by Tara Janzen
“I didn’t know you knew those words,” he said, his voice strained, which only made her that much angrier. He was in pain. It was all over his face, in the way he was holding himself.
She knew the words, all right, and as much as she’d like to rattle them all off again, cussing a blue streak wasn’t going to change their situation—which was royally screwed. The Mercedes wasn’t going anywhere.
“We’ll have to get a cab back to the hotel.” And leave that gorgeous, kick-ass luxury sedan for Red Dog to pick up in the morning, but Skeeter would be damned if she left her gear behind.
“Then we’ll have to move to another street,” he said, “because there ain’t nada coming down this one for the rest of the night.”
He was right. The streets bordering Whitfield’s mansion had all been blocked off, but the Mercedes hadn’t just been blocked off—it was surrounded, corralled, buried in SWAT trucks, ambulances, cop cars, and nondescript sedans authorized to park in the middle of the street. Her plan for a quick getaway had backfired big-time. Everyone parked in Whitfield’s driveway was being systematically searched, released, and directed out onto Q Street, and her getaway street had been turned into a federal and municipal employee parking lot.
It was her fault. She should have kept him moving, instead of stopping at the catering van, no matter that he’d all but collapsed at her feet.
Crap.
“Come on.” She took him by the arm, giving him what support she could. She had a plan. She needed to execute it. Hanging around Whitfield’s even a minute longer than absolutely necessary was only going to get them into a whole helluva lot of trouble.
There was a verge between the street where the Mercedes was parked and the next street over, a grassy, tree-lined stretch of parkway about twenty feet across.
“Can you hail us a cab if I leave you for a minute?” She was going to park him on the curb on the far side of the verge, then go back for the gear. There were dozens of official people around, and the quicker and more invisible she could be, the better. The one thing she didn’t want to do tonight was answer any questions, not while she had the Godwin file stuck down her pants, a .45 holstered under her arm, and two dead tangos in the house behind her.
“Sure,” he said, and despite the strain in his voice, she believed him. He was Dylan Hart. If he said he could do it, he could do it, even if he was starting to get a little bit of that falling-apart-in-her-arms feel to him again.
They reached the other street, and she propped him against the rear side panel of a nondescript Chevy. Then she crossed back to the Mercedes, popped the trunk, and grabbed her rucksack.
So far, so good.
She wasn’t the only civilian whose car had gotten commandeered by circumstances, and she did her best to blend in and mill around with the rest of the people getting things out of their cars. A cop actually asked her if she needed any help when he saw her carrying her big rucksack. She just grinned, gave him a thumbs-up, and kept on moving—and she kept believing everything was going to be fine, until she cut back through the trees and saw Dylan sliding down the side of the old Chevy with one hand over his face and the other wrapped around his middle.
Oh, crap. She crossed the rest of the parkway at a run, dropping the rucksack at the curb and catching him before he landed in the grass or, God help her, slid under the wheels and into the gutter.
Hawkins would have her ass in a sling if she lost the boss in a gutter.
“Dylan. Dylan.” She braced him as best she could, and tried to get her shoulder under his arm, and it was freaking déjà vu all over again. Could anything else possibly go wrong?
“Hey. Do you need some help?” a man called out from behind her.
“No. No,” she said, glancing over her shoulder and seeing another cop following her across the parkway. “My client has just had too much to drink, that’s all.” She turned a little more to the side and gave the cop a cheerful smile.
“Here, let me help,” the policeman said, reaching for Dylan. The cop wasn’t much older than her, and too observant for his own good. “I don’t know, ma’am, he looks sick to me, and he feels a little hot.”
Yes, Dylan did feel hot, but an NG4 nuclear-fusion hot-flash relapse always tended to do that to a person.
Dammit. Wasn’t the damn antidote doing its job? And what was she going to do if it didn’t?
Hospital was the only answer to that one, even if they both ended up in Leavenworth.
“Oh, I’ve worked for him before, and he always gets this way.” She tried to keep her tone light, but she was busy. She’d lodged her knee between Dylan’s, and was leaning into him, using her thigh and her hip to keep him from falling, while trying to look nonchalant.
“This is our car,” Dylan whispered so only she could hear, his face buried in the curve of her neck, where it was not supposed to be.
“This is our car right here,” she said, babbling along without missing a beat and wondering what in the hell Dylan was thinking even as the words came out of her mouth. There wasn’t a limo service in the country who tooled their clients around in a POS, a set of initials alternately defined as a Police Officer Special or a Piece of Shit. She meant the latter. “Thanks anyway, but I’m just going to take him home, you know, but thanks again anyway, for the offer.”
“Open the car door,” Dylan whispered.
Oh, right. He was a big help.
She wrapped her hand around the handle and pressed the button, but of course, the car was locked. In Washington, D. C., even the POSes were locked—and this beauty was a P O double S. It was missing paint, chrome, and part of its passenger-side rear-light assembly.
She smiled. “I’m just going to get my keys.”
It was a simple thing, really, to lean up against Dylan, rustle around in her rucksack for a moment, and pop the lock on the car with her Slim Jim, without the cop seeing her slide the tool out of the bag and down inside the door frame, and then there she was, opening the door and stuffing Dylan inside, and all the while she was smiling and babbling and trying not to let on that she was stealing a car in front of a policeman.
“If you’re sure you’re okay?” the cop said.
“Positive.” She smiled with all her teeth, like a freaking beauty queen.
The car ownership claim had to look a little doubtful to him when she leaned over Dylan and the whole front seat to unlock the driver’s-side door, but she didn’t let that throw her off her game.
“Bye,” she said, getting back out and closing the passenger door, “and thanks again.”
Without another look in his direction, she walked herself around to the other side of the car, hauling her rucksack, and by some miracle got it over the front seat and into the back—and she waited for him to leave.
And waited. Because POS or not, she had her whole crew and her gear in this damn Chevy now, and this was the car she was getting the hell out of Dodge in, but not even she could hot-wire a car in front of a cop without him noticing, and grand theft auto was not what she wanted added to her rap sheet tonight.
From outside, she heard somebody call out a name, and miracle of miracles, the cop split like a hot stock—but he wasn’t going to forget her, not if anyone asked. Cops were like elephants. She’d learned that lesson a long time ago.
Dammit.
“Dylan,” she said, scooting over and smoothing her hand across his brow. His skin was surprisingly cool. “Dylan?”
His eyes were closed, his head resting on the back of the seat, his breathing easy, thank God.
“Dylan? Can you hear me?”
He let out a heavy sigh and opened his eyes.
“Yeah. It’s a little better. The Navy docs said the antidote might take a while to kick in, that it might fluctuate, but that the successive hot flashes wouldn’t be so severe.” He rolled his head to the side and met her gaze. “I think they were right. I’ll have to give them a call, let them know. They wanted first dibs on the body if I kicked off, for the autopsy.”<
br />
Yes, his breathing was definitely easier, but hers was suddenly quite shallow, the individual breaths sticking in her throat. Body. Autopsy. She was going to be sick.
She put her hand over her sternum and breathed through the slow pain building in her chest. He was giving her such a case of heartburn.
“Antacid?” he asked.
“Please.”
He lifted his hips off the seat, dug a roll of antacids out of his pants pocket, and handed them over.
She took four.
“You might want to start this thing,” he said when she didn’t move.
“Yes,” she said around a mouthful of tropical fruit–flavored chalk. He was right.
God, it was turning out to be a long night.
“We had an Impala like this at Steele Street once,” he said.
Impossible, she thought. Nothing this ugly had ever graced the hallowed halls of Steele Street.
“Her name was Doreen.”
Of course. Doreen. Now she believed it.
“Well, then come on, Doreen,” she muttered, tilting sideways onto the seat and wedging herself under the steering column. Using her knife, she cut a couple of exposed wires, stripped them, then touched them together until she got the spark she needed. A quick twist, a little gas, and Doreen was ready to go, missing on two cylinders and sounding like she was gasping her last breath.
“I think she needs a tune-up,” he said.
No doubt, but Skeeter thought a .50 caliber round to the engine block would be more humane.
TONY Royce was very unhappy.
He was stuck in a goddamn parking lot of limos and Town Cars, with a hundred fucking law enforcement officers crawling all over Whitfield’s house and grounds, and he had two beat-to-crap pirates hiding in the back of his SUV.
Only two.
Apparently, the other two had gotten their fucking heads blown off. Or, actually, if he’d understood that incredible stream of gibberish coming out of Garin and Jai One, Kota’s head had been blown off, Jai Two had been double-tapped in the chest.
Either way, they were both dead, both lying on Whitfield’s property, and he could only hope neither of them had anything so stupid as an identifying piece of information on them—like his fucking name on a piece of paper safety-pinned to their T-shirts or something: In case of emergency, call Anthony F. Royce, formerly of the Central Intelligence Agency, who brought me here tonight and is waiting for me in a black Land Rover, license plate number VM35723.
It gave him an instant migraine.
Jesus Christ.
He should have known that even messed up and running at half speed, Dylan Hart would be damn hard to bring down and more than capable of delivering his own quota of mayhem.
But the girl. Goddamn. She was supposed to be a fucking car mechanic, not a goddamn double-tapping, kick-fighting ninja.
She’d broken Garin’s arm, and the bastard was back there groaning like a baby. Damn him. He’d better figure out how to shut himself up, or Royce was going to do it for him with a suppressed 9mm right between his eyes. The cops were doing a real shakedown in the driveway, and he’d be damned if he got caught because of some pansy-assed pirate.
He needed to call Negara’s men at the Hotel Lafayette and warn them to be on their guard. When Dylan and his little kick-ass girlfriend got there, he wanted them ready.
And he wanted the girl. Any way he could get her. Negara’s orders be damned. Women didn’t set right with Royce under the best of circumstances. Under the worst of them, he had a tendency to want to put them in their place—the hard way.
And that’s exactly what he was going to do to Skeeter Bang.
CHAPTER
21
TRAVIS WASN’T one to quantify his personal, intimate encounters with women, but geezus, he’d just had some of the hottest sex of his life with a woman named Red Dog in the backseat of a Honda Civic.
Really hot sex.
And that had been the backseat, the front seat, and half out the window.
The grin on his face was so big, it almost hurt.
He finished walking across the parking garage, until he reached the Civic. While they’d been waiting for the elevator to go up to the room, Gillian had realized she’d forgotten her glasses on the dash, so he’d come back to get them for her.
But the first thing he saw when he opened the door was her underwear—plain, white, one hundred percent cotton, and hanging off the rearview mirror.
His grin got even wider.
He didn’t know how in the hell her underwear had ended up on the mirror, but he loved it. Her bra was draped over the passenger seat. He gathered both items in his hand and brought them to his face—Gillian. The scent of her was still warm on the fabric, still sultry, still enough to turn him on.
He’d love to see her in black lace.
Oh, yeah. Black lace, sweet ass, soft mouth, and all over him. God, he could be falling in love, and once Skeeter and Dylan got back from Whitfield’s, he was taking Gillian Red Dog Pentycote and getting a room of his own.
It was such a good idea, so perfect, the whole night stretching out in front of them, he couldn’t wait to get up to the suite and tell her about it, to ask her, Please, please, please, Red Dog, spend the night with me.
DOREEN was dying.
Fortunately, she was taking her own sweet time doing it, losing a bolt here, a clamp there, a couple more pounds of compression on one street, a few more inches of integrity out of the steering on another. The brakes she was pretty egalitarian with—she lost them at every red light. If there had been any cops around, Skeeter would have been in trouble, and it would have been all Doreen’s fault.
Fortunately, there were no cops around—for a very good reason. There were neighborhoods in the District of Columbia where even the police feared to tread, and Doreen had found the granddaddy of them all. Skeeter didn’t have a clue where they were or how in the hell they’d ended up north of Pennsylvania Avenue, west of Maryland, and east of civilization. She’d been heading for the Hotel Lafayette, or so she’d thought, but Doreen had a mind of her own, and it was wicked, wicked bad.
“This doesn’t look like the way to the hotel,” Dylan said.
By her count, that was his unhelpful comment number eight.
“I had to get off the highway.”
“Why?”
“I thought the car was going to explode.”
“Well, this neighborhood doesn’t look very safe.”
Number nine—but she wasn’t counting, not really.
He pulled his Glock out of his pocket and checked the load, which perked up her outlook a little. His survival instincts were still working, and from the looks of where they’d ended up, they were going to need them.
“Why don’t you keep an eye out for a service station?” she said. “Doreen needs coolant.”
“Sounds like she needs a tune-up, rings, a muffler, and—”
“And like she’s going to explode?”
“I still wouldn’t have gotten off the highway.”
Number ten.
“It looks like Armageddon out there,” he said, but she wasn’t going to count that one against him. He was right. More than right. In her book, it looked like Armafreakinggeddon. She didn’t know how she’d gotten so far off the beaten track so quickly.
They’d gone from “tony” brownstones to half-gutted buildings in the space of a couple of minutes. A fifty-gallon drum was on fire on the corner, but spookily, no one was hanging around it. She felt people out there, though, sliding through the shadows. She could see them clustered in dark doorways and the alleys—and every single one of them was watching the blond chick in the busted Chevy cruising down the street.
Dylan put his pistol back in his holster, which suited her fine. She didn’t want him flashing any hardware. When she got out of the car, she’d be packing enough for both of them—and she was going to have to get out of the car. She could tell. It was only a matter of minutes before something t
erminal happened to Doreen. She just hoped to hell she found a service station or a garage before then.
At the next intersection, playing the brakes and the steering and truly feeling like she was piloting a bucket of bolts across a dark cosmic sea, she attempted a left-hand turn. Doreen didn’t have any suspension left in her suspension, but Skeeter got the whole Impala around the corner. It was a miracle.
“I wouldn’t have turned left.”
Number eleven.
“There’s a station up ahead on the right,” she said, pointing it out to him.
“It looks closed.”
And that was twelve—very unhelpful.
She didn’t give a damn if the station was closed or not. It had a garage, and if she had to, she’d open the place herself, totally on the down-low, of course. The last thing she wanted was for anybody to call the police.
Right. Like that was going to happen.
Which was a helluva summation of the situation. In this neighborhood, at this time of night, with only a deranged partner and a broken-down rattletrap of a car, she didn’t need saving by the cops. She just needed the hell out of Washington, D.C.
Her first choice of action would have been to dump Doreen and steal another car, but every car she’d seen for the last three blocks had looked just like the Impala or even sketchier. There had been two notable exceptions, and on her own, she might have attempted either one of them, but she didn’t think she could manage Dylan, bust the locks on a Cadillac Escalade or a Jeep Grand Cherokee, and outshoot the drug-dealing posse that was bound to come down on her with their guns blazing for trying to steal their ride. Two out of three of those she figured she could handle, but not all three, and her fear was that it would be the managing-Dylan part that would get lost in the fracas.
And she’d be damned if she risked that.
So, it was either Doreen…or Doreen.
They limped and lurched into the service station and came to a stop on the garage side of the building, as far away as she could get from the sputtering neon sign announcing their arrival at George’s Gas & Grub.
