Geezus.

The urge to protect her, which had always been ridiculously high in his book, was now through the roof.

Goddammit. Love. He should have seen this coming. What in the hell had he been thinking? That all these years he’d just wanted her because he hadn’t been able to get her? That it had just been some sort of conquering caveman instinct?

No such luck. It had been love, and he was doomed. He knew it, and yet he knew if he looked really deep in his heart, if he looked beyond the stark-edged danger of the thing, the truth was that he didn’t give a damn. If he’d known being doomed felt this good, he’d have thrown himself over the edge of it a long time ago.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Something was wrong.

Sitting at his desk, Franklin looked at his phone for the tenth goddamn time in as many minutes and knew he had a problem-two of them. Mitch and Leroy had disappeared off the goddamn planet.

Mitch would have answered his phone with the last breath he had, which made Franklin wonder if his guys were dead, and really made him wonder who in the hell Johnny Ramos was in real life. He sure as hell wasn’t just some damn north-side Loco, not if he’d gotten the drop on Mitch and Leroy. Those two boys had been street-fighting men since the day they’d been born, and the streets they’d been fighting in were Denver ’s. Bleak owned this damn town, and he’d lost two men somewhere between Genesee and Commerce City? He didn’t think so, not to one gangster and a girl.

So who the hell else was out there gunning for him tonight? Somebody sure as hell had beat up and handcuffed Kevin Harrell. Who was that?

Goddamn cocaine. So help him God, he’d known better.

But the deal had been so sweet, no fail, a sure shot-and that should have been his first goddamn clue. There was no such thing as a sure shot.

Coming to a decision, he speed-dialed another number, and then waited through seven long rings before somebody answered.

“Yo.”

“Rollo? It’s Franklin.”

“Franklin, you pussy, what the fuck are you doing calling me at two o’clock in the goddamn morning?”

“I’ve got a job for you.”

There was a slight pause.

“How much?”

“A thousand bucks.”

“Fuck you.” Rollo hung up the phone, and Franklin gritted his teeth.

Then he dialed the number again.

“Two thousand,” he said when Rollo answered.

“Double it, and tell me what you want.”

Four thousand dollars. Franklin usually had that much lying around in his “who gives a fuck” box, but not tonight. He needed every damn last dollar he’d been able to get his hands on to close the Chicago deal. He was tight, his balls in a goddamn vice, but only for tonight. By tomorrow afternoon, he’d be rolling in dough and on his way to meet Katherine Gray.

But he had to get through this night and his five o’clock meeting, and his nine o’clock meeting, and for that, he was going to need Rollo and two of his guys to replace goddamn Mitch and Leroy. He wasn’t going into anything with just Dovey and Eliot at his back. Dovey was a lightweight, and Eliot was… just Eliot, damaged goods, and Bremerton belonged to Chicago.

“You, and Greg, and Sammy at my warehouse at four o’clock this morning, packing. I’ll need you until noon.”

“Packing? Double it again, Bleak, and if me or one of my boys has to actually shoot somebody, the price goes to fifty in a heartbeat.”

Fucking Rollo.

“Be here, four o’clock sharp.” God, Franklin thought, some of the people he had to deal with were such assholes. But his back was against the wall. Esme Alden was showing up at his place with eighty-two thousand dollars, her cousin-whoever in the hell that turned out to be, and maybe he better send Eliot back down into the betting room to find out-and probably this goddamn Johnny Ramos, who even if he was just a damn member of the Locos meant Franklin was really, really screwed. Gang members tended to stick together, that was the whole goddamn point of them, and if Ramos brought a few of his homeboys with him, or a couple of those damn Crazy Spiders-well, hell, if that’s the way it was going to go down, he might even be so goddamn bold as to bring Baby Duce- and if that’s the way it was going to go down, well, hell, Franklin might as well throw himself out the goddamn window right now, head fucking first, just to make it easy on himself.

And now he was going to be short eight thousand dollars.

Where in the hell was he going to find another eight thousand dollars before nine A.M.? He had four hundred and eighteen thousand dollars sitting in his safe, and Alden’s eighty-two on the way, and that was it. He’d squeezed every lime, shaken every tree, gotten all the juice out of everybody.

And he’d borrowed the rest, borrowed it from guys who would chop him up into little pieces and feed him to their goldfish if he didn’t pay it back on time, guys in New Jersey who made the Chicago boys look like amateurs.

He was so far out on a fucking limb here.

He dropped his head in his hands and took a deep breath. There was no fooling himself on the deal. The Chicago boys would notice the missing eight thousand and have his head on a platter. He knew Chicago boys. He’d been one, and it had been a bloody fucking business. The guys in New Jersey would never lay a hand on him. He’d be dead long before they figured out he’d welshed on their deal.

Fuck.

How had this happened? Five hours ago, he’d had everything under control, completely under control. And now… now-

Christ.

John Ramos. That was it. That was the problem.

For whatever reason, Ramos had walked into the middle of Franklin ’s deal and everything had gone straight to hell. Everything.

He was going to kill the bastard. If John Ramos showed up at Franklin ’s warehouse, he was going to kill him. And he was going to fuck the girl, tie her up and fuck her, and then sell her to the highest bidder, over and over again, until he had his eight thousand dollars.

Or maybe Rollo would take her in payment. That would save a lot of time and effort on Franklin ’s part. Let Rollo, and Greg, and Sammy have her in lieu of a cash payment. There wouldn’t be much left of her by the time Rollo’s crew ran through her, but that wasn’t Franklin ’s problem.

His problem was having half a million dollars in cash on hand at nine o’clock.

Goddamn Johnny Ramos.

Franklin didn’t deserve this. He really didn’t.

Sex.

And plenty of it.

Dax looked at the two kids standing in front of him, and he wondered if Easy knew that her hair was sticking out on one side, and that her exquisite Karan suit jacket was snapped incorrectly. The jacket was cattywampus and gaping, and he could tell that somehow, she’d lost her bra.

Dax let his gaze drift over the luxurious apartment Johnny Ramos had brought him to, the one across the street from the Commerce City Garage, and he noticed the low-lit bedroom on the other side of the loft.

Fifty bucks said Esme’s bra was in that room.

“So,” he said, bringing his gaze back to the two of them. “Did you count the cash?”

Standard operating procedure-always count the cash.

Always.

But from the look on Easy’s face, that vital detail had somehow gotten overlooked.

“You didn’t count it at Nachman’s?” She should have counted it at Nachman’s.

“There, uh, wasn’t time,” she said-also incorrectly. There was always time to count the cash. “Johnny was, uh, in a bind.”

A bind?

U.S. Army Rangers did not get themselves into binds that overrode standard operating procedures, not unless there was gunfire involved, and Nachman was a pacifist, in an odd manner of speaking, as long as a person wasn’t a Nazi.

“And you didn’t do it when you got here?”