Crazy Wild

by Tara Janzen

  A crazy bad case of . . . heartburn.

  The map on the screen started to flash, drawing his attention back to the job at hand. It was moving faster now, each new map enlarging a smaller and smaller area, honing in on Creed's position.

  “What the hell is he doing on the other side of the river?”

  “I don't know,” she said. She wasn't smiling now, and neither was he.

  Creed needed to get his ass home.

  “I'm going after him,” Dylan said, making his decision. “Keep me updated on his position.”

  He started to turn and go.

  “Wait . . . just a minute. I don't know for sure if that was him or not. I'm getting ghost images.” She leaned over to the next screen and pulled up the map again. “Let me double-check what I've got. See if I can confirm that it's Angelina. It'll just take a minute . . . or two, and save you a lot of time in the long run. Go ahead and make yourself a cup of coffee, if you want. I'll take one, too.”

  Actually, a cup of coffee sounded great.

  “Please,” she said, looking from one screen to the other, each hand working a different keyboard—which simply boggled his mind. “It's bad out there tonight. There's no sense in wandering around in a blizzard until we know exactly where we're going.”

  “We?”

  “We,” she said, leaning even farther over and firing up computer number three. “I'll take mine with cream and sugar. The galley is at the end of the deck. A lot of cream.”

  He wasn't an idiot. He knew how these things worked, and she was right. Taking off into the night before he was sure he was heading in the right direction was useless—and the galley was at the end of the deck. Right.

  C HAPTER

  13

  C REED FOUND CODY'S baggy brown pants and her big gray coat just inside South Morrison's main door, neatly folded and placed in the shadows on a broken-down staircase leading to the upper floors.

  Great. She wasn't wearing any pants, or her coat, which just left the fishnet thing, which meant she was practically naked. Perfect.

  He set his jaw and grabbed her clothes and started down the dimly lit hallway, looking for a way into the basement. The music was so loud coming up from below, harsh and hard-driving, the floor was vibrating beneath his feet, a steady hum of energy.

  The hall ended in a barricade of chain link attached to the walls with scavenged two-by-fours. The opening was small and led to a flight of darkened stairs beyond. The music was almost deafening, rising out of the basement with an occasional strobelike flash of light.

  Putting his back to the wall, he shoved two shells into the shotgun, replacing the ones he'd used in the library. Whatever Cody Stark was up to, Dominika Starkova was nothing but trouble, with more bad guys on her ass than he'd seen since Colombia.

  Shit. He wasn't going to think about Colombia. Not now.

  Reaching a hand to his waist, he loosened the tactical nylon holster looped under his belt and Velcro'd the barrel end around his thigh. He chambered a round before shoving the Mossberg home. He wanted the 12-gauge close to his body, not hidden inside the scabbard sewn into his coat lining. He checked the pistol at the small of his back, then pulled a pair of wraparound shooter glasses out of his breast pocket and slipped them on. The yellow lenses would give him an advantage in the basement, heightening the contrast of whatever light was there—which from what he could see wasn't damn much.

  Suddenly, unexpectedly, a group of people spilled out of the stairwell and into the small opening in the fence, the noise of their ascent masked by the music. He tensed and flipped the edge of his coat over the shotgun. There were three men in their early twenties and two girls who looked a lot younger, one with pink hair, the other with blue—all of them stoned and reeking of alcohol.

  “Hey, man,” one of the boys drawled, his arm draped around the pink-haired girl's shoulders.

  “Hey.” Creed stepped back, letting them pass through the opening. The blue-haired girl's coat caught on a sharp end of chain link, and as one of the guys helped her get untangled, Creed noticed the tracks on her arms.

  The next guy got caught on the same piece of fencing, and they all started to laugh.

  “Oh, man, rough night,” somebody in the group said.

  Yeah, Creed thought, and gonna get rougher if you don't get the fuck outta my way.

  But he didn't say a word. He did reach out and grab the next guy on his way through and made damn sure he didn't get caught up in anything.

  “Hey, man. Thanks.” Bleary eyes lifted to his.

  “Yeah.”

  The last stoner slid by him, and Creed slipped sideways through the opening, entering the darkened stairwell, following the head-banging rhythm down into chaos.

  PATIENCE, Dylan told himself, starting the coffee. Five minutes' worth of patience now could save him hours later. Just him. There wasn't going to be any “we” when he went after Creed, no matter what Skeeter thought.

  The coffee started to drip, and he shifted his attention to the rest of “the galley,” looking for clean cups. Like the main deck, the galley's walls had been augmented in places with liberal doses of foam and make-believe rivets, but with better lighting—to better reveal the amazing amount of junk she had stored in the kitchen.

  What was all this stuff?

  He peered into the top of one box at a pile of broken ceramic tiles in blues and greens, and guessed they made a certain sense. The windshield fish tank was set into a wooden frame with a half-finished blue-and-green mermaid mosaic on it. The next box was purely unidentifiable junk, but the box next to that one held something of true interest.

  More than intrigued, he picked up the small sketchbook on top, the one that said “Self-Portrait.” He flipped it open, expecting to see her face, probably with the ball cap and sunglasses—and instead he saw the tail end of her ponytail and her butt. Her naked butt.

  His heart slowed for a beat as his gaze slid down the piece of paper, taking it all in. The next page was more of the same. So was the one after that, an almost exact duplicate. Then he realized the angle on those amazing curves was slightly different.

  Strange night, he thought, bending the sketchbook and letting his thumb hold back just the bare edge of each page before releasing it. One by one, in near-instant succession, each page followed the last, each one zipping by, the whole of them together making a brief animation of her butt swaying across the page, her ponytail flying, as she turned to one side.

  He pressed his thumb down, stopping on an end page. More than once since Hawkins had first mentioned it, he'd wondered about her lightning-bolt tattoo—but his imagination had been lacking the necessary epic scale.

  Wow.

  He picked up another sketchbook, and then three more, before he found what he was looking for, a full side view. He tilted the book one way and his head the other, and he had to wonder how much of the tattoo Hawkins had seen. Not much, he hoped, because the only way to see the whole thing would be to see her stripped down to her birthday suit. The ink started at her ankle and streaked up her leg in all its zig-zag electrified glory, a racing stripe for her body. It curved over her amazing hip. Halfway up her rib cage it took a sharp turn onto her back and shot up over her shoulder.

  The girl didn't have a mundane cell in her entire being, inside or out. She was all edge—and he'd just set some sort of a record. They hadn't been alone ten minutes, and he'd already seen her naked.

  Not all of her, though. The drawings of herself were just bits and pieces, like her boxes of junk—her arm with the Chinese tattoo; her leg, hands, and feet; the curve of her hip; the muscles of her back; her belly button and her smooth abs but no full frontals, which was just as well. Even the side view stopped at her neck, and her arm was placed to conceal the curve of her breast. Her style was pure manga, but he didn't need the title of “Self-Portrait” to recognize her. She had an amazing body. She owned the words sleek and strong. There was no mistaking her.

  And there wasn't a single drawing
of her face in any of the sketchbooks. She had other people, especially Hawkins and Kid and Johnny. Hacker was in some of the drawings, and so were Quinn and Creed. In a couple of the sketchbooks, Skeeter had made them all into superheroes: Superman for Hawkins, of course, but an apocalyptic Superman, his hair wild and longer than it was in real life, his costume ripped, his expression one of stone-cold justice in the flesh—with Kid backing him up as Chaos, a fierce-looking dude in torn yellow spandex with a jazzed-up M40 in his hand. Cherie Hacker was a character named Metrogirl; she, too, had wild, flying hair and a rather menacing-looking utility belt strapped around her optimistically curvaceous hips. In real life, Hacker was no siren. Quinn was Captain America, wrapped in the flag and super clean-cut, which was stretching imagination to the breaking point, but compared to the rest of the chop-shop boys, Quinn was a bona fide all-American hero. Johnny was a squirrelly-looking, wiry little guy named Gearhead, and Creed was Tarzan, but he didn't look like any Tarzan Dylan had ever seen. Skeeter had turned Creed into some other kind of jungle boy—something more feral with a wild, primal edge and a catlike countenance. The jungle was part of him, the vines twining through his mane of hair, the trees making a fortress behind him. His fingernails, rough and horny claws, gripped the tree limbs, but it was definitely Creed snarling at him from out of the lianas and leaves, his teeth bared, his expression fierce.

  The last few pages were all of J.T. as the Guardian, a dark angel with a sword and a ferocious scowl, short, spiky black hair, low-slung jeans, a torn black T-shirt, and powerful raven black wings. When Dylan flipped the pages, the wings beat and J.T. sliced the sword across the page.

  It broke his heart.

  God, J.T.

  He closed the book and set it on top.

  She hadn't drawn him, and he felt that as a hurt, too, and it irritated the hell out of him that he cared. It wasn't like him to be maudlin over some girl.

  Except Skeeter Bang wasn't just some girl, not by anyone's standards. He knew that. He'd figured it out over a year ago, and that's when he'd started avoiding coming home.

  He looked out toward the main deck and the huge expanse of windows beyond. The blizzard wasn't letting up. If anything, it was getting worse. He was going to have a helluva time getting to Creed, but his instincts were telling him to do it, and to do it now. Coffee time was up.

  “Holy crap,” her voice came from over by the computers.

  “What?” he asked, stepping out of the kitchen.

  “I've got a lock on Angelina.” She looked over at him. “We better make that coffee to go.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I've pegged him at Platte Street, just south of Fifteenth, which is the last place I'd expect Creed to be on Saturday night. It's just not his scene.”

  “What isn't?”

  “The party.” She gave her head a shake, her eyebrows drawing together into two white blond lines over her pale blue eyes. “The biggest freakin' party from the Front Range to the eastern 'burbs, every Saturday night in the basement of South Morrison. The place rocks hard, scary hard, even for me.”

  Well, that had to be pretty damn hard, Dylan thought. Like Skeeter, he'd done some time on the streets, and it took a lot to scare a kid who'd survived that kind of life.

  “He could be at North Morrison,” she continued. “There are a few floors of apartments in North, and there are a few shops around down by the river, but I bet they're closed tonight. So I'm guessing South Morrison is where we better start.”

  “I thought South Morrison was condemned.”

  “It is,” she said. “The whole thing is coming down next month, if it doesn't fall down before then. The place is a disaster just waiting for the right time to happen.”

  “So what the hell is Creed doing there?” he asked.

  “I don't know,” she said, pushing out of her chair and heading for the kitchen. “But we need to find out, right now.”

  Dylan stepped aside for her to enter the galley and watched as she slammed through a couple of kitchen cabinets before she found a stash of commuter cups.

  “Black?” she asked.

  “Yes.” He didn't know if she was conscious of it or not, but as she poured the coffee, she turned her hat around, so the bill shaded her face, and slipped her sunglasses back on. “You're not going with me.”

  She had to know that much. She'd been with Steele Street long enough to know the rules, especially since the only rules they had all pertained to her.

  “Sure I am.” She snapped the lid on one cup and handed it to him. Hers got loaded down with three tablespoons of sugar before she started pouring in the cream, which did nothing to ease the churning knot his stomach had been in since he'd seen the pictures of J.T.

  “What are you making?” he asked, his gaze narrowing as she kept pouring in the cream . . . and pouring. It wasn't a cup of coffee anymore, no way, not after three tablespoons of sugar.

  “Dinner,” she said, finally snapping the lid on the cup.

  Good god, she'd used over half a pint of cream, heavy cream, not half-and-half. Holding the tip of her finger over the drinking hole, she gave the cup a few good shakes.

  “Or dessert. Take your pick.”

  He picked none of the above, thank you.

  “I'm going alone.” It was only reasonable, and she knew it as well as he did. After what Royce had said happened at the library, anything could go down at South Morrison, if that's where Creed had gone.

  “You can't,” she said matter-of-factly, opening one of the kitchen drawers.

  “Can't?” That was a first. Nobody ever used the word “can't” in relation to what he could or could not do, not since he'd walked out of his mother's life at the tender age of fifteen and never looked back. Skeeter had no idea how similar their stories were—barring a rather staggering financial gap. She'd grown up in poverty, and he most certainly had not.

  “You need me,” she said, pulling out a holstered Heckler and Koch 9mm and strapping it around her hips.

  “What for?” he asked. She sounded pretty damn sure of herself, and he knew she knew her way around the gun. In the months she'd been at Steele Street, Superman had all but turned her into the next Lara Croft, Tomb Raider. Dylan couldn't say he was all that pleased with that particular course of study. The car stuff was great, and she'd proven invaluable at meeting SDF's high-tech needs—but weapons training? He didn't like to think of her getting anywhere near a line of fire.

  “South Morrison is a mess, a real labyrinth,” she explained. “Half of it is already torn down inside. You could find the party without me, easy. There'll be six, seven hundred people there, maybe more, and a couple of bands loud enough to bring the building down on your head—but I can find Dominika Starkova.”

  He didn't say a word at first, just watched himself in the reflection of her sunglasses and wished to hell he could see her eyes again. In his gut, he believed her. He didn't want to believe her. He also didn't want her anywhere near Dominika Starkova. The woman was dangerous.

  “And you don't think I can find her?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Not like I can. I've been getting a vibe on her all night.”

  A vibe. Like the vibe she'd gotten on J.T.

  Hell.

  SDF had been given a mission, direct orders from General Grant, simple, straightforward orders: Find Dominika Starkova and bring her in—tonight.

  And that meant tonight, not tomorrow, or the day after, or whenever the hell Creed got around to doing it—but tonight.

  Despite what Skeeter thought, he knew he could find Dominika Starkova. But he had a feeling Skeeter could find her quicker, and in his business, that counted.

  “Do you want me to fire up the Humvee?” she asked.

  Humvee?

  “What Humvee?” SDF didn't own a Humvee. They were rare-iron aficionados, muscle-car maniacs, chop-shop boys with a penchant for Porsches. They did not lunk around in seven-foot-wide four-wheel-drives.

  “The one Johnny an
d I supercharged last week.”

  On the other hand, a supercharged Humvee could probably do zero to sixty in less than a minute and a half, even in the blizzard of the century.

  C HAPTER

  14

  C REED KEPT CLOSE to the wall all the way down the stairs. On the landing, he strode past two kids trying to hold each other up and get it on at the same time and failing at both. Geezus.

  At the top of the last flight of stairs, he found himself looking down onto a seething, whirling mass of humanity. Hundreds of neon glow sticks and the strobes going off everywhere made it damn near impossible to distinguish one person from the next—and freakin' black fishnet seemed to be the outfit du jour. It was everywhere he looked—a flash of stark light, a body frozen in mid-gyration, an upraised arm sporting a fishnet sleeve, but not her arm, not her sleeve.

  Shit.

  He checked the makeshift stage. There were people dancing with the band—but none of them was Cody Stark.

  His gaze came back to the crowd, and he began systematically quartering the room, but everything in the room was moving, changing shape, shifting into the next quarter, creating chaos.

  She could be right in front of him, and if a strobe didn't fire at the exact right time, and her face wasn't at the exact right angle, he'd never see her.

  She could be anywhere . . . but the two dark-haired men flashing into view, flash after frozen flash of them plowing their way through the crowd, hell, they shouldn't be there at all. They were older; their body language quiet, serious, intent; their demeanor and their faces foreign, one tall and hawk-nosed, the other darker skinned and more rotund. They weren't dancing. They were searching for something—and his money said they were searching for Dominika Starkova.

  As a matter of fact, his money said they'd found her. They were moving with unerring focus, and in the next flash of light, Creed saw the tracking device in the taller man's hand.