Devil's Bargain

If I hang up now…hell, she’ll still have my number. Jazz took in a breath and said, as professionally as possible, “My name is Jazz Callender. I got a letter from—”

“Gabriel, Pike & Laskins?” Lucia finished. “Yeah, me, too. It said you’d be calling. Something about a partnership agreement.”

Jazz went still and felt her eyes half close as she thought it through. “You must have gotten my résumé, then. I got yours.”

“I did.” Nothing in the voice at all, and certainly no approval or offers of friendship. Lucia liked to keep her feelings to herself. “I apologize, but this is very strange for me. I’m uncomfortable with talking to a stranger on the phone about—”

“You’re uncomfortable? Join the club. I just had my evening interrupted by some lawyer with a cock-and-bull story and a nice-looking—” she edited her usually street-worthy vocabulary with a conscious switch “—presentation. How do you know these people? You owe them money, or what?”

She didn’t mean to lash out, exactly, but Lucia’s careful, measured voice had pissed her off.

“I don’t,” Lucia replied. The voice was still level and calm, but there was a floor of steel underneath. “And I don’t know them any more than I know you, Detective.”

“Former detective,” Jazz shot back. “Which you’d know, if you’d read the damn résumé.”

There was a brief, dark silence, and then Lucia’s cool voice. “A word of advice, Former Detective, there’s no need to take your anger out on me.”

“What?”

“You’re obviously angry at being manipulated, and—”

“Great. A fucking psychologist, you are.”

“Don’t interrupt me.”

“Excuse me?”

“Apparently no one’s ever explained that it’s rude,” Lucia said. “Like your general attitude.”

“Are you done? Because I don’t want to interrupt your apology, which I’m sure is coming any second now.”

“This isn’t going to work for me.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t like you.”

“Well, I don’t find you a bowl of cherries, either, Lucy!”

She was talking to dead air. Lucia Garza had hung up on her.

Shit.

Jazz angrily slapped the cell phone back on her belt, tossed the coffee cups and headed home. It was a six-block walk, and night had well and truly fallen; overhead, stars struggled to outshine the blank glare of streetlights. Kansas City wasn’t much of a walking town in this part of the city; it was a mostly industrial area, and while there were plenty of cars, she was the only one on the sidewalk.

That was all right, she was probably better off on her own just now. She walked faster, burning off adrenaline and anger, feeling the red envelope hot against her stomach.

Just as well, she told herself. This was a total waste of time, anyway. Why the hell would a lawyer from New York fly all the way out to the sticks to hand-deliver something like this? And get the hell beat out of him in the process? What had he really been after? She hadn’t given him anything, except a promise to think it over and call him.

A nonprofit organization? What the hell was she, some kind of charity case? What did they want?

He’d been told where to find her. How was that even remotely possible? He had to have followed her…but if she’d failed to notice a guy in that outfit following her on a deserted street, she was worse off than she’d thought. The jingle of chains alone should have given him away. He sounded like Santa Claus’s sleigh.

But if he hadn’t followed her, then how had they known where to find her? She’d never been to Sol’s. They—whoever they were—couldn’t have just sent him there, it was impossible. No, he must have followed her, she decided. Either he was a lot better than she thought, or she’d been preoccupied with her own distress and had just plain dropped the ball.

Mystery solved.

Well, not quite. What had all that drama achieved, exactly? Why would they have put on the whole dog-and-pony show in the first place?

To get me to call Lucia Garza.

She stopped walking, frozen in her tracks as her mind raced. Maybe that was all they’d wanted. If Garza was dirty, she’d just had a minutes-long conversation that was on her cell phone records, and dammit, this could have been a setup, couldn’t it? The cops who’d put away McCarthy were still on her ass, looking for any reason to pull her in for questioning. She’d had the fight in the bar. Borden—if his name was really Borden—would be tough to find, if all this was just an elaborate scheme. Maybe the paper and the check weren’t genuine. Shit, for all she knew, they’d had them printed up under her own name.

Paranoia, she told herself, and forced herself to start breathing again. You just saw McCarthy today. That makes you paranoid, and you know it.

Ben McCarthy had told her to watch her back. She should’ve listened to him. Yeah, listen to the convicted murderer. Good plan.

She wished the sarcastic monitor in her head would shut the hell up. McCarthy was no murderer. The case had been a crock of shit, and in time, they’d figure it out, have him exonerated and released from that hellhole. McCarthy had been a good partner and a hell of a cop, and he wasn’t guilty. Couldn’t be guilty, because if he was, that meant she was a poor enough judge of character not to have realized that her own partner, her friend, had calmly pulled the trigger on three people and then walked away, covered it up, and lied for nearly a year. And used her to do it.

Stop thinking about Ben. That was why she’d gone to Sol’s. It was a kind of punishment she meted out to herself for making the trip to Ellsworth. She always felt safer and stronger there, talking to him; he could always make her believe that the world was wrong and the two of them were right.

It was only after she got out into that wrong world again that she began to doubt, and the darkness started to creep in, and she felt the guilt and shame and horror again.

And went in search of something to drown it in.

Even if McCarthy was right, that didn’t improve things for her, because if they could get to him, they could get to anyone. She wished she could call him. If his enemies had set this up, then she needed McCarthy’s clarity of mind to tell her what it meant.

Right now, it was just a heap of fragmented facts looking for context. McCarthy had always been the logical one, the one to meticulously pick through the pile and fit pieces together until the picture started forming….

Her cell phone rang. She grabbed for it, startled, and checked the number before thumbing it on.

Lucia Garza was calling her back.

“Yeah?” she asked cautiously.

“Look, I’m sorry. It’s Jazz, right?”

“Yeah,” Jazz said, and started walking again.

“I got out of line, and I apologize. It is strange, though, don’t you agree?”

“I do.” She struggled with it for a few seconds, and admitted, “I was out of line, too.”

Another brief silence. “You think you’re being played?”

“Probably.”

“Yeah, me, too.” The sound of papers rustling. “I don’t like this phone thing. It’s a paper trail. They can interpret it however they want.”