Dragon Bitten (Shifter Paranormal Dragon Romance) (The Fire Dragon Series Book 2)

by Amy Faye

  But if two days is the cutoff, you don't take your time with risk assessment. It's just a reality. The plan is a non-starter if I can't get a meeting with whoever's leading the Crazy Horses. If it's not McCallister, that's news in itself, but I can accept it. I swallow hard and walk into the bar.

  It looks the same as it did yesterday. In fact, it looks downright quiet. I shouldn't be surprised, but then again, it won't be quiet for very long. I walk up to the bartender.

  "Call your boss."

  He looks up from the counter. "I own the place."

  "Perfect," I tell him. I don't like being lied to, and it makes the next part easier. I grab a bottle and smash it on the wooden bar top. It leaves a perfectly convincing dent in the thick polyurethane finish.

  "Hey—what the fuck are you—"

  The gun that comes out and into his face convinces him to be a more forgiving citizen.

  "You'd like me to stop? Call your boys. I'll wait."

  He doesn't turn his back on me, even as it takes three or four steps to make it to the phone hanging on the wall. As he moves I set the gun down in easy reach.

  "Hey, I got a guy here causing trouble—"

  "Tell him it's Ryan Beauchamp!"

  "He says it's Ryan Beauchamp. Yeah. He's got a gun."

  "I just want to talk!"

  I push the gun across the counter. It's still near me, and we both know it. But now it's out of easy reach, unless I want to race the bartender for it.

  He looks quick, for some nobody. He certainly doesn't look strong, so he'd better be quick, or he's just totally incapable. Well, I can't blame him if he is. It's not as if he has some kind of responsibility to be a tough son of a bitch.

  He watches me, his eyes wide. I let him watch me, then toss the bottle onto his side of the bar as well. I flatten my hands against the bar, and get real still. If I move too much or too fast at the wrong moment, then no amount of honor among thieves is going to count for much.

  I don't have to wait long. I can hear them coming from a ways off. Please don't let them notice the Indian out back, I think. Between the cops trying to fuck with me and the rush I'm under, I don't know that I could handle having them trash my bike, too.

  They come through hot, guns already drawn. Smart of them. But I don't move. I don't even blink if I can help it. They grab my arms and get me in a lock. I let them. I might be able to slip it, maybe. But with four of them there, and three of them with guns drawn, it wouldn't be smart.

  "What the fuck are you doing here, Beauchamp?"

  I can hear one of the other guys, slipped behind the counter, talking to the bartender in a hushed voice. Calming him down, I figure.

  "I thought, well, you know who I haven't seen lately?"

  He cuts off the answer with a heavy fist. The guy's built less like a bodybuilder and more like a beer keg, but he doesn't let that get him down. He still hits harder than a son of a bitch.

  "We know you did that job at the Franklin street warehouse."

  "You know about that, huh?" Another fist finds my floating ribs. I feel them start to protest, threatening to break. Maybe they already have broken, and the next hit will just make it worse.

  "I don't need your fucking sass, Beauchamp. What the fuck are you here for?"

  "Same reason I did the warehouse job. I'm looking to get your attention, shit-for-brains."

  The next hit doesn't have as much fire in it, but he makes up for it by hitting the same spot again. I feel a rib go for sure that time, but the guy behind me holds me pretty firm, so I can't exactly do anything about it.

  "How you liking that attention so far, bird-boy?"

  "You've taught me so much about boxing, I think it's already paying off."

  He takes the compliment reasonably well. Doesn't even hit the same spot this time. I think the guy's starting to like me. Maguire doesn't even remotely realize how much she's going to owe me for this.

  "So you're not hiring, then?"

  The guy doesn't bother hitting me this time. It's as if I'm watching evolution occur in front of me. The man can think, all of a sudden. It's as if he's just crawled out of the primordial ooze.

  I can see from his face that he's not great at it, though. They didn't send their smartest guys, they sent the guys who hit the hardest.

  "What the fuck do you mean, hiring? No, we're not looking for help from some two-bit outfit—"

  "Better than those guys you had watching that warehouse. Honestly, if my guys had the kind of kit your boys had—"

  That hits a sore spot. He doesn't hold back much, and he catches me under the arm, where my ribs aren't really supposed to get hit. It feels like I would expect it to, which makes my vision more than a little blurry.

  "What are we gonna do with him?"

  I can barely keep my eyes open, but I don't need to be able to see to know that he's not talking to me. The big son of a bitch behind me shrugs. I can feel it in the way that it makes my own arms shift.

  "We can't kill him here, can we?"

  No, they obviously can't. Anyone could see that. First of all because it's just a fucking bar. Which is why I came here in the first place.

  It's their territory, and they're not going to have a problem coming out here to get me. But they're not going to kill me, because it'll bring the wrong sort of attention down on the place where they make their money.

  That's what I'm hoping for anyways. A third voice, probably the guy who went behind the bar right away, chimes in.

  "You fuckin' stupid? No, you can't kill him here. Poor Mark's suffered enough already, you dumb bastards. Get this fucker out of here. We'll ask the boss what to do with him."

  There's the magic words. I need to get inside the organization, and fast. I need a face to go with the name. And I can't do that if I don't get noticed and picked up.

  If I can piss them off enough, McCallister will come out. Has to come out. Because there's no way in hell that he's going to let this stand.

  Once the connection's been made, I can work my ass off to stop him from killing me dead right, right there on the spot. But first I need to meet the guy, and I need to meet him now.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  MAGUIRE

  I don't know how long I'm supposed to wait, but it already feels like it's been too long. He should have gotten back by now, or if he wasn't going to, he should have given some kind of signal.

  Then again, we both knew that the job involved some risks. Not, I think to myself, that he had much choice in whether or not to take them. It doesn't matter now, though. Nobody has any choice in the matter.

  I take a deep breath. Nothing I can do but wait. If things go well, then we're in the game. If they don't go well—

  I don't think I'd rather think about that. I can still feel a little buzz of arousal at the thought of what happened earlier that night.

  The warehouse was a setup. It was a strange setup, in my opinion, but a setup nonetheless. If it was a setup, why waste your men, knowing they're going to die?

  That part makes no sense to me, but then again I suppose it's not as if I'm a gangster. Maybe they needed people there to play it to the hilt.

  The problem being, even from what I was able to tell, the plan had never been to hit them so soon. It was barely six hours between when they'd changed the plan and when they'd hit the place. Barely six hours to warn them, and barely six hours to get the plan in motion.

  The car bomb by itself takes a while to set up, especially so that nobody will notice. With the rush they were in, there was always good odds that nobody would even check for something like that.

  But why leave it up to chance? It seems like a big risk for surprisingly little reward. Too much of the plan was left up to chance, no matter how the setup was supposed to work.

  Say they took their own truck, and loaded it that way. What would have happened then?

  Suppose that they'd found the bomb. What would have happened then? The whole plan relies on nobody checking anything, and sur
e—it had worked out. This time.

  Something about it was nagging at me, and it had been all night. Now, as the sun sits high in the sky, I have nothing but time to think about it, and it isn't making any more sense than it was before.

  Unless they knew the details of the plan, there was no way to be sure. There simply was no way that they could have found anything.

  I know I didn't report the job in. I couldn't have. I only had twenty minutes to myself the whole time, and if I did, there's no way that Donaldsen would have given me the go-ahead on pulling a job like that.

  He'd have given me an unfathomable amount of grief about it, and then told me to just pick Ryan up and come back.

  Of course, that wouldn't have killed his gang. It never does. But that's exactly the sort of thinking that they have on Capital Hill—you can't win the war, so you might as well not try.

  I suck in a breath. I don't think that way, that's for fucking sure. If I can take one off the street, I will. But if I can cut the head off the whole snake, it doesn't matter that another one will just take its place eventually.

  That's time where, even if it's only for an instant, a girl won't have to cope with her mother's dope habits. That's not nothing. It's not a win, not completely, but it's a damn sight better than just getting rid of one low-level guy.

  I can't believe that Ryan did it himself. Not with the way that he reacted. Though, I've seen people's own problems come back to bite them in the ass before, and they always take it damn hard. So maybe I shouldn't take him off the list.

  Another instant, and I take him off the list again. No, he couldn't have. Wouldn't have. He's clever enough, sure. But I don't believe he'd sacrifice a man just to play off a charade for me.

  Which leaves three others. Hawkins, the brother, and the guy who got burned up.

  If he knew about the job being a setup, he wouldn't have gone into that truck. I've been on the inside of setups before. Maybe you don't know everything, but you know something's fishy.

  And the first thing you learn, nobody even needs to tell you: don't go first. Not ever.

  It doesn't take long to wipe Logan off the list, either. He's Beauchamp's brother, and he's got about as much pull with the gang as anyone. Maybe as much as Ryan. Maybe more, even. I can't say for sure, but I know that he's well-respected. I was able to see it in an instant.

  Hawkins, on the other hand—

  He'd have gotten the call before long. There's no way that he wouldn't have reported it in. He has to. Every job that he does gets called in. Danny takes the call, and that gets passed along. Double quick, no doubt, because Donaldsen is breathing down his neck.

  My face starts to twist up in annoyance and frustration. There's a leak somewhere. Command is a big totem pole, and things get shouted up and down it. Not much in the Bureau is a secret, not when orders are getting passed around.

  So I have to figure, anyone who wanted to know about the job knew that Hawkins was going on that job. They wouldn't necessarily know that I was going, especially since I kept quiet about it.

  No doubt there wasn't any reason to communicate to Hawkins. He looked as surprised to see me as anyone. Unlike me, he didn't have the benefit of being there for the change-of-plans meeting.

  I suck in a breath of air. If there's a leak, it could be anyone. But someone must be in contact with the Crazy Horses. Someone inside A.T.F., someone who apparently decided that the money was just too good to pass up.

  It's not hard to understand the reasoning. I wouldn't go for the money. Not in a hundred million years. But not everyone who gets into the business we're in, does it because they're true believers.

  You run into a lot of big damn heroes, as well. People who want recognition. They want to get famous, to get ahead. Money doesn't just grease palms in the Capital building, it works the same way in the Bureau.

  I can't get around one thing, though. I personally vetted every one of the people under me. There's always a chance that someone's dirty. Always, especially when there's boys working undercover.

  But you always know. I had feelings. Plenty of times, I thought that I knew a guy was dirty. I get rid of them. It's not as hard as it might seem, especially when you're dealing with stone-cold killers day in and day out.

  I always knew, every time. Every time someone was dirty, it didn't take more than a long, hard look at them to know that they were playing both sides of the field.

  I imagine every face in my unit. All fifteen of them.

  Not a one of them stands out to me. They're clean. Each and every one of them. And that's what bothers me the most.

  I can't think of a single person who might have done it, not in my unit. Which means that there's someone who's much smarter than I'm giving them credit for, out there fucking with my operation.

  Someone who is looking from the inside, out, and nobody knows that they're a snake in the grass.

  Someone who's got me totally outsmarted.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  RYAN

  I don't know how long they had me in there, but the question of whether or not I'd die from it had been bothering me as long as I could remember. I can barely recall a time that someone wasn't putting the screws to me.

  My entire body hurts. It feels strange to say that I've gotten used to it, but I had, like you got used to the cold during an Ohio winter. One day you just wake up, and you're sitting in a room ten degrees colder than you'd like and it's fine.

  Not hurting feels strange. I feel it more where they haven't hit me. In my calves and thighs. The feeling is a strange one.

  Finally they let me down. My head's still swimming, but I'm not in danger of passing out. Unlike the first crew, these guys seem to know what they're doing. They don't want me to pass out, so I won't.

  Maybe they screw it up, sometimes. You never know, with some guys. They go down fast and easy. I've never had a glass jaw, but then again I've never taken a beating so bad before, either.

  They pour my body into a chair. I feel as if my arms are going to melt right off, but they don't. Something in my body is still ready to fight to hold together in a human shape.

  "Why are you so insistent on seeing the boss?"

  I can't move enough to shrug. "I'm not."

  He doesn't like it when I lie, so I make sure to do it as often as possible. I don't brace for the hit because I can't. His hand doesn't move to strike me, which is good.

  "Beauchamp, you're a fucking idiot, you know that?"

  I can just about still move my face to smile up at the guy who's been working on me for what feels like weeks. It might have been three hours.

  "You're not going to meet McCallister."

  "I'll be alright," I assure him. "I mean, I got to meet you, which is just as good."

  The guy smiles. He's got a good sense of humor, this guy. I might be able to get along with him, in different circumstances. My body hurts too much not to get along with someone right now, though. "That's sweet. You know, you make it out of here, I'll have to put you on the Christmas card list."

  "That sounds lovely," I manage.

  He turns around and walks out of the room. I get a minute to breathe. Every time I take in a good breath, my ribs stab into my lung, so I take shallow breaths and try not to hurt myself. It doesn't work.

  I try to force myself to sit upright, but my body won't move right. I try to push myself upright with my legs. They're mostly unhurt, after all. My boots scrabble off the concrete floor, legs unable to handle even the slightest bit of weight.

  This time, my friend comes back in with a friend. A woman friend.

  "You're lucky, Beauchamp. Someone on high must like you."

  I smile at her. "Are you an angel?"

  She's got a sweet voice when she answers. "Is this a pickup line?"

  My head lolls to the side, in spite of my best efforts to keep myself looking like I can control my body in the least bit. "It doesn't have to be."

  Her big, round lips split into a smile. She's got
a soft body with curves in all the right places, and none where you don't want any. Attractive doesn't begin to describe it. She looks like a Barbie doll came to life.

  "You think you're very clever, don't you?"

  My face hurts when I smile, but I do it. It hurts when I don't smile, anyways. "Ain't you heard? Cops tell it from one side of the country to the other. Criminals are stupid. All of 'em, dumb as rocks. I'm a crook—must be dumb as a rock."

  Her fingers burn where they touch my skin. It hurts just to be in the same room as her. Hurts to be in the same room as anything. I'm just not sure whether or not it would hurt to float in a sensory deprivation tank. Maybe not, after a while.

  "You're not going to meet McCallister," she says. Everyone has been telling me that since I got here. I'd think that eventually they would figure I heard the message, but they don't seem to get tired of hearing it.

  "I was just telling my friend here—I'm just here to make friends. He's my friend, aren't you, old buddy?"

  The big guy behind the woman makes a tight-lipped smile in response to her questioning look. "He's very friendly, Krissi."

  "I can see that," she says. She turns back to me and smiles. "You can be a real pain in the ass, you know that, Beauchamp?"

  "It's not my fault," I protest weakly. "I was just born with these natural good looks and charm."

  She pinches my cheek. It hurts like a son of a bitch and it's insulting to boot. I try not to let either show on my face, but my ability to hide the pain went out the door a long time ago. I decide to take a little risk.

  "Are you going to kill me, or no?"

  The woman looks over her shoulder. I can't tell who's in charge between them. Each seems to be answering to the other, in their minds. The guy shrugs, and the woman turns back to me.

  "No, you poor boy. We're not going to kill you. We need you."

  That's the best news I've heard all day. My body hurts too much for any sort of tough-guy act, but I manage to keep myself from having much of a reaction at all. At least long enough to hear what they had to say.