Authors: Tara Janzen
Sure, she could get her dad out of town, and her mother…and Aunt Nanna, and Danny, and Deb, and Uncle Tim, and about forty other family members.
Crap.
She got in another half dozen stairs before Johnny spoke two words guaranteed to get her attention.
“Kevin Harrell.”
Well, that sure as hell stopped her cold. She whirled around, and landed smack dab up against him.
Her first realization was very physical, and very profound: Johnny Ramos was built like a slab of granite.
Her second realization was how amazingly angry she still was at the idiot who had dared to slam her up against the lockers in East High.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Johnny caught her close, bracing himself to keep the both of them from tumbling. It didn’t take much. If he hadn’t been following her so closely, she could have done her “spinning top” imitation without making any contact with him at all.
Thank God he’d been following her so closely.
She smelled great.
He hadn’t had a chance to notice when he’d been hauling her across Wynkoop and into O’Shaunessy’s, what with the cars, and the noise, and Dovey hot on their tails—kind of like now. But in the dark quiet of the stairwell, with the building’s walls coming up close on each side, with the two of them plastered together, and her just one stair above him with her face and neck right there in front of him, it was all about the scent of summer gardens and honeysuckle.
“That
sonuvabitch
is out of prison?” she whispered, her voice harsh.
Honeysuckle and summer gardens wrapped around one very angry woman, he realized.
“And he’s in the
bar
?”
Yes, he was. Johnny hadn’t forgotten what Kevin Harrell looked like, even if he had changed his hair color to blond, and the asshole had walked into O’Shaunessy’s and headed straight for Dovey. Franklin Bleak must have recruited him right out of Canon City.
“We need to—” he started.
“I know,” she snapped, and in the next second, she was moving back up the stairs, almost at a run, bitching under her breath.
Good. He liked a woman who knew how to prioritize, and escape always trumped a temper tantrum. But he had to wonder, for just a moment, while he was climbing up the stairs behind her, if he’d missed something all those years ago when Kevin Harrell had slammed her up against the lockers.
Had that sonuvabitch actually had the time to do something to her that he didn’t know about? And really, if he thought about it, just how far up had her skirt been when he’d called Kevin out? And where had that asshole’s hands been?
And what in the hell was he doing, really, chasing Easy Alex up to the O’Lounge, hoping Dovey Smollett wouldn’t remember about the damn double dog dare, all so he could get her out of this frying pan and throw her straight into the fire.
She still had an appointment to deliver whatever she’d put in the messenger bag bandoliered across her chest. He hadn’t forgotten.
This girl
…he thought, taking the damn short stairs three at a time.
This girl is nothing but trouble, scary trouble.
Scary for her. He wasn’t scared of anything, except of letting his men down, but his men, the guys in Third Platoon, weren’t in O’Shaunessy’s outrunning three mopes from Commerce City, and his men weren’t his anymore. They were back at Benning, most of them, and he was heading to his home team, SDF.
Most, but not all
—the thought skirted the edge of his mind, and he just let it go. For now, all he could do was let it go.
But hell, this girl—he should have played hardball with her right from the start, right when she’d first let him into her dad’s office. He should have called for backup as soon as he’d seen that damn German. He should have gotten somebody into that room and found out what was going on.
He should have called Creed. The jungle boy was in residence at Steele Street, and the German might have appreciated someone with a big, sharp knife to cut him free—and if having Creed standing over him with a knife in his hand hadn’t given the old guy a heart attack, Johnny would have figured the German was tougher than he’d looked tricked out in a thong and a dog collar.
On the other hand, General Grant was due in Denver tonight, a real short-notice visit, and even though Johnny wasn’t officially part of the team yet, and probably wouldn’t be part of any meetings, he was pretty damn sure he didn’t want SDF’s commanding officer to get the impression he was the kind of guy who chased hookers out of hotel rooms filled with deviant foreigners. Or actually, considering the slot he was hoping to fill, being able to run a “honey trap” wasn’t such a bad skill. Far worse to Grant would probably be that he was running around the streets of Denver and heading for the rooftops with a woman without knowing why. Even with the thought he’d given it, he wasn’t precisely clear about his motives.
Not precisely clear at all.
Yeah, that didn’t look so good on an operator’s resume.
What he should have done was call Loretta, Lieutenant Loretta Bradley of the Denver Police, and let her clear up the mess at the Oxford. He would have plenty of intel to work with then.
A sudden pounding sound coming up from below told him Dovey had remembered plenty about the O’Lounge, and that he was going to get another chance to play hardball real damn quick if he and Esme couldn’t outrun these jokers. From the sound of the grumbled cursing he heard between the scraping open of the pantry door and the sliding of the olive tubs, it was going to be Mr. Kevin Harrell up first at bat, which suited him just fine.
Johnny’s money was still on Esme. The girl was in shape with a capital
S.
They’d just passed the second landing and were on their way to the third, and even in heels and a tight skirt, she hadn’t so much as blinked, let alone slowed down.
She’d hitched her skirt up to give herself some room to run in, and her flashlight gave off enough illumination for him to catch a glimpse of her legs about every other step. He shouldn’t have noticed. Under their current circumstances, hoping to see up her skirt was just another dumb-ass move the likes of which had gotten him into this mess in the first place.
Geezus,
it had barely been more than half an hour since he’d sucked down the last of his beer at the Blue Iguana and gone outside to decide where else he could go and spend a couple of hours.
Anything to keep from going home—yeah, he knew he was avoiding it. But hell, his place at Steele Street’s Commerce City Garage was just too damn quiet to face alone.
Way too damn quiet. He just got in trouble when he was trapped with that much quiet. Red Dog and the Angel Boy lived upstairs, but they were out more often than they were in, and they’d been out for the last two weeks, running the security on a senate subcommittee’s junket through Bolivia.
Still, the O’Lounge was so far back in his memory banks, it wouldn’t have occurred to him in a week of Sundays as a place to go, let alone as a place to meet up with Kevin Harrell and Dovey Smollett for old home week.
Easy Alex was a different story. He actually thought about her quite a bit for a girl he’d never actually had sex with—or maybe those were the girls a guy tended to mull over in his mind, the ones who’d gotten away, especially the ones who’d barely gotten away.
Heavy footsteps started up the stairs below, accompanied by a fair share of swearing. Kevin and the Chicago Bear had to be scraping both sides of the narrow stairwell. Those boys were pushing well over two-fifty each, and it wasn’t all muscle, not even close.
He’d actually thought about Esme once in the middle of a firefight during this last go-around. It had startled the hell out of him at the time, that little lapse in his concentration. He’d been in a bunker in the Kunar Province of Afghanistan. They’d been getting pounded by enemy machine guns, and an image of Esme had flashed in front of his eyes, a really sweet image of her looking over her shoulder, smiling at him, wearing a little summer dress that barely covered her ass, her blond hair cascading down her back—hips swaying, her dress lifting in the breeze, sunshine lighting her like a halo.
It had unnerved the crap out of him. Third Platoon had already gotten hit seven times in twelve hours that day, and she’d shown up in the eighth firefight, like a messenger from God, an angel come to tease him with a vision of home, or maybe a Valkyrie waiting to claim a fallen warrior.
Nothing else strange had happened, just that little, almost hallucinatory vision of Easy Alex in the middle of the fight. Third Platoon had continued to get hammered into the night, which had been standard operating procedure during the Kunar deployment, but most of them had come out okay by morning, when an MRE and a couple of cups of coffee had set him straight—at least straight enough to face another day of the same.
He could probably use a couple of cups of coffee right now, and honestly, he didn’t need to see up her skirt. He already knew what was up there—red lace panties and a sweet size six.
Geezus.
They came out onto the roof, and Esme didn’t even break stride. She knew exactly where she was going.
She pointed to a couch up ahead under a canvas tarp rigged as a sunshade. “Should we—”
“No,” he cut her off. Blocking the door with the couch wouldn’t do any good. It would take Dovey and friends less time to push past it than it would take him and Esme to move it.
Better to keep moving, and she did, cutting off the beam on her flashlight as she continued at a jog toward the edge of the roof. There was enough streetlight to see where they were going, and no reason on earth to carry around a spotlight for Bleak’s goons to follow.
Tactically, he was impressed, even more so when she rounded the O’Lounge and came face to face with the alley bridge. It had been a few years since he’d been on the roof of O’Shaunessy’s, and sometime during those years, some manager must have decided the gig was up on the double dog dares. To limit his potential liability and cut down on the number of junior high school students trying to sneak into his bar, he’d had somebody’s old wrought-iron security door welded to the near end of the alley bridge, and then put a big steel padlock on it. The Wazee Warehouse was still only fifteen feet away, but now it was prohibitively difficult to get to—unless your name was Easy Alex.
Stopping in front of the scrolled wrought-iron door, and without missing a beat, she cut the beam of her flashlight back on, stuck it in her mouth like somebody used to working alone, and reached into another of the messenger bag’s outside pockets.
She was just so freaking smooth, all of her moves calibrated, with her thoughts always one step ahead of what she needed to do. He was impressed as hell. He was also impressed by what she was doing, although if he’d blinked, he would have missed the whole thing.
Johnny knew lock picks and the guys who used them. He knew Superman, who was one of the best and who had taught him—and she was better. Two seconds flat and she was turning off her flashlight, repocketing her tools, and opening the door onto the alley bridge. He followed her through to the other side, and she turned and closed it behind them. Then she refastened the padlock on their side.
For anybody to get through was going to take some doing, which meant, after some possible milling around and cursing his bad luck, even a less-bright guy like Dovey would realize the only chance he had was to pick up their trail on Wazee Street.
Johnny was still putting his money on Esme. From the sound of what he’d heard going on behind him in the stairwell, Dovey and his two bull elephants weren’t negotiating four flights of acutely angled stairs with nearly the grace and speed that he and the catlike Easy Alex had managed. By the time the bad guys got themselves turned around and back down the stairs, he and Esme would be halfway to Steele Street and hopefully some answers.
The bridge over the alley four floors below hadn’t improved with age, but neither had it deteriorated to the point where he felt like they needed ropes and carabiners. Esme was across in seconds and climbing the iron ladder bolted onto the side of the Wazee Warehouse.
A cat, that’s what she was, sinuous, leggy, sleek, graceful. Add skilled, fearless, decisive, efficient, and wary of the cops, and suddenly he got an even clearer picture of her: cat burglar.
Esme Alden, LoDo hooker, he couldn’t buy, but Esme Alden, cat burglar—yeah, he was afraid that one was all too easy to believe.
In minutes, they were across the warehouse roof and heading down the fire escape to the street, and so far, on his scoreboard, it had been one helluva night.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
“What do you mean you didn’t get the goddamn girl?” Franklin Bleak said into his phone. “How many lives do you think you’ve got, Dovey? Twelve? You think you’ve got twelve goddamn lives?”
“No, sir, Mr. Bleak.”
“Good, because you don’t. I can fucking guarantee you that much, Smollett.” Franklin settled back into his cordovan leather chair and lifted his feet to set them on his mahogany desk. The wallpaper in his office was richly flocked, a black rampant lion pattern on hunter green. The rug covering his hardwood floor was straight out of the Arabian Nights via hand-knotted New Zealand wool, a rich tapestry of gold, ivory, and cinnabar red. He had two richly upholstered chairs in his office, and a matching settee in a pattern called Rutherford. The material was wool, the frames were hand-carved beechwood stained to a rich cherry. Amber sconces and a crystal chandelier bathed his private lair with warm, luxurious light.
The room was richly colorful, but then, Franklin Bleak was a richly colorful guy, leaning heavily on the “rich” side of the equation. He owned Commerce City and everything north of Speer Boulevard in Denver. His empire stretched southeast to Aurora and north into Brighton. He stayed the hell out of Boulder, that crapshoot of liberalism and panty-waisted, tree-hugging, small-carbon-footprinted do-gooders to the west, but he did run a few games and some girls in Thornton. He’d stayed away from moving a lot of drugs, because drugs were such a dirty, fierce business, very dangerous. Girls were easy to keep in line. Game scores, race numbers, and the money never lied. But the drugs put a guy directly in the line of fire and could get him killed. To do drugs well, a guy needed layers, a lot of layers, between himself and the street. The safest place to sell drugs was from the top, and even then, some douche might decide to blow up your house, or take out your whole damn condominium building, just blow it the fuck up while you were asleep inside.
Drugs were a crazy business, not like the betting game and girls. Franklin Bleak left drugs to the Denver gangs, especially the Locos, who seemed to have their fingers in every kilo that ran through the city. He had no beef with the Locos, and for the most part, he’d worked hard to keep it that way.
But inevitably the three got mixed—girls, bets, drugs. You had girls who did drugs, and losers who wanted to pay in drugs, and winners who wanted to place in drugs, and guys who’d lost their ass who needed drugs, and guys in drugs who just wanted to make you a deal because you were Franklin Bleak, kind of a famous, colorful guy.
He had resisted all such offers, until the deal of a lifetime had landed practically in his lap three months ago, more of a middle-man transaction for him than outright involvement, a conduit situation of some high-end cocaine for which the demand was through the roof via a high-end dealer who only dealt with very select, high-end clients in Vail and Aspen and Beaver Creek.
And Franklin was talking incredibly select and high-end clients, famous people.
People on television and in films. Movie stars.
Colorado ski towns were Mecca to those people, and Franklin controlled a hefty portion of the front door into those towns, so naturally, when Hollywood had gone looking for a guy to bring in one of their loads from Chicago, Hollywood had found him. He had friends in Chicago. He was known. He had the ways and means…but he did not have the goddamn Alden girl, and he needed her to make sure her crapola father didn’t welsh on his bet one goddamn more time.
Bleak was done with the stupid bastard. He needed his money by five o’clock tomorrow morning, before the frickin’ crack of dawn, before the Chicago cocaine and its handlers got to Denver for the deal at nine o’clock. If Alden didn’t have his money to him by sunrise, there was literally going to be hell to pay, and then he’d give the guy two more hours. If Alden failed again, the bastard would wish he was dead, and then Franklin would make it so, putting the jerk out of his misery—and he’d be goddamned if he ever took a bet from anybody named Alden ever again.
“I don’t want to hear how you lost her, and I sure as hell don’t want to hear about O’Shaunessy’s. That O’Shaunessy bastard has given me nothing in forty years. Nothing. You hear me?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Bleak.”
The whole lower downtown crowd was nothing but assholes. They thought they were better than Commerce City. They thought they were high-end, but Franklin was going to show them high-end. Lunch, that’s what Graham Percy, the Hollywood agent and his connection, had promised him—lunch with Katherine Gray, the hottest “It” girl to hit late-night cable in the last six months, his kind of girl, all legs and long red hair. Franklin liked a girl with some pizzazz, and Katherine Gray had pizzazz up the yazoo.
He looked over at a picture of her he’d cut out of
Starlets
magazine and framed for his desk. She was gorgeous. She’d made it. She knew what it took. She was that kind of girl, and he was that kind of guy. He knew what it took—and it was going to take the damn Alden girl to insure he got his money, and he needed his money, all eighty-two fucking thousand dollars of it to get him through the Chicago cocaine deal tomorrow. No money, no deal—no lunch. And he wasn’t letting Burt Alden screw him out of Katherine Gray and his lunch. Everyone else he’d shaken down these last two months, pulling in
all
his bad debts, had been giving it up, no matter what it took, or they’d kissed their ass good-bye. Alden was going to give it up, too, or Bleak was going to personally check the bastard out—as in
out,
done, finished, dead.
“You stay on the lookout for her, you hear me? You ask around down there. You know people. Use them. Where’s the Chicago guy, Bremerton?” Vernon Better-Watch-His-Shit Bremerton. Franklin didn’t like fucking watchdogs, and Bremerton was a watch-dog, sent by the Chicago boys to make sure Franklin held up his end of the deal—the assholes.
“With me,” Dovey said.
“Good. You keep him with you. I don’t like him down here, staring at me all day like some dumb piece of Chicago pork. Put Kevin on the B and B office. Tell him to stay put.”
“I’ve got Kevin checking the coffee shop on Wazee,” the kid said, like he’d come up with a good idea.
Franklin was not impressed.
“And why in the hell would you do that? With three guys chasing them, I don’t think they’re going to stop for a goddamn cup of coffee. Do you?”
“No, sir…well, yes, sir, not stop exactly, but go by there because—”
“Because nothing, Smollett. Get Kevin back on the B and B office.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Eliot is on his way to her old man’s house, so we’re covered there, but if she shows up at that office again, you tell Kevin to get her and bring her to me. No more screwing up.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you tell him to keep his hands to himself. I want her in one piece.” He wanted Burt Alden to get one last goddamn good look at what he was going to lose if he didn’t have that money, and if it got to the point where Franklin had to take the girl apart, he didn’t want her old man missing any of the action, not so much as a single piece of it.
He hoped it didn’t get to that. He really did. In his heart, he did. The girl was a looker, plenty of pizzazz, and that created options. She wouldn’t be worth eighty-two thousand dollars, not right off the cuff, but he could play her, parlay her into something to hold the damn deal together—a smart looker like her, and he could teach everybody in goddamn Denver a lesson while he was at it.
“Yes, sir.”
That was the great thing about Dovey. The kid knew the two most important words in his vocabulary were “Yes, sir.” That’s all Franklin ever wanted to hear out of him.
“You find her, Dovey, or it’s gonna hurt you. Do you understand?”
“Y-yes, sir.”
Good,
Franklin thought,
a little hesitation is good.
It meant the kid was thinking.
But Dovey Smollett thinking wasn’t always that much better than Dovey Smollett not thinking.
Franklin ended the call and speed-dialed another number.
“Mitch,” he said, when the call was answered. “Are you and Leroy still at the Jack O’Nines?” The Jack O’Nines, a dump of a strip club in downtown, was sometimes referred to as Denver’s little Chicago, because of the three Chicago boys who had cruised through there a few years ago. One of them had gotten himself gutted, right there in Jack’s back bar, and the other two had been capped, with all three bodies dragged out into the alley, thrown in a truck, and blown to bits in an explosion out at the old Stapleton Airport. At least that was the story.
Bremerton better watch his ass. Denver wasn’t always so good to Chicago boys.
“Yes, boss.”
“Dovey is at Sixteenth and Wazee, looking for the Alden girl. She’s on the run. I want you and Leroy down there yesterday. See if you can pick her up.”
“Yes, boss.”
“Call Dovey for his last sighting.”
“Yes, boss.”
“Did you get my money out of that prick Abrams?”
“Yes, boss.”
Good.
“How hard did you have to work for it?”
“We leaned on him enough to let him know that being late wasn’t a good idea, but we were careful. We didn’t break anything on him, just roughed him up a little.”
“Good. Then get your asses down into LoDo.” He hung up the phone and took another long look at Katherine Gray’s photo, before he pushed away from his desk and walked over to the window at the far end of his office. With a twist of a rod, the blinds opened to reveal the main floor of the Bleak Enterprises warehouse.
Paper products, that was his legitimate game, supplying paper products to businesses up and down the Front Range—paper towels, toilet paper, napkins, cleaning supplies, specialty containers, bags, boxes, whatever his customers wanted, Bleak could get, including Lady’s Pride in the seventh at the Downs, but that part of his business was run out of the back of his building.
He walked to the other end of his office and opened up another set of window blinds. A private set of stairs led from his office to the room below. Most nights, he had two guys on computers and cell phones and a digital whiteboard hanging on the wall down there. Most nights, he ran a lot of bets through that room, with most of the transactions running smooth as silk, but every now and then, something went wrong. He was a good guy, and if somebody had a sure shot they wanted to play big, but not the cash to do it, they could count on Franklin to cover it for them. But sure shots seldom were, and no matter how the damn bet turned out, the piper had to be paid.
He caught sight of his reflection in the window and narrowed his gaze. That damn hairstylist at Mirasol’s had done him no favors with this last cut. At seventy dollars a pop, he’d think a damn hairstylist could cut a guy’s hair without cutting it all off. He still had plenty on the sides. He always had plenty on the sides, and it was the plentiful side hair that was supposed to make up for the barely noticeable thinness on top. But the damn stylist had cut him too short.
Using his fingers, he combed a few more strands off the side and up over the top. He was done with Mirasol’s. But the girl did give good color, nice and dark with just a touch of a warmer shade. That’s the way she described it, and Franklin agreed. His hair looked real natural, like he was a guy who got out in the sun.
He wasn’t.
Franklin Bleak was an inside guy, all the way; he was also the piper, and one way or another, Burt Alden was going to pay, starting with the middle-aged blonde handcuffed to a chair in the corner of the betting room. She was alone down there in the half-lit room where he ran his bets. Her first name was Beth, according to his information and her name tag, and she looked terrified—rightly so. She was a done deal. Twenty years ago…hell, even ten years ago, Franklin might have been able to cop a deal on her, but not now. She was worthless to him, except as leverage, her best years long behind her.
She was also in complete disarray—the top of her nurse’s uniform ripped up one seam, as if she might have put up a fight when Eliot had grabbed her out of the parking lot at Denver General Hospital. Her cotton pants were torn and dirty, as if she’d perhaps fallen in the parking lot and Eliot had dragged her to his car. Most of her hair had fallen free of her ponytail band and was hanging in a knotted mess to her shoulders, as if Eliot might have had a fistful of it while he was dragging her across the pavement. And one of her shoelaces was missing out of her sensible shoes.
That was a new one on Franklin. He’d never seen a woman lose a shoelace in a struggle. He’d seen them lose their shoes, but it had always been whole shoes, not just a lace.
Live and learn
, Franklin thought, turning his back on the frightened, smallish woman and walking toward his desk,
live and learn
—unless you were Beth Alden. Her time ran out on both those options at five
A.M
.