Crazy Wild

by Tara Janzen

  C HAPTER

  10

  S KEETER NO SOONER sat down and started typing in her access code for the check on Ernst and Edmund Braun than the screen next to her blipped on. She watched as a purple line snaked out of the lower left-hand corner and undulated across the black screen—Hot damn. It was Creed. A broad grin split her face.

  By typing in his ID number she could pull up a map on the screen and track Angelina. She would know exactly where the Chevelle was and where she was going—but so would everybody else in the room, which probably wasn't what Dylan wanted, not just yet. Hot damn. He's gotten out of the library and back to Angelina. Getting back to SDF headquarters would be a piece of cake now. Angelina was heavy, with 454 cubic inches of raw power, a zillion upgrades on her suspension, and some big-ass snow tires to get her through the storm. She'd take Creed anyplace he wanted to go tonight. Skeeter just hoped to hell that was home—or maybe not.

  Her glance skimmed over the CIA agent on the far side of the room. Hell, she didn't know what to think.

  “I . . . uh—” She cleared her throat and turned around in her chair. “I'll be back in a minute.”

  She rose from her chair rather shakily, and slid a hand low across her stomach, giving a damn good imitation of someone in serious gastric distress. Like maybe somebody who was about to lose their lunch because of some really terrible pictures she'd seen.

  The concerned look on Dylan's face lasted only as long as it took him to see the computer screen behind her. The sudden narrowing of his gaze and the glint in his eyes told her he saw the act for what it was.

  In two steps, Dylan was by her side, his arm coming around her, and it was oh, so amazing, being that close to him. She leaned against his side, playing it up—soaking it up—knowing this was as good as it was ever going to get between them, a fake hug dramatized for the CIA.

  Man, if her life was going to get any more pitiful, she didn't want to know about it. To her surprise, his arm tightened around her as they walked toward the elevator, pulling her in closer, as if he thought she really couldn't make it without his support, which was damned interesting, because he'd definitely seen the computer screen. He knew what scam she was running here.

  “I'll be right back,” he said over his shoulder to Royce, then added, “Don't touch anything.”

  Skeeter had to fight back another grin. Right, she thought. The minute she and Dylan got in the elevator, Royce and his goons were going to be touching everything in sight. She was counting on some truly cosmic odds of probability to keep them from punching 4167 into the tracking computer's keyboard before she could get to her loft and override the main office.

  CODY Stark lived in a dump, but at least it was a dump with heat, and she'd fixed the place up so it had a homey kind of Arabian Nights feel, with scarves draped over her bed and a beaded curtain between the bedroom and the rest of the apartment.

  Creed finished checking the room by looking in her closet, moving her clothes first to one side, then the other. When he didn't find anything, he reholstered his pistol.

  She was watching him from the doorway, which he thought was a damn good idea. He was watching her, too. If she had a boyfriend, he wasn't home, and if she had a gun, she hadn't gone for it, but he wasn't taking anything for granted.

  “Do you want some tea?” she asked.

  “This isn't a social visit.” He'd finally figured that out, and maybe he'd even convinced himself of the fact.

  Walking back out into the living area, he scanned the combination living room/kitchen, looking for anything unusual, out of place, or incriminating. She had one window, and he walked over to it.

  “You were going to tell me about an incident in Karlovy Vary,” he reminded her, pushing the curtain aside. There was nothing outside but the blizzard and a couple of cars moving slowly down the street. “And you were going to show me something here in your apartment.” He dropped the curtain and shifted his attention back to her.

  She hesitated, then walked past him into the bedroom and pulled a cardboard box out from under the bed. After a few seconds of searching through some clothing and other items, including what looked like a few small jewelry boxes, she pulled out a notebook.

  He followed her over and took it, and immediately wondered what was going on. The cover was made out of heavy purple paper with pressed flowers glued to the top—not exactly the type of document holder he was used to seeing. The first page explained it all. To Prague and Back Again—The Travels of Cordelia Stark was written across the top in bright purple letters.

  He flipped to the second page, and then the third, and the fourth. It was a freaking photo album, a vacation photo album, with pictures stuck in special slots, and tourist attraction brochures stuffed into the binding, and looking at it, he had to wonder if he'd gone to a whole helluva lot of trouble for nothing. He should have taken her straight to SDF headquarters.

  On page five he stopped and turned the album toward her. “Who is this?”

  She glanced down at the photograph he was pointing at.

  “My father, Dr. Dimitri Starkova.”

  Well, there was a news flash.

  “He's in Prague?”

  She nodded. “That's why I went there, to see him.”

  I'll be damned, Creed thought. No one had mentioned a father. It wasn't in any of the intelligence reports. Starkova wasn't an unusual name, but the only Starkova anyone had connected to Sergei Patrushev was Dominika.

  “Prague is a big city, though,” she continued. “Lots of action, lots of trouble to get into, and I fell in with a bad crowd. When things got rough, I cut my visit short and headed home.”

  “Rough like the incident in Karlovy Vary?” The scene the CIA agents had discovered in the warehouse had been about as rough as it got.

  “Yes.” Cody turned her face aside and hoped he would interpret the move as a sign of distress and regret, and not anger. She couldn't think of her father without getting angry, and she couldn't afford to be angry right now. Cool, calm, collected, that was her, because in the next few minutes, she was going to escape. “My father, well, he'd be devastated if he knew what kind of people I'd gotten involved with.”

  But not nearly as devastated as she'd been to realize the kind of people he was involved with, people he'd practically sold her to in order to save his own hide. Her mother had tried to warn her, but Cody hadn't listened. In truth, her father was far worse than her mother knew.

  “There are other pictures of him,” she said, reaching over and flipping a page. “I left in kind of a hurry, and didn't say good-bye, and I was hoping you could contact him, let him know I'm okay.”

  “You're not okay,” he said bluntly.

  And her father was dead, which meant he was about as concerned for her welfare now as he'd been the night he'd taken her to Sergei's and signed her life away as collateral against the mountain of gambling debts he owed a whole consortium of the Russian Mafia.

  Deliver the bomb, Sergei had told her father, or she'll suffer the consequences—which had been enough to put her in a cold sweat, because by then, it had become obvious that her father's problems far outweighed any parental sentiments he might have harbored.

  For years, Dimitri Starkova had lived off the Mafia, untouchable because of the nuclear warhead he had been in charge of moving from a military base in the U.S.S.R. Their destination had been top secret, and Dimitri, as the commanding officer, had always held to the story that he was the only one with the exact coordinates of the missile's final location. Those security precautions had paid off, he'd often bragged. With the government in disarray and the army in transition during the dissolution of the Soviet Republic, he'd retired and taken his information with him.

  Dimitri had never committed the location to paper or cyberspace. It was all in his head, he'd said, so his head had been safe—until his loans had begun to exceed his value with or without the rumored bomb to back him up.

  With her father's growing debt, a heretofore unknown da
ughter in tow, and the world market desperate for a rogue nuclear weapon, Sergei had decided the time was ripe to force the issue.

  “So your involvement with Reinhard Klein is purely social?”

  She nodded. “A bad decision on my part, but I've learned my lesson. If I can give you information that will help put him away, my life will be a lot easier.”

  He didn't look like he believed a word she'd said, and she didn't blame him. She wasn't a very good liar.

  “So tell me what happened in Karlovy Vary.”

  She took a deep breath, as if preparing to tell him a long, painful story, which it would have been, but then she paused.

  “Do you mind?” she said, gesturing toward the bathroom. “I'll only be a minute.”

  C HAPTER

  11

  F OUR MINUTES LATER, after searching the rest of the apartment and half of her dresser, Creed got to her bottom drawer. He no sooner opened it up than a low whistle left his lips. The not-so-blonde bimbo had the days of the week embroidered on her underwear, and if Creed said so himself, Tuesday looked especially fine.

  She also had some money tucked into the corner of the drawer. He picked up the small bundle and let it flip, bill by bill, off his thumb—five hundred dollars, five crisp one-hundred-dollar bills stacked in a neat pile and held together with a green paper clip.

  He pocketed the money before picking up Tuesday's scrap of white lace and pink rosebuds and lifting it into the light. It was definitely some juvenile sexual fantasy he should have outgrown that made the pristine, virginal pair an instant favorite. Friday, he noticed, was black silk with a single, strategically placed red heart—pure Dominika. Sunday was baby blue with embroidered daisies—Cody Stark. Thursday got all bad-girl again: hot see-through red with a black lace trim and a matching push-up bra.

  Her entire wardrobe was like that: half punk-rock raver and half pure Bible Belt librarian. He knew because he'd been through the whole thing, from her closet to her dresser, to the suitcase he'd found under the bed, and besides the five hundred dollars in the dresser, he'd found the equivalent of another five hundred dollars in Euros inside the suitcase. There hadn't been any cash in the cardboard box she'd pulled out, but he'd checked the mailing label and noticed she'd insured it, had it sent General Delivery to Denver from Dresden, and signed for it today.

  A thousand dollars, all of it in his pocket, because where she was going, she was going to need it, probably sooner rather than later. Confiscating her cash before the CIA hauled her off was the least he could do. Money could grease a few wheels in Leavenworth just like it did everywhere else.

  What he hadn't found was a map, or a computer disk, or jump drive, or any kind of electronic storage device, which didn't mean they weren't there.

  The sound of the water being turned on again in the bathroom made him pause. He lifted his head, listening. After a few more seconds he heard her rustling through her medicine cabinet—again. She'd flushed twice, which didn't surprise him. With all she'd been through tonight, her stomach was probably feeling a little weak.

  He checked his watch. She'd been in the bathroom for almost six minutes now, a busy six minutes. He'd looked the bathroom over again before he'd let her go in alone, and the place was secure, a typical low-end bathroom in a low-end studio apartment: a single-piece shower/tub enclosure with a curtain, a commode, a sink with a cabinet underneath, a medicine cabinet above the sink, and a towel bar with some silky black fishnet stuff hanging off of it that had definitely caught his attention.

  He went back to searching through her lingerie and enjoying it just a little too much. The woman had nice underwear, a nice stash of cash, and was living in a dump in a construction zone. When she'd said they were remodeling North Morrison, she'd meant daily, and from what he'd seen the job would last well into spring. They'd had to hike the four flights up and make their way around construction supplies on every floor.

  Driving the few miles to her place had given him a chance to clear his head. He didn't know what he'd been thinking. He wasn't going to get laid tonight. Far from it. He was going to do his job and take her to headquarters. In his line of work, only an idiot would sleep with a black-market arms dealer—and there weren't any idiots in his line of work. Faulty judgment killed them off long before they got into Spec Ops.

  So what was he doing with Tuesday's panties in his hand?

  Nothing, he assured himself. Absolutely nothing. She was his wake-up call. That's all. He'd been hiding out under Mercy's hood for two weeks, but now he was back on the job, and it was time to come clean.

  It was time to tell the truth.

  Kid knew what had happened to J.T. Creed had told him everything—and Kid hadn't come home. Creed didn't know if he ever would. Apparently there was a girl, Nikki McKinney, an artist up in Boulder Kid had left behind. He'd talked about her damn near nonstop, but Creed didn't know if she was enough to pull Kid free of the bad places he'd been, of the bad things he'd done.

  Ghost killers, los asesinos fantasmas, they'd all made names for themselves in South America, but especially Kid, and Creed felt guilty as hell about that, too.

  The toilet flushed again—and every warning bell in his head instantly went off. Shit! He whirled on his feet and ran across the room. It was a fucking pattern—turn on the water, rustle through the medicine cabinet, flush the toilet. He didn't even bother to knock. He gave the door a roundhouse kick right next to the jamb at the lock plate. Everything splintered, and his foot almost went through the goddamned wall.

  He jerked the door open on the tiny room—and it was empty. Totally fucking empty. Nobody there. Nada.

  But she hadn't disappeared into thin air. He jerked the shower curtain off its rod. Nothing. Then he did a full 360. The silky fishnet stuff was missing from the towel bar, and there was about half a ton of makeup upended in the sink—bottles, tiny boxes, tubes, and a hundred, oh, hell, two hundred pencils of every color known to man, four or five kinds of hair spray and colored gel—all of it smelling overly sweet and flowery. There wasn't so much as a scuff mark anywhere, but she hadn't dematerialized and then rematerialized on the other side of one of these frickin' walls or through the ceiling.

  That left the sink cabinet. Crouching down, he opened the small door. Nothing but three rolls of toilet paper and a box of tampons—he opened it up—with a tape player tucked inside.

  Hell. She'd chumped him good, but she hadn't slid down any pipes or gone through the heat vent.

  He ran his hand across the back wall of the cabinet, and sure enough, felt a tiny notch.

  He was so fucked.

  Using the tips of his fingers, he pried the panel loose.

  Son of a bitch. There was a goddamned good reason she'd chosen an apartment on the fourth floor of a building where the elevators didn't work—because half of the fourth floor had been gutted. Behind the walls of her apartment was a no-man's-land—and so it's down the fricking rabbit hole.

  Squeezing himself into the cabinet, he started inching his way around the pipes and through the too-damn-small-to-make-this-easy opening. It was pitch-dark on the other side of the wall, but he didn't give a damn. The scariest thing in the dark was always him.

  RIGHT along here somewhere, Cody thought, shining her penlight on the floor, following a board. Then she saw it, a splotch of yellow paint.

  Four boards south. She swept her light to the left and knelt on the floor. In seconds she had five hundred dollars in her coat pocket, getaway money to go with the two thousand in Euros she'd taken out of the cardboard box under the bed as she'd given him the photo album. She had another thousand in dollars and Euros squirreled away in her apartment, but if Creed Rivera was even only half as good as she thought he was, she could write that money off as lost, probably to Angelina's upkeep. Thank God she'd learned not to keep all her eggs in one basket. Twenty-five hundred wasn't much, but it was enough to get her out of town.

  Sergei hadn't been a generous jailer, though he hadn't physically mistreated
her either. But money had flowed like water at all of the bars and restaurants where he'd taken her to show her off, his little Dominika, his insurance policy, and the parties had always gotten out of hand—the booze, the drugs, the heat, the whores, the music. Sergei had wanted to make sure people saw her, and she'd made a point of picking up cash wherever she'd found it, off the tables and out of the pockets of men too drunk to notice. It had been Sergei's idea to dye her waist-length hair platinum blond. Turning her into a blond Russian bombshell, he'd said, but somehow, in Russian, the name had gotten twisted into the Blonde with the Bomb, which had suited Sergei just fine. He'd liked having her near him, like a pet.

  She'd known her looks hadn't hurt, and she'd played them up to the max, seriously doubting that her father was going to come to her rescue. The minute he'd left Sergei's mansion, after making a touching good-bye with the slim volume of poetry, she'd known she was on her own. Sink or swim.

  She hadn't figured her father was going to fare much better. After more than a decade of decadent living, however charming, urbane, and highly educated he was, she wouldn't have bet anything on his memory or him being able to even survive a trip into the wilds of the old Soviet frontier, let alone find anything there—and she'd been proven right.

  Heart attack. Complete and total cardiac arrest had hit him in the mountains of Tajikistan.

  God help her, she'd broken every law in the book since escaping Sergei's clutches—forged documents, illegal border crossings, out-and-out theft—and she'd known her freedom would be hard to hold.

  But she was close again, so close she could almost hear it, almost feel it.

  Staying very still, she switched off her penlight, and even in the dark, closed her eyes.