Crazy Hot

by Tara Janzen

  She'd had less trouble getting Betty out of Steele Street. Johnny had been pretty skeptical about helping them, but he'd also been half asleep and no match for two very insistent adults used to being in charge.

  When she finally got the door open, she hit the bank of switches on the wall and flooded the lab with light. For the last few weeks, she'd been working in the glassed-in lab where the public filed by and could watch the preparators at work. She and everyone else were always careful to make sure any displayed work in progress was labeled for easy identification—but she'd be damned if she knew what to call the fossil now commandeering the middle of her worktable—“Possible Tarbosaurus nest stolen by my grandfather from a man who stole it from a criminal who stole it from somebody else who stuffed it full of stolen diamonds, but please don't call the cops” seemed a bit wordy.

  But, oh, God, what if it really was a Tarbosaurus nest? And what if it really was stuffed with diamonds?

  “Ah, yes. Right where I left it.” Wilson chuckled and went straight over to the rocklike fossil lying on the table. The chunk of stone and plaster, and hopefully, fossilized eggshells and bones, was about four feet wide and three feet across, and despite the danger it represented, it beckoned to her.

  But Regan found herself hesitating. It occurred to her that getting her fingerprints all over the damn thing might not be in her best interest. But then, she hadn't stolen it; she was retrieving it. She doubted if Steele Street would press charges against Wilson, either, considering how they'd gotten themselves into this mess by hiring him in the first place.

  Somewhat reassured by her train of logic, she finally let a measure of her excitement seep through, and seep through it did, making her fingers tingle with anticipation. As far as she knew, this was the first Cretaceous carnivore nest ever discovered. It was certainly the first she'd ever gotten her hands on.

  Wilson was well into removing the hastily reassembled plaster jacket he'd put on the fossil, before she allowed herself to get in on the action. The two of them had always been a team while Regan was growing up, and they easily fell back into the familiar rhythms of working closely together.

  As they pulled the plaster away, the fossil inside appeared, including what appeared to be eggs, two broken open and one still intact. Regan wanted nothing more than to work on those eggs, to scrape away at the surrounding stone and free them, to check for embryonic skeletons and the bones of prey that might have been left in the nest.

  Then Wilson pulled out the first diamond, and then the second and on to the third, until he quickly had a pile of ten. Good God. It was just like he'd said. The whole jacket was full of diamonds, hundreds of them. Regan could hardly believe her eyes.

  Most were no bigger than marbles, some much bigger, each one looking more like colorless glass than a potential brilliant cut. Some were still embedded in a matrix of kimberlite. Some were round, others more squared off, some triangular, all of them together worth a fortune, a bloody fortune.

  My God, she thought, picking out another diamond and putting it in a small canvas bag Wilson had gotten out of one of the lab's cupboards. Nothing about working on fossils went quickly, not even a diamond harvest. For her, and for Wilson, too, the greater treasure was underneath the plaster and the gemstones, the nest with the fossilized eggs. Years of study would go into the nest—along with a fair amount of glory.

  Visions of National Geographic and Smithsonian flashed through her brain. Maybe even a television documentary.

  As they worked, Regan found herself finally relaxing into a controlled state of excitement. This is what she did. This was her life, the quiet confines of the paleontology lab, bones millions of years old fossilized into stone, and mysteries to be unfolded from the rock—and this time, diamonds. My God.

  She loved the work. It kept her life on a smooth track. There were surprises, delights, and epiphanies aplenty even in her normal working day, but they all came at a slow, manageable pace. Absolutely nothing happened at a hundred and twenty miles per hour. It was contemplative work not given to startling or heart-stopping moments of terror.

  Except . . .

  She held herself suddenly still, catching a movement in the darkened museum out of the corner of her eye. The hair on the nape of her neck slowly rose, sending a purely fear-induced bolt of panic down the length of her spine.

  Something was out there.

  Or someone.

  Wilson chatted obliviously along beside her, giving her an unnecessary lecture on rough-cut diamonds concurrent with a recap of Jack Horner's famous discovery of hadrosaur nests in Montana, and the naming of the genus Maiasaura, “good mother lizard.”

  Good mother lizard, indeed. If someone had broken in to the museum, why weren't alarms sounding all over the place? And if it was a guard, why was he lurking about in the dark? Or was the whole thing just her imagination?

  She was too scared to go over and simply look out the window. Something was telling her not to give away her hand like that.

  She glanced at the phone on the desk in the corner next to the lab door. Taking a deep breath, she started over. It was well past time when she should have called Quinn. She'd made the mistake of allowing herself to get sidetracked by the nest, letting her excitement override her common sense.

  Her legs felt stiff as she walked, a dead giveaway, she was sure, if someone was actually watching, not only for where she was headed and why, but that she was scared senseless.

  On the other hand, she tried to reassure herself, what—or who—could possibly be out in the museum? She was probably being ridiculously silly, just jumping at shadows, because the whole day had been nothing but one momentous, life-altering event after another, and at some point a girl just had to yell “uncle.”

  Sleep is what she needed, not a million dollars' worth of rough-cut diamonds and the world's most exclusive dinosaur nest.

  Fine, she decided. She would call Quinn, and then she and Wilson were heading back to Steele Street just as fast as Betty could take them, and given the engine in the red Coronet, Regan would bet that would be pretty damn fast.

  All she had to do was make her call.

  Finally reaching the desk, she stretched out her hand for the receiver—and froze, her gaze locked on the cruel face leering at her through the window in the laboratory's door. Her fingers trembled in sudden paralysis; her arm refused to move. So did her mouth, and her vocal cords, for if they hadn't, she most definitely would have let out a bloodcurdling scream.

  CHAPTER

  25

  ONE THING ABOUT QUINN, Hawkins thought as he pulled Roxanne to a stop on the corner of Fifteenth and Curtis in downtown Denver. He was always where he said he'd be. Getting out of the green Challenger, Hawkins approached Jeanette from the front.

  “Hey.” He leaned against the Camaro's door panel. The heat of the night had hit him like a furnace blast when he'd stepped out of the Jack O' Nines. The club had air-conditioning. Of course, it also had three dead bodies in it, which definitely detracted from its dubious charms.

  Hawkins sure could use a drink, about a pint of twelve-year-old Scotch ought to do it, a feeling that had only grown stronger when he'd seen Jeanette waiting for him on Curtis Street.

  Hell. Jeanette was nothing but trouble out on the street tonight. Quinn should have stuck with Betty after dropping Regan at Steele Street.

  “What's the situation report?” Quinn asked, cutting straight to the chase.

  “Well, for starters, you've got a lot of balls parking Jeanette this close to the Jack O' Nines.” Hawkins knocked a cigarette out of its pack, stuck it in his mouth, but didn't light it. Not yet. “Balls that I would have thought would be at least slightly deflated from that stunt you pulled in Lafayette,” he said wryly, reaching for his lighter.

  “Stunt?” Quinn repeated, then laughed. “Oh, right.” He had the grace to look embarrassed, but not for long. “Hell.”

  “Yeah, hell is right. Roper just offed Louie and the Chicago boys in the Jack.”


  “Shit.” Quinn sat up straighter. “You're sure they're dead?”

  “God, I hope so. Louie was knifed and was still trying to hold himself together when I left. Branson and Linberg were shot point-blank. This night has gone from bad to worse and from worse to completely fucked faster than any night I can remember, and damn it, Quinn, I want both of us to walk out of it in the morning in one piece.”

  “Fair enough,” Quinn agreed easily. “Look, I'm sorry, but Regan's out of it now. No more distractions. I swear.”

  “Right. Out of it. So let's see what we've got.” Hawkins wasn't going to belabor the point, but he'd definitely felt a need to make it. He needed Quinn to be a hundred percent focused on the job, something he couldn't remember his friend ever having a problem with until Regan McKinney had gone looking for him. “From what I gathered from eavesdropping on Roper and Louie's conversation in the Jack, Roper's in the middle of the deal. He's the broker, not one of the players, with the Chicago mob and the guns on one side and the Russians and something missing in the dinosaur bones on the other.”

  “Russians. Shit. We should have known it was Russian mafia buying the fucking guns. They've got every terrorist in the Middle East on their doorstep, looking to buy guns.”

  “Yeah, and it looks like Chicago is only too happy to be selling them.” Dylan had a long and checkered past with the ex-KGB guys who ran the Russian mafia. It was one area no one at SDF liked to delve into too deep.

  “So what's missing?”

  “I don't know. I only know Roper expected to find something in the dinosaur bones he didn't find.”

  “So we call Wilson?” Quinn asked. “Russians tie in real nicely with him thinking he had a Mongolian fossil.”

  “A Mongolian fossil we couldn't find,” Hawkins reminded him. “Hell, he struggles to remember stuff in the middle of the day. Waking him up in the middle of the night is a long shot. No matter what he says, we'll have to check it out, and we don't have time to run down bad leads. Not now.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Finish this fucking mess before it finishes us. The deal is going down tonight, real quick, in the Avatrix hangar out at the old Stapleton Airport. Roper wants me to meet him out there with you, so he can turn you into beef jerky.”

  “He'll have to get to me before I get to him,” Quinn said, an edge in his voice Hawkins didn't misinterpret for a second. There wasn't a guy at SDF who didn't want Roper Jones to go down hard.

  “Yeah, well, before you two get to each other, I'm calling in the FBI for backup. We all go out to the Avatrix hangar, wait for Roper and the Russians to put their cards—and the guns, and whatever—on the table, and then bust the whole lot of them. Bad guys lose. End of story. As a bonus, I'll have Special Agent Leeder send someone over to Steele Street to question Wilson. If they come up with something, great. We'll use it. If not, we haven't wasted our time. Where's Kid?”

  Quinn didn't say anything right away, but the look on his face was enough to trouble Hawkins.

  “What the hell else has happened in the last fucking hour that I need to know about?”

  “Dylan made it back to Steele Street while we were in Lafayette, and picked Kid up. They're both on their way to Colombia.”

  Okay, that didn't sound good. Whatever intel Dylan had gotten must have been all bad news. “Did he say why?”

  “J. T. and Creed missed their check-in, and a couple of Americans in bad shape have been reported up by the Panama border.”

  “Okay,” Hawkins said, tamping down his concern and deliberately not asking for more details. They had a job to do, right now. “One thing at a time. Once we get the guns, we'll let the FBI sort the rest of it out. This damn thing has taken too long as it is. One of us can be heading to Colombia by morning to back them up.”

  Quinn agreed with one word. “Avatrix?”

  “Avatrix,” Hawkins repeated.

  RIDING through the murky darkness of predawn, captive in the back of Roper Jones's Mercedes, Regan didn't have an ounce of heat left anywhere in her body. She was frozen numb with panic. Terror was really too mild a word to describe the talonlike emotion that had taken hold of her heart. Terror implied a certain heated chaos, or at least it always had to her.

  Her only consolation was that whatever Roper Jones had in mind for her, he'd left Wilson out of it. He was safe, unharmed. One of Roper's men had tied her grandfather to a chair in the lab, and Regan knew it would only be a matter of hours before he was found.

  For herself, she held out no such hopes. Since she'd reached for the phone in the lab and seen Roper Jones's face staring at her from the other side of the lab door, she'd lost all hope.

  They'd driven east out of Denver, sticking to the city streets, and just moments before, she'd recognized the old Denver airport, Stapleton. One sign in particular was looming bright in neon against the night sky above one of the old hangars: AVATRIX.

  It looked like a terrible place to die, but with no one knowing where she was, she was sure her fate was sealed. Roper didn't need her. He'd gotten both the Tarbosaurus nest and all the diamonds. He had it all. Everything. He'd won.

  Never in her wildest dreams could she have imagined ending up like this, that her life would end in a grimy airplane hangar in a deserted airport in the middle of the night. That she would die at the hands of a criminal maniac. Even after just having had the wildest day of her whole life, it was hard to piece together how it had all come down to this.

  “H-how did you get into the museum?” she asked Roper, who was riding in the backseat with her. The question had been torturing her. The museum was secure. She'd counted on that security without question, and it had let her down.

  “My dearly departed friend Louie guessed where the diamonds might be, so my men and I came out to see if he was right. We didn't have to wait long before you showed up, and Brad here”—he gestured to the driver—“watched the old man finally punch in your code through a pair of night vision goggles. Couldn't have been simpler. Any idiot could have done it.” He squeezed her arm, then stroked it, and Regan wished she hadn't asked. Her skin crawled where he'd touched her, and she knew, deep in her heart, that he might do far more than touch her.

  She had to escape if she could. So help her God, she had to escape.

  The Mercedes pulled up in front of the hangar and was instantly flanked by another, matching sedan. Even before Roper pulled her out of the backseat, she had a bad feeling about the other car. Shadows were moving inside the sedan, shadows she couldn't pin down, until the doors were opened.

  Suddenly, even rape paled in contrast to what she feared would be her final fate.

  Two huge rottweilers bounded out of the car, unleashed, unchained, their bodies rippling with slabs of muscle beneath sleek, black-as-hell coats. But it was their heads that demanded her attention, large heads with drool gathered in the corners of their mouths. Gaping mouths lined with teeth. Massive jaws designed with one overall purpose in mind: to crush bone, tear flesh, and destroy life.

  Roper called the beasts to heel, and as they padded past her, each one cast her a soulless glance filled with a single primal need to assuage: hunger.

  DON'T do it.”

  Quinn heard Hawkins's warning, felt his hand on his arm, keeping him from taking aim at the men hauling Regan into the hangar, but his blood was running too cold to register the fear the sight had put into his heart.

  They'd both parked a couple hundred yards away, but were watching the Avatrix hangar from closer in, from behind a stack of empty fuel drums.

  “We need Kid,” he said, and truer words had never been spoken. Quinn wasn't a sniper, and neither was Hawkins. Both were good shots, but neither of them could hit a cold zero in the dark, on a moving target who was too damn close to the hostage to give them a clear shot—let alone hit five targets and two dogs.

  “Leeder and the FBI will be here soon,” Hawkins said. “I'll call and have them bring in a sniper team.”

  Soon
wasn't going to be soon enough, and once Roper got her inside the hangar, it was going to take more than a sniper team to get her back out alive.

  “We need to do better than that, and we need to do it right now.” Quinn knew it. Hawkins knew it, too.

  “You know he's not going to hurt her until after the deal is made,” Hawkins said, his voice tight, the voice of reason. “You know it and I know it. He's going to wait for the guns to show up—which I highly recommend we do as well—and after all the wheeling and dealing is over, he'll have his fun. Except we'll go in, and we'll get the guns and save the girl and all go home happy.”

  “Fuck you,” Quinn said.

  After a long moment, he heard Hawkins sigh. “Yeah. Fuck me. I suppose you want me to turn you in to Roper and collect the fifty K he posted for the bounty.”

  “Demand it, then use it to get Regan.”

  “Fifty thousand dollars for a woman? You really think Roper is going to believe I'd pay fifty thousand dollars for a piece of ass?”

  He held Hawkins's gaze steadily with his own. “Pay what he asks, just make him believe you'll pay anything. Don't leave without her.”

  “Aw, hell, Quinn.” Hawkins looked away, shook his head, then swore again under his breath, before looking back up. “Okay, but don't come looking for me later, when you decide we could have done it my way and saved us all a whole lot of trouble.”

  “Cuff me.”

  Hawkins swore under his breath, gave him a baleful look, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a flex cuff. “Kee-rist, I hate this idea.”

  CHAPTER

  26

  THE INSIDE OF the hangar was jammed full with freight—boxes, cartons, and containers—all of it haphazardly organized. Regan saw lots of electronics: flat-screen televisions, in-home theater components, computers, DVD players, and everything in between. There was a whole fleet of Mercedes-Benz sedans parked on the east side, and racks of gasoline barrels. Two large refrigerator compartments held God knew what, but they walked past stacks of crated caviar and wines, cigarettes and cigars. More than a warehouse, she realized. Avatrix was Roper Jones's commissary.