Authors: Tara Janzen
“Why? Who’s in the van?” She sat back a bit, facing him.
“I don’t know who’s in it, but it says Bleak Enterprises on the side.”
“Geezus,”
she breathed the word, looking back out the rear window—and for the first time, he thought maybe she was getting a little unnerved by what he considered to be a damned unnerving situation.
At the end of the alley, he crossed Blake, then continued on through the alley, until he was back to Wazee and turned north.
“No-no-no-no,” she said. “South. We need to get to the interstate.”
“No, we don’t,” he said, continuing north, the Cyclone roaring up through its gears. A few more turns had them back on Market and headed into the danger zone.
LoDo quickly disappeared behind them, the neighborhood going downhill fast once they passed Park Avenue, and he kept going, past the rail yards and into the boondocks, until he pulled into another, even narrower alley. He quickly eased the Cyclone down into second.
She looked around at where he’d brought them, and when recognition settled in, he felt her stiffen.
Her gaze rocketed back to him.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
The only answer he gave her was to shake his head. He wasn’t kidding, not in this place.
Stretching his arm out the driver’s side window, he closed a circle with his ring finger and his thumb, and holding the Cyclone to a crawl, he drove through an open iron gate into the no-man’s-land of the Locos’ hideout.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Scotch.
General Richard “Buck” Grant dropped his duffel at the end of the bed in the guest suite at 738 Steele Street and walked over to the long row of windows overlooking the seventh-floor garage. A bottle and two glasses were waiting for him on a table next to the windows.
The Scotch at Steele Street was always the best of the eighteen-year-olds. Hart and Hawkins made damn sure of it.
He poured himself a short shot and took his first sip. For a long moment, he let it sit in his mouth, let it infuse his senses. For a long moment, he waited, wondering if anything could disguise the taste of betrayal.
No, he decided, swallowing. Not today.
Fuck.
He tossed back the rest of the shot and poured himself another.
Everything at 738 Steele Street was the best, up to and including the operators. Hart and Hawkins made damn sure of it, and there wasn’t a goddamn one of them who didn’t deserve better than what he’d brought with him to Denver.
Fucking CIA.
Below him in the bays, Creed and Skeeter had their heads under the hood of one of Steele Street’s most infamous American muscle cars. The Chevy Nova’s name was “Mercy” because she had none—so the story went, and Buck knew it for a fact. He thought Dylan had ordered the beast drawn and quartered years ago. The 1969 Yenko 427 Nova did her 0 to 60 mph in under four seconds. Buck had been in her once when she’d done it with Quinn Younger, SDF’s jet jockey, behind the wheel, and once had been enough. He hadn’t checked, but he was pretty sure he’d left part of his stomach and half his hair on the starting line. He didn’t like to admit it, but he really couldn’t afford to lose half his hair, so he kept it short, regulation buzz. What was left of it was one hundred percent iron gray, a hard color, on a hard guy, with a hard job. That was him—Hard-Ass Grant.
Geezus.
He set the glass aside, still full. This was so much bullshit, the reason he was here, and what he’d been sent to do.
He lifted his hand to his face, covering his eyes, and he swore again. Shit like this is what gave guys like him ulcers.
And apparently, ulcers didn’t like their Scotch neat.
He let the pain run through his gut, rode it out, and took a breath. Then he picked up the glass and dosed himself with the second shot of whiskey.
His gaze shifted from Creed and Skeeter and the cars on the garage floor to his duffel. There was a very official folder inside from the Department of Labor containing photographs and a letter from William J. Davies, who’d been the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict when Special Defense Force had been created and put under Grant’s command. Davies had long since been kicked upstairs to an undisclosed position in an undisclosed government agency that didn’t have a damn thing to do with the Labor Department. The chain of command hadn’t really changed for Buck and SDF, but it had sunk deeper into the black water of the Potomac as the years had gone by, the wars had gotten more costly, and the necessary deeds had become less publicly palatable. Still, the chain of command had never been as deliberately obscure or the orders as black as what he’d gotten this morning. He’d opened the folder as soon as it had arrived in his office in the Marsh Annex east of Washington, D.C. He’d read the letter inside once, looked at the accompanying photographs, put it all back in the envelope, and immediately hitched a ride out of Andrews Air Force Base to Colorado.
The photographs had been damned startling, damned unnerving, and Buck had seen it all in his fifty-four years. He just hadn’t seen anything like this.
Davies had told him what to do. He hadn’t told him how to do it, and Buck had wanted to do it in person. Some information just shouldn’t be delivered over the phone, no matter how secure the line. He’d also figured if he was on deck with them when he briefed the team, he could manage the fallout. He’d also wanted to be on board during the initial planning phase of the requested mission.
Mission
—he hated even putting the word to the deed. It was a goatfuck, a gut-wrenching goatfuck. Sometimes, being in this man’s army took almost more than he had to give. Everyone on SDF was going to know what that felt like and have to deal with it by the time they finished looking at those photographs, by the time he laid out the operation. The only alternative to dealing with it was anarchy, to willfully disobey a direct order, and the only alternative to mutiny was to lock the whole damn team up in some goddamn high-security prison and throw away the key until the mission had been accomplished by someone else. But then, that had been the problem, hadn’t it? No one,
no one,
had even gotten close to accomplishing the mission. Tasking SDF with the deed was about as desperate an act as he’d ever seen the government’s snoop-and-spook apparatchiki reduced to miring themselves in—and they were “in,” the whole goddamn alphabet-soup boatload of them. Not that anyone would ever take responsibility for what had happened. In cases like this, the buck got passed around faster than a hot potato, getting kicked under tables and buried in crap, until everyone who had ever heard of it was either dead, exiled, or promoted out of the line of fire.
Politics was such a goddamn dirty business. It made war look like a cakewalk. Politics was such a goddamn dirty business; it made him sick.
He checked his watch. It had taken forever to get to Denver from Peterson Air Force Base, and there wasn’t a whole lot of the night left. He’d contacted Dylan in New York and asked for a meeting at Steele Street first thing in the morning. Besides Creed and Skeeter, Hawkins was in residence. Grant knew Dylan had told them to stay put. Zachary Prade was already on his way from Podunk, Montana, or wherever the hell his wife’s family ranch was located.
Trace, that was it. Trace, Montana, in Chouteau County.
Kid had done a flip-flop in Los Angeles, barely getting there before the word had gone out for him to come home. Quinn would be down from his mountain home in Evergreen before dawn. Smith would be getting into Peterson a little after midnight. Buck hoped the traffic between Colorado Springs and Denver had cleared out by then. The damn interstate had been a parking lot when he’d been on it.
And they needed Smith. He’d be good to have on board, a cool head, a cold heart. Smith could be counted on to keep appropriate emotional distance between himself and what the others would be feeling no matter how professionally they’d always conducted themselves. This damn situation would test them all.
There was no pulling Gillian and Travis off their mission. Politics again. Protecting senators on junkets in Third World countries, this one Bolivia, took precedence over just about every other damn thing. The trouble was, Dylan would instantly recognize the advantage of having Red Dog and the Angel Boy on the outside, if everyone on the inside found the mission parameters unacceptable and chose to exercise their marked instincts for independent thought—and who could blame them? Not Buck, not on this deal.
But neither was he going to condone or allow it.
His job was going to be to convince them not to abandon ship, to stay inside the system, to stay inside the rules. Working together, they could keep the sacrifices to a minimum. They were soldiers. He knew them. They would comply. He’d be damned if he lost his whole team due to a situation the CIA should never have allowed, let alone allowed to get so damn far out of hand that it had become a priority-one national security issue.
On the upside, he’d also brought the team something they needed: Juan Aurelio Ramos. The kid had proven himself in combat over and over again in his three tours of duty. Even with his last go-around in Afghanistan having gotten a little tight in places, and damn rough in others, Ramos had pulled through. He’d made it home in one piece, inside and out. Hawkins would take care of the rest, getting him trained up for the type of missions SDF took on. Training never stopped for any of them. It was the order of the day, every day. Ramos was officially SDF’s now—and Grant’s. All Buck had to do was keep the team alive long enough to use him.
Snagging the pair of highball glasses with the fingers of his right hand, he grabbed the bottle of Scotch with his left and walked out of the guest suite to the main elevator in the office. It was a hot summer night in Denver, and he was heading to The Beach—a couple of lawn chairs and a ratty piece of Astro Turf nailed to the roof of 738 Steele Street. With a bit of luck, he wouldn’t be alone up there for long.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
Old fears die hard. Legitimate old fears don’t die at all, hard or otherwise. Driving into the Locos compound off north Delgany was a fairly well-grounded old fear in Esme’s book, an old fear with a new, unexpectedly current infusion of adrenaline.
Fight or flight—she was feeling it with every leap of her pulse.
“This isn’t cool.” It was crazy. She had enough trouble tonight without him adding a boatload of gangsters to the mix.
“No, it’s not,” he agreed, which didn’t do a damn thing to calm her nerves.
“Then why in the hell are we here?”
“I need some information. Baby Duce will have it.”
Oh, perfect. Baby Duce. She knew the damn hierarchy and history as well as any inner-city kid. Baby Duce ran the Locos. He’d been running them since Carlos had gotten killed in some turf war, and before Carlos, it had been Dom Ramos, who, as she most certainly remembered, had also gotten killed in some turf war. The Locos had been a lot smaller crew under Dom, very tight-knit, and they’d mostly run their business and their wars on the other side of the river. This north-downtown stuff had all started with a pipeline cocaine deal Baby Duce had brokered during the first year of his reign. The whole Locos sphere of influence had done nothing but expand since then. They owned both sides of the river now, ran most of lower downtown and downtown, and had made heavy inroads into the eastern suburbs.
Johnny freakin’ Ramos
—crown prince of the Locos by blood and heritage. Maybe she’d been wrong about him.
Crap.
Of course she’d been wrong about him.
Esme could see shadows moving in the shadows of the buildings and houses on each side of the alley. They were coming in the back door of a very sketchy neighborhood, a very well protected neighborhood, and they were running a gauntlet of its guards, with every shadow a potential threat.
Within the space of a couple of blocks, she and Johnny had left the hip and happening part of lower downtown and cruised into what Realtors referred to as River North, or RiNo, a “mixed use” area. In this case, the mix of use included ultra-low-end residential crammed in between no-longer-in-use industrial and retail buildings, a good breeding ground for vice. Not for long, though. Developers had already made headway in the area, optimistically hoping they could turn it into a “front door” neighborhood.
Hell, get a couple of developers holding hands with a few Realtors and guaranteed they’d start turning pigs’ ears into silk purses, and RiNo into the next LoDo—for a price, usually a pretty pricey price.
But for now, this block and half a dozen others belonged to Baby Duce, and she and Johnny were right in the middle of his River North territory.
Halfway down the alley, Johnny stopped the Cyclone and took the key out of the ignition. To her right, a haphazard array of garbage cans flanked a padlocked iron door with the words Butcher Drug Store painted on the cinderblock above it.
Geezus.
Butcher and drugs in the same sentence were enough to send a chill down her spine, especially when, to her left, a chain-linked, barbed-wire fence was all that stood between her and the Locos’ north-side crib. A pair of lights on the back of the ramshackle old house lit up the yard and part of the alley.
Yeah, every guy in Denver had some badass reputation he was working to uphold, and Baby Duce was no different. So now she had Bleak on her ass, Baby Duce on her left, Benny-boy staring out of her near future, Erich Warner and Otto Von Lindberg hopefully not bearing down on her from out of her past, and Isaac Nachman nowhere in sight, because she was stuck in this goddamn alley, in a car with no key.
“Wait here.” Johnny opened his door and was about halfway out when she stopped him with a word.
“Five,” she said.
He hesitated for a second, then glanced back at her over his shoulder.
“Five?”
“Five minutes, and then I’m walking out of here.” And she meant it.
He considered the pavement at his feet for a couple of seconds, then finished getting out, closed the door, and leaned down through the window. “In that case, I’ll be back in four and a half.”
Straightening up, he slapped the roof of the car twice, saying something in Spanish to the guys who’d come up from both ends of the alley and were stationing themselves along the fence.
Esme had taken French in high school, thinking it would make her more refined. It hadn’t, and now she was clueless about what he’d said, except it was probably something like “don’t steal the tires off this awesome car,” or “don’t strip the huge, mother-freaking engine I bolted under this hood,” or hopefully, maybe, “don’t harass the dumb blonde who let me hijack her into this alley.”
Not that the girl was going to stand still for too much harassing.
Still, hell—she watched him step through the gate into a weed-choked yard and walk to the back door of the house. A tall, muscular guy covered in tattoos met him there, and they talked for a few moments, with the guy looking at her most of that time, then he and Johnny disappeared inside, and she sat back in her seat. There were five guys milling in the alley, and each and every one of them was staring at her, too—
dammit.
She checked her watch. Four and a half minutes—just enough time to do a little housekeeping.
She pulled her phone out of the messenger bag and found three missed calls, all from Dax, and nothing from her dad. This time, she didn’t refrain from a heavy sigh. She gave into it, just to get it off her chest. This whole damn night was because of him, and all she’d asked for was the name of Franklin Bleak’s daughter. Burt had promised her his good friend Thomas in Chicago would get the name weeks ago, but like everything else with her dad, it hadn’t worked out like he’d planned. She’d given him one simple job to do, and he’d blown it.
Big surprise.
Esme Alden, Private Investigator—she was smarter with strangers. She expected more. But her dad—hell, she definitely had issues with her dad. Someday she was going to grow up and stop trying to make him into something he was not, like responsible, smart enough to take care of his family, and strong enough not to court financial ruin on every damn toss of the dice, and every dog race, or every horse, or the damn Denver Broncos.
Today was obviously not that day.
She scrolled down her address list to his name and pressed the call button. After seven interminable rings, she got her folks’ answering machine.
“Hi. You’ve reached the Aldens, Burt, Beth, and Esme,”
her mother’s sweet voice said.
“Leave us a message, and we’ll call you back.”
Esme figured when and if she ever got married, her mother would finally take her name off the family answering machine.
“Dad,” she said. “If you’re there, pick up. If you’re not, you should be, and either way, call me as soon as you get this message. The clock is running here, Dad.”
She hung up, and hit Dax’s number.
“Go,” he answered halfway through the first ring.
“I’m on my way to Isaac Nachman’s with the Meinhard.” And she was…sort of, in a roundabout way.
“Good going, bad girl, congratulations.” She could almost see him smile. “But you should have been at Nachman’s fifteen minutes ago.”
“I got hung up.”
“At the Oxford?”
“No. Back at the office.”
That slowed him down for a second.
“Your dad’s car didn’t start, right?”
He’d warned her against using her dad’s car, all but insisted she get a rental, but no, she’d had to use the old man’s minivan, so he could feel like he was contributing to the team.
The old man was going to get her killed.
She could see that coming now. His incompetence had always been contagious. It was why she’d worked so hard in school, and so hard keeping her ducks in a row, keeping her clothes tidy and her shoes clean and her homework done and her braids tight, and her pants on, just to have some goddamn control over something besides the missing grocery money, or the hocked television, or the men who sometimes had come to the house—men very much like Franklin Bleak and Kevin Harrell. It was why she’d moved to Seattle to work with Dax—to get away from the rolling inevitability of her dad’s disasters.
She’d begged her mom to come with her, but her mom had said no, she couldn’t leave Esme’s father—and if that was love, Esme didn’t want a damn thing to do with it.
“No. The minivan was starting for me all day. I didn’t have any problems with it until the cops booted it on Wynkoop.”
“Cripes,”
he swore under his breath. “So where are you? In a cab?”
“Actually, I’m in Baby Duce’s backyard, sitting in a Cyclone.”
“Baby Duce? The Locos Baby Duce?” he asked after a moment, not exactly an innocuous question under the best of circumstances, and these weren’t anywhere close to the best, and she could tell by the tone of his voice that he’d figured that much out in a heartbeat, and that his mood had taken a sudden, understandably steep dive.
“Yes.”
“In a Cyclone?”
“Yes.”
There was another slight pause.
“A ’68?” he asked.
She’d known he wouldn’t be able to resist that one.
“Probably. It’s fast, got a lot of engine in it, but it’s really beat-up.”
“A sleeper,” he said.
Sure, she thought, a sleeper, the kind of car no one would suspect of having more power than Godzilla.
“You’re sitting in a sleeper in Baby Duce’s backyard.” It wasn’t a question. “Who’s holding the pink slip on the Cyclone?” That was a question, and she was going to get around to answering it pretty damn quickly, right after she assured him she was still doing her job.
“I’m only here for another couple of minutes, then I’m heading straight for Isaac Nachman’s.” One way or another, with or without Johnny Ramos.
“Answer the question, Easy, and then tell me you got the name of Bleak’s kid from your dad.”
What did she have to offer him, really, except a damning silence. Fortunately, with Dax, a damning silence was about all it took.
She heard him sigh.
“You know what this sounds like, Easy,” he said, his voice slipping down another notch into the “very unhappy” category.
“A royal screwup.”
“Like it’s time to close up shop and figure out another plan.”
“No. We’re still a go here.”
“Your dad—”
“I know.”
She heard the Dax Killian version of an angry outburst, which sounded a lot like a softly muttered
“for the love of God and Patsy Cline.”
Burt Alden was the family curse. The fact had been highly documented over the thirty-year course of her parents’ marriage.
“What aren’t you telling me, Easy? Start at the top, and don’t forget the Cyclone.”
It was situation report time—sit-rep—or confession time, depending on a person’s point of view and level of guilt, and he wasn’t going to like this part any more than she did.
“I was recognized at the Oxford by a guy I went to high school with, John Ramos. He followed me to the office. We talked for a couple of minutes and walked out. When I saw the van was booted, I crossed Wynkoop to get a cab, and the next thing I know, he’s hauling me up Sixteenth, because Dovey Smollett, Kevin Harrell, and this other guy look like they’re out to snatch me off the street. So we do the O’Shaunessy’s–Cuppa Joe double dog dare, lose them, and end up here in one of Baby Duce’s alleys in Ramos’s Cyclone.”
It was quite a story, even in the retelling, a royal screwup, just like she’d said, but all Dax said to her was, “Kevin Harrell.”
“I know.” Kevin Harrell had been hovering near the top of Dax’s “Guy’s Who Don’t Want to Meet Me in a Dark Alley” list for years.
“Is Dovey Smollett Greg Smollett’s little brother?”
“Yes.”
“And why in the world would a Smollett be after you? What—did you break his heart in junior high or something?”
She wished it were that simple. She really did.
“He works for Franklin Bleak.”
Dax took Patsy Cline’s name in vain again under his breath. Three times on the Patsy business, and Esme knew the shit would hit the fan.
“I want you out of there now. Go back to the office, and—no, on second thought, skip the office. They’ve got that covered. Go to Mama Guadalupe’s. I’ll meet you in the bar.”
“I’m not meeting you anywhere, until I see Nachman and get the cash. We stick to the plan, Dax. Nothing has happened here, except for a half-hour delay.” More like an hour, actually, by the time she made it to Isaac Nachman’s mountain mansion, but the Denver industrialist was her next call. She’d smooth everything over, make the delivery, get the money, and meet Dax back at the Faber Building as planned.
“A half an hour and Bleak pooching the deal, bad girl. You know what this means. Bleak is looking to put the squeeze on your dad. And who is John Ramos?” Dax said. “What’s his angle? How do you know he’s not working for Bleak, too? What was he doing? Staking out the office, and then he follows you over to—oh, wait a minute here…ah, hell, Easy, don’t tell me John Ramos is Dom Ramos’s little brother.”
Okay, Dax.
Her lips were sealed.
“He’s Dom Ramos’s little brother, isn’t he?”
“Well, Dax, I’m sitting here staring at five Locos in an alley off north Delgany. I’m not at a warehouse in Commerce City staring at a few hundred cases of toilet paper and fiesta napkins.”
“What are you doing on Delgany?” Dax’s voice took on an added edge. “I thought Baby Duce worked out of the Aztec Club.”
“The Aztec burned down a few years ago. To the ground. You really need to keep up.”
While she watched, one of the Locos pushed off the fence and started for the car, and all she could think was—
Oh, baby, don’t go there.
Nothing good could come from backing her into a corner, absolutely nothing good.
She very discreetly slipped her open hand up against the snap on her jacket. From that position, she knew exactly how far she was from her pistol—less than a second away—but she wouldn’t draw unless she made the decision to shoot. An unarmed blonde in a beat-up old car had a zero threat quotient to a gang of five Locos, and that’s exactly what she wanted all of them to keep thinking—that she was no threat to them. Once a gun was brought into play, all the rules would change.