Page 63 of Devil's Bargain

Maybe I could send Lucia... No, she couldn’t pull Lucia out, not now; Lucia had taken weeks settling her cover, and she was getting close to breaking the case. Despite the jokes earlier, Lucia wasn’t going to disengage, and she damn sure wasn’t going to pull out of undercover work to go work for the Cross Society.

Jazz took a deep breath and held it. The pictures would keep. They’d kept all this time, three days wouldn’t kill her.It would give her time to pull the details out of Manny and verify the provenance.

“Fine,” she said. “Fine, I’ll go. Tell Laskins I’m cooperating.”

“That would be a pretty free interpretation of events,” he said, and looked at her with a trace of a smile.

“You’re a lawyer. Prevaricate.”

“Sorry I gave away your fruit basket.”

“Please tell me that was Laskins’s choice of a gift.”

His smile was purely giddy. “Fruit baskets don’t turn you on? Come on, Jazz. Bananas, pear honey—it’s practicalandseductive.”

“Are you hungry?”

“What?”

She said it slower. “Are … you … hungry?”

“Why?”

“Because I want to talk to you about your friend. If I’m going to fly off to L.A. to protect his ass, at the very least I should know a little something about him.”

Borden looked more stunned by that than by her agreement to take the case. “Um … okay. Where do you want to—”

“Wait downstairs,” she said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

The elevator arrived with a musical ding. She watched him get in and press the button for the first floor. Just before the doors closed, she said, “By the way? If you want to send a woman a present, chocolate’s seductive. Bananas are just crude.”

The closing doors cut him off before he could come up with any kind of a response.

Jazz stopped by Pansy’s desk on the way back to her office. Pansy was turning the fruit basket this way and that, trying to catalog contents without unwrapping the shiny paper.

Jazz picked it up and carried it into her office.

“Pear honey,” Pansy called after her. “He must really like you. That’s kinda kinky. Think of all the applications …”

She slammed the door, gathered up the photos into a briefcase, added her collapsible truncheon, PDA, a few more files she needed to catch up on, and grabbed the travel bag she always kept ready in the closet, with changes of clothing and toiletries. She shouldered it, opened the door again and saw Pansy jump.

“I’m going to L.A.,” she said, and Pansy’s eyes went narrow with surprise.

“It’s not on your schedule—”

“Add it. Three days in L.A.”

“With … anyone?”

“Please. It’s afruit basket.”

“Is it a case? Because I should open up a file if—”

The red envelope was in Jazz’s briefcase. She took it out, tossed it to Pansy, and said, “Make two copies, and give one to Lucia. In case.”

“In case what?” Pansy asked, frowning.

“In case I don’t come back.”

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