by Tara Janzen
Skeeter wasn’t going anywhere, Dylan could A-1 guarantee it, but he took the keys anyway.
Anybody who wanted to play chicken with the seventh floor ended up in the old freight elevator, the one that looked like an upended Gothic catwalk clinging to the outside of the building, the one that took fifteen minutes to reach street level. The new elevator on the other side of the building would get him there in two.
HAWKINS felt the rattle of the door when it slammed, and he heard Dylan slip on the first stair and swear.
Christ. He released a weary sigh and let his head drop down on the desk.
The boss had it bad, but no worse than Baby Bang.
A year ago, he would have murdered Dylan in his sleep if he’d messed around with Skeeter. But a lot had changed in the last twelve months—most of all Skeeter. She wasn’t the same girl she’d been. She was stronger, inside and out. Sometimes he looked at her and wasn’t sure what he’d created, or if he’d had a damn thing to do with her transformation.
Oh, he took full credit for her four-inch groups with a .45 at twenty-five yards. And her deadly roundhouse kick—that was all his. She could break a guy’s balls without breaking a sweat, because he’d taught her how. But there was no way on earth to teach someone how to beat Kid Chaos on the draw. That was pure mad instinct. He’d never seen anybody beat Kid on the draw, not and double-tap a guy who was shooting back.
Skeeter had done it with split-second timing, two shots to the chest on her first mission. She’d been just as effective in Afghanistan.
He hadn’t been lying when he’d said she was too good not to be utilized. She was an instant advantage on the playing field, an instant leveler when the odds were against them, and she needed to be at Dylan’s back when he went up against Whitfield’s security. If Grant wanted the Godwin file bad enough to sic SDF on a U.S. senator, it had to be something worth protecting. The mission wouldn’t be a walk in the park. They never were, no matter how simple they looked at the outset, and he’d be damned if he let the boss go in alone when Skeeter was ready, willing, and able. Dylan had been walking the razor’s edge these last few months, taking the kind of chances Hawkins thought they’d talked each other out of a long time ago, like the job he’d just pulled off in Jakarta. The boss had been a little short on details, but Hawkins knew Jemaah Islamiah, an Indonesian terrorist group, wasn’t to be fucked with, and he knew that over the course of his last mission, Dylan had single-handedly gang-banged every cell of Jemaah tangos from the Bay of Bengal to the Banda Sea, diverting seventeen million dollars of their high-grade heroin slush fund into a numbered Swiss bank account owned by the Indonesian government, for which favor the Indonesians had vowed eternal gratitude to the United States.
A useful thing, seventeen million dollars’ worth of eternal gratitude—so was teamwork, damned useful, but Dylan seemed to have forgotten all about teamwork. He’d always been SDF’s lone wolf, but the boss had been working without a net all year, and it was taking a toll. He looked like hell, pure, unadulterated, rehashed, warmed-over, rode-hard-and-put-away-wet hell. Dylan was falling apart, whether he knew it or not, and Hawkins wasn’t going to let it get him hurt, not on Hawkins’s watch—and at Steele Street, every watch was his watch.
With a couple of keystrokes, he closed the inventory program and opened a coded e-mail account. Sure enough, General Grant had sent a few files. Hawkins opened the first one and started downloading the attachments. As always, he was impressed with the general’s intel. If SDF had a secret weapon, it was their commanding officer. From what he was seeing, it looked like Grant had raided the Secret Service’s files. Detailed diagrams of the Whitfield mansion flashed on the screen, along with diagrams of the security system and Grant’s notes on the safe he’d seen in Whitfield’s office.
Last, but not least, was a memo detailing an invitation that would be waiting for Dylan at his hotel. Senator and Mrs. Arthur Whitfield were hosting a reception for the British ambassador tomorrow night. Dylan would be going as Michael Deakins, a State Department aide assigned to the ambassador.
White Rook. No one else could have arranged such a perfect cover at a moment’s notice, and Hawkins didn’t have a doubt in the world that given a few more moments, White Rook could arrange another.
He typed in his request, then sat back in his chair to wait.
He didn’t have to wait long. In a couple of minutes, he got confirmation: Mr. Michael Deakins would be taking his wife, Jeanette, to the party.
A grin curved the corners of his mouth. Dylan had better batten down his hatches, because Skeeter looked good in Versace. Damn good.
CHAPTER
3
DENVER WAS her city.
From LoDo to the suburbs, Skeeter had tagged it a thousand times. Anyone who’d been on the streets or in the alleys had seen SB303 spray-painted on a wall somewhere.
But that was all in the past.
She ruled with a new kind of power now, the power of hard-won skill and the undeniable power of 427 cubic inches of displacement. She ruled Mercy, and Mercy ruled the streets, especially the two-mile stretch of abandoned highway east of the city known as the Doubles.
She slowly drove the Nova toward the middle of the cars parked alongside the rubber-marked pavement. There were close to a hundred vehicles lining the sides of the highway, and people started gathering around her long before she pulled the car to a stop.
“Hey, Skeeter,” somebody yelled.
“Hey. It’s Skeeter Bang,” another guy called out.
“Shit,” someone swore.
Skeeter grinned. Anyone expecting to make some cash tonight wouldn’t be glad to see her or Mercy, but for the most part, she didn’t pay the crowd any mind. The racing hadn’t started yet. Bets were still being laid down, with bottles of beer, half-smoked joints, and a drugstore’s worth of chemicals changing hands along with the money. Music blasted out of dozens of cars along the strip.
The Midnight Doubles were as much a party as a car race, with no rules for either, but head to head at over a hundred miles per hour was no place to be paired with a drunk, or somebody too stoned to stay on top of their game. Skeeter always checked out the drivers even more than she did the cars.
Tonight’s crowd looked like they’d started the party early—maybe too early. B. B. Heaney had already blown his engine. Smoke was pouring out from under his Mustang’s hood. The rice boys were gunning up and down the highway, but nobody was setting anything off yet, and from the looks of Rob North and the girl hanging all over him and his Hemi ’Cuda, racing was the last thing on his mind. Gino Cuchara and his crew looked ready to go, but Skeeter wouldn’t race Gino. He got mean when he lost, and Skeeter didn’t think his girlfriend could take too many more beatings—and why that was her problem, she didn’t know. Lots of people got beaten all the time.
She’d been beaten. It was a weird thing for a kid—and not at all what she wanted to be thinking about tonight.
Cripes. She let out a sigh and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, then gently touched the scar that began at the corner of her eye. It went for five long, jagged inches, up through her eyebrow and across her forehead. It didn’t hurt anymore, hadn’t for a long time, but she didn’t like looking at it and knew nobody else did, either, so she wore her hat and her sunglasses and did her best to forget the night Superman had carried her out of that flophouse on Wazee Street, both of them soaked in her blood.
Geez. Her life was weird. She was weird.
And she’d outgrown the Doubles.
She’d known it before she’d gotten halfway out of town.
She pulled to a stop at the end of the line and cut Mercy’s engine. Reaching across the seat, she picked up her pack of Faros and knocked one out, then slipped the pack between her belt and her skirt. Her small stash of kitchen matches was in her back pocket, and after striking one across her belt, she lit up.
Oh, yeah. That helps, she thought, letting out a billow of smoke.
It was a crap
py habit, but she couldn’t say she didn’t like it, or that she probably wouldn’t try quitting again pretty soon—just not tonight.
Leaning forward, she draped herself over the steering wheel, took another long drag, and watched the crowd.
She didn’t belong here, not anymore, not after Colombia, not after Afghanistan. She belonged with Superman, and Kid, and Creed. She belonged on active duty with Travis, dammit, and she belonged with Dylan—maybe not the way she wanted, but professionally she belonged with him, and stomping off into the night was not the way to prove it.
Screw you?
What in the world had she been thinking?
Nothing, that’s what. She hadn’t been thinking at all. She’d let her emotions get the better of her common sense and said something incredibly juvenile to the one person on earth she most wanted to treat her like an adult.
Screw you?
Double freaking cripes. She dropped her forehead down on the steering wheel. Even a simple heist needed planning, intel, equipment. She could have helped get it all together, maybe impressed the hell out of him, maybe earned herself a slot on the mission. Hawkins wanted someone in Washington to watch Dylan’s back, and she could do it. Helping SDF’s boss steal the Godwin file was the perfect opportunity for her to prove herself to him. All she had to do was get him to take her to Washington, D.C.
Right, she thought.
A heavy sigh escaped her, and she scanned the crowd again. She hadn’t driven all the way out to the Doubles to smoke cigarettes and get all maudlin, and she hadn’t really driven out here to kick Rob North’s or B. B. Heaney’s butt in the quarter mile. She needed something, and when she saw Johnny Ramos heading her way, she knew she’d found it—spooky or not, weird or not, like every other girl on the planet, sometimes she needed somebody to pour her heart out to, sometimes she needed a friend.
DYLAN pulled Roxanne to a stop well down in the pack, being sure to keep out of everyone’s headlights. Hawkins’s Challenger was a legend at the Midnight Doubles.
Christ. The Doubles.
He looked around at the cars and the kids, at the drugs and the trouble just waiting to happen, and had to ask himself what in the hell he was doing there.
Unfortunately, the answer was pretty damn simple—Skeeter Bang.
Curiosity and women were a combination that had gotten him in plenty of trouble over the years, but he’d still given in to it, because he was damned curious about her, about her friends and how she spent her time, about what she liked and where she went. He knew what she did for SDF—or at least he’d thought he’d known, up until Hawkins had dropped his H-bombs.
Shit. He hated to even think about people shooting at her. She could die on a mission. It happened, which was all the reason he needed not to take her to Washington with him.
Yeah, he knew the chances were a hundred to one against even a single shot being fired on the Godwin file heist, a thousand to one—unlike his odds tonight, which were running a hundred to one in favor of his heartburn getting a whole helluva lot worse before it got any better.
He leaned forward over the steering wheel, staring out the windshield, his gaze narrowing.
Sonuvabitch. A tall, dark-haired kid was walking up to Mercy, and Skeeter was getting out with a smile on her face, looking damn glad to see him. Even from the back, something about the guy looked familiar, but it wasn’t until he wrapped his arms around Skeeter and turned sideways that Dylan recognized him. Johnny Ramos. Sonuvabitch. The kid was here, and he had his hands all over her.
All over—around her waist, sliding up the middle of her back, squeezing her upper arms, coming to rest on her hips. Geezus. He went for her ass, a move Dylan would have put money on, but Skeeter caught his hand and gave him a little punch. The kid grinned.
Dylan’s jaw locked.
Eighteen, that’s how old Johnny was, and at the rate he was going, he’d be damn lucky to see nineteen.
Which was ridiculous. Dylan had no claim on her, and she didn’t need him to handle Johnny Ramos. He’d seen her spar with Hawkins, and if she didn’t like Ramos grabbing her ass, she could break him in half.
But she wasn’t breaking anything—except his heart.
He swore under his breath. He was too old for this, chasing after girls in cars and losing out to a freaking teenager.
He didn’t fire up Roxanne, though, and he didn’t look away. He watched Johnny hold her, watched them talk, watched Skeeter’s lips move, her head resting on Johnny’s shoulder. He waited and watched as a tear rolled out from under her mirrored sunglasses and made a wet track on her baby soft cheek—watched Johnny wipe it off with the pad of his thumb.
Fuck. He’d done that to her. Dylan knew it as well as he knew how stupid it was to be sitting in the dark watching this little drama play itself out.
Crying. Because he’d been a bastard and shut her down.
She’d be twenty-one on Sunday. He’d already bought her a dozen presents, things from all over the world, but only one would have his name on it—a set of spinners for Babycakes, her ’65 Shelby-Mustang GT 350. It was sacrilege, putting spinners on a classic, but he knew Skeeter would love them, and they’d look great on the Mustang, pure pimping.
He wished to hell she was driving the Shelby tonight. Mercy had earned her name because she had none. The garages at Steele Street were full of beasts, but the Nova was Godzilla on wheels, fire-breathing, a barely street legal force of destruction. The last thing he wanted to see was Skeeter going head to head with Mercy against one of the Midnight Doubles road warriors, most of whom looked like they spent as much time altering their brain chemistry as they did altering their cars. That would be even worse than what he was seeing now—Skeeter and Johnny plastered against each other.
It shouldn’t hurt as much as it did.
He pushed himself back into the seat.
She was his. He didn’t know where he’d gotten such a crazy idea, but it had been in his head for months, dogging him, and avoiding her wasn’t helping matters. He was worse off now than he’d been in January.
He needed to change tactics. He needed a new plan.
He needed, somehow, to figure out a way to work her out of his system without taking her clothes off, because that would be easy—easy for him and real hard on her. If he put his mind to it, he could have her in his bed tonight. He was so fucking smooth, and she was so freaking young, and he knew how she looked at him from behind those damn sunglasses. But he also knew himself, and once he’d had her, his obsession would be over. He’d move on, and there she’d be at Steele Street, hurt and disillusioned, every time he came home, every time he showed up to put a mission together.
He honest to God didn’t think he could face her under those circumstances, or if he’d get much of a chance to face anything under those circumstances. Hawkins would murder him in his sleep if he hurt her like that, and Creed would be the one handing him the knife. Kid would hold Dylan down so Superman could get a good clean cut, right through the old jugular, and he wouldn’t blame any of them. They all loved her—and all he did was want her.
Swearing under his breath, he lifted his hips off the seat and dug a roll of antacids out of his pocket. She was killing him. He threw half a dozen of the chewable tablets in his mouth, not knowing why he bothered. They never helped.
Christ. Her shoulders were shaking, and Johnny was rocking her back and forth, and Dylan had to wonder just how much worse this whole scene was going to get—and whether or not he was going to be able to handle it without getting out of the car and going over to her.
He tossed back a couple more antacids and washed them down with a swig of Scotch out of the bottle he’d brought with him.
Fuck. There was another way.
Before he could think the damn thing through and admit what a shit-for-brains idea it was, he dug his phone out of his other pocket and flipped it open.
“Uptown Autos. Superman here,” Hawkins answered.
“In your dreams.”
> Hawkins let out a short laugh. “Don’t tell me you lost her.”
“No. I’m at the Doubles, and Mercy’s parked up the line.”
“And Skeeter?”
“Laminated to Johnny Ramos.” Like plastic wrap on Jell-O, a real airtight seal.
“You want me to get a bucket of water?”
Yes. “Call her. Tell her she’s in.”
“Good idea” was all Hawkins said after a slight pause, as if Dylan hadn’t just reversed his earlier decision by a full one hundred and eighty degrees, as if it really was a good idea—which it wasn’t. He just didn’t know what in the hell else to do with her.
“The Godwin file isn’t a combat mission,” he said, as if that made his change of mind perfectly reasonable, perfectly justifiable.
“No, it isn’t,” Hawkins agreed, still so damnably calm.
“I’ll set her up as surveillance.” And the job was CONUS, in the continental United States. Even if things went bad, they wouldn’t get too bad, not on a fairly straightforward heist, and nothing like what he’d been up against halfway around the world these last few months, where things had gone bad more times than he cared to remember, especially in Indonesia. He was either slipping, or he was being set up, and he hadn’t been able to figure out which.
“She’s good at surveillance,” Hawkins said. “Hold on. I’m calling her on the other line.”
Up ahead, Skeeter had broken free of Johnny and reached into Mercy to get her phone. Dylan couldn’t hear what Hawkins was saying, but he saw Skeeter wipe the back of her hand across her cheek, saw her straighten up, take a stance—take another step away from Johnny.
Good. That was better. He felt a measure of his own tension dissipate, felt the pain in his gut ease. Yeah, this could work. This was going to work.
Then suddenly it wasn’t working at all.
Skeeter looked down the line, sliding her gaze over the cars parked at the side of the road until she landed on Roxanne.
