Tara Janzen - Loose And Easy

“F-fuck you.”

Spoken like a scholar.

The next message was his to Easy. He skipped it, and then hit pay dirt.

“Burt,” the same male voice as before came over the answering machine. “ It’s Thomas. Why the hell haven’t you called me back? I’m not going to be here much longer, so you better get a pencil… Lindsey Larson… that’s it, Burt. Her friends call her Lucky.

Lucky Larson kinda sounds like a hooker, doesn’t it? That’s funny, given what her old man does for a living. It sure is. Call me.”

Dax watched Harrell while the message played, and the names Lindsey Larson and Lucky Larson didn’t register on the guy’s face at all. Dax wasn’t surprised. He’d have been more surprised if Franklin Bleak had bandied his daughter’s name about with his peons. The important thing was that the name registered with Dax, it registered with all the impact of half a dozen vanilla-vodka shooters.

Bleak’s daughter had about as much class as her dad.

Dax pulled the Folton Ridge file out of the inside pocket on his jacket and leaned over the desk to turn on the B & B Investigations paper shredder.

Burt had a few more messages piled up on the machine, one from a betrayed spouse wondering if he’d gotten the photos from the Bluebird Motel, another from some guy named Joe wanting to borrow fifty bucks, one more from a guy named Brad who wanted to borrow a hundred.

Walking around behind Harrell, Dax flipped through the file folder. When he reached the other side of the desk, he stopped and started shredding. One by one, he got rid of Nancy Haney, Jessica Durst, and Kim Stiple, the last two being the good girls. That left him with the photos and chat room chitchat of dear Lindsey, Bleak’s baby.

“So what were you doing out there on Wynkoop, Kevin? What’s Bleak want here? His money, or something else?”

He’d known it was “Lucky” Lindsey. She had her dad’s nose, and the same low forehead, and she wasn’t an inch over five feet-short, like her dad.

“He wants his damn money.”

“He’ll have it at five o’clock tomorrow morning. Do you want to go back to the warehouse and remind Bleak the deal is set?”

“Alden’s said that before and not delivered. The bastard never delivers. Everybody knows that.”

Dax looked up from the Lindsey file at the guy. Kevin Harrell was nervous, rightly so. Broken nose, handcuffed, bleeding, sweating, he was two hundred and thirty pounds of pure helpless. He was shaking in the chair, a low-level trembling. He also had a tattoo on the back of his neck.

“How long have you been out of Canon City?” Dax asked. The tat was classic prison ink, one capital C interlocked with another, the two letters sitting on top of a pair of dice showing snake eyes.

“Fuck you.”

“Ah, come on, Kevin,” he said, modulating his voice to a slow drawl. “We might still have a party here. I just need some information.”

The guy went still in his chair, and after a second, cast a glance back at Dax.

Dax met his gaze without flinching.

Weaknesses-he had a few, but unlike Kevin Harrell, he wasn’t telegraphing his in pink neon, and sex was just too simple. Nobody should get taken for sex.

Okay, for the sake of honesty, Dax needed to retract his last knee-jerk opinion. He’d been taken for sex, more than once, but he’d never given up the bank for it. Consolata Rodriguez had definitely taken him for sex. He’d given that girl everything he’d had at seventeen. He’d even let her drive his car, let her use it to impress her girlfriends, right up until she’d hit a stop sign with it-head-on, no brakes, no blinker, no sense. His ardor had cooled a bit after that, and he’d gotten away thinking he’d learned something about women, not the least of which was that they couldn’t goddamn drive.

Yep, he’d learned his lesson, right up until the next woman, Debbie Thanatos. She’d left his car alone, but she’d sure taken him for a ride. Adriana, Bridget, the car-wrecking Consolata, Debbie-he hadn’t covered the whole alphabet, but in retrospect, and he’d given his love life plenty of retrospective consideration, he’d probably gotten taken for sex more often than he wanted to admit.

Still, Harrell must have been an easy mark in prison. He sure as hell was an easy mark here on Wynkoop in the Faber Building.

“Two weeks,” the guy said. “I been out for two weeks.”

“Check in with your parole officer lately?”

“Yeah.” The guy nodded, then cast another furtive glance back at Dax. “I’ve been right on time.”

Two weeks wasn’t long.

“How long have you been working for Bleak?”

“This is my first job. A friend of mine called me this afternoon and got me on, said I can do real good with this outfit. He told Bleak I knew this girl he wanted, that I would recognize her real easy, from high school, and be a good guy to have around.”

Well, that was a helluva resume-“I knew this girl in high school.” And in other words, Kevin Harrell was a bust. He didn’t know crap about Bleak. It was possible he’d never even met the bookie.

“Is your friend’s name Dovey Smollett?”

“What’s it to you?” Kevin shot back, rallying in defense of a buddy.

Okay, Dax would give him that, the whole honoramong-thieves thing that never really held up very well, not for very long, not under pressure, not with guys like Kevin, and not with guys like Dovey.

There were guys who would give up their lives before they gave up a buddy. Dax knew a lot of them, but the tie that bound wasn’t friendship.

“So what’s Bleak want with Esme?” Dax continued. “Insurance?”

Kevin shook his head. “I don’t know. My friend says Bleak is done with Alden. He’s got some kind of important deal he’s working, and I don’t know, maybe he wants to impress somebody.”

“Impress how?”

“I don’t know.” Harrell shrugged. “But Bleak’s a big deal. He runs a lot of girls, and guys know to come to him if they want something special.” He shrugged again. “Esme always had a lot of class, and my buddy told him, told Bleak, that Alden’s daughter was really hot, like maybe she’d be worth something on the side. So maybe Bleak thinks he can get something for her.”

Sure. Maybe Bleak was thinking something like that.

Maybe Bleak was in more trouble than Dax had originally thought. Maybe Dovey was in way more trouble than that even.

And maybe Uncle Burt had better skip the next family get-together, because it was going to be a long, long time before Dax would trust himself in the same room with Easy’s dad.

“Whatever,” he said, coming back around the desk and leaning against it with his hip. He wanted to be eye to eye with old Kevin for a minute. “Right now, I’m more interested in you and me, Kevin. Are we square on Esme? You and me?” He didn’t want there to be any doubts in Harrell’s mind about appropriate distances and things like that. “You know she should never see your face again. If you see her, you go the other way. Okay? Are we square?”

“Yeah.” The guy was nodding his head. “We’re square. But, like, what’s your name, dude?”

Dude?

Kevin Harrell was sitting there in handcuffs with blood running down his face onto his shirt, and he was calling Dax dude?

Oh, yeah, Dax bet the guy had been a real hit in prison.

“Well, dude, I’ve got a lot of names.” None of which he planned on telling Kevin Harrell, but what stopped him was the sound of people coming up the stairs-more than one person, maybe three, maybe four, which was more business than B and B

Investigations had attracted in months.

He pushed off the desk and headed for the door.