by Tara Janzen
It wasn’t guilt that held him to her side, though he’d never forgiven himself for letting her go up alone to the room in the Hotel Lafayette the night she’d been abducted. He should have been with her. He’d been armed, he’d been trained, and she’d had neither of those advantages.
She’d been helpless.
She’d been tortured.
And nothing had been the same for her since.
So he tied her up sometimes, when she wanted sex that way, and he thought about it a lot, and he worried about it a little. Bondage had never been part of his sex life or his sexual imprinting techniques before, but he’d studied it, studied the psychology of it, and yeah, he figured the two of them were right on track—just a little fucked up.
Hell.
“Tell me about Panama.”
She’d said it had been rough.
“Rydell did the recon, and it was good,” she said, lifting the .223 barrel with its attached scope out of the tan case. “So when I got there, he had things pretty well set up, including how we were going to work with the local authorities.” With the frame, forestock, and barrel ready, she began assembling the Contender for its long-range capacity. It took just under a minute, and when she was done, she opened the action and looked through the barrel.
He knew what she’d see: nothing. She never left a speck of fouling in her barrels.
“Hawkins said you were looking for car bombs.” SDF had been called in by special request to neutralize five Colombian cartel terrorists who reportedly had two car bombs hidden somewhere in Panama City and were planning on using those bombs to attack either an American facility or one of the Panamanian government offices.
“The local boys were looking for the bombs,” she said. “Rydell and I were looking for the terrorists.” Closing the action, she opened the lens caps on the scope and turned each of the lenses of the LRS E-Dot to catch the light from the draftsman’s lamp on the end of the bench. Even from the bed, he saw the purple optical coating on the glass.
“And?”
“And we found them. Three were still in Panama City. Panamanian Intelligence caught them in the warehouse where they’d stashed the cars. Rydell and I tracked the other two to Colón.” She extended the weapon and sighted the scope through a window, then opened the battery compartment and inserted a fresh cell. After switching the unit on, checking it again, and switching it off, she set the Contender aside and reached for the .44 barrel.
Colón was the whorehouse of Panama, the most dangerous city in the country, and her being there sucked, even with Rydell at her back.
But that was the business, and those were the jobs, and Travis knew that Panamanian Intelligence had specifically requested Gillian because they’d expected the engagement to take place in an urban setting. When there were a lot of people around on busy city streets, the shooter had to be exceptionally skilled.
El cazador espectral, ghostly hunter. That’s what the Panamanians had called the operator known as Red Dog in the beginning, because Kid Chaos Chronopolous’s newest partner had those exceptional skills. As it had become known that Kid’s partner was a woman, the label had changed to its feminine form, la cazadora espectral, which, in the Latin mind, had made her all the more terrifying.
Rightly so.
He knew for a fact, because he’d been there with her and seen her do the deed too many times not to know that when she pressed the trigger on her long rifle, she was an emotional blank. All she felt—truly all she felt—was recoil.
“What went wrong?”
“A prostitute,” she said, doing the same check on the .44 that she’d done on the .223. “We caught the men coming out of a brothel. We knew they were in there, no surprise in Colón, and Rydell and I set up across the street in a hotel facing the house. I had the SR-25 bagged in on a table, the crosshairs on the door. Rydell was backing me up with his M-4, but when the cartel boys came out, they weren’t alone.”
“They had a woman with them?”
“A girl,” she said, opening the lens caps on the .44’s scope. “She couldn’t have been more than thirteen.”
That wouldn’t have stopped Red Dog, if she’d had a shot.
“I took the second guy out first, then smoked the first guy.”
Which was exactly what he would have expected her to do, girl or no girl.
“Rydell confirmed the hits, and we packed up and split.”
“But?” There had been something.
“The girl”—she shrugged—“the girl was wearing a white dress, a summery white dress, and when I shot the man holding on to her hand, his blood got all over it. All over it. And she started screaming. And she kept screaming. And even after Rydell and I left the room, and left the hotel, and left freaking Colón, I could still hear her screaming in her bloody white dress.”
“Can you still hear her?” he asked, keeping his voice calm, despite the sudden demoralizing dread he felt. He hated for her to suffer, and he didn’t know if it would ever end. Dr. Brandt at Walter Reed held out hope, but Dr. Brandt wasn’t the one who held her together in the middle of the night. He wasn’t the one who helped her work through her pain. And Dr. Brandt sure as hell wasn’t the one who tied her up.
Travis had a feeling the good doctor might look a little askance at that particularly intense and intensely intimate form of therapy, and yeah, he knew he was out there somewhere on a limb calling it that—but he was out there with her.
“No,” she said. “It stopped about halfway back to Panama City, but . . .”
But he knew it scared her, the way her mind worked sometimes. Scared her that someday she might get stuck in some strange place in her head where cleaning her weapons and following orders and physically training wouldn’t save her.
“I still hear you screaming sometimes,” he told her. “It’ll wake me up in a cold sweat, babe.”
“But I’m already awake when it happens to me.” She closed the lens caps on the scope and set the .44 barrel back in the case.
“I know.” He’d seen her get caught in the sudden confusion and pain of a flashback. He’d seen her work to hold on to the reality of the present. If Dylan had known how often it happened, there was no way the boss of SDF would have allowed her to do the work she did. But without the work, Travis was afraid she would be completely lost. “The trauma of those kinds of experiences doesn’t just go away, but no matter what happens, we’ll deal with it.”
Her gaze lifted from the Contender’s case and met his. “You were there when I first woke up in the hospital, waiting for me, ready to hold me, ready to catch me.”
“Always,” he said. “And it won’t change, Gillian, never.” The same mix of guilt, responsibility, love, and lust that had put him by her bedside in the beginning had only grown stronger over the years, tying him to her in ways he didn’t always understand, but always accepted. She was his, and there was no love without taking the responsibility that went with it.
He sure as hell could do without the guilt, though. It ate at him. He should have taken better care of her that night. He should have taken more care with her.
She started to say something, but then stopped when his phone rang.
Leaning over the side of the bed, he rummaged through his clothes until he found his cell. One look at the signal on the screen told him everything he needed to know. He immediately got up and started getting dressed.
“Who is it?”
“SDF, a call in.” There wasn’t a person on the other end of the line. Only the signal had been sent, but it was enough. Something was up, and Travis needed to be front and center at 738 Steele Street ASAP.
“My phone isn’t ringing,” she said, looking toward her fanny pack.
“Good. You need the rest.” He shrugged into his shoulder holster and reached for his shoes. “If I can come back, I will. Otherwise, you know the drill.”
“I’ll be here.”
“Good,” he said, crossing the room and leaning down to give her a kiss. “I’m
glad you’re home, babe. I’ll be back.”
It wasn’t until he was halfway down the outside stairs, heading for the street, that it occurred to him that with all the sex, and then more sex, he’d forgotten something very important.
He’d forgotten to ask her about El Salvador.
CHAPTER
12
HIS WIFE had the most amazing ass in the world, Dylan Hart thought, tilting his head to one side to better see through his office door, watching Skeeter bend over the computer desk in the main office on the seventh floor of Steele Street.
She did it on purpose, just for him, wearing pink fishnet hose, a little white lace miniskirt, and a pink-and-white striped bustier.
He knew it.
She knew it.
And Superman knew it.
“Cut the crap, Dylan.”
“Tell her to cut it out,” he said, grinning. Her hair was all piled up on top of her head in a messy ponytail twisted around and held in place with a pair of bright red chopsticks to match the skinny red patent leather belt around her waist and the red patent leather four-inch spike heels on her feet, her “catch me/fuck me” shoes.
He’d caught her a couple of times in those shoes.
He’d caught her a couple of times in nothing but those shoes.
The memory flashed, a few brain cells caught on fire and went up in smoke, and suddenly, this very important meeting he was having with Hawkins needed to come to an end.
Schooling his features, he checked his watch.
“Aren’t Kat and the kids due back in a couple of minutes?” Superman was up to a brood of two, Alexandria and John Thomas Hawkins, with another one on the way.
“You’re becoming dangerously transparent, Dylan.”
And hot, he thought, his gaze straying back out the door.
Skeeter was being bad.
She bent deeper over the desk, widening her stance, and his imagination went into overdrive, filling in a lot of—
“Dylan?”
Details. Hot, erotic details.
“Dylan?”
Two weeks, that’s how long he’d been gone. Two long, dreary weeks in London, researching a name General Grant had given him: Sir Arthur Kendryk, Lord Weymouth. It hadn’t taken two weeks for Dylan to surmise that Grant was justified in being concerned about the man. Kendryk had insulated himself from the criminal elements of his organization with thousands of yards of red tape and innumerable layers of legitimate business dealings, but the ties were there. Dylan’s job was going to be sorting through it all and stealing what he needed in order for Grant to be able to take his suspicions to the undersecretary of defense at the Defense Department. International arms dealing, influence peddling, and drug trafficking on the scale Kendryk seemed to be involved with posed a credible security threat to the United States.
Which meant, of course, that Skeeter’s sweet ass was going to have to wait.
He leveled his gaze back at Hawkins.
“So she went to El Salvador after the Panama mission,” he said, the “she” in question being the “she” who was always in question at SDF, their stringer, Red Dog. “Why?”
“The guys at the DEA say Tony Royce has opened a branch office there, in a town called San Luis. He’s working with Mara Plata, using the gang as a rung of bottom-feeders to get a foothold in Central America.”
“She needs to stop fucking around with Tony Royce.”
Hawkins gave a short nod. “You’ve told her. I’ve told her, and sure as hell Travis has told her. But there isn’t anybody in this office who doesn’t know she went to Uzbekistan when Royce was trying to put together a deal with Gul Rashid—a deal that fell apart.”
“We’ll take Royce out when, and if, Grant tells us to take him out.” Which couldn’t be any too soon to suit Dylan, especially since his London trip. The whole Rashid deal was getting a lot of play in a lot of bad places, and one of the names that had gotten attached to the story belonged to a man connected to Arthur Kendryk.
Dylan hated it when his enemies started connecting to each other. It made the hair rise on the back of his neck, because if there was one thing he and Hawkins didn’t believe in besides Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, it was coincidences of any kind.
“Unless Red Dog gets to Royce first,” Hawkins said. “There have been other deals she’s blown for him, Dylan. At least two I can verify, and a couple of others I can’t, but which seem to have her fingerprints all over them.”
Shit. The woman needed to be reined in, before she did irreparable harm to herself or SDF. But no matter what she’d done or hadn’t done, if it started to look like Royce was trying to flank SDF in retaliation for Red Dog’s sabotage, Dylan didn’t doubt that Grant would authorize the man’s summary execution. It was an order Dylan would gladly carry out himself. He’d been there the night Gillian Pentycote had been tortured, and he cut her a lot of slack because of it, but there were limits.
The SDF operators were loose cannons, they were cowboys, and they were a good many other things, but they weren’t out-and-out pirates. They could—and would—act when no one else seemed able to, which Dylan figured was what had prompted White Rook to sponsor an outfit like SDF in the first place, but they had a line they didn’t cross, the one drawn for them by General Grant.
It was the only line they needed—most of them. Red Dog was the exception. Sometimes he wondered if there were any lines she wouldn’t cross, and sometimes he wondered what he might have to do, if she went too far.
“Is Rydell still in Panama?” C. Smith Rydell could be trusted to act, to get a job done without making a mess of things or exposing SDF to unwanted scrutiny. A DEA agent for years before he’d joined the chop-shop boys on Steele Street, he knew how to cover his ass and his tracks.
“I already sent him to El Salvador. He’s in San Luis tonight. I tasked him with intercepting Gillian, but he’s ended up on his own. She showed up in Commerce City about two hours ago.”
“Good.” At least they knew where she was.
The ringing of a phone out in the main office caught his attention. The look on Skeeter’s face when she answered it had him straightening up in his chair, tuned in to his wife.
She turned more fully toward him and met his gaze. After a couple of seconds, she put the caller on hold.
“You might want to take this,” she said. “The call is showing FBI encryption, but it’s not a government number, and the point of origin appears to be New Jersey. Atlantic City. He’s asking to talk with you, personally.”
“Route it through your system,” he said. “Record and trace, and put it on my speaker.”
She turned back to the phone in the office, and almost immediately, the “incoming” indicator lit up on his console.
“Hart,” he said.
“Mr. Hart,” the voice on the other end said. “My name is Ruben Setineri. I’m calling on behalf of a mutual acquaintance with information regarding the itinerary of a subject that may be of interest to you.”
The man’s name alone was enough to garner Dylan’s undivided attention. He glanced at Hawkins, who looked equally intrigued. Ruben Setineri was a prominent, if somewhat notorious, New York attorney who represented Francis Tiburon, an East Coast mob figure.
What in the hell, Dylan wondered, would Frankie T’s lawyer be doing calling this office on a secure line? The look on Hawkins’s face said he was wondering the same damn thing.
“I’m listening,” he said.
“I have been instructed to tell you that a Tony Royce, traveling with five companions, has boarded Frontier Airlines Flight one-twenty-one from Las Vegas to Denver,” Setineri said. “The flight is scheduled to arrive an hour from now.”
“I understand,” Dylan said. “Anything else?”
“No,” Setineri said. “Have a pleasant evening, Mr. Hart.”
The indicator light winked out.
Dylan knew Skeeter had recorded the call, but he went ahead and jotted the information down on a notepad anyway.
“Talk to me,” he said to Hawkins, tossing the pen aside when he was finished.
“Frankie T’s got it in for Royce,” his second in command said. “That’s obvious. There’s no other reason to give him up to us. So now we know Royce is trying to elbow his way in on Sin City’s drug trade, and with his usual charm, pissing people off left and right.”
“Why is he coming to Denver?”
“Because while he’s been pissing off Frankie T, Red Dog has been pissing him off, and somehow, somewhere, someway while she was in El Salvador, she let him know where to find her. Knowing Gillian, it was probably by engraved invitation with a self-addressed and pre-stamped RSVP card. I’ll put in another call to Smith, see if I can get through to him this time and find out what in the hell has been going on in San Luis these last four days.”
“What about the FBI encryption?”
Hawkins gave him a resigned grin. “Business as usual, boss. You know it, and I know it. FBI surveillance picked Royce up in Vegas, but a hundred bucks says they don’t have a warrant for him, and not enough balls to get one. The CIA has declared him strictly hands off. He’s got too many ‘insurance’ files on too many of the people he worked with, and too many of them are too close to retirement to take a stand. So the FBI goes to the mob and gets Frankie T to give him up to us. We get the dirty work, and all the Feds get to sleep at night. Like I said, business as usual.”
Yeah, that’s exactly the way Dylan had figured it, too. Business as usual—totally convoluted.
“You better call Grant,” Hawkins said.
