Devil s Bargain

by Rachel Caine

  She looked down, watching as he turned her hand over, palm up, and began to lightly trace fingernails down the center of it. She felt light-headed. Tense. Oddly out of breath.

  “Come back safe,” he said softly. “That’s not a request, all right?”

  “All right,” she agreed. Her pulse was hammering, and that was stupid, stupid. It was just skin, just a touch, not even a touch anywhere she could call intimate. But she could barely keep her voice level.

  Borden reclaimed his right hand for the exit to the airport. She clenched hers into a fist, willing herself to stop feeling so…so…

  She had no words for how she felt at the moment, except frustrated.

  Borden pulled up at the curb, set his hazard lights and got out to grab her bag from the backseat. She was already out of the car by the time he’d managed it.

  As she shouldered the strap, he stepped in closer and looked down at her. She looked up.

  “See you,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  She thought, for a blinding instant, that he was going to kiss her—the thought was right there, in his eyes, naked—and then something happened, something out of the corner of her eye, and she snapped around to watch…but it was just a car squealing up, a frantic father yelling at kids, people running late.

  Normal life.

  She turned back to Borden, but the thought was gone. He was behind a polite screen again.

  “I should go,” she said, and nodded toward the door. He inclined his head, too. “Right. See you. Um…thanks for the ride.”

  He didn’t say a word. When she looked back, he was still standing there, hands in his pockets, looking after her.

  After negotiating security again, Jazz got on the phone to Lucia in the waiting area, exchanging information in short, vivid bursts.

  “You’re sure you want to do this?” Lucia asked as Jazz watched a family of five meander its way into the gate area. Mom, dad, three kids who should have been poster children for their various age groups. Toddler in a stroller, burbling happily. Six-year-old with a neon-pink Barbie backpack, from which Barbie herself peered, battered and well loved. A disaffected preteen who sat with his face buried in his Game Boy screen, kicking the legs of his chair. “Jazz?”

  “Remind me never to get married,” she said.

  “What brought that on?”

  “Kids.”

  “Ah. I think you’d surprise yourself.”

  “Me? Hardly. Not the motherly type, me.”

  “Depends on your definition of motherly.” Lucia sounded amused. “I think of you as a mother wolf, defending her cubs to the death.”

  “Yeah, well, I think of myself more as the single wolf, defending myself. Sorry. What were you saying?”

  “I was saying this is a nice chat we’re having, but I’ve got work to do. So, you needed something…?”

  Jazz hesitated, kicking a foot out rhythmically, watching the shadow move on the floor. “Lucia. Would you do me a big favor?”

  “Big?”

  “Major.”

  “Of course.”

  She sucked in a deep breath, let it out, and said, “Pansy scanned some photos for me. Would you put them out on the wires, see if anybody can match the images for me? Not the last one. I know who that is.”

  “Oh, yeah? Who?” Lucia sounded interested, not invested.

  “Ben McCarthy.”

  Silence. Jazz listened to the distant, constant hiss of dead air, and finally said, “You still there?”

  “Yeah. What kind of pictures?”

  “Potentially exculpatory pictures.”

  “Ah.” Nothing in her partner’s voice now, which was something in itself. “After I put them on the wire—”

  “No, you don’t need to do anything else,” Jazz hastened to say. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “I could ask around.”

  Jazz stared hard at her shoe. “I couldn’t—that’s a lot of favor.”

  “If I can wrap up this case today, I have free time tomorrow,” Lucia pointed out. “And you’re not coming back for what, three days?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ll go nuts.”

  “Probably,” Jazz said, smiling. “But seriously, only if you have time, right? This isn’t work. This is—personal.”

  “I know,” Lucia said.

  “Be careful.”

  “You’re the one flying off to L.A. without backup.”

  Good point. Jazz looked around. Nobody seemed to be watching. They’d been free of surveillance for months now, after that initial bout of scariness. “I’m good,” she said. “No bullets whizzing as of yet.”

  “Speaking of whizzing, I’d better get back to cleaning toilets.”

  “Yeah, right. Listen, I’ll call you from L.A., all right? To check in.”

  Lucia agreed. Jazz folded the phone just as the flight attendant made the first boarding call.

  Chapter 8

  S he’d seen the picture of Lowell Santoro, and it was a good thing she had, because otherwise she’d have completely missed him. By the term “film producer,” she’d have been expecting a flashily dressed, heavily bling-blinged guy, probably driving some overmuscled, over-priced convertible.

  Lowell Santoro had on walking shorts, a staid-looking Hawaiian shirt and drove a Toyota. His sole concession to Hollywood seemed to be the sunglasses he wore, which were pretty fine, and made Jazz wish she’d thought to pack some, because the morning light was pretty fierce.

  From the coffee shop across the street, she watched as Santoro parked in the lot of his office building. She sipped a pretty damn excellent coffee as he locked up his car and plodded up the walk to the front door of the lobby. She noted the time on her PDA, finished her coffee and got another to go. She went back to her rental car—an economy-class Ford, nice and clean, tons more comfortable than most copmobiles she’d ever used for stakeouts. Her small video camera and digital still camera lay on the seat beside her, along with her cell phone and her collapsible baton. Add some CDs, and we’ve got a party, she thought, and drummed her fingers on the steering wheel to the radio, which wasn’t half-bad, really.

  She’d parked to be in the shade, with a kitty-corner view of Santoro’s car and a clear shot to pull out in a hurry if necessary. Not that she figured it would be necessary. This was her second day of surveillance, and she’d already gotten the clear sense that Lowell Santoro was a man of rigid habits.

  She plugged in the last piece of equipment, using what was labeled as a “utility power outlet” instead of the time-honored cigarette lighter, and flicked on the tiny LCD screen on the palmtop.

  It had taken some trial and error in the dead of night, and some real skills, to enter Santoro’s offices and set up the video feed, but she was patient and thorough, not to mention careful. Lucia had given her a solid two-month course in electronic bugging and breaking and entering…apparently, all useful skills taught by government agencies with three letters. Jazz had been a good student.

  She watched as Santoro’s tiny little video figure crossed to his desk with a full coffee cup in his hand, exchanged some words with his assistant—indistinct in Jazz’s earpiece—and began to open up his mail. All very normal. This was going to be another of Borden’s “your presence prevents it” things, she already knew it. They’d had two before the debacle with Wendy Blankenship, besides the near-drive-by back in K.C. while she’d been recovering. One of them had been an all-night stakeout in a Denny’s, watching a waitress who hadn’t done anything but yawn, give bad service and drop a plate of food. The other hadn’t been that exciting.

  I shouldn’t be doing this. Then again, this would bring in cash, and Jazz was in favor of that. She’d never been a small-business owner before. Having people like Pansy depending on her for rent money made her nervous and greedy.

  Santoro’s phone rang. He had a conversation about an upcoming film he was producing, and against her will, Jazz thought that was kind of cool, because they were talking abo
ut casting actors she actually recognized. The assistant came and went, bringing him stacks of correspondence once the incoming mail had been disposed of. Santoro had a pair of lungs on him, and from the language he used talking to an MGM executive, he had a pair of brass balls, too. Jazz found herself liking the guy. He called his wife and talked with her, and it sounded nice, too. Comfortable. The kind of conversation adults had who could bicker a little about what color the new refrigerator was going to be, and whether or not the kids needed summer camp or not, but still end with a love you that sounded heartfelt.

  She never had conversations like that. Her arguments always felt so damn important…even when they weren’t.

  Santoro seemed like a good guy. Someone you’d want for a friend. Which told her something about Borden, too—because, not only was he friends with somebody warm and generous like this, he cared. Borden had a decent heart.

  Around an hour and a half later, the assistant broke into his routine to remind him he had some kind of set visit, which marked the end of the administrative portion of the day, and Jazz gulped down the last of her coffee as Santoro tidied up and prepared to depart.

  Apart from having heard half of a conversation—the wrong half, unfortunately—with Johnny Depp, she hadn’t accomplished a damn thing, really. She hadn’t spotted a single person tailing him, watching the office or home, or any suspicious activity whatsoever.

  She picked up the still camera and shot a couple of angles of his car while she was waiting for him to emerge from the building.

  Her cell phone rang. She flipped it open without taking her eyes from the entrance.

  “Anything happening?” Borden. She actually felt a little electric tingle at the sound of his voice, caught sight of herself in the rearview mirror and realized that she was smiling. That kind of smile. She wiped it off her face and glared at her reflection, as if it was to blame.

  “Not a damn thing,” she said. “Your friend’s doing fine.”

  “That’s good.” He sounded relieved. “How about you?”

  “Not a damn thing happening to me, either,” she said, “except that I’m about to OD on caffeine. You know the biggest problem about stakeouts without a partner?”

  “No conversation?”

  “No bathroom breaks,” she said. “Gets pretty difficult.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “You at the office?” Because he’d have to be, it was almost noon in New York.

  “No. I was in court earlier. I have the rest of the day off.”

  “Do you ever work, Counselor? All I ever see you do is stroll around your office looking sharp, taking meetings, and fly around bugging the hell out of me.”

  “It’s a filthy job, but the compensation’s pretty good,” he said blandly. “So I look sharp, eh?”

  “Don’t get cocky.”

  “Wouldn’t think of it.”

  She checked the monitor. Santoro’s office was empty, except for his assistant cleaning up the coffee cup and restraightening piles of paper. He hadn’t come out of the front door yet.

  “I’m going to have to go,” she said to Borden.

  “Anything wrong?”

  “No,” she said. “Go help a corporation hide its ill-gotten gains in an offshore account or something. I’ll call later.”

  Maybe Santoro had stopped off at the bathroom. Hell, she was starting to regret the second cup….

  Another full minute passed. No Santoro. No activity in his office.

  Jazz drummed her fingers on the steering wheel again, this time more from nerves than any enjoyment of the pop jingle on the radio. She watched the digits crawl on her clock.

  He was taking way too long.

  “Dammit,” she whispered, and got out of the car. She grabbed her still camera—nothing odd about a tourist with a camera in L.A.—stuck her collapsible baton in her back pocket, covered by the windbreaker she threw on, and moved quickly toward Santoro’s office building.

  She kept expecting him to pop out at any moment, as she got closer, but all remained quiet. Something tingled at the base of her spine, like a gun pressed close. She walked faster, took the three short steps up to the glass doors and walked in.

  No security in the lobby. There was a desk, but it was empty. She checked the elevators. Nothing was moving. Santoro’s office was on the fourth floor, and both elevators were on the ground. If he’d come out here, he’d have walked out the front. There weren’t any other places for him to have gone.

  Except for the stairs.

  Jazz cracked the door to the stairwell and listened, and heard a dull scuffling noise. Grunts of effort.

  She shoved the camera in a pocket, grabbed the baton and snapped it out to its full length as she ran up. She took the steps three at a time, feeling the burn in her thighs and a sharp twinge in her side, but if she was right, there wasn’t time to take it any easier.

  She burst around the third-floor landing and saw, on the flat halfway point to the fourth floor, Lowell Santoro being strangled.

  He was still alive, barely—face congested dull purple, eyes bulging, mouth open and tongue protruding. Fingers still scrabbling weakly for the cord around his throat that had dug in so deep she couldn’t even see it. The cord was all that was holding him upright.

  Jazz yelled—she didn’t even know what—and the sound bounced and echoed sharply from the concrete all around her.

  The man standing behind Santoro, both gloved hands twisting a black rope, met her eyes. She didn’t know him, but she knew the type—something missing in the eyes, a kind of animal vacancy that marked a bad life and a worse end coming. He was tall, blond, California-pretty, with an off-kilter nose that had seen somebody’s fist close up in the not-too-distant past.

  He let go of Santoro and let him pitch forward, right into Jazz as she bounded up toward him. Santoro’s weight—she didn’t dare think, dead weight—bowled her over, and the world became a confusing, hurting blur as they fell. Jazz landed flat on her back, Santoro half-crushing her, and saw California Guy heading back up the stairs, fast.

  She rolled Santoro over. His eyes were blinking, and he was whooping for breath. His mouth was bloody. He’d bitten his tongue.

  “Stay here!” she shouted at him, and lunged to her feet, digging her cell phone out of her pocket as she started up the steps in pursuit. She yelled out the office’s street address to the 911 operator, craning her neck to try to see where California Guy was on the stairs. She paused to listen.

  No sound. Either he was waiting, or…

  She hung up on the operator, who was trying to get her to give her name, and took the next few steps slowly, quietly, feeling cold sweat slide down her back. She wished for a gun, or at least a good coating of Kevlar. California Guy might like to use his hands, but that didn’t mean he was a conscientious gun objector, either.

  She had an unpleasant flashback of her blood glittering on asphalt, of the strange liquid feeling of being shot, and shook it off to ease up one more rising step. She was scared, she realized. Scared of being hurt.

  California Guy was waiting for her around the blind corner. Or rather, California Guy’s powerful kick was waiting for her, and it caught her squarely in the stomach and slammed her back against the concrete wall, seeing stars and out of breath. She hung on to her baton, somehow, and saw a black flash coming at her; she ducked, and heard his fist make hard contact with the wall, followed by a loud, yelping grunt of pain. Since she was safely braced, she yanked up a knee, missed his crotch, kept going and planted her foot flat against his chest and uncoiled with a shout. He went stumbling backward.

  She blinked the last disorientation out of her eyes and took a surgical swing with the baton. Whap. Right in his undefended ribs, which she felt crack. As he hunched over in reaction, she gave him a hard smack to the side of the head, too.

  His knees buckled, but instead of falling down unconscious, he lunged from a kneeling position, got hold of her and slammed her back against the wall again. Her head im
pacted with a dull thud. She tasted blood and damn, that hurt. She could barely get her breath, but his hands were yanking at her waistband, fumbling for a gun she didn’t have, and then he pulled her off balance and down, his weight on top.

  He liked to use his hands. Jazz didn’t particularly mind that. She grinned at him, spit blood in his face and slammed the heel of her palm up into his crooked nose just before he managed to get a grip on her neck. It didn’t drive bone up into his brain, but it certainly rearranged cartilage with a satisfying crunch and made him yowl in pain. Blood spattered her, warm as tears, and she used her leverage to flip him off.

  This time his head hit the wall.

  It was lights out, sweetheart, and he slumped sideways, breathing heavily through his mouth as his rebroken nose leaked a steady stream of red.

  Jazz crawled to him, yanked him forward and zip-tied his hands behind him before letting herself collapse to a weak sitting position on the steps. The place looked like a war zone. She dabbed cautiously at her face and sniffed. Yep, she had a nosebleed, too, not to mention a split lip and a ringing bell of a headache. Her side felt tight, protesting the action. One of her knees registered as hot and uncomfortable.

  Not bad, considering. Not bad at all. She’d had worse after an interesting night of barhopping.

  She patted down California Guy and came up with no ID at all—not even a bus pass—but a fat wad of cash and a letter.

  She paused as she slid it out of his pocket, staring, because it looked…familiar.

  Big red envelope. Like a Hallmark card.

  She didn’t have a proper evidence kit—hadn’t thought she’d need it—but this was no coincidence. Killers didn’t stroll around with birthday cards for their girlfriends in their jackets. She tucked it into her windbreaker just as she heard sirens echoing up the stairwell. Heavy treads on the steps, coming up.

  “Victim’s on the third-floor landing,” she called down. “The perp is up here. He’s secured.”