Tara Janzen - Loose And Easy

Esme was hot, but he sure as hell hadn’t left her alone. Oh, no. He couldn’t have jumped into the middle of this disaster any quicker if there’d been money in it.

Duce had noticed her, and he’d had plenty of questions about the blonde Johnny had left in the car, especially after Johnny had asked him about Franklin Bleak.

He started to turn the key, then stopped and took a breath.

Had it really only been an hour since he’d been sitting at the Blue Iguana drinking a Corona and minding his own business?

He checked his watch. Barely an hour- dammit.

Leveling his gaze at her from across the inside of the car, he very seriously asked himself if he needed to back off. She certainly hadn’t asked him to get involved; quite the opposite.

But there she was, tucked into Solange’s passenger seat, and there were a few things she needed to know, whether he backed off or not.

“Baby Duce wanted to know if you were Bleak’s Chicago mule,” he said. “Bringing in a few cakes of ice for this deal Bleak’s got going down tomorrow.”

That got her attention. Her eyes widened and locked onto his.

“I told him I didn’t think so,” he continued. “So then he asked me if you were one of Bleak’s girls, and I told him the whole Dixie-tricks-at-theOxford-Hotel scene, and he suggested I call Benny-boy Jackman personally and grease those wheels before anybody had a chance to get themselves all worked up and maybe go gunning for trouble.”

Her eyebrows rose at that, which he considered a good sign. Little Miss Cool as a Cucumber needed to know these guys were heating her up.

“And then he tells me Bleak has been shaking down all his losers for the last couple of months, shaking them hard, hurting a few. A couple of guys have even gone missing, guys who placed bets with Bleak, but bought their blow from the Locos. All bad for business, as far as Duce is concerned. He understands the need to protect profits, and God knows, he’s not above hurting people if that’s what it takes to make his point, but, according to Duce, it’s not like his and Bleak’s customers are stellar examples of humanity, especially Bleak’s, according to Duce. Shit is gonna happen, he says, and a guy who wants to stay in business just has to roll with it.”

For a moment, she just stared at him, and he could almost see the gears churning in her mind, organizing the whole boatload of information he’d just uploaded into her system. He could definitely see the worry suddenly darkening her eyes.

Good. She had reason to worry.

“So what do you think?” he asked.

“I think that’s a… uh, surprisingly philosophical view from somebody who didn’t get past the eighth grade.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I thought, too. And then I thought, hey, maybe Duce is right, maybe Esme’s getting shook out for some bad money.”

When she didn’t say anything, he kept going, pushing ahead.

“So then I ask myself, Johnny, what do you think? You think it’s the ponies she’s running? Or do you think it’s the dogs?”

He saw her slide her hand farther around the messenger bag and pull it closer.

Yeah, he was going to get to the bag in a minute.

“And then it occurred to me that a girl who’d gotten herself in trouble, a girl who didn’t want to turn a few tricks to get herself out of a jam, or a girl who didn’t want to transport a few kilos of coke in lieu of the cash she didn’t have, might take on another kind of job to pay her debts. She might steal something her bookie wanted, like whatever is in that bag you’re so damned determined to deliver to somebody. Except if you’d stolen it for Bleak, and he was your appointment, why in the hell have we been running from his guys for the last half hour? At least that’s what I asked myself, while Duce was asking about you.”

She still didn’t say anything.

“You can fill in the blanks here anytime, Esme. Just go ahead and jump right in.”

Still, he got nothing.

“Did I make a mistake when I got between you and Dovey Smollett?”

No. She shook her head. He believed it, but she still wasn’t talking.

Okay, he thought. Fine.

“Why don’t you show me what’s in the messenger bag.” If it was cocaine, the party was coming to a screeching halt. It was going to hurt. Really, it would, but if Duce had called it right, the best thing he could do for Esme was turn her in before somebody turned her six feet under. He sure as hell wasn’t going to step aside and let a kilo of coke hit the streets and watch her get hurt in the process. No fucking way. That was the Boy Scout in him, and for someone who had never been a Boy Scout, he seemed to have a helluva lot of it.

But, geezus, that was going to hurt, if she’d really sunk that damn low.

She looked down at the leather messenger bag she had clutched in her lap-and he waited.

“My partner suggested that I stick with you tonight,” she said after a long, weighted silence, right about when he was going to insist on seeing what was in the bag. “That with Bleak pooching our deal, you were doing a good job of watching my back and keeping me in one piece, and I should take you with me to make my delivery, if you were willing to go.”

Well, talk about a boatload of information.

Geezus.

He sat back in his seat and looked at her for a moment, and for every second of that moment, he only saw one thing: trouble. It was probably tattooed on her ass. In caps.

“What’s your deal with Bleak?” Start at the top. That was the best place.

“I pay him the money he lost on my dad, or he breaks my dad into a couple dozen pieces, a process my dad may or may not survive. It doesn’t matter to Bleak either way.”

Straightforward. Brutal. Predictable.

Fucking perfect.

“And your partner thinks I’m the guy to help you out with this transaction?” What kind of asshole had she hooked up with, to leave her on her own to do a deal with Franklin Bleak?

But she was shaking her head.

“Then what?” he asked.

“My first delivery is up in Genesee Park, to meet a man named Isaac Nachman. He’ll give me the money in exchange for the property I recovered off the German you saw in the Oxford. Nachman’s property. My dad’s been working on this deal for over four years, and I’ve been on it a month, getting everyone in place for tonight, and now I’m running late, about half an hour late, getting to Genesee and getting the money.”

Recovered -now there was a nice word. Johnny had “recovered” a few things in his younger days, and he wasn’t talking upholstery.

“And when are you meeting Bleak?”

“Five A.M., but my partner will be here by then. We’ll do the final deal together.”

“Partner in what?” Crime? Some kind of scam they were running on rich guys living up in Genesee? Out and out idiocy?

“Private investigations. We’re based in Seattle, and mostly do a lot of Pacific Rim stuff, specializing in property recovery and finding people, especially people who don’t want to be found. Sometimes we work in South America, and people who need help down there know to come to us.”

“Private investigations.” That was a nice catchall, and the whole Pacific Rim thing sounded so professional, and she was just so sure of herself, rattling all this information off-and yet, here she was, sitting in this dump of an alley with him, back in the old neighborhood, with a lowlife like Franklin Bleak threatening to bust up her deadbeat dad. “Did you major in that up in Boulder, at the university?”

He wasn’t being a smart-ass about it, really. He was curious. She’d been the best and the brightest, and guys like Franklin Bleak shouldn’t be in her vocabulary, let alone breathing fire down her neck.