Loose And Easy Read online

  He looked over at a picture of her he’d cut out of Starlets magazine and framed for his desk. She was gorgeous. She’d made it. She knew what it took. She was that kind of girl, and he was that kind of guy. He knew what it took-and it was going to take the damn Alden girl to insure he got his money, and he needed his money, all eighty-two fucking thousand dollars of it to get him through the Chicago cocaine deal tomorrow. No money, no deal-no lunch. And he wasn’t letting Burt Alden screw him out of Katherine Gray and his lunch. Everyone else he’d shaken down these last two months, pulling in all his bad debts, had been giving it up, no matter what it took, or they’d kissed their ass good-bye. Alden was going to give it up, too, or Bleak was going to personally check the bastard out-as in out, done, finished, dead.

  “You stay on the lookout for her, you hear me? You ask around down there. You know people. Use them. Where’s the Chicago guy, Bremerton?” Vernon Better-Watch-His-Shit Bremerton. Franklin didn’t like fucking watchdogs, and Bremerton was a watchdog, sent by the Chicago boys to make sure Franklin held up his end of the deal-the assholes.

  “With me,” Dovey said.

  “Good. You keep him with you. I don’t like him down here, staring at me all day like some dumb piece of Chicago pork. Put Kevin on the B and B office. Tell him to stay put.”

  “I’ve got Kevin checking the coffee shop on Wazee,” the kid said, like he’d come up with a good idea.

  Franklin was not impressed.

  “And why in the hell would you do that? With three guys chasing them, I don’t think they’re going to stop for a goddamn cup of coffee. Do you?”

  “No, sir… well, yes, sir, not stop exactly, but go by there because-”

  “Because nothing, Smollett. Get Kevin back on the B and B office.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Eliot is on his way to her old man’s house, so we’re covered there, but if she shows up at that office again, you tell Kevin to get her and bring her to me. No more screwing up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you tell him to keep his hands to himself. I want her in one piece.” He wanted Burt Alden to get one last goddamn good look at what he was going to lose if he didn’t have that money, and if it got to the point where Franklin had to take the girl apart, he didn’t want her old man missing any of the action, not so much as a single piece of it.

  He hoped it didn’t get to that. He really did. In his heart, he did. The girl was a looker, plenty of pizzazz, and that created options. She wouldn’t be worth eighty-two thousand dollars, not right off the cuff, but he could play her, parlay her into something to hold the damn deal together-a smart looker like her, and he could teach everybody in goddamn Denver a lesson while he was at it.

  “Yes, sir.”

  That was the great thing about Dovey. The kid knew the two most important words in his vocabulary were “Yes, sir.” That’s all Franklin ever wanted to hear out of him.

  “You find her, Dovey, or it’s gonna hurt you. Do you understand?”

  “Y-yes, sir.”

  Good, Franklin thought, a little hesitation is good. It meant the kid was thinking.

  But Dovey Smollett thinking wasn’t always that much better than Dovey Smollett not thinking.

  Franklin ended the call and speed-dialed another number.

  “Mitch,” he said, when the call was answered. “Are you and Leroy still at the Jack O’Nines?” The Jack O’Nines, a dump of a strip club in downtown, was sometimes referred to as Denver ’s little Chicago, because of the three Chicago boys who had cruised through there a few years ago. One of them had gotten himself gutted, right there in Jack’s back bar, and the other two had been capped, with all three bodies dragged out into the alley, thrown in a truck, and blown to bits in an explosion out at the old Stapleton Airport. At least that was the story.

  Bremerton better watch his ass. Denver wasn’t always so good to Chicago boys.

  “Yes, boss.”

  “Dovey is at Sixteenth and Wazee, looking for the Alden girl. She’s on the run. I want you and Leroy down there yesterday. See if you can pick her up.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “Call Dovey for his last sighting.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “Did you get my money out of that prick Abrams?”

  “Yes, boss.”

  Good.

  “How hard did you have to work for it?”

  “We leaned on him enough to let him know that being late wasn’t a good idea, but we were careful. We didn’t break anything on him, just roughed him up a little.”

  “Good. Then get your asses down into LoDo.” He hung up the phone and took another long look at Katherine Gray’s photo, before he pushed away from his desk and walked over to the window at the far end of his office. With a twist of a rod, the blinds opened to reveal the main floor of the Bleak Enterprises warehouse.

  Paper products, that was his legitimate game, supplying paper products to businesses up and down the Front Range-paper towels, toilet paper, napkins, cleaning supplies, specialty containers, bags, boxes, whatever his customers wanted, Bleak could get, including Lady’s Pride in the seventh at the Downs, but that part of his business was run out of the back of his building.

  He walked to the other end of his office and opened up another set of window blinds. A private set of stairs led from his office to the room below. Most nights, he had two guys on computers and cell phones and a digital whiteboard hanging on the wall down there. Most nights, he ran a lot of bets through that room, with most of the transactions running smooth as silk, but every now and then, something went wrong. He was a good guy, and if somebody had a sure shot they wanted to play big, but not the cash to do it, they could count on Franklin to cover it for them. But sure shots seldom were, and no matter how the damn bet turned out, the piper had to be paid.

  He caught sight of his reflection in the window and narrowed his gaze. That damn hairstylist at Mirasol’s had done him no favors with this last cut.

  At seventy dollars a pop, he’d think a damn hairstylist could cut a guy’s hair without cutting it all off. He still had plenty on the sides. He always had plenty on the sides, and it was the plentiful side hair that was supposed to make up for the barely noticeable thinness on top. But the damn stylist had cut him too short.

  Using his fingers, he combed a few more strands off the side and up over the top. He was done with Mirasol’s. But the girl did give good color, nice and dark with just a touch of a warmer shade. That’s the way she described it, and Franklin agreed. His hair looked real natural, like he was a guy who got out in the sun.

  He wasn’t.

  Franklin Bleak was an inside guy, all the way; he was also the piper, and one way or another, Burt Alden was going to pay, starting with the middle-aged blonde handcuffed to a chair in the corner of the betting room. She was alone down there in the half-lit room where he ran his bets. Her first name was Beth, according to his information and her name tag, and she looked terrified-rightly so. She was a done deal. Twenty years ago… hell, even ten years ago, Franklin might have been able to cop a deal on her, but not now. She was worthless to him, except as leverage, her best years long behind her.

  She was also in complete disarray-the top of her nurse’s uniform ripped up one seam, as if she might have put up a fight when Eliot had grabbed her out of the parking lot at Denver General Hospital. Her cotton pants were torn and dirty, as if she’d perhaps fallen in the parking lot and Eliot had dragged her to his car. Most of her hair had fallen free of her ponytail band and was hanging in a knotted mess to her shoulders, as if Eliot might have had a fistful of it while he was dragging her across the pavement. And one of her shoelaces was missing out of her sensible shoes.

  That was a new one on Franklin. He’d never seen a woman lose a shoelace in a struggle. He’d seen them lose their shoes, but it had always been whole shoes, not just a lace.

  Live and learn, Franklin thought, turning his back on the frightened, smallish woman and walking toward hi
s desk, live and learn-unless you were Beth Alden. Her time ran out on both those options at five A.M.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The state of Colorado was known as the Centennial State, having been admitted to the Union in 1876, one hundred years after the War of Independence. The state bird was the Lark Bunting. The state flower was the Columbine. The highest mountain was Mount Elbert at 14,433 feet, and the fastest fish was the barracuda.

  Not many people knew that last fact. Dax Killian did. He knew it, he’d built it, he’d run it up at Bandimere in the quarter mile and forever laid claim to the title-fastest fish in the state.

  Fourteen years later, he didn’t have a doubt in his mind that the pure stock Plymouth drag title was still holding at 11.897 seconds @ 119.46 mph. Her name was Charo, because she could shake, like jelly on a plate, with a Shaker hood scoop feeding air to 426 cubic inches of hemispherical engine, the old King Kong of power plants bolted under the hood of his 1971 Plymouth Hemi ’Cuda. Every car that had ever gone up against her had gotten sent to the house.

  Charo was shaking now, stuck in idle in the parking lot called Interstate 25. Four lanes heading north, and all of them were stopped cold.

  The traffic in Seattle had won “Worst on Planet” on some oddball list he’d seen last year, but Dax had to wonder if the list makers had checked out trying to get from Colorado Springs to Denver on a Friday night. He and Easy were on a schedule, and he was screwing up his end.

  That was unusual.

  Dax usually had everything under control. So did Easy most of the time, with a couple of notable exceptions-very notable exceptions. Bangkok came to mind. That one had cost him, but he couldn’t have left the girl to Erich Warner.

  A favor, that’s all Warner had asked for letting her go, an unnamed favor due and payable upon request-and then the German had offered a little something to seal the deal. Eighteen months later, and Warner still hadn’t asked for his favor, and Dax and Easy were back in Warner’s business, stealing the man’s Meinhard.

  Sometimes life got too interesting. Dax didn’t mind, not really. He figured it beat the alternative. On the other hand, a guy needed to think about things like an open-ended debt to the likes of Erich Warner.

  So every now and then, he gave it a thought, while trying at the same time not to think too much about that little something Warner had offered.

  He checked his watch-a Chase-Durer Pilot Commander Alarm chronograph. He wasn’t a pilot. He just wished he were when he was stuck in traffic with nothing but rolling hills, pine trees, and prime Angus on either side of the highway. He thought this might be a phenomenon unique to the Front Range of Colorado-interstate traffic stopping dead in the middle of nowhere. He had an aunt who lived north of Denver, in Fort Collins, and he’d heard her complain about the same thing happening whenever she drove south toward the city, the whole interstate grinding to a halt in the middle of nowhere.

  The Honda Civic in front of him slowly inched forward, and Dax followed suit, easing up on Charo’s clutch and brake to get the ’Cuda rolling. They went all of ten feet before they stopped cold again.

  He leaned over and popped open the glove compartment. At this rate, he was going to need Patsy and a smoke to see him through. There was only one Patsy, but he had a choice on the smokes, a jockey box full of half-empty cigarette packs, menthol, nonmenthol, filtered, straights, clove, no kidding, compliments of some girl, and those things had almost killed him. He had chewing tobacco, loose tobacco with papers, a pair of handcuffs, and cigars in every size, from corona to robusto, but no presidentes, which was fine. This was not a presidente moment.

  No. It was Patsy and a panatela.

  He unwrapped the long, thin cigar and cut the end before firing up his lighter and getting it going.

  Puffing, he thumbed through his case of CDs until he found what he wanted. Charo was a driver, not a concourse car, and he’d been only too happy to change out her eight-track for a Bose sound system.

  Patsy sounded good on Bose.

  The panatela smoking, he snapped his lighter shut.

  Ahead of him, the Civic rolled another ten feet and Dax followed, easing up on the pedals until he was back on the Honda’s ass.

  Sucking in a mouthful of smoke, he lifted his hips partway off the seat and slid his lighter back in his pocket. Then he slid the divine Ms. Cline into the CD player.

  It was a hot summer night in the most beautiful state in the lower forty-eight, a perfect night for “Walking After Midnight.” That’s what he and Patsy did a lot-search for love in the lonely dark hours. As a pair, they were a couple of losers in that regard, and that’s probably why he loved her so much.

  It was nine-thirty, and he knew where Easy was supposed to be-Isaac Nachman’s. She should be pulling into the guy’s Genesee Park compound in the mountains above Denver right about now. The old guy had built a massive hunting lodge back in the fifties, instantly creating a Colorado landmark, but Dax wasn’t at all sure the girl was there. She had not checked back in with him yet. The last he’d heard from her was right after she’d gotten the call from the valet at the Oxford, the call that should have gone to Dixie.

  She’d told him when she was going in, and she should have called and told him when she was coming out. Standard operating procedure called for turning cell phones on silent mode for the duration of any contact with the opposition. Certainly, frisking old Otto Von Lindberg out of his contraband qualified as hostile contact. But Easy should have had her phone back on normal ring by now and been taking his calls.

  He had three into her.

  Settling deeper into Charo’s driver’s seat, he took another long draw off the panatela.

  Dixie the Dominatrix. Her real name was Jolene Talbot. She’d been a few years ahead of him in school, and putting out even way back then. She hadn’t been the only girl doing it, of course, but she was the only one he knew who’d gone professional.

  It was a rough life. He didn’t remember her being bad, or even all that wild, just real down on her luck. She’d had a friend whose luck had been even worse than hers, a girl named Debbie Gold. Debbie had started turning tricks young, too, and ended up floating in the South Platte River, her body washing up near Confluence Park one summer about eighteen years ago.

  There’d been another murder that summer. Poor Debbie had barely gotten a mention in the papers, but Jonathan Traynor III, a senator’s son, had gotten plenty of play. Both murders had remained unsolved for most of those years, up until the Traynor case had gotten busted wide open and the Gold girl had been found to be a piece of collateral damage to the main event.

  Dax had seen and heard about incidents a lot worse than those two murders in the intervening years, but Gold and Traynor had died in his neighborhood while he’d still been young enough to be horrifyingly awed by violence, with both murders being lurid enough to have instantly attained the status of urban legend and seal themselves in his memories-gang rape, heroin, a little strangulation, and a bullet to the brain. Right in the heart of Denver.

  Life was funny. Dax had known the guy who’d gotten sent up for Traynor’s murder, wrongly it had turned out, had known him a whole lot better than he’d ever known Jolene Talbot. Hawkins had been his name. They’d boosted a couple of cars together with a kid named Quinn as part of a crew running out of lower downtown. Then that whole crew had gotten busted and sent up to juvie on a job Dax had been slated to work. The bust had pretty much scared him straight on the car boosting business.

  Fortunately, there’d been plenty of other trouble to get into, and he was pretty sure he hadn’t missed any of it, right up until a Denver police officer, Loretta Bradley, had suggested, strongly, that the

  U.S. Army might be a better place for him than the streets of Denver or one of her jail cells.

  Apparently, from what and whom he’d seen in a lot of far-flung places over the intervening years, she’d given that advice to a lot of lower downtown’s grand theft auto wizards.

  Loretta was a lie
utenant now, and she’d been right. The army had been a good place for an eighteen-year-old kid who’d been on the verge of upgrading into felonies beyond his successful, and therefore undocumented, forays into boosting cars.

  The Honda moved again, and Dax kept up. He could see the lights of Denver spread out across the horizon and spilling onto the dark plains to the east, but no matter how much sprawl the suburbs provided, Denver was a small town, especially if you’d grown up running her streets.

  Hawkins, Quinn, and a guy named Creed-he’d crossed all their paths at some point during his time in the army and during his last few years in the Middle East, before he’d gotten out of the military. He hadn’t seen Dylan, though. From a few oblique asides, he’d surmised that the boss of the chop shop had gone a slightly different route. More spook than operator, it didn’t appear that Dylan Hart spent much, if any, time in BDUs.

  The one guy he hadn’t seen since he’d left Denver was J. T. Chronopolous, but he’d heard the rumors about a couple of operators on a black op in Colombia a few years back, about one of them having three scars across the top of his shoulder-and he’d thought of the car thief he’d used to know. Given what the other guys had ended up doing, he’d always kind of figured there was a fair chance that guy in Colombia had been J.T. He hoped to hell what he’d heard hadn’t happened to anyone he knew, though, especially someone from the Steele Street crew, especially J.T. But someday, he was going to have to check it out and get the real story.

  Hell, they’d all been running so damn wild on the streets as kids way back then.

  Not all the wild kids were on the streets, though. He’d found a whole passel of them in a private prep school in Colorado Springs, Folton Ridge Academy. He’d been down at the school taking pictures of four of the students, all girls, all about seventeen years old, all brunettes, all on the Folton Ridge Flyers field hockey team. He’d gotten their names by matching the photos he’d taken with those in the school’s yearbook, and then gotten to know each of the girls up close and personal through their on-line profiles and the accompanying chitchat messages posted between them and their friends.