CHAPTER SIX

Esme’s heart caught in her throat, and for a moment, she was frozen in place. But just for a moment.

Bad news, she told herself. Take the hit, and move on, very carefully.

Goddammit. Franklin Bleak.

Commerce City, five A.M., a warehouse on Vogel Street -the payoff had been set. So why was the bookie pooching the deal?

Only one reason came to mind, and the bad feeling she’d had in the office suddenly got a whole lot worse. Strong-arming people for money sometimes required a little extra leverage. A wife or child, or both, worked pretty good. A guy who might be willing to sacrifice himself could usually be spurred a little harder to come up with cash when his other choice was having his family take the hit for him, possibly quite a bad hit. If they owed money to Franklin Bleak, the prognosis could be elevated to “definitely bad.” The Commerce City bookie had a very unsavory reputation, and thus the.45 for tonight’s work. Even with the money to pay her dad’s debt, she’d known presenting herself to Bleak in her father’s place entailed a certain amount of risk. For her own peace of mind and to keep potential problems at a minimum, she’d purposely left her dad out of the night’s proceedings.

But now. Hell, the risk factor had just gone through the roof-which in no way meant she didn’t still have to deliver the money. It did mean she couldn’t afford even one loose end, not so much as a thread out of place. She needed to tighten up her plan, get her contingencies in place and lock them in, and for that she needed the name Thomas had promised her father, and she needed Dax. She hadn’t planned on walking into a Vogel Street warehouse with eighty-two thousand dollars without guarantees. If the name Thomas delivered didn’t do the trick, the information Dax had gone to Colorado Springs to get was her backup-and if that didn’t work, then it would be just her and Dax, and that was as close to an ironclad guarantee as a girl was ever going to get.

At least it had been. Now she had to wonder if the only guarantee was to walk away. Come up with another game plan.

Dax had gotten her out of Bangkok -but it had cost him. She didn’t know what. He’d never said, not in eighteen long months, no matter how many times she’d asked, no matter how obliquely she’d approached the subject-but the price of her freedom, whatever back-room deal he’d cut with Erich Warner, had cost him, and now this damn deal was twisting in her hands.

That bastard Bleak had sent somebody to snatch her off the damn street, and if it hadn’t been for John Ramos, that somebody might have succeeded.

So what did Bleak want here? His damn money? Or blood?

Goddammit.

Something had gone wrong somewhere, and she needed to find out what.

“Are you sure it was Dovey Smollett you saw?” She wasn’t surprised to hear Dovey had taken to a life of crime. Hell, half their graduating class had been headed for a life of crime. And she wasn’t surprised to hear that Dovey worked for Denver ’s most dangerous bookie. What made her head spin was the screwing of the deal eight hours before it was supposed to go down.

That was all bad, all dangerous, all totally disastrous, and she was running out of time, standing around in a bar.

“Look for yourself,” John Ramos said, making a slight gesture toward the door where they’d entered.

She turned to look, and swore under her breath. He hadn’t been lying, and he hadn’t made a mistake. It was goddamn Dovey Smollett coming into O’Shaunessy’s off Sixteenth-stringy blond hair, pockmarked face, narrow shoulders, a cheap suit.

He hadn’t changed nearly enough since high school.

“I think he’s working the room with somebody,” she said. Dovey had a phone to his ear.

“Check out the Chicago Bear at two o’clock.”

She turned and looked in the direction he’d given.

“Yeah. I see him.”

Dammit. The guy coming in O’Shaunessy’s front door was big, brutish, dark-haired, bulbous-nosed, and needed a change in football team affiliation. Denver was a Broncos town, all the way, and this guy was wearing a Chicago Bears jacket. Esme didn’t know him. She didn’t have to know him. All she had to know was the look of somebody’s untrained chump looking for somebody else, and this guy had it-gaze blatantly quartering the room, phone to his ear, standing straight and tall, neck craned. He might as well have been wearing a sign that said, “Can you help me? I’m looking for ____________________.” Fill in the blank.

“I think…” God, she couldn’t believe what she was about to say.

“What?” he asked next to her.

“I think we should get a cup of coffee.”

There, it was out, and from the shit-eating grin forming on his face, Johnny Ramos knew exactly what she meant-inside joke, all the way. A person had either double-dog-dared their way through Campbell Junior High, or they hadn’t.

She had, and he’d been the one double-dogdaring her-him, and Mason Maxwell, and Ruben Sabino, and Janessa “the jerk” Kaliski. Esme had only taken the stupid dare because of Janessa. The girl had been ridiculously infatuated with Johnny Ramos, and Esme hadn’t wanted him to think the skinny brunette with the big boobs was tougher than her.

So, yes, she’d taken the dare, and she’d made it to the coffee shop, and Janessa Kaliski had chickened out. The other boys had rushed over to rescue “the jerk” where she’d gotten hung up in the bridge over the alley-but not Johnny. He’d been watching her, Esme the Miraculous, make her triumphant climb up onto the roof of what had once been the Wazee Warehouse. From there it had been a short drop and a five-story high walk to the fire escape down to street level. Half of another block southeast had dumped them out on Wazee, right in front of the Cuppa Joe coffee shop.

Their first date-that’s what she’d always called how that little escapade had finished up, a date. Her and Johnny Ramos, with his silky dark hair and tight T-shirt, the two of them sitting at a table next to the window overlooking Wazee, watching the traffic, waiting for Mason and Ruben and Janessa to show up-and not a damn thing to say to each other.

It had been excruciatingly embarrassing-but still an official first date. She’d put it in her diary that way. Date number two had been in the backseat of the Challenger, and now here they were on date number three. Like date one, date two had been a little low on conversation, so by comparison, date three was on a roll, a real chatterfest. Most of it bitchy on her part, true, but still conversation.

And they were in the exact spot where the Cuppa Joe double dog dare began, between the waitress station and the door into the kitchen of O’Shaunessy’s Bar and Grill. The first trick for a junior-high-school-aged kid being to get into the back bar to begin with. Anybody could get into the main bar. It was part of the restaurant. But the back bar was for the after-work crowd, the sports crowd, and the drinking crowd-no kids allowed.

“You’re wearing heels,” he said.

“You knew that when you brought me in here and shoved me into this corner.” Yes, she’d immediately recognized the spot where he’d corralled her, and recognized his tactics for what they were, a way of ditching a tail with a built-in escape route if the ditching failed. “Don’t worry, I can do the alley bridge in heels.”

“Then we only have one problem,” he said, his gaze going back toward the middle of the room. “Make that two problems.”

“Two?” She tried to turn and look, but he’d already started moving her toward the kitchen door.

The back bar end of O’Shaunessy’s kitchen was the storage area, and therein lay the secret of the double dog dare-the entrance to the O’Lounge. At the far end of shelves laden with cans and boxes and fifty-pound bags of flour and beans and rice, was a smaller pantry where the chef kept the good stuff, the specialty goods, and in the back of the pantry was a small wooden door, no more than four feet high. There wasn’t a busboy, dishwasher, or bar back who’d ever worked O’Shaunessy’s who didn’t quickly learn about the door, or the dark, rickety little staircase that led four stories to the southeast corner of the roof and the open-air O’Lounge.