Breaking Loose

CHAPTER SEVEN

Left-right-left-right-left-right…one long-legged stride after another.

Left-right-left-right… hips swaying in rhythm with her steps.

Out of the alley and onto the sidewalk, past an old Kawasaki up on its kickstand and chained to a handcart, skirting a line of plastic garbage bags spilling trash onto the pavement-left-right-left-right. All Dax could do was keep up. Suzi Toussi walked like she owned this godforsaken street in Ciudad del Este, and as long as she kept heading in the right direction, Dax was going to let her revel in that illusion. He had a Wilson Combat.45 tucked under his right arm in a shoulder holster, with two extra eight-shot mags and one in the pipe backing him up, enough to command a fair amount of personal space, even in this hellhole.

And Suzi had whatever she was carrying in her holster and him, whether she wanted him or not.

His money was definitely on the “or not” side of the equation.

She sure seemed to know where she wanted to go. His room at the Posada Plaza was only two blocks away, and she’d nearly covered the first one-but he seriously doubted if that’s where she was headed.

Tough.

That’s where she was going.

When she veered at the corner, he tightened his hold on her arm again. Possibly a risky move, but he was a risk-taking kind of guy.

“This way, Ms. Toussi,” he said, redirecting her without slowing down.

“I thought we could catch a taxi up at the next corner,” she said, responding to the change without breaking stride.

We? He liked that-and the way she stuck with him. He liked that a lot. It was just plain good thinking on her part not to try to ditch him.

“We don’t need a taxi.” Not where they were going.

“You have a car?” Regardless of how easily she’d taken the change in direction, the look she leveled at him from over the tops of the perfectly round, small gold and tortoiseshell sunglasses she’d taken from out of her purse should have stopped him in his tracks.

It didn’t.

“Yes,” he said. “But we don’t need it either, not yet.”

He glanced over his shoulder and was relieved to see the coast was clear. They weren’t being followed.

“Why not?” she asked. It was a legitimate question, for which he had a quasi-legitimate answer, which she could either buy or not. It didn’t matter to him one way or the other.

“Give me a chance here,” he said, “and I’ll get you back to your hotel in due time.”

“Due?”

“Due.”

He kept hustling her along, and to his surprise, she kept letting him. He’d been expecting insurrection since they’d gotten off the roof.

“So where are we going?” she asked, her tone the only cool thing in the tropical city, and he meant cool like ice, but she still had the “we” thing going, which worked for him.

“I have a room at the Posada Plaza.”

Her gaze went unerringly to the decrepit five-story building partway down the next block, and he was impressed. She’d either done a lot of homework before showing up in Ciudad del Este, or she was paying very close attention to her surroundings. The sign for the Posada Plaza was damn near indistinguishable from the dozens of others tacked onto the building. At one time, the hotel had been stylish. Hints of its former glory remained in the building’s pink stucco and the ornate shutters still hanging next to a few of the windows, but there was no disguising what it had become-a dive, pure and simple.

“The Posada,” she said, her heels click-clicking in an unbroken rhythm as they crossed the street. “I almost booked in there.”

“No kidding?” Right, and tomorrow the sun was rising in the west.

“No kidding, but I changed my mind at the last minute, something about the roach count.”

“It’s pretty high,” he admitted, and that was no lie.

“Then what are you doing there?” she asked, sounding more curious than smart-mouthed about it. “You could have afforded better.”

“Location, location, location,” he said dryly, keeping her moving. They weren’t nearly far enough away from the unfolding disaster at the Old Gallery to suit him, no more than a hundred meters. He knew, because his radio signal was guaranteed to a hundred and fifty, and he’d wanted to leave himself a cushion-thus the Posada. “Where are you staying? The Gran Chaco, or El Caribe?” It was one or the other. There were only two ultra-luxury hotels in the city.

And wasn’t it sweet, this little conversation they were having, with the deal of the day blown all to hell behind them-and that pushed him. That pushed him hard. No matter how many times it blew up, this deal wasn’t done until he walked away with the prize.

“Gran Chaco,” she confirmed.

Well, she was in for a bit of a letdown then. The lobby of the Gran Chaco was a tropical paradise, a garden courtyard of exotic flowers and bubbling fountains with mosaic columns spiraling up two floors to flank a first-class Asian fusion restaurant and a bar famous for their Singapore Slings.

The lobby at the Posada Plaza had a grill across the check-in window to protect the night clerk, one dead plant in a pot at the bottom of the stairs, and a restaurant specializing in ptomaine.

Lucky for her, he wasn’t planning on keeping her very long-just long enough to shake a little information out of her and get her out of town. There wouldn’t be time for a meal.

Or anything else, for that matter, and he was pretty disappointed in himself for even thinking about anything else. But there it was, jump-starting his imagination with every roll of her hips, with every glance he slanted in her direction.

She was drop-dead gorgeous, silky auburn hair swept up into a sleek French twist, except for the strands that had slipped out and were brushing across her shoulders, pale skin, almond-shaped eyes, exotic and richly, deeply brown shot through with streaks of green and amber. They knocked him out every time she lowered her sunglasses and gave him one of those looks. And man, oh, man, did she have a mouth on her-in every sense of the word. Smart, like he’d said, damnably imperious, and lush, her lips slicked with some cinnamon-colored sugar-and-spice lipstick he wanted to lick off.

Yeah, that’s what he was thinking about, kissing her crazy while he got his hands up her dress. He usually had more sense, but her whole “can’t touch that” attitude was enough to make any guy want to rise to the challenge.

And he meant rise.

A fleeting grin crossed his mouth. That’s what came from six months of fantasizing about a woman-a short fuse.

“The Posada isn’t so bad,” he said. “No worse than most of what’s down here, as long as you stay out of the elevators.”

She cast him another one of those whiskey-on-the-rocks looks from over the tops of her sunglasses, and his grin widened. Yeah, a knockout, just like he’d said.

“They’ve got a tag team running the lifts and working the clientele between floors, Marcella and Marceline,” he explained. “The night clerk gets fifteen percent on the action between the first stop and the lobby, and the day clerk is taking ten on floors two through five, and everybody is shelling out five to the cops.” She needed to know how bad it was here, bad everywhere, on every corner, in every shop, not just Beranger’s when he was carrying hot goods. Ciudad del Este was a cesspool of violence and misery, the police included. She needed to know she needed to get out.

“Just a regular little home away from home,” she said, her heels still hitting the street, one step after another. No matter how bad it looked-and even from a fair distance, the Posada looked like rough trade in a bad dress-Suzanna Royale Toussi kept walking like she wasn’t in over her head.

So maybe he hadn’t made his point-not yet.

“They’ve got a few amenities,” he said. “Damn few.”

“You could have sold that Plymouth of yours and checked into the Gran Chaco. The suite next to mine is available, and no, that’s not an invitation.”

He let out a short laugh. If she knew about his 1971 Hemi ‘Cuda, a blue fish he’d named Charo, it was only because she’d gone looking to find out. A classic, Suzi Toussi was right, Charo was worth more than a few nights’ worth of suite living at the Gran Chaco.

“Have you been checking me out, Ms. Toussi?” He gave her an even more assessing look.

“You failed calculus,” she said.

So did you, he could have told her, but refrained.

“You were looking good, too, like you had it in the bag,” she continued, “up until you bombed the final and completely tanked your grade. You were smart, just not smart enough at seventeen to think your way around-”

“Consolata-”

“Rodriguez,” she finished for him. “Consolata wrecked your grade point and your Galaxie.”

“The ‘65 Ford, yeah, that was a car.” Geezus. More of his automotive history.

“Women seem to be a recurring weak point in your life, Mr. Killian.”

Right. Like he needed reminding in that department, especially from her. Geezus.

“You’ve been talking to Esmee.” Talking to Esmee a lot.

“She adores you.”

Yeah, he knew it.

“Have you seen the scrapbook she made about you?” the divine Ms. Toussi asked, thankfully without giving him another of those looks, without giving him any kind of look.

Yeah, he’d seen his little cousin’s scrapbook. She’d started it young, when he’d been a big hero to her. He just wished she’d stopped young.

“Sounds like you’ve been busy.” Unnervingly busy, but he wasn’t going to let that show-no way in hell, no matter how many of his report cards she’d seen, or how many of his pink slips she’d tracked down.

“And you’ve been lucky, starting with the night you didn’t show up at the chop shop on Steele Street when the rest of the boys got busted.”

“Are you talking about Dylan-”

“Hart, Hawkins, the whole crew ended up in juvie that night, and you ended up-”

“Knowing better.” Geezus again. Was there anything the woman didn’t know about him?

Yeah, of course there was. Guys in his line of work always had secrets, and unless you’d been there, part of the team, or were in the chain of command, you’d never know what had gone down in some of the places he’d been, would never know some of the things he’d done. It’s what separated the big bad boys from all the rest.

“Which is how you ended up Airborne, Ranger-qualified, and at Fort Bragg,” she said.

Okay, well, this was all damned interesting, but she couldn’t have gotten all that out of him in a month of Sundays, and for the record, she couldn’t have gotten the piece about the bust out of Esmee. His hero-worshipping cousin didn’t know about his car-stealing days. Ms. Suzi Toussi could only have gotten that little tidbit from one of Steele Street’s original chop-shop boys. He knew the crew was still alive and well and running hard out of Denver, but for the U.S. government, not for grand theft auto-and yeah, Suzi knew them. She’d known them for years, quite a few of them, he’d discovered in the course of his investigation, which was something he usually tried not to dwell on for too long-women’s pasts.

In her case, he’d made an exception. He’d been dwelling, plenty.

“None of which explains how you ended up in Ciudad del Este at the Galeria Viejo today,” she said with a smile, stopping at the front door of the Posada Plaza and pulling it open. “After you, Sergeant Killian.”

Oh, he got it. Oh, hell, did he suddenly get it. She thought she was in charge. Amazing. No wonder she was so generous with the “we” thing.

“That’s ‘former sergeant,’” he said with a smile, reaching above her on the door and gesturing for her to enter first. “You’re going to like my room-I’ve got a private bath, a hot plate, and a window that opens.”

The look she gave him might have felled a lesser man, but Dax just grinned-and followed her inside.