Devil's Bargain

That got his attention. He glanced over at her, then away.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t like being—manhandled. You might have noticed that the first time we met. And I really don’t like being manipulated.”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “Sorry. I’m not trying to manipulate you. I just—I just don’t know where else to go.”

Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, she knew that. “I’m keyed up,” she said. “I’ve got some new information about…” For some reason, she didn’t want to explain it to him. “About a case. Asking me to take three days away from it’s a pretty high price to pay.”

He nodded, eyes on the closed elevator doors and the lit call button. “Maybe so,” he replied, “and I can’t ask you what’s more important. I can only tell you that my friend is important to me, and I’m willing to go if you don’t. So tell me now, because buying a last-minute plane ticket is murder.”

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 Ma

“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 practical and seductive.”

“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 stu

“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 a fruit 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.”

Pansy gave her a long, measuring stare. “You have to come back. You know that, right? I don’t give you permission not to come back.”

Jazz smiled. “I have to sign bonus checks,” she said.

“Damn straight.”

It wasn’t romantic, really, as di

She politely clapped after the second aria from the guy topping off her tea and gave him a not-too-subtle bug-off sign, which he took with good grace. Across from her, James Borden was digging into a plate of chicken parmesan, with bread sticks. She stuck to spaghetti.

“Here,” he said, as she was questing for a meatball with her fork. He slid an envelope across the table toward her. Not red, this time. White, but still the size and shape of a card. She raised her eyebrows and opened it up.

It really was a card. Flowers on the front, and inside, a handwritten note that said, simply, Thank you.

With a plane ticket for one to Los Angeles, leaving in—she checked her watch—four hours.

“Should give you enough time to eat, get there, check in and relax a little,” he said, watching her.

“You bought the ticket this morning. Before you actually talked to me.”

He substituted a mouthful of chicken parmesan for an answer.

“Am I actually that easy?”

“No,” he mumbled. “I was willing to take the risk.”

She studied him, twirling spaghetti on her fork, and said, “Tell me about your friend.”

He did, after swallowing. Lowell Santoro. College roommate. One of those ru

“Uh-huh,” she said doubtfully, and took a sip of crisp white wine. It had a nice cool undertone to it, the perfect counterpoint to the salt of the spaghetti sauce. “So he’s Don Juan and Saint Francis, all rolled up into one. And he was, what? A law student?”

“He changed after the first year, took film courses. That’s how he got into producing. It was a good thing. He wasn’t going to be a great lawyer. Too honest.”

“Unlike you.”

“Unlike me,” he agreed. “He met Susan—his wife—his last year in college. They got married, moved out to L.A. He’s a good guy, Jazz. What’s going to happen to him—he doesn’t deserve it.”

“What is going to happen to him?” Because that wasn’t in the letter. Just instructions on how to conduct surveillance. No warnings. She supposed the Cross Society thought it would predispose her toward what to watch out for.

“It’s not clear,” Borden said. Or prevaricated. “Something fatal. And something painful.”

“Car accident? Building collapse? Bullet?”

“It’s a human agency, that’s all that I know.”

“I hate it when you talk like—”

“Like a member of the Society? Jazz. I am one.”

She knew that. She just didn’t like to think about it. Conversation collapsed into silence as they ate, and the waiter came around to deliver a selection from The Marriage of Figaro, and it was dessert by the time Jazz said, “About the fruit basket?”

He looked up from his tiramisu, took a sip of wine and raised his eyebrows.

“Was it Laskins’s idea?”

“Mine,” he said.

“You’re hopeless.”

Borden had the good sense to look embarrassed as he shrugged. It might have been the wine, or the marinara sauce, but she felt a surge of warmth toward him, entirely unco