Tara Janzen - Loose And Easy

Of the four Folton Ridge girls, both of the nice ones had been in their rooms last night. The other two had started out in the boys’ dorm with a fifth of vanilla vodka and ended up half-naked in a hot tub at a private house near the Broadmoor Hotel with a whole bunch of Folton Ridge boys, half a dozen townies, and, from the uniforms he’d seen littering the deck, a couple of cadets from the Air Force Academy.

Dax knew hell-bent-for-disaster when he saw it, and the two Folton girls had been leading the pack. They were wild ones, a fact he had thoroughly documented with the long lens on his camera.

Four Folton Ridge field hockey players, varsity, and one of them was the girl he needed. He wouldn’t know for sure which one until Easy got him the name from Burt’s Chicago connection. They should have had it before he’d ever gone to Colorado Springs. If they didn’t have it by morning, he and Easy were going to be walking into the payoff with Bleak without their ace-in which case he’d be winging it.

Nothing new there, but he preferred the sure shot when he could get it.

Sure shot, hell. Uncle Burt had never had a sure shot in his life, and this mess Dax and Easy were trying to pull him out of had been screwed up from the get-go. They hadn’t been able to get Otto to commit to coming to Denver any earlier for the “deal of a lifetime” they’d concocted strictly to set him up, and they’d held Franklin Bleak off as long as they could. That bastard was done with Burt Alden. Tomorrow, five A.M., was the drop-dead date on the money Easy’s father owed, and she and Dax had ended up in the middle of the time crunch.

Never again, that’s all he could say. Esme wanted her father paid up, shut down, and exfiltrated. Ex-filleted was more like it as far as Dax was concerned. He didn’t care where Burt Alden landed, the old man was going to find a bet, and a scam, and trouble-and probably a little stolen art. Uncle Burt was good at that. Dax had to give him some credit.

His glance slid to the folder lying in the passenger seat. He’d found the girls-four girls, four sets of photographs, and endless pages of on-line chitchat. He’d combed through all of it, compared the photographs to the pictures he had of Franklin Bleak, and he had a guess as to which of the varsity girls called Franklin “Daddy”-and Daddy Franklin wasn’t going to be happy to see the photographs Dax had taken of his girl in that hot tub.

Bottom line, though, Dax could have photographed her serving tea to the queen, and it would have been enough to push Franklin Bleak off center and off Burt Alden’s back. No one was supposed to know Franklin Bleak had a daughter. The facts of the girl’s connection to him had been buried deep, and for good reason. Franklin was the kind of guy with a lot of enemies and no known weaknesses to exploit-except her.

The prep school girl was no love child, no by-blow from one of Bleak’s many mistresses over the years. No, the chubby, dark-haired, freckle-faced teen with the penchant for vanilla-vodka shooters and topless hot-tubbing was the real deal, Bleak’s only legitimate offspring, heir to his fortune-the blood running true. Seventeen years and nine months ago, after a violent rise up the ranks in the Chicago rackets, Franklin had bought himself a high-society wife off the East Coast who’d done her duty and then locked him out cold. There’d been no divorce. But the wife hadn’t stuck around either. She’d taken his money and his kid and hightailed it back to the coast. The only thing she’d left behind was his name-Bleak.

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.

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.