Free Loose and Easy by Tara Janzen

find out what.
    “Are you sure it was Dovey Smollett you saw?” She wasn’t surprised to hear Dovey had taken to a life of crime. Hell, half their graduating class had been headed for a life of crime. And she wasn’t surprised to hear that Dovey worked for Denver’s most dangerous bookie. What made her head spin was the screwing of the deal eight hours before it was supposed to go down.
    That was all bad, all dangerous, all totally disastrous, and she was running out of time, standing around in a bar.
    “Look for yourself,” John Ramos said, making a slight gesture toward the door where they’d entered.
    She turned to look, and swore under her breath. He hadn’t been lying, and he hadn’t made a mistake. It was goddamn Dovey Smollett coming into O’Shaunessy’s off Sixteenth—stringy blond hair, pockmarked face, narrow shoulders, a cheap suit. He hadn’t changed nearly enough since high school.
    “I think he’s working the room with somebody,” she said. Dovey had a phone to his ear.
    “Check out the Chicago Bear at two o’clock.”
    She turned and looked in the direction he’d given.
    “Yeah. I see him.”
    Dammit.
The guy coming in O’Shaunessy’s front door was big, brutish, dark-haired, bulbous-nosed, and needed a change in football team affiliation. Denver was a Broncos town, all the way, and this guy was wearing a Chicago Bears jacket. Esme didn’t know him. She didn’t have to know him. All she had to know was the look of somebody’s untrained chump looking for somebody else, and this guy had it—gaze blatantly quartering the room, phone to his ear, standing straight and tall, neck craned. He might as well have been wearing a sign that said, “Can you help me? I’m looking for ___.” Fill in the blank.
    “I think…” God, she couldn’t believe what she was about to say.
    “What?” he asked next to her.
    “I think we should get a cup of coffee.”
    There, it was out, and from the shit-eating grin forming on his face, Johnny Ramos knew exactly what she meant—inside joke, all the way. A person had either double-dog-dared their way through Campbell Junior High, or they hadn’t.
    She had, and he’d been the one double-dog-daring her—him, and Mason Maxwell, and Ruben Sabino, and Janessa “the jerk” Kaliski. Esme had only taken the stupid dare because of Janessa. The girl had been ridiculously infatuated with Johnny Ramos, and Esme hadn’t wanted him to think the skinny brunette with the big boobs was tougher than her.
    So, yes, she’d taken the dare, and she’d made it to the coffee shop, and Janessa Kaliski had chickened out. The other boys had rushed over to rescue “the jerk” where she’d gotten hung up in the bridge over the alley—but not Johnny. He’d been watching her, Esme the Miraculous, make her triumphant climb up onto the roof of what had once been the Wazee Warehouse. From there it had been a short drop and a five-story high walk to the fire escape down to street level. Half of another block southeast had dumped them out on Wazee, right in front of the Cuppa Joe coffee shop.
    Their first date—that’s what she’d always called how that little escapade had finished up, a date. Her and Johnny Ramos, with his silky dark hair and tight T-shirt, the two of them sitting at a table next to the window overlooking Wazee, watching the traffic, waiting for Mason and Ruben and Janessa to show up—and not a damn thing to say to each other.
    It had been excruciatingly embarrassing—but still an official first date. She’d put it in her diary that way. Date number two had been in the backseat of the Challenger, and now here they were on date number three. Like date one, date two had been a little low on conversation, so by comparison, date three was on a roll, a real chatterfest. Most of it bitchy on her part, true, but still conversation.
    And they were in the exact spot where the Cuppa Joe double dog dare began, between the waitress station and the door into the