Tara Janzen - Loose And Easy

Standard operating procedure-always count the cash.

Always.

But from the look on Easy’s face, that vital detail had somehow gotten overlooked.

“You didn’t count it at Nachman’s?” She should have counted it at Nachman’s.

“There, uh, wasn’t time,” she said-also incorrectly. There was always time to count the cash. “Johnny was, uh, in a bind.”

A bind?

U.S. Army Rangers did not get themselves into binds that overrode standard operating procedures, not unless there was gunfire involved, and Nachman was a pacifist, in an odd manner of speaking, as long as a person wasn’t a Nazi.

“And you didn’t do it when you got here?”

“Um, no, Johnny was hurt, and I thought we should stop the, uh, bleeding,” she said.

She was, he assumed, referring to the scratch on Ramos’s face.

He got the picture, loud and clear, and he was fascinated. Easy was not easy, and in less than five hours, Johnny Ramos had caught her, wooed her, and tumbled her hard.

He checked his watch. “We should leave here about four-thirty, which gives us a couple of hours. If somebody would like to start a pot of coffee, I think we should go over our plan for the meeting and count the cash,” he said. “I can guarantee you that Bleak is going to count it. Is that Dovey Smollett I saw in the Buick LeSabre?” When he’d gotten to the corner of Vine and Hoover, he’d noticed the stakeout and called Esme for further directions to the safe house. Charo was currently safely parked in the building’s garage, with Smollett none the wiser.

“Yes, sir,” Ramos said, nearly snapping to attention.

Okay. Time for a little attitude adjustment, so to speak. Three tours of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, Dax guessed he wasn’t surprised the kid had heard his name. He’d certainly seen recognition on the young guy’s face when Esme had introduced him as her partner, Dax Killian.

“You can forget any of those stories you heard in the Sandbox, Ranger,” he said. Hell, if even half the stories had been true, Dax might have been impressed himself-but more than half of them weren’t. Only a couple were true, but apparently, a couple were more than enough.

“Yes, sir.”

“Tonight we’re just a couple of guys with a job to do.”

“Yes, sir.”

Rangers, Dax thought. You had to love the Rangers.

Five A.M. , party time, Esme thought, sliding out of the Cyclone’s front seat. Johnny had parked Solange on the east side of the warehouse by the loading docks, per Bleak’s instructions. She and Dax had been told someone would be waiting for them in the docking area, and there was-a huge, hulking guy standing by the building’s rear entrance.

Dax followed her out of the car, coming from the backseat, carrying a small duffel bag loaded with the eighty-two thousand dollars. Exactly eighty-two thousand dollars-they’d counted it twice.

Charo had been parked two blocks over with the key under her front seat, safely snugged rear-endfirst into a loading dock at the long abandoned Geiss Fastener building, a backup escape, if things didn’t exactly go according to plan.

It happened-like in Bangkok, where her perfect plan for recovering a small fourteenth-century gold Buddha had gone awry and she’d ended up faceto-face with Erich Warner. Unfortunately, Shoko hadn’t been far behind. She of the one name and the many knives hated other women with a cold and ruthless passion-and she was here in Denver, unless Otto had been a hit-and-run, and she and Warner were already gone, headed back on Warner’s private jet to any one of half a dozen elaborate mansions he owned around the world. Warner wouldn’t be happy, not about losing the Meinhard, but as long as Esme’s name stayed out of it, she didn’t give a damn if Warner was happy or not.

Somebody else wasn’t very happy this morning, and even though she cared very much about that person, there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it. Johnny was getting out of the other side of the car, and his expression could only be described as grim.

She had overruled his plan to leave her behind in the safe house and have just him and Dax go into Bleak’s with Baby Duce and a couple of Locos, and bring in some guy named Sparky Klimaszewski to pull strings and jerk Bleak’s chain on the side.

To her amazement, Dax had grinned at Johnny’s suggestion to bring in this Sparky guy and been all on board with bringing in Duce, but hell, it hadn’t even been a plan, not really, just a knee-jerk guy thing-“Leave the girl out of it and let’s get some guys and go do this thing.” And yes, she’d had to remind Dax, very clearly, that they didn’t work that way, and that this was her deal. She’d been working it for a month, her dad even longer, and that was the crux of the matter. More than her deal, this was her responsibility. It was her father they’d come to save.

She glanced at the duffel bag and hoped to hell that eighty-two thousand hard-earned dollars and the name Lindsey Larson were enough to do the job.

Eighty-two damn thousand dollars-what in the hell had Burt Alden been doing to get himself into Franklin Bleak for eighty-two thousand dollars? Johnny wondered, pulling his phone out of his pocket for one last-ditch effort to sell his soul to Sparky. Alden must have been operating every which way from Sunday to get that kind of money out of one of Bleak’s bets. Or, if it had been more than one bet, why had Franklin let him get in so deep before he paid off? The only reason Johnny had was that Alden must be one of Bleak’s high rollers, a real boom-or-bust kind of guy who played a lot of cash. If so, this wasn’t the end of it. Alden would be back in the game as soon as he got the scratch, and this whole damn night and all of Esme’s efforts and laying herself on the line would have meant nothing.

So here he was, trying for the fourth time to make a call that was really going to cost him, and instead of negotiating to get Franklin off his ass, he was going to be working a deal to get Franklin off Alden’s. For his trouble, he could count on owning the top slot on Sparky’s short list for a long time and being on Bleak’s until hell froze over, a price he was more than willing to pay if Klimaszewski would just wake the hell up and answer his damn phone.

“This better be my wife,” Sparky finally answered on the third ring, sounding half asleep and maybe hung-over, with a real crabby edge to his voice.

“What’s the matter, old man, did Carol Ann leave you again?” Johnny said, trying not to sound so damn relieved he could spit.

“Johnny, you jerk,” Sparky said. “You must be in a whole helluva lot of trouble to be waking me up at- geezus -it’s five o’clock in the morning, boy.”

“I’m at Franklin Bleak’s warehouse.”

“Why?” Sparky asked. “You know better than to lay a bet with Bleak.”

“I’m not laying a bet. You had it right the first time. I’ve got some trouble that needs clearing up.”

“Then you need Superman, boy, not me,” Sparky said.

Superman? Christian Hawkins? Johnny hoped to hell not. The last thing he wanted was for anyone at Steele Street to know what he’d been doing all night. This deal with Esme and Bleak was so far under the table, there was no way to bring it out into the light of day and make it look good. Drugs, illegal gambling, prostitution-if they’d missed a vice here tonight, Johnny didn’t know what the hell it might be.

“No, Sparky. I just need you.”

“For what?” The old man sounded damn suspicious, and Johnny didn’t blame him.

“I’ve got a friend who’s into Bleak real deep. We’ve got the cash to clear the debt, but Bleak’s threatening payback with interest. I need you to call him off.”