Tara Janzen: Loose And Easy

Score, Esme thought, kneeling down and reaching into her tote for her personal cell phone. She’d needed that name days ago. She’d left her anonymous, prepaid phone in the tote, the one whose number she’d given to the Oxford ’s valet.

The machine beeped again, and a third recorded message came on.

“This call is for…BURT ALDEN…A courtesy reminder for your dental appointment on…”

She punched a couple of buttons on her phone, speed-dialing her dad. Then she tucked the phone between her ear and shoulder and began shimmying out of the fishnet hose.

“ … MONDAY, AUGUST 23, at… two o’clock

P.M.…with…DR. STEVENS…”

“Dad,” she said, when he answered. “Thomas called from Chicago. He’s got the name we need. Call him. Then call me back.”

She pulled a black half-slip off the towel rod and pulled it up to her waist.

“Did you get the Meinhard?” he asked, his voice tense with the strain of the last few months. His deal with Otto had hit the fan in San Francisco, and he’d been playing a game of high-stakes pickup sticks ever since-and losing, up until she’d come on board.

“Yeah. I got it,” she said, pulling a meticulously tailored black skirt off one of the hangers on the door and stepping into it.

“And Otto Von Lindberg?” he asked.

“Compromised.” She finished zipping the skirt and shrugged into a shoulder holster, slipping it on over her red push-up bra.

“And you’re okay?”

“Yeah, Dad. I’m okay.” He knew what her plan had been-and he knew she’d been right, no matter how much he’d disliked it. “Get the name and call me back.”

She ended the call and set the phone on the sink.

There was no way to play nice and come out ahead, not in this game, and still, Von Lindberg had gotten off lightly. He was alive, a condition she wasn’t putting any money on him maintaining, not once Warner found out old Otto had lost the Meinhard. She’d gone up against Warner before, a couple of times, and both times had been intensely educational. Hard, hard lessons had been learned.

Like in Bangkok eighteen months ago.

Yeah, she thought. That had been a real damn touch-and-go situation, real damn touch-and-go. If there was any one reason to permanently get out of the art-recovery game, its name was Erich Warner.

Christ. She instinctively squeezed her right hand into a fist, feeling all five fingers band together- and she was grateful, so damn grateful. The scars on her right shoulder were another matter. There was no getting away from them, no fixing them. They were a brand, the price she’d paid for not being quick enough to make a clean getaway.

So what was she doing here, getting within a thousand miles of another of Warner’s deals? He’d kill her this time, if he caught her, and that was if she was lucky. If she wasn’t lucky, if he was in a bad mood, which she had all but guaranteed by stealing his Meinhard, well, then things would get messy again-damn awful messy, and then they’d get worse.

Geezus. What in the hell was she doing here, dressing up like a hooker and hog-tying some guy in a thong and a dog collar at the Oxford Hotel? The act itself was at the top end of her EZ scale, but the fallout-hell, the fallout could be her very own personal nightmare, the one that snuck up on her in her dreams when her defenses were down.

She swore softly under her breath. Burt Alden had a lifelong habit of getting in over his head and more often than not sinking like a stone. But he’d never been sunk the way Warner could sink him- and that was why she was well within Warner’s thousand-mile limit. Her father didn’t have a clue what he was up against. Bainbridge would have known. Robert Bainbridge would have connected the dots on the Meinhard deal, realized Otto was no more than a messenger boy, and been on the lookout for the big fish, the shark, but Burt didn’t consult with Mr. Bainbridge anymore.

Burt hadn’t consulted with Esme either, not until he’d been going under for the third time, and the minute he’d mentioned Otto Von Lindberg as his connection to the Meinhard, she’d known exactly what he was up against, and exactly who he was dealing with-and she’d known she had to get in on the deal. She was the Alden who kept her head above water. She never sank.

Not ever.

She’d come damn close in Bangkok, closer than she ever wanted to be again, but even with the pain, and her guts churning, and her brain edging perilously close to panic override, she hadn’t slipped beneath the waves.

She was here tonight to make sure her father didn’t either. A month ago, she’d taken his Meinhard fiasco and started turning it into an operation, a mission, with her in charge. It’s what she brought to the table, the ability to conceive of and execute an effective plan. It was why the people who hired her paid top dollar for the privilege. It was why she ran her own investigations out of Seattle with a partner she trusted down to the marrow of her bones, far away from her dad’s day-to-day peccadilloes.

Except for today.

Today was Burt Alden’s last outing as a PI. She was putting him out of business. Today, she tied up all of his loose ends, cut him out of the loop, and set him on the road to retirement. All she had to do was deliver the painting to Isaac Nachman, redeem the bad paper Nachman was holding on her dad, walk away with what was left of the reward money, and pay off the bookie Burt had hocked his soul to, the badass Franklin Bleak.

Last, but far from least, she had to convince Mr. Bleak to call off his dogs instead of following through on his threat to make an example out of Mr. Burton Alden, kind of a body-slamming, bonebreaking, bloody-beating example, or even something more lethal if Mr. Bleak got the urge. Apparently, overdue payment on bad bets was all it took to give Franklin Bleak the urge to commit any number of sins-and that was her dad’s personal nightmare.

Between the two of them, it was looking like a real rough night all the way around. Geezus. It was going to take every last favor she had to get her dad out of this mess. With luck, the only losers tonight would be Otto and Warner, which was a crazy bad choice of enemies to make, but neither Otto nor Warner had ever heard of Burt Alden.

It was the only smart move her father had ever made, to work under the auspices of Robert Bainbridge, and since Bainbridge had been out of the game, to trade on the old man’s reputation by actually using his name. Every bookie in the northern hemisphere knew her father, but Otto Von Lindberg thought he was working with Robert Bainbridge. Esme was doing her damnedest to keep it that way-and if it all went to hell, she had backup. She had Dax Killian.

Before she put on her jacket, she slipped her Para-Ordnance CCW.45 out of the vinyl tote, checked the chamber, and slid it into the holster. She immediately felt better. She didn’t like “carrying” in a purse. She liked her pistol on her, in a holster. For the kind of people she’d be dealing with tonight, she needed protection, and she wanted it close. Reaching back into the tote, she pulled out her knife and slid the clip inside the top of the skirt.

She shrugged into the suit’s matching jacket and checked the drape, making sure it fell in an unbroken line to her waist, concealing her weapon. The jacket was low-cut, the lapels meeting at a set of two buttons that she’d had tailored into snap closures. Buttons were too slow.

The machine beeped again and ran some static, indicating a hang-up caller.

She reached for a pair of black high heels. The suit was supremely elegant, expensive, couture, and so were the heels. Tilting her head to one side, she removed a pair of cheap silver-toned hoops from her ears. She replaced them with diamond studs, then slipped a string of pearls around her neck.