Crazy Hot

by Tara Janzen

  “Slow down” had crossed her mind a few times, though. So had “Could you pull over and kiss me again, because I really can't believe what your kisses did to me.”

  She'd kept both thoughts to herself. Played it safe. That's what she was good at, playing it safe.

  “Well, we've got the Seismosaurus phalanges from New Mexico I've been working on for the last three years.”

  “Long-term project, huh?” He flashed her a grin. For a moment she forgot all over again that he was dangerous. When he smiled, all she could remember was that not so very long ago he'd been America's hero and one of the fifty most beautiful people in the world.

  Good Lord, he'd shaken hands with the President of the United States. What in the world was she doing sitting in a car going ninety miles an hour with him, talking about dinosaur toes?

  She took a breath and did it anyway.

  “It is taking a while, but the sandstone is like concrete, and there's only so much time I can devote to it. We have a lot of fossils in storage. I don't know if you've been to the museum lately, but the dinosaur exhibit is incredible. Dr. Houska, our curator of paleontology, is a phalanx expert, and he'd like to highlight some of our more spectacular fossils. Of course, what he'd really like to be known for is finding a Cretaceous carnivore's nesting site.”

  She did a surreptitious check to see if his eyes had glazed over yet. Surprisingly, they hadn't.

  “Isn't that what Wilson was always hoping to find at Rabbit Valley, a Tyrannosaurus rex nest, or egg, or a juvenile, or something?”

  Regan's eyebrows lifted, her estimation of him skyrocketing, guns and bad guys or no guns and bad guys. Thanks to Spielberg, most people thought of Tyrannosaurus as a Jurassic dinosaur. Quinn seemed to know it belonged to the Cretaceous period.

  “Well, yes. It's his dream, actually. I'm surprised you remember.” Shocked was more like it.

  “I remember everything.” He smiled again, albeit a little more wryly. “And not just about that summer. It's how I got through college after almost flunking out of high school. Photographic memory. Of course, by my junior year at CU, I realized I actually had to start learning how things worked together, not just memorize facts.”

  “You went to school in Boulder?” He was a wellspring of surprises.

  “My last two years of undergrad work. I spent the first two at UC Denver.”

  “And you never came back by the house to say hello?” She didn't know why the thought was so disappointing, but it was.

  “We weren't exactly friends,” he said with a shrug. “And by then you were married. Scott Hanson, wasn't it?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “He's still a professor at Boulder, right? In the engineering department. That first semester I was at the university, right after I'd gone to see Wilson, everyone was talking about Dr. Hanson getting married. That he'd left his wife for some really young girl who was barely out of high school.”

  Regan had been wrong. She hadn't been embarrassed before. She was embarrassed now, shamefully embarrassed. Mortified.

  “It took me a while to put it all together,” he continued, his tone perfectly normal, perfectly conversational, as if he weren't saying the most awful things. “You getting married that fall, and him getting married that fall. I never would have put the two of you together, but your name came up, and there it was—Professor Hanson was marrying old Doc McKinney's granddaughter. Just so you know, I aced his class. I was the only A he gave that whole semester.”

  “Congratulations.” The word was as stiff and cold as she felt. He wasn't nice. He was despicable.

  “All the other students were hoping you'd show up one day, bring him his lunch or something. Even the girls wanted to get a look at the sweet young thing Hanson had snatched out of the cradle. Not me, though. I was glad you never came.”

  So was she. It would have been horrible to have walked into one of Scott's classes and seen Quinn Younger—her middle-aged husband and the fantasy crush of her youth. It hadn't taken her long to realize she'd made a terrible mistake in marrying Scott—not nearly as long as it had taken her to get out of the marriage. It had all been so stupid and awful, the way he'd treated her like a child instead of a wife, telling her what to do and whom she could see, when she had to be home and what she should wear. He hadn't treated her like a child in bed, though, and given her lack of experience, the whole sex thing had been a disaster right from the very first time to the last.

  To be fair, she'd made plenty of mistakes, too. By the time it was over, neither one of them had looked like much of a bargain.

  Damn Quinn for dragging up the whole sorry mess. She didn't owe him an explanation, no way in hell, but her pride demanded one.

  “Just so you know, I was a sophomore in college when I got married, a long way from being fresh out of high school, and whatever problems Scott and his first wife had didn't have anything to do with me. He had filed for the divorce before I ever went out with him, and I never slept with him before our wedding night. Never.”

  “That's interesting,” he said in a tone that all but called her a liar.

  “No.” She turned angrily in her seat and glared at him. “That's true. Believe me, if I had slept with him, I would never have marri—” She cut herself off and sank back into her seat, so furious she could barely speak.

  “Well . . . he was old enough to be your father.” He turned on his blinker and switched lanes, moving toward an exit ramp. They were still in the mountains, overlooking the city below.

  “Which was obviously the whole point of my getting married in the first place,” she snapped back. “I was looking for a father figure. I didn't need a rocket scientist or a therapist to tell me that then, and I sure as hell don't need you to tell me that now.”

  A hundred yards off the exit, he pulled onto a dirt track heading into the trees and turned off the Camaro. After all the roar and rumble, the silence seemed sudden and complete. Slowly, the night sounds intruded. Wind blowing through the pine trees and rustling the leaves on the aspen. The muted sounds of traffic on the highway they'd left to the north.

  “Look, I wasn't making a judgment.”

  “You most certainly were,” she fumed.

  “I was only—”

  “Stop it. Just stop it.” She cut him off again, her words sharp-edged with emotion. “You don't know anything about my marriage. Not anything.”

  “So tell me.”

  “Go to hell.”

  GREAT, Quinn thought, sinking back into his seat, both hands draped over the steering wheel. He hadn't meant to make her angry.

  Or maybe he had. God knows he'd been angry. It was crazy, but after he'd kissed her and they'd gotten back on the road, he'd started thinking about her husband, a subject he'd thought he'd thrown out of his memory banks years ago. But there they'd been, cruising down I-70, and he'd suddenly gotten an image of old Hanson kissing her like Quinn had just kissed her but without having to stop. That had gotten Quinn pissed off.

  Really pissed off.

  But he still hadn't meant to bring up the subject—and that was the God's truth.

  It had just happened.

  “I'm sorry,” he said, and wondered if it was true.

  Shit. Professor Hanson—he really shouldn't have started thinking about the old buzzard.

  “You don't know me. You don't know anything about my life.” Her voice trembled, and underneath his anger he felt a twinge of alarm. He'd be damned if he wanted to make her cry.

  “You're right. I don't.” So why did he care so damn much? A thousand other women could have shown up in Cisco that afternoon, and he would have treated them with the utmost professionalism. But Regan McKinney was different and always had been.

  A moment later, he heard her gasp.

  “You,” she exclaimed. “It was you.”

  She swiveled in her seat, staring at him aghast, suddenly not sounding like she was anywhere near to crying.

  He had a feeling he knew what was
coming.

  “You stole Scott's car.”

  “Guilty.” He couldn't help it. He grinned. God, he'd been such a moron. He'd stolen Hanson's prize 1966 Mustang. It had been street-punk jerk adolescent revenge. Revenge against Professor Hanson for having what Quinn couldn't have: Regan.

  “How could you?” She sounded appalled. “How could you steal his car?”

  Somehow, he didn't think she wanted the technical answer.

  “He loved that car. It was a classic, totally unique.”

  “Trophy car,” Quinn admitted, turning his gaze on her. “Trophy wife. Did he love you, too?”

  Even in the darkened interior, with only the moon to light her face, he saw her blush.

  “I am not going to discuss my marriage with you. Not now. Not ever.”

  “Fine.”

  Damn it. Eighty-four days—that's how long he'd spent in Wilson's bone beds at Rabbit Valley. Eighty-four of the most important days of his life, even though he'd only been sixteen at the time. Without ever saying a word directly to him, hardly making eye contact, Regan had ruled every one.

  She and Wilson had changed him that summer. She'd come and gone a number of times, breaking his heart every time she'd left to go back to Boulder, giving him a thrill every time she'd returned, but Wilson had been a constant presence, always talking and teaching and pushing.

  Baking in the hundred-degree heat and digging old bones out of the sun-baked dirt had not been fun, not by any stretch of the imagination. It had been more like torture, punishment for all the bad deeds he'd piled up as the car thief king of Steele Street.

  Quinn's motto before that summer had been: If a man could afford a Porsche, he could afford to lose one—or a Mercedes, or a BMW, or a Lincoln . . . or a 1966 Mustang. As an adolescent he'd actually stolen a lot of cars out of Boulder, he and the guys cruising up to the university town and raiding the streets, culling out the finest machines and racing them back to Steele Street.

  Then Steele Street had gotten busted but good by the Denver cops, and all the street rats had run for their lives. Most had gotten away, but the inner core—Quinn, Dylan, Hawkins, Rivera, Prade, and J. T.—they'd gotten their butts landed in the city jail. From jail they'd gone to “juvie,” and from “juvie” to court, where Judge Campisano had sold them down the river to Wilson McKinney for his Job Training Partnership program.

  A damn fancy title for slave labor, he'd thought at the time. But he would have dug those dinosaur bones out of the ground with his teeth to avoid going to the state penitentiary. It was the first time Quinn had ever been caught, ever actually been picked up by the cops—and he'd known he wanted it to be the absolute last time.

  And yet, four years later, he'd still gone after Hanson's pony car.

  It could have cost him everything, college and ROTC, his way out, his freedom. But he'd been so cross-eyed angry over the idea of Professor Hanson with Regan. What he'd wanted, he couldn't have, and the rest of it—hell, the rest of it hadn't seemed important in comparison, not right then when he'd been hurting.

  “Don't we have someplace we're supposed to be going?” she asked, none too nicely.

  “Yeah.” They did, but he wasn't ready to leave, not just yet.

  He heard her sigh over on her side of the Camaro, a heavy—very heavy—much maligned sigh.

  DENVER.

  It was a good place to be.

  Wilson looked out the window of Johnny Ramos's pickup truck and absently nodded his head. The Denver Center for the Performing Arts was all lit up. On the other side of Speer Boulevard, the Auraria Campus was busy with students going to night classes.

  He'd lectured there many times over the years and had always received a warm reception.

  Denver was good.

  Getting away from the warehouse before the Air Force showed up was good.

  He twisted around in the seat as best he could and checked the crate he and Johnny had tied down in the bed of the truck. He didn't want the crate careening all over the place, and even though he'd packed it himself and carefully moved it with the forklift, he was worried about it. He didn't want to forget what he was doing with it, with the fossil inside. He didn't want to forget what he'd already learned about it or what he'd found in the surrounding plaster, and he certainly didn't trust the Air Force to ship it off somewhere and take good enough care of it.

  He'd heard Hawkins and another guy talking, and he'd known he had to do something. The Air Force certainly hadn't taken good enough care of Quinn Younger, letting him be blown out of the sky like that. He hoped the boy was okay.

  He stopped for a minute, stopped thinking and backtracked a bit. Then it came to him and he remembered. Quinn Younger had been rescued. He was fine, a hero, still friends with Christian Hawkins, who—it turned out—wasn't the cold-blooded murderer he'd been made out to be all those years ago. Both of them worked for Dylan Hart.

  He was working for Dylan now, too, and he was supposed to tell Dylan everything he found, but Dylan was gone, so he'd told no one. It was important, though, what he'd discovered embedded like riprap in the Tarbosaurus's plaster jacket. It was important and strange, and he needed to remember.

  A Tarbosaurus nest. My God. He had two, maybe three eggs—with embryos!—of the fiercest predator ever to walk the planet, a toothier Mongolian version of North America's Tyrannosaurus rex. His young competitors were out beating the badlands again, and he, washed-up old Dr. McKinney, had had a fossilized Cretaceous carnivore nest practically dropped right in his lap.

  Of course, Tarbosaurus was just his first guess. It could be a Tyrannosaurus. He needed more comparisons, tests, X rays. He needed Regan with her light touch and her dental pick to clean away the detritus and stone. He needed to get the nest someplace safe and find out where it had come from. Provenance would quickly tell him if it was Tarbosaurus or Tyrannosaurus. The bureaucratic abyss of a nameless federal warehouse was not a safe place, and the place he and Johnny were supposed to be going, Steele Street, couldn't possibly be safe either.

  He remembered it. The bust on Steele Street sixteen years ago had hit all the papers, closed down the city's biggest car theft ring, and netted him most of his first summer work crew.

  There was only one place safe enough for a find of this magnitude, and it wasn't too far from where they were heading.

  “Turn here,” he said to Johnny, pointing left, using his most professorial tone of voice, one no undergraduate had ever dared to gainsay. It had also worked pretty well on a dozen years' worth of juvenile offenders, and as he'd hoped, it worked on this one, too. He knew the look of hard living on the streets, and this kid had it.

  The boy cast him a quick sidelong glance, but he made the turn.

  “Sir,” he started. “Superma—I mean, Hawkins told me to take you to Steele Street tonight.”

  Yes, he'd heard the orders, but he needed to go someplace else first. He looked back out the windshield. Their next turn was just up ahead.

  Johnny Ramos reminded Wilson of Christian Hawkins a little bit. They were both dark-haired, with tall, rangy builds, but for all his machismo, the boy wasn't as hard-edged as Christian. Wilson doubted if he'd ever seen a man with harder edges than Christian. He was all angles and toughness and maybe a streak of mean.

  Christian carried a gun, sometimes more than one. He also had a knife, not a useful knife like a Swiss army knife, but a switchblade, a killing knife, and most of the time he dressed like someone who knew how to use it—someone who had used it, with a bandanna tied around his head and wraparound sunglasses, in T-shirts and low-slung jeans and two-hundred-dollar Nike Airs. After Wilson's initial shock at seeing him, he'd recognized enough of the boy he'd once known to be comfortable working with him.

  Still, he wished Dylan would return. Wilson wasn't good at keeping secrets, not anymore. He wasn't afraid of accidentally telling someone. What he was afraid of was that the secret would simply drift away.

  So many things drifted away from him.

  But no
t the crate. He wasn't going to lose the crate.

  “Take the next right.”

  “Sir—”

  “This won't take long,” he assured the boy. “We're only going a few miles. You know where City Park is, don't you?”

  Johnny gave the old man another long, dubious look.

  But he made the right-hand turn.

  CHAPTER

  11

  HOW WOULD YOU want to go to hell? Blindfolded or eyes wide open?” Nikki McKinney asked.

  Question number 308 by Kid's count.

  “Eyes wide open, ma'am,” he said, as he finished hauling Travis, in harness and rigging, into the air. He secured the rope to the wall. Travis had said eyes wide open, too, but she'd blindfolded him anyway.

  She'd also tied him up, gagged him, and put more paint on him, a hellish concoction of black and red.

  It hadn't exactly been the erotic episode Kid had imagined it would be.

  She was too intense, too intensely focused on the art. She was a little pushy, and tougher than she looked—and without actually coming out and telling him to back off, she'd made it damn clear that if he was going to be hanging around her studio, watching her, he was going to do it by her rules.

  Kid didn't want to actually come out and tell her to back off either. But he hadn't busted his hump getting from Cisco to Boulder so he could spend the night watching Nikki McKinney put a naked guy through hell—literally. She wasn't actually hurting Travis, but she wasn't gentle with him, either. If Kid hadn't been there, Travis would have been at her mercy.

  In her case, size was deceiving. She was damned relentless. Wherever she was trying to take Travis, helpless and naked, she was going to get there. For a hundred dollars an hour, Travis was perfectly willing to go.

  Maybe Travis had been there before. Nikki had other angel prints and sketches stacked around the walls. Kid figured it was just his own bad luck not to have been called up on a night when she was photographing or drawing a female angel—not that he saw any female angels in her lineup. But watching her finger-paint another woman's body, a naked woman, would have definitely made his top ten sexual fantasies list.