by Tara Janzen
Turning his back on the church, he started walking. At the street, he looked both ways, not for traffic—there was none—but for whatever was left of the riots. There wasn’t much, a burning pile of trash at one end, and a few stragglers at the other. Whatever the whole goddamn night had been about, he’d catch it on CNN.
Shameless sorority girl sex games—geezus. He grinned and crossed the street.
CHAPTER
31
HAWKINS LIKED to hunt—men. Other than that, he pretty much kept to a life of fine art appreciation and serious, hands-on fathering. He had two kids already on board and another in the hamper, and life was sweet.
And he still liked hunting men, especially men who were returning the favor.
Royce was a wily old fox, with “old” being the most pertinent adjective in the current situation. Still, the ex-CIA agent was armed and dangerous, and Hawkins wasn’t taking any chances on missing any birthdays, ever, so he was running the old guy into the ground.
Royce could have stopped and taken another stand, but they both knew how that was going to turn out. Every time he’d tried it, Hawkins had flanked the bastard, flushed him out, and put him back on the trail to run.
Zane Lowe was dead, the last of the men Royce had brought to Denver. Travis had taken out the guy’s central nervous system in an instant with a dead-on cranial cavity shot that was always messy, but also always effective, especially in a hostage situation. All those hours the Angel Boy spent up on the eighth floor in the armory had really paid off tonight. It had been a good call on Skeeter’s part to bring the guy into the fold.
It had been a good call on General Grant’s part to make sure SDF could take care of Royce once and for all. The man had cost them too much, and Hawkins had been keeping score.
Parts of Commerce City looked like Armageddon had come and gone: towering industrial buildings with harsh lighting and dark shadows, nothing green for miles or blocks in every direction, whole areas abandoned after the workday was done. Geiss Fasteners was on the edge of all that, and Royce had been going deeper into it every minute.
A sound from above had Hawkins glancing up in time to see a helicopter cut across the sky.
Shit. Nothing was ever easy, not in this line of work, but the people who did it didn’t do it because they were looking for the least line of resistance. They resisted, always, with their very lives if need be.
Resisting hadn’t been enough for Red Dog, though. Fuck. Even if she survived, there were no guarantees.
Old Royce, though, Hawkins was giving him an ironclad guarantee.
The man was running out of steam. A lot of assholes were going to be looking for work when he was dead, but given the state of the world, Hawkins didn’t think they’d have any trouble finding it.
A flash of movement up ahead caught his eye. It was Royce all right, the only other living thing in the whole canyonlike landscape of refineries and factories. He was starting to double over a little, his feet dragging through the puddles that were only getting bigger the longer it rained. Lightning had flashed a few times, punctuated by great claps of thunder.
Royce’s suit was sodden. Hawkins could see how it was pulling at the old guy, weighing him down. Royce’s hair had thinned over the last two years, and every time lightning flashed, he could see the ex-agent’s bald head gleaming in the light.
The man’s whole crew had died in Commerce City in the last two hours, and Loretta had not been happy to hear it. But Grant had talked her into sending in her best cleanup crew, and by morning, it would be as if nothing had happened.
The only thing still needing to be done was killing Royce. Hawkins could have shot him half a dozen times, but he was running him instead, stalking him through the night.
Up ahead, the man stumbled, then slipped and fell to his hands and knees. He was still holding on to his pistol. When he didn’t get up, Hawkins decided the night was over.
Raising his .45, he took careful aim and shot Royce precisely through the base of his skull. The ex-agent collapsed forward into a shallow, dirty puddle.
Royce was getting out of this life easy. Way too easy.
Hawkins walked over to him, kicked the gun away, holstered his firearm, and keyed his radio.
“It’s done,” he said.
CHAPTER
32
DAWN WAS BREAKING the sky when Honey heard the trucks pull up outside, the trucks taking Julia and Father Bartolo back into the mountains. She squeezed her sister’s hand under the table, and Julia turned to her with a smile.
“Come on, Honey,” she said. “Come pray with me.”
It was the closing of the set piece that had become their good-byes since Malanca. Honey didn’t try to talk her out of the choices she’d made, not anymore. She’d talked them both to death when Julia had first made her decision to join the church.
Rising from the table, Honey followed her into the sanctuary.
Peace, that’s all her baby sister had wanted, and no price had been too high to pay, certainly not giving up the York-Lytton life of empty society and jet-setting absurdities.
Empty to Julia. Absurd to Julia. Honey found meaning in her life, more than enough to sustain her, but she hadn’t lost the man she’d loved to a cause she had to believe had been worthwhile, had to believe in with every cell of her being in order to accept the sacrifice that had been demanded.
They knelt at the altar, and Julia took her hand again.
Honey had never forgotten what Carl had looked like in that elevator. It had been carnage, with his blood all over Julia, and her sister screaming and screaming, helpless against the horror of what her privileged life had suddenly and shockingly become: an utter, senseless tragedy.
Honey had known exactly why that woman had been screaming out on the street next to the Palacio. The quality and tenor of the sound had cut through her like a knife, and for a few endless seconds it had all been too real again, Carl and Julia, and the men who had knocked Honey over racing out of the hotel, the assassins with black stockings over their faces and black guns in their hands. For an endless second, it had grabbed hold of her.
But Smith had been there, and he’d been more than enough.
“Hail, Mary, full of grace; the Lord is with thee,” Julia began, her voice so young and sweet, like the curve of her cheek. So young. “Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.”
“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Honey said with her. “Pray for us sinners.”
HONEY watched until the last truck was out of sight. Four months, Julia had promised. She’d be leaving El Salvador in four months, and Honey could only hope she did. There had to be something out there better for her sister than a life of poverty and doing without even the barest trappings of civilization.
Sitting down on the front steps of St. Mary’s, she brought the tail of the green parrot shirt to her face and pressed her nose into it, and hoped she could smell him. It was just a little bit crazy, but she thought maybe she could, and she could see where maybe she’d underestimated her reaction to him.
Time would tell. It always did.
Letting out a sigh, she looked back the way the trucks had gone. Sister Anna had promised her a ride back to her hotel. All the good nun had to do was contact her cousin, Roberto, who was going to contact his boss, Luis, who had a brother, who had a car she could hire.
It was going to be a bit of a wait. Fortunately, the stone steps of St. Mary’s weren’t too uncomfortable, even with her hurt butt. She could always go in and lie down in a pew, but it was nicer to be outside, with the sun rising, and a soft breeze blowing in from the ocean.
She let her gaze drift back to the street—and that’s when she saw him, sitting on a bench under a stand of palm trees. He was very still, very relaxed, his feet square on the ground, his knees slightly apart, his hands folded together in his lap, and there wasn’t a doubt in her mind that he was looking at her through those Ray-Bans.
The feeling that went
through her was a hard one, a little too powerful, and it hit her all at once like a soft wave of recognition, that she could fall in love with him.
And why that should demoralize the crap out of her, she didn’t know.
She watched him watching her across the quiet space of the empty churchyard and the deserted street. They were alone, with nothing but the wind and the sun between them and the night sliding away behind them.
She didn’t know him. The truth was uppermost in her mind. But she knew what it meant when he unfolded his hands and beckoned to her. His palm was open and up, his fingers together, the gesture brief, self-assured, arrogant, and irresistible: Come to me.
Letting out a sigh and wondering if she had the strength to read him the riot act, she rose to her feet, pulled her tote close, and started down the steps.
GOD, what a lovely mess she was.
Smith let his gaze travel down the length of her, which didn’t take long. There just wasn’t that much of her, but what was there pleased him.
Her hips swayed with every step she took down the stone stairs of the church, one carefully placed foot at a time. He was impressed as hell that she’d gotten across San Luis on her own in the middle of the night, even more so in those shoes. They weren’t quite as white as they’d been when he’d first seen her. The straps still worked and were buckled around her ankles, but one of the bows had lost its mooring.
She’d taken his clothes, which also pleased him, and whether she’d meant to or not, she’d left her ruined dress and those shamelessly sheer panties at the Palacio.
He was keeping the panties, a memento to go with the gun she’d bought off the street—and yeah, he figured those two items pretty well summed up the night. He hoped he didn’t dwell on it too much.
“You stole my pistol,” he said when she was close enough to hear.
She’d slipped her big white sunglasses on while she crossed the street, and now deigned to push them down a little ways on her nose and flat-out knock him over with how green her eyes really were, in daylight, with the sun reflecting in them.
“It’s heavy,” she said, pushing the glasses back up and reaching in her tote to pull out the Sig.
She handed it over, and he checked the chamber, then slipped it into the holster at the small of his back, under his blue parrot shirt.
“The cabs are running one block over. I can get you out on a plane this morning, and in my professional capacity as your bodyguard, I highly recommend that you go. The party is going to start up all over again in a few hours. I can guarantee it.” People had died in the night, so now there was revenge mixed in with the politics.
She looked up at him, and he could almost see the wheels churning, but not for long.
“Thank you,” was all she said, and that was as it should be. He liked smart women. “What about you?”
He came. He went. He did the jobs he was paid to do.
“How are your feet holding up?” was all he said, gesturing up the street and waiting for her to start walking.
“Fine.”
“Good. You had a big night. For a while there, I wasn’t sure how you were doing.” He looked over at her, but this close, mostly all he saw was the top of her head. Her hair was just too wild to see much beyond it. In sunlight, though, he could see the other ninety-nine shades of blond she had in it, and it was almost as if every curl was a different color—absolutely gorgeous.
“I’ve got luggage at the Royal Suites Hotel,” she said, completely ignoring his thinly veiled accusation. He didn’t blame her for that, but she had dumped him in the middle of the night, exfiltrated, left him behind when he’d committed to doing the job for her.
“Give me your address, and I’ll have it sent.” He pulled a small notebook and a mechanical pencil out of one of his cargo pockets.
She rattled off an address in Washington, D.C., a city he knew just well enough to know she was as rich as she looked if she lived in Adams-Morgan. Hell, even richer, considering that she was wearing his clothes.
But he wasn’t going to dwell on that, either.
He did realize that somehow, almost inadvertently, he’d just gotten her address. If something came up, like with the panties or something, he guessed, at least now he could get ahold of her.
Yes, sir, that was him, not dwelling.
He could have found her anyway. He had her name, but it was nice that he’d gotten the address from her. It felt a little more personal than him investigating her, or siccing Skeeter on her.
“So how did it go with your sister?” He could be polite, even if she had dumped him and gone through his wallet. The signs had been unmistakable.
“Sad, like it always goes.”
Well, that was definitely an opening.
“I have a little brother who gets into trouble all the time, too.”
“Does he get into trucks at dawn with men carrying machine guns?”
“Actually, he does that quite a bit. He’s a U.S. Army Ranger.”
“Then he can take care of himself.”
Yeah, he had to concede the point, just like he had to concede the point that he was really bad at this “morning after” chatter. If they could have just gone back to bed, he was sure they could have reached an understanding of what in the hell had happened last night—or at least he wouldn’t be wondering about it so much.
But the girl did not look like she was in the mood.
He wasn’t really either, not like instantly, but he could get there pretty quick.
“Do you want me to check your butt before you get on the plane?”
She looked at him over the tops of her sunglasses again, and if he wasn’t mistaken, the littlest smile twitched the corner of her lips.
Score.
“I think my butt is fine.”
“Thanks for the book. I’m really going to study it.”
The smile was for real this time, curving both sides of her mouth.
God, she had a mouth—but he wasn’t going to dwell on it.
When they reached the next street, his luck improved again. There was a cab. It only took a couple of minutes to get her inside and tell the driver where he wanted to go.
“Puede transportarnos a este lugar?” Could you transport us to this location? He showed the guy the map he kept in his wallet. It was always a handy thing to have, a map of the quickest way out of Dodge, and more than once, having one had cut through a lot of confusion and saved his ass.
“A la pista de aterrizaje?” the driver asked, surprised. To the airstrip?
Smith understood. Tourists used the regular airport. Only the drug runners and the locals would have used the dirt airstrip—and guys like him.
“Sí. Tres kilometros nordeste.” Smith knew what he wanted, and he wanted the airstrip three kilometers northeast of San Luis.
“Bien,” the driver said. Good. It was one of those deals where, if you knew where in the hell the airstrip was, you obviously knew what in the hell you were doing.
Close enough, Smith thought. He knew enough to get her out of San Luis.
By the time they hit the outskirts of town, he could tell she was starting to relax, and he understood. Her sister was long gone. There was no reason for Honoria York-Lytton to cool her little white platform heels in San Luis any longer. It was time to go home and forget how wild the night had gotten, forget being sad, and probably forget him.
He hated that last part. Truly, he did. He wasn’t going to be forgetting her.
But the way she was ignoring him, so studiously keeping her gaze focused out the window, her back to him, made him wonder if she hadn’t already wiped him off her memory banks. Then he noticed that as the palm trees and farmers’ fields were flashing by on the side of the road, her shoulders were shaking.
She was crying.
Well, hell. He did the only thing he could. He reached for her, wrapping his hand around her upper arm and urging her to come closer.
She turned her head, and he saw the wet tracks o
f tears running down her cheeks, and in the next second she was in his arms.
Again. Thank God.
And her hands were on his chest, and her mouth was right there, and he kissed her, over and over and over, sweet and soft—and so it went, all the way to the airstrip. Just kissing. Lots of it. On her face, on his, sometimes with their mouths together. She licked his neck, and he almost told her licking wasn’t fair, because there was no place for all the kissing to go, not in the backseat of a Salvadoran cab.
But he didn’t say anything. It had been a crazy night, that was all, and kissing her was the right thing to do, right up until she was starting up the drop ramp to get into the plane, a twin-engine, low-wing Beech Baron.
“Take care of yourself, Honey.” He kissed her cheek one more time, while he held her in his arms one more time.
“You, too, Smith.” She pressed her lips to the corner of his mouth, one more time, and he was pulling away and giving her a little push in the right direction, up the ramp. Honey York was going home, where she belonged.
But halfway to the hatch, she stopped and turned around.
“You never told me what the C stands for in C. Smith Rydell.”
God, she was beautiful, with the sunlight in her hair and the sky behind her, with his pants rolled up to under her knees, and her shoes a testament to just how tough she’d been. A quarter of a million dollars—geezus, it was all a little unbelievable, that she’d done it and was getting out in one piece.
Oh, yeah, she was beautiful. More than beautiful, and he was never going to forget.
The C in C. Smith Rydell—a grin curved his mouth. She was a piece of work, all right.
“Next time,” he said, giving her a short wave as he backed away.
Yeah. Next time.
CHAPTER
33
I REMEMBER my mother,” Gillian said from the middle of her hospital bed.
