by Tara Janzen
Never.
He loved nothing better than to rattle on about dinosaur fossil beds to a captive audience and get paid for doing it. At seventy-two, nothing could have kept Wilson from his moment of glory—nothing except some kind of trouble.
Quinn Younger, she mused, looking over the collection of broken-down buildings. Sheets of tar paper flapped on every outside wall, loosened by the wind. Half the shingles on the roofs had been blown off. The two vehicles parked in front of the gas station were ancient. Over fifty years old, she’d bet—a pickup truck with four flat tires, and some kind of rusted-out black sedan up on blocks.
If Quinn Younger did live in Cisco, he was stuck there, and nothing could have made less sense. He was a former Air Force pilot, for God’s sake, a national hero. He’d been shot down over northern Iraq enforcing a no-fly zone and made the covers of Time magazine and Newsweek, and the front page of every major newspaper in America. His survival behind enemy lines and daring rescue by the Marines had become the stuff of contemporary legend. He was a one-man recruitment poster for the United States military.
Not a bad turnabout for someone who at sixteen had been on a fast track to juvenile hall and probably the state penitentiary, until a judge had put him in her grandfather’s field crew for a summer of hard labor digging up dinosaur bones. Wilson had been damn proud of the young man, one of the first to be pulled off the streets and out of the courts of Denver and given a second chance with him. Outlaws all, Wilson had called that first crew of boys, but over that long, hot summer, he’d begun the process of turning outlaws into men—and at least in Quinn Younger’s instance, he’d felt he’d succeeded.
Regan wasn’t so sure. Not anymore. She’d met Quinn Younger once that summer, if one awkward encounter constituted a meeting, and despite his subsequent rise to fame and glory, the image of him as a shaggy-haired sixteen-year-old car thief with coolly assessing eyes and a slyly artful grin was the image lodged in her brain. Looking at Cisco did little to change the impression. Neither did the cryptic entry she’d found written on her grandfather’s desk calendar, the entry with Quinn Younger’s name in it that had brought her to this nowhere spot in the road in Utah.
With an exasperated sigh, she returned her attention to the buildings. The town was eerie, damned eerie, but she’d come a long way, and the least she had to do was check the place out. If Wilson or Quinn Younger was there, or had been there, she was going to know it before she left.
Ignoring her unease and a good portion of her common sense, she put the car in gear and pulled back onto the road, heading for the gas station.
SHE’S stopped in front of Burt’s old place,” Peter “Kid” Chronopolous said, looking through his scope.
Quinn glanced up from under the hood of the ’69 Camaro parked in the barn and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Stopped?”
All kinds of people drove by Cisco. Every now and then somebody pulled over to the side of the road and got out their map to figure out where in the hell they’d gone wrong. Damn few people pulled into town and stopped—with good reason. Out of the seven buildings still standing, not a one of them looked anything less than forbiddingly deserted. Other than the shop and living space the SDF team had built into the barn to use as a safe house, the buildings were deserted.
“Yep.” Kid’s gaze was still trained on the gas station through the scope. “And now she’s getting out and going in.” The younger man’s voice stayed calm and steady, but Quinn sensed his heightened sense of readiness. Most lost tourists, especially lost women tourists, would not go wandering into Burt’s place. Most, however, wasn’t all, and Quinn wasn’t inclined to jump to conclusions. Not one damn thing had happened in Cisco in the two weeks he and Kid had been stuck there. A woman in Burt’s didn’t mean their luck was changing or that the action was picking up, not by his standards.
“Take her picture and send it through the computer,” he said, returning his attention to the Camaro’s engine. The car was barely street legal as it was. Changing out the pulleys to work with the boost had pushed it right to the edge. Kid could have his fancy Porsche. Quinn was putting his quarter-mile money on the Chevy.
“I’m on it, but I think you better take a look,” Kid warned.
Quinn lifted his head again, looking over the engine at the twenty-three-year-old ex-Marine. Kid—who for numerous reasons was also known as “Kid Chaos”—was the newest member of SDF and he was definitely jazzed. His eye was glued to the scope; his body was tense and alert. Of course, the boy had been roughing it with Quinn since the middle of June. Possibly it was merely the sight of a woman, any woman, that had gotten his juices going.
Or maybe Roper Jones, the man currently at the top of General Grant’s Most Wanted list, had tracked them down.
Setting aside his wrench, Quinn straightened up from under the hood, testing his left leg before trusting it to completely hold his weight. He limped across the shop floor and turned on the laptop Kid had rigged up to half a dozen cameras around Cisco.
Despite a serious addiction to fast cars, extreme sports, and general mayhem, Kid was a certifiable electronics wizard—an electronics wizard with way too much time on his hands since they’d been holed up in the desert, waiting for the heat to die down in Denver. Kid had wired the ghost town to within an inch of its life for twenty-four/seven surveillance. Getting hurt in their line of work came with a few interesting consequences, the least of which was Kid watching over him like a mother hen, and if lately Quinn had been feeling like he’d washed up on the wrong side of thirty with not much to show for it but a friggin’ barn to live in and a busted leg, well, he had no one but himself to blame. He’d made some bad choices—especially that last damn choice he’d made in the rail yards on the west side of Denver when he’d gone up against Roper and his goons.
Quinn typed in a couple of commands, activating the cameras in the buildings. When the camera in Burt’s came on, the image of a woman filled the screen.
His brow furrowed. The only female assassin he’d ever seen had been sleekly fit and buffed on steroids. She’d also moved with the prowling gait of a hungry panther. Not this woman. She was randomly picking her way through the dust and the tumbleweeds inside the gas station, peering over countertops and around half-fallen beams. A broken chair caught her unawares in the shin, and she swore under her breath.
Colorful, Quinn thought, his lips twitching in a brief grin. Definitely lost tourist material. No trained hunter would swear because of a measly shin hit. No truly trained hunter would have run into the chair in the first place. After rubbing her leg, she continued on, looking around with curiosity and caution, but not with deadly focus—and not with a weapon in her hand or visible anywhere on her body.
In short, she did not look like a killing machine. What she looked like was a schoolteacher—the luxury model. And oddly, to someone who didn’t know many schoolteacher types, she looked faintly familiar.
Her honey blond hair was piled into a ponytail on the top of her head, but a lot of silky swaths had tumbled back down, giving her a mussed-up, just-out-of-bed look. She wore a soft-looking lavender shirt and a pair of jeans, both of which appeared to be standard mall issue, and both of which revealed a perfectly average, if decidedly nice, and very nicely endowed, female form.
Plenty there for Kid to get excited about, Quinn thought. Maybe even something there for he himself to get excited about, if he’d been in the market for that kind of excitement, which he wasn’t. The only female in Cisco that Quinn was interested in fooling around with was the one he’d named Jeanette, she with the supercharged 383 LT1 stroker under her hood. The smartest move the woman in Burt’s could make would be to get back in her car and get out of town.
“Have you got that picture yet?” he asked Kid, who had moved to the computer in the back of the shop.
“Running it through now, Captain.”
Quinn let the rank slide, though he hadn’t been a captain since a surface-to-air missile had tak
en him and his F-16 out over northern Iraq. Still, he had been a captain in the U.S. Air Force for a hell of a lot longer than he’d been a cripple holed up in Cisco.
Two weeks. Shit.
Dylan Hart, his boss at SDF, couldn’t expect him to lie low forever. Quinn could only take so much sitting around listening to the wind blow through this nowhere town—Roper Jones was still out there, and Quinn needed to be out there, too. He needed to be back in the game.
He rolled his shoulder. It was healing. His leg half-worked. And he had a fucking vendetta with Roper Jones’s name written all over it.
On the screen, the woman picked up a dusty pile of papers and looked them over, giving him a better view of her face. She was fine featured, with a dusting of freckles across her nose. She was pretty in a quirky way, not elegant, but cute, her eyebrows surprisingly dark in contrast with her hair. Her chin was delicately angled, but definitely set with determination. Her eyes were light, the color indiscernible on the screen. At odds with her all-American looks, her mouth was lush, exotically full, and covered with a smooth layer of plum-colored lipstick.
Okay. She was nice. Very nice.
The whole package was nice.
“Not a known felon,” Kid said from the back of the shop.
Quinn absently nodded. He would have been damned surprised if the woman’s picture had matched that of a known criminal, especially given the kind of wiseguys in Kid’s current files.
“Try the official database,” he said, knowing it was another long shot. Despite his niggling sense of familiarity, the chances of the woman in Burt’s being part of an officially sanctioned U.S. government service were exceedingly damn low. And she sure as hell didn’t belong to SDF, the very unofficially sanctioned group of Special Forces operators that he and Kid were part of. General Grant, the two-star who deployed them, would never hire a woman for fieldwork.
“Already on it,” Kid confirmed.
Quinn kept his gaze glued to the woman. Where in the hell, he wondered, had he seen her? He didn’t forget faces. He didn’t dare, and he knew hers.
Or had known her.
“Son of a bitch,” Kid swore behind him, showing more emotion in the one small phrase than he had in the whole two weeks they’d been camped out in the desert.
“You’ve got a match?”
“No, but it looks like we’ve got more company,” Kid said, striding back toward the scope.
Quinn looked through the far window and saw what Kid had seen, a blue SUV coming off the top of a rise in the highway—and slowing down, way down.
“Two men, no visible weapons, but they don’t look happy,” Kid said from his position at the scope. Quinn watched him quickly scan the rest of the horizon and come back to the SUV. “They’re checking out the woman’s Ford . . . and . . . they’re . . . well, hell. They’re heading out of Cisco. What do you make of that?”
“A coincidence? Or maybe Cisco has just gotten real friggin’ popular.” Quinn limped back to the Camaro and picked up the Beretta 9mm he always kept close by.
“Maybe” was all Kid conceded as he checked the load on his rifle, a highly “accurized” sniper’s M40.
Quinn and Kid weren’t getting paid to take chances. Not today. Keep your heads down and don’t get your asses shot off had been Dylan’s orders. A couple of weeks ago, when his body had still been pretty messed up, Quinn had been willing to follow orders. But he was mobile now. His stitches were out, and he was ready to get back to the job of taking Roper Jones down. If the unhappy guys in the four-wheel drive were part of that job, great. He just had to get Little Miss Tourist out of the way.
Damn. In about five minutes, if she was an innocent civilian looking for ghost town junk, she was going to wish she’d driven right on by Burt’s old place and Cisco. What he didn’t like to think about was that niggling sense of familiarity and the possibility that what she was looking for was him—though God knew how a woman could have tracked him down in Cisco. Or why.
“Call Denver,” he said to Kid. “Tell them we’ve got company. I’ll get the woman.”
“No,” Kid insisted, quickly coming around the desk at the back of the shop. “I’ll get her. You . . . uh, should be the one to call.”
Quinn narrowed his gaze at the younger man and was gratified to see him falter just a bit. It took a lot to make Kid Chaos falter.
“What I mean is, Dylan would rather hear the . . . uh, details of the operation from you . . . I’m sure.” Kid didn’t sound too damn sure to Quinn.
“Dylan’s in Washington, D.C., and we don’t have an operation yet,” Quinn explained. “Skeeter’s holding down the fort back at headquarters.”
“Well, see, there you have it.” Kid kept moving toward the door, each step slower than the last, until he finally came to a complete stop under Quinn’s unwavering gaze.
Quinn knew the distance between the barn and the gas station. A hundred yards. “I can handle it.”
Kid didn’t look convinced. “Maybe she’s a decoy. Roper Jones is not going to give up, Quinn. Not until you’re dead or Hawkins gets him.”
“Roper Jones is not stumbling around in Burt’s Gas Emporium. A woman is, and I’m pretty damn sure we better find out why.”
With a reluctant nod, Kid finally agreed.
Quinn turned toward the door, slipping the Beretta under his shirt and into the waistband of his jeans. Hell. He wasn’t making it easy for Kid to play bodyguard.
Bodyguard. Christ. He’d always been his own damn bodyguard, and done a damn good job of it—up until two weeks ago in those West Side rail yards.
The memory gave him an instant’s pause.
Okay, he admitted. The Roper Jones heist had gone down bad, real bad, and Hawkins had literally had to scrape him off that friggin’ back alley, but they’d gotten what they’d been after that night and he was healed now. He was ready to get back in the game. More than ready.
He slanted the computer screen a quick glance as he passed by. Plum lipstick. Lavender shirt. Golden ponytail.
Hell. She didn’t look like she was ready to get in the game. She didn’t look like she’d ever even heard of the game. Ready or not, though, she was about to get her first taste of it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Of a mind that love truly is what makes the world go ’round, Tara Janzen can be contacted at www.tarajanzen.com.
Happy reading!
ALSO BY TARA JANZEN
Crazy Hot
CRAZY COOL
A Dell Book / November 2005
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2005 by Tara Janzen
Dell is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-440-33471-2
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