Cutting Loose

by Tara Janzen

  He stopped in front of an unmarked door and swiped a keycard through the lock. When the lock released, he opened the door, and Zach followed him into another hallway, more of the Langley maze.

  “I’ll be damned if we take the fall for State’s mistakes,” Alex continued, “and the last thing we need is the Defense Department on our back. After our briefing, you will leave immediately for Colorado. Find out what you can. If this is going to go bad, I want SDF going down first, then State. When you’re finished in Denver, go pick up the woman. I expect you to be in Albuquerque by tomorrow afternoon at the latest. The clock is ticking on this thing.”

  Of course, it was. The clock was always ticking. It had been ticking for Zach for eleven years, and sometimes it wore the hell out of him, but all he said was “Yes, sir.”

  He didn’t have a problem with going to Denver. He understood interagency politics, and he also knew the bad blood between the chop-shop boys of Steele Street and the CIA went back over a decade, to an incident in Moscow involving Dylan Hart. Regardless, he sure as hell didn’t think he’d be shaking down the SDF team, at least not as his first order of business. Later, though, if Lily Robbins didn’t pan out, he’d do whatever it took to get the job done. That’s what he did, get the job done, every time.

  But going to Denver was a good idea. He’d been considering it since he’d landed back in the States, and the letter clinched it.

  His grin returned for another fleeting second. Going to Denver was a damn good idea, but not for any reason Alex would understand, because for all his Ivy League education and brilliance, Alex was no mechanic.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Friday, 10:00 P.M.—Albuquerque, New Mexico

  Lily Robbins leaned over the side of the bed and checked to make sure her incredibly annoying and incredibly effective wake-the-hell-up alarm was set for five A.M. It was. Falling back on her pillow, she stared at the ceiling and took a deep breath. The FedEx envelope she’d found on her doorstep two days ago was lying next to her. It was the craziest damn thing. She’d opened it right off the bat, and then spent the last two days wondering what it all meant.

  Oh, hell, she knew what it meant—trouble.

  Pure, unadulterated, a-good-girl-wouldn’t trouble.

  She was a good girl.

  Maybe too good.

  Silently asking herself what in the world she thought she was going to do, she picked up the envelope, belled it open, and dumped the contents onto her duvet: a plane ticket to Tahiti, a politely phrased, anonymous invitation written in a stylized hand on twenty-pound bond, and ten thousand dollars in cold cash.

  Ten.

  Thousand.

  Dollars.

  And Tahiti.

  She lifted her gaze to the far wall and the travel poster framed and matted and hanging next to her bedroom door—Tahiti at sunset, palm trees, white sand, a thatched bungalow, and a sailboat silhouetted against a soft blue and pink sky. Tahiti, the poster said, Island of Dreams.

  Certainly the island of her dreams. She’d been dreaming about Tahiti since she’d been twelve years old, after seeing South Pacific. Bali Hai hadn’t existed, but Tahiti did, and it was exotic, tropically colorful, bounded by an endless ocean of water, and full of early morning mists and wild, lush greenery, the absolute opposite of everything in Trace, Montana, where she’d grown up, which she knew was the whole point of her fixation. She had a bookcase full of books about French Polynesia and not a cowboy poster in sight.

  And now she had a plane ticket to Tahiti and ten thousand dollars.

  Either someone had gotten lucky, or someone had gone to a whole helluva lot of effort to find out what she liked. Only one name came to mind, only one person with that level of cool sophistication, that many resources, and that much cash on hand: Alejandro Campos, the drug lord who’d saved her butt in El Salvador three weeks ago.

  Drug lord, she reminded herself, looking at the pile of money. Cocaine smuggler. Criminal. Bad guy.

  At best, it was an interesting way to ask for a date.

  At worst, it was an interesting way to ask for a whole lot more.

  Ten thousand dollars—she picked up a taped stack of bills and ran her thumb over the top. She could sure use the cash, but nothing inside her could accept the illicit invitation, and she most definitely didn’t need the trouble. She already had more trouble than she could handle, all of it coming out of nowhere, just like the damn envelope.

  Today had been the day—last-day-of-helping-out-at-school day, last-day-of-blackboards-and-books-and-lying-about-why-she’d-come-home-from-her-sabbatical-early day, last-day-in-Albuquerque day. She was going home.

  At least that’s one way to put it, she thought, dropping the stack of bills back onto the rest of the pile. Running away was another way to put it, and in her heart, she figured that was actually closer to the truth.

  She slanted her gaze toward the bedside table, and to the .45 caliber semiautomatic Colt lying next to the alarm clock. She’d already packed her suitcase for tomorrow’s early morning departure. All she needed to add was her toothbrush and a couple of books to read on the road, and she’d be ready for three months at her family’s ranch in Trace.

  She wouldn’t need the Colt once she got there. Any varmint running loose and up to no good on the Cross Double R was better gotten after with a rifle than a handgun. Pistols were for killing people, and that was exactly why she had one by the side of her bed and why it was going with her on the road.

  Life had taken a few unsettling turns since she’d come back from El Salvador. She’d gone to Central America to film a documentary on a group of Catholic nuns running an orphanage near the Honduran border. But what she’d gotten was in over her head. Within days of her arrival, she’d found herself in the middle of a bunch of guerrillas and drug runners, with far too many people dying on the sidelines. She’d gotten out in one piece, thanks to Campos, the biggest drug dealer in the Salvadoran province of Morazán, but staying that way was proving to be more of a challenge than she would have imagined possible in Albuquerque.

  Her house had been broken into three days ago, at least according to her. The police thought she was imagining things. Nothing had been stolen. Nothing had been left out of place. No one had seen anything or anyone strange in the neighborhood. No burglary, no robbery, no sign of any breaking and entering; therefore, no crime, just a jittery woman’s imagination.

  Bull.

  Someone had been in her house, touching her things, searching through her rooms.

  They.

  Two guys.

  She would put money on it.

  One tall, older guy with a gray ponytail and a paunch; the other guy with buzz-cut, white-blond hair, dark sunglasses, of average height, with a better-than-average build. They drove a silver Aston Martin, a car so unusual in her usual haunts that seeing it and the guys who drove it more than a couple of times had set off a warning bell, especially when she’d seen the sports car leaving the high school parking lot on Tuesday with the gray-haired guy at the wheel.

  Coincidence?

  Maybe.

  But her daddy was a sheriff’s deputy in Chouteau County, Montana, and a former United States Marine, and he didn’t believe in coincidences. Neither did she, not enough to take even a long-shot chance, and in the last three days, she’d put her plans in place, gotten her stuff packed, and mapped out her route—the interstate, all the way, straight north. Home.

  She’d also started sleeping with her pistol cocked, locked, loaded, and well within reach. If she was imagining things, great, perfect, all for the better, and if she wasn’t, she had the Colt.

  She didn’t blame the police for not believing her, not really. She hadn’t exactly told them where she’d been and what she’d been up to, or anything else about what had happened or what she’d witnessed in Central America. The whole surreal experience had ended with a luxurious trip back to the States on a private jet, compliments of the mysterious Alejandro Campos.

  No, she’d de
cided, telling the police everything hadn’t seemed like her best bet, so she was going home instead.

  Of course, she hadn’t exactly told her dad everything either. The last thing Deputy Grant Robbins wanted to hear was anything even remotely resembling trouble getting within spitting distance of his youngest daughter. It made him cranky, bearish. It brought out the Marine in him. It made him overbearing, Lily’s ex-husband, Tom, had said repeatedly, and ridiculously overprotective, and since her dad had thought her Italian husband was nothing but trouble, he’d been bearish through the whole six years of her marriage.

  Rightly so; by the time she’d filed for divorce from the spoiled, exotically foreign, philandering Tomaso, Tom, Bersani, Lily had felt a little bearish herself.

  And now she felt in the need of some deputy sheriff overprotecting.

  Maybe she was only imagining things, seeing danger where there were only a couple of guys with an expensive car who happened to be driving around her part of Albuquerque.

  But her instincts said something was up, something that said maybe she should call the phone number she’d been given on the private jet. The one she kept in her backpack. Though exactly how Campos could help her was a question she hadn’t been able to answer, at least not well enough to get her to actually dial up a known drug dealer.

  She wasn’t that crazy, not yet, Tahitian invite or no Tahitian invite. She had three months of summer vacation, four thousand acres of Montana high country, and her father to stand between her and anybody who might be after her. There was no reason for her to go looking for more trouble, and Alejandro Campos really was trouble, dangerous trouble, criminal trouble, and, for reasons she didn’t want to admit even to herself, personal trouble. She’d known it the instant she’d looked up into his eyes and felt the world shift under her feet.

  It was the stupidest thing in the world, and she wasn’t going to think about it, let alone pursue it, plane ticket or no plane ticket. If she’d had any sense at all, she would have thrown his phone number away three weeks ago.

  But she hadn’t.

  Instead, she’d casually jotted it on her kitchen calendar—just in case she lost the piece of paper he’d given her.

  Then she’d written it in her homework assignment notebook at school, the one she kept in her desk—in case she lost the piece of paper and her kitchen calendar spontaneously combusted.

  And she’d put it in her computer, under a file named ACES—Alejandro Campos El Salvador—in case she lost the paper, her calendar combusted, and somebody’s dog broke into the school and ate her homework assignment notebook.

  It was all precautionary.

  It was all so ridiculous.

  It was all just in case—just in case she lost every ounce of common sense she had and gave in to calling him, just to touch base, maybe to thank him again for saving her butt, maybe just to hear his voice.

  Yes, it had all been just in case, and now she had ten thousand U.S. dollars in taped bundles staring her in the face.

  “Stupid girl,” she muttered, rolling onto her side and wrapping herself around her pillow. What she needed was sleep, not another night of fantasizing about Alejandro Campos, and most definitely not a night of fantasizing about Alejandro Campos in Tahiti.

  Friday, 10:00 P.M.—Denver, Colorado

  Some things a guy never forgot.

  The first woman he’d ever loved. He’d been seventeen.

  The first man he’d ever killed. He’d been nineteen.

  And how to break into the first place he’d ever called home.

  Zach stood in the alley and looked up at the thirteen stories of steel-reinforced brick at 738 Steele Street. The old building in the heart of lower downtown’s historical district, an area affectionately referred to as LoDo, had started life as a car dealership back in the forties. A few economic booms and busts, and half a dozen reincarnations, had passed before it had become the most notorious chop shop in a tristate area, run by a fifteen-year-old mastermind with a handpicked crew of boys who’d made an art form out of juvenile delinquency and grand theft auto.

  She was in there: Charlotte, a 1968 Shelby Mustang Cobra GT500KR, the first car he’d ever rebuilt from the frame up—Charlotte the Harlot, in Candy-apple Red with white panel stripes on the lower body and white Le Mans stripes going up over the hood and down the deck. She’d done 0 to 60 mph in 5.5 seconds for him every day of the week, taking the quarter mile in 13.8, and on some days, she’d done better than that. One cool autumn night, a lifetime ago, he and Dylan had clocked her at an even 5 seconds and a 12.9 quarter mile out on the Doubles, a strip of abandoned highway east of Denver. Hawkins had been in and out of prison by then, and the other chop-shop boys had gone their own ways, most of the core group going into the military, a few of the stringers melting back into the streets, and him disappearing off the face of the earth.

  He’d been good at it, disappearing. A couple of times, he’d been too damn good at it, getting in so deep his handlers had lost track of him. Those had been some strange years—the Asian Years, he called them, the four years in Laos and Cambodia, the months spent going in and out of Thailand and Indonesia before he’d been reassigned to the Panama country office and ended up in El Salvador.

  He slid his gaze down the night-darkened alley, until it landed on an iron door with a grid pattern of bolts across its face. Seven thirty-eight—the numbers were painted on the brick above a stone lintel. A large metal sign with the word “WEATHERPROOF” had been secured to the wall next to the door.

  A grin curved his mouth. Weatherproof. Geezus. He’d forgotten about the chop-shop boys’ weatherproof theory of sex. Hell, they all should have forgotten it by now, but there was the damn sign, still in place.

  And there was the door.

  And three blocks to the north, there was an iron grate in the street.

  He took a long draw off his cigarette before dropping it onto the pavement and grinding it out with his boot. The streets were quiet—for now. Once he fired Charlotte up, he’d have about two and a half minutes to pull this damn thing off and get out, or he was going to have a helluva lot of explaining to do. Days of it. Weeks of it. Except to Dylan.

  Dylan would understand how it all had come down, about why he’d left the way he had, without a word. Quinn wouldn’t. Creed would understand why he’d left, but not why he’d stayed away so long. And Hawkins, fuck, he really didn’t want to have to explain himself to Superman.

  He’d kept up with them, Special Defense Force, SDF, a group of black-ops warriors birthed in the shadows of the Pentagon and the Potomac. The team skirted the edge of the Department of Defense, the State Department, and sometimes Posse Comitatus, the act forbidding the use of federal troops inside the United States. But their roots were here, in the grease and iron of Steele Street. Lost boys, every damn one of them, and he’d been the most lost of all.

  Dylan knew. Dylan knew everything, had known it from the start and still taken him on, made him one of the finest car thieves ever to survive on the streets of the Mile-High City.

  Charlotte running fifteens. Needs a mechanic. The letter he’d been handed in Langley hadn’t had a signature. It hadn’t needed one, or any more of an explanation. Six words had said it all.

  A mechanic. Fuck. Another quick grin curved his mouth.

  He owed Dylan Hart, and later, after he finished the Lily Robbins deal, he’d come back. At Steele Street, he could put Charlotte back on twelve-seconds-plus-change quarter miles.

  Or else he’d take the Mustang and keep going, the way he always kept going: away. The eight years in El Salvador were the longest he’d ever spent anywhere, but he’d been there as Alejandro Campos, not himself, and Campos didn’t have a history before his arrival in Central America. Zach Prade did, in spades, and there was no hiding from it here, not at Steele Street, not with Dylan, and probably not with Superman either.

  Hell. He’d come for Charlotte, not to get his life back. Not to pay overdue debts—but he did have one stop he had
to make, one person up on Seventeenth Avenue he had to see before he left Denver.

  He raised his left hand and touched the side of his face, the gesture almost unconscious, but not quite. The narrow line of his scar ran from above his temple down to his jaw, and being back in Denver made it impossible to be unconscious of it, of how he’d gotten it, or of the man who’d put him back together.

  Yeah, he had some debts in Denver.

  Lowering his hand, he lifted his gaze and followed the lines of Steele Street’s open freight elevator where it crawled up the side of the building. All girders and cables, steel plate and ironwork, the whole of it looked more like an upended suspension bridge bolted into the brick than anything else—bolted deep, Gothic and sweeping, with a garage door opening onto it at every level.

  He’d left Charlotte in her bay on the ground floor, pulled her in one long-ago summer night and said good-bye to everything he’d known. Patriotism hadn’t exactly been his motivation, and even from the start, he’d been pretty damn cynical about making a difference in the world.

  But the challenge—oh, yeah, that had grabbed him hard. Could a nameless kid from the American heartland survive in the farthest-flung reaches of the world as an agent of his government? Could a street rat from Denver take his skills into the underbelly of the world and come out in one piece, time and time again?

  The answer was a resounding yes. He’d not only survived, he’d thrived, and sometimes he wondered what that said about him.

  Not tonight, though. Tonight all it said was that he was going to get his car, and then he was driving to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and taking a small macramé bracelet from a sweet-faced schoolteacher who, if he did his job right, and he always did, would never have a clue how close she’d come to the edge of his world.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Saturday, 5:00 A.M.—Albuquerque, New Mexico

  At exactly five A.M., Lily’s incredibly annoying alarm clock screeched, and at five A.M. plus two seconds, she whacked it, unerringly hitting the off button. The damn thing could wake the dead, which was why she put up with it. Not that she’d needed the extra incentive lately. She hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since she’d gotten back.