by Tara Janzen
He dragged himself out from under the two limp bodies and immediately saw King’s problem—the syringe hanging out of his arm. Rock must have gotten him when he fell. Poor bastard.
Rock’s problem was just as obvious, but standing five feet away—Jane, her Bersa Thunder .380 smoking in her hand.
Good girl.
Behind him, he heard Rock come back from the initial shock of getting shot, gasping in agony. The bastard cursed and groaned, his breath harsh and raspy, and when Con looked, it was easy to see why. Jane had shot him in the left knee he no longer had. That thing had been shattered.
“Good shot,” he said, glancing back at her. Her dress had been torn straight up the seam from the hem, probably by King, during the brief intense scuffle they’d all had at the door, and she had a lot of leg showing. Her hair was wild from the fall she’d taken, her knee was bleeding again, and her face was deathly pale, but she was still on target, ready to shoot again if necessary.
He was impressed, with her steadiness and her shot placement. Rock had stretched his leg out behind him, using it for leverage. It was about the only place she could have shot him without possibly shooting Con, too. He was damned grateful she’d figured that all out at light speed, and he wondered for just a second what the odds were that a guy would see a drop-dead-gorgeous woman on the street at sunset and, a couple of hours or so later, wind up having her turn out to be one helluva shot and save his ass.
Slim, he decided, damn slim, and yet there she was, a keeper, if he’d been in the business of keeping anything.
He wasn’t. For six years, his life, everything he had of it, had been operating on a hit-and-run system. There were no keepers.
Leaning down, he made short work of frisking the men, emptying their pockets and retrieving his own knife. He’d have slit their throats without batting an eye, if they’d needed killing. But King wasn’t going anywhere for a very long time, and Rock wasn’t, either, not with what was left of his knee. So he let them live, and planned on them telling Lancaster everything they knew: that Conroy Farrel was alive and well, and on the hunt. That he was close and getting closer, and, above all, that he was still winning the fight, even with Lancaster sending his best boys.
A beast—he knew what his reputation was, across the board and around the world. He’d killed too many of Lancaster’s assassins to be underestimated, and now he and the Wild Thing had taken down Banner and Howe.
He thumbed his knife open and sliced King’s hoodie pocket with the razor-sharp tip to get at his gun. The guy was damn near comatose, lying inert in a pile, his pupils dilated, his breathing shallow, his brain somewhere off in never-never land. As a bonus, Con found where the second bullet had gone—into King. There was blood seeping out of a wound just under his rib cage on the right side. Not a lethal shot, but it had bought them some time.
He was going to let Rock buy a little time, too, for what it was worth. Unless Souk had worked the kinks out of his drugs that last year he’d been alive, all these boys were on their way out.
Just like him.
Fuck.
He knelt down in front of the guy, bringing them face-to-face, and pressed the tip of his blade into the side of Rock’s neck. The guy knew the drill. He knew what happened next.
“You can bleed out here in this alley, Rock,” Con said. “Or you can tell me what I want to know.” He was very matter-of-fact, very calm, and he knew Rock had been around the block enough times to believe him. It was in the guy’s fierce black gaze and in the strength he was using to keep from screaming his guts out.
Yeah, Con figured Rock was taking the option of a deal under very serious consideration.
Smart move.
“Nothing that’s happened here can’t be undone,” he continued, giving Rock an honest assessment of his injuries. “I bet you know somebody who can fix your knee up like new.” Literally. “But if I cut you it’s over. So tell me where my old friend is, and I’ll walk away.”
Rock was thinking, staring at him and thinking and struggling with the pain that had to be exploding through him like incendiary fireworks. He was drenched in sweat. A long streak of it dampened the front of his shirt. His breath was blowing in and out of him like he was hooked to a pair of bellows.
“I’m running out of time, sweetheart.” Con pressed the blade in a little deeper.
“K-kash …” Rock muttered, the effort to speak making his eyes roll back.
“Cash?” What the fuck? The knife went in another eighth of an inch. “Come again, Rock old buddy?”
“K-kashmir … you … you asshole.” And that was all she wrote. Rock collapsed, his eyes rolling up into his head until only the whites were showing, his body jerking like he was having a seizure, which was totally possible, but he wasn’t dead yet.
The Bangkok dope worked great for making a guy bigger and badder, but when the shit hit the fan, nine times out of ten, Souk’s soup went fucking haywire—like what had happened to him with the ketamine.
Con looked over the mess of bad boys in the doorway and rose to his feet, shaking his head. Despite his restraint, King and Rock might not make it.
Well, hell. He guessed Lancaster would get the message either way.
“Come on,” he said, stepping back and taking Jane by the arm to move her along. “We need to get out of here.” Before she got all focused on how much carnage she’d wrought with her last shot. Light from the door was spilling out in a long rectangle into the alley, but King and Rock were slumped off to the side, more in the shadows.
Just as well.
She nodded, rotated the Bersa’s decocker down, and slipped the gun back into her purse. That’s when he noticed the hole between a pair of the zebra stripes on her bag. He also noticed her hand was trembling. She’d been rock solid in her gunfighting stance, but she was losing it fast.
“You shot King with your pistol still inside your purse?” One-handed, he folded his knife back up and stuck it in his pocket. They were almost to the corner of the building, and Corinna was parked in front of the restaurant.
“Y-yes,” she said. “I slipped my hand in and grabbed my gun as soon as you told me to get up and leave, while we were still at the table. I was waiting for a chance to use it. I figured I’d get one as soon as we got outside.” She gave a quick glance around. “And I guess I was right.”
Very good girl, indeed. He was impressed as hell, and no wonder she’d been clutching her purse like her life depended on it.
“It was real stupid of them not to think that a girl might have a gun,” she continued, her voice trembling but still managing to sound tough.
He had to agree, but he also had to cut the guys a break.
“They’re not used to girls like you.”
A stricken expression crossed her face but passed almost as quickly as it had come.
“What do you mean, girls like me?” she asked, keeping her gaze straight ahead, the hesitancy of her tone telling him more than the question.
What could he possibly mean? he wondered, curious as hell. What could possibly have given her such a wounded look of uncertainty?
“Drop-dead gorgeous, pure hothouse, like you’re from another planet,” he said, not having any trouble coming up with the truth, or any trouble recognizing the relief on her face when he said it. “You look like you should be on the cover of a magazine, not like you’re strapped.”
She gave a small smile, shaky but there.
“I’ve been ‘strapped’ since Superman taught me how to shoot on the firing range at Steele Street—about four years ago.”
This Superman guy again. Con was beginning to think he should make a point of meeting the man, but according to Jane, he already knew him—and he hadn’t seen a damn thing to tell him she was wrong.
No, his old life was here. It was here with Kid Chaos and this guy called Superman, if he wanted it.
But wanting it wasn’t going to be enough for him to get it.
“Well, that’s all I meant,”
he said. “That when a guy looks at you, the last thing he’s thinking is that he’s going to get shot with anything you could drag out of a zebra-striped purse.” Or any other kind of purse, for that matter. Oh, hell, no. Every guy who saw her was definitely thinking something else—the same damn, impossible thing he was thinking.
He increased their speed, hustling her up the alley toward the street, passing the backs of a whatnot shop and the hardware store on the corner, moving faster, ignoring the burning pain in his side, his hand still on her arm.
She stumbled on the edge of a pothole, but he kept her from falling and tightened his hold on her. Off in the distance, he heard the first siren headed their way, but when they reached the corner of the building, he realized it wouldn’t matter even if they did make it to Corinna before the cops arrived. The GTO was sitting right where he’d left her, and her tires had been slashed.
Hell.
Two dead bodies, plenty of witnesses, and a damn good description of him and Jane weren’t exactly going to make the crime scene a cakewalk, but pretty damn close—except the cops wouldn’t find him in their database, not in any database. Every piece of identification he owned he’d either made himself or tagged an underworld expert to create. He was a clean slate in both hemispheres and on any continent.
He hesitated a second longer, looking in every direction. Like the elevator at Steele Street, and the garage, there was something familiar here, right here on this corner.
The first siren was joined by a second, both of them drawing closer. He looked around again. This was not the time to dawdle, but …
But his instincts were telling him to back up, go the other way. There was another way out of the alley about halfway down, where an opening in the tall fence led to a rough track that ran straight into the parking lots, loading docks, and service entrances for the businesses on the next street over, a concrete and corrugated steel wasteland.
The track is there. Everybody uses it.
The thought was clear and true, and he didn’t second-guess his plan any more than that. On his own, they’d never catch him.
Jane, who was now shaking like a leaf in her little high-heeled boots, was another story—but this wasn’t her fight, no matter what she’d done.
He pulled her back into the alley, up close to the wall where they couldn’t be seen.
“Give me your gun,” he said.
She gave one short shake of her head and clutched her zebra bag closer. “We already played this game.”
“No game,” he said. “I’m leaving, you’re staying, and I want to put my prints on the grip. Tell them I did all the shooting.”
“No.” She shook her head again. “I’m going with you.”
Which made no damn sense at all. He didn’t get it.
Jane Linden—who was she that she wouldn’t let him go? He could only think of one thing.
A third siren sounded off in the distance, drawing his attention to the street. Yeah, this was big for Denver, a fair amount of gunplay and, despite Rock’s previous yowling, what must look like a double homicide in the alley to whoever had called it in to the cops. In Ciudad del Este, it wouldn’t have made the morning news.
He turned back to her, his one idea pressing hard on him.
“Were we lovers?” he asked, a part of him wishing it was so, that the Wild Thing had once been his—and the hotness of her blush, the sudden startled starkness of her gaze told him it was true.
Geezus.
“I was a fool to leave you.” And it was time to leave her again. The cops were on the block. They’d be screeching to a halt any second now, and that was perfect timing. They wouldn’t catch him, but he wanted them to catch her, to take her in, get her off the streets for a while. By the time they let her go, he and Scout and Jack would be long gone, and this would all be over—at least in Denver.
“I want you to go with the cops,” he said. “Tell them anything you want about me, everything you know. There’s no reason to lie, and the more you can give them, the easier it’ll go on you. Now open your purse.”
After another moment’s hesitation, she did, and he reached in and quickly but firmly pressed his hand around the Bersa’s grip. Pulling his hand back out, he thought there should be something else, something he could say, but there wasn’t. No matter what they’d been, he didn’t know her now, and whatever happened, he was going to have to get out of the country and stay out. There really wasn’t anyplace for this to go and nothing for him to do except walk away.
And to give her a kiss.
One kiss for a wild thing on a wild night.
A bad idea, he silently admitted.
But irresistible.
Light from the police cars pulling up flashed into the alley, bright strobes of red and blue bathing the two of them in quick bursts of color. He raised his hand to her face, his thumb brushing across the softness of her cheek. If she wanted to run or turn away, that was her cue, her only chance.
But she didn’t turn away. She lifted her face, her eyes meeting his, her expression one of nerves and flat-out curiosity—and excitement. He could smell it on her, felt it in the sudden rise of warmth of her skin, heard it in the shallowness of her breath—and so he lowered his mouth and met her lips with his own.
Bad idea.
She melted into him, and it felt too good, tasted too good, of softness and sex, things he’d been too long without. The sigh of her breath into his mouth was sweet and unexpected and went all the way to his groin. Caught for a moment, he lingered, letting himself fall deeper into the pleasure of her kiss, the wonder of her mouth, its silkiness, and the intimacy of tracing her teeth with his tongue. Then it was time to break away, and he almost made it—but not quite.
She opened her mouth wider, and he slid in even deeper, and so it would have gone, down, down, down into the sweet darkness of desire, down to the sharp, bare edge of need cutting through him. He wanted her.
He pressed against her, pulled her closer, felt the pressure of her body up against his—and then came the sounds of stopping cars, doors opening, and guns coming out of holsters.
He dragged his mouth away from hers, then kissed her once more, hard and fast.
“Don’t forget me.” The words came out of nowhere, unexpected, just like her, but the instant they did, he knew he meant them. He’d forgotten everything and everyone—but he didn’t want her to forget him.
“Police!” The shout came from the street, and he turned and ran, a lightning-quick slip into the shadows, more speed than any local cop could understand, and he was gone.
But he could still smell her, even halfway down the alley, where he found the dirt track leading off between two lines of fencing. Even there in the darkness, two hundred feet away, her scent was with him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
J. T. Chronopolous had kissed her.
Jane was stunned, frozen in place up against the back-alley wall of the building two doors down from Mama Guadaloupe’s.
True, he didn’t know who he was, and he didn’t know who she was, but the kiss had been real, as real as the first time he’d kissed her, when things had gotten so out of hand. She’d been eighteen, not the twenty-two she’d told him, and he’d been a Special Ops soldier on the eve of his last mission.
It had been a wild night—steal a wallet, outrun the cops, get about half lost in the tunnels beneath the city, and make love with J. T. Chronopolous on his living room floor.
Yep. That was about right. That’s the way she remembered it, a wild, wild night …
The fire crackled and snapped in his big old fireplace, and Jane figured that’s what had awakened her. They’d eaten dinner sitting on the floor in his living room area with the city lights sparkling in the darkness through the windows on one side of them and the fire keeping them warm on another. The food had been good, the company better, and they’d both been thrumming with the night’s adventure—not much of one for him, she’d learned as he’d talked about his work, sharing par
ts of some of the missions he’d been on and telling her about the places he’d been all over the world.
Over the course of hours, the conversation had grown more and more intermittent, and now she realized she must have drifted off.
He had fallen asleep, too. He’d told her he was a Special Ops soldier, combat trained, combat ready, which had done nothing to make her feel better.
It must pay good, she figured, looking around at the wonderful place he lived in—and then she looked at him, sleeping on his side with a couch pillow under his head.
She was hurting like crazy already, knowing he was leaving to go off soldiering somewhere in the morning. It was terrible, really it was. She’d gone and fallen in love with a guy who was supposed to have been an unattainable crush.
So stupid to have done that.
And he was too old for her. He’d made that clear.
“You’re not twenty-two,” he’d said while they’d eaten, and he’d said it in a way that had told her she wasn’t going to convince him otherwise.
One kiss, she decided. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing, and if she was careful, and kissed him very carefully on the cheek while he was asleep, he might not even know she’d done it. He was snoring softly and looked to her like he was long gone, down for the count.
Yes, she decided. She was going to do this. Another minute passed while she figured out her best approach.
Situating herself closer to him, she leaned down and lightly pressed her lips to his cheek, and his arm came around her waist, slowly, easily, dragging her closer.
“Hey, babe,” he murmured, and then drifted off again, except this time she was wrapped in his arms.
Not such a bad place to be.
She wasn’t stupid, but she was safer than she’d ever been in her whole life, lying there with him in this beautiful place with a warm fire and clean furniture and all the other hundreds of things she didn’t have in her life. She wanted more of it, who wouldn’t? But mostly she wanted more of him. She spent her life taking care of her crew, always, every day, the scrapes, the troubles, the feeding them—and here was this amazing man who didn’t need anybody to take care of him. He was the strongest person she’d ever met, and he’d been her crush, and she’d fallen in love.
