Loose and Easy (3 page)

Burt hadn’t consulted with Esme either, not until he’d been going under for the third time, and the minute he’d mentioned Otto Von Lindberg as his connection to the Meinhard, she’d known exactly what he was up against, and exactly who he was dealing with—and she’d known she had to get in on the deal. She was the Alden who kept her head above water. She never sank.

Not ever.

She’d come damn close in Bangkok, closer than she ever wanted to be again, but even with the pain, and her guts churning, and her brain edging perilously close to panic override, she hadn’t slipped beneath the waves.

She was here tonight to make sure her father didn’t either. A month ago, she’d taken his Meinhard fiasco and started turning it into an operation, a mission, with her in charge. It’s what she brought to the table, the ability to conceive of and execute an effective plan. It was why the people who hired her paid top dollar for the privilege. It was why she ran her own investigations out of Seattle with a partner she trusted down to the marrow of her bones, far away from her dad’s day-to-day peccadilloes.

Except for today.

Today was Burt Alden’s last outing as a PI. She was putting him out of business. Today, she tied up all of his loose ends, cut him out of the loop, and set him on the road to retirement. All she had to do was deliver the painting to Isaac Nachman, redeem the bad paper Nachman was holding on her dad, walk away with what was left of the reward money, and pay off the bookie Burt had hocked his soul to, the badass Franklin Bleak.

Last, but far from least, she had to convince Mr. Bleak to call off his dogs instead of following through on his threat to make an example out of Mr. Burton Alden, kind of a body-slamming, bonebreaking, bloody-beating example, or even something more lethal if Mr. Bleak got the urge. Apparently, overdue payment on bad bets was all it took to give Franklin Bleak the urge to commit any number of sins—and that was her dad’s personal nightmare.

Between the two of them, it was looking like a real rough night all the way around.
Geezus.
It was going to take every last favor she had to get her dad out of this mess. With luck, the only losers tonight would be Otto and Warner, which was a crazy bad choice of enemies to make, but neither Otto nor Warner had ever heard of Burt Alden.

It was the only smart move her father had ever made, to work under the auspices of Robert Bainbridge, and since Bainbridge had been out of the game, to trade on the old man’s reputation by actually using his name. Every bookie in the northern hemisphere knew her father, but Otto Von Lindberg thought he was working with Robert Bainbridge. Esme was doing her damnedest to keep it that way—and if it all went to hell, she had backup. She had Dax Killian.

Before she put on her jacket, she slipped her Para-Ordnance CCW .45 out of the vinyl tote, checked the chamber, and slid it into the holster. She immediately felt better. She didn’t like “carrying” in a purse. She liked her pistol on her, in a holster. For the kind of people she’d be dealing with tonight, she needed protection, and she wanted it close. Reaching back into the tote, she pulled out her knife and slid the clip inside the top of the skirt.

She shrugged into the suit’s matching jacket and checked the drape, making sure it fell in an unbroken line to her waist, concealing her weapon. The jacket was low-cut, the lapels meeting at a set of two buttons that she’d had tailored into snap closures. Buttons were too slow.

The machine beeped again and ran some static, indicating a hang-up caller.

She reached for a pair of black high heels. The suit was supremely elegant, expensive, couture, and so were the heels. Tilting her head to one side, she removed a pair of cheap silver-toned hoops from her ears. She replaced them with diamond studs, then slipped a string of pearls around her neck.

The static came to an end on the office answering machine, and it beeped.

“Hey, bad girl, all good on this end…”

Her gaze shot to the phone at the sound of her partner’s voice, deep and easy. That was Dax Killian, cool, calm, collected, and the best damn cousin a girl ever had. She needed to give him a call as soon as she got off the phone with her dad.

“I’m leaving Colorado Springs now, ETA Denver at twenty-two-hundred hours. See you soon.”

She checked her watch again. He was on the road and on his way.

Thank God,
she thought, finishing with the clasp on the necklace, then reaching up into her hair and starting to pull the pins out of her mussed-up twist. She was on schedule, and things were going exactly according to plan, but she had a feeling, a nagging kind of unease way deep down inside that had been building all day. Normal tension, she’d told herself, the kind that keeps you sharp. But the longer it had gone on, the more she’d gotten to thinking it was a damn good thing Dax had come home with her to Denver, old stomping grounds for both of them—because her uneasy feeling was telling her she just might need all the help she could get to get through the night in one piece.

She pulled another pin out, and then another.

Dammit.
She hated it when she had that feeling.

CHAPTER
THREE

There was a God.

Johnny had never doubted it, not really. He was a good Catholic boy, one of the best, but verifiable instances of divine grace and intervention were still welcome and only helped cement his faith.

He was currently in the midst of one of those instances—
Shimmy, shimmy cocoa pop. Shimmy, shimmy rock.

Fishnet.

Coming off into a pile at her feet.

It was a gift, with Easy Alex stepping into a black satin slip and about half coming out of her red push-up bra, and if she wasn’t the earthly embodiment of divine grace, he didn’t know what was.

Red lace panties.

He hadn’t known. The hem of her hooker skirt had just covered them. But he’d seen them now, reflected in a double-hung window overlooking Wynkoop, the one closest to the B & B Investigations office bathroom where she was doing her reverse striptease.

She couldn’t know—not that every move she made was revealed in the window glass, just like a mirror, and she couldn’t know someone was standing in the low-lit hallway with a clear view through the window in the door.

And he wasn’t the guy who was going to tell her, not that he’d seen her in her underwear, but he was going to let her know he was there—in a minute, once she got herself dressed. His hand was raised, closed in an easy fist, ready to knock on the door as soon as she put on the suit jacket he could see reflected in the window.

But the jacket wasn’t what she went for next.

Amazingly, what she slipped into next was something he slipped into on a regular basis. Nothing could have surprised him more, that he and Esme Alden wore the same thing under their clothes—and he’d never been within a hundred miles of slipping on a pair of red lace panties.

Well, actually, he had kind of gotten tangled up in a pair one night in the rear bucket seats of a 1960 Chrysler “Letter Car,” a 300-F. The car had been a brute, beautiful and black, sleekly menacing with its 413-cid wedge-head V-8 and tail fins. The girl had been a pure heartbreaker from the get-go. She’d slain him in the back of that car, teased him to the point of no return and then taken him straight over the edge. That she’d only done it once and dumped him for a premed student at the university up in Boulder had damn near driven him crazy.

He was so goddamned glad he wasn’t nineteen anymore. Not that he felt overly in control of his reaction to seeing Easy Alex doing her Victoria’s Secret model impression.

She’d filled out a bit in the last few years. Quite a bit. What he was looking at couldn’t all be the push-up bra—though he did love a push-up bra. The only thing better was no bra.

When she pulled an autoloading pistol out of her ratty white tote bag and checked the chamber before slipping the gun into her shoulder holster, he lowered his hand. The girl was carrying, “cocked, locked, and loaded.”

Johnny instinctively checked the hall, looking in both directions. Carlson Services was behind him, down at the end of the hall closest to the stairs. The other offices were dark, but Esme Alden was expecting trouble.

He returned his gaze to her reflection in the window. Or maybe, like him, she made a habit of being ready for trouble whether she was expecting it or not.

Extra ready,
he thought, watching her slide a folding knife inside the waistband of her skirt. She was starting to look dangerous—damned dangerous.

So what was this all about tonight, he wondered, with her and her weapons and the German? What had she been after in the Oxford Hotel?

And did he really want to know? That was always the sticking point. Johnny’d learned a long time ago not to ask questions he wasn’t prepared to hear the answers to, good or bad. Life was funny that way, real life. A guy could be so goddamned sure of what was going on, and then get an answer straight out of left field.

It happened.

And given what he’d already seen tonight, Esme Alden owned the lease on left field.
Geezus.
The German in the Oxford had been strapped into a leather thong, and she’d leashed him to the bed—short-leashed. No wonder the guy had sounded a little strained.

Walk away,
a voice in his head said.
Back up,
chingaleto.
Get your ass down the stairs and back out on the street.

He knew that voice. He’d heard it hundreds of times. It was the voice of reason, and he was a reasonable guy.

And yet he didn’t budge an inch. He stayed right where he was and continued watching her.

She shrugged into the black jacket, slipped on a pair of black high heels, and changed her jewelry. He could hear the murmuring of the answering machine running through its messages.

Busy girl,
he thought.

A little black suit, “catch me, fuck me” heels, and a string of pearls—she looked good. Damn good.

Too good for him to walk away. She was Esme Alden, the hot crush of his teenage years, and he’d just seen her in red lace panties and a push-up bra. No guy was walking away from that.

He raised his hand again and knocked.

Geezus.
Esme’s heart damn near stopped. Then it occurred to her that it was probably Pete at the door with his pizza, coming over to share.

Geezus.
She took a breath and finished putting the last bobby pin in her sleek new twist before turning off the light and stepping to the edge of the bathroom door.

Peeking around the side, she noted a couple of things right off the bat: They needed better lighting in the hall, and it wasn’t Pete standing out there.

Picking her phone back up and slipping it into the pocket on her skirt, she looked back to the office door. She couldn’t see the guy very clearly through the window, but she could see the outline of his body, and she was guessing five feet ten, maybe five eleven. Pete topped out at five six, and with years of Friday night pizza under his belt, he was as big around as he was tall.

This guy was long, lean, and broad through the shoulders. He was also unknown and unexpected, two things she didn’t take any chances with under the best of circumstances. Tonight hardly qualified for the best of anything except pure, unadulterated trouble.

Crap.
Walking quietly and quickly across the room, she stopped to hit the off button on the answering machine, and then she made a beeline for the back office. Tucked into the end of the hall, Bainbridge’s old lair made the short end of the “L” of the two-office suite. From the window in his private entrance, she’d have a clear view of who was standing in the hallway.

An advantage that proved unnecessary when the man knocked again.

“Esme? Hey, it’s John Ramos.”

She stumbled to a stop and whirled around to stare at the door.
Geezo freakin’ crap. John Ramos? Johnny Ramos?
The name registered instantly, along with a face.

“From East High School. We graduated together.”

Totally unnecessary information. She hadn’t forgotten Johnny Ramos, oh, hell, no. Not in this lifetime, she wouldn’t.

“I, uh, heard you were working with your dad now. Thought I’d drop by and see if you could help me with a problem,” he said from outside in the hall.

Good God. Johnny freakin’ Ramos. Out in the hall.

Of course, out in the hall. Hell, he’d spent half his life out in the hall, especially at Campbell Junior High, especially during seventh-grade social studies class. She’d gotten sent out in the hall with him once, her one and only time in the hall ever, the two of them put there to “work things out,” and her poor little thirteen-year-old heart had barely survived the experience.

Ms. Trent had banished them to a pair of desks on either side of the doorway, leaving a bare three feet between them, thirty-six inches, not enough distance to insulate Esme from Johnny’s dark-eyed gaze and the heat that seemed to come out of nowhere and slam into her whenever their eyes met. There sure as hell hadn’t been any “working things out” going on. She hadn’t opened her mouth, not once. He’d been so bad, dangerously bad, even at thirteen, given the crowd he’d run with, especially his older brother, Dom Ramos, and for reasons she hadn’t understood, out of all the girls in the seventh grade, he’d chosen her to torture and tease.

Of course, eventually, she’d figured out what he was after—certainly by the time he’d asked her to the prom at the end of their junior year. Maybe even before that, like when he’d punched out Kevin Harrell in the locker bay—and for sure by the summer after graduation, when she’d ended up in the backseat of his car, a hot green, incredibly fast old-style muscle car he’d called “Roxanne.” Oh, yes, by then she’d definitely figured out what he’d wanted, and if she’d had any doubts, he’d pretty much cleared them up in between unhooking her bra and unzipping his pants. He wanted her, wanted her to be his girl, and he’d wanted it since the first time he’d laid eyes on her in Ms. Trent’s social studies class way back in seventh grade.

And he was out in the hall.

She took a breath. Roxanne. Yeah. That was right, a Dodge Challenger, 1971, very hot, very fast, and completely underappreciated by her at the time, but she’d long since learned how rare and wonderful the car had been, and exactly what Johnny Ramos had saved her from by putting himself between her and Kevin Harrell that day in the locker bay.

Kevin, a current resident of the state penitentiary in Canon City, had been twice his size, but there had been no contest in the brief, violent encounter. The older boy had shoved her up against the lockers, pressing his body against hers, talking trash and trying to jerk her skirt up to her waist, and for a few seconds, she’d been frozen in fear, the breath knocked out of her. Then someone had called him out, their voice harsh, the words insistent, spoken in gutter Spanish and full of threat.

Kevin had turned to face his challenger, and it had all been over. One punch, brick hard and lightning fast.

An iron fist, her dad had called it, being able to knock out somebody that size with one hit. Johnny had also had a tattoo, she’d discovered in Roxanne’s backseat, a tattoo with its own claim to iron.

God, that had been an experience. Definitely. Being in the backseat of a car with Johnny Ramos had been the single most educational experience of her life up to that point, and maybe even a little bit beyond.

Iron tattoo, iron fist, a reputation crossing over into misdemeanors edged in felonies, if the rumors about how he’d “acquired” the Challenger were true—and he was standing out in the hall.

Unbelievable.

And what in the hell was she going to do about it? He obviously knew she was in here—which just opened up a whole other can of worms, one she was simply going to ignore, like how maybe his was the voice she’d heard outside the door at the Oxford, like maybe she had been tailed, which made her more than a little irritated with herself, a whole lot more. It also meant he had way more information about her than she was comfortable with him having—like the whole hooker scene.
Dammit.
Dax had taught her better than that.

“Esme?”

Hell. She couldn’t wait him out. She had a schedule to keep, which only left her with Option B: Play along with his “heard you were working with your dad” line, and get rid of him.

Yeah, that’s what she’d do, say her hellos, hand him one of her dad’s business cards, give him the office hours—without actually telling him she was shutting the place down—and shoo him along, back out onto the street, which is where she’d heard he’d ended up—out on the street. Someone she’d known in high school had mentioned it, about how so-and-so who worked in LoDo had seen Johnny Ramos going in and out of the alley called Steele Street. As she had recalled, the only thing in that alley was an old garage, a place that at one time had been the most notorious chop shop in Denver.

Esme’d hoped for better for him. He’d been a smart kid, far smarter than his academic record had implied, but a lot of things can go wrong when a person grows up wild—and Johnny Ramos had been running wild for as long as she’d known him. His older brother hadn’t even made it to twenty before he’d been gunned down in City Park.

God, that had been awful, she remembered, especially for Johnny. He’d been there when it happened.

“I actually could use a little help here tonight, Esme,” he said, still trying to talk his way inside, and she wondered how in the world she’d failed to recognize his voice in the Oxford, the calm edge of it, the deep, feathered undertones, the easy, measured cadence. Those hadn’t changed. For all the craziness in his life, he’d had a steadiness about him, even at thirteen.

“All right, all right,” she said, stepping over to the door, making sure her voice carried. “Hold your horses. I’m coming.”

Yeah—play along and get rid of him. That was the best plan.

Taking a deep breath, Esme pulled the door open—and got hit by a freight train.

Full speed.

No brakes.

Two engines in front, and two engines in back.

No caboose.

Diesel powered. All locomotion.

Johnny Ramos, in the flesh, all grown up and looking like the stone-cold definition of every big bad boy she’d ever known, except better, harder, and like the last thing he needed was help, with anything. Oh, hell, no. One look said it all: This boy could take care of himself—in spades.

Criminy.
Her breath was actually caught in her throat, an unprecedented reaction to a guy since…well, since the last time she’d seen him, naked in the backseat of the awesome Roxanne.

Perfect.

She couldn’t breathe. Her heart was racing. He was standing in the hall, and all she could do was stand there in front of him, clutching the doorknob and praying for her brain to kick in.