He had both hands on the wheel, his gaze straight ahead.

“So were you.” It was true. “Thanks. I think that’s about the third time you’ve saved me tonight. We make a good team.”

“I think that time it was you who saved me, so we’re close to even, and we haven’t even gotten to the main event.”

She gave her head a small shake. “Well, you’re not on for the main event. You’ve already gone beyond the call of duty here tonight.” She still didn’t know why, not exactly, but she was grateful.

“Five
A.M
. at Bleak’s warehouse,” he said clearly. “I’m going to be there, with you and your partner, if he ever shows up.”

“Oh, hell.” Dax. She’d forgotten to call Dax. She’d listened to his message, but then lost cell reception again. She quickly pulled her phone out of her messenger bag and keyed in his number.

“Dax,” Esme said into her phone, when he answered. “We just hit the city limits.”

Over on his side of the car, she heard Johnny choke a bit on a swallow of the drink he’d gotten at Harold’s. When she looked, he was staring at her with an odd expression on his face—concern, maybe, or disbelief. It was hard to tell.

“Did you get the cash?” Dax asked, and she put her attention back into the phone call.

“Yes.”

“Are you still with Ramos?”

“Yes.”

“Good, don’t let yourself get out of his sight, not for an instant.”

“Warner and Shoko.” She understood. Down to the marrow of her bones, she understood. “What in the hell are they doing in Denver?”

At the worst, she’d figured Warner would realize Otto had screwed up the deal after the fact, not practically in the middle of it, and not where she’d be within striking distance.

“If Warner authorized the sale of the painting, then he was here to collect his half a million.”

“And if he didn’t authorize it?” Otto had done a little moonlighting in Bangkok, making some cash on the side with bits and pieces of Warner’s enormous collection, but unloading the Meinhard on his own was an unprecedented risk. Warner would notice that the Meinhard was missing, and yes, she could imagine that he would come after it fast and hard. Later, though, after she was long gone.

“Then Otto got off easy,” Dax said.

“Is he dead?” With Shoko in the mix, sometimes dead wasn’t such a bad option. And oh, holy crap, was she going to be in it up to her neck, if Warner’s dragon lady had killed Otto Von Lindberg. An anonymous hooker turning an anonymous trick in a hotel room and nobody was the wiser. An anonymous hooker leaving a dead trick in that hotel room, and suddenly she wasn’t anonymous. Suddenly everybody knew who she was; suddenly everybody remembered talking to her—starting with the parking valet.

“No. He’s not dead. He’ll be sporting ‘Nazi hero’ for a while, so whatever the reason is that Warner keeps him around, that reason is still holding.”

The relief she might have felt failed to materialize. Being in the same country as Warner was enough to tighten her gut. Add Shoko, and her gut was tying itself in knots.

Nazi hero.
Goddammit. She had half that mark, and the only thing that had saved her from the whole abomination was Dax. Eighteen months later, and she could still feel the tip of the bitch’s blade. It woke her up sometimes, always in a cold sweat, and the demon from that bad dream was here, in her hometown. So help her God, she’d never imagined Denver could be so damn full of so many badass felons out to grease her.

“Johnny and I left two of Bleak’s guys hog-tied in a convenience store off I-70 near Sixth Avenue.” And she was definitely pegging those two as felons. Hell, they worked for Bleak.

When Dax didn’t say anything, she knew she was hearing his “oh, for the love of God and Patsy Cline” silence, his unhappy silence.

“You were followed.” His words were flat when he finally spoke.

“Yes, but we did good,” she assured him.

“The two of you should have done good,” Dax said. “You’re you, and Ramos is a Ranger.”

Esme felt her eyebrows lift up.

“He just got back from Afghanistan two weeks ago, his third combat tour,” Dax said. “I’d guess he’s still pretty sharp.”

“Like a tack,” she said, all the pieces falling into place. She slanted Mr. U.S. Army Ranger a glance. Only one word came to mind, and she wasn’t shy about saying it. “Hoo-yah.”

Johnny didn’t look over, made no acknowledgment whatsoever of her revelation, except for the big grin that spread across his face.

Johnny Ramos a Ranger; it made perfect sense.

“You should have told me,” she said, still looking at Johnny.

“I did tell you,” Dax said on the phone. “What I haven’t told you is that the cops are looking for the blond hooker who was in Otto’s room, and my guess is that by the time they lift the prints off the prepaid phone you used, they’ll know your shoe size and your horoscope. So lay low.”

Crap. “I was wearing gloves, Dax. There won’t be any prints, but how in the hell did they find the phone?”

“Followed the emergency GPS signal straight to the B and B bathroom, babe. It was a piece of cake.”

And they had Shoko to thank for this. If she’d left Otto alone, no one would even have a clue what had gone on in the Oxford. No one would have cared.

“So where are you going to lay low?” Dax asked.

“Where are we going?” she asked Johnny.

“My place,” he said.

“No good,” Dax said, before she could relay the information. “Somebody at the Oxford gave them Ramos’s description, and they’ve got his name.”

Oh, hell. “Your place is no good,” she said to Johnny. “The cops are onto you at the Oxford.”

He didn’t say much to that, just one word under his breath, and it rhymed with luck.

She didn’t blame him.

“Tell Dax I’ve got a safe house in my neighborhood,” he said after a moment. “If he shows up at the corner of Vine and Hoover in Commerce City, I’ll come down and bring him in. Ask him what time he thinks he’ll get there.”

“An hour, maybe two,” Dax said, obviously able to hear everything in the car. “I’ve picked up a tail. When I shake it, I’ll show.”

“I still haven’t heard from my dad, about the name,” she said.

“Don’t worry. I got the name. Thomas called back and left it on the machine.”

“So we’re good to go?” she asked.

“You’ve got the money, and I’ve got the name,” Dax said. “We’re good to go. Just stay out of trouble until five o’clock. We’ll sort out this mess with the Denver cops once we’re back in Seattle. I’ll send them the file on Shoko. If they ask around, somebody at the Oxford will undoubtedly remember seeing the dragon lady tonight. Case solved. Everybody happy.”

“We’re going to run?”

“Like hell, bad girl.” He ended the call, leaving Esme to stare at her phone and wonder how in the hell she was supposed to stay out of trouble trapped in some safe house alone with Johnny Ramos for two hours.

Two hours was a long time.

Damn long.