Loose And Easy

by Tara Janzen

  “Fair warning, babe. Benny-boy may want more than cash. He’s got a reputation to maintain, and it ain’t pretty.”

  She held herself still, refraining from giving in to another, even heavier, sigh. She knew all this. Didn’t everybody the hell in Denver have some damn reputation to maintain? That was her whole frickin’ problem, men’s egos and their badass reputations. She knew how the streets worked, and they didn’t work with some middle-class blonde getting away with stealing “Dixie” Talbot’s tricks- but no matter what in the hell Benny-boy Jackman wanted, she had much bigger problems than a Mile High Sixteenth Street pimp.

  “Tough,” she said, and she meant it. “If he wants more than that, he’ll have to get in line.”

  Get in line? Benny-boy Jackman could just get in line?

  Yeah, Johnny thought. Benny-boy could get in line behind Franklin Bleak and his goons, and probably that German guy, too, if he’d gotten out of his cuffs yet. That ought to be a real party and a half, and just how the hell many of these guys did she think she could take on and still come out in one piece?

  Oh, she was a cool one, all right. Too cool for her own good, and he was just about ready to tell her, when he saw a delivery van pulling into the traffic behind them off of Eighteenth and onto Market.

  Fuck.

  “You’re buckled, right?”

  “Right.”

  He checked the street ahead of them again, waited for a truck to clear the intersection, then shot across against the light and kept going.

  She twisted in her seat to look out the back window. “What? The LeSabre? I don’t see it.”

  “No. A white panel van in the right lane.” He took a sharp left into an alley and slowed down just enough to keep the Cyclone from hitting the Dumpsters and packing crates pushed up against the sides of the narrow opening.

  “Why? Who’s in the van?” She sat back a bit, facing him.

  “I don’t know who’s in it, but it says Bleak Enterprises on the side.”

  “Geezus,” she breathed the word, looking back out the rear window-and for the first time, he thought maybe she was getting a little unnerved by what he considered to be a damned unnerving situation.

  At the end of the alley, he crossed Blake, then continued on through the alley, until he was back to Wazee and turned north.

  “No-no-no-no,” she said. “South. We need to get to the interstate.”

  “No, we don’t,” he said, continuing north, the Cyclone roaring up through its gears. A few more turns had them back on Market and headed into the danger zone.

  LoDo quickly disappeared behind them, the neighborhood going downhill fast once they passed Park Avenue, and he kept going, past the rail yards and into the boondocks, until he pulled into another, even narrower alley. He quickly eased the Cyclone down into second.

  She looked around at where he’d brought them, and when recognition settled in, he felt her stiffen.

  Her gaze rocketed back to him.

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  The only answer he gave her was to shake his head. He wasn’t kidding, not in this place.

  Stretching his arm out the driver’s side window, he closed a circle with his ring finger and his thumb, and holding the Cyclone to a crawl, he drove through an open iron gate into the no-man’sland of the Locos’ hideout.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Scotch.

  General Richard “Buck” Grant dropped his duffel at the end of the bed in the guest suite at 738 Steele Street and walked over to the long row of windows overlooking the seventh-floor garage. A bottle and two glasses were waiting for him on a table next to the windows.

  The Scotch at Steele Street was always the best of the eighteen-year-olds. Hart and Hawkins made damn sure of it.

  He poured himself a short shot and took his first sip. For a long moment, he let it sit in his mouth, let it infuse his senses. For a long moment, he waited, wondering if anything could disguise the taste of betrayal.

  No, he decided, swallowing. Not today.

  Fuck. He tossed back the rest of the shot and poured himself another.

  Everything at 738 Steele Street was the best, up to and including the operators. Hart and Hawkins made damn sure of it, and there wasn’t a goddamn one of them who didn’t deserve better than what he’d brought with him to Denver.

  Fucking CIA.

  Below him in the bays, Creed and Skeeter had their heads under the hood of one of Steele Street ’s most infamous American muscle cars. The Chevy Nova’s name was “Mercy” because she had none- so the story went, and Buck knew it for a fact. He thought Dylan had ordered the beast drawn and quartered years ago. The 1969 Yenko 427 Nova did her 0 to 60 mph in under four seconds. Buck had been in her once when she’d done it with Quinn Younger, SDF’s jet jockey, behind the wheel, and once had been enough. He hadn’t checked, but he was pretty sure he’d left part of his stomach and half his hair on the starting line. He didn’t like to admit it, but he really couldn’t afford to lose half his hair, so he kept it short, regulation buzz. What was left of it was one hundred percent iron gray, a hard color, on a hard guy, with a hard job. That was him-Hard-Ass Grant.

  Geezus. He set the glass aside, still full. This was so much bullshit, the reason he was here, and what he’d been sent to do.

  He lifted his hand to his face, covering his eyes, and he swore again. Shit like this is what gave guys like him ulcers.

  And apparently, ulcers didn’t like their Scotch neat.

  He let the pain run through his gut, rode it out, and took a breath. Then he picked up the glass and dosed himself with the second shot of whiskey.

  His gaze shifted from Creed and Skeeter and the cars on the garage floor to his duffel. There was a very official folder inside from the Department of Labor containing photographs and a letter from William J. Davies, who’d been the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict when Special Defense Force had been created and put under Grant’s command. Davies had long since been kicked upstairs to an undisclosed position in an undisclosed government agency that didn’t have a damn thing to do with the Labor Department. The chain of command hadn’t really changed for Buck and SDF, but it had sunk deeper into the black water of the Potomac as the years had gone by, the wars had gotten more costly, and the necessary deeds had become less publicly palatable. Still, the chain of command had never been as deliberately obscure or the orders as black as what he’d gotten this morning. He’d opened the folder as soon as it had arrived in his office in the Marsh Annex east of Washington, D.C. He’d read the letter inside once, looked at the accompanying photographs, put it all back in the envelope, and immediately hitched a ride out of Andrews Air Force Base to Colorado.

  The photographs had been damned startling, damned unnerving, and Buck had seen it all in his fifty-four years. He just hadn’t seen anything like this.

  Davies had told him what to do. He hadn’t told him how to do it, and Buck had wanted to do it in person. Some information just shouldn’t be delivered over the phone, no matter how secure the line. He’d also figured if he was on deck with them when he briefed the team, he could manage the fallout. He’d also wanted to be on board during the initial planning phase of the requested mission.

  Mission-he hated even putting the word to the deed. It was a goatfuck, a gut-wrenching goatfuck. Sometimes, being in this man’s army took almost more than he had to give. Everyone on SDF was going to know what that felt like and have to deal with it by the time they finished looking at those photographs, by the time he laid out the operation. The only alternative to dealing with it was anarchy, to willfully disobey a direct order, and the only alternative to mutiny was to lock the whole damn team up in some goddamn high-security prison and throw away the key until the mission had been accomplished by someone else. But then, that had been the problem, hadn’t it? No one, no one, had even gotten close to accomplishing the mission. Tasking SDF with the deed was about as desperate an act as he’d ever
seen the government’s snoopand-spook apparatchiki reduced to miring themselves in-and they were “in,” the whole goddamn alphabet-soup boatload of them. Not that anyone would ever take responsibility for what had happened. In cases like this, the buck got passed around faster than a hot potato, getting kicked under tables and buried in crap, until everyone who had ever heard of it was either dead, exiled, or promoted out of the line of fire.

  Politics was such a goddamn dirty business. It made war look like a cakewalk. Politics was such a goddamn dirty business; it made him sick.

  He checked his watch. It had taken forever to get to Denver from Peterson Air Force Base, and there wasn’t a whole lot of the night left. He’d contacted Dylan in New York and asked for a meeting at Steele Street first thing in the morning. Besides Creed and Skeeter, Hawkins was in residence. Grant knew Dylan had told them to stay put. Zachary Prade was already on his way from Podunk, Montana, or wherever the hell his wife’s family ranch was located.

  Trace, that was it. Trace, Montana, in Chouteau County.

  Kid had done a flip-flop in Los Angeles, barely getting there before the word had gone out for him to come home. Quinn would be down from his mountain home in Evergreen before dawn. Smith would be getting into Peterson a little after midnight. Buck hoped the traffic between Colorado Springs and Denver had cleared out by then. The damn interstate had been a parking lot when he’d been on it.

  And they needed Smith. He’d be good to have on board, a cool head, a cold heart. Smith could be counted on to keep appropriate emotional distance between himself and what the others would be feeling no matter how professionally they’d always conducted themselves. This damn situation would test them all.

  There was no pulling Gillian and Travis off their mission. Politics again. Protecting senators on junkets in Third World countries, this one Bolivia, took precedence over just about every other damn thing. The trouble was, Dylan would instantly recognize the advantage of having Red Dog and the Angel Boy on the outside, if everyone on the inside found the mission parameters unacceptable and chose to exercise their marked instincts for independent thought-and who could blame them? Not Buck, not on this deal.

  But neither was he going to condone or allow it.

  His job was going to be to convince them not to abandon ship, to stay inside the system, to stay inside the rules. Working together, they could keep the sacrifices to a minimum. They were soldiers. He knew them. They would comply. He’d be damned if he lost his whole team due to a situation the CIA should never have allowed, let alone allowed to get so damn far out of hand that it had become a priority-one national security issue.

  On the upside, he’d also brought the team something they needed: Juan Aurelio Ramos. The kid had proven himself in combat over and over again in his three tours of duty. Even with his last go-around in Afghanistan having gotten a little tight in places, and damn rough in others, Ramos had pulled through. He’d made it home in one piece, inside and out. Hawkins would take care of the rest, getting him trained up for the type of missions SDF took on. Training never stopped for any of them. It was the order of the day, every day. Ramos was officially SDF’s now-and Grant’s. All Buck had to do was keep the team alive long enough to use him.

  Snagging the pair of highball glasses with the fingers of his right hand, he grabbed the bottle of Scotch with his left and walked out of the guest suite to the main elevator in the office. It was a hot summer night in Denver, and he was heading to The Beach-a couple of lawn chairs and a ratty piece of Astro Turf nailed to the roof of 738 Steele Street. With a bit of luck, he wouldn’t be alone up there for long.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Old fears die hard. Legitimate old fears don’t die at all, hard or otherwise. Driving into the Locos compound off north Delgany was a fairly well-grounded old fear in Esme’s book, an old fear with a new, unexpectedly current infusion of adrenaline.

  Fight or flight-she was feeling it with every leap of her pulse.

  “This isn’t cool.” It was crazy. She had enough trouble tonight without him adding a boatload of gangsters to the mix.

  “No, it’s not,” he agreed, which didn’t do a damn thing to calm her nerves.

  “Then why in the hell are we here?”

  “I need some information. Baby Duce will have it.”

  Oh, perfect. Baby Duce. She knew the damn hierarchy and history as well as any inner-city kid. Baby Duce ran the Locos. He’d been running them since Carlos had gotten killed in some turf war, and before Carlos, it had been Dom Ramos, who, as she most certainly remembered, had also gotten killed in some turf war. The Locos had been a lot smaller crew under Dom, very tight-knit, and they’d mostly run their business and their wars on the other side of the river. This north-downtown stuff had all started with a pipeline cocaine deal Baby Duce had brokered during the first year of his reign. The whole Locos sphere of influence had done nothing but expand since then. They owned both sides of the river now, ran most of lower downtown and downtown, and had made heavy inroads into the eastern suburbs.

  Johnny freakin’ Ramos-crown prince of the Locos by blood and heritage. Maybe she’d been wrong about him.

  Crap.

  Of course she’d been wrong about him.

  Esme could see shadows moving in the shadows of the buildings and houses on each side of the alley. They were coming in the back door of a very sketchy neighborhood, a very well protected neighborhood, and they were running a gauntlet of its guards, with every shadow a potential threat.

  Within the space of a couple of blocks, she and Johnny had left the hip and happening part of lower downtown and cruised into what Realtors referred to as River North, or RiNo, a “mixed use” area. In this case, the mix of use included ultra-low-end residential crammed in between no-longer-in-use industrial and retail buildings, a good breeding ground for vice. Not for long, though. Developers had already made headway in the area, optimistically hoping they could turn it into a “front door” neighborhood.

  Hell, get a couple of developers holding hands with a few Realtors and guaranteed they’d start turning pigs’ ears into silk purses, and RiNo into the next LoDo-for a price, usually a pretty pricey price.

  But for now, this block and half a dozen others belonged to Baby Duce, and she and Johnny were right in the middle of his River North territory.

  Halfway down the alley, Johnny stopped the Cyclone and took the key out of the ignition. To her right, a haphazard array of garbage cans flanked a padlocked iron door with the words Butcher Drug Store painted on the cinderblock above it.

  Geezus. Butcher and drugs in the same sentence were enough to send a chill down her spine, especially when, to her left, a chain-linked, barbed-wire fence was all that stood between her and the Locos’ north-side crib. A pair of lights on the back of the ramshackle old house lit up the yard and part of the alley.

  Yeah, every guy in Denver had some badass reputation he was working to uphold, and Baby Duce was no different. So now she had Bleak on her ass, Baby Duce on her left, Benny-boy staring out of her near future, Erich Warner and Otto Von Lindberg hopefully not bearing down on her from out of her past, and Isaac Nachman nowhere in sight, because she was stuck in this goddamn alley, in a car with no key.

  “Wait here.” Johnny opened his door and was about halfway out when she stopped him with a word.

  “Five,” she said.

  He hesitated for a second, then glanced back at her over his shoulder.

  “Five?”

  “Five minutes, and then I’m walking out of here.” And she meant it.

  He considered the pavement at his feet for a couple of seconds, then finished getting out, closed the door, and leaned down through the window. “In that case, I’ll be back in four and a half.”

  Straightening up, he slapped the roof of the car twice, saying something in Spanish to the guys who’d come up from both ends of the alley and were stationing themselves along the fence.

  Esme had taken French in high school, thinking it would m
ake her more refined. It hadn’t, and now she was clueless about what he’d said, except it was probably something like “don’t steal the tires off this awesome car,” or “don’t strip the huge, mother-freaking engine I bolted under this hood,” or hopefully, maybe, “don’t harass the dumb blonde who let me hijack her into this alley.”

  Not that the girl was going to stand still for too much harassing.

  Still, hell-she watched him step through the gate into a weed-choked yard and walk to the back door of the house. A tall, muscular guy covered in tattoos met him there, and they talked for a few moments, with the guy looking at her most of that time, then he and Johnny disappeared inside, and she sat back in her seat. There were five guys milling in the alley, and each and every one of them was staring at her, too-dammit.

  She checked her watch. Four and a half minutes- just enough time to do a little housekeeping.

  She pulled her phone out of the messenger bag and found three missed calls, all from Dax, and nothing from her dad. This time, she didn’t refrain from a heavy sigh. She gave into it, just to get it off her chest. This whole damn night was because of him, and all she’d asked for was the name of Franklin Bleak’s daughter. Burt had promised her his good friend Thomas in Chicago would get the name weeks ago, but like everything else with her dad, it hadn’t worked out like he’d planned. She’d given him one simple job to do, and he’d blown it.

  Big surprise.

  Esme Alden, Private Investigator-she was smarter with strangers. She expected more. But her dad-hell, she definitely had issues with her dad. Someday she was going to grow up and stop trying to make him into something he was not, like responsible, smart enough to take care of his family, and strong enough not to court financial ruin on every damn toss of the dice, and every dog race, or every horse, or the damn Denver Broncos.

  Today was obviously not that day.

  She scrolled down her address list to his name and pressed the call button. After seven interminable rings, she got her folks’ answering machine.