by Tara Janzen
Yes . . . yes . . . yes. It was there, thank God, the distant pulse of freedom, the driving force of it, the chaos barely discernible beneath the beat.
South Morrison had been condemned—and like any condemned place, it attracted the wild restless creatures of the night in hordes. In those places, with those people, Dominika Starkova ruled. She'd “been there, done that” with the world's wildest party crowd—the Russian Mafia on the move across Europe, east and west.
Saturday nights at South Morrison meant crystal meth and skullcaps, ketamine and kamikazes, latex and leather, and industrial-strength garage bands blowing each other out of the basement. All she had to do was get there. Out of the six or seven hundred people who always showed up at the underground party, she wouldn't have any trouble talking one of them into giving her a ride back to her car—and then she was gone and Denver was just a mistake she'd survived.
Flicking her penlight back on, she quickly made her way to the back stairs and started down to the street.
CODY Stark's bathroom emptied out into the rubble and remains of another bathroom, and as soon as Creed left it, he lost the light from the hole. Wherever the hell he was now, he couldn't see his hand in front of his face, but he had it out there anyway, just in case the demolition crew had left another wall standing. In the Spec Ops community, they had a name for this kind of dark: fucking dark.
There had to be another door somewhere, or a window.
Since he couldn't see, he was following his nose. In her six and a half minutes of private bathroom time—a mistake he would never make again, a mistake Dylan never would have made in the first place, female prisoner or not—she must have put on enough makeup and hair spray to sink a battleship. He could smell it, the same overly sweet flowery scent from her bathroom. The question, of course, was why would a woman on the run take the time to fix her hair?
Did the King Kong boyfriend really exist? And was he scheduled to pick her up tonight? She'd still been dressed in her homeless-boy getup, unless . . . unless, geezus, that silky fishnet thing had been an outfit.
Now why in the hell would a person wear fishnet on the coldest freaking night of the year?
Then he heard it.
No. He felt it, the faint thump, thump, thump-thump . . . thump, thump, thump-thump of either the HVAC system getting damned creative—or of an electric bass running through an amp big enough to knock a couple hundred skinny kids on their asses. The hum of her refrigerator and the running of the building's furnace had been enough to drown it out in her apartment, but in no-man's-land, the sound was nearly tangible.
A shift in the rhythm and a crude riff put his money solidly on the bass. There wasn't an HVAC system in the world capable of generating a backbeat.
Suddenly, her escape plan was clear. The Prague party princess was back in business on Platte Street. All he had to do was find the party and he'd find the girl, and he damn well better find the party fast, or the girl was going to be gone.
He couldn't allow that to happen, and yes, it was personal. Damn personal.
On his next step, his boot came up against something solid. He reached out with his hand and found a wall. Thank you, Lord.
Following it along, he was able to pick up his pace, and twenty steps farther on he came across a door. As soon as he opened it, he realized he'd been in a hallway for the last two minutes. Now he was home free, in a cavernous room with enough light coming through the windows to prove that she was long gone.
Damn it. He raced across the room, toward the steady rhythm of the bass. When he got to the windows, he was looking out across the courtyard at South Morrison and could hear the rest of the band and the low buzz of way too many people jammed into way too small a space.
Perfect. A freaking metal rave inside a condemned building was way down on his list of places to go on a frigid winter night. Then he saw her, a small form darting through the snow and weaving her way through the dozens of cars that had spilled off the street and were parked every which way in the courtyard.
He looked to either side of the room, and when he saw the back stairs, he took off again. He hoped to hell she was enjoying her last moments of freedom, because when he caught her—and he was going to catch her—her freedom was coming to a screeching, permanent halt.
He just had to make damn sure that he caught her before anybody else did.
C HAPTER
12
D YLAN STOOD IN the doorway of Skeeter's loft on the eleventh floor of Steele Street where she'd left him, taking his time, taking a breath, and taking a moment to try to figure out how in the hell to get inside. There was a trick to it, because the floor was missing. Not the whole floor, just a big piece right in front of the door, with a palm tree growing out of the hole. Now he did know where the tree came from. The tree was Creed's. Everything growing up from the ninth floor and through the exposed skeleton of the tenth floor belonged to the jungle boy's jungle. Dylan just hadn't known that the jungle had now reached and was slowly devouring the eleventh floor as well. It was a disturbing realization.
It was also all Skeeter Bang's doing. He didn't doubt it for a second. Up until she'd moved in, Creed's whole houseplant inventory had consisted of a philodendron, two scraggly ficus trees, and a couple of big ideas about someday doing something really cool with a whole bunch of plants.
“Someday” had come and gone. Hawkins had given the girl free rein and apparently an unlimited line of credit. With Creed out of the country most of the time, she'd taken over, and now Steele Street was being eaten alive from the inside out. The steel-reinforced building would never collapse, no matter what she decided to grow in Creed's loft, but the insides of the building could go. As a matter of fact, it looked like the insides of this floor had already packed its bags and left. What the ninth-floor jungle hadn't displaced, Skeeter had transformed beyond recognition.
J.T. and Kid's place up on twelve had always looked like a garage sale and a sporting goods store getting it on, with the sporting goods store on top. Hawkins's loft was an elegant, understated, but definitely uptown museum-quality art gallery with a kitchen and a bath. Quinn's place, on the other side of the tenth floor, looked deserted, because it was. Unlike Hawkins, when Quinn had gotten married, he'd gotten completely out of the spy vs. spy business.
Skeeter's place looked like a spaceship.
With a palm tree guarding the hatch.
What in the hell was she feeding everything down there on the ninth floor?
“Just step to your right.” Her voice came from his left, sounding far away, like she'd dropped into a hole. “There's a weight-controlled extension ledge that will swing you around to the main gangway.”
Main gangway? Since when had there been gangways on the eleventh floor? Or low curved walls with low curved ceilings covered in rivets and bathed in softly pulsing blue light?
He looked to his right, the direction she'd gone when she'd so neatly disappeared, and sure enough, there was an extended ledge hidden beneath the palm fronds, apparently weight-activated to swing him around and land him in her foyer—or maybe “deck” was a better way to describe the entrance to her loft with its three tubular gangways going off in different directions.
“Is this the Enterprise, or the . . . uh, Nebuchadnezzar?” The place had a definite high-tech, post-Apocalyptic look to it.
“Millennium Falcon.”
Of course, the Millennium Falcon: every galactic gear head's dream come true, a nuts-and-bolts hot rod with a hyperdrive. There was a reason this “thing” he had for Skeeter Bang was a nowhere deal, and it wasn't all age and edginess related.
Or maybe it was. Didn't people with Han Solo wannabe fixations eventually outgrow them? And what was with all the boxes piled everywhere? Was she moving, or just a pack rat?
He stepped on the ledge, and to his surprise, the extending action was incredibly smooth, almost undetectable. She had some nifty hydraulics back behind the wall somewhere; in seconds, he was connected to the Falcon's sta
ging platform, entryway hatch, or whatever.
“Okay, I've got it.” She popped out of the tubular hall to his left, slightly breathless, as if she'd been running. “I didn't mean to strand you there. I just needed to override the computers in the office. Didn't want Royce and his boys accidentally pulling up Creed's tracking device.”
Yes. Of course. Good idea. All of those words rolled across the logical part of his brain without actually making it out of his mouth—because he was speechless, momentarily struck dumb.
She'd taken off her sunglasses and turned her hat around backward, and her eyes were more beautiful and the scar across her forehead worse than he'd ever imagined either. He'd heard about both from Hawkins, the same way he'd heard about her lightning-bolt tattoo, but he'd never seen them until now.
“Did you get Creed's location?” he asked, working real hard to maintain a normal tone of voice. He deserved an Academy Award. Her eyes weren't just blue, they were a pale, silvery blue, with eyelashes as blond as her hair, and even two years after the fact, the scar on her forehead was a jagged, dark pink line cutting into her creamy skin and across one pale blond eyebrow.
She was exquisite, her coloring otherworldly, and she'd damn near died in that flophouse up on Wazee. Hawkins had stayed by her side for a week and given her a pint of his blood that night in the ER. Dylan hadn't been around much during that time, but he knew she thought that's what had saved her, having Superman's blood pumping through her heart and running through her veins. It was her talisman, and it was always with her—always, with every breath she took . . . Superman . . . Superman . . . Superman.
Dylan knew Christian Hawkins better than any man alive, and he didn't doubt her reasoning for a second. At one time or another, Superman had saved them all.
“I haven't pulled the map up yet, but give me two minutes, and I will.” She grinned and ducked back inside the low curving hallway. “Come on.”
Bingo. The Oscar was his. Nothing of what he was feeling and thinking must have shown, or she'd have been as horrified as he was. He knew from experience how hard a person had to swing a whiskey bottle to break it on somebody's head. Damn hard. What he didn't know was how a person swung a whiskey bottle that hard while aiming at a face like hers. It was incomprehensible.
“So what do you think of my place?” she asked. “Pretty cool, huh?”
“Uh, awesome,” he said, and suddenly felt a hundred years old. She'd been so badly hurt, and was still so young, and he was a thirty-two-year-old guy who couldn't have lived in this rabbit warren to save his life. What in the hell was in all these boxes? They almost filled the tunnel. Half of them were open, spilling their junk onto the floor and into each other, and it all looked like stuff—not just car parts, though there were plenty of those, but bits and pieces of other things, like she spent her nights raiding the salvage lot, the junkyard, and the Salvation Army. It was enough to make him twitch. He wanted to straighten something, maybe close a lid—or three or four, after shoving a few things inside.
“Superman helped with the engineering and the hydraulics, not that we've got a lot in here, but there is some cool stuff, like the ledge. Kid helped with the welding, but it's just been me and Johnny for all the foam work. We've been carting the stuff in here by the bucketful and blowing it on, making the tunnels and things.”
Foam, not riveted steel plates—well, that helped the weight problem, he thought, having to duck his head to follow her through the tunnel. Johnny Ramos was another of Hawkins's street kids. He worked up in their garage in Commerce City, but Dylan knew he spent a lot of time at Steele Street, too, tearing down engines with Skeeter and apparently blowing a whole lot of foam around in her loft.
Just when he was starting to get a little claustrophobic and was praying the tunnel didn't dead-end into something no bigger than an “escape pod,” they came to “the bridge.”
He straightened up, taking it all in, amazed. Logically, he knew they were still on the eleventh floor of Steele Street, not a thousand light-years from Earth, heading toward the Crab Nebula, but that's what it looked like—the illusion of deep space spread out before him, the safety of “the ship” behind him, with the city lights of Denver glowing soft and hazy through the snow, stretching to the dark horizon across a fifteen-foot-high wall of windows and looking very much like a quadrant of stars.
The space between “the bridge” and the windows was pitch-black, an abyss. Logically, again, he knew Creed's loft was below hers, the whole jungle of it, with a solid floor between them, but she'd created a visual chasm with only the most shadowy forms visible across its width. The lighting on the deck was still low, still blue, still pulsating, but it wasn't annoying. It was more like a heartbeat. It was also probably why she'd taken her sunglasses off here when she didn't do it anywhere else. It must have become habit, to keep from running into all the junk she had piled everywhere. He doubted if she even realized she'd exposed herself to him.
“Here we go,” she said, dropping into a chair in front of a bank of computers and hitting a switch. Small, tubular lights hanging from the ceiling came on and cast a soft, steady glow over the computers. There were five screens lined up next to each other on a desk made out of a recycled dual exhaust system and a glass top. The desk was overflowing with crumpled wrapping paper and frazzled-looking bows, with yards of ribbon trailing off everywhere.
She pushed a pile of the paper trash away from around one of the middle screens and set her fingers to flying on the keyboard. A map of Denver immediately came up.
“Party?” he asked, lifting a metallic red ribbon off the desk, curious as hell. There were pop cans and coffee cups scattered around, a hubcap full of popcorn, an old set of rods welded into a sort of pencil cup, and a whole lot of candy bar wrappers. No ashtrays, though. He'd heard she'd quit smoking when Hawkins had quit—just one more thing he needed to thank Superman for doing.
“It was Hacker's birthday yesterday. Johnny and I threw her a bash.” She tossed aside a few more crumpled balls of tissue paper until she found the mouse pad and her mouse. A couple of clicks enlarged the map, zooming it in on Denver proper and leaving out the suburbs.
Dylan knew Cherie Hacker. He'd almost asked her out once, then realized he wasn't quite that insane, not yet, so he'd hired her instead—to hack through other people's firewalls, keep the guys up-to-date with techno toys, and to turn Steele Street into one big hot spot. Then the feds had stolen her. The last he'd heard, she was still an off-site consultant for the FBI. Off-site, off the books, under the radar—that was Hacker's MO.
“She get anything good?”
“Doc Randall sent her a prototype of his newest wi-fi transmitter. She got pretty excited about that. Johnny and I gave her banana slippers. Get it? Banana? Slippers?” She glanced up from the screen, and he gave her a weak grin. Yeah. He got it—like he was starting to get a bad case of heartburn just looking at her place. She had a pile of pizza boxes stacked between two lime green beanbag chairs farther down on the main deck. There was a lamp sitting on top of the boxes along with a half-dead African violet, which officially made the boxes an end table—a pizza-box end table.
And the plant. Hell. She had the makings of a Third World economy growing two floors beneath her, and she kept a half-dead African violet in her apartment?
And why not? he thought, still looking around. She had a circular staircase made up entirely of headers and chrome wheels, a fish tank made out of windshields, and enough party trash to do the whole birthday thing over again tonight.
“Looks like a lot of people came,” he said, glancing back at the screen. There seemed to be some kind of interference, probably the storm. It was really howling out there now—but Skeeter was working through it. After Hacker had left them, Kid had come on board, and between the two of them they'd gotten Skeeter up to speed, teaching her enough for her to more than earn her keep at Steele Street. Hawkins thought she was a bloody genius, and had made it clear to every gangster on the streets that they bette
r not mess with Baby Bang.
She'd brought some freight with her, that was for sure, some unpaid debts and a few out-and-out threats, some incoming, some she was sending. Her crew hadn't wanted to lose her, either; they'd been stars tagging with SB303. But Hawkins had laid down the law. No more hanging with the crew, and no more hanging from the Fifteenth Street Bridge just to tag a girder. The spooky little wallbanger had brought out all of Superman's protective instincts.
That's the way he should feel about her, Dylan thought—protective, fatherly.
But that wasn't the way he felt, not even close, and he didn't like himself too much because of it.
And he really hated having to face that tonight.
“Not many. Not really. There's only a few people I even let up here—Johnny and Gabby, Cherie, Doc Randall, Doc Blake. We watched a movie,” she said. “I stuck a note on your door in case you got home last night.”
“Thanks.” He hadn't been close to getting home last night. He'd been in Washington, D.C., at the British embassy with a woman named Deborah Layton, Dr. Deborah Layton from Georgetown University, whom no one ever called Debbie or Deb. It had been their fifth date in the last two months, and when he'd dropped her off at her brownstone and turned down her offer to come in, he knew she'd been both disappointed and confused—but that's the way things had been going for him for quite a while.
And just like the jungle down on the ninth floor, it was all Skeeter Bang's doing. He'd thought she was a cute, messed-up kid when Hawkins had first brought her home. Okay, a pretty damn cute kid, but still just a kid, with some major problems that he'd been sure Hawkins would help her figure out. That's what Superman did, helped people figure out their problems. Then Dylan had picked up on Skeeter's voodoo vibe, how she anticipated people's moves or what tool they needed, and how she'd sometimes look up at the elevator or a door a few seconds before it opened, or move toward the phone before it rang, and he'd started watching her a lot more closely. The more he'd watched, the more fascinated he'd become—until it had come to this.
