Tara Janzen - Loose And Easy

The photographs had been damned startling, damned unnerving, and Buck had seen it all in his fifty-four years. He just hadn’t seen anything like this.

Davies had told him what to do. He hadn’t told him how to do it, and Buck had wanted to do it in person. Some information just shouldn’t be delivered over the phone, no matter how secure the line. He’d also figured if he was on deck with them when he briefed the team, he could manage the fallout. He’d also wanted to be on board during the initial planning phase of the requested mission.

Mission -he hated even putting the word to the deed. It was a goatfuck, a gut-wrenching goatfuck. Sometimes, being in this man’s army took almost more than he had to give. Everyone on SDF was going to know what that felt like and have to deal with it by the time they finished looking at those photographs, by the time he laid out the operation. The only alternative to dealing with it was anarchy, to willfully disobey a direct order, and the only alternative to mutiny was to lock the whole damn team up in some goddamn high-security prison and throw away the key until the mission had been accomplished by someone else. But then, that had been the problem, hadn’t it? No one, no one, had even gotten close to accomplishing the mission. Tasking SDF with the deed was about as desperate an act as he’d ever seen the government’s snoopand-spook apparatchiki reduced to miring themselves in-and they were “in,” the whole goddamn alphabet-soup boatload of them. Not that anyone would ever take responsibility for what had happened. In cases like this, the buck got passed around faster than a hot potato, getting kicked under tables and buried in crap, until everyone who had ever heard of it was either dead, exiled, or promoted out of the line of fire.

Politics was such a goddamn dirty business. It made war look like a cakewalk. Politics was such a goddamn dirty business; it made him sick.

He checked his watch. It had taken forever to get to Denver from Peterson Air Force Base, and there wasn’t a whole lot of the night left. He’d contacted Dylan in New York and asked for a meeting at Steele Street first thing in the morning. Besides Creed and Skeeter, Hawkins was in residence. Grant knew Dylan had told them to stay put. Zachary Prade was already on his way from Podunk, Montana, or wherever the hell his wife’s family ranch was located.

Trace, that was it. Trace, Montana, in Chouteau County.

Kid had done a flip-flop in Los Angeles, barely getting there before the word had gone out for him to come home. Quinn would be down from his mountain home in Evergreen before dawn. Smith would be getting into Peterson a little after midnight. Buck hoped the traffic between Colorado Springs and Denver had cleared out by then. The damn interstate had been a parking lot when he’d been on it.

And they needed Smith. He’d be good to have on board, a cool head, a cold heart. Smith could be counted on to keep appropriate emotional distance between himself and what the others would be feeling no matter how professionally they’d always conducted themselves. This damn situation would test them all.

There was no pulling Gillian and Travis off their mission. Politics again. Protecting senators on junkets in Third World countries, this one Bolivia, took precedence over just about every other damn thing. The trouble was, Dylan would instantly recognize the advantage of having Red Dog and the Angel Boy on the outside, if everyone on the inside found the mission parameters unacceptable and chose to exercise their marked instincts for independent thought-and who could blame them? Not Buck, not on this deal.

But neither was he going to condone or allow it.

His job was going to be to convince them not to abandon ship, to stay inside the system, to stay inside the rules. Working together, they could keep the sacrifices to a minimum. They were soldiers. He knew them. They would comply. He’d be damned if he lost his whole team due to a situation the CIA should never have allowed, let alone allowed to get so damn far out of hand that it had become a priority-one national security issue.

On the upside, he’d also brought the team something they needed: Juan Aurelio Ramos. The kid had proven himself in combat over and over again in his three tours of duty. Even with his last go-around in Afghanistan having gotten a little tight in places, and damn rough in others, Ramos had pulled through. He’d made it home in one piece, inside and out. Hawkins would take care of the rest, getting him trained up for the type of missions SDF took on. Training never stopped for any of them. It was the order of the day, every day. Ramos was officially SDF’s now-and Grant’s. All Buck had to do was keep the team alive long enough to use him.

Snagging the pair of highball glasses with the fingers of his right hand, he grabbed the bottle of Scotch with his left and walked out of the guest suite to the main elevator in the office. It was a hot summer night in Denver, and he was heading to The Beach-a couple of lawn chairs and a ratty piece of Astro Turf nailed to the roof of 738 Steele Street. With a bit of luck, he wouldn’t be alone up there for long.

Old fears die hard. Legitimate old fears don’t die at all, hard or otherwise. Driving into the Locos compound off north Delgany was a fairly well-grounded old fear in Esme’s book, an old fear with a new, unexpectedly current infusion of adrenaline.

Fight or flight-she was feeling it with every leap of her pulse.

“This isn’t cool.” It was crazy. She had enough trouble tonight without him adding a boatload of gangsters to the mix.

“No, it’s not,” he agreed, which didn’t do a damn thing to calm her nerves.

“Then why in the hell are we here?”

“I need some information. Baby Duce will have it.”

Oh, perfect. Baby Duce. She knew the damn hierarchy and history as well as any inner-city kid. Baby Duce ran the Locos. He’d been running them since Carlos had gotten killed in some turf war, and before Carlos, it had been Dom Ramos, who, as she most certainly remembered, had also gotten killed in some turf war. The Locos had been a lot smaller crew under Dom, very tight-knit, and they’d mostly run their business and their wars on the other side of the river. This north-downtown stuff had all started with a pipeline cocaine deal Baby Duce had brokered during the first year of his reign. The whole Locos sphere of influence had done nothing but expand since then. They owned both sides of the river now, ran most of lower downtown and downtown, and had made heavy inroads into the eastern suburbs.

Johnny freakin’ Ramos -crown prince of the Locos by blood and heritage. Maybe she’d been wrong about him.

Crap.

Of course she’d been wrong about him.

Esme could see shadows moving in the shadows of the buildings and houses on each side of the alley. They were coming in the back door of a very sketchy neighborhood, a very well protected neighborhood, and they were running a gauntlet of its guards, with every shadow a potential threat.

Within the space of a couple of blocks, she and Johnny had left the hip and happening part of lower downtown and cruised into what Realtors referred to as River North, or RiNo, a “mixed use” area. In this case, the mix of use included ultra-low-end residential crammed in between no-longer-in-use industrial and retail buildings, a good breeding ground for vice. Not for long, though. Developers had already made headway in the area, optimistically hoping they could turn it into a “front door” neighborhood.

Hell, get a couple of developers holding hands with a few Realtors and guaranteed they’d start turning pigs’ ears into silk purses, and RiNo into the next LoDo-for a price, usually a pretty pricey price.