by Tara Janzen
“Somebody did,” Doc said flatly. “And a lot of people thought Manny Waite’s confession was just a little too pat for an alcoholic who’d been living on the street for twenty years and hadn’t managed a coherent sentence in ten.”
Hawkins got his point. As grateful as he’d been for Manny the Mooch’s confession, he’d had a hard time picturing the old buzzard getting up enough gumption to murder anyone. According to Manny, he hadn’t acted alone, which had made his story a whole lot more plausible, but the pusher Manny had fingered as Traynor’s other killer had never been found—and since Manny had died of cancer shortly after, probably never would be.
A couple of years after Hawkins had been released, when he and Dylan had accumulated a little pull through their government work, they’d made some inquiries, trying to get ahold of the investigation, but by then the case had been sealed tighter than a Colfax Avenue street-boy’s—
Well, it had been sealed pretty damn tight.
“She bought Suzi Toussi’s gallery down on Seventeenth,” Doc offered. “It was in all the papers about a month ago, Senator Dekker’s daughter coming back to Denver.”
Well, hell, Hawkins thought. This really is old home week.
He knew Suzi Toussi. He’d bought a number of pieces from Toussi’s over the years, paintings and sculpture. The gallery was just a few blocks from Steele Street in LoDo, and it was where Quinn Younger’s new sister-in-law, Nikki McKinney, was having her first big showing tomorrow night. Dylan had bought a few paintings through Suzi’s gallery, too.
But Dylan hadn’t dated her.
Hawkins had—up until the night the two of them had accidentally run into Creed in a Larimer Square bar. Suzi had taken one look at SDF’s jungle boy, and Hawkins had been history. Suzi was nice, a lot of fun, but he couldn’t say he’d missed her, or that Creed had done him anything but a favor by taking her off his hands.
Katya Dekker did not fall in the same easy come, easy go category. She’d been stolen from him, and he’d felt the loss every day he’d been in prison, and for way too many days after he got out.
“I haven’t been in town much lately,” Hawkins said, filing Doc’s information away, though he was sure Dylan was already checking out the Toussi connection by now. Katya must have donated a painting to the art auction, probably the Oleg Henri, since that’s the one she’d been helping move.
“The gallery’s just two blocks from where they found the Traynor boy’s body.”
Something in Doc’s tone made Hawkins narrow his gaze. “Are you saying you think she did it?”
“Somebody did,” the older man repeated. “Somebody besides Manny the Mooch and maybe a drug dealer nobody else in LoDo ever saw.”
Maybe, Hawkins silently agreed. It wasn’t like he hadn’t thought the same thing a thousand times, but whoever the other killer was, it had not been the prom queen.
He slid his gaze back to the examining room. She’d been sound asleep when he’d left her in bed that night, absolutely worn out. The loving had been crazy between them, so very hot. It had haunted him, the things they’d done—and he’d had two long years in lockdown to go over every last detail.
Fuck, he swore to himself, then had to fight back a wry curve of a grin. Yeah, they’d done that, too. Their last night together was the night he’d taught her the difference between all the sweet love they’d shared and just how far he could really take her.
They’d ended up in the bottom of the shower with her melting against him and crying, and him holding her and praying he hadn’t given himself a freaking heart attack at nineteen. She’d been so beautiful, lying between his legs, naked in his arms, the water pouring down on them, her lashes wet and spiky against her cheeks, her breath coming soft and fast against his chest, her skin flushed. Holding her, he’d known he could go to the very edge of the universe and not see a more beautiful sight—and he’d given her his heart.
Bad, bad, Bad Luck Dekker. She’d been the end of him, but she hadn’t killed Jonathan Traynor, not alone, and not in cahoots with Manny the Mooch.
“It wasn’t her, Doc,” he said, believing in her innocence as much as his own. Whoever had put a bullet in Traynor’s brain had also shot him up with a load of smack big enough to stop his heart. The gun had never been found, but the needle had been lying in the alley with the boy, without a fingerprint on it.
Hawkins knew that under the right circumstances, anybody was capable of murder, but Katya Dekker hadn’t put a gun to her ex-boyfriend’s head, and she hadn’t stuck a needle in his vein, not with enough premeditated cunning to clean her prints off the syringe. As for Manny the Mooch, he couldn’t have premeditated a late-night leak, let alone a murder.
“Watch yourself. That’s all I’m saying.”
Fair enough. “How much longer?” he asked, nodding toward the examination room.
Doc glanced back to where Katya was working on her dress with another safety pin, and a big grin split his face. “Twenty minutes,” he said, heading back toward the room. “Maybe half an hour.”
Hawkins stopped the old man with a heavy hand on his shoulder. Now he was scowling, without a doubt.
“Five minutes,” he said in warning when Doc turned and looked up at him. “And keep the door open.”
He let the old man go and pulled his cell phone out of the inside left pocket of his suit coat. The right side was where he kept his Glock 9mm in a shoulder holster.
He punched in a number and put the phone to his ear, keeping his eye on the doc and Katya.
“Yeah,” Dylan answered on the second ring.
“It’s Hawkins. What’s going on?”
“Fireworks. The shells were planted in the fake palm trees. Electronic detonators. The auctioneer is a little scraped up, but mobile. Some of the paintings are torched. The place is crawling with Denver cops, and the lovely Lieutenant Loretta Bradley is in charge. I’m sure she’ll give us a full report when she’s finished. That’s the good news.”
“And the bad news?” The way the night had gone down so far, there had to be bad news.
“They found a corpse in the cottonwoods. Double-tapped between the eyes, a clean hit.”
Hawkins let that nasty piece of information sink in for a couple of seconds, then took a deep breath. Holy shit. “Anybody we know?”
“Not yet.” Dylan’s voice came over the phone. “It spun him around a bit, blew off the back of his head, and he landed in some bushes. I have to give the cops credit for getting the area cordoned off and for keeping everybody out of it until homicide gets here. We’ll know pretty soon.”
He knew what Dylan wasn’t saying. He was thinking the same damn thing.
“It couldn’t possibly be Ted Garraty, right?”
“The odds are four hundred to one. Four hundred and fifty-five to one if we include the caterers and auction staff.”
Shit. He’d wanted Lotto odds on that one.
“Who’s the Asian guy who was talking with Ms. Dekker?” Pure professionalism all the way—that’s the way he was going to deal with her. She’d be Ms. Dekker to him until he handed her off to Dylan, or until hell froze over—whichever came first.
“His name is Alex Zheng, and he’s rabid about losing her, but I gave him the secret handshake, and he’s going to hold off calling in the Marines or the senator for about another thirty seconds. If you don’t give her back by then, he’s going to do his worst.”
Hawkins wasn’t too worried about the guy’s worst anything. “Tell him to call Gunny Howzer at Quantico. If it’s gotta be Marines, that’s who I’d want coming after me if I’d been snatched and grabbed.”
“Zheng spent six years with L.A.’s finest, before coming on board with Katya Dekker five years ago.”
“If he’s her bodyguard, she needs a new one.” It was a flat statement of truth.
“According to him, he’s her secretary, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find Senator Dekker’s phone number tattooed on his butt.”
Neither would Hawki
ns.
“So are we giving her back?” He didn’t like the idea, which surprised the hell out of him, but it was the logical thing to do. With that kind of connection, Katya didn’t need him.
“Probably,” Dylan said, but with the same hesitation in his voice that Hawkins felt.
“Okay. Tell Zheng we’re hell and gone from the Botanic Gardens, but if he wants his girl back, he can meet us at her place.”
There was a slight pause. “Yeah, well, it seems her place is his place, and he already suggested you meet us there. They live in a loft above the Toussi Gallery on Seventeenth.”
Well, that made everything just about fucking perfect.
Hawkins took another deep breath and asked himself again why he’d quit smoking. He was on day three, which was two more days than he’d made it the last time he’d quit.
“We’ll be leaving Doc’s in a couple of minutes.” He shifted his attention back inside the examining room and couldn’t help himself—his gaze went over her from the top of her streaked blond hair to the tips of her pink polished toes.
Of course she had a boyfriend. She probably had a dozen.
“You want some advice?” Dylan’s voice came back at him.
“No.”
“Don’t make any stops,” Dylan told him anyway.
A brief grin flickered across Hawkins’s mouth.
“Right.” He hit the disconnect button and slipped the phone back in his inside pocket. What could Dylan possibly be worried about? That he might tape her to a lamppost on East Colfax and take the highest bid? Or dump her in a bad part of town and hope she made it out in one piece?
Well, he had news for the boss. He’d matured way beyond such petty revenge. Way beyond. He was a civilized guy, a member of an elite, hand-picked United States force used solely at the discretion of a two-star general who reported directly to the secretary of defense. In the years since prison, he’d cruised his way through dozens of embassy and consulate parties from Washington, D.C., to Riyadh. He’d gone through a receiving line once in Houston and come face-to-face with Marilyn Dekker. Without so much as a blink of his eye, he’d introduced himself as Niles Hahn, a name guaranteed to slip even the most determined minds, shaken her hand, and moved on.
Or maybe Dylan was afraid he’d try to hustle Bad Luck into Roxanne’s backseat and jump her bones.
Well, he’d matured way beyond that, too. Way beyond—no matter how much of her dress was falling off. His business now was getting her to Toussi’s, dumping her back on her boyfriend, and then calling General Grant and finding out what in the hell was going on, so he could get the hell back on a plane to Colombia.
He was going to start by questioning her about what had happened at the Gardens, find out if she knew anything. He’d go easy on her, though. If Dylan wanted to get tough with her, that was Dylan’s call. Hawkins just didn’t want her falling apart on his watch. That’s what had gotten him into trouble at nineteen—into trouble and into her bed—holding her together when she’d fallen apart. He’d had a reputation even back then for being damn near invincible, but she’d broken him with one soft, shuddering sigh, looking up at him with her green eyes swimming in tears.
He’d never in his life seen anything like her, and he sure as hell had never held anything like her. The girls he’d known, well, they’d been different. Some sweet, some not, some good, some real bad, but no out-and-out fluff balls. That’s what had caught his attention in the first place.
He’d been cruising in the 350 Malibu that Sparky Klimaszewski had asked him to pick up out in the suburbs. He’d cased the car for a week, then on Friday night had J.T. take him out to Lakewood and drop him off. After they’d boosted the car, J.T. had gone straight back to Sparky’s, but the 350 was hot, and Hawkins had driven it around LoDo a bit. Going by the old chop shop on Steele Street where they’d all gotten busted two years earlier had been a spur-of-the-moment decision. The shop had been shut down tight, with bits of police tape still hanging off the doors and a big FOR RENT sign posted in the window. Four blocks down from the shop was where he’d noticed a fight going on in the parking lot at Seventeenth and Wazee.
Normally, he would have kept on driving. But he’d caught sight of something bright in the middle of all those guys pushing and shoving each other around in the parking lot. A moment later, a girl had broken free from the crowd, running like a track star and making for the street. She’d been wearing the most amazing dress, yards and yards of shimmering pink and white material, the skirts fisted in her hands, her back bare except for two tiny straps running from the front, her hair bright blond, a look of sheer terror on her face.
Hawkins had jammed the Malibu into reverse so fast the shifter had almost come off in his hand. The engine had screamed as he’d buried the gas pedal in the floorboards and taken off backward to pick her up, or at least give the assholes chasing her something to think about so she could make her getaway. A couple of the guys must have actually been track stars, though, because before the girl even got close to the street, they’d headed her off and run her into the alley.
Fuck, he’d thought, his heart racing. They were going to gang-bang Tinkerbell.
He’d kept going, tires squealing and smoking, running the Malibu the wrong way on a one-way street. He knew where the alley emptied out, and in seconds he was there, throwing the Chevy into Park and jumping out of the car. A cloud of smoke had billowed over him, and he remembered thinking Sparky was going to have his ass for running the tires off the car.
He’d caught the girl almost instantly upon entering the alley. Either she hadn’t seen him or she hadn’t had the sense to avoid him, because she’d run right into his arms—and stayed there, clinging to him.
It wasn’t exactly what he’d expected her to do, but he didn’t second-guess his luck.
“Get in the car, princess,” he’d said fast and low, putting her behind him.
It wasn’t until she stepped away that he realized his hand was wet where he’d been holding her—wet with her blood.
Things changed for him then. It was a shift inside himself, a subtle but profound shift from pulse-pounding excitement fueled by fear into utter, no-way-am-I-going-to-die-here calm.
There were eight guys in the alley with him, but three of them must have already decided they didn’t have the stomach for more trouble and were heading back out the other end. That left five—all of them wearing tuxedos, Hawkins had noted somewhere in the back of his mind—and two of those were backing off, too.
That left three.
“Who cut her?” he asked, and watched as two sets of eyes landed on a dark-haired kid who looked like he’d gotten into something a little more mind-altering than his daddy’s liquor cabinet. When Hawkins checked, the stoner, indeed, was holding a knife in his hand.
Hawkins had a knife in his hand, too, but he didn’t think the other guys knew it—not yet.
And they might have pushed him into using it, if he hadn’t heard a car door shut behind him. The fairy princess had actually gotten into his car. It surprised him—and suddenly there was no contest about where he wanted to be and what he needed to do. Slicing the bow ties and cummerbunds off the bad boys in the alley would have to wait.
“Touch her again, and there won’t be enough of you left to put in a box.” The words were fair warning in his book. Then it had occurred to him that any one of those penguin-suited guys could be packing a piece and might be wired enough to use it.
So he’d backed toward the car, keeping them all in sight, not realizing he’d just prophesied his own doom. Later, in prison, he’d had plenty of time to mull those words over in his mind, the sheer hubris of them. Yeah, sure, he’d been so fucking tough.
Tough enough that when one of the boys had come after him, Hawkins had cut him, just a little, a lightning-quick slash up his chest, enough to cut his shirt, just enough to draw a little blood and seal his fate.
The boy had fallen back into the arms of his stoned friend and the third boy,
and Hawkins had leaped into the car with Tinkerbell and taken off for the wildest ride of his life.
CHAPTER
5
ROXANNE.
Katya blew out a short breath and glanced sideways, then looked over her shoulder, checking out the backseat. She was sitting alone in the car, while Doc Blake and Hawkins stood in the alley, talking in a pool of light cast by a street lamp and the clinic’s open door.
Hawkins had named his set of wheels, and he called her Roxanne.
The name fit.
She was a Roxanne. Big, green, and mean, hot under the hood, and all pitch-black leather on the inside.
“How’s Roxanne?” Doc had asked him, after they’d finished up in the examination room.
“Running low elevens,” Hawkins had answered. “Skeeter ported and polished her heads, and we’ve got damn near perfect flow. We’re going to blow Quinn’s new Camaro off the track, if he and Regan ever come back from their honeymoon.”
Ah, Katya had thought. They were talking about the car, the rocket he’d launched out of the Botanic Gardens parking lot.
The Botanic Gardens, where her beautiful Oleg Henri was probably in ruins. Who in the world would blow up a charity art auction, she wondered, and with fireworks of all things? Some neo-Nazi, antienvironment, orchid-hating group of radicals who’d decided to move onto the world stage by destroying botanical art?
It didn’t make sense. No matter how many times she’d asked herself the same questions in the last half hour, she wasn’t even close to coming up with an answer.
She didn’t know if her insurance would cover an act of environmental terrorism. If it had been negligence on the part of the Botanic Gardens, some mistake with the fireworks, she and the other gallery owners could sue. She certainly hadn’t been told or warned about a fireworks display—not that she thought suing the Botanic Gardens would be good for business. In fact, the whole thing was one big public-relations disaster.
God, she hoped no one had been hurt. That’s what bothered her the most. There had been a lot of people milling about the stage area, though none as close as she had been, and she hadn’t been seriously hurt. A little singed in spots, and scraped up, but not really hurt.
