Loose Ends

by Tara Janzen

  And the only thing standing between him and his girl was the building across the street. If she was in there, he was going to get her, and if she wasn’t in there, he was going to get whoever was and ask them once where they’d taken her—only once. Scout was tough, as tough as she’d needed to be to survive alone in Southeast Asia, before he’d finally tracked her down on the streets of Bangkok. They’d celebrated her eighteenth birthday in Rangoon, her nineteenth in Vientiane, her twentieth in Phnom Penh, her twenty-first in Da Nang, and her twenty-second in Amsterdam—a promise he’d made her father, Garrett Leesom, a soldier like him, one of the world’s warriors whose last breath had been wrung out of him in the same hellhole that had all but killed Con.

  Yeah, Scout was tough, like her father. These thugs on Steele Street wouldn’t have what it took to break her. But he had what it took to break them, and it would all come to bear on every single one of them, starting with a guy named Dylan Hart, until he had Garrett’s daughter back.

  He reached into his pocket, felt the business card there, but didn’t pull it out. He didn’t need to pull it out. The words on the card had been burned into his memory the instant he’d seen them: DYLAN HART, UPTOWN AUTOS, WE ONLY SELL THE BEST, 738 STEELE STREET, DENVER, COLORADO. He’d found the card on his kitchen table in Paraguay the day they’d taken Scout.

  These boys knew he was coming. Hell, they’d left him an engraved invitation—and they weren’t car salesmen. He didn’t give a damn what the card said.

  No. They were operators of the highest order. They’d done what no one else had come close to accomplishing in six years: They’d gotten the drop on him. He hoped they’d enjoyed their momentary success. He hoped it had gone straight to their heads.

  He shifted his attention to the roof of the building opposite the alley to 738 Steele Street, the Bruso-Campbell Building. The Bruso was a story taller than 738, a good vantage point.

  Con couldn’t see him, but he knew Jack Traeger was up there on top of the Bruso, manning the listening post they’d set up, a laser mike sighted on one of the banks of windows fronting 738. No one could see Jack, and no one would, not until it was too late.

  Con checked his watch—6:30 p.m.—then glanced back to the building. Right on cue, a classic piece of Sublime Green American muscle from 1971, a Dodge Challenger R/T, rolled out of the seventh floor onto the sleekly modern freight elevator on the opposite side of the building from the gothic contraption. Actually, rolled wasn’t quite the word. Lurched was more like it. He and Jack had been watching 738 for four days, and the list of rare iron they’d accumulated was nothing short of amazing. These Steele Street assholes knew their cars. He had to give them that.

  What he didn’t know was why anyone with a car like the Challenger would let some ditzy-looking redhead abuse it every day at 6:30 p.m. She was pretty in a skinny sort of way, but she couldn’t drive worth beans. Fortunately, she never went more than three blocks to the closest convenience store, where she parked in a small lot next door and went inside to buy a pack of cigarettes, a couple of candy bars, and a machine-brewed double-shot latte. Then she’d get back in the Challenger and lurch her way out of the parking lot and back three blocks to 738 Steele Street.

  Her name was Cherie.

  He’d followed her into the Quick Mart once and had Jack follow her in once. The clerk and she were on a first-name basis, and from their chatter, he and Jack had figured out that she was some kind of computer tech.

  She was also predictable.

  Dangerously predictable.

  The weak link in the Steele Street chain.

  Every day she’d exited the building at 6:30 p.m. and returned within half an hour. Con needed her to do it only one more time.

  While the Challenger made its descent to the street, he turned and started walking toward the convenience store, turning south on Wazee Street and making his way through all the folks leaving work late and hitting the bars early. This section of the city was called LoDo, for lower downtown. It had remnants of industry and a bit of ghetto to the north and enough restored old buildings to the south to qualify as a historical district, all of them renovated into restaurants, boutiques, bars, bookstores, cafés, art galleries, and architectural antique shops. On a late-spring evening, it was crowded with cars and people, office people, city people … beautiful people.

  He slowed his steps for a second, and then another, his gaze locking on a woman a block away—very beautiful people.

  He’d always had a soft spot for slinky brunettes, and this one moved like a cat, her long, straight hair tossed over her shoulder, lifting in the light breeze, her strides supple and easy.

  Always had a soft spot for slinky women, from way back when.

  Yeah, always. That was a definite skip in his cylinders. A man with no more than six years’ worth of memories to fill out his scorecard had a damn sketchy concept of always.

  Sketchy or not, though, she fit the bill, all legs and silky dark hair, slender curves wrapped in a short, golden sheath of a dress, very short. A leopard-print belt cinched the dress in at her waist, and she had jungle bangles on her left wrist, three of them: zebra print, tiger striped, and ebony. Wild girl. All the way. A short-cropped black leather jacket, very sleek, very stylish, topped the outfit, and each of her strides was taken in a pair of ankle-high, high-heeled, black suede boots. Large, black designer sunglasses covered half her face, and she had a big, slouchy, zebra-striped purse slung over her shoulder.

  She looked like a model and walked like she owned the street, and there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that she did, especially this one.

  As she crossed 19th, the clouds broke behind her and a shaft of sunlight caught the gold hoops in her ears, throwing glinting sparks of light into the shadows behind the lenses of her glasses. For a tenth of a second, he could see her eyes—not the color but the shape, the slight tilt of the outside edges and the thick sweep of her lashes.

  No one else could have seen so much with so little, but his senses were ramped up, awareness hard-wired into his every cell the same way the muscles in his body were ramped up and hard-wired for speed and strength and reaction times that could be measured in hundredths of a second.

  He didn’t take any personal credit for being so ripped. That was the way they’d made him, to be damn near indestructible, and he was. Dr. Souk had been the mechanic, but the orders for the torture he and Garrett had suffered in the name of demented science and the never-ending search for the perfect warrior had come down from a man in Washington, D.C., the spymaster. He was the brains behind some of the blackest operations ever to come out of the CIA and the Department of Defense, Con’s nemesis, a man who pulled strings across half a dozen of the United States’ most clandestine agencies. He had a lot of names, but his given name was Randolph Lancaster, and getting it had cost more than one man his life.

  Con had no regrets. Everyone in the game was playing on the same field, and everyone knew his life was at stake. Politics and war were just different names for power, and the price of power was predictably high and could be precisely measured—in dollars, yen, euros, rubles, riyals, and blood.

  Keeping his pace steady, he allowed himself the luxury of letting his gaze travel over the jungle girl—urban jungle. She was “city” from the top of her head to the discreet black leather straps wrapped around the ankles of her boots. If beauty had an edge, she was it, the gloss of sophistication highlighting her attitude and the toughness he saw in the way she carried herself, in her awareness of her space. The sidewalk was crowded, but she had a way of not letting anybody get too close. He knew it wasn’t an accident, the way she kept herself apart, because he had the same skill, the same instinct. It was survival learned the hard way.

  Thirty yards and closing, twenty yards, ten yards and he caught her scent, picking it out of the thousands in the air, exotic, sensual, female, and, yes, feral—a kindred spirit. He couldn’t take his eyes off her, and the smallest smile curved a corner of his mouth.

&n
bsp; Wild Thing.

  Five yards and something shifted in her stride, a hesitation. Her next step came slower, and then she stopped, her mouth opening on a soft gasp. She was looking straight at him. He could feel her gaze, felt her awareness of him spike and redline. He was scarred—on his face, on his arms, his hands, his chest—hell, everywhere—but it wasn’t horror reaching out to him from her. It was something … something … something else.

  Something he hadn’t felt in a long time.

  She reached up, lowered her sunglasses, and took a step closer as he started to pass, nearly brushing against him, her other hand lifting ever so slightly, as if she might touch him, but all he felt was the intensity of her pale green-eyed gaze, the heat of it holding him captive for the brief moment of their encounter.

  He kept moving, kept heading toward the Quick Mart. But for the space of a breath, the street disappeared, the people, the buildings, the cars, and all he could see was her face, the angles and curves, the slight dusting of freckles and the small white scar across the bridge of her nose, another scar across her left cheekbone, the sheer wild beauty of golden skin with the wind blowing her dark hair across it like a veil. She was mystery and enthrallment. She was unexpected.

  She was trouble, but easily avoidable. All he had to do was keep walking, and he did.

  His pulse was racing, though—not a good sign. He never lacked for women, but there had never been anyone like this urban jungle girl, not on any street in the world, a chance encounter that set off a dangerous mix of lust and warning bells. She’d broken his concentration, and he hadn’t thought that was possible. His concentration had not faltered in six years, not since the day he’d woken up, and always it was focused on the mission.

  Always.

  He glanced back, and she was still standing in the middle of the sidewalk, watching him.

  Trouble—that’s what she was, and he didn’t need it. He was in Denver to get Scout, not to get laid.

  Forcing his attention away from her, he continued south on Wazee Street and ignored the siren call he felt running through his veins—that maybe, just maybe, with the right timing, the right circumstances, the city girl could be his.

  But probably not. If all went as he and Jack had planned, they’d be out of Denver by midnight, but he wouldn’t forget her scent. It had melted into him, a gift to be treasured.

  After pulling a ball cap out of his coat pocket, he snugged it down on his head, slipped a pair of sunglasses on his face, and lengthened his strides, focusing back on the mission. He’d timed the route to the convenience store and knew exactly how many minutes he had—plenty to do what needed to be done.

  Half a block from the Quick Mart, he could see the Challenger in the small parking lot crammed between the store and an old, rundown hotel, which meant weak-link Cherie was still inside buying candy and cigarettes. She used the street lot every day, but Con’s favorite downtown parking was the high-rise garage catty-corner from the store. He liked it so much, he’d spent an hour in it last night, rigging a smoke bomb at the entrance and putting it on a radio signal controller.

  The setup wasn’t overly dramatic, just enough to get people’s attention, especially the attention of whatever guy was sitting at a certain outside table at the restaurant opposite the garage. A man had been there every day when Cherie pulled up, a different guy each day, and twenty minutes after she headed back to Steele Street, each one of those guys had gotten up and left.

  They were surveillance, and when Con spotted today’s observer, he conceded that the man was just as good, just as subtle as every other guy who’d been keeping the same schedule at that table, but they were all watchers, and what they were watching was Cherie and the Challenger. From the outside table where they’d all sat, they had a perfect line of sight to the store and the car, but today’s guy was going to have to turn his head to see what was happening at the parking garage.

  And he would turn his head. The smoke, with the added distraction of the scent Con had packaged with the “bomb,” guaranteed it. A couple of seconds, that’s all he needed.

  Coming up on the parking lot, he saw Cherie walk out of the store, and he timed his approach to be just ahead of hers. He had his hands in his pockets and the radio signal controller in one of his hands. At a precisely calculated moment, he flipped the switch and turned toward the Challenger parked three cars in from the sidewalk. He heard the small ripple of commotion when people saw the billow of smoke come out of the garage entrance, felt a spike of fear run through the crowd, and knew a fair percentage of them had flashed on 9/11 and the World Trade Center. He saw Cherie look back over her shoulder to see what was happening, and he didn’t hesitate. Stepping up to the rear of the Challenger, a lockpick in his hand, he popped the trunk. Up ahead on the sidewalk, a couple people quickly complained with an “ohmigod, can you smell that” while they were all trying to figure out just how frightened they needed to be. By the time they’d finished grousing, he’d climbed inside the trunk and pulled the lid closed on top of himself. The whole operation took less than five seconds. By then, the smoke and the smell were gone, and the crowd was curious but starting to feel relieved. It was a nonevent—except that people had noticed, and the man at the restaurant would have noticed. Guys like him were trained to see the forest and the trees. He would have looked.

  Inside the Challenger, the trunk space was a little on the shy side, but not unpleasantly so. Con had been in worse places, smaller spaces, all of them in the Bangkok prison laboratory of the long-dead, never-missed, demented Dr. Souk. He didn’t remember much of anything before awakening in one of Souk’s cells, but he did know he hadn’t been in many places that smelled like baby powder.

  Baby powder—what the hell? he wondered. He knew from the car’s badges and the sound that the Challenger had header extensions and a 426 cid Hemi under the hood, a power plant with the well-earned nickname of King Kong, the biggest production engine ever to come off a line in Detroit. Nothing about the 1971 Mopar street machine said “baby powder,” but that was exactly what it smelled like in the trunk.

  He sniffed the air again, then reached toward the front right corner and found a diaper bag. He’d never actually seen a diaper bag, but he’d heard about them, and he knew this soft, padded cotton satchel he’d found was one, because it had diapers in it, and baby powder, and lotion, and wipes.

  That set him back a bit.

  The Challenger, one of the toughest, meanest, most unbeatable pieces of Mopar muscle to ever hit the streets, was a family car.

  He didn’t see much of that in his line of work, families. He and Scout had cobbled together a family of sorts, but he never fooled himself into thinking he could ever take the place of her real father. He’d kept her safe, and kept her out of trouble as best he could, and so far, in a battle he knew he was bound to lose, he’d kept her out of Jack Traeger’s bed. The pirate had come far more than six thousand miles to get her back, though, and this time Con figured Jack had come to take her for good.

  He’d barely set the bag back in the corner when, just like clockwork, the car door was opened and Cherie the computer tech got back inside. He felt the slight shift of her weight and knew she was lighting a cigarette before she started the engine. When she turned the key, the Challenger came to life, and it was a beast, just like him, all rumble and roar with that badass 426 Hemi under the hood. The chassis rocked with the power she was feeding it through the gas pedal, and then, with a lurch, she pulled out of the lot and into traffic and they were heading back to Steele Street.

  Game time.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Jane Linden walked quickly toward 738 Steele Street, breaking into a run every few steps, her zebra bag clutched close to her chest, her prize inside.

  Good God Almighty. Her heart was pounding. J.T., J.T., J.T., the name ran through her mind. Here. In Denver … alive. My God.

  Or maybe she was wrong—but that man on the street, my God.

  She knew J. T. Chronopolous.
She knew the clean, lean lines of his face, the deep-set eyes, the thick, straight eyebrows, the hint of dimples when he grinned. She knew he’d been one of the original chop shop boys, a juvenile car thief of superlative skills and intensely delinquent tendencies back in the day. She knew he’d gone on to become a Recon Marine and that he’d come back to Denver to work with his friends out of the old garage on Steele Street.

  And she knew he’d caught her red-handed one night, trying to steal his buddy’s wallet.

  She could count on one finger the number of times she’d missed a score, and he’d been it, snatching her up by the scruff of her neck and hoodie in the middle of her lift and handing her off to the guy whose pocket she’d just picked.

  A wild thing, that’s what he’d called her that night in front of the Blue Iguana Lounge, while he’d pried Christian Hawkins’s wallet out of her fist, as in: “Here’s your wallet back, Superman. I think this wild thing is all yours. Better run her by Doc Blake before you throw her back on the street. She looks a little worse for wear.”

  She had been worse for wear that night, hungry and roughed up, her body aching from a run-in with a junkie over on Blake Street. Still, she’d squirmed and twisted and tried to break his hold—and all the while she’d been wondering what in the hell had made her think these guys would make good marks. They’d both looked like some kind of superhero. J.T. had been especially incredibly beautiful, a real traffic-stopper, clean cut, tall, and superbly fit, his shoulders broad, his arms strong, with a bone-deep confidence radiating out of every pore that had set her heart aflutter—and that’s what she’d been thinking, how hot he was, instead of paying attention to the lift.