Tara Janzen - Loose And Easy

There were worse things, though, far worse, and if John Ramos was anything close to what she thought he might be, he knew it.

“So?” she said, refraining from a sigh. She wasn’t going to squirm. Regardless of how sordid it all must have looked to him, she’d done a damn good job in the Oxford. She’d gotten in with the least amount of effort possible, a seamless pretext that had required nothing more of her than fifty bucks to the valet and slipping into a short skirt and a cheap shirt. She’d controlled the situation from the first instant of contact until the last. Old Otto had never had a chance. She’d had one hundred percent mission success, verified by the Jakob Meinhard currently residing in her messenger bag.

And she’d gotten the hell out without a hitch- except for the close to six feet of tight-jawed bad boy sitting behind the Cyclone’s steering wheel.

He was a hitch. No matter how she worked it around in her mind, the truth was she’d gotten herself tailed and caught.

“I heard him say he’d called for Dixie,” he said. “He was expecting the dominatrix.”

Oh, great. He’d been right there on her ass practically the whole time, and she hadn’t had a clue.

“ Dixie ’s pimp is a guy named Benny-boy Jackman,” he continued, after her first moment of silence built to a second, and a third, and a fourth.

She cleared her throat-very discreetly.

“If he finds out you’ve been trading on her name, he’ll come after you big-time and not play nice when he catches up with you.”

Yes, she knew, and wasn’t that just what she needed, one more thing to worry about, but it wasn’t like she hadn’t figured Dixie and Benny-boy into her night’s profit margin.

“I’m prepared to shell out some cash to keep the peace,” she said.

“Fair warning, babe. Benny-boy may want more than cash. He’s got a reputation to maintain, and it ain’t pretty.”

She held herself still, refraining from giving in to another, even heavier, sigh. She knew all this. Didn’t everybody the hell in Denver have some damn reputation to maintain? That was her whole frickin’ problem, men’s egos and their badass reputations. She knew how the streets worked, and they didn’t work with some middle-class blonde getting away with stealing “Dixie” Talbot’s tricks- but no matter what in the hell Benny-boy Jackman wanted, she had much bigger problems than a Mile High Sixteenth Street pimp.

“Tough,” she said, and she meant it. “If he wants more than that, he’ll have to get in line.”

Get in line? Benny-boy Jackman could just get in line?

Yeah, Johnny thought. Benny-boy could get in line behind Franklin Bleak and his goons, and probably that German guy, too, if he’d gotten out of his cuffs yet. That ought to be a real party and a half, and just how the hell many of these guys did she think she could take on and still come out in one piece?

Oh, she was a cool one, all right. Too cool for her own good, and he was just about ready to tell her, when he saw a delivery van pulling into the traffic behind them off of Eighteenth and onto Market.

Fuck.

“You’re buckled, right?”

“Right.”

He checked the street ahead of them again, waited for a truck to clear the intersection, then shot across against the light and kept going.

She twisted in her seat to look out the back window. “What? The LeSabre? I don’t see it.”

“No. A white panel van in the right lane.” He took a sharp left into an alley and slowed down just enough to keep the Cyclone from hitting the Dumpsters and packing crates pushed up against the sides of the narrow opening.

“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’sland of the Locos’ hideout.

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.