Loose And Easy

by Tara Janzen

  Interestingly, the maid had not seen any blood or wounds when she’d first glanced in the room. But by the time the manager had calmed her down enough to understand what she was talking about and gotten up to room 215, the guy had definitely been bloody and writhing around on the floor. The 911 call had been dramatically overstated-with three squad cars bearing down on the hotel in award-winning response time… “Blood everywhere, it’s a massacre.”

  Not quite a massacre, Loretta thought, shaking her head and looking the old guy over. He did have blood running down his back into his butt crack, though, and geezus, she would have just as soon skipped that part.

  Half of a leash was hanging off the guy’s dog collar and trailing down the front of his chest, with a cleanly cut end, and the other half was still tied around the bed frame. He’d been easy pickings for whoever had cut him up and then cut him loose.

  Sometimes Denver was an interesting town- too interesting.

  “I don’t remember Dixie ever taking a knife to anyone,” she said.

  “ Dixie ’s involvement was a misunderstanding on our part,” Connor said. “The guy was pretty wound up when we arrived, jabbering away in English and German, and it took a while to figure out he wasn’t saying ‘It was Dixie.’ He was saying ‘It wasn’t Dixie.’ Kind of a miscommunication thing…maybe.”

  Loretta gave her new boy a long look. “I want Dixie anyway, and I want Benny-boy Jackman, and I want them both at the precinct before I get there.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And if it wasn’t Dixie, who was it? Maybe this guy blew into town on his own and found a knife-wielding dominatrix hawking it on Colfax. Or maybe somebody helped him out. The doormen here at the Oxford usually have their little black book vetted better than this, but if someone in the hotel was involved, I want to know who.”

  “The new valet,” Connor said. “He was approached a couple of days ago by a blond-haired woman who wanted him to make sure she got this trick instead of Dixie. The woman also requested that Von Lindberg be put in this room-two-fifteen. I think because of the fire escape. She paid the valet fifty bucks, and the reservation clerk fifty bucks.”

  Loretta looked to the open window and the curtains blowing in the light breeze. Okay, she thought, the Boulder boy was earning his keep.

  “And how was the valet supposed to steer this john to her?”

  Connor flipped open his notebook and showed her the top page. “She left her phone number.”

  Loretta grinned. “Find this blonde and bring her in. I can’t have hookers carving their initials into their customers.”

  “It’s not her initials, Lieutenant. It’s kanji.”

  “Kanji?”

  “Japanese characters. At least the middle part of it looks like a distinct character. The angled lines around the outside of it might just be for decoration.”

  Whatever it was, she didn’t want decorating fat old Germans with the sharp end of a knife to become a new trend in Denver.

  “And what’s the kanji on this guy mean?”

  “I’ll know here in just a minute,” he said. “I had the tech clean him up a bit and took a picture of it to send to-”

  “Skeeter,” she interjected. Who else? Skeeter Bang Hart was a mutual friend, manga artist, and former kick-ass street punk turned good. The young woman had become part of a Defense Department black-ops team Loretta was very glad to have based in Denver and on her side. She’d saved most of the operators’ butts at one time or another as juveniles, and they made a habit of returning the favor when they could, sometimes quite handsomely. For reasons on both sides, their unspoken alliance remained just that-unspoken. They had each other’s numbers and weren’t afraid to use them. It was enough.

  “Yeah.” The detective showed her the photograph on his phone, and Loretta was impressed. His phone took better pictures than her camera. Hell, she could hardly keep up with personal technology anymore.

  “Well, let me know as soon as she…” Her voice trailed off, and she reached for Connor’s phone. Holding it one way into the light, and then the other, she swore under her breath. There was no doubt what she was looking at-dammit.

  “What?” Connor asked.

  She handed him back the phone.

  “Swastika,” she said. “Those angled lines? That’s a swastika, radiating out of the kanji in the middle.”

  Connor looked at his phone, then looked over at the German.

  “Hell,” he said softly. “So what do you think? Aryan Nation?”

  “Or just plain old Nazis,” she said. “Either way, I don’t like it. What’s Otto Von Lindberg been saying?”

  Connor gave her a resigned glance. “Nothing except he wants us out of his room. He paid good money for the room and seems to have plenty left, and he wants to be left alone.”

  Loretta gave a short nod. Von Lindberg had a fistful of hundred-dollar bills clutched in his right hand.

  “Robbery would have been too easy,” she said.

  Getting attacked and robbed was a nice, straightforward crime. Getting cut the hell up, while wearing a dog collar and a thong, and being tied to a bed, and not getting robbed-that was complex.

  Most days, Loretta thrived on the complex, but she had a late date tonight, and a damned early morning tomorrow, and she wasn’t in the mood for ranting Germans.

  “We’ve got a definite crime scene here, Lieutenant,” Connor said. “But Mr. Von Lindberg is saying he did this to himself.”

  “Handcuffed and tied to a bed, he cut a swastika and a kanji into his back?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Connor said. “That’s his story.”

  “It’s a little weak, wouldn’t you say, Detective?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’ve definitely heard better.”

  So had she.

  “Take him into protective custody. We’ll hold him as long as we can, see what we come up with. I want the window dusted. If the blonde paid for an escape route, I’m sure she used it.”

  “And maybe the guy with the maid did, too,” Connor said. “Nobody saw him go back out the lobby, but there’s almost half a dozen ways out of the hotel. He could have used any of them.”

  “Guy?” Loretta asked. “What guy with the maid?”

  The detective had the wisdom to blanch slightly. “Sorry, Lieutenant.” He flipped over to the next page in his notebook. “I thought Weisman filled you in on the way up.”

  “He did, but he didn’t tell me about any guy with the maid.”

  “Young guy, in his twenties, five ten, maybe five eleven. Taller than the maid’s husband, she says, and her husband is five eight,” Connor said, consulting his notebook. “Hispanic, clean-cut, wearing jeans and a black-collared shirt, gray T-shirt, told the maid he was the police and asked her to open the door of this room for him. She did open the door for him. He walked in. She took one look, saw Von Lindberg tied to the bed, and ran the other way.”

  “But this guy came in the room?”

  “That’s what she says.”

  “Did she see if he was carrying a knife?”

  “No such luck,” Connor said. “But she did say he had a hard look about him, serious, very much in charge. She didn’t doubt for a second that he was a policeman.”

  “In jeans and a black shirt.”

  “She thought he was undercover.”

  “Did he flash any identification?”

  “No, ma’am. Not according to her.”

  “And she goes around opening room doors for every Tom, Dick, and Harry who comes along?”

  “If he says he’s a policeman, it seems so, yes, ma’am.”

  Perfectly legitimate, Loretta thought. If she were an illegal immigrant shifting the sheets around in an upscale hotel, she wouldn’t be second-guessing anybody calling himself a policeman either, especially if he had a solid air of authority. It sucked, but that was the way of it.

  “Take her in, get her an artist. Let’s find out what this clean-cut police impersonator looks like.”

&
nbsp; “Yes, ma’am.”

  The detective’s phone beeped twice, signaling a text message, and they both looked at the screen while he opened the file. The sender was Skeeter, and only one word came up on the screen: HERO.

  “Nazi hero,” Connor said, putting the two symbols together.

  Well, that just about took the cake in Loretta’s book of crap she didn’t want to deal with on her beat, which was the whole damn city.

  “I don’t like it,” the detective said, shaking his head, still looking at the screen on his phone.

  “Neither do I, Connor,” Loretta agreed. “Neither do I.”

  She was going to die. Her mind was going in circles, thoughts racing.

  Her heart was pounding, pulse racing. Her legs were shaking, arms trembling, her stomach churning, lips quivering. She hated it all. She hated it so much-and yet she couldn’t stop any of it. She was going to die. She knew it with a dread certainty.

  For no reason, she was going to become one of those horrifying statistics, an unsolved crime, a victim of senseless, random violence.

  She only had one edge, and she was holding onto it with a death grip, using every ounce of her strength to keep her emotions frozen, to keep from crying.

  The awful, terrifying man who had kidnapped her had taped her to a chair, her ankles taped to the legs, big, wide, gray duct tape, her wrists handcuffed to the arms. He’d stuffed something foul in her mouth and taped it in place, and it took every ounce of her strength not to gag. She hurt everywhere, especially where he’d hit her, backhanding her in the face, punching her in the stomach, where he’d pulled her hair out and wrenched her arm backward. She could see her blood on the front of her uniform shirt. He’d taken her name tag. She didn’t know why.

  She didn’t know where he’d brought her, or why. It had all happened so fast. The huge, frightfully strong man had come out of nowhere, his attack so fast, so brutal, so unexpected, she’d never had time to react. One second, she’d been walking across the hospital parking lot, and in the next she’d been in the middle of a nightmare, caught in the maelstrom of violence, a random act of violence perpetrated by some pervert, some woman-hater.

  She felt sick. She was so frightened, and she knew beyond any shred of a doubt that her situation was very, very unlikely to improve.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Yes, Mr. Nachman… No, Mr. Nachman… Absolutely. I have it with me now, and it is beautiful. I’m quite thrilled, and I know you will be, too.” Smoothing feathers, that’s what Esme was doing, smoothing eighty-two thousand feathers, and after her last stammering bit of embarrassed idiocy in the alley, she was also doing everything she could to avoid having to talk to Johnny Ramos ever again for the rest of her life. “Within the hour, yes, sir. I’m leaving downtown now.”

  But despite her dearest wish to remain utterly occupied while in Ramos’s car, there was only so much verbal genuflecting she could manage, and with her last “yes, sir” she’d met her quota.

  She should have gotten a damn cab, and the reasons she hadn’t were reasons… well, they were reasons she wasn’t going to examine too damn closely. She knew they wouldn’t pass any test of actual reason, so she wasn’t going to put them to the test. Given the night she was having, she figured she deserved a break, and it sure as hell didn’t look like the universe at large was going to give her one.

  “Thank you, sir. I’ll see you shortly.” She ended the call and checked her messages, hoping for some, especially one from her dad, but there was nothing, which left her at a momentary loose end- dammit.

  “Solange and I have made the run to Genesee in half an hour, if you need to be there quicker,” Johnny said to her from his side of the car.

  Solange? She glanced over at him.

  Who in the heck was… oh, she got it. The Charger had been named Roxanne. Solange was the Cyclone, and yes, she supposed if a person sort of squinted and didn’t look too closely, possibly the “sleeper” looked French. Good God.

  “I think regular speed will be fine,” she said. “It’s why I told Mr. Nachman an hour, in case there were any… uh, any more extenuating circumstances.”

  Extenuating. Right. She guessed that was one way to put the night so far, one damned unexpected extenuating circumstance after another.

  “Even if there is a delay, we should be okay.” Yes, she’d just said that. “We shouldn’t hit traffic, though.”

  And that was it.

  “Not at this time of night,” she added, and that really was it. Nothing more needed to be said, which left her at another momentary loose end- dammit.

  While Johnny downshifted for the next stoplight, she busied herself with rummaging through the pockets on her messenger bag until she came up with her PDA. She really needed to upgrade to an all-inclusive system. A quick check of her calendar proved she was heading in the right direction, toward Genesee, but running a little late, over half an hour. No news there.

  She let out a very quiet sigh, which in no way indicated her current level of stress.

  He’d kissed her, and on top of everything else she had going wrong tonight, she’d liked it-a lot. So everything was A1 perfect: running late, Bleak gunning for her, Dax in the boondocks, and she’d liked kissing a guy she’d known in high school who, despite her initial hopes, had turned out to be a street gangster.

  She had to be certifiable. She didn’t have a love life, true, and she resented that she’d all but told him as much, but on those nights when she dreamed about having a love life, she usually dreamed a little bigger than old muscle cars with big engines, and bad boys with big…

  Oh, for the love of God and Patsy freakin’ Cline- she brought her hand up to cover her face. She couldn’t believe she’d just thought that, about his…

  Oh, hell-there she was again, remembering his…

  “Are you okay?” he asked, and under her hand, she felt her face turn hot with a blush.

  No, she wasn’t okay. She was mortified. He was the first boy she’d ever seen naked, and in her naiveté, she’d thought all guys were built like him.

  They weren’t.

  Not even close.

  “Esme?”

  Not that size mattered, really, at least that’s what everyone said, but how in the hell would she know? Every guy she’d ever been with had been about the same, size-wise anyway, and she’d never been with him, not really, not with him actually…

  Oh, geez, Esme, she told herself, grow up, get a grip.

  But there was no way to get more grown-up than the thought she’d just had, of him inside her, of everything she remembered about him, and everything she’d learned about men since. The combination was sheer, erotic meltdown, a wall of heat crashing into her and washing through her body, triggering a deep, sensual reaction that was going to be her undoing, right here in his bucket seat.

  He’d kissed her, and she’d been poleaxed, frozen in place, because his mouth had felt like coming home. The taste of him, the smell of him, the sound of his breath-the slow slide of his tongue over and around and down the length of hers, it had all said, “Here’s your place, girl, here with me.”

  Wrong. Impossibly wrong. It just simply couldn’t be.

  He’d done a great job tonight, and it had been a good decision to stick with him for the delivery to Isaac Nachman’s, but beyond that it was crazy.

  Crazy to want to kiss him again, right now, while the warmth of him was still in her mouth.

  Crazy to feel desire like a weight on her chest, a longing she wasn’t getting past, even though it had only been a kiss.

  Just a kiss.

  One kiss.

  “I’m…um… feeling a headache coming on. It’ll pass. They usually do. If I just rest quietly.” And don’t talk to guys who get me hot.

  She was pitiful.

  Of course, not talking to guys who got her hot was her signature modus operandi. That was the problem. Almost one hundred percent of the time, she was only ever in the company of guys who didn’t get her hot-and n
ow she knew why. Johnny Ramos was the guy who got her hot, and she hadn’t been in his company since high school.

  Good God.

  “Here,” he said, and she heard him lift something into the front seat from the back.

  She glanced up from beneath her fingers, then reached over and took the small red canvas pack he was handing her.

  The stoplight changed, and with a press of the gas pedal, the Cyclone ramped back up to chassis-shaking life. Geezus, she felt it everywhere, the slow, deep rumble curving around her in the seat, the sound of it sliding down her spine.

  “Look in the mesh pocket inside,” he said, shifting into second gear. “You’ll find aspirin and Motrin. Take your pick. Have you had anything to eat lately? Like in the last three or four hours?”

  “Uh, no.” Breakfast had been coffee. Lunch had been light, and dinner had been nonexistent.

  “Well, open this up.” He stretched his arm into the backseat again and brought up the last thing she’d expected to see.

  She lowered her hand from her face to take the package he was offering.

  “Um, thanks.” It was an MRE-Meal, Ready to Eat. She glanced into the backseat. Four more MREs were stacked in the corner-government issue, no commercial resale allowed. A guy couldn’t just go to the grocery store and buy a few MREs to keep in his car. She should have noticed them before, and she might have, if she hadn’t been so busy noticing the Locos in the alley and trying to keep them all in view.

  She had noticed how nice he kept the interior of the Cyclone. The dash looked as if it was regularly detailed with a toothbrush. Every knob and dial gleamed. There wasn’t so much as a gum wrapper in sight, and if she wasn’t mistaken, the upholstery on the seats was new. Considering what a wreck his car looked like from the outside, he took surprisingly good care of it on the inside.

  He’d been taking good care of her, too. Dax had been right, and she’d noticed. Even taking her to Baby Duce’s hadn’t been a bad idea. It had given her a chance to catch her breath someplace safe- and not much could have surprised her more than that she’d been safe in Locos land.