LITMIR.BIZ

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A cautious voice on the other end.

      “Manny, open up,” she said. “It’s Jazz. I need an opinion.”

      “Drive-through’s closed.”

      “Give me a break.”

      “You didn’t pay me for the last opinion.”

      “I thought that was a freebie!”

      “Jazz, Jazz…I don’t give freebies and you know it.”

      “Fine, I’ll pay you this time. Double.”

      Silence. He hung up. Jazz waited for a few seconds, and smiled as the grimy garage door a few yards down the street began rattling slowly up.

      As soon as her car passed under it, the door reversed course and began jerking and clattering back down again. Manny didn’t like open doors. “Who’s Manny?” Lucia asked. She didn’t sound bothered, for which Jazz had to give her points. If the situation had been reversed, Jazz was pretty sure she’d have been firing off questions every ten seconds and jumping at every noise.

      “Old friend,” Jazz said, which didn’t really answer anything, and killed the engine. She kept the headlights running, bathing the big concrete room in white light. The few spotlights were feeble and far between. Manny also wasn’t big on paying electric bills.

      She got out of the car, leaned against the cool metal and waited with her arms folded. The car shifted as Lucia got out on the other side.

      “What now?”

      “We wait,” Jazz said. “Oh, and keep your hands where he can see them. He’s a little twitchy.”

      “Twitchy?” Lucia echoed grimly. “Wonderful. I already like your friend.”

      “Trust me. When someone’s out to get you, the best friend you can have is a paranoid nutcase with skills.”

      “Amen to that,” said a dry, raspy voice out of the shadows. “You know the rules, Jazz. Weapons on the ground.”

      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 assume 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 said I’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 the hell did 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.

      Because beyond was a state-of-the-art science lab, segmented by movable clear glass partitions. Beyond that was a thick leather couch and widescreen HDTV that doubled as Manny’s living area. Green hospital curtains hung on suspended rods hid the open-forum bathroom—which, Jazz had cause to know, was an interior designer’s wet dream of gleaming marble, Jacuzzi tub and spa shower—and the bedroom, which she’d only glimpsed but looked good enough that if she lived here, she’d never get out of bed. Manny shooed them away from the lab part of the room and toward the living room. He combed fingers through his disordered hair and avoided their eyes.

      “Um, yeah, sorry, I don’t get a lot of—visitors—sit. Sit down.” He moved newspapers and piled them on a glass side table, then picked up the remote control and clicked the TV to some high-definition channel doing a travelogue of China. No sound. “So. Um, tell me what you want. Oh, and hi, by the way. I’m

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