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.
CHAPTER FIVE
Dressed to kill and driving a minivan?
Johnny double-checked the direction of her gaze and ended up right back at the same POS minivan he’d thought she was looking at-the butt-ugly brown-and-tan one with the license plate number LVH3590 and the big orange boot on it.
From her crestfallen expression, she knew that baby wasn’t going anywhere tonight. To her credit, the news only waylaid her for about three seconds, before she turned and stuck out her hand to him.
“Well, it was great to see you… really,” she said, giving his hand a firm shake when he took hold of hers. One shake, then she let go of him. “Good luck with my dad tomorrow. Maybe we can have that drink sometime.”
Sure they could, he thought, watching her take off across the street, dodging the traffic. Talk about a bum’s rush.
From the other side of Wynkoop, she hailed a cab, but the cabbie passed her by. That was her problem, not his. His problem was… hell, he didn’t have any problems. He’d done three combat tours and gotten away with nothing worse than a sprained ankle, a bajillion flea bites, and a few stitches once when a round hadn’t quite missed him.
He didn’t have any problems.
Except for the skinny, blond-haired guy getting out of the passenger side of a Buick LeSabre about halfway up the block on her side of the street. Two things bothered him about the guy. One, Johnny knew him. His name was Dan Smollett, more often known as Dovey, and he worked for a bookie up in Commerce City named Franklin Bleak. Two, Dovey was looking straight at Esme as he was getting out of the car, which made this as close to a high school reunion as Johnny had ever gotten- him, Dovey Smollett, and Easy Alex. They’d all graduated from East the same year, and apparently, only one of them had gone straight. Surprisingly enough, it hadn’t been the class valedictorian.
Dovey closed the door on the LeSabre and started toward her, and Johnny felt another knee-jerk reaction coming on. Goddammit.
Civic duty, he told himself. They were in the middle of lower downtown, Esme had not yet seen the scumbag zeroing in on her, and Dovey was coming up on her strong side. The element of surprise could really work against old Dovey in this situation, given that Esme had a.45 strapped under her arm, and from the extra little bit of adjusting she’d given the messenger bag, Johnny was guessing she practiced drawing out of her shoulder holster, which had the potential of making her fast.
Not that he thought she might accidentally shoot old Dovey. No, he figured if she shot somebody, it probably wouldn’t be by accident.
Kee-rist. He stepped off the curb, checking the traffic both ways, and made his way across the street. She saw him coming, he made sure of it, and she didn’t look happy about it, but that was just too damn bad.
He headed for her left side, to put himself between her and Dovey, and no doubt, Dovey was going to see him, too, and no doubt he’d tell Franklin Bleak what and who had happened to his bird, which meant Johnny was going to have to call Sparky Klimaszewski and have him put the heat on Franklin to set things right and get the bookie off his ass.
It was amazing really, how quickly life could get complicated, amazing just how quickly a guy without any problems could acquire a whole boatload of them.
Case in point: Being in debt to Sparky usually required felonious restitution. Sparky was only interested in one thing, cars and the grand theft auto thereof.
Hell. Johnny hadn’t stolen a car since he’d been fifteen. Okay, seventeen, but that had been a strictly one-off job for the last time he’d needed a favor from Sparky. But fine, he could deal with Sparky, because Sparky, for all that he ran more cars through Denver than any other chop shop, was not an undersized psycho who tried to compensate for his lack of physical stature by committing violent acts of retribution against losers who didn’t pay and anyone else who got in his way.
Franklin Bleak was all that and more, a verifiable freakazoid. He had a very nasty reputation, well earned, for doing very bad deeds-and he’d sent his errand boys to pick up Esme Alden.
Johnny didn’t particularly bother to explain all this, or himself, to her when he stepped up on the curb on the other side of Wynkoop.
“Let’s go.” The command was short, succinct, and impossible to misinterpret, his specialty, and before it was even out of his mouth, he had ahold of her, one of his arms going around her back, his hand gripping her upper right arm, his other hand going across his front and taking hold of her left biceps. Without expending too much effort, he had her under control, half lifted off her feet, and heading back across the street.
“Wh-what in the… who do you think…whwhat in the hell?”