Crazy Hot

by Tara Janzen

  As for the rest of it, she'd done enough government work to know the labyrinth of regulations and departments was big enough to hide anything that somebody didn't want to be found. Something like she was beginning to imagine Steele Street might be wouldn't be too hard to hide.

  “What about the other guys?” she asked. “There was a whole group of you from the chop shop. You already mentioned Dylan Hart, I remember him well, and Skeeter, who I don't remember at all. Hawkins I definitely remember. There was also that skinny kid, Cesar Raoul Eduardo Rivera. You all called him Creed. And then there was J. T. Oh, my God.” She stopped suddenly, her eyes widening. “J. T. Chronopolous. Kid Chronopolous.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Kid is J. T.'s little brother.”

  “So does J. T. work for Steele Street, too?”

  He just looked at her and shook his head. “Do you ever forget anything?”

  “No.”

  “Does the word precocious mean anything to you?” he asked, walking over to open the cage.

  “I'm too old to be precocious.”

  “How about too damn smart for your own good? Are you too old for that?” With a pull on a long lever, the door to the elevator began grating open.

  “Absolutely.” In her book, there was no such thing as being too smart for your own good. “The world needs more brains, not less. So what about Dylan? What does he do?” In a group of very intelligent, very young car thieves, he'd been the ringleader, the guy who knew how to work the angles—though all the angles he'd tried to work on Wilson had come to naught.

  “Capitán! ¿Qué pasa?”

  Regan turned at the sound of the voice and saw a young Hispanic guy coming across the cavernous opening that was the seventh floor, working his way through a line of very expensive cars. They were all sleek and shiny: Betty, looking pretty in hot pink and candy-apple red, a couple of Porsches and Corvettes, maybe a Jaguar, and something so high-tech-looking she didn't have a clue what it was called.

  Then she saw the car in the corner, a sleek, lime-green, muscle-car monster, and knew she'd just found Jeanette's best friend—the pretty one.

  “Johnny!” Quinn called out, giving the kid a wave before turning back to Regan. He took her hand in his and spoke quickly, quietly. “I've got to meet Hawkins tonight, finish up a few things, but I'd like to see you afterward. I could come to the hotel, spend the night . . . sleep with you.” He let out a short laugh and linked his fingers through hers. “Wake up with you. We could have breakfast together, waffles and whipped cream.”

  “Waffles?” What in the world was he talking about?

  “Okay, just the whipped cream, then.” His grin explained everything, and despite what they'd just done, she felt herself start to blush.

  “I . . . uh . . . we're moving awfully fast.” Which in her heart of hearts she had to admit was a whole hell of a lot better than coming to a screeching halt. She wasn't ready to give him up, not just yet. On the other hand, spontaneously combusting on his car three times was significantly different from taking full, clear-eyed responsibility for her actions and agreeing breathlessly to meet him in bed with as much whipped cream as room service would allow.

  Significantly different, especially for a woman who had never worked with so much as a single dairy product while making love.

  “Definitely.” His grin broadened. “Very fast.”

  And that's the way he liked things, she realized. Very fast—jets, cars, women, and probably love affairs. If she wasn't careful, he would be done with her before they'd even gotten properly started, the operative word being properly. Improperly, they'd broken the land speed record.

  Her blush deepened, much to her dismay. After tonight, how was it possible to blush? Then again, how was it possible not to blush?

  Before she had a chance to answer his question, the teenager he'd called Johnny arrived at the elevator. “Hey, Capitán. Superman said you'd be here about an hour ago. What happened?”

  Regan turned toward Johnny, and that's when she saw him—the reason for the whole crazy night and two weeks of desperate worry.

  Behind the teenager, a tall, broad-chested man was slowly making his way down a short flight of metal stairs from a bank of offices with windows looking out on the main floor. A lion's mane of white hair swept back off his face. His skin was tan and leathery from a lifetime of working the badlands of the West from New Mexico to Montana and all the wild places in between. He was wearing his regulation khaki pants and an open-necked blue oxford shirt, looking as imposing and regal as ever—except for the hesitation in his steps and in the careful way he was maneuvering his way down the stairs.

  “Wilson,” she whispered, her hand coming up to her chest to hold in the sob forming there. She'd found him. Through the grace of God and Quinn Younger, she'd finally found him.

  CHAPTER

  17

  KID KNEW THEY WERE in trouble when he gunned Nadine's engine up to a death-defying ninety miles an hour on the winding mountain road leading up to the Southern Cross Hotel, and the two cars behind him did the same.

  Son of a bitch, this was all his fault. He should never have let Nikki lollygag in that freaking bathroom.

  He slammed the Porsche back down into fourth, then third, and slewed around the next curve. Kid was intimately familiar with the approach to Southern Cross—a dead-end road to the hotel and nowhere else. There was a passing lane about another half a mile ahead, and if he used it correctly, it could be their ticket out of this mess—unless, of course, one of the drivers behind him was capable of doing a bootlegger's turn in a narrow space at a very high rate of speed with a cliff wall on one side and a sheer drop-off on the other.

  He was betting neither one of them was crazy enough to try it.

  Hell, he wasn't crazy enough to try it. No, he was just going to damn well do it, and he was going to do it clean and fast.

  He'd checked his rearview mirror all through Boulder, and he hadn't seen the tail until they'd hit the mountain road—and that bothered the shit out of him. The bastards had to have picked them up at McKinney's, and he'd been—what? Getting off on the smell of Nikki McKinney's perfume filling up Nadine? Noticing how her nothing scrap of a skirt rode all the way up to her ass when she sat down in a bucket seat? Even stupider yet, hadn't he thought, more than once or twice, mind you, just how damn good she looked in his car?

  What the fuck was up with him?

  He needed to get laid more often. There was no doubt about it. But now he wanted her, with her spiky black-and-purple hair and those silver-gray eyes and that mouth that seemed to say “Kiss me, Kid” every time he looked at it. But if he didn't start thinking with his head instead of his dick, he was going to get them both killed, and he could just kiss off any chance he had of making love with the most beautiful, totally incomprehensible woman he'd ever met.

  And that was not going to happen.

  “Get down, stay down, and put your hands over your ears,” he told her.

  “What's going on?” she asked, without, he noted, following a single order.

  Geez. Women. No wonder they didn't let them go into combat.

  “We're being followed, and if they shoot at us, I'd rather you didn't get hit.”

  “Hit? You mean with a bullet?” Nikki sounded incredulous, and rightfully so. As wild as she was, getting shot at was not part of her normal working day.

  “Nadine is partially armored, so if you'll just put your head down on your knees, ma'am, you'll be safe.” Well, safer anyway, providing he didn't get hit, and they didn't crash, and providing everything else went according to plan.

  Then he remembered he didn't exactly have a plan, except to jerk on the parking brake, turn the wheel, and ride the skid through a head-snapping 180-degree slide guaranteed to flip them ass-backward in the opposite direction. If they lived through all that, he'd hit the lights and, power-shift his way back up to a balls-to-the-walls rate of speed heading down the mountain. Nadine was painted flat black with no chrome showing.
Stealth Porsche, that's what she was, and on a night like tonight, with only a sliver of moon hiding behind the treetops, it was possible the guys following them wouldn't even see her as they flashed by. Instead, they'd be looking for a pair of taillights they'd be thinking were just around the bend up ahead.

  “Armored? Did you say this car was armored?” Nikki asked, finally finding her voice. She definitely sounded nervous, but her head still wasn't down around her knees. “Why?”

  “I bought her off a guy who had her in Panama during Noriega's regime, and you've got about thirty seconds before this baby comes to a screeching halt and turns on a dime. Do not, I repeat, do not lift your head until I tell you to, because if the guys tailing us shoot, I'm going to shoot back. Twenty seconds.”

  He pushed Nadine even harder, screaming around the curves, looking for those extra few seconds to put them out of sight when they hit the passing lane and made the turn. The acceleration was enough to hammer his point home. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her duck down.

  He checked his rearview again, and when it came up blank, nothing but black, he readied himself and downshifted. Then the white lines of the passing lane started slipping beneath the Porsche, and he executed the maneuver like a fucking Duke of Hazzard. Nadine spun around, tires squealing, brakes burning. Kid hit the lights, slammed her into first, sidled her up to the canyon wall, and lay there, catching his breath and lurking on the narrow shoulder of the road in the dark.

  Shit. His heart was pounding. Sweat was pouring down the sides of his face and under his arms. His heart was in his throat, but he didn't waste a second. He reached for the Mossberg and laid the shotgun across the open window frame. The first car zoomed past; the second car followed half a dozen heartbeats later. Both of them had been Mercedes, which fit Roper's MO.

  He eased up on the clutch and rolled Nadine back onto the road. Once he cleared the curve going back down, he punched the lights on and hit the gas. A quarter of a mile later, he knew his ruse hadn't worked. Or more correctly, it had only half worked.

  A pair of headlights loomed up in his rearview, but only one pair. Divide and conquer: that's what Roper's guys had done. That they'd done it so quickly told Kid they had radio communications. When the first driver had failed to catch up with the Porsche, they'd obviously decided to send the second driver back down the canyon.

  A three-burst ping, ping, ping and the shattering of Nadine's driver's-side mirror wiped any last doubt out of Kid's mind about who was following them. Bits of glass flew as the mirror disintegrated, leaving only a part of the shell hanging from the car.

  “Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit,” he heard her swear. She was in a damn near fetal position now, her legs drawn under her, her shoulders hunched around her knees.

  Roper always played for blood. The rest of his slimy-assed crew weren't any better, but one car full of submachine-gun-toting goons was better than two. Kid could outrun them.

  He shoved Nadine back up into fifth and came around the next curve—almost head-on into the rear end of a freaking minivan in his lane. A humongous RV was approaching in the other, both of them poking along. He tapped the brakes, hard, then double-tapped 'em, then triple-tapped 'em, until he was damn near tap dancing on them.

  Where in the hell, he wondered, had a minivan come from? There'd been no other traffic forty seconds ago, when they'd been racing up the canyon. Then he remembered the access road that led up to a lone cabin just before the passing lane. The minivan must have come from there, puttering down onto the highway at the absolute worst time.

  The RV's timing sucked just as badly. It slowly rumbled forward, blocking off any escape. Nikki McKinney was still huddled down in her seat. It crossed his mind to tell her to prepare for a crash landing, but there wasn't time to voice the warning. The truth was, she was never going to know what hit her. They were going to annihilate the minivan and themselves in about two fucking seconds with the Mercedes close behind, as in right up Nadine's tailpipe.

  Everything was happening in split seconds. He held on to the wheel, played the brakes, and prayed and cursed at the same time. Just a millisecond from impact the RV rolled far enough past the minivan to create the narrowest of openings, and Kid shot through. The fit was so tight, the rear light of the RV went by him less than six inches from his window. The shattered remains of Nadine's left side mirror were history.

  They rode two wheels into the narrow shoulder over the drop-off, overshooting the road by two feet, before he was able to muscle the Porsche back onto the highway in front of the minivan. The Mercedes held on to the road by the same hairsbreadth, sending up a plume of dust before screeching in behind the Porsche.

  More shots dinged into Nadine's rear end. Now it was a run for the money, and it was no contest. There was a half a mile of straightaway up ahead, the only straight stretch on the whole damn road. If it was empty, Kid was taking Nadine out of there.

  “Hold on,” he warned as they flew up a small rise. At the top, one look proved the straightaway was clear of traffic. He didn't hesitate. With the flip of a bright-red switch on the console, he unleashed a ten-pound bottle of nitrous oxide into Nadine's carburetor—and they disappeared down the road in a rocket blast of power.

  IT was good to see her, Wilson thought. Good to see Regan. It had been a long time. Too long, maybe. He couldn't quite remember.

  “Did you have supper tonight?” she asked, straightening the perfectly straight sheets on a bed in one of the suites above the garage where he'd be spending the night. Most of the suites were used as offices, but three were set up to accommodate overnight guests. They all had outside windows facing the street, and inside windows looking out over the garage. The decor was very sleek, very modern, especially in the offices, which were full of high-tech gadgetry that went beyond even some of the science labs at the university. The bedroom suites were more user-friendly, with dark paneled bookcases, leather chairs, discreet lighting, and private, well-appointed bathrooms. Efficiency seemed to be Steele Street's overriding theme—and cars. There were cars everywhere, all through the building, floors of them.

  “Yes.” He did remember supper. “The boy and I stopped for burritos.” He loved burritos smothered in green chile, and the boy had known a great place to eat, Mama Guadalupe's.

  He and the boy—whose name he couldn't quite recall, but he'd be darned if he asked again—had parked on one of the lower floors when they'd arrived at 738 Steele Street, which was actually more of an alley than a street. He didn't remember which floor, though, darn it.

  There had been a bunch of cars down there, most of them torn apart and in pieces. Big engine blocks had hung down, hoisted on pulleys and chains. One whole wall had been nothing but tires. The car Dylan had first given him was here, the one he'd called Betty. That was the one thing he did remember. The car was a beauty, but Wilson had decided his driving days were behind him. He was getting too darned forgetful to trust himself behind the wheel of a car.

  He was tired, too. He'd been sleeping poorly, he and Hawkins roughing it on cots at the warehouse most nights, though a few had been spent in the comfort of the Steele Street guest rooms.

  And the Porsche had gotten away from him outside Lafayette. Besides almost outright killing him, the incident had darn near scared him to death, and probably the driver he'd nearly had a head-on collision with as well. When he'd finally reached the warehouse, still badly shaken up, he'd given the keys to Hawkins.

  Forgetful, tired, careless—driving was a risky business for an old man suffering from what he feared was a terminal lapse of memory. He hadn't told Regan, but he'd been seeing the doctor. No diagnosis had been made other than old age catching up to him with a vengeance, but it felt like more to Wilson, especially lately.

  Where was Hawkins? he wondered.

  And where was Dylan?

  He couldn't remember either of those things, any more than he could remember the boy's name, and that bothered him like so much of his forgetfulness bothered him. So many t
hings floated just out of reach of his memory. Sometimes a piece of information would land, and he would wonder how something so clear had ever eluded him. But the boy's name was not one of those things, and neither were the whereabouts of Dylan and Hawkins, or when they were coming back.

  “I wish you'd called,” Regan said, turning down the bed and fluffing up the pillows. “Nikki and I have been very worried.”

  “Worry's no good, honey,” he told her, moving into one of the chairs with a book he'd picked from the bookcase, one he'd started a week ago. “But you do seem to like it more than most.”

  He heard her sigh, but he didn't retract his statement. Regan worried the same way Nikki painted—distressingly well. She always had. Nikki was a scandal, without a doubt. If they'd lived anywhere except Boulder, he would have had to shut the house up. But Regan was the one Wilson had always worried about.

  Nikki had been little more than a baby when Robin and Lisa had died. She'd hardly known her parents, what with them spending so much time in South America that last year. Regan had known them, though, and she'd felt their loss even more keenly than Wilson had himself, devastated that his beautiful son had died, along with his lovely wife, in an earthquake in Peru only three years after Wilson's own wife had passed on, his own dear Evelyn.

  Too much tragedy, he thought, and wished he couldn't remember that part of his life so well. Yesterday and even this afternoon were a bit of a blur, but twenty years ago was crisp and new, and still painful.

  “You have a cell phone, Grandpa.”

  “Yes, but I forgot the darn charger,” he finally had to admit. “Darn thing ran out of juice early on.” He'd meant to call her, he was sure. It was just hard to keep everything straight.

  “I went to the police.”

  Oh, hell. Of course she had. Count on his girl to look under every rock.

  “Well, that's no good,” he grumbled, settling into the chair. “The whole thing is supposed to be very hush-hush. Top-secret stuff. The FBI was there.”