And they needed Smith. He’d be good to have on board, a cool head, a cold heart. Smith could be counted on to keep appropriate emotional distance between himself and what the others would be feeling no matter how professionally they’d always conducted themselves. This damn situation would test them all.
There was no pulling Gillian and Travis off their mission. Politics again. Protecting senators on junkets in Third World countries, this one Bolivia, took precedence over just about every other damn thing. The trouble was, Dylan would instantly recognize the advantage of having Red Dog and the Angel Boy on the outside, if everyone on the inside found the mission parameters unacceptable and chose to exercise their marked instincts for independent thought-and who could blame them? Not Buck, not on this deal.
But neither was he going to condone or allow it.
His job was going to be to convince them not to abandon ship, to stay inside the system, to stay inside the rules. Working together, they could keep the sacrifices to a minimum. They were soldiers. He knew them. They would comply. He’d be damned if he lost his whole team due to a situation the CIA should never have allowed, let alone allowed to get so damn far out of hand that it had become a priority-one national security issue.
On the upside, he’d also brought the team something they needed: Juan Aurelio Ramos. The kid had proven himself in combat over and over again in his three tours of duty. Even with his last go-around in Afghanistan having gotten a little tight in places, and damn rough in others, Ramos had pulled through. He’d made it home in one piece, inside and out. Hawkins would take care of the rest, getting him trained up for the type of missions SDF took on. Training never stopped for any of them. It was the order of the day, every day. Ramos was officially SDF’s now-and Grant’s. All Buck had to do was keep the team alive long enough to use him.
Snagging the pair of highball glasses with the fingers of his right hand, he grabbed the bottle of Scotch with his left and walked out of the guest suite to the main elevator in the office. It was a hot summer night in Denver, and he was heading to The Beach-a couple of lawn chairs and a ratty piece of Astro Turf nailed to the roof of 738 Steele Street. With a bit of luck, he wouldn’t be alone up there for long.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Old fears die hard. Legitimate old fears don’t die at all, hard or otherwise. Driving into the Locos compound off north Delgany was a fairly well-grounded old fear in Esme’s book, an old fear with a new, unexpectedly current infusion of adrenaline.
Fight or flight-she was feeling it with every leap of her pulse.
“This isn’t cool.” It was crazy. She had enough trouble tonight without him adding a boatload of gangsters to the mix.
“No, it’s not,” he agreed, which didn’t do a damn thing to calm her nerves.
“Then why in the hell are we here?”
“I need some information. Baby Duce will have it.”
Oh, perfect. Baby Duce. She knew the damn hierarchy and history as well as any inner-city kid. Baby Duce ran the Locos. He’d been running them since Carlos had gotten killed in some turf war, and before Carlos, it had been Dom Ramos, who, as she most certainly remembered, had also gotten killed in some turf war. The Locos had been a lot smaller crew under Dom, very tight-knit, and they’d mostly run their business and their wars on the other side of the river. This north-downtown stuff had all started with a pipeline cocaine deal Baby Duce had brokered during the first year of his reign. The whole Locos sphere of influence had done nothing but expand since then. They owned both sides of the river now, ran most of lower downtown and downtown, and had made heavy inroads into the eastern suburbs.
Johnny freakin’ Ramos-crown prince of the Locos by blood and heritage. Maybe she’d been wrong about him.
Crap.
Of course she’d been wrong about him.
Esme could see shadows moving in the shadows of the buildings and houses on each side of the alley. They were coming in the back door of a very sketchy neighborhood, a very well protected neighborhood, and they were running a gauntlet of its guards, with every shadow a potential threat.
Within the space of a couple of blocks, she and Johnny had left the hip and happening part of lower downtown and cruised into what Realtors referred to as River North, or RiNo, a “mixed use” area. In this case, the mix of use included ultra-low-end residential crammed in between no-longer-in-use industrial and retail buildings, a good breeding ground for vice. Not for long, though. Developers had already made headway in the area, optimistically hoping they could turn it into a “front door” neighborhood.
Hell, get a couple of developers holding hands with a few Realtors and guaranteed they’d start turning pigs’ ears into silk purses, and RiNo into the next LoDo-for a price, usually a pretty pricey price.
But for now, this block and half a dozen others belonged to Baby Duce, and she and Johnny were right in the middle of his River North territory.
Halfway down the alley, Johnny stopped the Cyclone and took the key out of the ignition. To her right, a haphazard array of garbage cans flanked a padlocked iron door with the words Butcher Drug Store painted on the cinderblock above it.
Geezus. Butcher and drugs in the same sentence were enough to send a chill down her spine, especially when, to her left, a chain-linked, barbed-wire fence was all that stood between her and the Locos’ north-side crib. A pair of lights on the back of the ramshackle old house lit up the yard and part of the alley.
Yeah, every guy in Denver had some badass reputation he was working to uphold, and Baby Duce was no different. So now she had Bleak on her ass, Baby Duce on her left, Benny-boy staring out of her near future, Erich Warner and Otto Von Lindberg hopefully not bearing down on her from out of her past, and Isaac Nachman nowhere in sight, because she was stuck in this goddamn alley, in a car with no key.
“Wait here.” Johnny opened his door and was about halfway out when she stopped him with a word.
“Five,” she said.
He hesitated for a second, then glanced back at her over his shoulder.
“Five?”
“Five minutes, and then I’m walking out of here.” And she meant it.
He considered the pavement at his feet for a couple of seconds, then finished getting out, closed the door, and leaned down through the window. “In that case, I’ll be back in four and a half.”
Straightening up, he slapped the roof of the car twice, saying something in Spanish to the guys who’d come up from both ends of the alley and were stationing themselves along the fence.
Esme had taken French in high school, thinking it would make her more refined. It hadn’t, and now she was clueless about what he’d said, except it was probably something like “don’t steal the tires off this awesome car,” or “don’t strip the huge, mother-freaking engine I bolted under this hood,” or hopefully, maybe, “don’t harass the dumb blonde who let me hijack her into this alley.”
Not that the girl was going to stand still for too much harassing.
Still, hell-she watched him step through the gate into a weed-choked yard and walk to the back door of the house. A tall, muscular guy covered in tattoos met him there, and they talked for a few moments, with the guy looking at her most of that time, then he and Johnny disappeared inside, and she sat back in her seat. There were five guys milling in the alley, and each and every one of them was staring at her, too-dammit.
She checked her watch. Four and a half minutes- just enough time to do a little housekeeping.
She pulled her phone out of the messenger bag and found three missed calls, all from Dax, and nothing from her dad. This time, she didn’t refrain from a heavy sigh. She gave into it, just to get it off her chest. This whole damn night was because of him, and all she’d asked for was the name of Franklin Bleak’s daughter. Burt had promised her his good friend Thomas in Chicago would get the name weeks ago, but like everything else with her dad, it hadn’t worked out like he’d planned. She’d given him one simple job to do, and he’d blown it.