“And the fact that the husband who finds out might be packing,” White added.
“And if he is packin’, I might not be there to shoot him for you,” I threw in.
“I shot the car,” Ian insisted.
“Jesus, where is the fuckin’ ballistics report?”
What was interesting, even to my inebriated, exhausted brain, was that no one in the car, even the driver, gave a crap that Ian and I were very obviously together.
THE CLUB was noisy and packed in the front but not in the back, where it was more lounge than bar. White’s wife, Pam, had a table with her girlfriends and three male admirers who were buying the five women drinks. I noticed the round of cosmopolitans on the table that looked untouched.
“Ladies,” Sharpe announced as he got close, and Pam was up quickly and in his arms, hugging him tight before turning to the others and introducing her husband’s partner.
“This is Deputy United States Marshal Ethan Sharpe, everyone, who’s very newly single.”
The marshal part did the trick, and the guys, apparently looking to score, disappeared and a waitress came by to collect the drinks no one wanted.
“I liked your partner better when he had a girlfriend,” I told White.
“My wife is trying her damnedest to fix that,” he snickered.
Sharpe ordered a round of Kamikaze shots for the women, and Ian turned and stepped into my space before I could order a beer.
“You wanna drink or go home with me?”
What was I, nuts? “I want to go home with you,” I replied adamantly.
His laughter was warm. “You’re so wasted, but it’s nice that even though you are, you pick me.”
“Always,” I burped. “But I’ve been much more wasted than”—Eric Lozano—“than now and—wait.”
“Why am I waiting?” he pried, leaning in like it was noisy, so that’s why his mouth was so close to my ear, but in reality his breath was there, on my skin, and—
“Shit,” I gasped, jolting away from him, reaching out and grabbing his bicep. “Ian, I think Eric Lozano walked into the bathroom.”
“What?” he asked harshly, clearly annoyed. “I’m trying to—”
“I swear to God.”
And that fast, because he was not only my lover but my partner as well, he brushed off seductive mode and stepped back into the marshal. “Let’s go.”
There was no thought given to alerting Sharpe and White. We simply bolted.
Ian went first, as usual, and we waited until we were outside the bathroom to draw our guns. But as soon as we stepped into the bathroom, we first, quickly and quietly, made sure it was clear, and then walked to the last stall, where it sounded like Lozano was getting lucky.
I myself had had many encounters in restrooms over the course of my sex life, but never with women. So I was impressed, really, by the balance displayed by Lozano’s lady friend, who had her legs wrapped around his waist, her back arched like a rainbow, and her hands on the rim of the toilet. It was important to note that she had wads of toilet paper between her palms and the seat.
“Why didn’t you simply bend her over?” I asked from where I stood, up on the toilet in the next stall over.
“It’s a good question,” Ian apprised from where he was standing on the toilet in the stall on the other side of them. We had them bookended.
Lozano’s head snapped up and his eyes bugged out, glancing from me smiling at him to Ian, who was scowling over the top of the dividing wall on his other side, and back to me.
“It would’ve been faster.”
“And easier,” the girl said, because, really, what the hell—why wouldn’t she weigh in?
“I’ll fuckin’ kill you guys,” he threatened, which really showed a lot of balls, because for one, his pants were around his ankles, and for two, there was no way he was getting out of the stall without getting her legs off him.
“We’re federal marshals,” I informed him, holstering my gun under my sweater even as Ian lifted his over the side of the divider so Lozano could see the P228 clearly. “You wanna maybe rethink that?”
He sighed deeply. “I thought I gave all you guys the slip when I left Des Plains.”
Ian lowered his gun, knowing as well as I did that Lozano wasn’t going to give us any trouble. We were already talking like regular people, and we’d been marshals long enough to know what that meant. Lozano, like most of the people we busted—when they knew we had them—was going to come along easy.
“You were in Iowa?” I grimaced. “Aww, man, I’m sorry.”
“Hey.”
The new voice made me look up, and I saw three men behind us, all in trench coats, all in suits, and I wondered, as I often did, why these guys didn’t simply put on nametags that said “Hi, I’m a mob enforcer.”