Tara Janzen - Loose And Easy

No. It was Patsy and a panatela.

He unwrapped the long, thin cigar and cut the end before firing up his lighter and getting it going.

Puffing, he thumbed through his case of CDs until he found what he wanted. Charo was a driver, not a concourse car, and he’d been only too happy to change out her eight-track for a Bose sound system.

Patsy sounded good on Bose.

The panatela smoking, he snapped his lighter shut.

Ahead of him, the Civic rolled another ten feet and Dax followed, easing up on the pedals until he was back on the Honda’s ass.

Sucking in a mouthful of smoke, he lifted his hips partway off the seat and slid his lighter back in his pocket. Then he slid the divine Ms. Cline into the CD player.

It was a hot summer night in the most beautiful state in the lower forty-eight, a perfect night for “Walking After Midnight.” That’s what he and Patsy did a lot-search for love in the lonely dark hours. As a pair, they were a couple of losers in that regard, and that’s probably why he loved her so much.

It was nine-thirty, and he knew where Easy was supposed to be-Isaac Nachman’s. She should be pulling into the guy’s Genesee Park compound in the mountains above Denver right about now. The old guy had built a massive hunting lodge back in the fifties, instantly creating a Colorado landmark, but Dax wasn’t at all sure the girl was there. She had not checked back in with him yet. The last he’d heard from her was right after she’d gotten the call from the valet at the Oxford, the call that should have gone to Dixie.

She’d told him when she was going in, and she should have called and told him when she was coming out. Standard operating procedure called for turning cell phones on silent mode for the duration of any contact with the opposition. Certainly, frisking old Otto Von Lindberg out of his contraband qualified as hostile contact. But Easy should have had her phone back on normal ring by now and been taking his calls.

He had three into her.

Settling deeper into Charo’s driver’s seat, he took another long draw off the panatela.

Dixie the Dominatrix. Her real name was Jolene Talbot. She’d been a few years ahead of him in school, and putting out even way back then. She hadn’t been the only girl doing it, of course, but she was the only one he knew who’d gone professional.

It was a rough life. He didn’t remember her being bad, or even all that wild, just real down on her luck. She’d had a friend whose luck had been even worse than hers, a girl named Debbie Gold. Debbie had started turning tricks young, too, and ended up floating in the South Platte River, her body washing up near Confluence Park one summer about eighteen years ago.

There’d been another murder that summer. Poor Debbie had barely gotten a mention in the papers, but Jonathan Traynor III, a senator’s son, had gotten plenty of play. Both murders had remained unsolved for most of those years, up until the Traynor case had gotten busted wide open and the Gold girl had been found to be a piece of collateral damage to the main event.

Dax had seen and heard about incidents a lot worse than those two murders in the intervening years, but Gold and Traynor had died in his neighborhood while he’d still been young enough to be horrifyingly awed by violence, with both murders being lurid enough to have instantly attained the status of urban legend and seal themselves in his memories-gang rape, heroin, a little strangulation, and a bullet to the brain. Right in the heart of Denver.

Life was funny. Dax had known the guy who’d gotten sent up for Traynor’s murder, wrongly it had turned out, had known him a whole lot better than he’d ever known Jolene Talbot. Hawkins had been his name. They’d boosted a couple of cars together with a kid named Quinn as part of a crew running out of lower downtown. Then that whole crew had gotten busted and sent up to juvie on a job Dax had been slated to work. The bust had pretty much scared him straight on the car boosting business.

Fortunately, there’d been plenty of other trouble to get into, and he was pretty sure he hadn’t missed any of it, right up until a Denver police officer, Loretta Bradley, had suggested, strongly, that the

U.S. Army might be a better place for him than the streets of Denver or one of her jail cells.

Apparently, from what and whom he’d seen in a lot of far-flung places over the intervening years, she’d given that advice to a lot of lower downtown’s grand theft auto wizards.

Loretta was a lieutenant now, and she’d been right. The army had been a good place for an eighteen-year-old kid who’d been on the verge of upgrading into felonies beyond his successful, and therefore undocumented, forays into boosting cars.

The Honda moved again, and Dax kept up. He could see the lights of Denver spread out across the horizon and spilling onto the dark plains to the east, but no matter how much sprawl the suburbs provided, Denver was a small town, especially if you’d grown up running her streets.

Hawkins, Quinn, and a guy named Creed-he’d crossed all their paths at some point during his time in the army and during his last few years in the Middle East, before he’d gotten out of the military. He hadn’t seen Dylan, though. From a few oblique asides, he’d surmised that the boss of the chop shop had gone a slightly different route. More spook than operator, it didn’t appear that Dylan Hart spent much, if any, time in BDUs.

The one guy he hadn’t seen since he’d left Denver was J. T. Chronopolous, but he’d heard the rumors about a couple of operators on a black op in Colombia a few years back, about one of them having three scars across the top of his shoulder-and he’d thought of the car thief he’d used to know. Given what the other guys had ended up doing, he’d always kind of figured there was a fair chance that guy in Colombia had been J.T. He hoped to hell what he’d heard hadn’t happened to anyone he knew, though, especially someone from the Steele Street crew, especially J.T. But someday, he was going to have to check it out and get the real story.

Hell, they’d all been running so damn wild on the streets as kids way back then.

Not all the wild kids were on the streets, though. He’d found a whole passel of them in a private prep school in Colorado Springs, Folton Ridge Academy. He’d been down at the school taking pictures of four of the students, all girls, all about seventeen years old, all brunettes, all on the Folton Ridge Flyers field hockey team. He’d gotten their names by matching the photos he’d taken with those in the school’s yearbook, and then gotten to know each of the girls up close and personal through their on-line profiles and the accompanying chitchat messages posted between them and their friends.

If Dax ever had kids, he’d only have two words for the on-line chitchat, post-your-picture-so-yourfriends-can-find-you Web sites: no way. Not if hell froze over. He knew the one girl’s bra size, which was not the information he’d been looking to gather. On the plus side, by sifting through their messages, he’d determined that two of the girls were pretty nice kids. Three of them were good students. All four complained about their coach. One of them had freckles and thought they made her look fat.

Dax thought that maybe it was the extra twenty pounds she was carrying that made her appear plump, but he was no expert on teenage girls and didn’t want to be. He’d survived that territory once by the skin of his teeth, as a teenage boy, and he wasn’t going back except in the driver’s seat, though truth be told, he’d never met a father yet who thought he was in charge of his teenage daughter’s life. Quite the opposite-teenage girls seemed to rule whatever planet they were residing on, which was exactly how he remembered high school being: girls in charge, boys going in circles standing still.