Nobody could tie Franklin to that deed-but the more Sparky talked, the more uneasy Franklin got.
“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” he said, reaching the end of his rope-like he needed blackmail on top of every other screwup he’d had to contend with tonight. “My guy is counting the cash now. If it comes up right, Alden is off the hook. I won’t touch him. He can walk away.”
In theory, Burt Alden could walk away, but only in goddamn theory. In truth, Alden hadn’t budged since Eliot had dropped him on the betting-room floor.
Franklin turned and looked halfway down the length of his warehouse, where Esme and her knights in shining armor were waiting for him to accept payment and clear the debt. Shifting his gaze to Dovey, he watched the kid count the last of the bills out of the duffel.
When Dovey gave him the “okay,” he made his decision-he would roll over for Sparky. Burt had already had the crap beat out of him. Nothing was going to fix that, except a trip to the hospital, but if he handed the guy over, that’s where his buddies would take him. Sparky Klimaszewski didn’t make idle threats. Guaranteed, by this time tomorrow, if Burt Alden didn’t get put back together, the Bleak warehouse was going to be swarming with cops looking to hang the guy who had offed one lousy lawyer and sold two whores.
Christ. Like the world didn’t have enough lawyers and whores. Sure, he and Eliot had gone a little overboard with the lawyer guy, but so what? What was one lousy lawyer in the scheme of things?
“Sure, Sparky. I’m reading you, and we’re clear.” Clear as mud. “My guy kind of wrenched Alden around a bit, but I’m gonna take care of that right now. If I’d known he was important to you, I’d have told Eliot to be more careful with him. But you know how these things happen… sure, sure, Sparky. Alden won’t see my guys again. Hands off. Right.”
Bullshit. All of it. Franklin was going to do whatever it took to get out of this with the most he could get, which he was afraid was not going to include lunch with Katherine Gray.
He ended the call and stared down the main aisle of the warehouse. The answer to his problems was watching him with her big gray eyes, her cute little suit fitting her just so, her blond hair twisted up in a real sophisticated style. She had diamonds in her ears, and high heels on her feet, and all he needed to do was get rid of her father, get rid of her goons, and keep her with him, and for that, he only needed one thing-her mother.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Esme stood carefully and quietly in the bottom of a canyon of paper-filled pallets-paper towel pallets, paper napkin pallets, and towering pallets of toilet paper. It was damned crowded on the floor, with a baker’s dozen of mostly very bad guys variously arranged around a small table, including the three gangsters on the home team.
No, sirree, having three of the worst gangbangers in the history of Denver on her side was not a comfort, not when Franklin Bleak was headed their way. Six or eight Locos might have done the trick, but she only had three, and it was all she could do not to bolt.
The bookie had his damn money. Dovey had counted it and given him the sign. All was well. All was as it should be, and yet Esme had a very strong feeling that the deal wasn’t even close to being over, and she wanted it over. She wanted out of this damn warehouse, and the closer Franklin Bleak got, waddling his short, overweight, gimpy body down the aisle toward the table, the more she wanted out.
She consciously deepened her next breath to keep from jumping straight into full-blown panic. Even with Johnny on one side of her, Dax on the other, and an auto-loading.45 closer than both of them, Bleak scared the hell out of her. The photographs she’d seen of him, a couple of stills taken in a Denver restaurant, did not do him justice. He’d looked almost normal, smiling, raising a glass of wine in a toast, a heavily made-up bimbo on each side.
But he wasn’t normal. Not even close.
It wasn’t his slightly misshapen body, his right leg obviously shorter than the other and giving him an odd limping gait, that made him look so strange. It wasn’t his hair, worn in a dark, greasy comb-over long enough to be tucked behind his ears. It wasn’t his clothes, a disco turn of electric blue silk and badly tailored black polyester with the looping chain of a pocket watch crisscrossing the front of his mismatched vest. It wasn’t even his shoes, shiny bright black patent-leather elevator shoes with taps-freakin’ taps. Every step he took down the concrete floor was an announcement-“I’m coming. I’m coming. I’m coming.” And every step made her want to run like hell.
No, what made Franklin Bleak so damn scary was his face, every part of his face, the low widow’s peak of sparse dark hair backed up by the comb-over, the beakish nose, his eyes too round, the irises too dark, like bottomless pits, fixated on her, and his mouth. It didn’t close, but stayed partly open, his tongue sliding across his lips. She was creeped out to the max and had to force herself to hold her ground-carefully, quietly, nothing showing, not giving her fear away. But sweat was beading on her upper lip and running down the middle of her back.
He stopped at the table, his gaze still riveted to her, and he stood there, staring, until she understood this was personal between them. That whatever was going through his head was more than the debt her father owed-and all she could think was that he was damn lucky she didn’t draw down on him, anything to get the bastard to back the fuck off. She wasn’t going to play this game with him, and yet it was only when he broke eye contact with her that she realized Dax had said something.
“Yes. The money’s good, but it’s late,” Bleak said, his gaze shifting to Dax for a brief couple of seconds before returning to her.
“Eighty-two thousand clears the debt, no repercussions, no blood revenge, no breaking anybody, no shakedown,” Dax said, his voice slow and calm and sure without an edge in sight. “That’s the deal, nothing more.” He made it sound like they were exchanging calling cards, but what he put on the table was the Lindsey Larson file.
Bleak picked it up, took one look inside, and turned beet red, color and anger infusing his face in equal measures. Those too-round, bottomless black eyes landed on Dax with the force of a train wreck, but Dax had faced down a helluva lot worse than a psycho bookie.
“That’s the deal, nothing more,” he repeated, still very calm, very matter of fact, and Esme breathed a little easier. As weird as Bleak was, Dax wasn’t fazed by the crooked little man. She was overreacting, that was all.
His fist tightening around the file, crushing it, Bleak turned to the huge guy who’d met them at the loading dock door, “Bleak’s beast,” she was calling him. The guy bent his head to Bleak’s, and the bookie said something too softly for her to hear. The big guy nodded and turned and left, heading toward a door at the rear of the warehouse.
“This is a mistake,” Bleak said, raising the fistful of crumpled papers. “You would have been better off leaving her out of this.”
Dax nodded his head. “Absolutely. You’re right, and I have no intention of ever going to Folton Ridge again… unless you give me a reason to go.”
No one with half a brain would mistake Dax’s calmness for anything other than what it was- complete and utter control of himself and the situation.
“A smart man would forget what he knew,” Bleak warned.
At the end of the warehouse, the huge guy had opened the door and disappeared inside.
“A smart man would take the money and call it good,” Dax said. “Take the money, Bleak.”
Take the damn money, Esme thought, her attention shifting from Bleak to the door at the end of the warehouse and back again. Take the damn money, so we can get the hell out of here.