“No,” she said, and instead of coming out cold, the way she’d intended, it sounded regretful. “No, I’m not.”
“You’re going to let a man die.”
She didn’t have an answer to that, except to say, “If what you guys said in that car was right, there are other people out there. Other people who can stop it. It doesn’t have to be me.”
“You know what, Jazz? Sometimes, it does.” He didn’t sound angry, just sad. Sad, and a little lost. “Sometimes there just isn’t anybody else to step up and do what has to be done. You should know that.”
She didn’t say anything at all to that. Borden shook his head.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll get you copies of the autopsy photos. Maybe you can put them in your scrapbook.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Yeah? You know what? None of this is fair!” He shouted it at her, and for a second she saw something flare, something hot and wild and desperate, and it jumped across to her like ignition through a wire. “This is my friend! Do you understand me? My friend! So yeah, you want me to beg? I’m begging! Please, Jazz. Please help me save his life!”
She swallowed and came a step closer to him. His pulse was beating fast along the matte-velvet skin of his throat, and his lips were parted. He looked on the edge of doing something…dangerous.
“If you don’t go,” he said softly, “I will.”
“What does your boss say about that?”
“That I won’t come back.”
“But I will.”
He nodded slightly.
“So it’s not really just your friend I’d be saving,” she said. “Right?”
No answer. He didn’t move, didn’t speak.
“That’s a hell of a blackmail, Counselor. And it only works if I believe even a fraction of the bullshit the Cross Society is peddling.”
“Then don’t believe it,” he said. “Go on with your important case. I can’t stop you.”
He started for the door, then came back and grabbed his fruit basket.
She watched in disbelief as he stalked out the door, handed the basket to Pansy, whose lips parted in a silent O of amazement, and kept going, heading for the elevators.
Jazz caught up to him at the reception desk. “Hey! Counselor!”
He stiff-armed through the glass doors and into the elevator lobby, where he hit the button twice before stopping. He didn’t look at her.
“Borden,” she said, and then, half-desperately, “James.”
That got his attention. He glanced over at her, then away.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t like being—manhandled. You might have noticed that the first time we met. And I really don’t like being manipulated.”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “Sorry. I’m not trying to manipulate you. I just—I just don’t know where else to go.”
Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, she knew that. “I’m keyed up,” she said. “I’ve got some new information about…” For some reason, she didn’t want to explain it to him. “About a case. Asking me to take three days away from it’s a pretty high price to pay.”
He nodded, eyes on the closed elevator doors and the lit call button. “Maybe so,” he replied, “and I can’t ask you what’s more important. I can only tell you that my friend is important to me, and I’m willing to go if you don’t. So tell me now, because buying a last-minute plane ticket is murder.”
Maybe I could send Lucia…No, she couldn’t pull Lucia out, not now; Lucia had taken weeks settling her cover, and she was getting close to breaking the case. Despite the jokes earlier, Lucia wasn’t going to disengage, and she damn sure wasn’t going to pull out of undercover work to go work for the Cross Society.
Jazz took a deep breath and held it. The pictures would keep. They’d kept all this time, three days wouldn’t kill her. It would give her time to pull the details out of Manny and verify the provenance.
“Fine,” she said. “Fine, I’ll go. Tell Laskins I’m cooperating.”
“That would be a pretty free interpretation of events,” he said, and looked at her with a trace of a smile.
“You’re a lawyer. Prevaricate.”
“Sorry I gave away your fruit basket.”
“Please tell me that was Laskins’s choice of a gift.”
His smile was purely giddy. “Fruit baskets don’t turn you on? Come on, Jazz. Bananas, pear honey—it’s practical and seductive.”
“Are you hungry?”
“What?”
She said it slower. “Are…you…hungry?”
“Why?”
“Because I want to talk to you about your friend. If I’m going to fly off to L.A. to protect his ass, at the very least I should know a little something about him.”
Borden looked more stunned by that than by her agreement to take the case. “Um…okay. Where do you want to—”
“Wait downstairs,” she said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
The elevator arrived with a musical ding. She watched him get in and press the button for the first floor. Just before the doors closed, she said, “By the way? If you want to send a woman a present, chocolate’s seductive. Bananas are just crude.”
The closing doors cut him off before he could come up with any kind of a response.
Jazz stopped by Pansy’s desk on the way back to her office. Pansy was turning the fruit basket this way and that, trying to catalog contents without unwrapping the shiny paper.
Jazz picked it up and carried it into her office.
“Pear honey,” Pansy called after her. “He must really like you. That’s kinda kinky. Think of all the applications…”
She slammed the door, gathered up the photos into a briefcase, added her collapsible truncheon, PDA, a few more files she needed to catch up on, and grabbed the travel bag she always kept ready in the closet, with changes of clothing and toiletries. She shouldered it, opened the door again and saw Pansy jump.
“I’m going to L.A.,” she said, and Pansy’s eyes went narrow with surprise.
“It’s not on your schedule—”
“Add it. Three days in L.A.”
“With…anyone?”
“Please. It’s a fruit basket.”
“Is it a case? Because I should open up a file if—”
The red envelope was in Jazz’s briefcase. She took it out, tossed it to Pansy, and said, “Make two copies, and give one to Lucia. In case.”
“In case what?” Pansy asked, frowning.
“In case I don’t come back.”
Pansy gave her a long, measuring stare. “You have to come back. You know that, right? I don’t give you permission not to come back.”
Jazz smiled. “I have to sign bonus checks,” she said.
“Damn straight.”
It wasn’t romantic, really, as dinners went. Maybe midway between the Formica bustle of Arthur Bryant’s and some French restaurant with low lights and unpronounceable food—the restaurant was brightly lit, Italian, and full of the smells of garlic and parmesan and red sauce. Instead of soothing violins discreetly whispering through concealed speakers, this place featured waiters who sang opera. Loudly. Jazz supposed they were lucky the waiters actually could sing.
She politely clapped after the second aria from the guy topping off her tea and gave him a not-too-subtle bug-off sign, which he took with good grace. Across from her, James Borden was digging into a plate of chicken parmesan, with bread sticks. She stuck to spaghetti.
“Here,” he said, as she was questing for a meatball with her fork. He slid an envelope across the table toward her. Not red, this time. White, but still the size and shape of a card. She raised her eyebrows and opened it up.
It really was a card. Flowers on the front, and inside, a handwritten note that said, simply, Thank you.
With a plane ticket for one to Los Angeles, leaving in—she checked her watch—four hours.
“Should give you enough time to eat, get there, check in and relax a little,” he said, watching her.
“You bought the ticket this morning. Before you actually talked to me.”