Crazy Wild

by Tara Janzen

  Oh, God. Dear God. Cody's heart was racing, pounding in her chest.

  Akbar was screaming. Someone else shouted something she couldn't make out through the ringing in her ears, but she knew why Akbar was screaming. His kneecap had exploded.

  Hashemi was dead, she had no doubt, and she was trapped. She tried to pull free, then froze as a dark shadow passed overhead.

  Oh, God. Akbar's screams turned to gasping sobs and moans. She heard a struggle, heard muttered curses, and saw movement in the shadows.

  Any second the shadow would come for her—and she was trapped.

  She jerked her hands again and struggled against the bindings around her ankles. Get out. Oh, God, get out, she thought, the words ricocheting around her brain as every breath became harder to draw. The smell of blood filled the air, and a sob of pure panic broke free from her throat. She couldn't breathe, and her arm felt like it was breaking with her full weight on it. She couldn't move—and then it was too late.

  The shadow passed over her again, stealing the faint light, plunging her into utter darkness. A man bent over her. She could feel the weight of his presence, hear his breathing. Oh, God. If it was Reinhard or Bruno, she was doomed. With a soft grunt, the man shoved Hashemi further away. The faint stream of light from the hall returned, and she saw a bent knee and the drape of a dark coat. She hurt so badly, every muscle in her body, every bone.

  Help me, she wanted to say. Help me. But her mouth was too dry, and she knew there wasn't any help to be had, especially when she saw the man's hand reach across her, holding a knife.

  Everything was moving too fast. Blood was running across the floor, glistening in the low light.

  Oh, God. She was going to be sick. She was going to faint.

  Hashemi's killer leaned in closer behind her, the knife still in his hand, and Cody cringed.

  “Hang on,” he said. “I'll have you free in a second.” The voice was rough-edged, rock-steady—and recognizable. Creed Rivera.

  The sudden surge of relief she felt made her weak. He sliced through her bonds, first her hands, then her waist, and each of her ankles, each cut a single, swift stroke. She tried not to think about the blood on the floor, about what he'd done to save her. He had saved her, and nothing else mattered.

  He pulled the chair away from her, but she couldn't move. Her arms and legs were numb. Akbar's moaning gasps and short, harsh screams were edged in pain, but all she could think was that she'd been saved.

  “Come on,” Creed said, hauling her up to a sitting position and propping her against the apartment wall. “Stay put.”

  The order was like a bad joke. Her limbs felt like dead weight. She wasn't going anywhere, not yet, not under her own power. She watched him roll Hashemi over, heedless of the bloody mess he'd made, and pat the man down, taking things out of his pockets and from inside his coat. It all went in his own coat, every paper, Hashemi's wallet, a set of keys, and something that looked like a wristwatch, only thicker, more like a hard plastic cuff with gadgetry on its face. When he was finished with Hashemi, he moved to Akbar, who wasn't dying, but was handcuffed with the same plastic cuffs Creed had used on her. Blood flowed down the side of his face. His leg was shattered, but his eyes were wide open and full of pain and fury.

  Creed said something to him, his voice low and hard-edged, and Cody would have sworn the language he used was Dari. Akbar certainly understood him. The smaller man went livid, his words coming fast and furious between his gasps of agony. Creed ignored him and just kept patting him down, relieving him of all his possessions. Every movement was controlled, his actions swiftly executed and efficient. He had both men stripped of their goods and was back by her side in less than a minute.

  “You okay?” he asked, pulling Hashemi's strange watch out of his pocket and pressing a button on the front.

  When she didn't immediately answer, he lifted his gaze to hers, and she nodded, a single, automatic movement.

  “Good,” he said, returning his attention to the watch. A red light blinked on in the center of it. There was no time display, just a bunch of dials and small buttons, which he spent a few seconds adjusting. When he lifted it to her shoes and began slowly running it up her body, she suddenly understood what he was doing.

  “It's the earrings,” she said, her throat so dry it hurt. “Hashemi told me it was the earrings they'd all been following.” The earrings she'd gotten out of the package she'd picked up this afternoon at the post office. She'd no sooner told him than the red light stopped blinking and went full-out solid, right when he passed the tracking device past her ear.

  “Sure enough,” he said, dropping the tracker in his pocket and reaching for the earrings. In seconds, he'd removed them, an exquisite set of ruby-and-diamond-encrusted crosses by Olena, a Ukranian designer. They were worth two thousand Euros in Prague, but to Creed Rivera, they weren't worth the risk. She watched with a mixture of dismay and relief as he leaned over and tossed them down a broken, exposed pipe jutting out of the wall. The tiny clatter of their fall didn't last more than a second or two, before they were lost to the world.

  The sound of voices in the hall brought her moment of dismay to a sudden halt. Her adrenaline spiked, and she tried to get to her feet. Creed was way ahead of her, scooping her up into his arms and whisking her through a wide gash in the wall behind them where a door had once been. The hinges were still hanging on what was left of the jamb. In two steps he had them hidden in the shadows and rubble of the dark room. There was no outside door in this room—a bedroom, she figured—and the window had been busted out, leaving it open to the weather and the wind howling outside. Snow swirled across the carpeting and drifted in the corners. There was no furniture, just piles of trash and junk. He let go of her legs, letting her feet slide to the floor, but kept his other arm tightly around her, holding her up.

  She clung to him, terrified of who might come in the apartment with another tracker in his hand—but nobody did. The voices went on by, laughing and swearing in good old American English, two guys talking about a girl. She didn't relax, though, not for a second—because he didn't. Every muscle in his body was on alert, tensed, ready for whatever the hell happened next.

  Well, so was she, so tense and ready she felt like she was going to snap.

  In another couple of seconds, all that nauseating tension proved justified. A new set of voices came down the hall speaking German.

  Reinhard.

  Her blood ran cold. She would know his voice anywhere, in any language. She heard it in her nightmares, sneaking up on her in the dark, whispering in her ear, threatening her.

  More voices joined in, more than she could distinguish from each other, all of them getting closer to the apartment. She and Creed Rivera were horribly outnumbered—and oh, God, he'd killed Hashemi.

  The Afghan had said the Zurich 7 were in Denver. It could be them coming down the hall with Reinhard. She'd never seen the Zurich 7, didn't even know if there were actually seven of them or not and seriously doubted that any of them were from Zurich. All of their dealings with Sergei had been encrypted and sent over the Internet, the amount of money they had been able to secure effectively pushing out all of the smaller buyers, except the Iranians, who were hanging on by a thread but didn't really have a chance against the major players.

  An arc of light sliced through the gash in the wall, and a man said, “Scheisse!” Shit!

  Cody knew how awful the whole thing looked, with Hashemi dead and his blood everywhere and Akbar screaming and writhing on the floor. She heard a shout, sounding like Akbar, and then the apartment was overrun.

  She gasped as Creed tightened his hold on her waist and ran for the window. He was damn near crushing her, but the worst was the window.

  He shoved her out ahead of him onto a rickety old fire escape, and oh, God—she felt like she was going to die. The bitter wind slashed at her skin, each snowflake feeling like the cut of a knife, the fishnet giving her no protection at all. The air was too frigid to b
ear, too raw. She was too exposed, her heart racing, her head pounding, her muscles throbbing, tingling, trying to come back to life and failing against the sheer fierceness of the blizzard. Her last ounce of strength was torn away from her by the icy maelstrom, and then she was falling.

  C HAPTER

  16

  C REED SWORE, catching her as her knees buckled and swinging her back up into his arms. He'd had a fistful of fishnet, holding onto her while he'd ducked through the window after her, but he'd still almost lost her. Geezus—the friggin' window. It hadn't been his first choice. Going back into the apartment, pumping shells through the shotgun, that would have been his first choice if he'd been alone. Of course, if he'd been alone, there would have been no reason to go back in with guns blazing, because all the tangos in South Morrison would have been someplace else chasing after Cody Stark.

  And they were tangos. Every damn last one of them. He'd read their files, and he knew Reinhard Klein billed himself as an international businessman, but anybody who dealt with the Taliban and the likes of Ahmad Hashemi and Qasim Akbar was a terrorist in his book.

  Geezus. Selling guys like Hashemi a friggin' nuclear warhead was like signing a death warrant for New York, or London, or any of half a dozen major cities in the world. Let the Chechens buy it, and you could say good-bye to Moscow. Give it to Jemaah Islamiah and say so long to a big chunk of Indonesia. Al-Qaeda didn't bear thinking about. Hamas or Hizbullah would blow Israel right off the map. It would be Holocaust on a global scale. There would be no end of destruction if a rogue nuclear bomb was set off.

  So what did that make the woman freezing to death in his arms?

  Tango with a capital T.

  Fuck.

  And what all the assholes in the apartment had not been able to do, he was going to manage without even trying—namely, be the death of her. Her outfit put a whole new spin on the term “scantily clad.” He'd lost her clothes somewhere in the basement, dropped them when he'd dragged out the Mossberg. It had seemed like the smart move at the time. Funny how things changed. Clothes looked like a good idea about now, with her shivering to pieces—and she still had half a dozen bad guys on her ass.

  He only made it down two floors before deciding that the fire escape idea had been one of his worst of the night, and that was saying a lot, considering how things were turning out. The whole damn thing didn't have more than two bolts in it, and besides being icy as shit, it was swaying in the wind. A silenced shot coming from above and pinging off the outside rail gave him the last little bit of incentive he needed to get the fuck off it.

  He kicked in a window and knocked the remaining shards off with his shoulder as he pushed inside. She groaned, which he took as a good sign, which just once again proved how quickly the night had gone to hell. Dylan was going to have his ass if anything happened to her, and he'd be welcome to it.

  Moving fast and avoiding the hall, he carried her through to the next room, and the next, and the next. Most of the walls separating the abandoned apartments had been at least partially destroyed. Others had doors in them. He managed to get quite a ways before he dead-ended and was forced to move back toward the hall.

  She'd roused herself enough to put her arms around his neck and hold on to him, but he wasn't inclined to set her down anywhere while he did recon. She'd proven damn slippery so far, and he was done with chasing her. All he wanted now was to get her to Steele Street and hand her over to Dylan.

  Well, it wasn't all he wanted, but it was all he was going to get. The rest of it was too damn crazy, especially the god-awful urge he had to press his face into her hair, to somehow reassure her, to—fuck—reassure himself that she really was okay. That Hashemi hadn't cut her.

  He could feel her breath on his skin, soft and shallow and warm. Damn.

  He needed a new line of work, really. Just because the Afghan had been ready to start carving her up was no reason for him to get his boxers in a wad. It was no reason for him to have had a fucking heart-stopping flashback starring him and J.T.

  But he had. Fiercely intense, like running smack-face into Hell and having your guts ripped out in half a second flat.

  He was still sweating, his hands shaking. Geezus. It had been so real, the heat, the smell—J.T. screaming.

  He'd heard Akbar say he wanted to fuck her, but he'd been hearing it from a thousand miles away, still reeling from the sudden burst of heat and pain and raw emotion that had seared itself across his brain. All because Hashemi had put a knife to her throat.

  Yep. He definitely needed a new line of work. Flashbacking commandos were dead commandos, and they sure as hell weren't any good to anybody else. He'd hesitated. With Hashemi threatening her, and Akbar going freakin' nuts knocking her around, it had taken everything he had to drag himself back to the present, to focus on what was happening now.

  Fuck! He stopped just inside the door and slammed his back up against the wall, his arm tightening around her waist as he let her feet slide to the floor.

  He was losing it, and now was not the time, and this was not the place to be losing anything.

  A snick of sound at the back of the room had him whirling around, the Glock leveled and loaded, his finger on the trigger.

  A derelict shuffled out of the shadows, completely oblivious to the fact that his life was a mere two-and-a-half pounds of pressure away from getting blown to smithereens.

  Creed didn't even want to think about how he'd missed something as big as a wino in the room. The old guy was mumbling to himself, struggling to get the screw top off his bottle of hooch, and Creed felt like his heart was in a vise.

  “Get out,” he growled when the man looked up.

  The guy didn't need to be told twice. Staring down the handgun's bore, his rheumy eyes went as big as saucers. He wrapped his arm protectively around his bottle and shuffled off, going back the way Creed and Cody had just come.

  Bad choice, Creed thought, but he wasn't getting paid to save winos tonight. He was getting paid to save her.

  And it was time to earn his keep.

  The sound of men talking, searching, coming through the apartments behind them and down the hall was narrowing his options pretty damn fast.

  Shoving the Glock back into its holster, he pulled out the shotgun and put it firmly in her hands.

  “You've got six shots,” he said. She'd never be able to reload. She looked shell-shocked, her lips white, her gaze dull. “That's more than you think, so don't be shy about using them. All you have to do is point this thing even remotely in the general direction and pull the trigger. Trust me. You're gonna hit something, and if you keep pulling the trigger, you're gonna hit everything.”

  He shrugged out of his coat and lifted it onto her shoulders, then helped her get her arms through the sleeves, always bringing her hands back onto the shotgun. She needed to know what she had, to get a grip, literally and figuratively.

  “Get back in the corner, into that pile of junk, and shoot anything that comes through the door in the next two minutes,” he continued, hating himself for even having to give her such crap advice. He should never have brought her here.

  “Wh-where are you going?” Her teeth were chattering, her body trembling.

  He jerked his head toward the darkened hall. “I'm going to draw them off to the apartments on the other side. Work my way back to the front of the building.”

  “N-no . . .” She shook her head. “Don't leave me.”

  “Don't worry. The good guys are on their way, and they're gonna be looking for this.” He pulled his cell phone out of his pants pocket. A blue light cycled across its screen. He dropped it into one of the pockets on his coat. He'd put a 911 call in to Skeeter on his way up the stairs that would have lit up every computer screen at SDF's headquarters.

  “B-but . . . but what if it's you who comes through the door?”

  “Odds are I won't be making it back this way,” he said, buttoning the top button on the coat to keep it from falling off her.

&nbs
p; Her hand came up and wrapped around his wrist. “N-no . . . you can't . . . can't leave me here. I haven't . . . haven't ever shot anyone.”

  Okay, time to backpedal, big-time. “It's not as bad as I said before, when we were on the roof. Honest.” He pulled the coat more tightly around her and buttoned the next button. “You've got to be sharp. Okay? Because if any bad boys show up at the door, it means I'm gone. Really gone. No coming to the rescue. Okay?” He ducked his head to look her straight in the eyes. “Six badass shots, babe,” he repeated. “Six. Use them. And if my buddies don't get to you and you still get out of here, turn yourself over to the FBI, or the cops, CIA, somebody, please. It's the only chance you've got. Swear to God, you're never going to make it on your own, not with these guys after you.”

  “You don't even know me.” She sounded so distraught, so heartbroken, he didn't have the heart to tell her that knowing her wasn't the point. He didn't need to know someone to lay his life on the line for them. It was his job to lay his life on the line, whatever line Uncle Sam drew, whenever and wherever he drew it.

  No, he wasn't going to tell her that. So all he said was, “Not yet.” And then he kissed her, bent his head down and opened his mouth over hers.

  Talk about a heart attack. Her lips were cold, but the inside of her mouth was sweetly warm and unbelievably welcoming. She melted for him. She melted on him. She melted in him—so instantly, so perfectly. A soft groan, the catch of her breath in her throat, her body leaning into his. It was more than he'd expected and all he needed to know.

  He'd be coming back for more of this, come hell, high water, or Reinhard Klein.

  “Gotta go,” he said, pulling back just enough to whisper against her lips and steal another kiss.

  The voices were drawing nearer, the sound of the search intensifying. He hoped to hell the wino had gone to ground.

  Setting her aside, he drew the Glock and checked the hall, one quick line-of-sight glance. They were down there all right, moving shadows in the darkened building.