Loose And Easy

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 make 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.

“Hi. You’ve reached the Aldens, Burt, Beth, and Esme,” her mother’s sweet voice said. “Leave us a message, and we’ll call you back.”

Esme figured when and if she ever got married, her mother would finally take her name off the family answering machine.

“Dad,” she said. “If you’re there, pick up. If you’re not, you should be, and either way, call me as soon as you get this message. The clock is running here, Dad.”

She hung up, and hit Dax’s number.

“Go,” he answered halfway through the first ring.

“I’m on my way to Isaac Nachman’s with the Meinhard.” And she was… sort of, in a roundabout way.

“Good going, bad girl, congratulations.” She could almost see him smile. “But you should have been at Nachman’s fifteen minutes ago.”

“I got hung up.”

“At the Oxford?”

“No. Back at the office.”

That slowed him down for a second.

“Your dad’s car didn’t start, right?”

He’d warned her against using her dad’s car, all but insisted she get a rental, but no, she’d had to use the old man’s minivan, so he could feel like he was contributing to the team.

The old man was going to get her killed.

She could see that coming now. His incompetence had always been contagious. It was why she’d worked so hard in school, and so hard keeping her ducks in a row, keeping her clothes tidy and her shoes clean and her homework done and her braids tight, and her pants on, just to have some goddamn control over something besides the missing grocery money, or the hocked television, or the men who sometimes had come to the house-men very much like Franklin Bleak and Kevin Harrell. It was why she’d moved to Seattle to work with Dax-to get away from the rolling inevitability of her dad’s disasters.

She’d begged her mom to come with her, but her mom had said no, she couldn’t leave Esme’s father-and if that was love, Esme didn’t want a damn thing to do with it.

“No. The minivan was starting for me all day. I didn’t have any problems with it until the cops booted it on Wynkoop.”

“Cripes,” he swore under his breath. “So where are you? In a cab?”

“Actually, I’m in Baby Duce’s backyard, sitting in a Cyclone.”

“Baby Duce? The Locos Baby Duce?” he asked after a moment, not exactly an innocuous question under the best of circumstances, and these weren’t anywhere close to the best, and she could tell by the tone of his voice that he’d figured that much out in a heartbeat, and that his mood had taken a sudden, understandably steep dive.

“Yes.”

“In a Cyclone?”

“Yes.”

There was another slight pause.

“A ’68?” he asked.

She’d known he wouldn’t be able to resist that one.

“Probably. It’s fast, got a lot of engine in it, but it’s really beat-up.”

“A sleeper,” he said.

Sure, she thought, a sleeper, the kind of car no one would suspect of having more power than Godzilla.

“You’re sitting in a sleeper in Baby Duce’s backyard.” It wasn’t a question. “Who’s holding the pink slip on the Cyclone?” That was a question, and she was going to get around to answering it pretty damn quickly, right after she assured him she was still doing her job.

“I’m only here for another couple of minutes, then I’m heading straight for Isaac Nachman’s.” One way or another, with or without Johnny Ramos.

“Answer the question, Easy, and then tell me you got the name of Bleak’s kid from your dad.”

What did she have to offer him, really, except a damning silence. Fortunately, with Dax, a damning silence was about all it took.

She heard him sigh.

“You know what this sounds like, Easy,” he said, his voice slipping down another notch into the “very unhappy” category.

“A royal screwup.”

“Like it’s time to close up shop and figure out another plan.”

“No. We’re still a go here.”

“Your dad-”

“I know.”

She heard the Dax Killian version of an angry outburst, which sounded a lot like a softly muttered “for the love of God and Patsy Cline.” Burt Alden was the family curse. The fact had been highly documented over the thirty-year course of her parents’ marriage.

“What aren’t you telling me, Easy? Start at the top, and don’t forget the Cyclone.”

It was situation report time-sit-rep-or confession time, depending on a person’s point of view and level of guilt, and he wasn’t going to like this part any more than she did.

“I was recognized at the Oxford by a guy I went to high school with, John Ramos. He followed me to the office. We talked for a couple of minutes and walked out. When I saw the van was booted, I crossed Wynkoop to get a cab, and the next thing I know, he’s hauling me up Sixteenth, because Dovey Smollett, Kevin Harrell, and this other guy look like they’re out to snatch me off the street. So we do the O’Shaunessy’s-Cuppa Joe double dog dare, lose them, and end up here in one of Baby Duce’s alleys in Ramos’s Cyclone.”

It was quite a story, even in the retelling, a royal screwup, just like she’d said, but all Dax said to her was, “Kevin Harrell.”

“I know.” Kevin Harrell had been hovering near the top of Dax’s “Guy’s Who Don’t Want to Meet

Me in a Dark Alley” list for years.

“Is Dovey Smollett Greg Smollett’s little brother?”

“Yes.”

“And why in the world would a Smollett be after you? What-did you break his heart in junior high or something?”

She wished it were that simple. She really did.

“He works for Franklin Bleak.”

Dax took Patsy Cline’s name in vain again under his breath. Three times on the Patsy business, and Esme knew the shit would hit the fan.

“I want you out of there now. Go back to the office, and-no, on second thought, skip the office. They’ve got that covered. Go to Mama Guadalupe’s. I’ll meet you in the bar.”

“I’m not meeting you anywhere, until I see Nachman and get the cash. We stick to the plan, Dax. Nothing has happened here, except for a half-hour delay.” More like an hour, actually, by the time she made it to Isaac Nachman’s mountain mansion, but the Denver industrialist was her next call. She’d smooth everything over, make the delivery, get the money, and meet Dax back at the Faber Building as planned.

“A half an hour and Bleak pooching the deal, bad girl. You know what this means. Bleak is looking to put the squeeze on your dad. And who is John Ramos?” Dax said. “What’s his angle? How do you know he’s not working for Bleak, too? What was he doing? Staking out the office, and then he follows you over to-oh, wait a minute here…ah, hell, Easy, don’t tell me John Ramos is Dom Ramos’s little brother.”

Okay, Dax. Her lips were sealed.

“He’s Dom Ramos’s little brother, isn’t he?”

“Well, Dax, I’m sitting here staring at five Locos in an alley off north Delgany. I’m not at a warehouse in Commerce City staring at a few hundred cases of toilet paper and fiesta napkins.”

“What are you doing on Delgany?” Dax’s voice took on an added edge. “I thought Baby Duce worked out of the Aztec Club.”

“The Aztec burned down a few years ago. To the ground. You really need to keep up.”

While she watched, one of the Locos pushed off the fence and started for the car, and all she could think was-Oh, baby, don’t go there. Nothing good could come from backing her into a corner, absolutely nothing good.

She very discreetly slipped her open hand up against the snap on her jacket. From that position, she knew exactly how far she was from her pistol- less than a second away-but she wouldn’t draw unless she made the decision to shoot. An unarmed blonde in a beat-up old car had a zero threat quotient to a gang of five Locos, and that’s exactly what she wanted all of them to keep thinking-that she was no threat to them. Once a gun was brought into play, all the rules would change.

“I keep up enough,” Dax assured her. “You tell Duce you’re with me. That dude owes me from way back. He won’t have forgotten.”

“Sure. If it gets to that, I’ll drop your name.” She wasn’t going to ask what Baby Duce owed him for, but she didn’t doubt the debt was real, or that Baby Duce would remember both it and Daniel Axel, Dax, Killian. All the time she’d spent being good in school and keeping her ducks in a row, Dax had spent running wild and making a name for himself. Dax’s ducks wouldn’t have known a row if it had snapped up and bit them in the butt.

“Have you called Isaac Nachman?”

“He’s next on my list. Trust me, there won’t be any trouble. He wants the Meinhard. You know how he is about his paintings. Me being even an hour late isn’t going to change anything or put us out of the running.”

“Call me when you get to Mama Guadalupe’s.”

“Can do. It should be about eleven,” she said, keeping her eye on the young Loco. He smiled at her, showing off two rows of pearly whites with his incisors capped in gold-vampire-style. Geezus.

“If there’s any trouble, any at all, I want you-”

“Nachman knows the drill,” she interrupted. There wasn’t going to be any trouble, not with Isaac Nachman. “Dad’s done amazing work for him over the years. Geez, Dax, Dad’s the one who tracked down Nachman’s Renoir. In sixty years, no one else even got close to it, and with me on board now, the Meinhard is another clean transaction.”

Disasters and general failures aside, her dad did have a real flair for finding stolen art, especially if it had been stolen by the Nazis, which encompassed most of the Nachman family’s missing pieces.

Hitler’s ambassador to France had personally absconded with three hundred and forty-eight paintings and drawings out of the Nachman family vault. To date, one hundred and twenty-three had been recovered, over forty of those by her father, including, as of tonight, the Jakob Meinhard.

“So what’s your ETA?” she asked.

“Ten-thirty to eleven o’clock on the outside. I’m on the back roads in the boondocks south of Denver. The interstate is a traffic jam,” Dax said. “If you get to the bar first, don’t have a margarita. Just wait for me. When I get there, we’ll decide whether or not we need a new plan for dealing with Bleak. And answer your darn phone when I call.”

“Can do.” She started to hang up, but he stopped her.

“Easy, wait.”

“Yes.”

“So what’s the deal with Dom’s little brother? What’s his stake in this? What does he want?” Dax asked.

“I haven’t figured that part out yet. He said he came to the office to hire my dad, but I don’t think that’s it.”

“He tailed you from the Oxford without you knowing it?”

Talk about rubbing it in.

“Yes.”

“And he saw Smollett before you did?”

And that was even worse.

“Yes.”

“And he got you out of there.”

“Yes.”

“Take him to Nachman’s with you.”

No. Her plan was to dump him and catch a cab.

“Dax, I don’t-”

“Easy,” he interrupted. “You’ve got Bleak looking for you, and I’m not there to watch your back. Whatever this guy’s reasons for tailing you, I’d rather you kept him close. Maybe he’ll come in handy. So far he’s made pretty good moves.”

“Dax, I’m sitting in Baby Duce’s backyard with five Locos staring me down.” And one of them was moving in.

“You’re there with Domingo Ramos’s little brother, sweetheart, and that blood runs deep. Ain’t nothing going to happen to you on Locos turf, and this John guy knows it.”

Sure, she knew it, too, except even the oldest gangster in the alley was too young to have run with Dom, and the one moving in on her might not even remember Carlos, and Johnny’s time had run out about a minute ago.

“Well,” she said. “If I don’t make it to the bar at Guadalupe’s, remember, the body will be just off Delgany, behind Butcher Drug Store.”

“If I believed that for even a second, I’d be calling in the cavalry.”

Esme felt herself blanch. “Uh… no. No cavalry. Honest, Dax. I’m fine. You’re right.” The last damn thing she needed was Dax’s idea of Denver cavalry, which could be summed up in two words: Lieutenant Loretta. The woman had been a beat cop long before she’d made lieutenant, and if there was a kid on the street she hadn’t scared straight, that kid had probably ended up in Canon City.

She’d scared the crap out of Esme. One little incident of being in the wrong place at the wrong time had been all the delinquency Esme had been able to handle.

Lieutenant Loretta was a big woman, reddish hair, large nose, amber-eyed, kind of lovely… maybe, if a person wasn’t shaking in her shoes, looking straight up at her. Esme had been shaking like a leaf the night she’d run up against the lieutenant, and she was going to skip the cavalry tonight. Loretta Bradley didn’t forget, ever. That was the urban legend, and Esme wasn’t about to put it to the test.

“Hola, chica.” The gangster with the gold incisors finally reached the Cyclone and leaned down in the driver’s-side window, all flash and swagger. Two spiders inked into his skin covered the back of his right hand. Not black widows, she didn’t think, not tarantulas, but brown recluses-with fangs. Cripes.

“Gotta go, Dax.”

“Watch yourself.”

“Check.” She hung up the phone and gave the gold-toothed, spider-inked wonder a contemplative look, wondering how much longer Johnny was going to leave her here, holding down the fort in the damn alley, and whether or not it really was in her best interest to get out of the car and start walking.

Somehow she didn’t think so.

The longer she held his gaze, the wider the boy’s grin got.

“You see somethin’ you like, gatita?” he asked, leaning a little farther into the car.

Not really, especially since two of the other guys had pushed off the fence and were heading toward the Cyclone. She didn’t like seeing that at all.

“Maybe.” She smiled back. “Do you like…uh, Vermeer?” She was floundering, making conversation, passing time, and hoping she could just slide her way through the next few minutes without having to make a big deal out of saving her ass.

But these guys weren’t going to touch her. No way. Not when this one was flashing vampire teeth and arachnids.

“Sure, chica.” He nodded his head, very cool, very laid-back. “I love Vermeer. Me gusta mucho. You got some? You wanna party?”

“Me gusta Vermeer, también,” another of the gang members said, leaning down to look in the driver’s-side window. He, too, had spiders tattooed on the back of his right hand.

“Kiko,” the guy with the gold teeth said, “wasn’t that Vermeer boom we were smokin’ at Rosario ’s?”

“Yeah,” the third Loco confirmed. “That was Vermeer.” She couldn’t see his right hand, but her money said he was sporting a spider tat.

“That was good shit, man.”

“Yeah.”

Yeah, Vermeer was good shit. Adolph Hitler had me gusta muchoed it so much, he’d stolen a piece from the Rothschilds in 1941, an exquisite painting done by the artist in 1668, The Astronomer. To the benefit of everyone, the piece currently resided in the Louvre.

On the other hand, she was currently residing in this damn Cyclone, and Johnny Ramos was now two minutes late.

“So, chiquita, cómo se llama? What’s your name?” vampire boy asked.

Esme didn’t give it a second thought.

“Margaret Mead.” That was the name she was going by in the alley tonight.

“Ah, Margarita.” They all chimed in, charming as hell, and why not? She was no threat to them.

Yes, Margarita frickin’ Mead.

“Arañas, qué tal? Eh?” She heard Johnny make his way through the crowd around the driver’s door, and all she could think was that it was about time.

“Juanio.” The boy with the gold teeth greeted him, giving him a sign that Johnny returned.

“Ramos, your girl.” One of the other Locos made a kissing sound. “Se me empalmó.”

The other guys laughed. The banter continued, and from the sounds of it, Esme was glad she didn’t speak Spanish.

Behind Johnny, from somewhere in the yard, she heard a guy shout out. She glanced through the windshield and saw the tall, muscular man with all the tattoos-Baby Duce. Within seconds, the Locos had melted back into the alley, returning to their posts.

Crisis averted, thank God.

“You’re late,” she said, when Johnny finally got inside the car.

“And you’re Margaret Mead?” He slid her a highly skeptical look.

“Margarita Mead,” she corrected him.

“Shifting your anthropological research from the indigenous tribes of New Guinea to the inner-city tribes of Denver?”

She lifted one eyebrow, nonplussed. This boy was no gangster. She didn’t care how tight he was with Baby Duce.

“Uh… gang culture is highly regarded as a legitimate field of academic inquiry with a number of direct correlations documented between it and more traditionally recognized tribal customs and affiliations.” It was the truth. More than one dissertation had been published on the subject.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Right. That’s what I’ve been studying for the last few years, too, tribal culture.”

For no good reason, she believed him, even if she did get the idea that somehow they were talking about two different things.

“Well, I mean, of course, aside from the violence of the gangs,” she added, wanting to clarify that she understood there were some inherent differences.

He let out a short, humorless laugh. “There’s no ‘aside’ about the violence, Esme. It’s front and center and always coming up behind you when you’re not looking, and I can guarantee there isn’t a gang in America that has anything on the ‘more traditionally recognized tribes’ when it comes to sheer, mind-numbing brutality. It’s a war zone out there, babe, every day, in every way.”

The casual bluntness of his words struck a chord, giving them a hard validity.

“Voice of experience?” she asked, curious as hell.

In answer, all he did was hold her gaze, clear and steady. By the time he looked away, she had all the answer she needed.