Anything to keep from going home-yeah, he knew he was avoiding it. But hell, his place at Steele Street ’s Commerce City Garage was just too damn quiet to face alone.
Way too damn quiet. He just got in trouble when he was trapped with that much quiet. Red Dog and the Angel Boy lived upstairs, but they were out more often than they were in, and they’d been out for the last two weeks, running the security on a senate subcommittee’s junket through Bolivia.
Still, the O’Lounge was so far back in his memory banks, it wouldn’t have occurred to him in a week of Sundays as a place to go, let alone as a place to meet up with Kevin Harrell and Dovey Smollett for old home week.
Easy Alex was a different story. He actually thought about her quite a bit for a girl he’d never actually had sex with-or maybe those were the girls a guy tended to mull over in his mind, the ones who’d gotten away, especially the ones who’d barely gotten away.
Heavy footsteps started up the stairs below, accompanied by a fair share of swearing. Kevin and the Chicago Bear had to be scraping both sides of the narrow stairwell. Those boys were pushing well over two-fifty each, and it wasn’t all muscle, not even close.
He’d actually thought about Esme once in the middle of a firefight during this last go-around. It had startled the hell out of him at the time, that little lapse in his concentration. He’d been in a bunker in the Kunar Province of Afghanistan. They’d been getting pounded by enemy machine guns, and an image of Esme had flashed in front of his eyes, a really sweet image of her looking over her shoulder, smiling at him, wearing a little summer dress that barely covered her ass, her blond hair cascading down her back-hips swaying, her dress lifting in the breeze, sunshine lighting her like a halo.
It had unnerved the crap out of him. Third Platoon had already gotten hit seven times in twelve hours that day, and she’d shown up in the eighth firefight, like a messenger from God, an angel come to tease him with a vision of home, or maybe a Valkyrie waiting to claim a fallen warrior.
Nothing else strange had happened, just that little, almost hallucinatory vision of Easy Alex in the middle of the fight. Third Platoon had continued to get hammered into the night, which had been standard operating procedure during the Kunar deployment, but most of them had come out okay by morning, when an MRE and a couple of cups of coffee had set him straight-at least straight enough to face another day of the same.
He could probably use a couple of cups of coffee right now, and honestly, he didn’t need to see up her skirt. He already knew what was up there-red lace panties and a sweet size six.
Geezus.
They came out onto the roof, and Esme didn’t even break stride. She knew exactly where she was going.
She pointed to a couch up ahead under a canvas tarp rigged as a sunshade. “Should we-”
“No,” he cut her off. Blocking the door with the couch wouldn’t do any good. It would take Dovey and friends less time to push past it than it would take him and Esme to move it.
Better to keep moving, and she did, cutting off the beam on her flashlight as she continued at a jog toward the edge of the roof. There was enough streetlight to see where they were going, and no reason on earth to carry around a spotlight for Bleak’s goons to follow.
Tactically, he was impressed, even more so when she rounded the O’Lounge and came face to face with the alley bridge. It had been a few years since he’d been on the roof of O’Shaunessy’s, and sometime during those years, some manager must have decided the gig was up on the double dog dares. To limit his potential liability and cut down on the number of junior high school students trying to sneak into his bar, he’d had somebody’s old wrought-iron security door welded to the near end of the alley bridge, and then put a big steel padlock on it. The Wazee Warehouse was still only fifteen feet away, but now it was prohibitively difficult to get to-unless your name was Easy Alex.
Stopping in front of the scrolled wrought-iron door, and without missing a beat, she cut the beam of her flashlight back on, stuck it in her mouth like somebody used to working alone, and reached into another of the messenger bag’s outside pockets.
She was just so freaking smooth, all of her moves calibrated, with her thoughts always one step ahead of what she needed to do. He was impressed as hell. He was also impressed by what she was doing, although if he’d blinked, he would have missed the whole thing.
Johnny knew lock picks and the guys who used them. He knew Superman, who was one of the best and who had taught him-and she was better. Two seconds flat and she was turning off her flashlight, repocketing her tools, and opening the door onto the alley bridge. He followed her through to the other side, and she turned and closed it behind them. Then she refastened the padlock on their side.
For anybody to get through was going to take some doing, which meant, after some possible milling around and cursing his bad luck, even a less-bright guy like Dovey would realize the only chance he had was to pick up their trail on Wazee Street.
Johnny was still putting his money on Esme. From the sound of what he’d heard going on behind him in the stairwell, Dovey and his two bull elephants weren’t negotiating four flights of acutely angled stairs with nearly the grace and speed that he and the catlike Easy Alex had managed. By the time the bad guys got themselves turned around and back down the stairs, he and Esme would be halfway to Steele Street and hopefully some answers.
The bridge over the alley four floors below hadn’t improved with age, but neither had it deteriorated to the point where he felt like they needed ropes and carabiners. Esme was across in seconds and climbing the iron ladder bolted onto the side of the Wazee Warehouse.
A cat, that’s what she was, sinuous, leggy, sleek, graceful. Add skilled, fearless, decisive, efficient, and wary of the cops, and suddenly he got an even clearer picture of her: cat burglar.
Esme Alden, LoDo hooker, he couldn’t buy, but Esme Alden, cat burglar-yeah, he was afraid that one was all too easy to believe.
In minutes, they were across the warehouse roof and heading down the fire escape to the street, and so far, on his scoreboard, it had been one helluva night.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“What do you mean you didn’t get the goddamn girl?” Franklin Bleak said into his phone. “How many lives do you think you’ve got, Dovey? Twelve? You think you’ve got twelve goddamn lives?”
“No, sir, Mr. Bleak.”
“Good, because you don’t. I can fucking guarantee you that much, Smollett.” Franklin settled back into his cordovan leather chair and lifted his feet to set them on his mahogany desk. The wallpaper in his office was richly flocked, a black rampant lion pattern on hunter green. The rug covering his hardwood floor was straight out of the Arabian Nights via hand-knotted New Zealand wool, a rich tapestry of gold, ivory, and cinnabar red. He had two richly upholstered chairs in his office, and a matching settee in a pattern called Rutherford. The material was wool, the frames were hand-carved beechwood stained to a rich cherry. Amber sconces and a crystal chandelier bathed his private lair with warm, luxurious light.
The room was richly colorful, but then, Franklin Bleak was a richly colorful guy, leaning heavily on the “rich” side of the equation. He owned Commerce City and everything north of Speer Boulevard in Denver. His empire stretched southeast to Aurora and north into Brighton. He stayed the hell out of Boulder, that crapshoot of liberalism and panty-waisted, tree-hugging, small-carbonfootprinted do-gooders to the west, but he did run a few games and some girls in Thornton. He’d stayed away from moving a lot of drugs, because drugs were such a dirty, fierce business, very dangerous. Girls were easy to keep in line. Game scores, race numbers, and the money never lied. But the drugs put a guy directly in the line of fire and could get him killed. To do drugs well, a guy needed layers, a lot of layers, between himself and the street. The safest place to sell drugs was from the top, and even then, some douche might decide to blow up your house, or take out your whole damn condominium building, just blow it the fuck up while you were asleep inside.