Loose And Easy

CHAPTER FOUR

Oh-kay, Johnny thought, looking at the stunned expression on Esme Alden’s face. This is good…I think.

Sure. Shell shock was good. It meant he wasn’t what she’d expected, and that could only be good, considering that everyone from his parish priest on down to his guidance counselor had expected him to end up in prison before his twenty-first birthday.

“Esme. Hi. Good to see you.” He gave her an easy smile and stuck out his hand. “You don’t mind if I come in for a minute, do you?” Low-key, friendly, but not too friendly-that was him.

She responded automatically, putting her much smaller hand in his. Her grip was firm, her skin warm.

“John… Ramos, yes, well… come in, yes.” She was slightly breathless, but given the night she’d had so far, he didn’t blame her.

When she stepped back, he stepped into the office, and since she hesitated about what to do next, he did it for her, taking hold of the door and quietly closing it behind him, which left them in the dark-not such a bad place to be with a woman wearing red lace panties and a push-up bra.

But that wasn’t why he was here-or maybe it was. He wouldn’t have followed Liz Malone, a great girl from his twelfth-grade chemistry class, or Benita Montoya from calculus, or Janessa Kaliski from English… okay, he might have followed Janessa Kaliski, if he’d seen her on the street dressed in next to nothing and platform heels. But he wouldn’t have followed her into a hotel, climbed down a fire escape, and jogged through an alley to catch up with her.

No. He’d done that because it had been Easy Alex he was trailing.

“I… uh, guess I should explain right up front,” she said with an absent gesture, carefully backing her way toward one of the desks in the office, one high-heeled step at a time. “I don’t actually work for my father.”

There were two desks in the office, two bookcases, and four filing cabinets, another door besides the bathroom door, two overstuffed chairs, and enough light coming in the windows for him to see it all.

“Well, I do, actually,” she was going on, “but I don’t do my dad’s kind of work. I do secretarial stuff… like filing… and stuff… so, I, uh, don’t know how I could help you… with anything, I mean… like a problem.”

Yeah, right. Every secretary he knew made a habit of checking the chamber on their.45 before they filed the day’s invoices. So now he had the German, the hog-tying, the theft, the weapons, and the first lie.

The night was definitely getting interesting.

“But I can, uh…” She paused for a second as she leaned over the desk and switched on a lamp. “I can give you one of my dad’s business cards.”

“Thanks, that’ll be great,” he said, and she gave him a bland little weak sort of smile, before turning and rummaging through a catchall box on top of the desk.

Behind her back, he grinned. She’d always been the queen of the bum’s rush, and it was nice to know some things never changed, but she was hell out of luck tonight. Any woman who needed a.45 after hog-tying a guy in a hotel room was probably more trouble than she was worth. As a matter of fact, he was absolutely positive of it, and yet he was hooked, like a big old fish with the bait stuck in his gullet.

Little Miss Goody Two-shoes packing a pistol. That was his line of work, his territory, and he couldn’t help but wonder what she was doing in it. Back when they’d been in school together, the closest they’d gotten to common ground had been in the backseat of Hawkins’s 1971 Challenger, a beautiful beast named Roxanne. He hadn’t seen Esme since, and in between then and now, she was supposed to have become some kind of kick-ass accountant, or corporate lawyer, or at least have saved the whales. She’d always been going on about saving the whales. Never in a million years would he have guessed “gun-toting hooker” would end up on her resume, or even “gun-toting hooker impersonator.”

“Somebody told me you’d moved to Seattle,” Johnny said, looking around the office, and there was just no denying it. The place was a dump, frayed on every edge. “I think it might have been Toby Eaton.”

“Toby Eaton,” she repeated, still rummaging through the box. “Sure. I… uh, remember him. Good old Toby. Wasn’t his dad the one who owned the hardware store over on Thirteenth?”

“Did,” he said. “They lost their lease on the building a few years back. It’s all condos on that corner now, and Toby is selling used Subarus up on Sheridan. Funny, isn’t it.”

She looked up from her search. “Funny?”

“How life can throw you a curve,” he explained. “Toby always thought he’d be working for his dad, selling screwdrivers, not shilling Subarus up on Sheridan.”

One of her eyebrows arched briefly, a nonplussed expression passing over her face before she dropped her gaze back to the desk.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s… uh, too bad, old Toby getting a rough deal like that.” Her tone implied otherwise, like the difference between selling screwdrivers and Subarus could be summed up in one word-tonnage-and probably didn’t have a damn thing to do with fate or thrown curves or legitimate bar-stool philosophy.

“Kind of the opposite of you, I guess.”

“Me?” Esme’s gaze came back to his, but with a definite wariness in it this time.

“Yeah,” he said. “You’re the last person I would have thought would end up working for their dad. So this must be your desk over here.” He moseyed over to the corner of the office. “The one next to the filing cabinets, for when you do your filing.”

Yeah, he said it with a straight face, even though the cabinets didn’t look like anything had been filed in them in the last hundred years. They were four of the junkiest damn things he’d ever seen, gray metal, dented, heavily scratched, a couple of broken handles. Everything in the office looked old and beat-up, except for the sleek black laptop set precisely in the middle of a cleaned-off area on top of the corner desk-and her.

Up close, she looked amazing. The girl had great lines, about five feet five inches of mind-bending curves wrapped in a suit that fit her like a glove, and he was upping the ante on her ass to a very nice size six. All that leg in fishnet had skewed his first calculation, but bent over a desk, hell, he didn’t make mistakes when a woman was bent over a desk.

Actually, he didn’t make mistakes when a woman was bent over anything. He had that contingent covered. Literally.

Size six. He was putting the bank on it.

He picked a pen up off the desk. It had a picture of a pinup girl on it, and when he tilted it upside down, her clothes slid off. Glancing over, he caught Esme still watching him, but with something a little more calculating than wariness in her eyes.

“You can keep the pen, if you like,” she said. “Compliments of B & B Investigations.”

He looked down at the pen again and noticed the lettering going down the side, next to the girl- “B & B Investigations-Your One-Stop Undercover Shop-We Snoop 4 U”-and a phone number.

It was the tackiest damn thing he’d ever seen.

“Catchy motto,” he said, looking back up.

“My dad’s a marketing genius, comes up with all sorts of things,” Esme said, straightening from the desk, the elusive business card in her hand.

Johnny just bet he did. Burt was her dad’s name. He remembered now. Burt Alden. And it looked to Johnny like the man had come up with everything except a decent living.

Esme was doing all right by herself, though- doing something somewhere other than this second-floor dump in the Faber Building. She was wearing couture. He’d bet the bank on that, too. He had a friend, Skeeter Bang Hart, former street rat, current kick-ass operator and high-class fashionista, who bought designer clothes the way kids bought candy, and in Skeeter’s world, shoes had names. He was betting Esme’s shoes had a name. He didn’t know what in the hell that name might be, but from the looks of them, it probably started with Kate, or Stewart, or Manolo.

“Here’s his card,” she said, extending her hand. “He usually has the office open by ten A.M.”

“Thanks.” Johnny stepped forward and took the card-and there they were, standing close to each other, with traffic noise coming up from the street, and the desk lamp bathing her face with soft creamy light.

“I’ll… uh, let him know to expect your call.”

“Great.” Maybe they were standing too close.

Yeah, he was sure of it, because he was having a little trouble taking his eyes off her, and because suddenly he was remembering the satiny texture of her skin, the way she’d tasted that night in Roxanne, and the way she’d felt in his arms-nubile.

Yeah, she’d pretty much defined the whole erotic concept of being nubile, at least for him. He’d heard the word a few times, and after those few glorious hours in Roxanne, he’d gone and looked it up. The actual definition had been a bit lacking to his way of thinking, but the word…the word itself was fine, extremely accurate. The way it felt in his mouth lined up precisely with the way she’d felt lying up against him, the give of her in his hands, the silky strength of her body-fulsome, curved, resilient, a force to be reckoned with, and yet tender, and so very soft.

And that image pretty much confirmed the excellent condition of his memory. He was running at a perfect one hundred and ten percent, all systems go. Great.

“Yes… well…” she said, her voice trailing off.

Well…yes…He needed to think here, come up with something fast, or she was going to have him back out on the street in no time.

“Thanks… uh, for stopping by,” she said. “We can always use the business.”

Obviously, he thought, but he kept it to himself.

“I’d like to take you to dinner, if you haven’t eaten, or buy you a drink, if you have.” It wasn’t original, and he just kind of blurted it out, but it was solid, something a girl could count on.

“Actually, I have an appointment, and I’m running a little late.” She made a point of checking her watch. “So if you’ll excuse me…”

An appointment? At nine o’clock on a Friday night?

Actually, he was going to have a little trouble excusing that, and if Esme Alden actually turned out to be some kind of high-end call girl, he was going to have to sit down and sort through the unsettling information with Christian Hawkins-Superman, second in command at Steele Street, owner of the beauteous Roxanne, and SDF’s unofficial but widely used therapist. Hawkins knew things about women all the other guys could only surmise. Dylan was certainly useless in that capacity. He and Skeeter had been married for-hell, Johnny didn’t know how long, a few years, and it didn’t look to him like the boss had figured out too much about women, or he might have noticed he’d been holding the reins a little too tight on his girl. If he wasn’t careful, Skeeter was going to flat-out break loose.

Kid was holding on to his wife, too, holding on for the ride, but who could do anything else with Nikki? She was an artist, like quicksilver. Johnny had posed for her completely buck naked, the first time a couple of years ago, and a few times since, and he still wasn’t sure if he’d ever quite recovered from the experience. He liked the paintings she’d done though, most of them dark angel paintings with him looking pretty badass. He liked them a lot. Nikki did, too. She’d picked one of the paintings of him for the poster of her latest exhibit, the Ironheart Angel. It would probably impress the hell out of Esme.

Sure it would-and he just happened to have the announcement Nikki had left for him at Steele Street in his back pocket. She and Kid had left for Los Angeles this morning, and he knew she was hoping he’d stop by the gallery and just sort of be there-getting stared at.

Right-just one of the perks of posing naked for a famous artist, having women show up to check you out. Not that they needed you there. Nikki didn’t leave anything to the imagination, but Johnny had wondered if she kind of added a little something extra here and there. Even with paintings of himself to look at, the verdict was still out on that one.

“Well, maybe after your appointment then,” he jumped back in, reaching around and checking his back pocket. Sure enough, he had the postcard announcement next to his wallet. “You could give me a call.” He pulled out the postcard. He wasn’t really floundering. This was a plan. “A friend of mine has some paintings showing at the Toussi Gallery on Seventeenth. There’s going to be wine and cheese, that kind of stuff, tonight, and these things always go late. So, if you like, we could go and look around, check out the artwork, whenever you were free. It wouldn’t matter what time, not really. I know the owner.” He handed the postcard over to her-and if her answer had even a hint of “I’ll be busy the rest of the night,” he was heading straight back to Steele Street and knocking on Hawkins’s door.

“You know Suzi Toussi?” Her eyebrows went up again, her expression slightly disbelieving.

Okay. More than slightly.

He wasn’t insulted. There was no reason on earth for her to think he’d turned into anything other than the street gangster his guidance counselor had predicted.

“Yeah, I know Suzi, and she’s still involved with the gallery,” he said. “But the woman who owns it now is named Katya.” Katya Hawkins, Superman’s wife and mother of three, with another one on the way. Johnny wasn’t the only one at SDF who was beginning to wonder if Christian and Katya were going for some kind of record.

“Uh, sure…Toussi’s, that sounds like fun,” Esme said, after another few seconds of looking him over. Then her gaze dropped to the postcard.

He didn’t expect her to recognize him, not as the blood-streaked, tragically heroic angel Nikki had made him. For the postcard, Nikki had only used a portion of the painting, zooming in on his jaw and shoulder, with part of one wing showing. The feathers in the wing were broken and torn, and he didn’t know why, but that was the part that disturbed him the most-not what Nikki had done to him, how she’d made him look so brutalized, but what she’d done to his wings. It just looked so fierce, like some maelstrom had gotten ahold of that angel and shaken him to his core-which, if he remembered correctly, and he did, was exactly how he’d felt when Nikki had gotten hold of him.

He guessed she was a pretty good artist. In fact, he knew she was an amazing artist.

“This is good… very good,” Esme murmured, quietly echoing his thoughts. “Um, sure”-she looked up-“why not. Why don’t you give me your number?”

She set the card on the desk and pulled her cell phone out of a pocket on her skirt. He recited the ten digits, watching her punch them into her phone’s memory along with his name-and all the while, he knew she was lying through her teeth.

She wasn’t going to call him, and suddenly it wasn’t just curiosity motivating him, and it wasn’t just his heated memories, or his teenage crush. Suddenly, she was a woman with a gun and something she’d stolen off a man in a hotel room, and she had an appointment she was damned serious about keeping.

Whatever was going on, Johnny had a feeling it had to do with her marketing genius of a father, and it was a bad feeling. He knew her. He’d spent six years in school with her, and he’d been paying attention, probably too much attention-but, man, she’d held it hard. She’d been more than book smart. She’d been able to think her way around things, book things, sure, but people and situations, too. East was a tough school. She shouldn’t have lasted a week in those hallways, not looking the way she had, all cute middle-class white bread. But she’d done three years, and the only time anyone had ever gotten to her had been in that locker bay with Kevin Harrell-and that bastard hadn’t gotten far.

She’d been the valedictorian of their class for a reason, and none of those reasons would have led her here. No way in hell did she work in this dump, and no matter where she worked, she didn’t have pens with naked women on them lying around on her desk.

Christ. She had stolen goods, a.45, and an appointment. There wasn’t a thing in that combination that didn’t spell trouble in capital letters, and the one thing she didn’t have, the one thing he hadn’t seen anywhere since he’d first seen her up on Seventeenth, was backup.

He let his gaze drop down the length of her, and when he got to her feet, he stopped, his attention arrested. By whatever quirk of fate was out there, when she’d stepped over to the desk, she’d stepped right on top of her hooker skirt. It was under her slinky black high heel, and as he watched, she quietly and deliberately slid her foot across the carpet, dragging the small slip of leather and lace with her, until she could give it one small last push and make it disappear under the desk.

And she did it all without a word.

When she pulled her foot back from the desk, he looked up and caught her gaze. She knew he’d tailed her from the Oxford. She knew he knew about the German, the leash, the dog collar, and probably about the suit jacket she’d cut open, and man, oh, man, it didn’t faze her in the least. Butter wouldn’t have melted in her mouth.

Oh, she was a cool one, all right, but not cold. Her hair was warm honey gold, swept up in a Holly Golightly twist. Her mouth was softly pink and glossed, and her eyes were gray, a dozen shades of it, any one of them callable at will-and the one she was currently calling up was clear. Not storm gray, not arctic gray, nothing to do with ice or an emotion-just clear, pure, simple, clean gray. Pure and simple “I know what I’m doing, so don’t get in my way” gray, and he was impressed as hell. What he’d seen in room 215 was none of his business. She couldn’t have made it any plainer if she’d painted it on a billboard in big block letters: “Back off, big boy.”

He knew women like her, had been in love with them most of his adult life, women like Skeeter Bang and the bodaciously dangerous Red Dog. Those two knew exactly what they were doing, and they really didn’t need his help, especially if they had each other.

But Easy Alex had taken on the German alone, and nobody had been waiting for her in the Faber Building. She was running a private game here- and she was cutting him loose, pushing him out the damn door. He had an emotion for that, but he really didn’t know what in the hell to call it.

Bottom line, though, this was her call, not his, no matter how skeptical he was about her father, her gun, and how she’d leashed that guy to the bed. She was done with him, and he wasn’t going to learn anything more by hanging around the B & B office, getting in her way and holding her up.

“If you want to get your things, I’ll walk you out.” He didn’t ask. It wasn’t a question. He was walking her out, end of story, and unless she threw herself at his feet and begged for his help when they hit the street, he was going to go back to his beer at the Blue Iguana.

From the looks of her, he figured the odds on her begging him for anything were zip and none.

Esme hesitated, but only for a second, before she walked back to the bathroom. She knew what time it was, and she knew she didn’t have any to waste.

Good God, Johnny freakin’ Ramos.

She had a handheld black light already in the bathroom, and once she closed the door, she turned it on. It would only take her a minute to check the painting. The last thing she wanted was to show up at Nachman’s with a fake. The Meinhard was her bargaining chip. She needed to know she had a solid opening hand.

Reaching into the white vinyl tote, she removed the thin metal case containing the Meinhard and popped it open. With a small screwdriver also from out of her tote, she loosened the wooden frame on the painting and lifted off the protective covering. One slow pass with the black light was all she needed, and as soon as she was finished, she reassembled the painting and the frame and put the piece back into the case.

The metal case measured precisely two by ten by fifteen inches, and when she got back to her dad’s desk, she slipped it neatly inside a black leather messenger bag she’d designed for a courier contract she’d taken last May. The job had been to transport a rare manuscript from Presque Isle, Maine, to Bern, Switzerland, and it had gone without a hitch.

She zipped the interior pouch on the bag closed, securing the case inside, then buckled the outside straps.

John Ramos, standing right there next to her. That was a bit of a hitch, maybe more than a bit. Cripes. She’d seen the way he’d looked at her red leather skirt, and she didn’t have a doubt in her mind that he’d been the “policía” at the Oxford, or that he’d followed her through the hotel room, or that he knew exactly what she’d done to Otto Von Lindberg.

Hell, for all she knew he was a policeman, undercover, off-duty, whatever. It was enough to make a girl sweat, if a girl ever sweated. Thank God, Esme didn’t, never, not on the job.

The messenger bag had been constructed with a net of very fine steel mesh sandwiched between its lining and the thick latigo leather. It also had a cipher lock connected to a steel cable running through the flap. She engaged the lock before slipping the bag’s shoulder strap over her head and adjusting it across the front of her body in a manner that insured it wouldn’t get in the way of drawing her pistol. Nobody could get the bag without taking her with it, which suited her just fine. This was a four-part deal with three parts left-Isaac Nachman, Franklin Bleak, get the hell out of Denver. That was the plan, and she was still damn close to being on schedule, despite Johnny freakin’ Ramos.

He walked ahead of her into the hall and waited while she locked up.

Hell. She probably needed her head examined for opening the door to him. She should have waited him out, toughed it out, gone out the window-something.

Jiggling the key in the lock, trying to get the dead-bolt to slide home, she hazarded another quick glance at him, and got hit by that freight train all over again, which brought her train-wreck quota for the last ten minutes up to an even dozen, easy, dammit. She felt the collision the same place she’d felt all the others, in her throat and her upper chest, a pure respiratory reaction-as in he took her breath away. It was ridiculous. She was too old for this, too jaded. She’d had real lovers since him, with real sex-and never ever had a man gotten her so hot in a backseat or anywhere else that all she could see on her horizon was complete and utter annihilation. It was the only thing that had stopped her from losing her virginity to the baddest of the bad boys that night-fear of destruction. Everything between the two of them had been so hot, and wild, and edging on frantic, the windows of the car steamed over, his body like corded sinew, all muscle and bone and warm skin, his dark hair so silky, and so tangled from her fingers, his mouth on her everywhere.

Everywhere.

Dammit. Her fingers slipped on the key, and she chipped a nail on the jamb.

Dammit.

She glanced at him again-and got hit by the memory train one more time, except the collision was closer to her solar plexus, and a little lower down.

He’d been naked that night, the first naked boy she’d seen, and she’d never seen another one like him, naked or otherwise, until ten minutes ago.

Perfect.

What an absolutely perfect image to have slide out of her memory banks-John Ramos naked. Cripes. With another couple of tries, she finally got the deadbolt locked.

Dropping the keys into an outside pocket on the messenger bag, she headed for the stairs, and he fell in beside her.

She took a breath, calm, easy. About two more minutes and he’d be firmly back in memory land, a blast from the past that was behind her. She took another breath and kept walking.

He had definitely filled out since high school. He was broader through the shoulders, broader through the chest, taller-just plain bigger all the way around. His hair was thick, and dark, and cut short, shorter than she’d ever seen him wear it. The style made him look older than she knew he was, and the thickness of it made his hair stick up a little, and altogether, combined with the lean, carved lines of his face, he looked tough, like he’d just walked out of the LoDo alley where he’d been seen, like he was still running wild on the streets.

Oddly enough, he also looked like he’d just walked out of an Abercrombie catalog. Clean, softly worn, button-fly jeans; expensive boots, tactical boots like Dax owned; a dark gray T-shirt; and over the T-shirt, a black, collared shirt, worn unbuttoned and untucked, the long sleeves neatly buttoned at the cuff. He’d slipped the naked-girl pen in his pocket between a mechanical pencil and a small spiral notebook-whatever in the world he needed those for on a Friday night in LoDo. She could also see the top end of an envelope peeking out of the pocket. In another life, if he’d grown up another way, this close to the Auraria Campus, he could have been taken for one of the university’s graduate students. As it was, she’d never seen a college boy with that hard a gaze, so much “Don’t fuck with me” stamped in the way he carried himself.

Maybe he really was a cop.

Or maybe, the gang his brother had been fighting for the night he’d been killed, the Locos, maybe Johnny had climbed to the top of it, made himself the shot caller.

Honest to God, she didn’t know which would be worse, cop or gang lord. For her sake, it would be better if he wasn’t a cop. She didn’t want to show up anywhere, officially, as having been in Denver, and she sure as shoot didn’t want to get arrested, but everything in her hoped for his sake that he hadn’t followed in Dom Ramos’s footsteps, that he’d done better by himself.

At the bottom of the stairs, she felt a moment’s regret. This was it. Her dad’s car was parked on the street, right out in front, so as soon as they walked out of the Faber Building, that would be it. Sayonara. Adios. Ciao. He’d go his way, and she’d go hers.

Too bad.

This close to getting rid of him, she could admit it. Another time, another place, under different circumstances, she might have taken him up on that drink, just to catch up with him, see what he was up to, see how he’d really turned out. But tonight, she was on a mission: return the painting, get the reward money, buy off the bookie, full speed ahead-up until they came out onto the sidewalk and her mission came to a sudden screeching halt.

She couldn’t believe it.

Parked next to the curb in all its cheap-ass, middle-of-the-road, minivan glory was her dad’s car, right where she’d left it, but somehow, for some unknown but probably easily deducible reason, sometime in the last twenty minutes, between when she’d walked in with the painting and was now walking out, the cops had booted it.

Big, heavy, and clamped to the rear wheel, the hunk of bright orange metal said only one thing to her: She wasn’t going anywhere, not in her dad’s damn minivan.