by Tara Janzen
“Why did you take it?”
“I-I thought you were dead, and then there you were on the street, and I had to know if it was really you, if you were really J. T. Chronopolous … and … and I need to know whether or not you did that to King and Rock. Whether you ripped King’s arm off and left it lying in the alley. You’re strong enough. I swear you are.”
And just like that, the whole night took another deep dive into the twilight zone. Geezus. King Banner’s arm had been ripped off?
Ripped off?
No wonder there were so damn many cops swarming this block. He looked over her shoulder, down the alley. This was bad. Explosions tore people into pieces, but there hadn’t been an explosion. So what in the ever-loving world could have—
It came to him then, just an idea, but a damned awful idea, that the Bangkok rumors he and Jack had heard were true. That Lancaster, dealing with a subpar Thai lab, had commissioned a monster—and possibly, for whatever reason, had brought the beast with him to Denver.
Either that, or there was a pack of wolves running loose on the west side, but even a pack of wolves couldn’t have worked that fast—and they wouldn’t have left the arm in the alley.
So what the hell else could it be, if it wasn’t a guy like him juiced to the next plane, where humanity took a backseat to violence? He’d seen it in Souk’s lab, when the good doctor’s mistakes stretched the bounds of the imagination—twisted experiments gone wrong, like Shoko.
“No,” he said clearly, meeting Jane’s gaze again. “When I went back, both men were exactly as we’d left them. One of the cooks had come out into the alley, but he was small and old, not big enough to do that kind of damage.”
“Something was.”
She had that right.
“Your ghost,” he said. “How good of a look did you get at it?”
“Not very,” she admitted. “What I saw was a pale blur in the darkness—something big, moving fast, maybe with long white hair, or maybe that was just a trick of the light.”
Big and fast he understood. A lot of the LeedTech warriors were big, and they were all fast. The long white hair—he didn’t know about that. He’d never come up against a LeedTech assassin with long hair, white or otherwise, and he didn’t want to tonight, not when he was heading toward his own personal Three Mile Island, a meltdown at his core, and not when Jane was within a hundred miles of him.
“Come on,” he said. There were enough people on the street now, enough chaos to cover their escape, and they needed to move out. Somewhere up there on the hill, in that old neighborhood of winding roads, was a place where they would be safe. He could almost hear it calling to him, like a siren’s song.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Creed had seen some pretty wild things in his life, some real bad stuff, but nothing quite like this.
Standing in the alley behind Mama Guadaloupe’s, a few things were immediately obvious. First, a lot of people back here in the alley hadn’t seen much bad stuff. Two of the cops and a fireman had upchucked their suppers, and it looked like one of the EMTs was going to be next. Second, typically, there were at least four versions of the truth in two languages being tossed around. Last, but far from least, there was one bad motherfucker out there somewhere. King Banner’s arm had been twisted clean off at the shoulder and been tossed aside.
Amazing.
Shades of Beowulf came to mind, and the monster Grendel. He was also thinking about Red Dog, and what a man juiced like her would be capable of doing—a man like J.T.
It was a lot to think about.
“You got enough light?” he asked Hawkins, who was photographing everything with his cellphone. The detectives were going to be there any second, and they were traditionally territorial about their crime scenes. But Loretta had given Superman the go-ahead, and they were running with it under her firm command not to touch anything.
He was good with that—except for one thing. He sure would like to take the syringe hanging out of the arm still attached to King. He’d seen others like it. He knew what it was, and so did everybody else on SDF: a Thai syringe, strange stuff that the forensics lab here in Denver was going to have a helluva time deciphering.
“This place is lit up like the inside of a klieg light,” Hawkins answered.
Yeah, it was.
“You might want to get close-ups of their faces,” he said. “In case there’s family somewhere. If we can come up with a match in the LeedTech files Dylan snagged, somebody might get called down to a cop shop someplace to identify them.”
“Thank you, Mother Teresa.”
Yeah, yeah. Whatever. It was damn nice of Loretta to let them in on this, but he doubted if Dylan was going to be sharing the LeedTech files with her. That was going to be their piece of the puzzle.
He lifted his face into the night air and closed his eyes.
“There’s a lot of blood,” Hawkins said.
Yeah, he could smell it. Carnage.
He turned his head a few degrees to the south. Three more shots had been heard coming from that direction, and according to Geronimo, Jane had run into the parking lot on the other side of the fence.
He looked back at the two corpses and let his gaze trail over them and to the loose arm lying two feet from King Banner’s body.
Sonuvabitch.
“Hey, Superman, better get a shot of this.” He gestured at the arm.
Hawkins stepped over and, after looking at the arm for a couple of seconds, let out a long, low whistle.
“Do you want to call the boss, or do you want me to do it?” he asked.
“I’m on it.” Creed already had his phone out, and while Hawkins angled his camera toward the arm and clicked off a series of photos, he waited for somebody to answer at Steele Street.
“Uptown Autos—”
“Skeet,” he cut her off. “Are you getting all these pictures?”
“Yes,” she said. “With a new set coming in now.”
Tough girl. She didn’t sound at all freaked out, but she’d been in combat.
“Zoom in on the upper part of the biceps on that loose arm.”
“Looking now, Jungle Boy,” she said, and he knew she was seeing the odd wound just below where the arm had been separated from the shoulder.
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking something took a bite out of Mr. Banner, maybe took some shirt with it.”
“That’s what I was thinking, too.”
“Wild dogs?” she asked after a moment, and he understood the brief delay. She was hoping for the best.
“I don’t think so, Skeet. Let Dylan know, and we’ll get back to you when we find something.” He hung up and turned back to Hawkins. “This is getting weird.”
“Copy that,” Hawkins said, pocketing his phone. “You ready?”
“Yeah, we need to get moving,” he said. There were at least three other cop cars whooping and flashing in the parking lot alley on the other side of the fence, but Creed knew it was going to take more than that to find anybody back there. It was a great place to hide. He’d done it hundreds of times as a kid.
So had J.T.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Lancaster stood at the window of his suite, looking down at the city streets. Denver was starting to unnerve him. The whole mission was starting to unnerve him. He was too exposed, the situation had become too uncontrolled.
He checked his watch. Crutchfield had been gone for half an hour and hadn’t checked in. Lancaster was going to give him ten more minutes, and then he was jerking the lawyer’s chain. That damn gimp Walls had never checked in. Neither had King and Rock after their call from Crutchfield.
If King and Rock had failed and SDF had snatched Farrel right out from under their noses, he could understand why they hadn’t called him. They’d be executing their contingency plans, still working the mission, going for the win—and if they weren’t, he would replace them in a heartbeat. He had a hundred names in his files of men who had been throug
h Souk’s lab and could do the jobs he needed done.
What he needed now was the woman, and Crutchfield had better damn well deliver her. Dylan Hart would go to the ends of the earth for her. He would certainly give up a man who didn’t even remember him. Conroy Farrel was a stranger, not a friend, not a brother in blood and arms the way J. T. Chronopolous had been.
A mistake—that’s what Conroy Farrel really was, a mistake Lancaster needed to fix, the same way he’d fixed the mistake called MNK-1. Death was the only possible solution, and, by God, he wanted it done, and then he was getting out of this town.
Karola was checking in like clockwork, for what little that was worth. He’d spotted Scout Leesom once and then quickly proceeded to lose her. Karola hadn’t seen Walls since the gimp had taken off out of the ally in the opposite direction, intending to intercept the girl. The Leesom brat couldn’t have given them much trouble, if they’d caught her, and neither could that bastard Jack Traeger. Traeger did not have a chemically enhanced edge. He wasn’t a LeedTech warrior.
Lancaster picked up a glass of Scotch off a side table and took a long swallow. He’d bought an island off the coast of Venezuela, and that’s where he was going when he was finished here in Denver, a much-needed vacation from all the prying minds in Washington. He’d already resigned his board positions on two financial corporations and his advisory position at the Schumaker Institute. The old man was pulling in his horns, making way for the new bucks.
He took another swallow of Scotch and checked his watch again.
Nothing felt right anymore. All his sure footing had turned to sand, and he wanted out, before he got buried. He didn’t want Washington, D.C., to turn out to be his grave—and he didn’t want this damn town to turn out to be his grave, either.
God, it was hell getting old. Maybe he’d stayed in the game too long.
Eight minutes, that was it, and then he was calling Crutchfield and finding out where in the hell he was and what in the hell he was doing, farting around out there in Denver, when their asses were on the line.
* * *
From where he was sitting, Tyler Crutchfield could see his suit jacket dragging in the water of a low-lit swimming pool in a subterranean, granite-encased room.
After Peter Chronopolous had literally kidnapped him and wrestled him down here, the guy had stripped him out of his jacket and all too casually let it drop on the pool deck, the cretin. One of the sleeves had fallen into the water, and now the whole jacket was ruined, half of a four-thousand-dollar suit. Tyler had become fixated on it—the way the sleeve had started out floating on the surface of the pool, how it had slowly lost its buoyancy and drifted underwater, the stain creeping up the material. The suit was new, his sartorial pride and joy, and he’d have given it and every other handmade Italian suit in his closet to anyone who could have gotten him out of this basement.
It wasn’t going to be Sam Walls. Lancaster’s bullyboy was across the room, lying in a crumpled heap, wet and, from the looks of him, dead. Tortured, Tyler was certain, with the bleak rig of ropes and pulleys hanging from the ceiling over the edge of the pool. As a two-year captain of his university’s water polo team, Tyler had spent half his life in a swimming pool. He had an affinity for pools, an affection for them, but not this one. The wet, dead lump of Walls terrified him, and so did the other two men in the basement, one of whom was behind him somewhere in the dark, silent and waiting, a man he’d recognized as Quinn Younger. The other man was standing in full light, right in front of him—calm, in control, soft-spoken, harder than iron, and the most ruthless SDF operator of them all.
Tyler had memorized the team’s bios. He knew who he was dealing with, and it made his gut churn. For Liam Dylan Magnuson Hart, there was no past too far removed, no future too distant, and no intellectual path or strategic configuration too complicated to bring to bear on current circumstances.
Tyler was a current circumstance, and he felt the weight of that truth with every breath he took. Even if he lived, which he sorely doubted, he’d be run to ground and ruined in a thousand unforeseen ways, ad infinitum, unless Lancaster destroyed SDF.
Tonight was none too soon, before something truly terrible happened to him, but Tyler wasn’t putting his money on a rescue.
Trapped in this fucking basement, in the bowels of Steele Street, face-to-face with Dylan Hart, he finally understood why Lancaster had failed to kill this team off long before now.
A clean snatch and grab, that’s what Dylan liked, and he was looking right at one: Tyler Crutchfield. The man had all but given himself up when Kid had approached him in O’Shaunessy’s Bar, but not until after he’d first made the mistake of flashing a weapon at the Boy Wonder. Dylan was sure the guy was still hurting from the half-dozen ways Kid had hit him, ways no one else in the bar would even have noticed. Up until that point, Kid had said the guy hadn’t looked like he’d ever gotten dirty in his life.
Things had changed for Tyler Crutchfield. He was sweating like a pig and as white as a sheet. Kid swore that he’d barely touched him after relieving him of his pistol, but the guy still looked like he’d been messed with, and things had gone downhill for him from there. He’d already given up everyone except his mother, and Dylan had barely gotten started.
“Tyler, you’ve been real cooperative so far, and I appreciate all the information you’ve given me about Lancaster and his plans for the teams he created,” Dylan said, and truly, the man had given him everything he’d asked for, one question after another. “But you’re in the wrong game for a guy with no balls. Just an FYI.”
Dylan had known some tough lawyers, but Crutchfield wasn’t one of them. Skeeter could have taken him down with one arm tied behind her back, literally, but Dylan was damn glad to say that she hadn’t. His girl was back up on the comm console where she belonged—at least for now.
“That’s Sam Walls over there,” Tyler said with a lift of his head. He couldn’t lift anything else. After Kid had dropped him off and headed back to the Kashmir Club, Dylan and Quinn had given Crutchfield the deluxe duct tape restraint workup. The guy was practically married to his chair.
“Yep, that’s Walls.” Who was no longer married to his chair.
“Is he dead?”
“Not yet” was the honest reply. Walls wasn’t dead, and there wasn’t a mark on him, except where Quinn had pulled off the duct tape, but he was more or less comatose over on the pool deck, sleeping off his Thai syringe.
With King and Rock massacred at Mama’s, and Walls and Crutchfield secure in Steele Street’s pool room, that left only Rick Karola and Lancaster on the loose—and Dylan didn’t think either of them had killed King and Rock. And so help him God, deep in his heart, he didn’t think J.T. had torn the two men apart, either, and that only left him with one other choice.
There was somebody else running wild on Lieutenant Loretta’s streets tonight, but who?
“I’ve only got one more question for you, Tyler. I know you and Walls and Karola came to Denver with Lancaster, and I know King Banner and Rock Howe are here, so to speak, but did you bring someone else? Somebody who maybe had some kind of beef with King and Rock?”
Crutchfield’s gaze narrowed. “No,” he said hesitantly. “No one else. What do you mean, King and Rock are here ‘so to speak’? What does that mean?”
It was a pure lawyer question, and Dylan was happy to explain.
He whipped out his cellphone and brought up the photos Hawkins had sent. They were damn grim by anybody’s standards.
Stepping closer to Tyler’s chair, he showed the first photo to him and then clicked through the next four. At number five, the lawyer threw up on himself.
Geezus.
Dylan carefully stepped away from the guy.
“Do you know anybody who had it in for those boys?” Everybody had enemies. What Dylan wanted was names.
“You’re … you’re smarter than this, Hart.”
Yeah, maybe he was.
“I’m not saying Conroy F
arrel didn’t kill them,” he said. “He certainly had every reason in the world, including self-defense, if it came down to that. But this is vicious, unlike him—”
“You don’t know what he’s like,” Crutchfield snapped, his nerves obviously fried, frazzled, and frayed.
“No,” Dylan agreed. “But I know what he used to be like, and nothing I saw here today, when he came and rescued the girl, told me anything different than what I used to know. I don’t think he did this.”
“Then you’re a fool. The man is a beast.”
“Then he’s a beast of Lancaster’s making. You might want to think about that while you contemplate the pool.” He signaled Quinn, then turned and headed for the door.
Quinn walked over to where the pulleys hung from a boom on the ceiling. Taking hold of one of the ropes, he started swinging the whole rig around to Tyler’s side of the pool deck.
“No!” Crutchfield cried out, squirming in his chair, his voice sharp with panic. “You … you can’t … can’t do this. Can’t let him … can’t. You can’t.”
Oh, yes, I can, Dylan thought, still walking.
“I know all about Moscow.” The man’s voice rose along with his panic. “About the deal you had with the KGB. How you sold them state secrets you … you bastard!”
Tyler Crutchfield didn’t know anything other than what Randolph Lancaster had told him, and it was all lies. Dylan had delivered the diplomatic pouch exactly to where White Rook had told him to deliver it. The deal had gone south and had been hanging over Dylan’s head for the last fourteen years.
But that was over tonight.
It would die with Randolph Lancaster.
Dylan wasn’t planning on killing Lancaster, but the faster this night wound down, the less sure he was that he could do anything to keep him alive.
“Wait!” Crutchfield called out. “Wait … please wait.”
Dylan stopped and, after a moment, turned back to the lawyer.
Crutchfield just sat there and stared at him, panting for breath with puke on his shirt and eyes full of fear and distress.
