Tara Janzen - Loose And Easy

“And maybe the guy with the maid did, too,” Connor said. “Nobody saw him go back out the lobby, but there’s almost half a dozen ways out of the hotel. He could have used any of them.”

“Guy?” Loretta asked. “What guy with the maid?”

The detective had the wisdom to blanch slightly. “Sorry, Lieutenant.” He flipped over to the next page in his notebook. “I thought Weisman filled you in on the way up.”

“He did, but he didn’t tell me about any guy with the maid.”

“Young guy, in his twenties, five ten, maybe five eleven. Taller than the maid’s husband, she says, and her husband is five eight,” Connor said, consulting his notebook. “Hispanic, clean-cut, wearing jeans and a black-collared shirt, gray T-shirt, told the maid he was the police and asked her to open the door of this room for him. She did open the door for him. He walked in. She took one look, saw Von Lindberg tied to the bed, and ran the other way.”

“But this guy came in the room?”

“That’s what she says.”

“Did she see if he was carrying a knife?”

“No such luck,” Connor said. “But she did say he had a hard look about him, serious, very much in charge. She didn’t doubt for a second that he was a policeman.”

“In jeans and a black shirt.”

“She thought he was undercover.”

“Did he flash any identification?”

“No, ma’am. Not according to her.”

“And she goes around opening room doors for every Tom, Dick, and Harry who comes along?”

“If he says he’s a policeman, it seems so, yes, ma’am.”

Perfectly legitimate, Loretta thought. If she were an illegal immigrant shifting the sheets around in an upscale hotel, she wouldn’t be second-guessing anybody calling himself a policeman either, especially if he had a solid air of authority. It sucked, but that was the way of it.

“Take her in, get her an artist. Let’s find out what this clean-cut police impersonator looks like.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The detective’s phone beeped twice, signaling a text message, and they both looked at the screen while he opened the file. The sender was Skeeter, and only one word came up on the screen: HERO.

“Nazi hero,” Connor said, putting the two symbols together.

Well, that just about took the cake in Loretta’s book of crap she didn’t want to deal with on her beat, which was the whole damn city.

“I don’t like it,” the detective said, shaking his head, still looking at the screen on his phone.

“Neither do I, Connor,” Loretta agreed. “Neither do I.”

She was going to die. Her mind was going in circles, thoughts racing.

Her heart was pounding, pulse racing. Her legs were shaking, arms trembling, her stomach churning, lips quivering. She hated it all. She hated it so much-and yet she couldn’t stop any of it. She was going to die. She knew it with a dread certainty.

For no reason, she was going to become one of those horrifying statistics, an unsolved crime, a victim of senseless, random violence.

She only had one edge, and she was holding onto it with a death grip, using every ounce of her strength to keep her emotions frozen, to keep from crying.

The awful, terrifying man who had kidnapped her had taped her to a chair, her ankles taped to the legs, big, wide, gray duct tape, her wrists handcuffed to the arms. He’d stuffed something foul in her mouth and taped it in place, and it took every ounce of her strength not to gag. She hurt everywhere, especially where he’d hit her, backhanding her in the face, punching her in the stomach, where he’d pulled her hair out and wrenched her arm backward. She could see her blood on the front of her uniform shirt. He’d taken her name tag. She didn’t know why.

She didn’t know where he’d brought her, or why. It had all happened so fast. The huge, frightfully strong man had come out of nowhere, his attack so fast, so brutal, so unexpected, she’d never had time to react. One second, she’d been walking across the hospital parking lot, and in the next she’d been in the middle of a nightmare, caught in the maelstrom of violence, a random act of violence perpetrated by some pervert, some woman-hater.

She felt sick. She was so frightened, and she knew beyond any shred of a doubt that her situation was very, very unlikely to improve.

“Yes, Mr. Nachman… No, Mr. Nachman… Absolutely. I have it with me now, and it is beautiful. I’m quite thrilled, and I know you will be, too.” Smoothing feathers, that’s what Esme was doing, smoothing eighty-two thousand feathers, and after her last stammering bit of embarrassed idiocy in the alley, she was also doing everything she could to avoid having to talk to Johnny Ramos ever again for the rest of her life. “Within the hour, yes, sir. I’m leaving downtown now.”

But despite her dearest wish to remain utterly occupied while in Ramos’s car, there was only so much verbal genuflecting she could manage, and with her last “yes, sir” she’d met her quota.

She should have gotten a damn cab, and the reasons she hadn’t were reasons… well, they were reasons she wasn’t going to examine too damn closely. She knew they wouldn’t pass any test of actual reason, so she wasn’t going to put them to the test. Given the night she was having, she figured she deserved a break, and it sure as hell didn’t look like the universe at large was going to give her one.

“Thank you, sir. I’ll see you shortly.” She ended the call and checked her messages, hoping for some, especially one from her dad, but there was nothing, which left her at a momentary loose end- dammit .

“Solange and I have made the run to Genesee in half an hour, if you need to be there quicker,” Johnny said to her from his side of the car.

Solange? She glanced over at him.

Who in the heck was… oh, she got it. The Charger had been named Roxanne. Solange was the Cyclone, and yes, she supposed if a person sort of squinted and didn’t look too closely, possibly the “sleeper” looked French. Good God.

“I think regular speed will be fine,” she said. “It’s why I told Mr. Nachman an hour, in case there were any… uh, any more extenuating circumstances.”

Extenuating. Right. She guessed that was one way to put the night so far, one damned unexpected extenuating circumstance after another.

“Even if there is a delay, we should be okay.” Yes, she’d just said that. “We shouldn’t hit traffic, though.”

And that was it.

“Not at this time of night,” she added, and that really was it. Nothing more needed to be said, which left her at another momentary loose end- dammit .

While Johnny downshifted for the next stoplight, she busied herself with rummaging through the pockets on her messenger bag until she came up with her PDA. She really needed to upgrade to an all-inclusive system. A quick check of her calendar proved she was heading in the right direction, toward Genesee, but running a little late, over half an hour. No news there.

She let out a very quiet sigh, which in no way indicated her current level of stress.

He’d kissed her, and on top of everything else she had going wrong tonight, she’d liked it-a lot. So everything was A1 perfect: running late, Bleak gunning for her, Dax in the boondocks, and she’d liked kissing a guy she’d known in high school who, despite her initial hopes, had turned out to be a street gangster.

She had to be certifiable. She didn’t have a love life, true, and she resented that she’d all but told him as much, but on those nights when she dreamed about having a love life, she usually dreamed a little bigger than old muscle cars with big engines, and bad boys with big…