Breaking Loose

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Levi Asher’s palm was sweaty.

His face was sweaty.

His neck was sweaty.

Even his eyeballs looked sweaty.

And the more he drank, the sweatier he got.

Suzi reminded herself that she’d asked for this opportunity. She’d called him, knowing what she was getting herself into, but the possibility of being groped paled in comparison to the actuality of having Levi Asher trying to get his sweaty hand up her skirt.

Well, Marcella’s skirt.

“Suzi, Suzi Toussi,” the old man murmured for about the thousandth time since she’d shown up looking like Barbie Gone Wild, and the more he drank, the more he liked saying her name. “You are here. Thank God, we’re finally alone. This is wonderful. Champagne, yes?” He signaled to the waiter, then returned his full attention to her. “We must talk, Suzi. The day has been so…well, when my man, Gervais, told me you had come to Beranger’s this afternoon, I was astounded. Not in a hundred years would I have dreamed to see Suzanna Royale Toussi in Ciudad del Este…or, my dear”-he lowered his voice intimately, let out a soft burp, and continued-”that you would ever come to me so…so delightfully en déshabillé. You look lovely.”

Or like a cheap hooker, she thought, as the case may be, but actually, not so cheap. Besides the Get Out of Jail card she’d had to pony up for, Marceline had bargained hard for every piece of fashion she’d dragged out of her and Marcella’s closet. Suzi had never been afraid of a short skirt or a tight top in her life, but she didn’t have any illusions about how she looked.

Or any illusions about Levi Asher. He was rich for a reason, disgusting by nature, older than he appeared to realize, and getting drunker by the minute.

Just as well. She was hoping to catch him off his guard, get him to babble a bit, instead of just drool. If the old slimeball knew something, she wanted to know what.

She smiled. “Levi, we’re both a long way from London or New York right now.”

The waiter stepped forward to pour more champagne, while another refreshed the first course, bringing a second round of tapas.

Levi reached for a couple of bacon-wrapped dates and popped them in his mouth.

“Yes, a long way,” he said, chewing and leaning closer, his pale blue suit clinging to him in a dozen bad, sweaty ways. His hair was gray and very sparse across the top, his full face flushed with the heat, but his watery eyes were alight with excitement. “It’s the Sphinx, Suzi, she brought us here. She exists. She wasn’t just a figment of Howard Carter’s imagination. She is here. Now.”

“Where?” she asked bluntly. That was the damn question of the day, and by her count, that was the third time she had successfully brought the conversation around to it, so far without much luck in getting an answer. “I was with Remy when the police came to the gallery. He told me you were in the viewing room with Esteban Ponce. We were headed that way, but when the police started destroying everything and the shooting started, I ran out the back.”

“You were very wise to do so, my dear, very wise.” For once, he patted her hand instead of her ass or her knee, then he picked up his glass of champagne, drained it in one go, signaled to the waiter again, and popped another bacon-wrapped date in his mouth.

The man was a consumption machine.

“What happened in there, Levi? Did you see it? Was it there? The Sphinx?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head, and another burp escaped him. “Beranger showed us a fake in the viewing room.” His gaze moved impatiently over the fresh plates of tapas, going from one to the other. “I knew what it was, of course, but Ponce thought it was authentic. Beranger took the fake with him, when he went to greet you, I’m guessing. Then the shooting started. Good God, the service in Third World countries is usually better.” Spotting a waiter across the way, he snapped his fingers in the air. “Why don’t we have any tapenade?” he muttered. “There’s always tapenade on a tapas tray.”

“So where’s the real statue?” And that made four times.

Levi opened his mouth to say something but then seemed to think better of it and smiled instead, which was a shame, because Levi Asher had very gray, crooked teeth.

He obviously needed another glass of champagne, or two, or three, whatever it took to keep loosening his tongue.

“Well, that’s the million-dollar question, now isn’t it?” he did say, sounding like a jerk for a reason. “Fortunately, I have a lead I’m following, and I’m guessing you do not?”

He was always easy to hate.

“I’ve got a couple of things I’m working.” Like you.

For a moment, he looked at her, measuring her, chewing away with a chomping, swaying roll of his jaw. She didn’t have a clue what he was thinking-and that was not good.

“It’s been a difficult day,” he eventually said, then swallowed. “Stressful.”

He had that right.

Suzi leaned in closer, resting her hand on his leg and giving him a comforting little pat.

“Would you like some help, Levi? I’m very good at following leads and finding things,” she said, and under the table, she rubbed her strappy platform heel up and down his calf.

And that’s when she felt all the little hairs on the back of her neck start to rise.

Noticeably so.

Unavoidably so.

With her hand still on Levi’s leg, she glanced across the dining room, and ran smack-dab into an iron-gray gaze locked onto her like a tractor beam.

She considered herself very cool under pressure and oblivious to the unsolicited demands of men, and she was-except, it seemed, when it came to this man.

Her pulse instantly picked up in speed, and she quickly broke the contact between her shoe and Levi’s calf. She straightened up, sitting back in her chair and loosely linking her fingers around her champagne glass.

“Absolutely, Suzi dear,” Levi said, and she dragged her attention back to him. “No question about it. We should be working together on this. I’ve been thinking about it all day, ever since I heard you were here. Partners, yes, that would be best.”

Suzi stared at him for a moment, surprised-and wary. His offer appeared generous at most, and benign at the least, but she could guarantee it was neither. Levi Asher made his money by knowing other people’s business and knowing how to work it for his own gain. He was calculating and ruthless, and not anybody’s friend-least of all hers.

None of which dissuaded her, not at this point.

“I’m in,” she said unequivocally. “What did you have in mind?”

So she’d run out on Dax. So what. She refused to feel guilty. The whole fifty-fifty deal would never have worked-and yet she did feel a little twinge of guilt. He had gotten her out of Beranger’s, and considering what had happened in there, it was a damn good thing. He’d come after her at the Gran Chaco, and kept on coming, even after seeing what had happened to Jimmy Ruiz. He’d tried to protect her from going back into the gallery, and he’d paid Marcella and Marceline a hundred dollars to watch over her while he’d gone out to get her some dinner. She knew, because it had cost her another hundred to get them to sell her some clothes and let her out of the Posada.

He was practically a saint, and she’d run out on him.

Guilt, that’s what drew her gaze back across the dining room, and oh, hell, he looked good.

He’d changed clothes, cleaned himself up from the sludge and mud of the day’s misadventures. Unlike her, he looked very elegant, and yet still very tough, in a black polo shirt and a pair of dark gray slacks. She noticed he was still wearing his trail boots.

You can take the boy out of the jungle, she thought, but you can’t take the jungle out of the boy.

The polo shirt was almost a crime, really, the way it hugged his shoulders and how the material stretched around his biceps. He’d gotten the mud off his face and combed his hair, but it was sticking up a little in front. His jaw was hard and still stub-bled with beard, and he was relaxed back in his chair with all the barely leashed power and grace of every big bad boy who’d ever been at the top of the food chain.

Long legs, strong hands, oh, yes, there was a reason she’d been kissing on him all day.

“There’s a place up the river,” Levi said, leaning in closer, taking up the slack of her retreat. “And a man there who is… involved with the Sphinx.”

Her gaze shot back to Levi.

Her first score had netted her two points: a place up the river and an involved man. Maybe this was all going to be easier than she’d thought-but probably not.

She put her hand over Levi’s where he had it on her knee and gave him a little squeeze-a promising type of squeeze.

“What’s his name? Is he someone you know?” That’s all she needed, a name-the guy’s name or the place’s name. She didn’t care which, she just needed somewhere to start looking again, and she’d be out of El Caribe in a heartbeat.

“I don’t know his name, but I can guarantee he’s worth talking to.” Levi’s smile returned, all toothy and gray and maybe starting to get just a little bit wobbly, and she gave his hand another encouraging squeeze. “He was…uh, at Beranger’s today, after the damage was done. We were all scrambling around, trying to find the statue in the wreckage, and Remy was dying on the spot, shot up by the police, and not talking to anybody, though everyone tried to rush over and help.”

Yes, she just bet they had. Probably more like rush over and try to shake the location of the Sphinx out of him before he expired.

“That must have been terrible for you, Levi,” she said, leaning over again, letting her personal concern for his safety put a catch in her soft, soft voice.

He popped a tiny empanada in his mouth as his gaze slowly fell to her cleavage and got stuck there.

“It was a… a, uh, free-for-all in the gallery, absolutely crazy, Ponce and the cops with a whole damn platoon of bodyguards trying to take charge, which my men and I simply weren’t going to allow-and then this man came in the back door, just one man, and we all got hit.” He stopped, and reached for a toothpick with deep-fried baby squid on the end of it.

“Hit?” she prompted after a few seconds of dead silence.

“Uh, yes, Suzi dear.” He lifted his bloodshot eyes to meet hers and used his teeth to drag the bit of squid off the toothpick and into his mouth. “Zapped with some force,” he said around the tapa, “something unlike anything I’ve ever known, something hot. It was everywhere, all over us, making our skin crawl, and we all ran, but Gervais got caught by this man, right by the throat, and of all things, my dear, he wanted to know your name.”

A bolt of alarm skittered down her spine. That was the last thing she’d expected to hear.

“My name?” she asked.

“Yes,” Levi confirmed, still chewing. “And mine.”

“Wh-why?” This was not good, some guy zapping people in Beranger’s wanting to know her name.

“Because we’re the dealers here,” Levi said. “You and me. This man said he would have the Sphinx at this place up the river tomorrow, and he wants to sell, and who else is he going to contact in this town to unload something as valuable as the Maned Sphinx of Sesostris III besides you and me? Beranger is dead.”

Precisely, and Beranger was the last guy who’d tried to unload the Sphinx.

“Aren’t you jumping to conclusions? Just because this guy says he has the Sphinx doesn’t mean he actually has it.”

He looked at her like she’d missed the whole point-which she undoubtedly had.

“Nobody is jumping to anything,” he assured her, sounding thoroughly exasperated and annoyed and frustrated and like all the champagne and the four shots of vodka he’d had at the craps table were finally, suddenly, starting to kick in. “I have been ch-chasing this piece of Egyptian junk for the last damn four months, and that’s not counting all the years when I merely thought it might be out there somewhere, and the one thing I can guarantee you, Suzanna, is that somebody has it-in their hands, in their keeping, right now, in this damn city. Everything points to it being here.”

“But anybody could have it.”

“No.” He shook his head, adamant. “It’s not just anybody. It is this man who was at Beranger’s, who is now up the river, and… and you need to go up there and get the damn thing for me… for us.”

Oh, right. And that’s what this was all about? Levi welcoming her with open arms, not because she looked like a guttersnipe, but because he thought he could order her around?

Good God, the man was delusional.

“So where am I supposed to go?” Really, it couldn’t be this easy, but he looked so relieved when she asked that for a moment she thought it was going to be this easy.

“You don’t need to know that.”

The hell she didn’t, but she could let it ride for a minute or two.

“You’ll be going with Gervais, and he knows the name of the place and where it is.”

“Uh, what about you?” she asked. “Where are you going to be?”

He slumped back in his chair and squinted up at her from under his bushy gray eyebrows-and he burped.

“Suzi, you know I’m not a well man.” He reached for more champagne and filled his glass.

No, she didn’t. Overweight, old, and out of shape, yes, flat-out cowardly, yes, but not unwell.

“Actually, you look great, Levi,” she lied.

He beamed for just a second or two at the compliment. “So do you, my dear. You know, you’ve always been one of my favorites.”

“Thank you.”

“We need to work together on this,” he continued, taking a short gulp of wine before he continued. “Gervais wouldn’t know an authentic artifact if it hit him in the head, but you will, and if we present a solid front, this other man can’t play us off against each other.” He was making the hard sell and proving once again that for a real player, money trumped sex every time. “The piece starts at a million, we both know that, and he will, too, but working together, maybe we can keep the price from going to five, which means we both make money, profits to be split fifty-fifty.”

He had a buyer. She could see it in his watery gaze, and he was offering her a cut of the money, which told her exactly what he thought about this whole “up the river” plan-sketchy at best, dangerous at worst.

“What’s your client willing to pay?” All she needed was a name, and he’d have to give her one before she got on a boat heading anywhere.

He hedged for a minute, then said, “Eight.”

Which meant ten.

“Who is it?” she asked, even knowing he wouldn’t say. Push, shove, push back, pull-it was the game they played.

“He’s Japanese.”

“Ahh,” she said. All the good stuff was going to Japan these days.

“What about you?” he asked. “What’s your client willing to pay?”

“Twenty.” Twenty thousand, not million, but that was a minor difference in this situation.

His eyes widened for the briefest moment, and she knew he was hooked.

“Twenty? Well, yes, then, I think we go with your client on the Sphinx, and I’ll find my Japanese friend some other exquisite Middle Kingdom artifact.”

And there she was, making another fifty-fifty deal on something no one she knew had ever laid eyes on.

“Your buyer isn’t interested in a chance at immortality?”

“Suzi, please.” Levi gave her a long-suffering look. “The stories are good for increasing the price. If I had a dollar for every four-thousand-year-old magic statue I’ve handled, I’d be retired in the south of France by now.”

She, too, but she’d never handled a magic statue endorsed by the Defense Intelligence Agency of the United States of America.

“So where am I going tomorrow morning?” she asked again.

He just stared at her, blinking owlishly silently perturbed. She knew he didn’t like being pushed once, let alone twice-but neither did she, so she stared right back.

“You’ll have to shrust me on this,” he said, starting to slur his words.

Trust, she was sure, was what he meant, and the hell she did.

She scooted her chair back and started to rise, but he caught her arm with his hand and held her in place.

“Sit back down, S-uzi,” he whined. “Pul-lease, you need to-”

That’s as far as he got.

“Mr. Asher,” a strong masculine voice interrupted with a tone of command she instantly recognized.

Dax.

She turned and found him closing in on her and Levi.

The old man quickly released her, then immediately looked for his men.

“They went back into the casino,” Dax informed him, pulling up a chair from the next table. “We need to talk.”

“And you…are?” Levi asked, trying to draw himself up into a figure with some authority-and failing. Despite his effort, he was still slumped in his chair, all sweaty and drunk.

“Danny Kane, from The Daily Inquirer,” Dax said, flashing his press pass. “I’m down here following a story, and-”

“I’m, uh, sure that I don’t talk to reporters,” Levi said, not actually sounding too sure of anything. “And, Suzi dear”-he turned to her and started to rise shakily out of his chair-”I don’t think you should talk to any, uh, reporters either.”

“No, Levi,” she agreed, being careful not to look over at Dax. She stood, too. “Do you want me to walk you up to your room?” He wasn’t very stable on his feet

“No. No, my dear.” He was holding on to the table. “It’s been a frightful day, truly frightful, and I’m not feeling all that well.”

After four shots, numerous glasses of champagne, and a couple of pounds of deep-fried squid and bacon-wrapped dates, Suzi wasn’t sure that she’d be feeling very well either.

“Yes, Levi, I understand, but-”

“Ah, Gervais.” His gaze shifted to somewhere behind her, and his face brightened. He lifted his hand and beckoned the man over, then returned his attention to her. “You will be here in the morning, right? We have a deal?”

“Yes, but it would be best if you told me-”

He let out a short laugh. “Oh, no, Suzi. No, no. I’m not that drunk. In the morning. You can go with Gervais.”

Dammit.

The burly Frenchman hurried to Levi’s side, took him by the arm, and the two of them started off.

Dammit. Watching him leave just took it out of her, her last ounce of strength. The day had been too long, too brutal, too awful. Frightful, just like Levi had said. All she’d wanted was one damn name to make it all worthwhile, and she hadn’t been able to get it.

She turned to Dax, but before she could say anything, Levi called her name.

“Suzi… dear?”

She shifted her attention back to where he was standing a few feet away, Gervais by his side, still holding on to him, a small, pudgy old man in a very damp and wrinkled pale blue suit.

“Yes,” she said.

“I never got the sh-chance to, well, because He paused for a second, his brow furrowing as he looked at her. “Well, because we haven’t really run into each other lately, but I’m sorry.”

Sorry about something and drunk. She turned back to Dax, hoping to come up with something to say, because the “sorry” word wasn’t going to work for her, not with him. She was on a mission, not a social outing.

“About the girl in Ukraine,” Levi said from behind her back, his voice suddenly sounding painfully clear. “The one you’d set up with Pierre Dulcine in New York, to work in Dulcine’s gallery. He told me the girl was killed in Odessa, on vacation or something, such a terrible tragedy.”

Yes, a terrible tragedy, and poor old Levi didn’t know the half of it.

She took a breath but couldn’t quite find the strength to turn around and face him. It was too much at the end of a bad day, the same way the girl’s death had been too much three months ago. An eighteen-year-old Alabama girl who’d thought she was heading for a life of adventure in Europe, to work at a first-class resort. Instead, she’d ended up at a fourth-rate brothel on the shores of the Black Sea, a grim existence full of brutality and meagerness, and she’d died there.

“Pierre was shocked, of course, quite dishtraught,” Levi was going on. “And we were both so concerned for you, my dear, that somehow the whole awful-awful thing would bring back memories of your own terrible tragedy, what with the similarities. You know, the girl for Dulcine’s getting shot, and your daughter getting shot.”

Her heart stopped for a beat, and in that short, intense interval, all the pain she always barely held at bay came washing into her.

“How old was she again?” Levi asked. “Your little girl? Three?”

Three, and Suzi could hardly breathe, her little girl.

God, it had been so long-and would never be long enough.

Levi was still yammering away behind her, and the thought crossed her mind to just take her whole damn day out on him.

Her baby, her little girl, how dare he bring that much heartache back to life, how dare he be so casually destructive.

She started to rise from the table, her hands closing, tightening. Christian had taught her how to fight, and she could take Levi any day of the week-except before she could make a move, she was caught from behind and hauled up close to a very solid body. Dax, dammit.

“No” was all he said, very softly, very close to her ear, his grip like iron around her waist.

“Let go of-” She started to struggle, just letting herself get wound up to go after Levi and teach him a damn lesson, and maybe get her hands around his throat and just shake him until he gave her the damn name of the place on the river, just throttle the bastard, just get the information out of him-just get him to shut up.

“Not here, not now,” Dax said, his voice still so very calm, his words still for her ears only.

“You don’t understand,” she gritted from between her teeth, tensing against him, ready to fight him, too.

She felt movement around the table, heard the sound of footsteps, but her attention, every atom of her being, was focused on Levi Asher, on the dawning stupefaction spreading across his face that Suzanna Royale Toussi wanted to slug him.

“Back off,” she heard Dax say to someone coming up behind them. “I said back off. I’ve got her. We’re leaving.” He was angry, protective, his voice on edge.

Tension was pulsing around her, Levi babbling, his bodyguard steadying him, and Dax was taking charge, giving clear directions and walking away with her in his arms, getting them out of El Caribe.