Closing the bathroom window, he wondered how in the hell he and Easy were going to talk their way out of this once the cops lifted her prints off the phone she’d used to set up her contact with the parking valet. A lot of people could place her at the Oxford at the right time for an assault with a deadly weapon charge at the very least, including Johnny Ramos.

Yeah, that guy. The one whose picture Lieutenant Loretta was flashing around. He had to be trouble, and yet Dax’s directive stood-he wanted Easy sticking to the guy like a hot lamination. Dom Ramos had been a punk, but he’d been a punk Dax had liked, a straightforward guy, no bullshit.

He reached in his back pocket and pulled out the angel picture postcard. It was an invitation for a showing at an art gallery over on Seventeenth, the Toussi Gallery next to the Oxford Hotel, and it had Ramos’s name on it. No address, just the guy’s name where the address would be, along with the note written in a loopy female hand Dax took the time to decipher this time-“Come be the star that you are, sweetie. Love, Nikki.”

He flipped the card back over to the angel side, and sure enough, the showing was for an artist named Nikki. That was all the postcard said, Nikki, like Picasso, or Rembrandt. From the looks of the painting on the front of the card, one name might be enough. She was good.

And this woman thought Johnny Ramos was a star.

Dax figured he better go find out if she was right.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Afghanistan, Nuristan Province, not the Kunar- Johnny was looking right at it. He could smell it, feel the dust sifting down on him. There had been so many tunnels cut into the mountainsides, and Third Platoon’s job had been to search a section of them.

He knew better than to reach for his pistol. He was in Colorado, not a war zone, but the sight of the tunnel, actually being in one again, unnerved him.

It shouldn’t. He hadn’t been unnerved in Nuristan, not even the first time, when they’d gotten rocked by mortar fire on their way out. They’d spent another four weeks clearing tunnels, and he’d never broken a sweat-until now.

Shit.

He was still in the elevator, and Esme and Nachman were heading around a corner. He wasn’t going to let that happen, for her to go off in the darkness of a damn tunnel with a strange old man, and him just stand here and watch her disappear.

Shit.

He was a U.S. Army Ranger, had been for five years, and there wasn’t anyplace he was afraid to go.

Sucking it up, and more than a little embarrassed that he had to suck it up to get off a damn elevator, he stepped into the tunnel. The feel of the dirt beneath his boots was uncomfortably familiar, the short deadness of the footfalls, but he kept going, one step after the next.

After about twenty feet, the tunnel branched off in two more directions. One glance at the additional corridors snaking off into darkness, and he drew his gun. Fuck it. Whatever he was going to be looking at, he was suddenly absolutely positive he wanted to be looking at it through the tritium dots on his gun sights. What the hell did he know, really? Anything could be down here, a bear, a mountain lion, anything, and a Ranger would be ready.

So he was ready.

Right.

With a.45 in the sub-subbasement of a multimillionaire’s mansion in the Colorado Rockies.

And there was Esme, up ahead, cool as a little cucumber, raising tufts of dust with her high heels.

And him, sliding along the wall behind her, knees bent, muscles tense, his trigger finger laid flat along the pistol’s slide-ready to slip inside the trigger guard, ready to rock and roll.

He checked his six, looking back toward the elevator, moving his pistol with his line of sight- ready-and when he turned back around, gun lowered again, he was facing Esme, stopped in the middle of the tunnel and looking at him with an expression of confusion, fascination, and maybe a little plain old “you’ve got to be kidding me” surprise.

Her gaze dropped down the length of him in less than a second, then took another one to come back up to meet his eyes. Her expression didn’t change. Everything was still in play as she stood and watched him, watched him calculate his odds-the odds of running into an enemy fighter, Taliban, al-Qaeda, Egyptian, Arab, Pakistani, an Islamic insurgent from anywhere who’d come to battle the coalition forces. Anyone who’d come in country to go up against him and his guys.

Zero, he decided. It was zero odds down here in Isaac Nachman’s sub-subbasement. Sure. He knew it was zero, or damn close to it.

Convinced, he slowly straightened up, flipping the safety back on his pistol before he slid it into its holster.

“PTSD?” she said, one of her eyebrows lifting a bit, adding a serious dose of flat-out curiosity to her question-more curiosity than the question itself implied.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, he knew what the initials stood for.

“No.” He shook his head. “Instinct.”

Pure instinct, the survival kind. A lot of soldiers struggled with PTSD in varying degrees and with a variety of symptoms. He knew it for a fact. He’d seen it on deployment and seen it each time they’d come home, and he knew that wasn’t his problem, not full-out anyway. Hell, he’d been in “combat” most of his life, fighting on street corners and in back alleys, and the night Dom had died, fighting it out in the lush, green expanse of City Park.

He’d seen a lot, done a lot, or so he’d thought until his first combat tour. When he’d come back from Afghanistan the first time, he’d come back with an unsolicited and unexpected realization about the night in the park: Dom had died clean.

It had seemed like such a bloody mess at the time, with Dom gasping in pain and gasping for breath, with the blood pumping out of him, out of the hole one of the Parkside Bloods had put in him. One shot, not even a well-aimed shot, just one unlucky shot had killed his brother. A bunch of Parkside gangsters waving their pieces around and pulling their triggers had managed to actually hit Domingo Ramos.

In real combat, death could be a lot different. First, the shots were better aimed. When the shooting started, a guy could be assured that his enemies were shooting at him, not just around him, shooting to kill, and that every guy out there with a scope was using it to target him, that every set of iron sights was leveled at him. Soldiers didn’t wave their guns around or hold them slanted on the side. That was only for dumbass gangsters and people in the movies.

The Rangers had most definitely taught him how to shoot.

The second thing about death in combat was the ordnance. Dom had been killed by a single 9mm round, a damn unlucky shot that had hit him square in the heart. But in combat, people got blown apart-into pieces. Some people still got shot, and it was never pretty, but guys also got literally blown to bits, and sometimes those guys looked like the lucky ones.

That was the third thing about death in combat- a warrior’s death wasn’t the worst way to go. Dead wasn’t the worst way to leave a battlefield. Johnny hadn’t known that until he’d been in combat and watched people die, and watched the people who hadn’t died.

He didn’t move his hand, but suddenly he could feel the envelope in his pocket, feel it like it was hot-not hot enough to burn, he wouldn’t give himself that. He wasn’t the one who had been branded by combat.

But he felt the heat, and he felt guilt-building in his chest and twisting in his gut and sweeping up to make his face hot, and suddenly, he wanted the hell out of this goddamn tunnel.

“What are we doing down here, Esme?” His words were short, his voice curt.

“Mr. Nachman keeps his collection down here in a vault, his art collection,” she said, very clearly, holding his gaze steady with her own. “There will be a black light in the vault, and we’ll use it to verify that the Meinhard I’ve brought him is exactly what I told him it is-the original painting, untouched, exactly what he’s paying for. Then he’ll give me the money, and we’ll leave.”