Loose and Easy (23 page)

“It was like at the Oxford, wasn’t it,” he said. “Except things went bad. You were ‘recovering’ something, weren’t you?” She was a damn cat burglar, a thief.

“A fourteenth-century gold Buddha,” she admitted after another long silence. “It was stolen from the ordination hall of the Wat Pho temple in Bangkok. It’s an important piece, a sacred object, and the monks pray every day for its return. They’ve been praying for over twenty years for its return. Dax and I got a line on it, and figured we could add some actual recovery expertise to their prayers, so we went for it. I just got a little ahead of him, ended up in a tight spot.”

Okay, a legitimate cat burglar.

“What happened to the Buddha?” It was obvious what had happened to her, and the thought of her being in a “tight spot” scared the hell out of him.

“Still missing. I blew that one.”

And gotten herself cut and scarred for life by some psycho Japanese bitch with a knife.

“This business you’re in, this private eye, put your ass in a sling thieving and impersonating god only knows what besides cheap hookers—have you really given this career path the thought it deserves?” He didn’t think so, not really. “Seems to me there’s an awful lot of risk involved.” Too much damn risk. It was crazy. She needed another job.

“I’d say I’d given it about as much thought as you’ve given your job. U.S. Army Ranger seems to have an awful lot of risk involved in it, too.”

Touché.

If anyone had told him back in high school that he and Esme Alden had anything in common besides a lot of unresolved fascination and lust, mostly his, he’d have told them they were nuts. But here they were, both a little battle-hardened, both putting themselves on the line for what they believed in. Of course, he’d take combat over psycho, knife-wielding Japanese women any day of the week.

Geezus.

The urge to protect her, which had always been ridiculously high in his book, was now through the roof.

Goddammit.
Love. He should have seen this coming. What in the hell had he been thinking? That all these years he’d just wanted her because he hadn’t been able to get her? That it had just been some sort of conquering caveman instinct?

No such luck. It had been love, and he was doomed. He knew it, and yet he knew if he looked really deep in his heart, if he looked beyond the stark-edged danger of the thing, the truth was that he didn’t give a damn. If he’d known being doomed felt this good, he’d have thrown himself over the edge of it a long time ago.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE

Something was wrong.

Sitting at his desk, Franklin looked at his phone for the tenth goddamn time in as many minutes and knew he had a problem—two of them. Mitch and Leroy had disappeared off the goddamn planet.

Mitch would have answered his phone with the last breath he had, which made Franklin wonder if his guys were dead, and really made him wonder who in the hell Johnny Ramos was in real life. He sure as hell wasn’t just some damn north-side Loco, not if he’d gotten the drop on Mitch and Leroy. Those two boys had been street-fighting men since the day they’d been born, and the streets they’d been fighting in were Denver’s. Bleak owned this damn town, and he’d lost two men somewhere between Genesee and Commerce City? He didn’t think so, not to one gangster and a girl.

So who the hell else was out there gunning for him tonight? Somebody sure as hell had beat up and handcuffed Kevin Harrell. Who was that?

Goddamn cocaine. So help him God, he’d known better.

But the deal had been so sweet, no fail, a sure shot—and that should have been his first goddamn clue. There was no such thing as a sure shot.

Coming to a decision, he speed-dialed another number, and then waited through seven long rings before somebody answered.

“Yo.”

“Rollo? It’s Franklin.”

“Franklin, you pussy, what the fuck are you doing calling me at two o’clock in the goddamn morning?”

“I’ve got a job for you.”

There was a slight pause.

“How much?”

“A thousand bucks.”

“Fuck you.” Rollo hung up the phone, and Franklin gritted his teeth.

Then he dialed the number again.

“Two thousand,” he said when Rollo answered.

“Double it, and tell me what you want.”

Four thousand dollars. Franklin usually had that much lying around in his “who gives a fuck” box, but not tonight. He needed every damn last dollar he’d been able to get his hands on to close the Chicago deal. He was tight, his balls in a goddamn vice, but only for tonight. By tomorrow afternoon, he’d be rolling in dough and on his way to meet Katherine Gray.

But he had to get through this night and his five o’clock meeting, and his nine o’clock meeting, and for that, he was going to need Rollo and two of his guys to replace goddamn Mitch and Leroy. He wasn’t going into anything with just Dovey and Eliot at his back. Dovey was a lightweight, and Eliot was…just Eliot, damaged goods, and Bremerton belonged to Chicago.

“You, and Greg, and Sammy at my warehouse at four o’clock this morning, packing. I’ll need you until noon.”

“Packing? Double it again, Bleak, and if me or one of my boys has to actually shoot somebody, the price goes to fifty in a heartbeat.”

Fucking Rollo.

“Be here, four o’clock sharp.” God, Franklin thought, some of the people he had to deal with were such assholes. But his back was against the wall. Esme Alden was showing up at his place with eighty-two thousand dollars, her cousin—whoever in the hell that turned out to be, and maybe he better send Eliot back down into the betting room to find out—and probably this goddamn Johnny Ramos, who even if he was just a damn member of the Locos meant Franklin was really, really screwed. Gang members tended to stick together, that was the whole goddamn point of them, and if Ramos brought a few of his homeboys with him, or a couple of those damn Crazy Spiders—well, hell, if that’s the way it was going to go down, he might even be so goddamn bold as to bring Baby Duce—and if that’s the way it was going to go down, well, hell, Franklin might as well throw himself out the goddamn window right now, head fucking first, just to make it easy on himself.

And now he was going to be short eight thousand dollars.

Where in the hell was he going to find another eight thousand dollars before nine
A.M
.? He had four hundred and eighteen thousand dollars sitting in his safe, and Alden’s eighty-two on the way, and that was it. He’d squeezed every lime, shaken every tree, gotten all the juice out of everybody.

And he’d borrowed the rest, borrowed it from guys who would chop him up into little pieces and feed him to their goldfish if he didn’t pay it back on time, guys in New Jersey who made the Chicago boys look like amateurs.

He was so far out on a fucking limb here.

He dropped his head in his hands and took a deep breath. There was no fooling himself on the deal. The Chicago boys would notice the missing eight thousand and have his head on a platter. He knew Chicago boys. He’d been one, and it had been a bloody fucking business. The guys in New Jersey would never lay a hand on him. He’d be dead long before they figured out he’d welshed on their deal.

Fuck.

How had this happened? Five hours ago, he’d had everything under control, completely under control. And now…now—

Christ.

John Ramos. That was it. That was the problem. For whatever reason, Ramos had walked into the middle of Franklin’s deal and everything had gone straight to hell.
Everything.

He was going to kill the bastard. If John Ramos showed up at Franklin’s warehouse, he was going to kill him. And he was going to fuck the girl, tie her up and fuck her, and then sell her to the highest bidder, over and over again, until he had his eight thousand dollars.

Or maybe Rollo would take her in payment. That would save a lot of time and effort on Franklin’s part. Let Rollo, and Greg, and Sammy have her in lieu of a cash payment. There wouldn’t be much left of her by the time Rollo’s crew ran through her, but that wasn’t Franklin’s problem.

His problem was having half a million dollars in cash on hand at nine o’clock.

Goddamn Johnny Ramos.

Franklin didn’t deserve this. He really didn’t.

Sex.

And plenty of it.

Dax looked at the two kids standing in front of him, and he wondered if Easy knew that her hair was sticking out on one side, and that her exquisite Karan suit jacket was snapped incorrectly. The jacket was cattywampus and gaping, and he could tell that somehow, she’d lost her bra.

Dax let his gaze drift over the luxurious apartment Johnny Ramos had brought him to, the one across the street from the Commerce City Garage, and he noticed the low-lit bedroom on the other side of the loft.

Fifty bucks said Esme’s bra was in that room.

“So,” he said, bringing his gaze back to the two of them. “Did you count the cash?”

Standard operating procedure—always count the cash.

Always.

But from the look on Easy’s face, that vital detail had somehow gotten overlooked.

“You didn’t count it at Nachman’s?” She should have counted it at Nachman’s.

“There, uh, wasn’t time,” she said—also incorrectly. There was always time to count the cash. “Johnny was, uh, in a bind.”

A bind? U.S. Army Rangers did not get themselves into binds that overrode standard operating procedures, not unless there was gunfire involved, and Nachman was a pacifist, in an odd manner of speaking, as long as a person wasn’t a Nazi.

“And you didn’t do it when you got here?”

“Um, no, Johnny was hurt, and I thought we should stop the, uh, bleeding,” she said.

She was, he assumed, referring to the scratch on Ramos’s face.

He got the picture, loud and clear, and he was fascinated. Easy was not easy, and in less than five hours, Johnny Ramos had caught her, wooed her, and tumbled her hard.

He checked his watch.

“We should leave here about four-thirty, which gives us a couple of hours. If somebody would like to start a pot of coffee, I think we should go over our plan for the meeting and count the cash,” he said. “I can guarantee you that Bleak is going to count it. Is that Dovey Smollett I saw in the Buick LeSabre?” When he’d gotten to the corner of Vine and Hoover, he’d noticed the stakeout and called Esme for further directions to the safe house. Charo was currently safely parked in the building’s garage, with Smollett none the wiser.

“Yes, sir,” Ramos said, nearly snapping to attention.

Okay. Time for a little attitude adjustment, so to speak. Three tours of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, Dax guessed he wasn’t surprised the kid had heard his name. He’d certainly seen recognition on the young guy’s face when Esme had introduced him as her partner, Dax Killian.

“You can forget any of those stories you heard in the Sandbox, Ranger,” he said. Hell, if even half the stories had been true, Dax might have been impressed himself—but more than half of them weren’t. Only a couple were true, but apparently, a couple were more than enough.

“Yes, sir.”

“Tonight we’re just a couple of guys with a job to do.”

“Yes, sir.”

Rangers,
Dax thought.
You had to love the Rangers.

CHAPTER
THIRTY

Five
A.M.
, party time,
Esme thought, sliding out of the Cyclone’s front seat. Johnny had parked Solange on the east side of the warehouse by the loading docks, per Bleak’s instructions. She and Dax had been told someone would be waiting for them in the docking area, and there was—a huge, hulking guy standing by the building’s rear entrance.

Dax followed her out of the car, coming from the backseat, carrying a small duffel bag loaded with the eighty-two thousand dollars. Exactly eighty-two thousand dollars—they’d counted it twice.

Charo had been parked two blocks over with the key under her front seat, safely snugged rear-end-first into a loading dock at the long abandoned Geiss Fastener building, a backup escape, if things didn’t exactly go according to plan.

It happened—like in Bangkok, where her perfect plan for recovering a small fourteenth-century gold Buddha had gone awry and she’d ended up face-to-face with Erich Warner. Unfortunately, Shoko hadn’t been far behind. She of the one name and the many knives hated other women with a cold and ruthless passion—and she was here in Denver, unless Otto had been a hit-and-run, and she and Warner were already gone, headed back on Warner’s private jet to any one of half a dozen elaborate mansions he owned around the world. Warner wouldn’t be happy, not about losing the Meinhard, but as long as Esme’s name stayed out of it, she didn’t give a damn if Warner was happy or not.

Somebody else wasn’t very happy this morning, and even though she cared very much about that person, there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it. Johnny was getting out of the other side of the car, and his expression could only be described as grim.

She had overruled his plan to leave her behind in the safe house and have just him and Dax go into Bleak’s with Baby Duce and a couple of Locos, and bring in some guy named Sparky Klimaszewski to pull strings and jerk Bleak’s chain on the side.

To her amazement, Dax had grinned at Johnny’s suggestion to bring in this Sparky guy and been all on board with bringing in Duce, but hell, it hadn’t even been a plan, not really, just a knee-jerk guy thing—“Leave the girl out of it and let’s get some guys and go do this thing.” And yes, she’d had to remind Dax, very clearly, that they didn’t work that way, and that this was her deal. She’d been working it for a month, her dad even longer, and that was the crux of the matter. More than her deal, this was her responsibility. It was her father they’d come to save.

She glanced at the duffel bag and hoped to hell that eighty-two thousand hard-earned dollars and the name Lindsey Larson were enough to do the job.

Eighty-two damn thousand dollars—what in the hell had Burt Alden been doing to get himself into Franklin Bleak for eighty-two thousand dollars? Johnny wondered, pulling his phone out of his pocket for one last-ditch effort to sell his soul to Sparky. Alden must have been operating every which way from Sunday to get that kind of money out of one of Bleak’s bets. Or, if it had been more than one bet, why had Franklin let him get in so deep before he paid off? The only reason Johnny had was that Alden must be one of Bleak’s high rollers, a real boom-or-bust kind of guy who played a lot of cash. If so, this wasn’t the end of it. Alden would be back in the game as soon as he got the scratch, and this whole damn night and all of Esme’s efforts and laying herself on the line would have meant nothing.

So here he was, trying for the fourth time to make a call that was really going to cost him, and instead of negotiating to get Franklin off his ass, he was going to be working a deal to get Franklin off Alden’s. For his trouble, he could count on owning the top slot on Sparky’s short list for a long time and being on Bleak’s until hell froze over, a price he was more than willing to pay if Klimaszewski would just wake the hell up and answer his damn phone.

“This better be my wife,” Sparky finally answered on the third ring, sounding half asleep and maybe hung-over, with a real crabby edge to his voice.

“What’s the matter, old man, did Carol Ann leave you again?” Johnny said, trying not to sound so damn relieved he could spit.

“Johnny, you jerk,” Sparky said. “You must be in a whole helluva lot of trouble to be waking me up at—
geezus
—it’s five o’clock in the morning, boy.”

“I’m at Franklin Bleak’s warehouse.”

“Why?” Sparky asked. “You know better than to lay a bet with Bleak.”

“I’m not laying a bet. You had it right the first time. I’ve got some trouble that needs clearing up.”

“Then you need Superman, boy, not me,” Sparky said.

Superman? Christian Hawkins? Johnny hoped to hell not. The last thing he wanted was for anyone at Steele Street to know what he’d been doing all night. This deal with Esme and Bleak was so far under the table, there was no way to bring it out into the light of day and make it look good. Drugs, illegal gambling, prostitution—if they’d missed a vice here tonight, Johnny didn’t know what the hell it might be.

“No, Sparky. I just need you.”

“For what?” The old man sounded damn suspicious, and Johnny didn’t blame him.

“I’ve got a friend who’s into Bleak real deep. We’ve got the cash to clear the debt, but Bleak’s threatening payback with interest. I need you to call him off.”

His request was met with a long moment of silence, and then another, and another. Johnny was beginning to think Sparky had dozed off, when the old guy spoke.

“I’ve got some stuff I can use on Bleak, sure, but it isn’t going to come cheap.” Sparky didn’t sound half asleep or hung-over now. Oh, no. The chop-shop king of Denver was wide-awake and firing on all cylinders.

“How bad are you going to hit me?”

“Three cars,” Sparky said without hesitation. “I’ve already got them scouted. All you have to do is go and pick them up. Piece of cake for you, Johnny.”

Yeah, Johnny just bet. Stealing cars was never a piece of cake, even if the keys were in the ignition and the doors weren’t locked. Stealing anything took a mind-set Johnny had backed off from a long time ago. No, it wasn’t going to be easy for him to steal three cars for Sparky, no matter how good he was at it.

“What have you got on Bleak?” he asked.

“You don’t want to know, boy,” Sparky said. “It’s dirty business. Let me give him a call. That’s all it’ll take.”

Sparky was right. Johnny had a good enough imagination to imagine he didn’t want to hear what lousy information the chop-shop king had on the bookie—and yeah, for a second, Johnny had to wonder what knowing all these guys said about him. But then he looked up ahead, at Esme climbing the concrete steps into the warehouse, and figured he was in good company, skirting the edge of Denver’s underworld with the girl of his dreams.

God, he was such a sap. He’d finally had her, twice, no less, and three hours later, he already wanted her again. But mostly he wanted her out of here. He didn’t know why she couldn’t have just stayed put at the safe house. Everyone would be so much happier if she wasn’t in the middle of this. He sure as hell would be.

“Can you make that call in about fifteen minutes, Sparky?”

A pair of headlights at the end of the Bleak parking lot announced another arrival, a big-ass black Escalade that all but had Baby Duce’s name painted on the door panels.

Both Dax and Esme glanced back at him, and Johnny gave a short nod. They’d seen the Escalade, too.

“Sure, Johnny. I can have Bleak eating out of my hand in fifteen minutes.”

“Thanks, Sparky.”

“You call me when you’re done with this, and I’ll let you know about those cars.”

Hell.

“Sure, Sparky. I’ll give you a call.” He pressed his end button.

At the top of the stairs, Esme came to a stop, and the brute waiting for them at the back door got a confused look on his face.

“The boss wants you inside,” he said.

Fighter, Johnny thought, looking the guy over. He looked like he’d spent a lifetime getting hit in the face.

Johnny looked down at the guy’s hands and made a mental note not to end up on the receiving end of a right hook. It would put him into next week, guaranteed.

“We’ve got company,” Dax said, gesturing at the Escalade being parked at the next dock over.

The fighter looked, and Duce and his boys got out of the big SUV.

“He ain’t s’posed to be here,” the guy said.

“Well, why don’t we let Mr. Bleak tell him that,” Dax said, walking by the fighter and into the warehouse.

The big guy looked even more confused. Then he looked at Esme and his face cleared, like he suddenly remembered what he was supposed to do.

“You,” he said, pointing at her. “You come on inside.”

Asshole. Johnny had his number. He took the last two stairs in one step, hearing Duce and the Locos coming up behind him, and within a couple of minutes, he, Esme, Dax, Duce, two
Arañas Locos,
and eighty-two thousand dollars were cruising into Bleak’s warehouse.

Baby fucking Duce.

Franklin couldn’t believe he was looking at Baby fucking Duce standing in the middle of his warehouse at five o’clock in the morning.

“Yeah, sure, I get it,” he said into his phone, not quite believing what he was hearing coming at him from the other end of this call, either.

There was no justice.

He was screwed.

Goddamn Sparky Klimaszewski was playing hardball to keep Burt Alden in one piece, and Burt Alden was already broken, at least his damn arm if nothing else, and Franklin knew there was something else broken on the guy, probably more than one something else.

But hell, he wasn’t going to tell Sparky that.

“Yeah, sure, I remember, Sparky. I remember how it used to be.” This was all just so goddamn bad. How in the hell had this happened? he wondered. How in the hell had his back gotten shoved so hard up against the wall?

Five guys and a girl—that’s all that had come in through his loading dock, but he’d done nothing but sweat since they’d arrived, and then his phone had rung. Bad news on top of bad news, like the two gangsters with Duce, one of them with vampire caps on his teeth.
Geezus.
Franklin had heard a few things about the
Arañas Locos,
the Crazy Spiders, and none of it was good.

“Sure, Sparky. There’ll be no heat on the guy. Once I’m clear with a guy, I’m clear with him, you know that.”

Goddamn Sparky. How in the hell had the chop-shop king of Denver gotten into his deal? What the hell was Burt Alden to Sparky Klimaszewski? Some long-lost brother or something?

And Duce, goddamn Baby Duce wanted a cut of the deal, of the cocaine, and if Franklin didn’t deliver, things were going to happen—bad things, to him, personally, with Duce throwing him to the Parkside Bloods.

Old news, now, and Duce didn’t know it, but he and the Bloods were going to have to get in line behind Sparky Klimaszewski if they wanted a piece of Franklin’s ass. Sparky, Duce, Bloods, the Chicago boys, the guys from New Jersey—hell, he needed a goddamn dance card to keep track of everyone who wanted a piece of him. If he lived ’til Christmas, it would be a miracle.

Baby Duce, the two
Arañas,
Johnny fucking Ramos, Esme Alden, and “the cousin”—five guys and a girl, that’s all he was looking at, and he was in it up to his eyeballs.

Franklin had six guys at his back, six mean sons-a-bitches packing plenty of hardware, and he was still sweating. Johnny Ramos, who had screwed the whole deal for him in the first place, didn’t look like he’d be all that damn easy to kill, and if that wasn’t bad enough, the damn cousin Esme Alden had brought with her looked like he could drop them all on a dime. Dax was his name, and Franklin didn’t know what in the hell kind of name that was.

The only damn bright spot of the whole damn morning was Esme herself.

Dovey was such an idiot. He’d gotten it all wrong, and the photos Franklin had seen simply had not done the young woman justice.

She was exquisite—fine-boned, elegant, gorgeous, classy, every square inch of her, and stupid him, he’d already made his deal with Rollo.

Hell, he could get a fortune for her in this certain Middle Eastern market he had done business with a few times. He needed to think this through, figure out the win for himself. With the eighty-two thousand to finish his cocaine deal, and the girl, he could come out okay.

That’s all he needed, half a million dollars’ worth of cocaine with a ready market in Aspen and Vail, and one drop-dead gorgeous girl worth ten times those two young whores he’d sold five years ago. By the time he unloaded all that, he’d be sitting back on top. Of course, from the looks of things, he’d need to be sitting someplace other than Denver.

Goddamn cocaine.

Keep your head down, lay low, work your bets—those were his rules, and he’d broken them all for a damn drug deal and a shot at Katherine Gray, who wasn’t going to find him all that damned intriguing if he was dead.

He needed to put Rollo off, that was all. Offer him more money if he’d wait until the coke was delivered and sold. Hell, that’s all he needed to do, hold everything together until he could get the coke sale money in his coffers.

Of course, he was running a tight margin on the cocaine sale, damn tight, what with the exorbitant interest rates charged by the Jersey guys, and having to buy off Duce, and now to buy off Rollo.

But damn Sparky didn’t want cash or cocaine. Damn Sparky wanted Burt Alden.

“That’s old news, Sparky. Nobody cares about two runaway whores who disappeared off the face of the earth five years…well, yeah…sure, Sparky, the cops care, but nobody is going to be dragging the cops into our business, are they?”

Klimaszewski was insane. Nobody in their right mind would drag the cops down on Commerce City just to save Burt Alden.

“That’s a bad decision, Sparky. I mean it. You—” Sparky interrupted him, and Franklin listened with growing unease—hell, as if he wasn’t uneasy enough.

This lawyer guy Klimaszewski was talking about was no good. Franklin bent his head into the phone, holding it closer. Sparky couldn’t really be serious about dragging this guy up out of the past. One dead lawyer who had been into cheap whores, big bets, and premium cocaine, who had bought the farm one night in kind of a gruesome manner, and Sparky was going to hold that over his head?