When he got to the door, he could hear some guy with a German accent spluttering in indignation and anger from inside the room.

“You…you… goddamn Shiksa.You… you can’t do this to me.”

Johnny pressed his ear closer. None of his business, absolutely none-dammit.He wasn’t cop of the world, not here. He should be enjoying the reprieve, not jumping in the middle of a fifty-dollar trick.

“Shiksa yourself, mister,” a cool, sweetly feminine voice replied. And yes, it was definitely Easy Alex. He remembered the slightly cultured accent, the honeyed tone, the instinctive edge of authority. Christ. She’d always had the edge of authority, usually with her hand in the air, fingers waggling, her arm stick-straight, going for all the height she could get-Hey, hey, teacher, I know the answer, I know the answer. Hell, she’d always known the answer.

“That’s not… this isn’t,” the guy kept spluttering, his voice starting to sound a little strained. “This isn’t what I asked for…I wanted Dixie. I was told to ask for Dixie, and… and you’re not Dixie.”

No, Johnny thought, a little taken back. She most certainly wasn’t. Anywhere in Denver north of the Sixteenth Street Mall, the name Dixie bandied about in that tone of voice by some guy in a hotel could only mean one thing: a diminutive forty-yearold dominatrix with a quirt. She’d been a permanent fixture of the city’s nights for as long as Johnny could remember, which did nothing to answer the questions of why Esme Alden was taking one of Dixie’s calls, and what in the hell she’d just done to the guy in 215.

Somebody in the room let out a strangled sound of distress, and he knocked, twice, hard and solid, a pure knee-jerk reaction that clearly said, “What in the hell is going on in there?”-and the room went silent. He could have heard a frickin’ pin drop in the hall, and he could just imagine the two of them frozen in some sordid S &M act, their gazes glued to the door, wondering who in the hell had knocked.

“Housekeeping,” he said, loud and clear. “We have your towels.”

Towels?

Esme tightened her grip on the handcuffs she’d used at Otto Von Lindberg’s request to secure his hands behind his back. He was facedown on the floor, her knee planted firmly and deliberately in his back, pressing hard. Her other hand had a strong grip on the dog collar the German had also been so kind as to provide already in place around his neck. She had the attached leash tied to the bed frame-and there was somebody at the door, somebody she’d bet didn’t have any towels.

Dammit. Releasing her hold on the collar, she swiveled on Otto’s back, and used one of his other leashes to hog-tie his flex-cuffed ankles to his wrists. He was old, and his ankles looked frail, considering his well-over-two-hundred-pound girth, but she wasn’t overly concerned about Otto’s skinny ankles. They’d been carting him around for sixty-some years. More than likely, they’d hold up under a little hog-tying.

“Nein… nein,” he gasped and struggled-to no avail. She’d had the bastard cold from the instant he’d let her lock him into the cuffs.

Let her? Hell, he’d begged her. It was part of the game.

She finished off the knot on the leash and jerked it tight. Geez.Germans and dogs-it was always the Germans with the dog paraphernalia. She’d seen it half a dozen times in her line of work, which despite her outfit didn’t have a damn thing to do with prostitution.

Esme Alden, Master of Disguise-yes, sir, that was her, all right, when the situation called for it, and old Otto had laid himself wide open to get taken by a hooker tonight. She’d known he would, and she’d known exactly what kind of girl he’d be looking to hire. Fifty bucks to the parking valet hadn’t gone to naught. The call for Dixie had come to her instead. She might have to make up the missed trick to the aging dominatrix, just to keep peace on the street, but a couple hundred bucks ought to cover it, which left her with the night’s potential profit margin still hitting at the required eighty-two-thousand-dollar mark.

And it wasn’t enough, not even close, not for the risk she was taking, not if she didn’t make a clean deal of it and an even cleaner getaway.

Esme rose to her feet, leaving Otto to cuss and squirm on the floor. He’d left his suitcase open on the bed, and it took her about thirty seconds to search through his clothes and the rest of his dog collars. He had a penchant for spikes and studs.

She had a penchant for fine art, the stolen variety, and she wasn’t finding any packed in his suitcase. Oh, hell, no-that would have been too easy.

“Wh-what are you looking for?” he stammered. “What do you want? Money? More money?”

Actually, bottom line, yes, and the art was the means to that end.

“You… you shouldn’t be doing this. Not…not to me,” he rattled on. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”

Oh, yes, she did. She knew exactly whom she was dealing with.

“I am a very important man.”

True. Damned important to her, for now, or she wouldn’t be in this damn hotel room, wearing a damn stupid outfit, with a damn fat old German at her feet.

Some nights, life just got quirky on a girl. She was sure as hell redlining the Quirky-O-Meter tonight, which she could handle. No problem. As long as the Shit-Hitting-The-Fan-O-Meter stayed well on the low end of the scale.

Reaching into a narrow pocket on her skirt, Esme pulled out a knife and thumbed it open, and next to her on the floor, Otto went dead silent. Suddenly, there wasn’t a peep, or a squeak, or a twitch coming out of him. She could almost hear the gears in his head grind to a halt in sheer, unadulterated terror.

Yes, old boy, she thought, this is the masochist’s risk, that the game gets out of hand.

Not bothering to reassure him of anything, let alone his safety, she leaned farther over the bed and started in on the suitcase-and in her opinion, his relief, heralded by a sharp expulsion of breath and a general collapse of his body against his restraints, was overly optimistic. He was in it up to his neck for this night’s work even if he was safe from her blade.

“Wh-what…” he finally stammered, when he’d gotten his breath back. “Wh-what are you doing? I don’t…I don’t understand.”

Oh, yes, he did. He just needed to think it through a bit.

She kept to the edges of his suitcase, inside and out, running the blade close to the frame and carefully pulling back the linings and fabric covering.

No art.

Specifically, no Jakob Meinhard’s 1910 Woman in Blue, a small Expressionist masterpiece last seen in Munich in 1937 as part of the Entartete Kunst exhibit, the Degenerate Art exhibit, and believed burned in Berlin in 1939. Her father had been on the painting’s trail since word of its survival had surfaced four years ago. Or more accurately, he’d been on the trail of the reward money offered by the painting’s rightful owner, Isaac Nachman, a wealthy, eccentric Denver industrialist. A good friend, Burt had always called the man, which in the jargon Esme knew meant Mr. Nachman had loaned her father money-quite a bit over the years, as it had eventually come out, with their “friendship” and their business overlapping almost one hundred percent of the time in Mr. Nachman’s favor.

Esme hoped to even that number out a bit before the night was through.

“You… you are crazy,” Otto said under his breath. “A crazy American whore.”

Not really.

“You will regret this, Shiksa,” he swore sotto voce, having apparently found a theme. “You…

you crazy American bitch. I…I will find you, and beat you… beat you to death, you crazy whore.”

Fat chance. Old Otto couldn’t catch her on her worst day, but he wasn’t the one she was worried about, not on this deal.