“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 his 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.