Loose and Easy (9 page)

Without the name, the kid had been little more than a rumor, but a damned persistent rumor with enough clues to get Dax and Easy wondering why Franklin Bleak, a man with no previously observed altruistic tendencies, had endowed a little-known school in Colorado Springs and gotten himself appointed to the board of trustees. On top of which, for the last three years, he hadn’t missed a single Folton Ridge Flyers field hockey game. He was also the sole donor of the Flyers’ new uniforms, which they got every year—this information having been unearthed by Easy while she’d been chatting up the coach during an afternoon practice a week ago.

It had all fit, and despite having to witness a lot of adolescent hot-tub groping and the one girl upchucking the night’s libations, and despite being stuck in a traffic jam and running out of time, Dax was sitting easy.

He had Patsy.

He had the panatela.

And up ahead, at the top of the next rise in the road, he had an exit ramp to get him back on an open road heading into the hills. He wasn’t that far out from the city. He’d find his way into lower downtown, no matter how many cows he had to pass.

CHAPTER
TEN

This couldn’t be right.

Esme looked at the car Johnny had stopped next to, a low-slung wreck in primer gray with a few haphazardly applied swaths of navy blue paint and one black stripe going up over the hood and down the deck, a fastback with a badly dented rear end and dirty whitewalls. The badge on the side panel said Cyclone.

She couldn’t have agreed more. The car looked like something that had been spit out of a hurricane and then rolled down a cliff.

“This is your car?” She had one hand pressed to her rib cage, trying to ease the stitch in her side. They’d sprinted the two blocks from Wazee up to Market, after making it down the warehouse fire escape.

“Yes.” He pulled a set of keys out of his pocket, checking the street in both directions, not at all winded. She was in shape. She went to the gym. She didn’t know where he went, but if it was a gym, he was living there.

“I thought you used to steal cars.” She checked the street, too, looking to see if Dovey and his crew were rounding a corner or pounding up the sidewalk.

“I did once…maybe twice,” Johnny admitted after a short pause.

Yeah, maybe twice. Maybe more than twice.

“Maybe you should have kept one of them.” The rear bumper on the Cyclone was held in place with a few wraps of baling wire and a length of twine and was still half falling off.

The look he gave her was unreadable—but it was definitely a look.

“It was just a suggestion.”
Geez.
The Challenger he’d picked her up in that long-ago summer night had been a beautiful car, and so freaking fast the takeoff had stolen her breath and jump-started her pulse. He should have kept that one.

He slid the key into the hunk-a-junk’s passenger-door lock and gave it a twist, but nothing happened.

Big surprise, she thought.

She looked back down toward Wazee and saw a guy running up the street—
cripes.
It was Dovey. Smollett hadn’t forgotten anything about the damn double dog dare.

“Hey,” she said, thinking she should give Johnny a heads-up.

“Yeah, yeah, I see him.”

Okay, but did he see—

“Yeah.”

Good. Great. Kevin and the Bear guy were lumbering after Dovey, shoving their way through anybody not smart enough to get out of their way.

What in the hell was she thinking? she wondered. Any advantage they’d had was in speed, and the Cyclone didn’t look like it had any—even if he could get in the damn thing.

And even if he did get in, she shouldn’t.

No, that wasn’t the smart move.

He jiggled the key, then jiggled it again, and she felt her tension rising with every little shake and wiggle.

Sure, logically, if he could get in and get it started, a car could outrun a guy, especially a guy like Kevin or somebody like the guy in the Bear’s jacket—but Dovey was looking pretty quick. He was gaining ground.

She glanced back at Johnny. He’d taken the key out and was shoving it back in very gently, very slowly.

Good God. If the suspense didn’t kill her, Franklin jerk-off Bleak might.

She needed to move.

“I’ll just go ahead and get a cab,” she blurted out, taking a step up the sidewalk. “Uh, thanks. For everything. Really. I’ll call you—”

The key turned.

“Get in the car,” he ordered, swinging the door wide.

He didn’t wait for her to obey, just stepped around her and headed for the driver’s side of the wreck.

Shit.

She grabbed the door and glanced down the street again, then slid her gaze back to Johnny, who was already dropping in behind the steering wheel, the ignition key in his hand.

If the Cyclone started, so help her God, she was getting in. Dovey had hit the sidewalk and was moving in fast—and she had to wonder, really: Just how damn badly did Bleak want her? And if he wanted her as badly as it looked, sending three of his boys after her, then, chances were, it would definitely be to her advantage to—

Geezus holy mother
—the beat-up old car came to life with one twist of the key, sending a body-rocking vibration up through her hand, up her arm, and down her body all the way to her toes—and in that instant, inside of a heartbeat, the Cyclone ruled the street.

The hunk-a-junk was alive and well, tuned and timed to a rumbling roar of horsepower and headers, growling low in its throat like a feral cat, shaking like a wet dog, and making the glass rattle in the door frame.

She didn’t hesitate.

In one move, she was in the car, dropping into the passenger seat, reaching for the seat belt with one hand, and slamming the door behind her with the other. Johnny instantly spun the wheel, his feet working the pedals. Shoved up into first, and then second, the Cyclone slid fast and sleek into a break in the traffic.

She craned her head around, looking back toward Wazee, only to see Dovey standing stock-still on the sidewalk, his gaze riveted to Johnny, his mouth hanging half open.

Damn, damn, oh, double damn.

“I think Dovey has definitely recognized you,” she said, feeling beholden to warn him. For whatever reasons, he’d just saved her ass—again.

“Good,” he said, the word succinct. “It’ll give him something to think about.”

She arched an eyebrow in his direction, surprised at the coldness of his voice.

In high school—sure, Dovey would have definitely thought twice about messing with Johnny Ramos. In fact, he would have thought about it until he’d changed his mind. But Franklin Bleak wouldn’t, and Dovey worked for Bleak—at least according to Johnny, the guy in the driver’s seat, the one momentarily in charge.

Very momentarily, if she so chose.

She looked him over again, from the thick dark hair cut short on his head, to the lean, chiseled lines of his face. There was no “give” in the way he looked, no softness. His shoulders were broad under his shirt, his hands large and strong on the steering wheel, the way he moved filled with intent. He wasn’t the wild kid she’d known in school. He was something else. She just didn’t know what. No shot caller for some gang—she’d bet the house on that, and no errand boy for Franklin Bleak, setting her up for a takedown. Something about him was too straight. She felt it. Something emanating from his core, and it filled him with a confidence she’d only seen in a certain kind of guy. Guys like Dax.

Yeah, that was it, and she knew damn well where her partner had gotten it from—the crucible of combat and years of exacting training engaged on a level that was recognized in all quarters as elite, those teams where the percentages of acceptance were measured in single digits, with only two or three men out of a hundred already toughened soldiers making the cut. Dax belonged in the life-and-death game of war played by the “for real” big bad boys, not the sagging gangbangers, not the mall rats and the street punks, but the ones who’d “been there, done that” in far-off places under circumstances few men could survive.

And Johnny Ramos reminded her of that.

It was enough to make a girl think.

No, he wasn’t setting her up for Bleak, and she knew for damn sure he wasn’t part of any fallout from Otto. She knew Erich Warner’s guys, and Johnny wasn’t one of them. Whatever he was up to, following her, getting involved, he was up to it for his own reasons—and she couldn’t help but wonder what in the hell those were.

They cruised up Market Street in the Cyclone, weaving through traffic at just over the speed limit, just fast enough to give them an edge without getting a ticket, leaving Dovey and his crew behind, which was all great and good, except for one thing.

“We’re going the wrong way.” She didn’t mean to sound ungrateful, but it was the truth.

“Excuse me?” He slanted her a quick glance across the darkened interior of the car.

“Wrong way,” she repeated, pointing out the windshield. “We’re going it.”

“We’re on a one-way street.”

“I know.” And she did. She knew Denver like the back of her hand, and she knew he did, too. “We need to get up on Larimer and back down to Speer, or you need to pull over and let me out somewhere up here, so I can catch a cab.”

“Sure,” he said, nodding his head, his brow furrowing. “Right. Good idea. I’ll get right on it, right after you settle down for a minute and take a breath, and maybe, just maybe, tell me what in the hell is going on.”

He downshifted for a light, and they sat at the corner, rumbling and rocking in place.

“Is this thing street legal?” It didn’t feel street legal.

“Not in fourth gear.”

Whatever that meant, though she thought she had an idea. Just like she had an idea of what was making his jaw so tight. Just like she had an idea that he wasn’t really considering her suggestion to pull over and let her out.

“I have an appointment,” she explained. She didn’t dare put it any plainer, or make it any clearer, and her appointment was in the other direction.

“So you said.” He kept his attention on the street, his gaze checking the intersection and the Cyclone’s rearview mirror. “But you didn’t say who with, or what it’s about, and frankly, given who’s chasing you, I think we’d both be better off if I knew the answers to both those questions.”

She thought about his request for a nanosecond, and gave him the only possible reply.

“You can think whatever you like.”

It was a summer night in August, in the middle of the city, but the temperature in the Cyclone dropped forty degrees in a heartbeat, with the Ice Age starting on his side of the car. She didn’t bother to turn and see what kind of look he was giving her. She could figure it out on her own—glacial, with a side order of pissed-off. So what—she had a job to do. That was her bottom line, and he wasn’t part of the job.

While they waited, two cop cars came down Eighteenth, heading northwest, passing in front of them at a good clip. A second later both cars hit their lights and sirens. Another siren sounded somewhere behind them, the noise fading north.

Typical Friday night in the city, she thought. Trouble everywhere, and her in the middle of more than she liked. She had to get to Isaac Nachman’s. Her schedule wasn’t flexible, her plan was not optional, and Johnny Ramos wasn’t part of either.

The light turned, and they cruised up another block and stopped at the next light with cars on either side of them. He slid the Cyclone back down into first gear.

“I saw that guy you hog-tied at the Oxford,” he said, not sounding any too happy about it.

She didn’t blame him. Otto Von Lindberg hog-tied in a black leather thong and leashed to a bed frame was one of those haunting images she was afraid she was just going to have to live with, probably for quite a while.

There were worse things, though, far worse, and if John Ramos was anything close to what she thought he might be, he knew it.

“So?” she said, refraining from a sigh. She wasn’t going to squirm. Regardless of how sordid it all must have looked to him, she’d done a damn good job in the Oxford. She’d gotten in with the least amount of effort possible, a seamless pretext that had required nothing more of her than fifty bucks to the valet and slipping into a short skirt and a cheap shirt. She’d controlled the situation from the first instant of contact until the last. Old Otto had never had a chance. She’d had one hundred percent mission success, verified by the Jakob Meinhard currently residing in her messenger bag.

And she’d gotten the hell out without a hitch—except for the close to six feet of tight-jawed bad boy sitting behind the Cyclone’s steering wheel.

He was a hitch. No matter how she worked it around in her mind, the truth was she’d gotten herself tailed and caught.

“I heard him say he’d called for Dixie,” he said. “He was expecting the dominatrix.”

Oh, great. He’d been right there on her ass practically the whole time, and she hadn’t had a clue.

“Dixie’s pimp is a guy named Benny-boy Jackman,” he continued, after her first moment of silence built to a second, and a third, and a fourth.

She cleared her throat—very discreetly.

“If he finds out you’ve been trading on her name, he’ll come after you big-time and not play nice when he catches up with you.”

Yes, she knew, and wasn’t that just what she needed, one more thing to worry about, but it wasn’t like she hadn’t figured Dixie and Benny-boy into her night’s profit margin.

“I’m prepared to shell out some cash to keep the peace,” she said.

“Fair warning, babe. Benny-boy may want more than cash. He’s got a reputation to maintain, and it ain’t pretty.”

She held herself still, refraining from giving in to another, even heavier, sigh. She knew all this. Didn’t everybody the hell in Denver have some damn reputation to maintain? That was her whole frickin’ problem, men’s egos and their badass reputations. She knew how the streets worked, and they didn’t work with some middle-class blonde getting away with stealing “Dixie” Talbot’s tricks—but no matter what in the hell Benny-boy Jackman wanted, she had much bigger problems than a Mile High Sixteenth Street pimp.

“Tough,” she said, and she meant it. “If he wants more than that, he’ll have to get in line.”

Get in line?

Benny-boy Jackman could just get in line?

Yeah, Johnny thought. Benny-boy could get in line behind Franklin Bleak and his goons, and probably that German guy, too, if he’d gotten out of his cuffs yet. That ought to be a real party and a half, and just how the hell many of these guys did she think she could take on and still come out in one piece?

Oh, she was a cool one, all right. Too cool for her own good, and he was just about ready to tell her, when he saw a delivery van pulling into the traffic behind them off of Eighteenth and onto Market.

Fuck.

“You’re buckled, right?”

“Right.”

He checked the street ahead of them again, waited for a truck to clear the intersection, then shot across against the light and kept going.

She twisted in her seat to look out the back window. “What? The LeSabre? I don’t see it.”

“No. A white panel van in the right lane.” He took a sharp left into an alley and slowed down just enough to keep the Cyclone from hitting the Dumpsters and packing crates pushed up against the sides of the narrow opening.