Loose Ends (16 page)

Instinct, she knew, pure and simple. She was trained to make the score, to seize opportunities and keep moving
.

But hell, J.T. saw her coming as she darted between the pedestrians on the sidewalk and the cars turning up 17th—and he instantly realized what was happening. She saw it all over his face—his very calm, expressionless face. She saw it in the casual glance he cast at the guy and the way he appeared not to notice her
.

He was good, and he must have been damn good on the streets
.

She wasn’t going to involve him in her current crisis, and, still dodging people, she ran by him—and that was all she wrote. The guy chasing her got stopped cold
.

“
Get, get out—” The man spluttered, trying to get by J.T
.

“
Oh, sorry, man,” J.T. said, and she was gone. All she’d needed was a chance, and he gave it to her
.

She slipped into a parking garage and didn’t stop running until she was on the third level, and if the guy with the books could get past J.T. and keep up, he deserved his wallet back
.

A stitch in her side, the wallet in her hand, she leaned back against a Mercedes and tried to catch her breath
.

J.T. wasn’t too far behind
.

“
Come on,” he said, his hand out. “Let’s have it.
”

She knew what he wanted, and against her better judgment, she gave him the wallet
.

Hell. What a waste of effort, and she still had a stitch
in her side, and he probably hadn’t even noticed the beautiful shirt she was wearing, a stretchy T-shirt in a dozen shades of blue with little buttons up the front. It looked like a waterfall—and it was new, brand-new, never been worn by anyone else, and she’d bought it, paid cash
.

Geez, all that work
.

“
You know this is no good,” he said
.

“
It usually works out better than that,” she told him
.

“
Yeah, well, maybe you better rethink your career.
”

Career, right; picking pockets wasn’t her career. He sounded so old when he talked like that
.

“
Come on,” he said. “I’m parked down on the street. With a little luck, we can get this guy’s wallet home before he gets there.
”

Oh, hell. What a frickin’ waste
.

He flipped open the wallet to check the address, and, after a second, his gaze lifted and locked onto hers
.

“
Cop,” he said. “C-O-P.
”

Oh, hell. Now she’d done it
.

The thought barely registered before the sirens sounded
.

He gave her a look that said he really did know better—and then they both broke into a run
.

She was hard-pressed to keep up. Geez, he was fast. They practically slid down the stairs, one level after another, while the cop car
whoop-whoop
ed up the ramp in hot pursuit
.

She couldn’t believe it. She’d stolen a cop’s wallet. No wonder the guy had been so quick to notice. And this soldier-boy she was following, he was quick, too. They hit street level, and he grabbed her, keeping her from going out on the sidewalk. She didn’t know where the hell else he was planning on going. There was no place else—or so she’d thought for all the years she’d been working this part of town
.

J.T. knew differently. With a move so fast, she didn’t really see everything he did, he jimmied open the maintenance room door and pulled her inside
.

Great, she thought. Now they were trapped in a place not much bigger than a closet
.

But he kept going, all the way to the back, and slid a metal plate out from under a shelving unit
.

And there was a hole in the floor, a big, dark, pitch-black hole into the bowels of the earth
.

“
Go, go, go,” he said, waving her in
.

Hell, no, no, no. She balked, and would have continued balking, except for the sound of running feet and another siren
whoop
ing into the garage
.

Oh, hell. Down she went, like Alice into the rabbit hole. There was a ladder, and she was scrambling like mad with him coming down above her, and when he pulled the metal plate back over the hole, it was dark
.

Pure dark
.

No light
.

None
.

And she froze like a limpet on a rock
.

“
I can’t see anything,” she whispered
.

“
Just follow the ladder, babe. Trust me, it only goes down.
”

That’s what she was afraid of
.

“
Maybe we should just hang right here.
”

“
Maybe not. The cops know about this place, but they never follow anybody past the first level or two. If we can get that far before they catch us, the only problem we’ll have is how to get back out.
”

Oh, God
.

“
I can’t move.” And she couldn’t. She was stuck
.

“
Suck it up, babe.
”

She heard the metal plate being dragged off the hole above, and the thinnest sliver of light shone down
.

“
Move,” he ordered
.

And she moved—fast
.

Oh, God. Oh, God. Every step she took down felt crazy, like there had to be a better way
.

Above them, she heard the cops coming in, and she moved even faster down the ladder to only God knew where. At one point, she felt a cool breeze and she guessed they were at the first level. The next breeze she felt was warm, and that had to be level 2, and then came the big nothing, a sense of vastness with no breeze at all, and above them, only the tiniest pinprick of light and the receding sound of the cops leaving
.

Then the light went out
.

“
Hey, good job,” J.T. said
.

No, she didn’t think so. She thought this was insane. They were three floors down under the city in pitch darkness
.

“
How long do we have to stay down here?” she asked
.

“
As long as it takes.
”

“
For what? Hell to freeze over?
”

He laughed, which really didn’t make her feel better
.

And then a miracle, a small beam of light shined down from above. He had a flashlight
.

“
Can you see the floor?
”

“
Yes.” Thank God. She could see the floor
.

“
We’ll head north for about a quarter mile and then come up under St. Benedict’s.
”

North. For a quarter of a mile. In this black tunnel. She knew the big church, but she hadn’t known about this underground labyrinth—and, quite frankly, she’d have been happier not knowing about it
.

“
Oh, geezus, what was that?” She’d heard something, some skittery thing in the dark
.

“
Rats, most likely.
”

Oh, crap
.

“
How did you find this place?” She made it to the
floor and stepped off the ladder onto concrete. “Nobody knows about this place.
”

He laughed at that, with good reason, she guessed
.

“
It’s old-school, babe. We were all just screwing around one night, the same way kids always find stuff, especially trouble. Hold on to the back of my pants, and let’s see if we can get out of here before the rats eat us.
”

“
Very funny.” But it wasn’t, and she was scared, and she held on to the back of his pants for what seemed like hours, before he found the rusted-out old ladder he was looking for and they started back up
.

She was exhausted by the time they came up in the basement of St. Benedict’s, which was another labyrinth of rooms full of junk and broken pews and church documents, boxes of them. Much to her dismay, they didn’t head out onto the street. They only crossed the basement to get to another door, which led to another hole in the floor
.

“
This next stretch is just between you and me, okay?
”

“
Secret passageway?” A part of her thought he was kidding, but the expression on his face was dead serious
.

“
Yes or no?” he asked, and she gave him her honest answer
.

“
Yes.
”

And down they went again, with their path winding through old passageways with tumbledown walls and tunnels with the guts of the city running through them, and she knew her promise had been true. Even if she wanted to tell someone about this place, she could never have found her way through it without him
.

After a long while, they came through a narrow corridor to a place where the walls didn’t quite meet. He squeezed through, and so did she, and then they were in a real building again. They passed through one room and then another, before coming to an elevator—and
she had to wonder where in the world in Denver would they turn out to be
.

Home, it turned out. His home. They got off on the eleventh floor, and when he opened the door leading into his apartment, she knew exactly where they were: 738 Steele Street. A hundred feet of floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the eastern half of the city all the way to the plains. The floors were all hardwood. The furniture was minimal, most of it grouped around a big fireplace on the southern wall
.

“
The bathroom’s over there,” he said, pointing to a door. “I’ll fix us something to eat …
”

She’d stayed with him until dawn, and hell, even after all these years, she wasn’t sure if she’d done the right thing. Regardless, she didn’t think she’d be getting anything to eat tonight. It was
really
dark in the basement. She couldn’t see her hand in front of her face, and she was trying.

She took a breath and told herself to calm down, to take a cue from him.

“How long are we going to stay down here?” A fair question, she assured herself, and not just a knee-jerk reaction to being bitchy and breathless with near-death anxiety. They were under the building, in some kind of basement, an underground storage room, or a supply area, or a utility access, or maybe an old coal bin. And his whole argument about not crashing was pitifully weak. Tires had left earth. They’d been airborne, even if only for a second. Corinna had scraped her front end on the landing, and if anyone had ever used that supposed “ramp” they’d come down to get an automotive vehicle in here, Jane would eat her socks.

“As long as it takes.”

Oh, for crying out loud
.

“As long as it takes for what? Because if you’re waiting for me to—”

“Shhh,” he said softly, interrupting her.

Fine. She could
shhhh
.

She took another breath. Then she heard it, the sound of the other cars. Steele Street muscle was unmistakable. Even from a distance, she could tell Roxanne from Angelina and that was Roxy up there. Coralie sounded like Corinna, and she was coming in from the other side of the building. Angelina must have gone in another direction, probably trying to cut them off at the pass. Roxanne was little more than a brief sound signature echoing in the darkness, but Coralie was prowling the parking lot, the low rumble of her engine tracking west to east behind them. Then Jane heard sirens.

Cops
.

She stiffened in her seat, the sound giving her a start. Coralie must have been startled, too. The GTO revved back to full-bore life and took off, and the police car followed her. For one long minute after another, she and J.T. sat silently in Corinna, in the dark, listening to the fading sound of the sirens and to each other breathe.

Cripes. Cops
—the last thing she needed. She had a clean record now, and there were a few folks, like Lieutenant Loretta, of the Denver Police Department, whose good graces Jane worked very hard to retain.

So maybe she should have thought about that before she’d ended up sliding off the map into the basement of an abandoned factory over on the west side with a guy with God knew what kind of criminal tendencies.

As a matter of fact, sitting in the dark at the bottom of a virtual pit with a man who had no recollection of himself as one of the good guys—well, on second thought, maybe that hadn’t been her best move.

“Is there a way out of here?” she asked, tossing a question into the great pool of silence between them,
trying to sound nonchalant, like it was a matter of business, not of survival.

“The way we came in.”

She gave him an incredulous look, not that he could see it, which in no way stopped her from flat-out staring in his direction like he was nuts.

“And Plan B?” she asked, because his Plan A sounded like a homeless kid’s Christmas list: a whole lot of wishful thinking.

“We don’t need Plan B,” he said. “This is doable.”

“With a jetpack and a winch?” She didn’t mean to sound skeptical, but she was damned skeptical.

“No.” He started the car, and suddenly she could see the basement in the twin-beam illumination of Corinna’s headlights.

The place was a dump, literally, full of junk and garbage. It looked like bad things happened here, and that was the voice of experience. She’d been homeless. She knew about the Christmas list, and she knew what homeless looked like, and it looked like this.

“I’ve gotten a car up that ramp,” he said. “Driven one out of here.” He paused for a moment. “It was a deal for a guy named … Sparky. Yeah, Sparky … a BMW 535i, black, an ’89.”

Oh-kay
. That definitely got her attention. He couldn’t remember his own name, but he remembered a car he’d stolen. Oh, yeah, he was J. T. Chronopolous, all right. She knew Sparky Klimaszewski, remembered him from a few years back. J.T. must have dealt with old Sparky quite a bit in his younger years. Mr. Klimaszewski was a hard nut, a guy who’d been brokering half the cars stolen in Denver for the last twenty years.