Loose and Easy (4 page)

CHAPTER
FOUR

Oh-kay,
Johnny thought, looking at the stunned expression on Esme Alden’s face.
This is good…I think.

Sure. Shell shock was good. It meant he wasn’t what she’d expected, and that could only be good, considering that everyone from his parish priest on down to his guidance counselor had expected him to end up in prison before his twenty-first birthday.

“Esme. Hi. Good to see you.” He gave her an easy smile and stuck out his hand. “You don’t mind if I come in for a minute, do you?” Low-key, friendly, but not too friendly—that was him.

She responded automatically, putting her much smaller hand in his. Her grip was firm, her skin warm.

“John…Ramos, yes, well…come in, yes.” She was slightly breathless, but given the night she’d had so far, he didn’t blame her.

When she stepped back, he stepped into the office, and since she hesitated about what to do next, he did it for her, taking hold of the door and quietly closing it behind him, which left them in the dark—not such a bad place to be with a woman wearing red lace panties and a push-up bra.

But that wasn’t why he was here—or maybe it was. He wouldn’t have followed Liz Malone, a great girl from his twelfth-grade chemistry class, or Benita Montoya from calculus, or Janessa Kaliski from English…okay, he might have followed Janessa Kaliski, if he’d seen her on the street dressed in next to nothing and platform heels. But he wouldn’t have followed her into a hotel, climbed down a fire escape, and jogged through an alley to catch up with her.

No. He’d done that because it had been Easy Alex he was trailing.

“I…uh, guess I should explain right up front,” she said with an absent gesture, carefully backing her way toward one of the desks in the office, one high-heeled step at a time. “I don’t
actually
work for my father.”

There were two desks in the office, two bookcases, and four filing cabinets, another door besides the bathroom door, two overstuffed chairs, and enough light coming in the windows for him to see it all.

“Well, I do,
actually,
” she was going on, “but I don’t do my dad’s kind of work. I do secretarial stuff…like filing…and stuff…so, I, uh, don’t know how I could help you…with anything, I mean…like a problem.”

Yeah, right. Every secretary he knew made a habit of checking the chamber on their .45 before they filed the day’s invoices. So now he had the German, the hog-tying, the theft, the weapons, and the first lie.

The night was definitely getting interesting.

“But I can, uh…” She paused for a second as she leaned over the desk and switched on a lamp. “I can give you one of my dad’s business cards.”

“Thanks, that’ll be great,” he said, and she gave him a bland little weak sort of smile, before turning and rummaging through a catchall box on top of the desk.

Behind her back, he grinned. She’d always been the queen of the bum’s rush, and it was nice to know some things never changed, but she was hell out of luck tonight. Any woman who needed a .45 after hog-tying a guy in a hotel room was probably more trouble than she was worth. As a matter of fact, he was absolutely positive of it, and yet he was hooked, like a big old fish with the bait stuck in his gullet.

Little Miss Goody Two-shoes packing a pistol. That was his line of work, his territory, and he couldn’t help but wonder what she was doing in it. Back when they’d been in school together, the closest they’d gotten to common ground had been in the backseat of Hawkins’s 1971 Challenger, a beautiful beast named Roxanne. He hadn’t seen Esme since, and in between then and now, she was supposed to have become some kind of kick-ass accountant, or corporate lawyer, or at least have saved the whales. She’d always been going on about saving the whales. Never in a million years would he have guessed “gun-toting hooker” would end up on her resume, or even “gun-toting hooker impersonator.”

“Somebody told me you’d moved to Seattle,” Johnny said, looking around the office, and there was just no denying it. The place was a dump, frayed on every edge. “I think it might have been Toby Eaton.”

“Toby Eaton,” she repeated, still rummaging through the box. “Sure. I…uh, remember him. Good old Toby. Wasn’t his dad the one who owned the hardware store over on Thirteenth?”

“Did,” he said. “They lost their lease on the building a few years back. It’s all condos on that corner now, and Toby is selling used Subarus up on Sheridan. Funny, isn’t it.”

She looked up from her search. “Funny?”

“How life can throw you a curve,” he explained. “Toby always thought he’d be working for his dad, selling screwdrivers, not shilling Subarus up on Sheridan.”

One of her eyebrows arched briefly, a nonplussed expression passing over her face before she dropped her gaze back to the desk.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s…uh, too bad, old Toby getting a rough deal like that.” Her tone implied otherwise, like the difference between selling screwdrivers and Subarus could be summed up in one word—tonnage—and probably didn’t have a damn thing to do with fate or thrown curves or legitimate bar-stool philosophy.

“Kind of the opposite of you, I guess.”

“Me?” Esme’s gaze came back to his, but with a definite wariness in it this time.

“Yeah,” he said. “You’re the last person I would have thought would end up working for their dad. So this must be your desk over here.” He moseyed over to the corner of the office. “The one next to the filing cabinets, for when you do your filing.”

Yeah, he said it with a straight face, even though the cabinets didn’t look like anything had been filed in them in the last hundred years. They were four of the junkiest damn things he’d ever seen, gray metal, dented, heavily scratched, a couple of broken handles. Everything in the office looked old and beat-up, except for the sleek black laptop set precisely in the middle of a cleaned-off area on top of the corner desk—and her.

Up close, she looked amazing. The girl had great lines, about five feet five inches of mind-bending curves wrapped in a suit that fit her like a glove, and he was upping the ante on her ass to a very nice size six. All that leg in fishnet had skewed his first calculation, but bent over a desk, hell, he didn’t make mistakes when a woman was bent over a desk.

Actually, he didn’t make mistakes when a woman was bent over anything. He had that contingent covered. Literally.

Size six. He was putting the bank on it.

He picked a pen up off the desk. It had a picture of a pinup girl on it, and when he tilted it upside down, her clothes slid off. Glancing over, he caught Esme still watching him, but with something a little more calculating than wariness in her eyes.

“You can keep the pen, if you like,” she said. “Compliments of B & B Investigations.”

He looked down at the pen again and noticed the lettering going down the side, next to the girl—“B & B Investigations—Your One-Stop Undercover Shop—We Snoop 4 U”—and a phone number.

It was the tackiest damn thing he’d ever seen.

“Catchy motto,” he said, looking back up.

“My dad’s a marketing genius, comes up with all sorts of things,” Esme said, straightening from the desk, the elusive business card in her hand.

Johnny just bet he did. Burt was her dad’s name. He remembered now. Burt Alden. And it looked to Johnny like the man had come up with everything except a decent living.

Esme was doing all right by herself, though—doing something somewhere other than this second-floor dump in the Faber Building. She was wearing couture. He’d bet the bank on that, too. He had a friend, Skeeter Bang Hart, former street rat, current kick-ass operator and high-class fashionista, who bought designer clothes the way kids bought candy, and in Skeeter’s world, shoes had names. He was betting Esme’s shoes had a name. He didn’t know what in the hell that name might be, but from the looks of them, it probably started with Kate, or Stewart, or Manolo.

“Here’s his card,” she said, extending her hand. “He usually has the office open by ten
A.M
.”

“Thanks.” Johnny stepped forward and took the card—and there they were, standing close to each other, with traffic noise coming up from the street, and the desk lamp bathing her face with soft creamy light.

“I’ll…uh, let him know to expect your call.”

“Great.” Maybe they were standing too close.

Yeah, he was sure of it, because he was having a little trouble taking his eyes off her, and because suddenly he was remembering the satiny texture of her skin, the way she’d tasted that night in Roxanne, and the way she’d felt in his arms—nubile.

Yeah, she’d pretty much defined the whole erotic concept of being nubile, at least for him. He’d heard the word a few times, and after those few glorious hours in Roxanne, he’d gone and looked it up. The actual definition had been a bit lacking to his way of thinking, but the word…the word itself was fine, extremely accurate. The way it felt in his mouth lined up precisely with the way she’d felt lying up against him, the give of her in his hands, the silky strength of her body—fulsome, curved, resilient, a force to be reckoned with, and yet tender, and so very soft.

And that image pretty much confirmed the excellent condition of his memory. He was running at a perfect one hundred and ten percent, all systems go. Great.

“Yes…well…” she said, her voice trailing off.

Well…yes…
He needed to think here, come up with something fast, or she was going to have him back out on the street in no time.

“Thanks…uh, for stopping by,” she said. “We can always use the business.”

Obviously, he thought, but he kept it to himself.

“I’d like to take you to dinner, if you haven’t eaten, or buy you a drink, if you have.” It wasn’t original, and he just kind of blurted it out, but it was solid, something a girl could count on.

“Actually, I have an appointment, and I’m running a little late.” She made a point of checking her watch. “So if you’ll excuse me…”

An appointment? At nine o’clock on a Friday night?

Actually,
he was going to have a little trouble excusing that, and if Esme Alden
actually
turned out to be some kind of high-end call girl, he was going to have to sit down and sort through the unsettling information with Christian Hawkins—Superman, second in command at Steele Street, owner of the beauteous Roxanne, and SDF’s unofficial but widely used therapist. Hawkins knew things about women all the other guys could only surmise. Dylan was certainly useless in that capacity. He and Skeeter had been married for—hell, Johnny didn’t know how long, a few years, and it didn’t look to him like the boss had figured out too much about women, or he might have noticed he’d been holding the reins a little too tight on his girl. If he wasn’t careful, Skeeter was going to flat-out break loose.

Kid was holding on to his wife, too, holding on for the ride, but who could do anything else with Nikki? She was an artist, like quicksilver. Johnny had posed for her completely buck naked, the first time a couple of years ago, and a few times since, and he still wasn’t sure if he’d ever quite recovered from the experience. He liked the paintings she’d done though, most of them dark angel paintings with him looking pretty badass. He liked them a lot. Nikki did, too. She’d picked one of the paintings of him for the poster of her latest exhibit, the Ironheart Angel. It would probably impress the hell out of Esme.

Sure it would—and he just happened to have the announcement Nikki had left for him at Steele Street in his back pocket. She and Kid had left for Los Angeles this morning, and he knew she was hoping he’d stop by the gallery and just sort of be there—getting stared at.

Right—just one of the perks of posing naked for a famous artist, having women show up to check you out. Not that they needed you there. Nikki didn’t leave anything to the imagination, but Johnny had wondered if she kind of added a little something extra here and there. Even with paintings of himself to look at, the verdict was still out on that one.

“Well, maybe after your appointment then,” he jumped back in, reaching around and checking his back pocket. Sure enough, he had the postcard announcement next to his wallet. “You could give me a call.” He pulled out the postcard. He wasn’t really floundering. This was a plan. “A friend of mine has some paintings showing at the Toussi Gallery on Seventeenth. There’s going to be wine and cheese, that kind of stuff, tonight, and these things always go late. So, if you like, we could go and look around, check out the artwork, whenever you were free. It wouldn’t matter what time, not really. I know the owner.” He handed the postcard over to her—and if her answer had even a hint of “I’ll be busy the rest of the night,” he was heading straight back to Steele Street and knocking on Hawkins’s door.

“You know Suzi Toussi?” Her eyebrows went up again, her expression slightly disbelieving.

Okay. More than slightly.

He wasn’t insulted. There was no reason on earth for her to think he’d turned into anything other than the street gangster his guidance counselor had predicted.

“Yeah, I know Suzi, and she’s still involved with the gallery,” he said. “But the woman who owns it now is named Katya.” Katya Hawkins, Superman’s wife and mother of three, with another one on the way. Johnny wasn’t the only one at SDF who was beginning to wonder if Christian and Katya were going for some kind of record.

“Uh, sure…Toussi’s, that sounds like fun,” Esme said, after another few seconds of looking him over. Then her gaze dropped to the postcard.

He didn’t expect her to recognize him, not as the blood-streaked, tragically heroic angel Nikki had made him. For the postcard, Nikki had only used a portion of the painting, zooming in on his jaw and shoulder, with part of one wing showing. The feathers in the wing were broken and torn, and he didn’t know why, but that was the part that disturbed him the most—not what Nikki had done to him, how she’d made him look so brutalized, but what she’d done to his wings. It just looked so fierce, like some maelstrom had gotten ahold of that angel and shaken him to his core—which, if he remembered correctly, and he did, was exactly how he’d felt when Nikki had gotten hold of him.