Rachel Caine - Devil's Bargain

Once they were in the sedan again, the metal door cranked up like a castle gate, allowing them to exit into the bright morning air.

“So what,” Lucia asked with absolutely precision, “the hell was that? ”

“ That is Manny Glickman.” Jazz pretended to concentrate on the flow of commuter traffic, which wasn’t too much of a stretch—K.C., like most semilarge cities, was hell in the morning rush hour. She was trying to decide what to share. “Used to be the go-to guy at Quantico for the big cases after the shakeup of the lab, you remember the scandal over the evidence problems—”

Lucia nodded, eyes fixed on the cars around them. Sweeping the street for surveillance.

“Anyway, he went through a bad patch. Started private practice a couple of years ago, after he got out of the hospital. Most of the P.I.s and lawyers use him, or try to, but he won’t do any cases with violent crime elements.”

“Sounds like he’s limiting his business pretty severely.”

“Yeah. But he’s got money, and he doesn’t want to go back into that world.” Jazz shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. He’ll get us what we need. Manny’s hell on wheels when it comes to evidence.”

Lucia thought about that for a few seconds, and then turned her head to look straight at her. Sunlight flashed between the buildings and painted her skin in strobing flashes of gold. “What happened to him? Really?”

“Really?” Jazz made up her mind in a split second. There were few people she told about Manny—the real story—out of respect for his privacy, but she couldn’t start out with lying, not to Lucia. She’d know. “He was buried for almost forty-two hours in a black box eight feet under the ground, with nothing but some oxygen tanks to keep him alive, and a continuous loop recording playing the sound of the killer’s previous victim being tortured. That kind of thing will take all the fizz out of a person.”

Lucia understood immediately, it was all over her face. A deep, sad appreciation for everything Jazz didn’t say about that ordeal. “Did you find him?”

“No,” Jazz said softly. “No, I was across town, interrogating the suspect. My partner found the spot. He and two FBI agents dug Manny up.”

“My God,” Lucia murmured. “Did you know him?”

“Not then. He was a case file shipped down to us. I met him when he woke up in the hospital.” She’d never forget that bloodied, dirt-caked figure. Shaking. Weeping. The FBI agents turning away while Ben McCarthy pulled up a chair and took one of those filthy hands, nodding for her to hold the other. Holding Manny in the world.

“It was related to an investigation.” Lucia didn’t make it a question. “Something Manny was working on.”

“Serial killer,” Jazz agreed. “Just our blind luck he decided to dump Manny in Kansas City. He was a coast-to-coast, equal-opportunity son of a bitch. We all got lucky. Me, Manny, Ben…”

Lucia didn’t ask about Ben. No doubt she knew everything there was to know on that subject already, had made up her mind as to Ben’s guilt or innocence.

“Anyway…now Manny’s a friend,” Jazz finished awkwardly. “And if he’s twitchy, well, hell, you’d be twitchy too after that. But he does his best. He gets by.”

“And three thousand dollars? You’ve got that amount of money lying around to pay him?” Lucia wasn’t being insulting, just matter-of-fact. She’d done her research, Jazz knew that. Lucia knew her finances, down to the penny that was breathing its last gasp in Jazz’s bank account.

“No,” Jazz said. “But I’ll get it.” She sounded confident.

Lucia threw her an interested look but didn’t ask.

If there was a tail on them, it was good enough that neither Jazz nor Lucia spotted it. Just in case, Jazz did some acrobatics on the freeway, taking I-435, then I-70 toward St. Louis through Independence before looping back home. “You know, they have to know where you live,” Lucia pointed out. “Don’t you think this cloak-and-dagger business is a little over the top?”

“No,” Jazz said shortly, and felt a blush high in her cheeks. Dammit. Lucia made her feel like some unschooled hick, which she wasn’t. She’d been one of the youngest, most highly decorated detectives ever in KCPD. She’d trained with the FBI at Quantico. She wasn’t an idiot. Okay, maybe she wasn’t up on international terrorism and proper spy etiquette, but dammit, she was trying.

Lucia let it go. “Your gas to burn.” She shrugged and tapped her fingernails on the window glass. “If your lawyer was sincere, and if these letters mean what they say, what does that tell us? What are we going to do, in that case?” Lucia’s dark eyes turned toward her. Jazz didn’t take her attention off the road. “Are you tempted to accept?”

“Hell, yes, I’m tempted. That’s a hundred grand you’re talking about, not to mention the time and resources to devote to clearing my partner’s name. And an actual job would be a good thing, for the sake of my apartment rent, not to mention the gas-burning you’re so concerned about.” Jazz blew out her breath in an irritated sigh. “But you’re probably not into this thing, are you?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Oh, come on. You fly in from some supersecret mission looking like you dressed out of a Bond girl’s closet. You’re so hooked up that you can score a gun without leaving the airport, for God’s sake. Why would you tie yourself down with a partner? Particularly one that isn’t, you know, all spy-worthy?”

Lucia blinked slowly. “When you put it that way,” she murmured, “it’s a very good question.”

“Yeah. Well.” Somehow, this didn’t feel like a victory.

“You don’t know anything about me,” the other woman said. “Yes, I have a job. I have a decent wardrobe. I have resources. That doesn’t mean—” She shook her head, frowning. “That doesn’t mean I’m not trapped, Jazz. Or that I don’t want out of the place I’m in.”

She didn’t say anything else. Unsure how to take it, Jazz didn’t push things.

She rolled up to her apartment building, cruising at a normal speed, and said, “See anything interesting?”

“No.”

“Yeah, me neither. Don’t you think that’s interesting, in itself?”

No sounds or movement, all the way to her apartment. Jazz motioned Lucia away and took the lock-and-handle side of the door. She slotted the key into the dead bolt at arm’s length, staying well out of range if anybody decided to put a bullet through the door itself.

Nothing. Lucia watched as the door swung open, then snapped her gun up into an effortlessly graceful firing position and flowed forward, shouldering the door flat against the wall with a soft bump. The speed with which she checked and dismissed blind corners was incredible. Jazz shut the door and dead-bolted it again, then went to the gun safe in the corner and keyed it open.

The familiar weight of her H & K nine-millimeter pistol felt cool and heavy, weighing her down, grounding her against that feeling of having been blown off course by the day’s events.

Lucia stopped appraising the room from a tactical point of view long enough to say, “I like your taste in colors.”

“You’d be the only one, then,” Jazz smiled. The rug was olive green, the furniture a throwback to the worst of the seventies—dull oranges and duller golds, a truly obnoxious plaid that somehow captured all three colors plus a muddy brown for variety. She’d finished it off with a kitschy velvet painting of a matador and a print of one of Dali’s lesser works from his conquistador period.

“I was being polite,” Lucia said, and ran her fingers over the gold armchair’s back. “Possibly even sarcastic. Tell me the place came furnished.”