by Tara Janzen
“Yeah. And you call Smith.”
“Roger that,” Hawkins agreed. “And we’re going to need—”
“Yeah,” Dylan interrupted and turned in his chair to look out his office door. “Skeeter, get me Lieutenant Bradley.”
“Check line two,” she answered. “I’ve already got her on.”
That was Steele Street, a well-oiled machine.
Dylan hit two. “Loretta.”
“Mr. Hart,” came a cool, competent female voice on the other end.
“I need a favor.”
“Of course you do.” She didn’t sound any too happy about it, but that was just Loretta, his favorite lieutenant at the Denver Police Department. He’d been sixteen the first time she’d saved his ass, a skill she’d had plenty of opportunity to hone over the years on all the chop-shop boys.
“Flight one-twenty-one from Las Vegas is arriving at Denver International in an hour,” he said. “I need surveillance on a group of passengers.”
“Do you have names?”
“One. Remember Tony Royce?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” she said dryly. “As a matter of fact”—he heard papers being shuffled—“I received a ‘person of interest’ bulletin two days ago on the ex-spook-turned-entrepreneur, one of those ‘if located, do not approach, contact originating agency only’ things. In this case, it’s the DEA, so I’m guessing he’s up to his ears in drugs.”
“And other things,” Dylan confirmed.
“How many people are traveling with him?”
“Five. I could use surveillance footage on all six, what kind of luggage they pick up, and what they’re driving when they leave the airport. I’m going to send someone out there, now.”
“I assume you don’t want the Feds to know about this just yet.”
“Give me what you can, Loretta, a few hours at least, and maybe I can save both of us a whole lot of trouble.”
She let out a small snort. “That’s not the way it usually works when SDF hits the streets, and they’re my streets, Dylan, every single one. As a sworn peace officer, I’d like some assurances that you’re going to keep the gunfire and body count to an acceptable level.”
“What’s acceptable?” He knew. She knew. And she knew he knew, because it never changed.
“Zero.”
“You know I always do my best.”
“Keep it contained, Dylan, and if you fail, and this thing turns violent, I expect you to let me know before it happens.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Give me Skeeter, then,” she said. “The department still has a full-time unit of cops at DIA. They can report directly to me, and I’ll transmit the footage to your office.”
“Thanks, Loretta,” he said. “There’ll be a little something extra in your Christmas stocking this year.”
A short laugh escaped her. “Make it Buck Grant, and you’re going to buy yourself a whole lot of Get Out of Jail Free cards.”
Buck?
“You mean General Grant?” Now she’d surprised him. “When did you meet General Grant?”
“Last week, when he was in town. Christian brought him down to the precinct.”
The phone was still on speaker, and Dylan raised an eyebrow in Hawkins’s direction.
Superman just shrugged.
“I showed him around a little, and we went out for drinks afterward,” Loretta continued, and Dylan’s eyebrow went even higher. “He’s a nice guy, very cute.”
Drinks with Loretta? That was bad enough, but nice? Cute?
Their older-than-dirt commanding officer?
Geezus. The guy had cut his teeth in Vietnam, running recon behind enemy lines. There was nothing “cute” about him.
“Is he single?” she asked, and Dylan got a bad feeling in his gut.
“Very,” he said, maybe a little too quickly, but it was the truth. This was a nowhere, no way deal, and it had to be nipped in the bud. Richard “Buck” Grant went through women like combat soldiers went through ammo, hard and fast, and he was the last damn thing Loretta Bradley needed. SDF wouldn’t be able to breathe in Denver if Buck messed around with the lieutenant.
He shot Hawkins a look that said “What in the hell were you thinking?” and Superman grinned, which just went to prove how sappy and idiotic a guy could get after three years of marriage and two kids.
“Well, if he’s ever ready to be unsingle, you be sure and let me know.”
“You’ll be my first call.”
Not.
“Thanks, Hart. Keep it safe out there tonight.”
“Always, Loretta.”
He turned off the call and swung around to face Hawkins, whose smile quickly faded. There was another order of business, and it wasn’t the lieutenant’s love life, and they both knew it.
“You or me?” Hart asked.
“You’re the only one she’s afraid of,” Hawkins said. “If you tell her to stand down, she might.”
“Might?”
“The girl’s not all there, Dylan. You know it. I know it, and she knows it.”
And everybody knew why. Tony Royce could only be coming to Denver for one reason: to finish the job Dr. Souk had started two years ago. To kill Gillian Pentycote.
CHAPTER
13
TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY thousand dollars, Smith thought, tossing the last bundle back on the bed, a quarter of a million dollars, in cash, free and easy, just lying there with all the other stuff she’d had in her tote. And he meant stuff with a capital “S,” a big fricking pile of it.
He flipped his flashlight off. With the candle he’d put in the bathroom and the one he’d lit next to the bed, it was light enough for what he needed to do next without wasting any more of his batteries.
“You bastard.”
She’d already said that, about half a dozen times.
“You can call me names all night long, Ms. York, but that isn’t going to change the facts.” And the facts were that she was in trouble—with a capital T.A gringa carrying a quarter of a million in U.S. currency in Central America could only mean one of three things, none of which was a shopping spree. Ransom was the first thing that came to mind. Some relative of hers had been kidnapped, and she’d been sent to pay the ransom, for which every man in her family should be strung up. Ransom was bad, a real tragedy with lousy odds, but ransom could be the high point of this hit parade. The other two options were going to land her polka-dotted butt in jail: Either she was a money mule for some drug dealer, or she could be putting together a deal for herself. Either one would have him calling his old buddies at the DEA office in Panama City and delivering one cupcake to go.
“I’m going to give you one more chance to explain your mission of mercy. I suggest you make it good, or you’re going to find yourself under arrest, and trust me, being under arrest in El Salvador is the last damn thing you want, Ms. York. They’ve got cockroaches bigger than you in Salvadoran jails.”
Her eyes widened at that, and he made a mental note that cockroach threats worked with her.
Fuck. Cockroaches were the least of her problems.
But she didn’t think so.
He could tell by the horrified look on her face.
“It’s f-for the children.”
Children.
Well, that was the last damn thing he’d expected, maybe even less than last.
“What children?”
“Julia’s.”
He didn’t know what in the hell she was talking about, but somehow, it had the ring of truth. She’d brought a quarter of a million dollars into El Salvador for Julia’s children.
“Who’s Julia?”
“My sister, Sister Julia.”
Sister, Sister Julia might have taken any other guy a while to interpret, but he’d been working the Latino beat for a long time, and nine times out of ten, the word “sister” attached to a woman’s name meant one thing: nun, a Catholic angel of mercy. Bride of Christ. A habit and a rosary.
“Nuns don’t
have children.” It was a deal breaker. He was a little low on his catechism, but he knew that much.
And her sister was a nun. There wasn’t much he could do with that right off the bat. It was going to take a little getting used to, take some time to wrap his mind around even the remote possibility of somebody who looked like Honey York being a nun.
“The St. Mary’s p-parish orphans,” she explained. “The orphanage is old and falling apart, becoming dangerous. A month ago, one of the younger boys fell and broke his arm when part of a stair railing gave way. Julia’s been lobbying the bishop for more funds, but the orphans of San Luis aren’t in his budget this year, so she’s taking matters into her own hands. She’s going to fix the building herself, out of her trust fund.”
It took a lot to make Smith blink, but trust-fund-baby brides of Christ was enough to do the job.
Geezus. Who was this woman?
He let his gaze go over her again, a little more carefully. She looked expensive. He’d noticed that on the street, but what he hadn’t really had a chance to notice was just exactly how expensive.
He flicked his flashlight back on and ran the beam down her dress.
Off the rack.
Off the rack at some designer’s shop was his guess. He knew what the material felt like, and he sure as hell could see what the dress fit like, and it felt and fit like couture, utter perfection in a size two petite. And those shoes—he steadied the beam on her feet. Those shoes brought only two words to mind.
Skeeter.
Bang.
Actually, Skeeter Bang Hart now, Queen of Hot Shoes, hot, expensive shoes, and the shoes Smith was looking at brought a dozen pair of Skeeter’s shoes to mind: her Blahniks, running at four hundred dollars a pop, and no, he never wanted to have to explain to Dylan what he’d been doing in Dylan’s wife’s shoe closet with Dylan’s wife for an hour.
Research would have been his first line of defense, but Smith didn’t want to bet his health or his job on Dylan buying the importance of the Fucking New Guy and ex-DEA agent needing to know the difference between a pair of Manolo Blahniks and a pair of Donald Pliners. Hell, he hadn’t bought it himself, but an hour in a closet with Skeeter had been nothing but fun, even if they had only talked about shoes.
Oddly enough, it had also been educational. He knew what he was looking at: dollar signs in white, handcrafted leather wrapped around a beautiful foot and a first-class, candy-apple red pedicure.
And somehow, for a guy who had never had a foot fetish before, he wanted to get his mouth on those toes. They were just so pink, and perfect, and polished, and they all but screamed “girl,” and that was something he’d been without for a while, a girlfriend, a woman, in bed, on top of him, underneath him, or in a hundred other positions he could imagine without even trying.
None of which he had any business imagining with her.
But there it was, in his head now, goddammit, a whole slide show of him and the blonde.
He cleared his throat.
“So your sister, the nun, Sister Julia from St. Mary’s parish, is donating a quarter of a million dollars out of her trust fund to fix the parish orphanage?”
“Yes.”
“And rather than wire the money, or transfer the funds through your bank, you personally brought it in cash, in fifty-dollar bills.” The most popular currency on the face of the earth, especially in the world of black money and dark deals.
“Yes.”
She’d obviously missed his implication. As a matter of fact, given the earnest look on her face and the almost desperate sincerity in her voice, it had flown right over her head, which was a point in her favor, a big point, and he had to wonder if somehow he’d accidentally slipped into a Shirley Temple movie, with the orphans, and the nun, and the boy’s broken arm, and her telling him about it with her green eyes all wide and imploring.
Geezus. She even looked a little like Shirley Temple, with the curls and the polka dots, if he could just get past the halter top, which her skimpy little matching jacket did nothing to cover up.
Okay, there was no getting past that halter top, or the way she filled it out. As a matter of fact, if he was being completely honest with himself, and he always was, he didn’t want to get past the halter top. He wanted to get in it, which was a little more honest than maybe it was smart for him to be with himself right now.
“Why the fifties?”
“Julia said it would be easier for her to get the work done if she could hire the workmen herself and pay them in cash. So she needed small bills.”
Mierda. Bull. He wasn’t buying it, and Sister Julia of St. Mary’s parish in San Luis, El Salvador, would have gone to the top of his “People to Investigate” list if he was still with the DEA. What he could do was turn her name over to the Panama office and let them see if drug-running nuns were going to be the next crime wave in C.A.
“That still doesn’t explain why she didn’t go through the bank. They would have given her all the small bills she wanted.”
Honey—God, what a name—just stood there, looking up at him, one arm wrapped around her waist. Then she took another drag off her cigarillo, and he could see her hand was still shaking.
“I can’t go to jail here,” she said. “Really, I can’t.”
Dammit. He needed to gather her up, hold on to her, anything to help her stop trembling. Something was going to shake loose if she didn’t.
“Then tell me something I can believe.”
“J-Julia likes to keep a low profile,” she said, blowing out a cloud of smoke.
“Why?”
Another cloud of smoke preceded her reply.
“It’s not always easy being a . . . a York.”
Not easy having a trust fund and everything that implied about the York family and how Honey and her sister had probably grown up? He didn’t think so. Being an orphan in San Luis, now that wasn’t easy.
“Why?”
“We’re a little . . . uh, notorious, and given Julia’s . . . calling, she prefers to keep her distance from the family. I can’t blame her, not really. Sometimes I’d like to get a little distance myself, but the truth is, I haven’t tried very hard.” Her gaze slid away. “Too spoiled, I guess.”
Finally, she’d told him something he could believe, one hundred and eighty percent.
“Notorious for what?”
“There has been some, hmmm, somewhat outrageous behavior at times.” She paused, took another drag off her cigarillo, then shot him a guilty glance as she blew out the smoke. “Some of it mine.”
And hey, he believed that, too, another one hundred and eighty percent. She was outrageous just standing there.
“Would you care to explain that a little more clearly?”
She shook her head, and he gave her a look that said maybe she should reconsider.
Fortunately, she got the message, sort of.
“How close am I still to going to jail?”
A nice man would have told her the truth, which was “not very close.”
Smith wasn’t that nice.
“I saw a cockroach once in San Salvador dragging half a plantain across a cell floor.”
She blanched, but wasn’t buying it.
“Liar,” she said.
“He was a beast, Ms. York, and I am not lying about that.”
She gave a resigned sigh and tossed her hair back over her shoulder.
“Have you taken a good look at me?”
Oh, hell, yeah, and what kind of question was that?
“Fairly good,” he said carefully, and now, when he really was lying through his teeth, she bought his line.
“Maybe you better look again.”
Tough job, but sure, he could swing his flashlight beam over her, very slowly, one more time, starting at those candy-apple toes and sliding up those not very long, but very nice legs. Then the knees, which were nothing but sweet, and all that lovely, exposed thigh before the hem of her—
“My face, Smith. No one has b
een famous for their legs since Tina Turner.”
Famous?
Oh, crap. He didn’t want to hear that he was stuck in his room with someone famous.
He lifted the beam of his flashlight until it landed on her face.
She was cute, no doubt about it, even more than cute, but no longer that picture of elegant chic she’d presented out in front of the Palacio. With her hair falling to her shoulders in a mass of wild curls, and standing there in a cloud of cigar smoke, smelling slightly of bourbon, she did not look familiar in any way, shape, or form. He didn’t know her from Adam or Eve.
“You’ll have to give me a clue.” God, he hoped that didn’t hurt her feelings, but no matter how famous she thought she was, she was not registering anywhere on his Fame-O-Meter.
He’d seen Angelina Jolie once, in Martinique, and she had registered. Oh, man, had she registered.
But not this woman.
“Honoria York-Lytton,” she said, taking another puff off her cigar.
Nothing. He got nothing.
“I wrote a book, and for about two minutes, it was lauded as a groundbreaking treatise for the new face of feminism.”
Still nothing, except for a spike in his interest. If she was the new face of feminism, the movement was definitely heading in the right direction. Not that he didn’t like strong, self-actualized women. He did. He just liked them better—well, hell, he just liked them better if they looked like her.
“So what happened after the first two minutes?”
“The whole thing turned to tabloid fodder, partly because I’m a York of the York-Lytton side of the family, and mostly . . . mostly because I let it, which is just so typical. Honestly, there’s a reason Julia doesn’t want anything to do with the rest of us. I tried to redeem myself by coauthoring Women’s Sexuality Under the Yoke of Twenty-first Century Political Tyranny with my Feminist Studies professor at Harvard, Dr. Sarah Barstow, but nobody even noticed that book.”
Yeah. He’d kind of missed that one, too—thank God.
“So what’s the name of the book you wrote yourself?”
Another sigh left her. “You don’t want to hear this.”
Yes, he did. “Try me.”
Another chest-heaving sigh left her, and he dutifully noted it on his very short list of the night’s blessings.
