Breaking Loose

by Tara Janzen

  The way he wanted to get his mouth on it.

  Yeah, that was the situation-the kiss-the-back-of-Suzi-Toussi’s-neck situation. Talk about tough.

  Tough luck, because he sure as hell wasn’t going to be fulfilling that little fantasy anytime soon.

  As if to prove his point, off in the distance, coming from the north, he heard the rise and fall of police sirens again.

  Suzi lifted her head at the sound, her eyes meeting his across the console and the bucket seats.

  “More cops?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Gang-style slaying at the Gran Chaco is going to trump a lot of street crime. It doesn’t even matter that the dead guy is Jimmy Ruiz. What matters is that he was killed in the gringa‘s room.”

  Even behind her amber tinted glasses, he could see the sudden edge of panic in her gaze, and man, did he understand. In about ten minutes or less, she was going to own the top slot on the cops’ suspect list, and ending up in a Paraguayan prison was simply not on the menu-ever.

  Then she went for the slam dunk. For the barest instant, as their gazes met, she did something so unexpected, so ingenuous, so purely female, that all he could think was Fuck it. She bit her lower lip, her teeth gently pressing into that plump curve of super soft, cinnamon-lipstick-slicked skin-and it was a done deal.

  The whole thing was over.

  Without another thought, he leaned across the Land Cruiser and took her mouth with his, his hand sliding around the back of her neck, over her soft, satiny nape, his fingers tunneling up into her hair, holding her, his tongue sliding into the warm, honeyed depths of her mouth.

  And sliding again, exploring, taking her with a kiss, again and again, holding her tighter, kissing her harder, his heart starting to pound-because she let him. She more than let him. Geezus, for such a piece of work, she was so sweet, turning into him, her lips so soft, her tongue sliding over his teeth. She made a small sound deep in her throat, and he knew he was in trouble, hands down, no holds barred-and he loved it, the heated thrill of it, the chase, anticipating the hot, hot sex of discovering a woman for the first time, the excitement of taking her clothes off-the way he wanted to take Suzi’s clothes off and just get into her.

  Yeah.

  He slanted his mouth over hers more fully, taking more of her, taking everything he could get, all the sweet surrender and every soft sigh.

  Oh, yeah.

  She was so wonderfully dangerous, turning him on. Six months of nonstop fantasizing had brought him to this, their first kiss and wanting to just “do it” and keep on “doing it” in the front seat of a stolen Land Cruiser, with a dead body behind them, a dead body ahead of them, the cops getting closer, second after second, and him getting hard.

  Perfect.

  Oh, God, his kiss.

  Suzi just gave herself up to it, to the taste and the heat of it. He was rock solid up against her, the muscles in his arms flexing around her, the gentle strength of his hand on the back of her neck, the sensual thrill of having his tongue pushing into her mouth again and again, the erotic rhythm of it melting her brain. He was insistent and tender at the same time, turning her on with every move of his lips over hers, with every thrust into her mouth, making her want to give him more.

  Oh, God, she usually had more sense.

  And she wasn’t fooling herself. This didn’t have anything to do with being scared half to death by Jimmy Ruiz getting massacred in her room or by the police descending on the hotel.

  This was all about Killian the Konqueror, “Konk” to the guys with their boots on the ground, or sometimes K.C., to those who could spell, she guessed. Rumor had it that it was tattooed on his ass in Chinese-”Conqueror,” his nom de guerre, his war name.

  God, she believed it. There was enough “boy” left in the Boy Scout to pull a stunt like that. And so help her, she wanted to find out, to get him out of his clothes and just get so damn close to him.

  She slid her fingers up into his hair and kissed him like her life depended on it, slow and deep, teasing him with her tongue, breathing him in and tasting him-and it was all so impossibly good, so impossible.

  “Konk”-geezus, who in the world let themselves be called Konk?

  She sighed and moved against him, pressing herself against his chest. God, he was built like a slab of granite, and she loved it, and yes, she knew what kind of guy let himself be called Konk, the kind of guy who’d earned the name the hard way from the kind of guys who’d been up there on the ridge with him in Afghanistan seven years ago and innumerable times since.

  She’d had to dig deep for that information, for the story of the ambush, of the overwhelming enemy forces, and of the deeds that had brought him and his guys home that long-ago night. Dax’s cousin Esmee Ramos didn’t have access to those facts, but her husband, Johnny, did, and so did the other SDF guys. They knew Dax was a legend in the wasteland, and Johnny hadn’t been shy about telling that story and all the others. Before joining SDF, Johnny had been a U.S. Army Ranger, one of the bad boys who hoped to end up with the big bad boys like Dax and the A teams.

  But this kiss…this kiss was crazy and had no place to go.

  No place, she told herself.

  Off in the distance, but getting closer at an accelerating rate of speed, the wail of sirens cut through the air-trouble and nothing but, just like Daniel Axel Killian, and heading their way.

  Somebody needed to show an ounce of sense, and considering the way his hand was sliding up her side and heading toward her breasts, she figured if there was going to be any sense in this front seat, it was going to have to come from her.

  Damn.

  With a monumental effort, because he tasted and felt so good, and because it had been so, so long since she’d been kissed, she broke away from him-and there they sat, still wrapped up so close, their noses touching, his breath soft on her skin, the temperature in the Land Cruiser heading for the deep freeze with the air conditioner going full blast, and her still absolutely melting inside.

  “Hey,” he said, his voice rough.

  Yeah, that was about all she had left, too.

  “Hey.” She needed her head examined, and they were still so damn close, one of his hands still in her hair, rubbing the back of her neck, the other no more than an inch away from her breast, their foreheads still touching.

  Behind them, the second flank of police cars screamed by, their sirens descending in the other direction.

  “We need to…”

  “Yeah.” The quicker the better, and still she didn’t move away from him.

  Who the hell was he to affect her this way? Some guy who’d walked into the Toussi Gallery one night and looked too good to be true. Some guy who’d smiled at her and with one unabashed, come-on curve of his mouth had told her that he knew all about her, everything-and for a moment, she’d believed that he had.

  But he didn’t. No one did, except for Buck, and probably Hawkins, maybe Dylan, her family, and the few people who had been involved. An accident, it had been termed, and rightly so, a violent accident covered up by the money and power of one of Australia’s most prominent families, the records sealed, the rumors squelched, the story barely heard. The Weymouth clan was synonymous with the Northern Territory, be it cattle stations, gold, or uranium, and by their choice, a life had been nearly wiped off the slate of the world, nearly forgotten.

  Nearly, but not quite.

  Suzi would never forget. She couldn’t, no matter how many years passed.

  She pulled away from him and was so disappointed by the effort it took. She was usually smarter. He was an unnecessary complication, the competition, the guy to beat, not the guy to be kissing.

  “That was a mistake,” she said. Unacceptable. Dangerous territory.

  “Yeah.”

  “We have a job to do.” She had unfinished business, and she couldn’t afford to fail, not in the work she did for Buck, and never again in the work she did in Eastern Europe. She wasn’t trying to save the world, or even every poor
woman who fell into prostitution-but the younger girls, the ones who were trafficked from the U.S. to the Balkans, the Czech Republic, and the one she’d found in Ukraine, in Odessa on the Black Sea-with the SDF crew’s help, and Buck Grant’s documents, she’d returned six of those girls, almost seven.

  It was the “almost” that kept her going. The “almost” she hadn’t forgiven herself for. The last thing she’d needed was another black mark on her soul, but there it was now, and like the first one, it had a sweet name-Lily Anne Thompson, but at least she could voice that name. The other one, the one she felt with every breath, that one she couldn’t speak.

  Hell, sometimes she wondered if she was going to live long enough to make up for her failings and wash away her sins.

  “Which one next, Warner?”

  Inside the luxury cabin of his Learjet, flying high over the western edge of southern Brazil, Erich Warner closed his SAT phone and returned to watching his mistress roll half a dozen pretty pills around a small silver bowl-blue, red, green, orange, yellow, purple, all gelcaps, bright and shiny.

  She was fascinated by her pills, as well she should be. He’d only let her go a minute too long without medication half a dozen times. Each time had been a punishment, a lesson taught. Each time had been a lesson learned.

  Sometimes he wondered if he would ever let her go longer. Two minutes, possibly. The pain, he knew, was excruciating. He’d spent enough time in Dr. Souk’s lab to have seen human suffering on a truly epic scale-not in quantity, but epic in the quality and the depthless wonder of the suffering.

  Pain had been Dr. Souk’s stock in trade. No mere torturer, he’d been a medical genius, a chemist, and Shoko was one of his finer creations. Erich knew why she cut people to ribbons, literally, with her knives. She was sick. Her mind twisted by the pain of her countless near deaths and rebirths in Souk’s laboratory.

  Poor, bitter little thing. He’d been known to give her prizes as well as punishments, and today, he’d decided, would be a prize day. Maybe his generosity would bring him luck. His faith in Killian was being tested.

  Tonight, the man had said. He’d have the Memphis Sphinx tonight.

  If he didn’t, Dallas, Texas, was in for a very bloody Monday morning the first week in April. Heroin made for predictable bedfellows, drug lords and warlords, and nobody had more heroin to transport than a man who was both, Akram Jamal in southern Paktika, Afghanistan. For the favor of piggybacking one of the Afghan’s loads into Marseilles in one of Erich’s cargo ships, and for facilitating the land transportation of a shipment of surface-to-air missiles, SAMs, across Tajikistan, Jamal had given him the name of a restless Saudi deep in the heart of Texas.

  Erich had more power and money than half the countries he did business in, and yet neither power nor money was enough to save him from Souk’s shadow beast. The creature had an uncanny ability to reach into Erich’s business and make his presence known. Two of Jamal’s lieutenants had been killed during the transport of the surface-to-air missiles, and the missiles had arrived in Jamal’s warehouse irreparably disabled. Erich hadn’t supplied the missiles. He’d only transported them-and yet it was clear to him that the shadow beast had been involved. He left things for Erich, marks. There had been a mark on one of the SAM crates-XT7, Dr. Souk’s code for a particularly effective drug he’d created. It was the only mark Erich had needed to know the beast had been involved. Always it was like this, the silent, evasive threat of him. The creature lurking around Erich’s deals, breathing on them, ruining them, then disappearing for months.

  He was alive, he knew too much, and Erich had not been able to stop him in any way. The situation was untenable, and the solution was the Sphinx. With the shield of immortality upon him, he could track the beast down and kill him-or bring him to heel.

  The thought was a recurring one and never failed to make his blood race, to control that much power, to chain the beast to him the way he’d chained Shoko.

  “The woman, Warner,” Shoko said, looking up at him from where she sat at his feet, gently rolling her pills around and around in the silver bowl, the iguana resting along her hip and thigh. “I heard her on the phone, while you were talking with Killian.”

  “What about her?” As if he didn’t know.

  “I want her, Warner. I told you there was a woman, and I want her for my own. No interference.”

  “So be it,” he said, granting the unknown “Sugar” a death unlike anything she ever could have imagined.

  Shoko smiled, and that truly was a lovely sight.

  “Purple, my dear,” he said, and she all but purred, taking the purple pill out of the bowl and putting it in her pocket for later, when she needed it.

  For the next few hours, she was free of him, free to roam as she willed, and he had no doubt that when they landed, some poor sap in Ciudad del Este would pay for her freedom with his life.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Stakeout-Suzi had never been on a stakeout, but surprisingly, the scene in front of her was very familiar-half a dozen prostitutes congregating on their strip of turf in front of Galeria Viejo, gearing up for the night shift.

  “Coffee?” Dax asked, offering his cup.

  She’d opted for bottled water when he’d made his recon stroll past the Old Gallery and then slipped into a dive called El Mercado for a few supplies, but a little coffee wasn’t a bad idea. She’d stayed in the Land Cruiser, parked a ways down the street, but in a place where they had full view of the main door and Ponce’s Range Rover parked out front.

  “Thanks.” She took the cup and held it to her mouth, blowing first before taking a sip. “So what do you think? Is that the world’s oldest profession?”

  “Nah,” he said. “War is the world’s oldest profession, by a long shot, and then comes tax collecting, and then the trick turners showed up to give everybody some relief from the other two.”

  She grinned, and when he glanced over, he did, too.

  Yes, sir, that was them, just a couple of fun-loving kids with murder and mayhem behind them, and a four-thousand-year-old occult statue in front of them-hopefully.

  Ponce hadn’t even left a guard on the Range Rover. All five of his crew, himself included, were in the gallery. Suzi almost hoped he did find it. At least they’d know where it was then, and she didn’t doubt that Dylan and the boys could steal it back, maybe even before Dax could get his hands on it.

  “What are his chances, you think, of them finding anything in there?”

  “Slim to none, about the same as ours. The place is really torn up inside. As a matter of fact, you might want to reconsider this plan and let me just take you to the airport.” He held a cookie out for her, from out of a bag he’d bought, and she took it.

  They’d been an hour on the river road, getting back into town, and were an hour into watching the gallery, and that was the third or fourth time he’d suggested taking her to the airport.

  “No,” she said. “I need to get inside, look around for myself.”

  She still had the scanner, her ace in the hole, and yes, he was bound to notice when she pulled it out, but until she was in the gallery, she was keeping her technical advantage to herself.

  He had caveman tendencies. It wouldn’t be beyond him to just take the damn scanner and try to ship her out. He wouldn’t get far with getting rid of her, but she could save them both the wear and tear of him finding that out by just keeping her secret to herself.

  “Senator Leonard must be paying you one helluva commission.”

  “Top-notch,” she agreed.

  “Bull,” he said.

  “Whatever.”

  He held an open bag of chips out, and she reached in and got a handful.

  Sharing coffee, eating chips and cookies, they both watched the gallery and the Range Rover and the whores.

  “I could pay you more.”

  That’s all he said, sitting over there dangling bait, and yes, she knew he could. General Grant was paying her twenty plus tactical support, and
Dax had both those and more to offer. He’d done well in his business, whatever his business was-which she was guessing was more than the art-recovery-type investigations he’d done with Esmee. The guy had money.

  Without biting on his offer, she handed the coffee back to him and reached for her bottle of water.

  “And here we go,” he said, leaning slightly forward in his seat, picking up the binoculars she’d donated to the cause.

  Ponce and his boys were coming out.

  She looked at each man, carefully cataloguing what she saw, and knew he was doing the same. Neither one of them said a word, until the Range Rover pulled away from the gallery and drove off.

  He lowered the binoculars and looked over at her. “What did you get?”

  “Nothing.” She shook her head.

  “Nothing,” he agreed. “They came out empty-handed. Let’s go.”

  Three minutes later, back in the alley behind Beranger’s, Dax started prying open the makeshift security gate someone had attached to the Old Gallery’s delivery door. The sun was going down, the alley was still piled with garbage, and Suzi, Dax noticed, was taking a pen-shaped object out of her fanny pack. After getting a look at it, he lifted his gaze to her face.

  Geezus, she was beautiful. Beautiful and, he was sure, guilty as hell-of something, standing there holding the small piece of equipment like it was a wand, pen-shaped, yes, but with a readout display and a couple of pressure switches.

  “What is that?” he asked, leaning into the length of rebar he was using as a lever on the iron bars. Walking in the front door, where Ponce and his men had come out, would have been nominally easier, but Suzi probably had the top spot on Ciudad del Este’s Most Wanted list for another couple of hours at least. By midnight, for certain, some other horrendous crime, or probably half a dozen, would have taken place and knocked her into yesterday’s old news. Until then, parading her through the lineup of Colony Club whores and pimps taking over the block and congregating in front of the gallery was not in their best interest, and besides, it just wasn’t all that difficult to get into Beranger’s Old Gallery.