Crazy Wild

by Tara Janzen

  Add the nationless element of globe-trotting tangos to the mix and it was easy to see why Dominika Starkova was so popular. How they'd all traced her to Cody Stark, Denver Public Library research librarian, was something he needed to figure out fast, before any more insurgent types showed up and started breathing down his neck.

  He glanced up the street. Two police cars were still parked at the corner of Broadway and Thirteenth Avenue, covering the library's east entrance, and there were probably at least a couple of patrolmen on the Plaza and a couple more hunkered down in a cruiser on the Fourteenth Avenue Parkway, watching the main entrance. The Denver Police Department had been working hard tonight. It was time to give them a break.

  Walking quickly away from the library, he held onto Cody with one hand and pulled his cell phone out of his pocket with his other. The 911 call was short and to the point, and after slipping his phone back in his pocket, he looked over his shoulder. The cops at Thirteenth and Broadway were piling out of their cars.

  Perfect. The DPD wasn't going to go home completely empty-handed. They'd missed the Bimbo with the Bomb, but two Iranians trespassing in a closed section of the Denver Public Library after a reported shotgun blast ought to keep them busy the rest of the night.

  C HAPTER

  9

  D YLAN WATCHED SKEETER put the folder back on the desk. With her ball cap low on her face and her mirrored sunglasses, he couldn't see her expression, but he'd seen the tremor that had gone through her when she'd opened the folder. He'd heard the catch in her breath.

  Yeah, she'd had some idea of what she was going to see—they all knew J.T. had come home in pieces—but seeing it had still been a shock. He had to give her credit, though. Another kid might have buckled at the sight of J.T. being . . .

  Jesus, J.T. A wave of heat washed through him, churning his stomach. J.T., Christ.

  And Creed had been there, on his knees, chained in the mud at J.T.'s feet, helpless to stop it.

  “Creed's been disappearing a lot lately, a few days at a time,” Skeeter said, her voice low, her head still bowed.

  “Disappearing?” he repeated. “You mean you don't know where he goes?”

  She shook her head.

  “I thought you tracked all of us when we were in town.” Christian Hawkins, the SDF operator they all called Superman, had told him—or warned him was actually more like it.

  “With Creed, it's only if he feels like letting me. He's disabled more of my tracking devices in the last two weeks than I've lost in the last two years,” she said. “He's running so fast, I can't keep up with him.”

  But not fast enough, Dylan thought. There was no way in hell to outrun what had happened in that camp.

  He dragged his hand back through his hair and took a breath.

  “So you haven't just been putting Royce off? You really don't know where Creed is right now?”

  “No,” she admitted.

  That was the last damn thing he'd wanted to hear. Shit.

  “I should never have sent him.” Hindsight was always so crystal-fucking-clear. Jesus.

  “Creed can take care of himself,” she said, her chin coming up. “He's like you. He doesn't need looking after, at least not for what you sent him to do tonight.”

  Intrigued, Dylan looked at her a little more closely—and wished for the hundred thousandth time that those damned mirrored sunglasses of hers would just disappear.

  She was right, of course. Creed could take care of himself, if he wanted to, especially when he was up against a challenge.

  As for her comment about him, she was right about that, too. He didn't need looking after, never had, not by anyone. What Dylan had never figured out was whether or not that was a blessing or a curse.

  “What about you?” he asked, more curious than he let on—way more curious. How much looking after did she need these days, he wondered, and yeah, that was a whole separate part of his problem tonight: Skeeter Bang. He usually avoided her like the plague. But there just weren't enough people hanging around Steele Street lately for him to have his normal buffer zone. So he was stuck with her, and her platinum ponytail, and the Chinese tattoo running down her arm, and the black muscle shirt clinging to her amazing breasts.

  And that, he reminded himself, was why he hadn't been coming home much since Hawkins had hired her to answer the phones, mess with the computers, and do race-quality tune-ups on the side. According to Hawkins, it had only made sense to also give her a loft up on the eleventh floor.

  “I don't need looking after, either,” she said, sounding damnably assured.

  Right, he thought. That's why Hawkins had practically adopted her, because she'd been doing so well on the streets, only getting her butt kicked every other Saturday night and doing her best to hide the fact that she was older than she looked—which Dylan wasn't at all convinced had saved her from the more sordid aspects of street life. She'd been busted twice for stealing, eight times for graffiti, and had run away from four different foster homes before she'd turned eighteen and Social Services had simply cut her loose.

  Skeeter Bang—honest to God, that was her real name. He'd checked. The hair was real, too. He and Hawkins had tracked down her parents once, and platinum blond was a Bang family trait along with poverty, squalor, and alcoholism. God only knew how many generations of Bangs had come and gone before the miracle had happened: a girl child whose IQ and psychic abilities were off the chart.

  He knew why she wore her ball cap so low and never went without her sunglasses—to cover the scar on her forehead—and it was a testament to Hawkins's good sense that her father was still alive. Left to his own devices, Dylan would have taken the man out and never looked back. Dylan was, even by his own estimation, one coldhearted son of a bitch.

  Except when it came to her, a girl who should have been way too young and way too edgy to even begin to catch his attention.

  Hell, she'd been barely eighteen when Christian Hawkins had dragged her in from the cold—disturbingly young and a street rat to boot. The women Dylan dated didn't know a wrench from a dipstick, and none of them had ever spent a night in anything less than a five-star hotel—let alone the flophouse on Wazee where Hawkins had finally tracked Skeeter down the night she'd been hurt.

  So why had Dylan been riveted to every move she'd made for the last two years?

  He swore again, silently to himself, refusing to answer his own question. He wasn't going there, period. She wasn't even old enough to drink.

  “I've never found a tracker on Trina,” he said.

  “That's because I've never put one on the trailer queen.”

  The trailer queen, as Skeeter called her, was a silver 1965 289 Cobra roadster, the rarest piece of iron in the Steele Street stables, and she was Dylan's ride.

  “Why not?”

  Before she could reply, they were interrupted by a sharp knock on the door.

  “Hart!”

  Dylan crossed the room to open the door. Royce was waiting for him on the other side.

  “I just got a call from my guy downtown, and there's been some sort of shoot-out at the Denver Public Library.”

  Oh, Christ.

  “What's the CIA doing at the library?”

  “The same damn thing you are,” Royce said, clearly not in the mood to play their usual game of cat and mouse. “My information has been running behind yours all day, but we finally got the name we'd been waiting for, the name I think you gave Creed Rivera: Cordelia Kaplan, newest employee of the Denver Public Library. Unfortunately, our guy didn't get there in time to do anything but mop up. The cops are swarming the place, and there's a man down.”

  “Rivera?” Dylan ignored the sudden clenching of his stomach. He was going to hate himself for a very long time if anything happened to Creed tonight.

  “No,” Royce said. “According to an eyewitness, another guy who looked just like the downed man came busting out of the stairwell with a third guy. They started for the man laid out in the study carrels, but
the cops had about ten guns on him, so they hauled ass out of there. The witness thought she was hallucinating—two of the guys looking alike, all big and ugly, both of them with the same gorilla face.”

  Big ugly gorilla face was definitely not Creed, but Dylan had a damn good idea of who fit that description. “The witness saw twins?”

  “Yeah, and another of the librarians remembers them coming in tonight,” Royce said. “I'm thinking the Braun boys.”

  Who the hell else? Dylan thought. Nobody was bigger or uglier than the Brauns, and they were the only twins on Interpol's Most Wanted List.

  “Somebody named Lieutenant Bradley commandeered the crime scene and is probably making a mess out of the place, but my man isn't leaving there without the Braun guy, or the two Iranian nationals they found sneaking around an abandoned part of the building.”

  That would be Lieutenant Loretta Bradley, which meant Dylan didn't have to worry about the library. It would take more than one rabid CIA agent to pull Loretta off her game. She'd have the place dusted and cordoned off before Royce could even get his butt down there, let alone win a jurisdiction standoff.

  “Do you have names for the Iranians?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Skeeter, run me a check on Ernst and Edmund Braun. B-R-A-U-N. Start in Berlin, then go to Prague. See if they show up in New York.”

  “Sure,” she said, and slipped by him into the main office, heading toward the bank of computers spread out across the tables in the center of the room.

  He couldn't help it. He watched as she walked by, all long legs, killer curves, and pure, unadulterated trouble laminated in black leather and silver studs. She was so incredibly sleek, the muscles in her arms smoothly defined, her hands strong yet elegant. And that platinum ponytail—it looked like watered silk. He didn't like to think about how many times he'd imagined it wrapped around his wrist and pooling in his lap.

  And what a lie that was—he did like thinking about it. He liked it way too much.

  Which brought him to her mouth. Skeeter Bang, baby street rat, wallbanger, tagger, had a world-class mouth. Her lips always looked soft, barely pink, never covered with lipstick. Everything about her was so consummately feminine—soft skin, soft hair, softly curved face, wickedly curved body—everything except for the black leather and chain mail she wore exclusive to almost everything else. Her tattoos included a lightning bolt he'd seen parts of running down the left side of her body, and of course, there was always the switchblade she carried on her hip.

  God help him.

  “I'm hoping your guy is as good as you think he is,” Royce continued, drawing his attention back to the real problem at hand—which was not Skeeter Bang's butt. “Or we're going to be picking him up off the street in pieces.”

  “What about Cordelia Kaplan?”

  “Disappeared,” Royce said. “One minute she was making copies up in Research, and the next she was gone, right after a big bald guy with a Fu Manchu was up there asking around for her.”

  “Bruno Walmann.” Walmann took up a whole file in the Starkova/Patrushev case, as did a few other people—notably Reinhard Klein, and some shadowy characters calling themselves the Zurich 7, with everybody out to buy a multimegaton nuclear warhead. Dylan had crossed Walmann's path a few times in Moscow and Berlin. He knew what a dangerous son of a bitch Bruno could be.

  “Look,” Royce said, dialing his attitude down a couple of notches. “This thing is going down. With Walmann here, Reinhard Klein can't be too far away. We've got enough players to make one helluva bust, except we're missing the grand prize. You have to bring Creed Rivera in now.”

  “Yes,” Dylan agreed. It was a damn good idea to get Creed off the streets tonight, Creed and Dominika Starkova—because every dime Dylan had said Rivera had her. No way in hell would Creed have let her get away.

  He shifted his gaze to the windows overlooking Steele Street. There was a helluva blizzard tonight, but even with a snowstorm blinding the city, it wouldn't take Creed more than half an hour to travel the short distance between the downtown library and SDF headquarters. Given that Royce had said his agent at the library was “mopping up,” the action was over—which meant Creed and Ms. Starkova should be showing up any minute.

  But Dylan didn't think his luck was running that good tonight.

  Hell, no.

  COME on, baby,” Creed murmured. “Turn over. Come on.”

  Cody eyed the ignition on the steering column of Creed's car, then she eyed the man turning the key. This wasn't working, she thought, and even though she was trembling again, frozen right down to her knickers, she was starting to sweat. They weren't that far from the library, let alone safely out of downtown. All she had to do was glance through the rear window and she could see the lights on the police cruisers two blocks away. God only knew what she couldn't see—like Bruno the Bull or Ernst Braun sneaking up on them through the blizzard, or the two Iranians who'd slipped into the old library right there at the end.

  She'd recognized one of the voices, Mohamad Jamal Khalesi, another buyer who'd come to Prague to get in on Sergei's big deal.

  There had been ten buyers in the beginning—from extremist militant groups like Hamas in Palestine and the Indonesian Jemaah Islamiah, to the rebels in Chechnya and the remnants of the Taliban in Afghanistan, to shadowy men secretly representing the governments of North Korea, Libya, and Iran, countries who'd already been buying nuclear components and the instructions to use them from Pakistan. Reinhard, acting as Sergei's right-hand man for the deal, was looking to make the score of a lifetime, as was a certain Saudi prince. The other set of buyers had been nameless numbers on a computer screen who went by the code name of the Zurich 7.

  Some of the buyers had fallen by the wayside over the last few weeks, coming up short of cash. Those who had set up the required bank accounts in Switzerland as per Sergei's instructions still had a chance at the prize, and there wasn't a one of them Cody would trust with ten grams of cesium-137, let alone a nuclear warhead. It would be Armageddon.

  No wonder she never slept and could barely eat. She really was carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders.

  “I know it's cold, baby, but you can do this. Come on.”

  He was talking to his car, possibly the coolest car she'd ever seen, a cherry red, double-black-striped Chevelle, but the car was not talking back. It was cold, stone cold, dead cold, ain't-gonna-start-in-this-century cold, and Cody didn't blame it. Despite the way it looked, the car was old, the type of car they'd made back in the sixties and seventies, a muscle car. She'd owned a few old cars herself, nothing fancy like this one, but they'd never started either, not once the temperature dropped.

  “Angelina, baby. You can do this. You can start for me, baby.”

  Angelina? Cody thought. Now the car had a name? Well, name or not, he was wrong. This car was not going to—

  Oh, sweet Jesus. The car started. No, that wasn't right. The car came alive, the whole thing, all at once, from the floorboards to the roof. It turned over, lifted its head, and roared. She could feel the rumble of the engine shimmying through the passenger seat and up her spine, and when Creed pumped the gas, the chassis rocked.

  Good God. She grabbed the armrest and her seat and wondered if Angelina baby was even legal. She couldn't be. No one drove cars like this on the street. And Cody wasn't one to complain, but the cops were only two blocks away, and they could probably hear Angelina growling all the way to the interstate. The library windows were probably shaking. God knew she was.

  “Buckle up,” he said, and gunned the engine again, his voice back to all business now that Angelina baby was up and running.

  And oh, God, the car was definitely running. Cody scrambled for her seatbelt. She could feel the Chevelle rocking beneath her, powering up, getting ready to do God only knew what when he shifted it into gear. What in the world had made her think she'd be safer with him? Her nice little Saturn was parked in the garage across from the library, all steady and r
eliable. She could have figured out a way to escape him and the Brauns and the Iranians and made it to the parking garage. She was so sure of it now that it was too late.

  “What's your address?” he asked.

  “I'm on P-Platte Street, just south of Fifteenth.” She was so damn cold her teeth were chattering again, but she was still in charge, she assured herself, still in control. They were headed to her apartment, which was exactly what she wanted, and regardless of his car, and the big engine, and all the noise they were making, Creed Rivera was still a step up from Reinhard, Bruno, or Khalesi. She could manage him. He wasn't playing a blood game. The others would kill her once they got the information they wanted. He was only going to put her in jail for the rest of her life.

  “South of Fifteenth?” He slanted her a sideways glance. “The old Morrison building?”

  “Y-yes.” Okay. She had a change in plan. She absolutely, positively needed to make her escape to someplace warm, really warm, like Mexico.

  “I thought they condemned the place,” he said, reaching over and pushing a button next to the glove compartment. Part of the dashboard retracted, revealing a small screen and keyboard. Good Lord, he had a computer built into his old car.

  “Just the . . . uh . . . south building.”

  After he'd entered a four-digit numerical code—4167, which she wouldn't forget—his gaze came back to her. “I always thought it was the north building that looked like it was falling apart.”

  All right. So she lived in a dump. So what? And what was the computer for? she wondered. It looked very high-tech. The screen was dark except for a thin purple line tracking low across it in waves, and the keyboard was lit from underneath.

  “They've been remodeling North Morrison,” she said. “I've got one of the new apartments.” Which still wasn't saying much. The best of North Morrison wasn't even close to the great lofts and condos just a stone's throw away on either side of her building. But she hadn't wanted great. She'd wanted cheap and low-profile, and as soon as she got back to her cheap, low-profile apartment in ratty old North Morrison, where paint qualified as a remodel and the elevators were always under repair, she was going to ditch Creed Rivera faster than he could say subsidized housing.