Loose and Easy (8 page)

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 lieutenant 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.

If Dax ever had kids, he’d only have two words for the on-line chitchat, post-your-picture-so-your-friends-can-find-you Web sites: no way. Not if hell froze over. He knew the one girl’s bra size, which was not the information he’d been looking to gather. On the plus side, by sifting through their messages, he’d determined that two of the girls were pretty nice kids. Three of them were good students. All four complained about their coach. One of them had freckles and thought they made her look fat.

Dax thought that maybe it was the extra twenty pounds she was carrying that made her appear plump, but he was no expert on teenage girls and didn’t want to be. He’d survived that territory once by the skin of his teeth, as a teenage boy, and he wasn’t going back except in the driver’s seat, though truth be told, he’d never met a father yet who thought he was in charge of his teenage daughter’s life. Quite the opposite—teenage girls seemed to rule whatever planet they were residing on, which was exactly how he remembered high school being: girls in charge, boys going in circles standing still.

Of the four Folton Ridge girls, both of the nice ones had been in their rooms last night. The other two had started out in the boys’ dorm with a fifth of vanilla vodka and ended up half-naked in a hot tub at a private house near the Broadmoor Hotel with a whole bunch of Folton Ridge boys, half a dozen townies, and, from the uniforms he’d seen littering the deck, a couple of cadets from the Air Force Academy.

Dax knew hell-bent-for-disaster when he saw it, and the two Folton girls had been leading the pack. They were wild ones, a fact he had thoroughly documented with the long lens on his camera.

Four Folton Ridge field hockey players, varsity, and one of them was the girl he needed. He wouldn’t know for sure which one until Easy got him the name from Burt’s Chicago connection. They should have had it before he’d ever gone to Colorado Springs. If they didn’t have it by morning, he and Easy were going to be walking into the payoff with Bleak without their ace—in which case he’d be winging it.

Nothing new there, but he preferred the sure shot when he could get it.

Sure shot, hell. Uncle Burt had never had a sure shot in his life, and this mess Dax and Easy were trying to pull him out of had been screwed up from the get-go. They hadn’t been able to get Otto to commit to coming to Denver any earlier for the “deal of a lifetime” they’d concocted strictly to set him up, and they’d held Franklin Bleak off as long as they could. That bastard was done with Burt Alden. Tomorrow, five
A.M
., was the drop-dead date on the money Easy’s father owed, and she and Dax had ended up in the middle of the time crunch.

Never again, that’s all he could say. Esme wanted her father paid up, shut down, and exfiltrated. Ex-filleted was more like it as far as Dax was concerned. He didn’t care where Burt Alden landed, the old man was going to find a bet, and a scam, and trouble—and probably a little stolen art. Uncle Burt was good at that. Dax had to give him some credit.

His glance slid to the folder lying in the passenger seat. He’d found the girls—four girls, four sets of photographs, and endless pages of on-line chitchat. He’d combed through all of it, compared the photographs to the pictures he had of Franklin Bleak, and he had a guess as to which of the varsity girls called Franklin “Daddy”—and Daddy Franklin wasn’t going to be happy to see the photographs Dax had taken of his girl in that hot tub.

Bottom line, though, Dax could have photographed her serving tea to the queen, and it would have been enough to push Franklin Bleak off center and off Burt Alden’s back. No one was supposed to know Franklin Bleak had a daughter. The facts of the girl’s connection to him had been buried deep, and for good reason. Franklin was the kind of guy with a lot of enemies and no known weaknesses to exploit—except her.

The prep school girl was no love child, no by-blow from one of Bleak’s many mistresses over the years. No, the chubby, dark-haired, freckle-faced teen with the penchant for vanilla-vodka shooters and topless hot-tubbing was the real deal, Bleak’s only legitimate offspring, heir to his fortune—the blood running true. Seventeen years and nine months ago, after a violent rise up the ranks in the Chicago rackets, Franklin had bought himself a high-society wife off the East Coast who’d done her duty and then locked him out cold. There’d been no divorce. But the wife hadn’t stuck around either. She’d taken his money and his kid and hightailed it back to the coast. The only thing she’d left behind was his name—Bleak.