Devil s Bargain

by Rachel Caine

“It’s not going to happen.” She thought about the photos, sitting on the desk. The tantalizing thought of a lead, an actual honest-to-God lead after all this time. A chance to throw proof on McCarthy’s lawyer’s desk and demand action. A chance to sit in the courtroom and see Stewart’s face as Ben McCarthy became a free man.

  A chance to see Ben smile again.

  Borden must have seen it in her eyes. “You’re not going to do it.”

  “No,” she said, and instead of coming out cold, the way she’d intended, it sounded regretful. “No, I’m not.”

  “You’re going to let a man die.”

  She didn’t have an answer to that, except to say, “If what you guys said in that car was right, there are other people out there. Other people who can stop it. It doesn’t have to be me.”

  “You know what, Jazz? Sometimes, it does.” He didn’t sound angry, just sad. Sad, and a little lost. “Sometimes there just isn’t anybody else to step up and do what has to be done. You should know that.”

  She didn’t say anything at all to that. Borden shook his head.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll get you copies of the autopsy photos. Maybe you can put them in your scrapbook.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Yeah? You know what? None of this is fair!” He shouted it at her, and for a second she saw something flare, something hot and wild and desperate, and it jumped across to her like ignition through a wire. “This is my friend! Do you understand me? My friend! So yeah, you want me to beg? I’m begging! Please, Jazz. Please help me save his life!”

  She swallowed and came a step closer to him. His pulse was beating fast along the matte-velvet skin of his throat, and his lips were parted. He looked on the edge of doing something…dangerous.

  “If you don’t go,” he said softly, “I will.”

  “What does your boss say about that?”

  “That I won’t come back.”

  “But I will.”

  He nodded slightly.

  “So it’s not really just your friend I’d be saving,” she said. “Right?”

  No answer. He didn’t move, didn’t speak.

  “That’s a hell of a blackmail, Counselor. And it only works if I believe even a fraction of the bullshit the Cross Society is peddling.”

  “Then don’t believe it,” he said. “Go on with your important case. I can’t stop you.”

  He started for the door, then came back and grabbed his fruit basket.

  She watched in disbelief as he stalked out the door, handed the basket to Pansy, whose lips parted in a silent O of amazement, and kept going, heading for the elevators.

  Jazz caught up to him at the reception desk. “Hey! Counselor!”

  He stiff-armed through the glass doors and into the elevator lobby, where he hit the button twice before stopping. He didn’t look at her.

  “Borden,” she said, and then, half-desperately, “James.”

  That got his attention. He glanced over at her, then away.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t like being—manhandled. You might have noticed that the first time we met. And I really don’t like being manipulated.”

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “Sorry. I’m not trying to manipulate you. I just—I just don’t know where else to go.”

  Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, she knew that. “I’m keyed up,” she said. “I’ve got some new information about…” For some reason, she didn’t want to explain it to him. “About a case. Asking me to take three days away from it’s a pretty high price to pay.”

  He nodded, eyes on the closed elevator doors and the lit call button. “Maybe so,” he replied, “and I can’t ask you what’s more important. I can only tell you that my friend is important to me, and I’m willing to go if you don’t. So tell me now, because buying a last-minute plane ticket is murder.”

  Maybe I could send Lucia…No, she couldn’t pull Lucia out, not now; Lucia had taken weeks settling her cover, and she was getting close to breaking the case. Despite the jokes earlier, Lucia wasn’t going to disengage, and she damn sure wasn’t going to pull out of undercover work to go work for the Cross Society.

  Jazz took a deep breath and held it. The pictures would keep. They’d kept all this time, three days wouldn’t kill her. It would give her time to pull the details out of Manny and verify the provenance.

  “Fine,” she said. “Fine, I’ll go. Tell Laskins I’m cooperating.”

  “That would be a pretty free interpretation of events,” he said, and looked at her with a trace of a smile.

  “You’re a lawyer. Prevaricate.”

  “Sorry I gave away your fruit basket.”

  “Please tell me that was Laskins’s choice of a gift.”

  His smile was purely giddy. “Fruit baskets don’t turn you on? Come on, Jazz. Bananas, pear honey—it’s practical and seductive.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “What?”

  She said it slower. “Are…you…hungry?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to talk to you about your friend. If I’m going to fly off to L.A. to protect his ass, at the very least I should know a little something about him.”

  Borden looked more stunned by that than by her agreement to take the case. “Um…okay. Where do you want to—”

  “Wait downstairs,” she said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  The elevator arrived with a musical ding. She watched him get in and press the button for the first floor. Just before the doors closed, she said, “By the way? If you want to send a woman a present, chocolate’s seductive. Bananas are just crude.”

  The closing doors cut him off before he could come up with any kind of a response.

  Jazz stopped by Pansy’s desk on the way back to her office. Pansy was turning the fruit basket this way and that, trying to catalog contents without unwrapping the shiny paper.

  Jazz picked it up and carried it into her office.

  “Pear honey,” Pansy called after her. “He must really like you. That’s kinda kinky. Think of all the applications…”

  She slammed the door, gathered up the photos into a briefcase, added her collapsible truncheon, PDA, a few more files she needed to catch up on, and grabbed the travel bag she always kept ready in the closet, with changes of clothing and toiletries. She shouldered it, opened the door again and saw Pansy jump.

  “I’m going to L.A.,” she said, and Pansy’s eyes went narrow with surprise.

  “It’s not on your schedule—”

  “Add it. Three days in L.A.”

  “With…anyone?”

  “Please. It’s a fruit basket.”

  “Is it a case? Because I should open up a file if—”

  The red envelope was in Jazz’s briefcase. She took it out, tossed it to Pansy, and said, “Make two copies, and give one to Lucia. In case.”

  “In case what?” Pansy asked, frowning.

  “In case I don’t come back.”

  Pansy gave her a long, measuring stare. “You have to come back. You know that, right? I don’t give you permission not to come back.”

  Jazz smiled. “I have to sign bonus checks,” she said.

  “Damn straight.”

  It wasn’t romantic, really, as dinners went. Maybe midway between the Formica bustle of Arthur Bryant’s and some French restaurant with low lights and unpronounceable food—the restaurant was brightly lit, Italian, and full of the smells of garlic and parmesan and red sauce. Instead of soothing violins discreetly whispering through concealed speakers, this place featured waiters who sang opera. Loudly. Jazz supposed they were lucky the waiters actually could sing.

  She politely clapped after the second aria from the guy topping off her tea and gave him a not-too-subtle bug-off sign, which he took with good grace. Across from her, James Borden was digging into a plate of chicken parmesan, with bread sticks. She stuck to spaghetti.

  “Here,” he said, as she was questing for a meatball with her fork. He slid an
envelope across the table toward her. Not red, this time. White, but still the size and shape of a card. She raised her eyebrows and opened it up.

  It really was a card. Flowers on the front, and inside, a handwritten note that said, simply, Thank you.

  With a plane ticket for one to Los Angeles, leaving in—she checked her watch—four hours.

  “Should give you enough time to eat, get there, check in and relax a little,” he said, watching her.

  “You bought the ticket this morning. Before you actually talked to me.”

  He substituted a mouthful of chicken parmesan for an answer.

  “Am I actually that easy?”

  “No,” he mumbled. “I was willing to take the risk.”

  She studied him, twirling spaghetti on her fork, and said, “Tell me about your friend.”

  He did, after swallowing. Lowell Santoro. College roommate. One of those running buddies that Jazz had always wanted and somehow never really had, apart from McCarthy—someone to laugh with, raise hell with, experience life with. “He was older than I was,” Borden said. “It didn’t matter, we both acted like twelve-year-olds. He never met a girl he didn’t try to talk into bed, but he never had one hate him afterward, either. Lowell’s always been—honest. I know that sounds strange, but it’s true. He’s just got nothing but truth in him.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said doubtfully, and took a sip of crisp white wine. It had a nice cool undertone to it, the perfect counterpoint to the salt of the spaghetti sauce. “So he’s Don Juan and Saint Francis, all rolled up into one. And he was, what? A law student?”

  “He changed after the first year, took film courses. That’s how he got into producing. It was a good thing. He wasn’t going to be a great lawyer. Too honest.”

  “Unlike you.”

  “Unlike me,” he agreed. “He met Susan—his wife—his last year in college. They got married, moved out to L.A. He’s a good guy, Jazz. What’s going to happen to him—he doesn’t deserve it.”

  “What is going to happen to him?” Because that wasn’t in the letter. Just instructions on how to conduct surveillance. No warnings. She supposed the Cross Society thought it would predispose her toward what to watch out for.

  “It’s not clear,” Borden said. Or prevaricated. “Something fatal. And something painful.”

  “Car accident? Building collapse? Bullet?”

  “It’s a human agency, that’s all that I know.”

  “I hate it when you talk like—”

  “Like a member of the Society? Jazz. I am one.”

  She knew that. She just didn’t like to think about it. Conversation collapsed into silence as they ate, and the waiter came around to deliver a selection from The Marriage of Figaro, and it was dessert by the time Jazz said, “About the fruit basket?”

  He looked up from his tiramisu, took a sip of wine and raised his eyebrows.

  “Was it Laskins’s idea?”

  “Mine,” he said.

  “You’re hopeless.”

  Borden had the good sense to look embarrassed as he shrugged. It might have been the wine, or the marinara sauce, but she felt a surge of warmth toward him, entirely unconnected to the undeniable surge of—what the hell had that been? Lust?—she’d felt in her office, when she’d had him up against the wall. That was unsettling. She preferred lust. Lust was simple—it had a beginning, middle and end to it. You could shut lust up by giving it what it wanted.

  This feeling…it had more of a feeling of sticking around.

  He was watching her. She realized she’d been staring back, felt a rush of blood heat up her face and turned back to the cheesecake she was not really eating.

  “How’s Lucia?” he asked. Which was completely the wrong thing to ask at that moment.

  “Don’t you know? I mean, don’t you guys know everything?” She heard the edge in her voice.

  “Yeah, sorry, I don’t actually sit around and monitor your lives on a daily basis.”

  “Who does?”

  He changed the subject. “I take it that she’s okay.”

  “She’s fine. Better than fine, actually. She’s happy as a clam. That girl really likes undercover work. It’s a little scary, how good she is at it, for somebody who wears a lot of—you know—designer clothes.”

  “What’s she doing now?” he asked around a mouthful of brandy-soaked ladyfingers.

  “Right now? Probably emptying trash from the sixth-floor restrooms.” Jazz glanced at her watch. “Actually, I take it back. She’s on her break, sitting in the lunchroom, watching Spanish-language soap operas.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I told you. She likes undercover work. You’re not going to do anything stupid like follow me to L.A., are you?” she asked, without any transition, and watched him scramble to keep up with the conversational left turn.

  “Do you need me to?” he asked. Not, she noticed, Do you want me to.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t need you there. And it would probably be easier if you stayed out of my hair. Having somebody around with a personal stake in things is distracting.”

  “It’s just that he’s—like family.” Borden shrugged, but it didn’t look casual. “I don’t have a lot of that.”

  “Family? Hell, sometimes I have too much. Want a sister?”

  She’d said something wrong. She saw the flinch. Unless he already knew Molly.

  “I had one,” he finally said, and met her eyes.

  She knew that look, had seen it on the faces of too many families. Lost. Baffled. Wounded. She hadn’t just made a mistake, she’d opened a vein. “What happened?”

  “The usual. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” His smile cut like glass. “Not everybody’s a Lead. She never even got to be an Actor.”

  Not a good time to express her skepticism on the whole theory. “Any other family?”

  “My mother lives in Canada. Father—” He shrugged again. “I don’t really know. So, Lowell means a lot to me. He was there when I needed him.”

  She studied him. “Then I’ll do everything I can.”

  He nodded, sipped wine and fiddled with his fork. “Want me to drive you to the airport?”

  “Sure.” She shrugged and then frowned. “You don’t have a car.”

  “Rental. I need to take it back to the airport and catch the red-eye back to New York.”

  “So you weren’t planning to stay.”

  “No, I was planning to go, but which way I was flying depended on you.”

  There was something underneath that, something like a cliff she could easily fall from, and she backed up fast. “Okay, then. If you could give me a ride, that would be great.”

  Borden called for the check. They argued over who was going to pay it, but in the end, she let him put it on the GPL tab. They exited into a rush of late commuters and a cool whisper of wind, and walked together like a couple along the sidewalk back toward the office. Borden silently took her shoulder bag; she just as silently let him. Her gun wasn’t in it, anyway.

  “Is somebody going to start taking potshots at me again?” she asked him. He missed a step, stumbled and lengthened his stride as if trying to leave that awkwardness behind him.

  “I doubt it,” he said. “Generally, once Leads are inside the Society, it’s not in the best interest of the opposition to try to get rid of them unless they really present a problem. Their best chance of success is before you’re fully informed, before there are others watching your back. Or to get to you first and put you on their side.”

  “Huh,” she said. “So that’s why they tried to kill us in the parking garage. Because we hadn’t actually joined up yet, but we knew enough not to join them.”

  “Yes. It was their last opportunity to stop you without directly coming after the Cross Society.”

  “This thing—this L.A. thing—this isn’t just to get me out of the way, right? Because something’s going down here?”

  He jammed his hands into his pockets and hun
ched his shoulders, looking lost in thought. “Interesting thought,” he said, “but I don’t think so. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be possible, but…”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Do I seem like the secret master of the world to you? No, I’m not sure. But I don’t think they’d do that.” Still, he was frowning, concentrating on his feet. She wished she hadn’t brought it up. “I suppose we’d better get you to the airport.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed softly.

  They walked in silence for another few hundred feet, and then Borden unlocked a dark red rental car and handed her inside—literally, offered a hand, as if she was a lady in big skirts getting into a carriage. She was taken aback by that, but she had to admit, the warm touch of his fingers on hers was nice. And he hadn’t done it to be showy; it was, she sensed, just something he did. She remembered him doing it for Lucia, at the limo door…but not her. She supposed her body posture at the time had been in the language of touch me and die.

  The car felt small and intimate with the two of them inside of it. Borden drove competently, without any hesitation, although she knew he couldn’t possibly know his way around that well. Could he? She concentrated on traffic and taillights, on road noise and the peripheral glow of his face in the wash of headlights. When she looked over, she was struck by how…good he looked. A little rough around the edges, a little tired, a little worried. Human.

  “Hey,” she said. He looked over at her, then back at the road. “I’m going to make sure nothing happens to him. You know that, right?”

  “Right,” he agreed. “Make sure nothing happens to you, either, would you? As a favor to me?”

  She hadn’t really noticed, but clouds had convened overhead while they were in the restaurant, and now big, fat raindrops began to pelt the windshield—a few at first, and then a silver shower. Borden activated the wipers. They were already on the freeway. Ten minutes, she thought to herself. Ten minutes and I’m at the airport, ready to get on a plane. This is not how I wanted today to end.

  She drummed her fingers on the armrest nervously, watching the rain-smeared road, and was surprised when his right hand suddenly came down on her agitated left one, stopping her from tapping out a rhythm. He didn’t say anything. His long, tapering fingers wrapped slowly around hers, exploring. More sensual than anything she’d felt in a long time. This wasn’t reassurance, wasn’t a quick impersonal touch of the hand…this was something else.