Page 16 of Devil's Bargain

She spread her jacket. “No weapons.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

“Not.”

“Then who are you and what have you done with Jazz Callender?” He sounded amused for a second, and then his raspy voice turned serious. “I mean it. Knives, batons, tasers—everything on the ground, or I turn around and walk.”

“Manny, I got nothing. We came from the airport, for God’s sake. You don’t run around armed there, in case you missed the events of the last few years.”

Manny edged out of the shadows. He was a big man, not very clean, with a greasy tangle of black hair that he kept cut above too-large ears. Muddy green eyes that with a little polish would have knocked a girl dead, but when combined with his unattractive personal grooming habits, a perpetual slump to his broad shoulders, and a habit of flinching from loud noises … no, Manny wasn’t exactly prime date material.

Not that Jazz was in the market.

Manny was watching Lucia. “What about her?” he asked, and pointed. Jazz wasn’t exactly a makeover fan, but even she winced from the state of his cuticles. “She armed?”

“She,” Lucia said with absolute precision as she took off her sunglasses, “is always armed. So you can just.as-sume that and move on.”

Manny was already shaking his head, violently. “No, no, no, Jazz, you know I don’t do—I don’t let—no, no, no—”

“Hold on.” She shot Lucia a look. Lucia tilted her head and gave her one right back, and this one clearly saidI’m not giving it up for your paranoid weirdo friend.Jazz lowered her voice and walked around to talk to her. “Manny’s a little freaky, but he’s a good guy. Plus, this building has the best security in the city. He built it himself. He’s really good at it. But he’s got quirks, okay? You need to cut him a little slack.”

“Why do we need him?”

“Because I say we do,” Jazz said? Simple. “You can either trust me about this, or we can get in the car, drive out, and go our separate ways. Your choice.”

Lucia’s dark eyes studied her for several long seconds, and then those elegantly outlined lips curved into a smile. “All right,” she said, and reached to her back with one hand.

Gun.Damn,Lucia had a gun. It was a small one, a .22 automatic, combat black. “How thehelldid you get that through airport security?”

“I didn’t,” she replied, and put the weight of it into Jazz’s hand. “I sent it ahead to a courier and had him bring it. I palmed it on the way out of baggage claim from the man with the briefcase.”

Jazz hadn’t even noticed a man with a briefcase, except as part of the general wallpaper. There must have been a hundred fitting that description. She blinked, the weight of the gun heavy and warm in her palm, and then nodded as if she’d known that all along. Not that Lucia appeared fooled, considering her smile. “Uh-huh. Anything else?”

“Search me,” Lucia invited, and spread her arms.

“Oh, this isn’t going to be that kind of relationship, believe me.” Jazz bent over and put the gun on the ground, then held up both hands in the air and raised her voice for Manny. “Yo! Gun on the ground! We’re cool now, right?”

Manny was dithering, half in shadow, half in the whitewash of the car headlights. Clearly spooked. “I don’t know, Jazz … you know I don’t like it when you bring strangers …”

“She’s not a stranger,” she lied. “Look, Manny, you do this for me and you get a free lunch. Plus the usual fee.”

He stared at her for a long, long moment. “I don’t do criminal. You know that.”

“It’s not a criminal case, Manny.”

“No murders. No rapes. No violent crimes.”

“It’s maybe fraud, and that’s a maybe.” She was seriously stretching the truth, and saw Lucia watching her with slightly raised eyebrows. “You won’t need to do anything but give me results. No depositions. No trials.”

He swallowed, wiped his sweaty face with his grimy sleeve and nodded. “Yeah, okay,” he agreed. “But only because it’s you, all right? Follow me, ladies.”

Lucia started to pick up the gun. Jazz kicked it under the car with a skitter of metal on concrete, then reached through the window to shut off the headlights. Darkness closed in around them.

“You don’t want to do that,” she said. “Really. You don’t. Manny may look like some squirrelly little pushover. He isn’t.”

They followed Manny to the stairs.

Upstairs was a different world. This didn’t come as a shock to Jazz, but she saw it register on Lucia as Manny keyed a code into a lock and opened the door at the top of the stairs.

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