She very discreetly slipped her open hand up against the snap on her jacket. From that position, she knew exactly how far she was from her pistol- less than a second away-but she wouldn’t draw unless she made the decision to shoot. An unarmed blonde in a beat-up old car had a zero threat quotient to a gang of five Locos, and that’s exactly what she wanted all of them to keep thinking-that she was no threat to them. Once a gun was brought into play, all the rules would change.
“I keep up enough,” Dax assured her. “You tell Duce you’re with me. That dude owes me from way back. He won’t have forgotten.”
“Sure. If it gets to that, I’ll drop your name.” She wasn’t going to ask what Baby Duce owed him for, but she didn’t doubt the debt was real, or that Baby Duce would remember both it and Daniel Axel, Dax, Killian. All the time she’d spent being good in school and keeping her ducks in a row, Dax had spent running wild and making a name for himself. Dax’s ducks wouldn’t have known a row if it had snapped up and bit them in the butt.
“Have you called Isaac Nachman?”
“He’s next on my list. Trust me, there won’t be any trouble. He wants the Meinhard. You know how he is about his paintings. Me being even an hour late isn’t going to change anything or put us out of the running.”
“Call me when you get to Mama Guadalupe’s.”
“Can do. It should be about eleven,” she said, keeping her eye on the young Loco. He smiled at her, showing off two rows of pearly whites with his incisors capped in gold-vampire-style. Geezus.
“If there’s any trouble, any at all, I want you-”
“Nachman knows the drill,” she interrupted. There wasn’t going to be any trouble, not with Isaac Nachman. “Dad’s done amazing work for him over the years. Geez, Dax, Dad’s the one who tracked down Nachman’s Renoir. In sixty years, no one else even got close to it, and with me on board now, the Meinhard is another clean transaction.”
Disasters and general failures aside, her dad did have a real flair for finding stolen art, especially if it had been stolen by the Nazis, which encompassed most of the Nachman family’s missing pieces.
Hitler’s ambassador to France had personally absconded with three hundred and forty-eight paintings and drawings out of the Nachman family vault. To date, one hundred and twenty-three had been recovered, over forty of those by her father, including, as of tonight, the Jakob Meinhard.
“So what’s your ETA?” she asked.
“Ten-thirty to eleven o’clock on the outside. I’m on the back roads in the boondocks south of Denver. The interstate is a traffic jam,” Dax said. “If you get to the bar first, don’t have a margarita. Just wait for me. When I get there, we’ll decide whether or not we need a new plan for dealing with Bleak. And answer your darn phone when I call.”
“Can do.” She started to hang up, but he stopped her.
“Easy, wait.”
“Yes.”
“So what’s the deal with Dom’s little brother? What’s his stake in this? What does he want?” Dax asked.
“I haven’t figured that part out yet. He said he came to the office to hire my dad, but I don’t think that’s it.”
“He tailed you from the Oxford without you knowing it?”
Talk about rubbing it in.
“Yes.”
“And he saw Smollett before you did?”
And that was even worse.
“Yes.”
“And he got you out of there.”
“Yes.”
“Take him to Nachman’s with you.”
No. Her plan was to dump him and catch a cab.
“Dax, I don’t-”
“Easy,” he interrupted. “You’ve got Bleak looking for you, and I’m not there to watch your back. Whatever this guy’s reasons for tailing you, I’d rather you kept him close. Maybe he’ll come in handy. So far he’s made pretty good moves.”
“Dax, I’m sitting in Baby Duce’s backyard with five Locos staring me down.” And one of them was moving in.
“You’re there with Domingo Ramos’s little brother, sweetheart, and that blood runs deep. Ain’t nothing going to happen to you on Locos turf, and this John guy knows it.”
Sure, she knew it, too, except even the oldest gangster in the alley was too young to have run with Dom, and the one moving in on her might not even remember Carlos, and Johnny’s time had run out about a minute ago.
“Well,” she said. “If I don’t make it to the bar at Guadalupe’s, remember, the body will be just off Delgany, behind Butcher Drug Store.”
“If I believed that for even a second, I’d be calling in the cavalry.”
Esme felt herself blanch. “Uh… no. No cavalry. Honest, Dax. I’m fine. You’re right.” The last damn thing she needed was Dax’s idea of Denver cavalry, which could be summed up in two words: Lieutenant Loretta. The woman had been a beat cop long before she’d made lieutenant, and if there was a kid on the street she hadn’t scared straight, that kid had probably ended up in Canon City.
She’d scared the crap out of Esme. One little incident of being in the wrong place at the wrong time had been all the delinquency Esme had been able to handle.
Lieutenant Loretta was a big woman, reddish hair, large nose, amber-eyed, kind of lovely… maybe, if a person wasn’t shaking in her shoes, looking straight up at her. Esme had been shaking like a leaf the night she’d run up against the lieutenant, and she was going to skip the cavalry tonight. Loretta Bradley didn’t forget, ever. That was the urban legend, and Esme wasn’t about to put it to the test.
“Hola, chica.” The gangster with the gold incisors finally reached the Cyclone and leaned down in the driver’s-side window, all flash and swagger. Two spiders inked into his skin covered the back of his right hand. Not black widows, she didn’t think, not tarantulas, but brown recluses-with fangs. Cripes.
“Gotta go, Dax.”
“Watch yourself.”
“Check.” She hung up the phone and gave the gold-toothed, spider-inked wonder a contemplative look, wondering how much longer Johnny was going to leave her here, holding down the fort in the damn alley, and whether or not it really was in her best interest to get out of the car and start walking.
Somehow she didn’t think so.
The longer she held his gaze, the wider the boy’s grin got.
“You see somethin’ you like, gatita?” he asked, leaning a little farther into the car.
Not really, especially since two of the other guys had pushed off the fence and were heading toward the Cyclone. She didn’t like seeing that at all.
“Maybe.” She smiled back. “Do you like…uh, Vermeer?” She was floundering, making conversation, passing time, and hoping she could just slide her way through the next few minutes without having to make a big deal out of saving her ass.
But these guys weren’t going to touch her. No way. Not when this one was flashing vampire teeth and arachnids.
“Sure, chica.” He nodded his head, very cool, very laid-back. “I love Vermeer. Me gusta mucho. You got some? You wanna party?”
“Me gusta Vermeer, también,” another of the gang members said, leaning down to look in the driver’s-side window. He, too, had spiders tattooed on the back of his right hand.
“Kiko,” the guy with the gold teeth said, “wasn’t that Vermeer boom we were smokin’ at Rosario ’s?”
“Yeah,” the third Loco confirmed. “That was Vermeer.” She couldn’t see his right hand, but her money said he was sporting a spider tat.
“That was good shit, man.”
“Yeah.”
Yeah, Vermeer was good shit. Adolph Hitler had me gusta muchoed it so much, he’d stolen a piece from the Rothschilds in 1941, an exquisite painting done by the artist in 1668, The Astronomer. To the benefit of everyone, the piece currently resided in the Louvre.
On the other hand, she was currently residing in this damn Cyclone, and Johnny Ramos was now two minutes late.
“So, chiquita, cómo se llama? What’s your name?” vampire boy asked.