by Tara Janzen
“Contact him again, and tell him I need to know who on his end is connected to Banning, Schroder, and Stark. I need to know who sicced them on Lily Robbins. They’re the ones who killed Schroder, not me.” And they’d killed him for fucking up.
“Who do you think sicced the cops on Charlotte?” she asked.
It was a damn good question, with all sorts of repercussions.
“She could have been seen at the Robbins house this morning.” If anybody on the block had been up and looking, which was very likely.
“What about at the Sunset?”
That was more of a mystery.
“Less likely. I parked on a different side of the building from where Schroder’s room was located.”
“Could Schroder have identified Charlotte for whoever killed him?”
Aye, and there was the rub.
“Possibly, even probably.”
“Then your bigger problem just got bigger and more personal, and if they’re listening to the cops this morning like the rest of us, you’re going to wish you had more ammo.”
She was right. She couldn’t possibly know how much ammunition he had, but there was no such thing as too much.
“We’re almost to the exit, and we will be taking your recommendation and disappearing into the wilds of New Mexico.” Truthfully, he couldn’t get his ass off the interstate quick enough at this point.
“We’ll be watching everything from our end,” she said. “Tracking you and listening to the police. If you’re spotted, I’ll contact you immediately.”
“Thank you, SB303.”
“Roger.”
On his screen, Zach saw the girl swivel around on her chair and get up to walk away—and then he saw her walking away.
Geezus. Combat boots, pink bustier, all that platinum blond hair in a ponytail, a waist-length skein half twisted up and half falling down, and a pair of skintight black-and-white-striped leggings hugging the most perfect ass he’d ever seen.
Geezus. This was Dylan’s wife?
A guy’s face suddenly loomed into view, obscuring the whole screen.
It was Dylan, and the odd sensation he’d felt in his chest when he’d first seen SB303 slammed into him again, only more intense.
“Come home, pendejo, and I’ll introduce you,” Dylan said.
Home. Yeah, Steele Street had been his first home, the first place he’d ever been safe, and it had probably been the last place he’d ever been safe. He sure as hell hadn’t lived anyplace safe during the Asian years, and in El Salvador, his life had been on the line every day. His budget for that job had included a big line item for hiring and maintaining a security force, his own small army, because the job required a small army—and even that wasn’t enough to guarantee safety. No one in the drug trade lasted long without a paramilitary force backing them up.
Hell, no one in the drug trade lasted long, period.
“I’d like to meet her,” he said, his voice uncomfortably gruff with an emotion he would prefer to keep to himself.
“She wants to know how you got in the building last night,” Dylan said, and Zach let out a short laugh.
“You didn’t tell her?”
Dylan shook his head.
“Then she isn’t getting it out of me.” The steel grate in the street led down a rabbit hole.
“Just watch yourself,” Dylan said. “That’s all I’m saying. The girl can read minds.” The look on his face said he was serious, and Zach was instantly intrigued.
“You know what it’s like down there. Tell her the route is dark, dirty, and dangerous.” No one who looked like SB303 wanted to be crawling around under the streets of Denver.
“Dangerous and dark doesn’t scare her. She’s worked with Creed for too long.”
Well, the day was getting jam-packed with surprises. Cesar Raoul Eduardo Rivera, Creed, had always been a night hunter, even at the ripe old age of thirteen, when Zach had first met him under the steering wheel of a 1968 Mercury Cyclone GT that had been “Fast-backed, 4-stacked, and Radial-tracked.” Dylan had been watching the car for months, and when an order had come in, he’d sent the new boy, Creed, and one of the older, more experienced thieves then working for the chop shop, a street rat named Kenny, to go pick her up.
The two kids had found the Cyclone in a warehouse complex up in Commerce City, on a moonless night so still, the city had been under a pall, steaming from the day’s record-breaking heat and smelling of grime. By the time Zach had gone looking for the pair, Creed had been on his own…
“Hey, kid,” he said, hunkering down next to the Cyclone’s open driver’s side door. “Where’s Kenny?”
“Spooked,” the scrawny boy with a mop of blond hair said. He was stretched out under the steering wheel, skinny legs poking out of the car, his T-shirt torn and greasy, with a penlight stuck behind his ear, shining on the steering column.
“That asshole ran off and left you?” Kenny’s ass was grass.
“He got scared.”
“I thought he was ’sposed to be teaching you the ropes.” Whatever the kid was doing under the steering wheel, he wasn’t being very effective, and honestly, stealing cars was a very, very time-sensitive career.
Zach rose up a little on his feet and looked over his shoulder, checking out the parking lot. Except for the Cyclone, it was deserted, and more than a little creepy. If the car was here, where in the hell was the driver? There weren’t any lights on in any of the warehouses. They were all just looming up into the night, their outlines visible only because of the bright lights of Denver to the south.
But this was the address on Dylan’s sheet, all right, and they had found the car.
Now they needed to get it the hell out of there.
But first, a word of warning to the kid.
“You need to pay better attention to what’s going on around you. If you don’t have a lookout, then you need to do it yourself. I could have been anybody sneaking up on you.”
“No, you couldn’t,” the kid said, still working under the steering wheel, his little penlight a weak-ass tiny glow above his ear, which couldn’t be doing a damn bit of good. “You could only be you.”
Whatever the hell that meant.
“Pay attention, or you’re going to get hurt.” Dylan had dragged this one in too young, and Zach was going to tell him.
“Fuck you, pendejo. I knew it was you, ’cuz I heard you coming a mile away.” Pale green eyes cut toward him from under that tiny light. “You got those deep-tread boots, and something’s stuck in the left one, a rock or something, and every time you take a step, I hear a snick. So snick, step, snick, step—that’s nobody sneaking anywhere, asshole. That’s you.”
Zach just stared at the kid. Sonuvabitch. That was good. That was damn good.
But whatever he was trying to do under the steering wheel was getting him nowhere. That asshole Kenny was out. This was the last job he screwed up.
And leaving the kid out here alone. That sucked. That was unacceptable.
“Come on, Creed, get out from under there.” Dylan had balked at the kid’s name, which had gone on forfuckingever, and started calling him Creed almost from the get-go. And Zach didn’t care that his last name was Rivera; the kid was no Chicano. He wasn’t going to mention it to the boy, but he must have noticed that he was a green-eyed blond and didn’t look a damn thing like his brothers and sisters, of which he had so many, the kid didn’t get enough to eat. Dylan had actually found him outside Mama Guadaloupe’s, a restaurant on the west side, waiting for kitchen scraps, of which Mama made sure she had plenty for the younger kids in the neighborhood. The older ones were on their own.
But no, Zach wasn’t going to mention that Creed’s Anglo mama must have gotten it on with the mailman or some other white dude. He was in no shape to be dishing dirt on other guys’ mothers, not with the mother he had.
“And pay attention,” he said to the kid after he’d squirmed out from under the steering wheel. “You got wire on you?”
“Well, you need wire. You’re always gonna need wire, so you might as well get some and keep a roll of it in your pocket. You can use it for a hundred different things on a car.” He walked toward the front of the Cyclone and popped the hood. A timer in his head went off at the sound. That was the other thing the kid was going to need, a timer in his head that he was always going to be trying to beat. “And Dylan sent you after a Mercury, so somebody should have brought a screwdriver.”
“Kenny had a screwdriver.”
“Yeah, well, me too. Shine that light on the solenoid,” Zach said, leaning under the hood and getting to work. “Now look. We’re going to use the wire to connect the coil to the ignition post on the solenoid.” It took him ten seconds to pull off the circuit wires and rig the connection. “And we’re going to use the screwdriver to feed power to the starter.” He laid the screwdriver on the starter post and the positive battery cable simultaneously, and a flurry of sparks shot out from the connection. The engine also turned over, just as if he’d used the key. He pocketed the screwdriver and slammed the hood.
With the Cyclone softly rumbling and ready to go, Zach took one more look around at the dark buildings and the empty spaces in between them, and for a split second, he thought he saw something flit across one of the alleys.
The hair instantly rose on the back of his neck. Effen-ee-fuck.
“So…uh…what spooked Kenny?” he asked the kid.
In answer, Creed turned off his penlight and stuck it in his back pocket.
“Well,” he said, turning his back to the Cyclone and looking out over the deserted parking lot and the warehouses. “There’s a couple of things running wild around here tonight. He got scared.”
Fair enough.
“And you didn’t?”
The boy shrugged. “Ain’t nothing out here wilder than me.”
Zach hadn’t admitted it then, and he wouldn’t admit it now, but listening to that skinny kid’s offhand dismissal of whatever in the hell had been prowling through a Commerce City compound that night had sent the hair on the back of his neck rising all over again.
And the blonde in the bustier worked with Creed, SDF’s jungle boy?
“She’s an operator?” he asked Dylan, not quite believing it, not really.
“I’ll put you in the gym with her for five minutes, and you tell me.”
He’d be damned. Steele Street had obviously improved considerably over the years.
“Is she going to kick my ass?” he asked, and this time it was Dylan who grinned.
“If she couldn’t, I wouldn’t let you anywhere near her.”
Fair enough.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Saturday, 8:00 A.M.—Commerce City, Colorado
Cherie pulled Roxanne to a stop in the alley next to Steele Street’s Commerce City Garage, turned off the key, and took a breath. Driving relaxed her, especially driving Hawkins’s Challenger, and she’d definitely needed a little relaxation after the meeting in Dylan’s office, and a little more relaxation in order to face the third floor of the Commerce City Garage with Gabriel Shore at her side.
She took another easy breath, and let it flow through her. Roxanne had power and looks, and handled like a dream since Skeeter and Superman had redone her suspension.
Cherie was no mechanic. She never worked on the cars, but she could drive with the best of the big boys, and Skeeter, of course. Red Dog drove the way she did everything else, as close to the edge as she could get, which sometimes gave the impression that she was out of control.
She wasn’t. Ever.
Neither was Cherie. Ever. But sometimes she got a little un-relaxed, this morning being a case in point. So thank goodness for Roxanne. She’d been taught to drive the Challenger by Christian Hawkins, a.k.a. Superman, and he’d given her supreme confidence in her skills.
Not to say that riding in any of Steele Street’s muscle cars was for the faint of heart. She’d had to build up to it herself.
She slanted a glance at her passenger to see how he was holding up, and was pleased to see him relaxed back in his seat, his hands in his lap.
“Gillian’s apartment is—” she started.
Without so much as a flicker of emotion, or in any other way acknowledging her presence, Gabriel held up two fingers, like a benediction. She instinctively understood he was asking for silence, she supposed because he was dreaming up a brilliantly insightful plan for interfacing the DREAGAR 454 with a secure link to Steele Street and downloading the mysterious files that had Dylan all wound up—for all the good that was going to do him.
She took another breath and just relaxed into it. Good Lord, the man worked in the Marsh Annex, and in about five minutes or less, he was going to enter her shop. She didn’t think Dylan appreciated what an incredible place the Annex was, or the kind of beyond-the-cutting-edge technology the people there produced. Ostensibly, the Marsh Annex was part of the Department of Commerce. At least it had started out that way, an offshoot of the department’s security division, specifically in charge of keeping the U.S. government’s latest and greatest gizmos out of the hands of the opposition. In today’s climate, sometimes keeping them out of the marketplace and off eBay was an even greater challenge. It hadn’t been too much of a stretch from protecting the technology to improving upon it. Some of the best minds in the country went through the Marsh Annex.
Cherie’s security clearance hadn’t granted her total access when she’d been there, but when General Grant had put her name in the hat for the DREAGAR 454 2Z8s contract, the Marsh people had been very pleased to meet her. She had a reputation, all good, especially with government folks dealing with classified information—and she would like very much for everything to stay that way.
“I—” she started.
The two fingers came up again, cutting her off, and she saw him visibly take a breath.
“I’ll be driving back to Steele Street,” he said.
She didn’t think so.
“No, you won’t. Superman doesn’t let just anybody drive his car.”
“You weren’t driving his car,” he said. “His car was driving you. There’s a difference, and by Superman, you mean Christian Hawkins, correct?”
“Yes, but—”
“There aren’t any ‘buts’ about it. You drive like my grandmother, and from here on out, I will be taking over the transportation duties. I am sure Mr. Hart will clear me on the car.”
Cherie blinked at him.
“Your grandmother?” He had a lot of gall. She knew what he meant, and he was wrong. She was careful, that was all. “I bet a hundred dollars your grandmother has never driven a 1971 Dodge Hemi Challenger R/T.” Actually, she’d bet a thousand. There just weren’t that many 1971 Hemis out there to be driven.
“Neither have you,” he said, sliding a glance in her direction. “Do you even know about fourth gear?”
Of course she did.
“Fourth gear is a highway gear, and we never got on the highway.” Keeping to the back roads and staying off the interstate, where people drove like maniacs, was no crime. It was just good sense.
He shook his head. “I can’t believe Christian Hawkins lets you drive his car. How many clutches has he had to put in this thing?”
“A few,” she admitted, not quite seeing his point, “but that’s what they do at Steele Street, fix cars, put in clutches, do valve jobs, time things. The cars require constant maintenance, and—”
“Is he in love with you?” The young guy’s gaze narrowed on her, which she found somewhat discomforting. “I mean, are you with him, like his girlfriend?”
Well, that startled the hell out of her. “No,” she said, then said it again for good measure. “No. He’s married.”
Her and Superman? That was actually an alarming thought. Christian Hawkins was so…so much. Too much.
No, no, no. When she went for a guy, and she’d had any number of boyfriends over the years, she went for guys like Henry Stin
er, the Seventeenth Street lawyer, and there was no denying that she thought Gabriel Shore was exceptionally cute. She had a penchant for computer geeks, tech guys, brainy guys with the skills to hotwire DREAGAR 454s rather than 1970 Chevelles, even if the brainy guys never quite seemed to be brainy enough. Truly brainy guys were proving hard to come by.
Still, she would never, had not, did not go for guys like the SDF operators. Oh, God, no.
“Then why does he let you destroy his car?” Red Dog’s little brother looked confused, and he was definitely cute, but he was also a little insulting, and starting to sound a little bossy.
“Well, in the first place, I’m not destroying his car.”
“Yes, you are,” he interrupted, sounding very sure of himself—which, when she thought about it, wasn’t a trait she found particularly appealing in men on a personal level.
“I have never so much as gotten a fingerprint on it, let alone any kind of a dent.” He couldn’t know that, of course, which was why she was telling him, which put her on comfortable ground. She liked telling men what they didn’t know, and she usually had plenty to say.
“I’m not talking dents,” he muttered.
She ignored him.
“And second of all, Superman believes that Roxanne and I are soul sisters of a sort, that she wants to bring out what he calls my ‘inner NASCAR.’ So he lets me drive her, and if any little problems occur, they get fixed.”
“Inner NASCAR?” He looked incredulous at that, which was also probably an insult. “Ms. Hacker, you don’t even have an ‘inner Soap Box Derby,’ let alone an ‘inner NASCAR,’ so maybe you should go back to driving whatever it is you usually drive, like a…a…”
