Loose And Easy Read online

  “Lieutenant?” Weisman said, standing outside a door in the corner of the office. “I think I’ve found our phone in there.”

  “Open her up.” She didn’t ask permission. She didn’t need to ask permission.

  Weisman opened the door and turned on the light. It was a bathroom with a wide-open, floor-toceiling, double-hung window. She walked over and leaned a little ways out the window, far enough to see the street two floors below.

  It had been a night of open windows.

  “Is it in there, Weisman?” she asked, looking back at the officer kneeling on the floor next to a tote bag.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “What’s that bag made out of?”

  “Looks like vinyl to me, Lieutenant.”

  “Vinyl,” she said. “Let’s get it back to the precinct without contaminating it, Weisman. I bet we can lift at least one good set of prints off it, and probably another real good set off the phone. What do you think, Detective Ford?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Connor said. “At least one good set off each.”

  “Good.” She turned back to Dax Killian. “The phone in the bag belongs to that blond hooker I’m looking for, a dominatrix, maybe one with a knife. If she comes back here, looking for it, you watch yourself, and I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a call.” She handed him one of her cards.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Without a second’s hesitation, he took her card and slipped it in his pocket.

  “And if you see this Johnny Ramos guy, I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a call.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  And if Dax Killian gave her a call any time in the next forty years, she’d eat Weisman’s hat.

  Sonuvabitch-that was the only thought Dax had, watching Lieutenant Loretta Bradley and her boys exiting the office. Sonuvabitch.

  He closed the door behind them, threw the lock, and pulled his cell phone out of his pocket.

  “Come on, Easy, baby.” He speed-dialed the bad girl and put the phone to his ear. “Answer.”

  Geezus. Erich Warner was in Denver, and he’d brought his favorite witch with him, the blade queen of Bangkok, coming straight out of Tokyo: Shoko. One name, innumerable knives.

  A kanji and a swastika? Shoko had practically patented the design. She’d sure as hell perfected it on half a dozen people that he knew about, and who the hell knew how many more that he didn’t know about.

  He strode into the bathroom and leaned partway out the window, scanning the sidewalks and the street. Kevin Harrell had made a helluva jump for a guy in handcuffs. Dax was amazed he wasn’t splatted all over the sidewalk below the window.

  But he wasn’t. Oh, hell, no. He was off and running somewhere, and if the cops didn’t pick him up, somebody from Bleak’s outfit probably would, not that Harrell mattered anymore. Dax had gotten what he needed out of the guy.

  When Easy’s voice mail picked up, he left a very succinct message. “Warner in town. Shoko with him, fully loaded. Stay out of Denver. Stick to Ramos like glue, and call me. I’ll meet you.”

  Geezus. He looked at his watch. Five o’clock was looking a helluva long way away.

  He dialed Burt, ready to read him the riot act if he answered. But Uncle Burt didn’t answer, so he left another very succinct message. “If you’re not at Bleak’s warehouse when I get there at five A.M., I’m going to come looking for you, Uncle Burt, and you ain’t gonna be happy when I find you. Don’t disappoint me.”

  It was a threat, yes, but it was also the truth. The plan had been to leave good old Uncle Burt out of the deal, keep the fat out of the fire and that sort of thing, but Dax had changed his mind. The fat was going in feetfirst. Uncle Burt, God help him, was going to be his backup on the deal. It was Easy he was kicking off the team. He didn’t want her within a mile of Franklin Bleak. Even with Lucky Lindsey Larson in his arsenal of tricks, he didn’t want the bad girl anywhere in Bleak’s sight.

  She was already in enough trouble.

  And now Shoko. Christ.

  Easy had a cool head on her shoulders, one of the coolest, but the Bangkok bitch had hurt her, marked her for life, and Dax knew the bad girl still had nightmares about it-which really pissed him off. He’d been waiting a long time to get Shoko in his sights, but it wasn’t going to happen tonight. Even more than the Bleak deal, he still owed Warner, and more than the debt was the prize Warner had offered, the little something. The German had information Dax wanted, the kind of information that was going to have him doing just about anything Erich Warner asked, short of treason, a designation that could get damned slippery, depending on how much the information proved to be worth on the E-ring in the Pentagon.

  Closing the bathroom window, he wondered how in the hell he and Easy were going to talk their way out of this once the cops lifted her prints off the phone she’d used to set up her contact with the parking valet. A lot of people could place her at the Oxford at the right time for an assault with a deadly weapon charge at the very least, including Johnny Ramos.

  Yeah, that guy. The one whose picture Lieutenant Loretta was flashing around. He had to be trouble, and yet Dax’s directive stood-he wanted Easy sticking to the guy like a hot lamination. Dom Ramos had been a punk, but he’d been a punk Dax had liked, a straightforward guy, no bullshit.

  He reached in his back pocket and pulled out the angel picture postcard. It was an invitation for a showing at an art gallery over on Seventeenth, the Toussi Gallery next to the Oxford Hotel, and it had Ramos’s name on it. No address, just the guy’s name where the address would be, along with the note written in a loopy female hand Dax took the time to decipher this time-“Come be the star that you are, sweetie. Love, Nikki.”

  He flipped the card back over to the angel side, and sure enough, the showing was for an artist named Nikki. That was all the postcard said, Nikki, like Picasso, or Rembrandt. From the looks of the painting on the front of the card, one name might be enough. She was good.

  And this woman thought Johnny Ramos was a star.

  Dax figured he better go find out if she was right.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Afghanistan, Nuristan Province, not the Kunar- Johnny was looking right at it. He could smell it, feel the dust sifting down on him. There had been so many tunnels cut into the mountainsides, and Third Platoon’s job had been to search a section of them.

  He knew better than to reach for his pistol. He was in Colorado, not a war zone, but the sight of the tunnel, actually being in one again, unnerved him.

  It shouldn’t. He hadn’t been unnerved in Nuristan, not even the first time, when they’d gotten rocked by mortar fire on their way out. They’d spent another four weeks clearing tunnels, and he’d never broken a sweat-until now.

  Shit.

  He was still in the elevator, and Esme and Nachman were heading around a corner. He wasn’t going to let that happen, for her to go off in the darkness of a damn tunnel with a strange old man, and him just stand here and watch her disappear.

  Shit.

  He was a U.S. Army Ranger, had been for five years, and there wasn’t anyplace he was afraid to go.

  Sucking it up, and more than a little embarrassed that he had to suck it up to get off a damn elevator, he stepped into the tunnel. The feel of the dirt beneath his boots was uncomfortably familiar, the short deadness of the footfalls, but he kept going, one step after the next.

  After about twenty feet, the tunnel branched off in two more directions. One glance at the additional corridors snaking off into darkness, and he drew his gun. Fuck it. Whatever he was going to be looking at, he was suddenly absolutely positive he wanted to be looking at it through the tritium dots on his gun sights. What the hell did he know, really? Anything could be down here, a bear, a mountain lion, anything, and a Ranger would be ready.

  So he was ready.

  Right.

  With a.45 in the sub-subbasement of a multimillionaire’s mansion in the Colorado Rockies.

  And there was Esme, up ahead, cool
as a little cucumber, raising tufts of dust with her high heels.

  And him, sliding along the wall behind her, knees bent, muscles tense, his trigger finger laid flat along the pistol’s slide-ready to slip inside the trigger guard, ready to rock and roll.

  He checked his six, looking back toward the elevator, moving his pistol with his line of sight- ready-and when he turned back around, gun lowered again, he was facing Esme, stopped in the middle of the tunnel and looking at him with an expression of confusion, fascination, and maybe a little plain old “you’ve got to be kidding me” surprise.

  Her gaze dropped down the length of him in less than a second, then took another one to come back up to meet his eyes. Her expression didn’t change. Everything was still in play as she stood and watched him, watched him calculate his odds-the odds of running into an enemy fighter, Taliban, al-Qaeda, Egyptian, Arab, Pakistani, an Islamic insurgent from anywhere who’d come to battle the coalition forces. Anyone who’d come in country to go up against him and his guys.

  Zero, he decided. It was zero odds down here in Isaac Nachman’s sub-subbasement. Sure. He knew it was zero, or damn close to it.

  Convinced, he slowly straightened up, flipping the safety back on his pistol before he slid it into its holster.

  “PTSD?” she said, one of her eyebrows lifting a bit, adding a serious dose of flat-out curiosity to her question-more curiosity than the question itself implied.

  Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, he knew what the initials stood for.

  “No.” He shook his head. “Instinct.”

  Pure instinct, the survival kind. A lot of soldiers struggled with PTSD in varying degrees and with a variety of symptoms. He knew it for a fact. He’d seen it on deployment and seen it each time they’d come home, and he knew that wasn’t his problem, not full-out anyway. Hell, he’d been in “combat” most of his life, fighting on street corners and in back alleys, and the night Dom had died, fighting it out in the lush, green expanse of City Park.

  He’d seen a lot, done a lot, or so he’d thought until his first combat tour. When he’d come back from Afghanistan the first time, he’d come back with an unsolicited and unexpected realization about the night in the park: Dom had died clean.

  It had seemed like such a bloody mess at the time, with Dom gasping in pain and gasping for breath, with the blood pumping out of him, out of the hole one of the Parkside Bloods had put in him. One shot, not even a well-aimed shot, just one unlucky shot had killed his brother. A bunch of Parkside gangsters waving their pieces around and pulling their triggers had managed to actually hit Domingo Ramos.

  In real combat, death could be a lot different. First, the shots were better aimed. When the shooting started, a guy could be assured that his enemies were shooting at him, not just around him, shooting to kill, and that every guy out there with a scope was using it to target him, that every set of iron sights was leveled at him. Soldiers didn’t wave their guns around or hold them slanted on the side. That was only for dumbass gangsters and people in the movies.

  The Rangers had most definitely taught him how to shoot.

  The second thing about death in combat was the ordnance. Dom had been killed by a single 9mm round, a damn unlucky shot that had hit him square in the heart. But in combat, people got blown apart-into pieces. Some people still got shot, and it was never pretty, but guys also got literally blown to bits, and sometimes those guys looked like the lucky ones.

  That was the third thing about death in combat- a warrior’s death wasn’t the worst way to go. Dead wasn’t the worst way to leave a battlefield. Johnny hadn’t known that until he’d been in combat and watched people die, and watched the people who hadn’t died.

  He didn’t move his hand, but suddenly he could feel the envelope in his pocket, feel it like it was hot-not hot enough to burn, he wouldn’t give himself that. He wasn’t the one who had been branded by combat.

  But he felt the heat, and he felt guilt-building in his chest and twisting in his gut and sweeping up to make his face hot, and suddenly, he wanted the hell out of this goddamn tunnel.

  “What are we doing down here, Esme?” His words were short, his voice curt.

  “Mr. Nachman keeps his collection down here in a vault, his art collection,” she said, very clearly, holding his gaze steady with her own. “There will be a black light in the vault, and we’ll use it to verify that the Meinhard I’ve brought him is exactly what I told him it is-the original painting, untouched, exactly what he’s paying for. Then he’ll give me the money, and we’ll leave.”

  Okay. There was an end in sight.

  “Let’s go,” he said, gesturing for her to lead the way.

  No, he didn’t have PTSD, but neither had he come down from his last deployment. His instincts were still on high alert, which meant “weapon ready.” He hadn’t decompressed. Two weeks at home wasn’t enough to bring him back down, and neither was one beer in the Blue Iguana.

  Dammit. He shouldn’t have drawn his pistol. Instincts were good; giving into irrational impulses wasn’t. But this place, this tunnel…he was sweating, and it was cool down here.

  Unfinished business, that was his problem, and he needed to finish it. He’d been carrying the letter in his pocket around with him for months, and he needed to deal with it.

  Great. Now he had it all figured out-for about the hundred millionth time. He knew what he had to do. He just hadn’t found the guts to do it, and now he was in this damn tunnel, unnerved.

  Nachman was ahead of them, still shuffling along in his slippers, until he came to a heavy steel door set into solid rock. Johnny couldn’t even imagine what the whole setup had cost, but when Nachman opened the door, he knew whatever the vault had cost, it was nothing compared to the value of what was inside.

  Geezus.

  He glanced at “Miss Esme” and realized she’d been here before. She’d expected all this. She wasn’t struck dumb with amazement, and he was damn close.

  “Welcome to my closet, Mr. Ramos,” Nachman said, letting the steel door swing open.

  Closet was a misnomer, but Johnny understood what Nachman had meant about there not being enough room for him. The place was huge, but it was also completely packed, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, with art, an unprecedented sight, utterly unique. It was a warehouse of masterpieces, old masters and new.

  “Have you heard of the Alt Aussee, Mr. Ramos?” Nachman asked, leading the way inside, keeping his hand on the door.

  “No, sir.”

  “It’s a salt mine in Austria, southeast of Salzburg, a veritable labyrinth.”

  When Johnny and Esme were inside with him, standing in one of the only clear areas Johnny could see, Nachman slowly pushed the heavy steel door closed behind them.

  Johnny heard a lock fall into place.

  Perfect.

  Not exactly nightmare material, but close- being locked inside an underground vault deep inside a mountain.

  Very close, actually.

  Maybe even a little closer than Johnny wanted to admit.

  Dammit.

  But the art was stunning, and there was a museum’s worth of it, two museums’ worth, hundreds of paintings, pieces of sculpture both large and small, decorative items, vases, jewelry, glassworks, plaques, artifacts, ceramics, and more paintings- some of them massive, upward to eight or nine feet high and nearly as wide-all of it carefully and meticulously organized on racks and in cases, filling the cavelike vault. The ceiling of the room was more than twenty feet above them, the far end of it beyond where Johnny could see. Everything that should have been hanging on the walls and displayed in the mansion upstairs was down here in Nachman’s temperature-and-humidity-controlled “closet.” He’d felt the difference in the air immediately upon entering the stone depository.

  “The Nazis used the Alt Aussee to store their plunder, literally thousands of pieces of stolen art,” Nachman said, “all of it nearly destroyed toward the end of the war, when the Germans set explosives inside the salt mine
. Fortunately, the plot was discovered by the resistance fighters, and the bombs were never detonated. Some of those saved paintings reside here, now, Mr. Ramos, some of them awaiting proof of provenance so that I can return them to their rightful owners, many of them here because their rightful owners wish them to remain hidden from the world and safe, and a few of them rightly mine. And yet…” Nachman turned and looked at Esme.

  “And yet some of Mr. Nachman’s most cherished pieces are still missing, pieces like the Monet,” she said.

  “Pieces like the Henstenburgh,” the old man added.

  “Yes, the Henstenburgh,” Esme echoed.

  “And the…” Nachman’s voice drifted into a soft whisper.

  “We don’t have to talk about it,” Esme assured him, and from the look on the old man’s face, pained and distressed, Johnny thought Esme probably had the right of it.

  “No,” Nachman insisted. “Mr. Ramos should know the depth of our loss.”

  Not necessarily, Johnny thought, wondering how in the hell he’d ended up in this place, in this strange situation, with this very strange little man wearing a bathrobe, when he’d started out the night with that beer at the Blue Iguana.

  “There was a Rembrandt, Mr. Ramos,” Nachman continued. “And… and another, the other. They’re both priceless, utterly priceless, and they belong here.” The old man made a sweeping gesture with his arm, including the whole vault-and Johnny couldn’t fault his opinion, not too much anyway. A Rembrandt, any Rembrandt, had to be amazing, but he wasn’t sure what the value of something was if no one ever saw it except one old man.

  “Isaac,” Esme said gently, when Nachman simply continued to stand there, his arm outstretched, his gaze distant, his lips quivering.

  Johnny had a grandma, and her lips quivered sometimes, especially when she was getting emotional and about to cry, which was quite often.

  Please, he thought. Please spare us Nachman’s tears.

  Sobbing was only going to make things worse, besides making him personally uncomfortable. Nachman was old, yes, but he was still a guy underneath that silk bathrobe, which was as far as Johnny was going to take that thought.