Free Loose and Easy by Tara Janzen Page A

kitchen of O’Shaunessy’s Bar and Grill. The first trick for a junior-high-school-aged kid being to get into the back bar to begin with. Anybody could get into the main bar. It was part of the restaurant. But the back bar was for the after-work crowd, the sports crowd, and the drinking crowd—no kids allowed.
    “You’re wearing heels,” he said.
    “You knew that when you brought me in here and shoved me into this corner.” Yes, she’d immediately recognized the spot where he’d corralled her, and recognized his tactics for what they were, a way of ditching a tail with a built-in escape route if the ditching failed. “Don’t worry, I can do the alley bridge in heels.”
    “Then we only have one problem,” he said, his gaze going back toward the middle of the room. “Make that two problems.”
    “Two?” She tried to turn and look, but he’d already started moving her toward the kitchen door.
    The back bar end of O’Shaunessy’s kitchen was the storage area, and therein lay the secret of the double dog dare—the entrance to the O’Lounge. At the far end of shelves laden with cans and boxes and fifty-pound bags of flour and beans and rice, was a smaller pantry where the chef kept the good stuff, the specialty goods, and in the back of the pantry was a small wooden door, no more than four feet high. There wasn’t a busboy, dishwasher, or bar back who’d ever worked O’Shaunessy’s who didn’t quickly learn about the door, or the dark, rickety little staircase that led four stories to the southeast corner of the roof and the open-air O’Lounge.
    The last time Esme had been up there, in high school, someone had gotten a couch up the staircase. She didn’t know how. The first time she’d been in the O’Lounge, the day of the dare, it had been furnished with produce crates, a couple of broken chairs from the restaurant that somebody had duct-taped back together, and an amazing number of empty beer bottles, “handles,” and forties. How the O’Lounge had lasted all these years without some drunken kid accidentally pitching himself over the side of the roof was beyond her.
    Johnny pushed the kitchen door open, and she got hit with bright light and chaos. In a big place like O’Shaunessy’s, on a Friday night, the kitchen was a madhouse. Dozens of people were moving in dozens of directions, orders flying, flames on the grill flaring, cooks yelling above the din, waiters going every which way.
    Nobody asked them if they needed help, or particularly took notice of them. Johnny knew how to walk through a room like he belonged there, and so did she. They stayed out of the action, keeping close to the storage shelves. It wasn’t very many steps to the pantry, just enough for him to take the small spiral-bound notebook and his mechanical pencil out of his shirt pocket and look exactly like a delivery guy checking an order.
    She, on the other hand, made a point of looking like his boss—expensive and unhappy.
    “Two problems?” she repeated, when they reached the pantry. She kept her attention on the door, with an occasional glance at his notebook. She did not look around the kitchen.
    “I think Dovey Smollett did this dare back in seventh grade.”
    Oh, crap.
He was right. Dovey had been a Campbell Junior High kid, and like every other outcast, which at Campbell had just about encompassed the entire damn seventh grade and half the eighth-graders, Dovey had laid himself on the line for double dog dares. On the whole, ninth-graders were too sophisticated for double dog dares. By ninth grade, sex, drugs, and gangs had taken them.
    But Dovey, she remembered, had gotten suckered into a few sketchy moments and gotten hurt on the Larimer Square dare, a bit of “on the hoof” pickpocketing of the chichi LoDo crowd. Dovey had been too heavy-handed for the deed and been knocked into next week by the guy whose wallet he’d tried to lift.
    Esme had bypassed the Larimer Square dare, out-and-out thievery being