Loose And Easy

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Solange stretching out at twenty-five over, riding a hundred, city lights streaming through the darkness, growing fainter in the rearview, making the run up into the mountains, the run up to Genesee-Johnny had done it more than a few times on a hot summer night like tonight, escaped the city for the cooler air of the high country.

And yeah, sometimes he’d had a girl with him. There were a few places up here in the hills where a guy could get pretty busy with his sweetheart. There was even a map of some of the better places tacked to the garage wall on the third floor at Steele Street, put there by the SDF guys back in the day when they’d all considered themselves backseat urban legends. Some of the places had hash marks by them and stories attached to the hash marks, some of which had been alluded to a few times over the years, mostly when the guys had gotten back from some particularly hairy mission and ended up hanging around, working on cars and downing a few beers-some pretty good stories, actually, mixed in with a lot of remembered teenage bull and bravado.

Johnny had put a hash mark up on the map one time, and Skeeter had walloped the holy hell out of him. He’d kept his sexual exploits to himself after that. For being such a badass operator, she was still such a girl. Red Dog had more edge on her, and even though she was smaller than Skeeter, there wasn’t a guy on the team who’d take a bet on himself going up against her, not even Superman, and Christian Hawkins was the guy who’d trained her.

Johnny couldn’t help but wonder who had trained Esme. He didn’t know if she had any handto-hand combat skills, but she’d certainly handled her.45 like she knew what she was doing.

He downshifted into third, pulling one of the big hills out of Denver, heading into the darkness of the mountains. With one hand on the steering wheel and the other staying on the gearshift, a grin curved his mouth. She’d kissed him. Esme Alexandria Alden had kissed him like she’d wanted to eat him alive, twice-all grown-up and wearing red lace panties.

Not such a bad night after all, he decided.

The Bleak business didn’t have him too worried. When he’d gone back in the house on Delgany to talk with Duce, the Locos’ boss hadn’t hesitated to sign on to the Bleak payoff. Good for business, Duce had said, letting Bleak know he wasn’t pulling anything off on the Locos moving his load of cakes out of Chicago. Duce might even do the guy a favor and cop a couple of points off the top of the keys, take his tribute, put his mark on the deal, and keep the Parkside Bloods from turning Mr. Bleak inside out, literally, for thinking there was room on the north side for another dealer to be bringing in coke. Those rights were won the hard way, and Bleak hadn’t even skirmished for them, let alone gone to battle-which was more information than Johnny had wanted to hear. He knew how it all worked, the drug and turf wars. Dom had died in his and Duce’s arms during battle with the Parkside Bloods-and man, he hadn’t ever been within spitting distance of any goddamn drug ever again, not any illegal substance, and he didn’t want within spitting distance of Bleak’s cakes.

Cash-delivery boy was probably more than he should have signed on for, more than he wanted General Grant to know about, but there wasn’t any way for him to stand by and let Esme do the delivery. He was seriously thinking about stringing her dad up from the nearest light pole and leaving him there for a week or two. What was the bastard thinking? Letting his daughter do his dirty work for him.

When they’d been growing up, Johnny had known Esme’s home life had gotten a little sketchy at times. By the time they’d reached high school, he’d also figured out why she was so damn careful with all her little personal parts, like her hair, and her buttons, and her shoes. He could have told her that keeping her buttons buttoned and her shoes clean wasn’t going to change a damn thing about running out of groceries, and neither was having all her homework done with extra credit, not in the short run, but he figured, in her heart, she’d probably already known that. He and Dom had always just hustled a little here and there and slid by the rest of the time, but Johnny knew that sliding by and hustling didn’t work out the same for girls.

She’d turned out great, though. She’d gone to college, and whatever he thought about her private investigation business, it obviously afforded her some very nice underwear. There were worse jobs.

He couldn’t think of any off the top of his head right now, not for the smartest girl in school, considering where she’d ended up tonight and who was after her, but he knew there were worse jobs.

“We’re about a half an hour out of Genesee, tops,” he said. “You want to tell me what’s in the bag, what we’re delivering, and maybe everything you know about this Nachman guy we’re delivering it to?”

Even a private investigator had to realize that information, intelligence, was the key to success. It wasn’t to her advantage to leave him in the dark, not about everything, or anything, for that matter.

“Isaac Nachman,” she said, obviously understanding. “Seventy-nine years old, born in Germany, lost his father, a brother, and two sisters to the Holocaust. His mother was American, from here in Colorado. She and Isaac came home to visit his grandfather back in 1939, shortly after the German invasion of Poland, and they never made it back to Europe. Isaac took over his grandfather’s tire business after the war, put his name on the masthead, and made millions.”

“Nachman Tires?” he asked, taking Solange back up into fourth gear.

“That’s the one.”

Johnny let out a low whistle. Multi, multi, multi-millions, Nachman had to be the richest guy in the state. Everyone used Nachman tires-the auto manufacturers, the government, the military, the Indy cars. Nachman rubber hit the road every day of the week from L.A. to New York, and from Baghdad to the Midnight Doubles.

He slanted Esme a quick glance. No wonder she was dressed to kill in couture with diamond earrings.

He didn’t have to look at himself. He knew exactly what he was wearing, what he was always wearing. If it wasn’t a uniform, it was jeans, a shirt, a T-shirt, and a pair of boots.

It worked, that’s about all he could say about his wardrobe.

“There’s going to be a helluva security system on his house.” That was the second thing to pop into his mind.

“Fortunately, we’re not here on a B and E, to break and enter,” she said, her tone a little dry, which was a good sign. She was regaining her composure. “We’re invited. We’re here on business.”

She had her legs crossed in the passenger seat, and her skirt was riding up, and for all that he was thinking about getting up to this rich old tire guy’s house and doing the contraband-for-cash dance, he hadn’t for a second forgotten where he was taking her after that-to bed, his bed. At least he was going to give it his best shot. He wasn’t passing Go. He wasn’t collecting anything.

“You’re invited,” he clarified. “I’m unexpected.”

“It won’t be a problem. He might not even…uh, particularly notice that you’re there. He’ll be pretty focused on the property I’ve recovered. He’s a very, uh, very gracious man, but just a tidge eccentric. I’ve dealt with him before, with my dad.”

That got her a lift of his eyebrows. Her dad? What in the hell was a guy like Isaac Nachman doing hiring a guy like her dad? It didn’t make sense. Multimillionaires usually had their own people on staff to do anything, including investigations and security. He could see where Nachman would hire a brilliant, classy private contractor like Esme for a specific situation, maybe something she specialized in, but her dad, what Johnny remembered of him anyway, and certainly from what he’d seen tonight, was a jerk with about as much class as a ten-cent hot dog.

“Your dad…” he started, then let his voice trail off, hesitating. Her dad was a royal fuckup kinda guy, but it wasn’t Johnny’s place to say it like that, not to her. He’d save his unvarnished opinion for the guy who needed to hear it the hard way-her dad.

“Actually, he has a good reputation when it comes to art recovery,” she filled in his pause with another surprising piece of information.

“Art recovery? You mean he finds stolen art?”

She nodded. “Yes. The Nachman family lost over three hundred paintings to the Nazis during the war, including a Renoir my dad helped them find and reacquire, and they’ve never stopped looking for the rest of them, especially Isaac.”

Nazis. Germans. The guy in the Oxford Hotel with a sliced-and-diced suitcase and a neatly cut-open suit jacket-Johnny’s gaze landed on the messenger bag.

Geezus. He was such an idiot.

“You’ve got a painting in there.” Of course, she did, a damn small painting stolen by Adolf Hitler and, somehow, miraculously recovered by Esme Alexandria Alden and her deadbeat dad.

Easy Alex wasn’t anybody’s drug mule. Hell, no. He should have known that down to his bones- not that knowing it would have necessarily gotten him thinking of stolen art. Nikki McKinney, now she got him thinking about stolen art. One of her “ascending angel” pieces had been stolen in transit to Los Angeles a few years ago, and it had opened up quite a lengthy discussion at Steele Street, and a little personal private investigation on SDF’s part. Dylan had been the one to find the piece, and Hawkins and Kid had gone and gotten it back.

No one had said much more about it, other than Johnny knowing it hadn’t been the first or the last time the guys had done a little inside work off the record. Things came up with friends and family, and the guys had skills. They’d been superlative car thieves at sixteen, and had become absolutely world-class burglars of anything and everything General Grant tasked them with getting in the ensuing years.

“An incredible painting,” Esme confirmed. “Jakob Meinhard’s Woman in Blue, an Expressionist masterpiece. He painted it in 1910, and up until a few years ago, people thought it had been burned in Berlin in 1939, or possibly in the Tuileries in 1941. Hitler had thousands of pieces destroyed in those two fires. The führer hated modern art. He thought it was degenerate, an abomination undermining the character of the state.”

Johnny hadn’t known that. Not any of it. Nazis and art had never collided in his educational experiences. Land navigation-he had that down cold. HALO, High Altitude, Low Opening jumping out of airplanes with a ram-air square parachute-no problema. Small-unit tactics-he’d studied those hard, given them his all. But the Nazis were way before his time, and the only art education he’d ever had was hanging buck-ass naked from Nikki’s studio ceiling while she’d filmed him in angel wings in the middle of a lightshow and music maelstrom.

“And you and your dad found this Meinhard painting?”

“Just my dad. He tracked down its whole history, from when it was initially smuggled from Germany into France via a diplomatic pouch, to its inclusion with a score of the Rothschilds’ collection at one of their castles in the Loire, to when the Nazis discovered the cache of paintings and seized them all. He’s good, he really is, but he’s best at finding the paintings, and not so good at actually getting them back. In the case of the Meinhard, he’d set up a deal, but it fell through in the clutch, and he lost the cash he’d brought for the exchange without getting the painting. I took over the investigation a month ago and managed to get the seller back into place.”

“The guy in the Oxford?”

“Yes. Otto Von Lindberg.”

“You knew exactly how to set him up, didn’t you, exactly how to play him?” And that was a sobering thought.

“Otto and I go back a few years,” she said coolly.

And there was another sobering thought. She played hardball on this court all the time. Geezus.

“So what was your dad up to, trying to buy the painting back from Von Lindberg? Was he working for Nachman, being a go-between?”

She let out a short breath. “Initially, yes, but Dad has a way of getting into trouble. He gets in over his head, and then it’s just one big Ponzi scheme for him, robbing Peter to pay Paul, and making deals and promises he shouldn’t, hoping it will all turn out right in the end.”

“He gambles,” Johnny said, and she agreed.

“With everything.”

Which Johnny couldn’t have cared less about, except this time, Burt Alden had gambled with Esme’s well-being, with her safety, and frankly, that pissed him off-royally.

“Can I see it? The painting?” He’d sure like to know what all the fuss was about, because the night had been full of fuss.

“Sure,” she said, reaching down and opening the messenger bag.

He concentrated on the road, until he heard her snap open the metal case she’d slipped into the bag at the office.

He glanced over to where she had opened the case. It was dark inside Solange, but Esme had taken out her flashlight and had it shining on the small piece of art inside its protective covering.

“That’s not canvas, is it?” The painting was too solid, too stiff.

“No. Meinhard painted this piece on copper. It’s one of only three pieces he did on metal. One is in the Louvre, and the other was with the Rothschild collection. It hasn’t been seen since 1942.”

Johnny could see it, even under its covering. Sure he could, and he supposed if a person liked red, orange, gray, and green with a big smear of blue and a little dab of pink-well, yeah, he could see that if a person liked that, well, then they would like Jakob Meinhard’s Woman in Blue on copper.

Alrighty, then. Now he knew. Their asses were on the line, and the one thing that could save them and old Burt was an eight-by-ten-inch brightly colored piece of copper that didn’t look anything like a woman-and yes, it was called art. He wasn’t a complete heathen. He didn’t doubt for a second that the thing was worth all the trouble everyone had ever gone to for it. But by flashlight light, in a moving car, under its cover, it was a stretch to see the “masterpiece” part of the Expressionist masterpiece.

It was plenty expressionistic, though. He could give it a perfect ten for expressionism.

“Very cool,” he said, and yeah, he knew that was about a low-end one on the art appreciation verbalization scale, but for all that he’d posed for Nikki, he’d never really picked up the lingo.

“Cool?” Esme sounded a little disappointed in his opinion.

He was, too. Truly.

“Yeah, cool. Very, uh, colorful. It kind of looks like Solange, with the blue and all, and the curves, and that thicker swath of gray straightaway. The red could be her taillights.”

“Solange, your car?”

“Yeah, very curvy, very female, I guess, when I look at it a little more. I never heard of Jakob Meinhard, but the painting looks like it could be worth quite a lot of money.” He was telling her the truth. The long slinky lines and the colors reminded him of the Cyclone, but as far as opinions went, that one probably didn’t have many redeeming qualities either-a fact she conveyed quite succinctly with her closing of the painting into the case.

“It is,” she said.

And there he was, back in high school, in another classic Esme Alden moment-in over his head.

“The word masterpiece alone implies a certain value.” That sounded a little better-maybe.

Hell, if she wanted to talk art, she needed to be talking to Hawkins. Superman could even outtalk Nikki about all the “this and that” of art, and he’d married a woman who owned art galleries, for crying out loud.

“Yes, it does.”

He heard her snap the case shut.

“How much could you get for it on the open market?” he said, cutting to the chase. There probably weren’t any additional redeeming qualities in that question either, but he wanted to know.

“There is no open market, per se, for works of this quality if they’re stolen,” she said, sliding the case back into the leather messenger bag.

Fair enough.

“How much on the black market?”

“Half a million.”

Quite a hell of a lot of money, just like he’d said.

“And if it wasn’t stolen and could be bought legitimately?” he asked.

“One point five to two million.”

He didn’t whistle at that. He just kept driving.

Two million dollars, sitting in his car.

He’d known life was going to be interesting, being back in Denver, being part of SDF, or at least almost part of SDF, but, man, he’d come up with Esme Alden and a two-million-dollar painting all on his own. And any girl dealing in two million dollars’ worth of art had done damn well by herself, her screwup dad aside. Private investigations on that scale were a few cuts above following errant spouses around with a long lens, or tracking down the guy who hadn’t paid his construction lien.

The sudden vibration of his phone had him reaching in his pocket to pull it out. He automatically looked at the screen before he answered.

“Skeets, wazzup?”

“General Grant, Johnny-boy. He’s here, up on The Beach with a bottle of Scotch.”

Johnny sat up a little straighter behind the wheel. Oh-kay.

He might not have been an official member of the SDF team yet, but he’d been working at Steele Street and living in the annex at the Commerce City Garage for almost ten years, and of the few times that General Grant had come to Denver, he’d only gotten plastered up on The Beach once, when he’d come to mourn J. T. Chronopoulos, one of the original chop-shop boys and one of the original members of SDF.

“Did someone die?” It was a hard question, an awful question, the kind a guy felt in his gut, but with a few of the operators out on missions, anything was possible, and the hard questions always needed to be asked first.

“No. I ran everybody down as soon as I realized where Grant had gone and that the Scotch was missing from the guest suite,” Skeeter said. “He’s called a meeting for the A.M., and he wants everyone here.”

“Red Dog and Travis-” Johnny started, but she cut him off.

“They won’t make it. Senators rule, SDF drools when it comes to fact-finding tours of Third World countries. They stay put.”

“Smith?” C. Smith Rydell was the other operator currently deployed.

“Arriving at Peterson in a couple of hours. Everyone else is either driving in or flying in before dawn, and we’re all meeting up here. Your name is on the guest list.”

The news set him back for a second. He’d expected it, sure, but to hear it.

Hoo-yah … he grinned-except if Grant was here to deliver good news, what was up with the Scotch?

“Yeah, I’m wondering the same damn thing,” Skeeter said, reading his mind-business as usual with SDF’s spooky long-legged blonde. He’d spent enough time with her under the hood of a car not to be surprised when she knew exactly what he’d been thinking.

“Exit,” Esme whispered, pointing up ahead to an exit ramp.

He nodded and pulled over into the right-hand lane.

“Who all’s at the garage?” The building at 738 Steele Street had thirteen floors, seven of which housed cars, mostly American muscle from the sixties and early seventies.

“The jungle boy and I have been working on Mercy all night, and Superman is here.”

“And the meeting?”

“Eight A.M., everybody on board, front and center. Creed and I will be hosting. The coffee will be Jamaican, hot, and strong, and the doughnuts will be fresh from Sugarbombs.”

Excellent. Everything was excellent. He and Skeeter had been living on Sugarbomb doughnuts since he’d gotten home, and Creed’s coffee could stand in a corner without a cup, which was just the way Johnny liked it.

And the timing was perfect. Eight A.M.-plenty of time for him to do the Bleak deal for Esme and still get to Steele Street with time to spare. No one at SDF need ever know he’d spent the night skirting some pretty sketchy edges.

“I’ll be there at seven-thirty,” he said.

“Good. Are you still at the Blue Iguana?”

“Not quite.”

That gave her a little pause.

“Did you get lucky, chico?” She was grinning. He could tell.

“Not quite.”

She let out a short laugh. “Well, if you run out of places to go, come here before you go home. Creed and I could use some help with Mercy’s-”

The rest of her words were lost in static, and then he lost the whole connection.

It happened in the mountains. He could call her back later.

Putting his phone back in his pocket, he slipped off the interstate onto the exit-Genesee, Isaac Nachman in sight, Bleak on the horizon, and in between, him and Easy Alex finally getting where they’d always needed to be, naked in bed.

Yeah, he needed that. He’d needed it for a long time, and never more so than since he’d gotten back from his last tour of duty.