by Tara Janzen
She didn’t know. Somehow it seemed damned risky, and yet …
“How about just breakfast?” he asked.
Sure. She could agree to breakfast.
“All right,” she said, and then had to fight the stupid grin she felt coming on. She was going to see him again, talk with him. For the first time in a long time, she felt light inside, like all those things that weighed on her every day were lifting a bit.
“Great,” he said, a broad smile spreading across his face. He rose to his feet and reached his hand down to pull her up. “Do you know Duffy’s?”
“The bar on the corner,” she said, accepting his hand and standing up.
“Yeah. They serve breakfast. Can you meet me there at seven tomorrow morning?”
He was still holding on to her hand, and as much as she loved it, she was also unnerved. In her line of work, it was hard to make a living if a person was holding your hand.
“Duffy’s at seven. Sure.” She pulled her hand free and swung her pack over her shoulder.
Good God, she had a date at one of the classiest breakfast joints in Denver. So what in the world was she going to wear?”
A skirt, she remembered. That’s what she’d come up with, a gauzy little ivory-colored summer skirt with black bows at the waist, a pair of pink-and-white striped leggings, and a black tank top, everything scored at a secondhand shop on her way home, a secondhand shop with a broken basement window.
She’d shopped there a lot back in the bad old days.
Still looking down the street, a pained sigh escaped her, echoing the ache in her chest. Why hadn’t she moved faster to stop him?
Shock had held her where she stood, but she should have moved faster. Instinct alone had guided her hand. She’d seen an opportunity, and she’d taken it, but, damn, she wished she’d said something to him.
J. T. Chronopolous—he hadn’t been scarred back then, except for three straight lines he’d had on his upper left arm.
The man on the street had been scarred everywhere, on his hands, his neck, his face—but so help her God, she knew that face.
Looking down, she reached into her zebra purse and flipped open the wallet she’d just lifted off him. It was made out of olive green canvas, heavy-duty, with double-stitched seams, and she’d had to work like light-fingered lightning to slip it out of his back pocket. She was good—for all the good it had done her.
Hell.
Conroy Farrel, that’s what his driver’s license said, the whole of it in Spanish, issued in Paraguay.
Farrel, not Chronopolous.
Her heart sank just a little bit, and she looked back down the street. Every sense she had was telling her she’d just seen J. T. Chronopolous, not some man named Conroy Farrel. It had been in his eyes. “Forever eyes” she’d called them, back when she’d been ridiculously infatuated with him, like she’d seen all the way to forever whenever she’d looked into them, like they’d opened onto the cosmos, a window not into his soul but out to the far, depthless reaches of the universe. What a romantic sap she’d been back then, and yet, as a woman, she would still call them compelling, intensely so, and the eyes that had held hers for that brief second of contact had been exactly the same as those she remembered from so long ago—J.T.’s.
The light changed at 20th and Wazee, and after checking both ways first, she crossed and kept heading north. She had been heading home, but she needed to get to 738 Steele Street to see Christian Hawkins.
Superman had saved her half a dozen times over the years. She owed him her life.
She sure as hell owed him the wallet she’d just lifted off the man heading south on Wazee Street.
From where he was settled into his hide on the roof of the Bruso-Campbell Building, Jack Traeger checked his watch, then looked through his binoculars one last time. Four days of recon on 738 Steele Street had finally given him what he wanted—a lock on Scout’s location.
Tenth floor. West side.
He hadn’t seen her, but he knew Morse code, and he sure as hell knew what dit-dit-dit meant, and he’d seen it flashed from the tenth floor two hours ago; then an hour ago, he’d gotten dah-dah-dah. Three dots, the letter S, the first letter in the international distress signal, SOS. The three dashes were the letter O.
Close enough.
Four days of chatter, with him switching from floor to floor with the laser mike and a laptop, and they’d only been teased with the sound of her voice a few times, each time from a different floor. She sounded good, but he wouldn’t be happy until he saw her for himself, and now he had a lock on her location—so they were going in.
The gods of war were with them.
He keyed his radio.
“Alpha Two, my money is still on the tenth floor,” he said, talking while he stowed his binoculars with the rest of his gear. Every move he made was practiced, smooth, timed. “Did you catch Cherie at the Quick Mart?”
“Roger,” Con replied. “Alpha One heading in. Give me fifteen minutes.”
“Roger.” Fifteen minutes to create utter chaos. Fifteen minutes to get inside 738 Steele Street and turn the place inside out. Fifteen minutes for Jack to get to the tenth floor and rescue Scout.
That was his job, his only job. Con had all but beaten it into him: Get Scout, and get her out.
Nothing else. No sidebar heroics, no coming back into the building for any reason. Get her and get her out of Denver, out of Colorado, out of the country. That was the mission, and Jack was all for it. If he’d been in Paraguay doing his job, instead of in Eastern Europe picking up work on the side, she wouldn’t have been captured in the first place, and he’d felt the heavy weight of that mistake ever since Con had contacted him. By then she’d already been gone for over six weeks.
He didn’t blame Con for the delay. The guy had been fighting for his life. But they’d finally gotten here, and Jack had to save her, whatever it took. God forbid, if she’d been hurt in any way, these bastards would go down in fucking flames.
She wouldn’t be glad to see him, not after the last time she’d seen him, in Key Largo. He knew that much. He wasn’t an idiot. The Florida situation had been a disaster, but she was smart enough to put their personal situation aside to get the job done—he hoped.
Personal situation—cripes. It was never supposed to have gotten to a “personal situation” between them. God knew he’d done his best to keep their relationship strictly on the up-and-up, purely professional, no entanglements.
He should have known better. They were tangled, all right. They’d been tangled from the minute he’d first laid eyes on her four years ago in Rangoon, a gorgeous mulatto girl, with Con the protector at her side. She’d been eighteen, and he’d known better—then. Now he didn’t know anything when it came to Scout, except that he was getting damn tired of keeping to the high ground.
Okay, the middle to the low ground, if a person included the blonde he’d shacked up with in Key Largo for a few weeks last winter. She’d been a great girl, a Key-easy cocktail waitress, short, round, sweet, and unlikely to kick his ass—the exact opposite of everything that was Scout.
Scout kicked him. She kicked him hard, especially in the small, unguarded part of his heart that he hadn’t even known he’d had until he’d seen her.
It was ridiculous, the height of stupidity, and had been for four years, ever since Con had found her. He didn’t need it. Scout was trouble. He and Con made a good team. For a price, they provided the best personal security on the planet. For a price, they guaranteed delivery of anything anywhere, from cargo, to cash, to ransom, to the unknown. For a helluva price, they did hostage rescue and facilitated negotiations between a hundred varieties of despots and governments, most of which were barely discernible from each other on any given day of the week. Today’s warlord was often tomorrow’s prime minister in the places where his and Con’s reputations ensured the highest remuneration for their services. They lived well. Jack had cash stashed in banks from the Caymans to Switzerland, and he wasn�
��t about to screw it all up wanting what he couldn’t, or shouldn’t, have—namely Scout.
Good. He was glad he had that all straightened out in his head—again.
Besides, Con had told him she had a boyfriend now, some Dutch asshole she’d met in London named Karl. He just hoped old Karl had enough brains to stay out of Jack’s reach, or Scout would be looking for a new boy.
Yeah, right. So glad he had everything all straightened out in his head. Con had made a damn point of telling him how great the guy was, how good he was for Scout, some kind of college professor idiot.
How in the hell Scout could take up with a professor was beyond Jack. Hell. The only degree Jack had was his Ranger tab.
He closed the last compartment on his backpack and slipped the straps over his shoulders, then bandoliered a length of climbing rope with a grappling hook across his chest. He’d rigged a zip line from the Bruso-Campbell to 738 Steele Street last night, running it behind the old freight elevator. With him accessing the building in daylight, he was counting on Con to provide the appropriate distraction with a few flash bangs or whatever the hell it took to get the job done. Once they got Scout out, he didn’t care if the building crumbled to the ground, not that the explosive devices he and Con had rigged were likely to do that much damage—but they sure as hell would get everyone’s attention.
Leaning over the roof, he used a carabiner to clip a handgrip onto the pulley on the zip line, and then he checked his watch again and settled in to wait—twelve minutes.
Karl, a damned Dutch professor.
What was up with that? She’d never had a boyfriend before.
He’d ask her. That’s what he’d do, ask her about her jerk boyfriend, clear the air between them, and then he really needed to move on.
Great. He had a plan. He was moving on.
He checked his watch.
Eleven minutes.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Fill me in,” Dylan said, coming out of the Steele Street elevator with Skeeter.
His second in command, Christian Hawkins, glanced up from where he was listening on the phone, signaled him to hold on just a second, then went back to the call. Skeeter headed straight to the security camera console and checked the monitors. A wall of windows in the office overlooked the seventh-floor garage.
Hawkins keyed a sequence into his computer and glanced up again after hanging up the phone.
“That was Jane Linden,” he said, his face grim. “She swears she just saw J.T. down on Wazee, heading south.”
“South?” Dylan asked calmly, controlling a sudden rush of excitement. The Quick Mart was south. “Have we heard from Zach?”
Hawkins nodded. “He checked in just before Jane called.”
“And?” Dylan asked.
“There was a distraction at the Quick Mart, a small amount of smoke and a rank smell coming out of the parking garage across from the store.”
“Diversion?” he asked.
Hawkins shrugged. “No sound, no visual noise, and the smoke and smell dissipated in seconds—pretty damn subtle for a diversion. Could have been anything, a blown engine, a diesel belching out junk.”
“Or it could have been J.T.,” Dylan said, turning toward his wife. “Skeeter, are all the cameras on the seventh-floor garage up and running?”
“I’m going through them now.” She keyed in the security cameras and started checking monitor screens.
“Where’s Zach?” he asked, turning back to Hawkins.
“On Cherie’s tail,” Hawkins said. “He broke for the Quick Mart as soon as the smoke hit.”
“Go ahead and have him follow her in.”
J.T. was here. Now. He knew it in his heart.
The game was on.
And Dylan would win—absolutely, unequivocally. The only thing he didn’t know was what the final price might be. There were very few things he wasn’t willing to risk to save J.T.
“Jane got his wallet,” Hawkins said, dropping the bomb with the barest hint of a grin curving his mouth.
Geezus. One of Dylan’s eyebrows went up.
“No shit,” Hawkins said, his grin widening. “When she passed him on the street, she made the lift. She thought we might like to take a look at it.”
“Good girl.” He was impressed. Jane Linden was a street rat from way back. She managed Katya Hawkins’s upper-end art gallery, Toussi, in LoDo now, but he was damn glad to know she hadn’t lost any of her old-school skills. Lifting a wallet off J.T. had to have been some kind of trick. “Where is she?”
“Almost to our front door. I just sent the elevator to bring her up to the office.”
“Good. Where’s everybody else?”
“Creed, Quinn, and Travis are doing rounds,” Hawkins said. “I’ll have them head toward seven. Red Dog and Kid took guard duty on the girl. They’re up on ten with her now.”
Dylan nodded. “Get a shooter on the south side of the seventh floor, whoever is closest.” To put J.T. down chemically was their plan, their best bet, even after the failure of the ketamine, even with the risks involved. Half of Dylan’s team was carrying .22 rimfire rifles loaded with drug darts, but they’d changed tranquilizers to Halo-Xazine, also known as Halox, if you were buying top-of-the-line brand-name stuff, and Shlox, if you were selling it on street corners to day-trippers. “Tell everybody we may be having company.”
Inside the Challenger’s trunk, Con felt the freight elevator come to a stop and heard the door open. By gunning the engine a few more times, Cherie the computer geek got the car to lurch into the building and across the floor until it shuddered to a stop.
Geezus. Her driving had just about made him seasick.
He waited until she got out and he heard her footsteps recede, and then he waited some more, searching the silence. One by one, she went up a flight of stairs, and when he heard a door open and close, he popped the trunk just enough to peer out.
“Alpha One, ready,” he said softly into his radio.
“Copy, Alpha One.” Jack’s voice came back at him over the dedicated channel.
The building was cool. The lights were low. A long, slow look around revealed a couple dozen other cars, a lot of them classic American muscle, and a lot of those were Camaros. On the north end of the garage, he saw the stairs Cherie had gone up. The door at the top of the stairs was flanked by a set of large windows overlooking the cars. All of the windows were shuttered from the inside, making it impossible to see what was going on in the room behind.
After slipping out of the trunk, he kept low to the floor and moved into the shadows close to the wall. The plan was simple: Head to the tenth floor, create a diversion along the way to draw these boys down on top of him, give them all a run for their money, and when Jack had Scout out of the building, get the hell out of Steele Street and the hell out of Denver.
No one else could have done it, not the way he could do it—fast and clean and damn near risk-free. The only reason these guys had gotten to him last time was because he’d been distracted with other business, mostly the banshee bitch who had been tearing his house up with a .50-caliber rifle mounted on a gunboat and the twenty or so armed troops she’d had with her, all of them bent on destroying him. He wasn’t distracted this time. The Steele Street boys had his undivided attention, and he knew where they were and what they wanted: him. Scout was just bait, a very poor choice on their part. Four days of recon had given him precise knowledge of the outside of the building and the surrounding area and a damn good idea of the layout of the inside of the building—very few windows, the freight elevators, and the cars coming and going meant work areas and warehousing on the lower floors; big windows and lots of lights on the upper floors after dark suggested living areas. He could find his way around without too many problems. As a matter of fact, he could find his way around with damn few problems.
Continuing his observation from close to the wall, he looked across the garage full of cars again. His senses were extremely acute, but he wasn’t prescient, o
r omniscient, or any such thing, and yet … and yet he knew where the door under the staircase went—to a couple of storerooms and an out-of-the-way corner room with a table, a few chairs, and a refrigerator full of beer.
Looking the door over from top to bottom, he tried to place the sense of knowing, then decided it was only logical, he supposed, to have a fridge full of beer somewhere close to a garage, where guys might be working all day, someplace to go and sort through business and any personal junk that was getting in the way, a place where the gloves came off, a place to tell the truth, to put your guts on the line, to tell the guys what you really thought about the shit hitting the fan on your last mission.
Mission.
Yeah, these guys had missions, not car sales, and they had a bullpen behind the door under the staircase. It only made sense; that was all.
Holding steady up against the wall, he let his gaze track more slowly across the garage, going from Camaro to Camaro, to a badass 1970 Chevelle SS 454, cherry red with double black stripes. Another funny feeling went up his spine. He knew that car. He knew it had a 780-cfm Holley four-barrel carburetor under the hood, and he didn’t care how much sense a Holley four-barrel made on a 454, he shouldn’t know that. No way in hell.
He shifted his attention to the next car, and the funny feeling going up his spine got sharper, even more intense. Sleek, deep blue, so blue it was almost black, a 1967 Pontiac GTO glimmered in the low light, beckoning.
Corinna, Corinna … the words of a golden oldies song drifted across his mind. Corinna, Corinna …
Sweat beaded on his upper lip, and he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
Corinna—it was the car’s name. He knew it deep down where it counted, and it unnerved the hell out of him. Who named their cars, he wondered, then instantly knew the answer.
These guys named their cars. He looked back to the Challenger, Roxanne, then returned his gaze to the Chevelle—Angelina. Next to Angelina was Charlotte the Harlot, a 1968 Shelby Mustang Cobra. He knew them all, but how?
