Loose Ends Page 10

  Nervous, but trying not to show it, Jane sat perfectly still with her hands folded in her lap while J.T. ordered croissants, scrambled eggs and bacon, and fresh berries and cream, real cream, for their breakfast. For a minute, she wasn’t sure what she was more excited about, the food or him. Her confusion didn’t last long, not past the grin he gave her when he looked up from the menu.

  “And a mocha latte?”

  Geez, he was beautiful. The thrill of it went straight through her, right down her middle.

  “Sure,” she said. She loved mocha lattes, and she was damned afraid she was going to end up loving him. She needed someone strong in her life, someone she could count on, someone stable, and he was like a rock, solid from the get-go. But in her experience, what she needed and what she got were usually two different things.

  Breakfast, though, she could count on, and the more she ate and the more lattes she drank, the more comfortable she got and the more she talked about this and that and the other.

  He listened to it all, her whole sad little story. Light-fingered mother who’d gotten sent up, a sweet woman with a penchant for bad company who now lived in a small town in southern Wyoming, absent father, family somewhere, maybe Kansas, maybe not, her crew of eight kids she seemed to spend her life trying to feed and keep out of Lieutenant Loretta’s clutches, and Sandman.

  “Tell me about him,” he asked. “About Sandman.”

  Sandman, hell. What could she say about a best friend she didn’t seem to have much in common with anymore. They used to be inseparable, and lately she’d found herself avoiding him.

  “He’s tall, skinny, a good scrounger.” One of the best, for what it was worth. Surprisingly, lately, that hadn’t been as much as she’d always thought.

  “Is he your boyfriend?”

  “No.” She shook her head. No way. “We’ve been through a lot of hard times together, that’s all, a lot of years. Our moms were friends. He’s got a girl. They talk about getting married.”

  “What about you?” He seemed genuinely curious, leaning a little closer over the table, holding her gaze. “Do you have someone you think about marrying?”

  Oh, yeah—she felt a sigh building in her chest and squelched it.

  “No.” She shifted her attention from him to her plate. “No. I keep thinking …” Her voice trailed off.

  “Thinking what?”

  “Keep thinking there has to be something more.” She picked up her croissant, then put it back down and met his gaze. “I’m not stupid, J.T. I can see what’s going on around me, and I see people with real jobs, and bags of groceries, and cars that work. It’s right there in front of me every day, like right here in Duffy’s, the people at all these tables, but I can’t seem to see how to get from where I’m at to where they are.”

  Sandman thought that was crazy talk. He had everything all figured out. They were the good guys, the Robin Hoods, the Robin Rulz, taking from the rich to give to the poor, which was mainly themselves.

  But J. T. Chronopolous was no Sandman. Instead of dismissing her, he understood.

  “I remember thinking the same thing once when I was stealing a BMW.”

  “A Beemer?” Hell, she’d never stolen anything as big as a car, let alone a BMW.

  “Yeah.” He hunkered in closer. “I was over by the Denver Country Club, trying to jack this guy’s 535i in a blizzard, and I was thinking what in the hell was I doing freezing my butt off trying to steal some guy’s car, when he was all cozy inside this big damn house I was looking at. And I was thinking I’d rather be him than me right about then. I’d rather be paying for the Beemer and getting it stolen and collecting on the insurance than outside being the schmuck stealing it for pennies on the dollar.”

  She just sat there and stared at him dumbfounded.

  He got it.

  The whole thing, her whole problem.

  “So what are you driving these days?” She was damned curious.

  He grinned and settled back in his chair. “A midnight-blue 1967 Pontiac GTO. I named her Corinna.”

  And lo and behold, he was still driving the same damn midnight-blue 1967 Pontiac GTO.

  Stick with him—that had been her plan, her only plan, but it was looking a little shortsighted now. Corinna had hit sixty miles an hour for a stretch there back on 15th, blowing through a couple of lights and redlining Jane’s pulse. Sixty wasn’t much on the highway, but in downtown traffic, it was a thrill ride plus.

  “What’s his name?” J.T. asked, nodding at the 454 Chevy idling at the curb, facing him off on the other side of Vallejo Street.

  “Creed,” she said, her spirits sinking even lower, knowing he meant the guy sitting like the badass messenger of “shit outta luck” behind the wheel of the black-cherry red Chevelle. “Cesar Raoul Eduardo Rivera, Creed for short.”

  This was awful. He didn’t know Creed, and if he didn’t know Creed, one of the best friends he’d ever had, then who the hell was he really? Even if he’d been J.T., was he still J.T.?

  “Creed Rivera,” he repeated, seeming to give her answer some thought. “Back at the Quick Mart, you said you wanted to wait for Hawkins. Who is Hawkins?”

  Another terrible question. She tightened her grip on her zebra purse again, just because it was something to hold on to.

  “Christian Hawkins,” she said. “Sometimes, on the street, they call him Cristo, and all the time, they call him Superman.”

  That got her a subtle snort of disbelief. Superman, she could almost hear him thinking. Yeah, right.

  But it was “yeah, right,” all the time, and J.T. would know that.

  “Is he in one of these cars?” he asked, lifting his hips partway off the seat and shoving a hand into his front jeans pocket.

  “The green Challenger.” This was all so wrong. Roxanne and Hawkins were like peanut butter and jelly, and J.T. would know that, too.

  “So Hawkins is one of the guys from the garage.” He pulled his hand back out, and when he opened it, she saw a dozen or so brightly colored gelcaps in his palm. “The guy who was on the stairs, right?” He picked out a couple of green ones, tossed them in his mouth, and shoved the rest back into his pocket. “I saw him make a run for the Challenger when we were leaving.”

  Yes, the guy on the stairs in the garage, she thought. The one you threw a grenade at—cripes.

  And what were those pills all about? The colors were almost iridescent, but it didn’t make them look pretty or fun. They looked dangerously serious, intense, even toxic, as if even a little bit might kill you—and he’d popped those two green ones like candy.

  He shot her a brief glance, his eyes the same depthless hazel she remembered. He was J. T. Chronopolous, so help her God. He had to be.

  “He called you Jane.”

  “Yes. That’s my name,” she said, then went for broke. “What’s yours?”

  It took him a few seconds to answer, and for a moment, she thought he might not.

  “Con,” he finally said.

  Con. A long sigh escaped her, and she brought her hand up to cover her face.

  Well, this was all so perfect. They’d gotten the introductions out of the way, sort of. She was Jane, and he didn’t know who he was. She was only about half sure herself. No matter who he looked like, he didn’t know Creed, and he didn’t know Hawkins, and he didn’t know his own name, and to top it all off, unbelievably, he’d taken her knife, and he’d taken her gun.

  She was smarter than this, savvier than this. She’d been on the streets most of her life and knew how to take care of herself—except, she guessed, when people were throwing grenades and were superhero fast. She’d never seen anyone move like him.

  Well, actually, now that she thought about it, she had seen one person who moved like him, with that much speed and grace: Red Dog, Gillian Pentycote. But Gillian had suffered a run-in with some real twisted people, and the whole experience had changed her from the inside out. She’d been tortured with drugs and lost her memory.

 
; Oh.

  She went very still over on her side of the car, then lifted her hand just enough to angle her gaze over to Con’s side of the car. Oh, no.

  She took him in, letting her gaze slide over his jawline and down the side of his neck, taking in the scars that had never been there before, down to his hand and the half-missing ring finger. Dear God. She didn’t spend a lot of time hanging out with the people at Steele Street, nowhere near as much as they spent hanging out with each other. She mostly ran with Denver’s art crowd, but she’d been around enough to know that Gillian had been without her memory for a few years, quite a few, before her life’s history had started coming back to her, which had explained a whole lot about her coldly awkward personality. She was actually kind of sweet now … sometimes, and just a little bit nice, but not a lot. She could still kick major ass.

  Ah, hell.

  Jane had been in some pretty rough situations, but she couldn’t begin to imagine what it was like to be tortured until you lost your memories, even of who you were.

  And she was sitting in a car with a man who was ripped like Red Dog, and fast like Red Dog, and who took pretty pills and looked like he’d been tortured, and who seemed to have lost his memory.

  This was a disaster, and she was in the middle of it.

  So what was she going to do?

  Lowering her hand, she looked away from him and out toward the street, and realized the question might be moot. Roxanne was sidling up to the curb on Vallejo at the intersection.

  The man next to her reached down and shifted the GTO into a different gear, drawing her gaze back to his mutilated right hand.

  “Was it an accident?” she asked, suddenly needing to know. “How you lost your finger?” Maybe she was wrong. Maybe he hadn’t been tortured. Maybe he’d been in a crash, a car crash, a train crash, a plane crash, a bad one that had left him without his memory and cut him in a lot of places.

  “Probably not,” he said, his voice calm, matter-of-fact.

  She flicked her gaze up to his face, meeting his eyes, and they were calm, too, and very clear. Whatever had happened to him, he either didn’t know, or he’d accepted it and moved on.

  “Any one of these guys will give you a ride,” he continued. “So why don’t you get out and go home, do us both a favor.”

  He was right—but she had plenty of reasons to do her damnedest not to get kicked out of his car, none of which had anything to do with her ancient-history teenage crush. She was all grown up now, and that whole pathetically besotted time of her life was long gone. All she could hope was that if he really had lost his memory, he’d lost the one of her lurking around Steele Street, hoping to catch a glimpse of him from the roof of Sprechts Apartments. She hazarded another quick glance in his direction.

  No, she surmised, he didn’t seem to be connecting her with any latent memories of schoolgirl idiocy—thank God.

  And if he’d forgotten the idiocy, maybe he’d forgotten the last time she’d seen him, the night things had gotten completely out of hand and the damned next morning when he’d left and she’d cried.

  Oh, yes, she could only hope he’d forgotten all of that.

  Watching her from his side of the car, Con refrained from a weary sigh. She wasn’t budging, which made no damn sense at all, and he didn’t like things that didn’t make sense.

  “Is this personal between us?” he asked, going with his least likely theory first. It sure sounded good to him, but it also sounded like wishful thinking, despite the intense awareness they’d had of each other when he’d first seen her on the street. “Why are you sticking to me like superglue gone wrong? Why are you still in this car?”

  That’s what he needed to know before he got rid of her, why she hadn’t gotten out at the Quick Mart. He wanted to know what her stake was in the day’s events.

  “Or am I a job?” That was theory number two, and it was a helluva lot more likely. He’d been a lot of guys’ job over the last six years, a world full of spooks and door-kickers determined to bring him in for cash, or glory, or both. She’d be the first girl he’d come up against, though, and if somebody had sent her, well, he could only give them credit for being the first ones to get it right. She had a helluva lot better chance of bringing him down than any guy.

  He waited for an answer, but whatever she was thinking, she was keeping it to herself.

  “Do I know you?” he asked, trying a different tack—and, much to his surprise, scoring.

  She blushed, a wash of pink rising under her skin as she turned away and looked out the passenger-side window.

  Fascinating—it was personal, all right, whatever it was between them.

  So just how well had he known her, he couldn’t help but wonder, and if he’d known someone like her, how in the hell could he have forgotten her?

  Stupid question. Souk’s soup had taken so much of his life. But it hadn’t taken him, what he was at his essence, at his core, because he was still that: a soldier, a warrior, a gunfighter to the marrow of his bones.

  “The guys who are after me,” he asked, giving Corinna’s rearview mirror another quick glance. “Are you working with them? Are you one of the operators at Steele Street?” She’d been armed, and he could A-1 guarantee every one of these guys out on the street tonight was packing something.

  “No.” She shook her head, and he watched in wonder at the silky movement of her hair, the dark slide of it across her shoulders, the flow of it down across her breasts—and he believed her. She wasn’t like the woman who’d been holding Scout on the tenth floor. The auburn-haired operator was serious business, and Jane was nothing but trouble.

  Personal trouble.

  Hell. Like he needed any more of that.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Steele Street’s basement was an interesting place, its concrete walls faced with green and black granite, a low-lit lap pool shimmering down its middle. There had been a time when Dylan had used the pool almost every night, swimming laps when he couldn’t sleep. Now he slept with Skeeter.

  There were stacks of clean white towels on a rack next to the door, a water cooler, a few comfortable deck chairs and chaise lounges—and there was one simple metal chair, nothing fancy, no cushion on the seat, just an attached rope and pulley setup that Dylan wouldn’t want to trust his life to, not on a bet. The chair had a high back, the better to duct-tape a man’s upper body to, and two good, strong metal arms, the better to secure a man’s wrists and elbows with more heavy-duty duct tape. The chair had four metal legs, and, currently, a man’s legs were taped to two of them, one leg good and strong and the other a medical mess.

  “So how’s your day going, Sam?” Dylan asked.

  “Fuck you,” the man sitting in his boxers taped to the chair said. Sam Walls had six-pack abs, bulging biceps, one thigh the size of Vermont, and another deeply scarred and shriveled. Except for the glaring deformity, he was juiced, more than juiced. He was superjuiced, Souk juiced.

  Frankly, Dylan was damned impressed that Quinn and Kid had been able to snatch him without resorting to a ballistic solution.

  “I don’t know who you think you are, asshole”—Walls ground the words out between clenched teeth—“but you made a big mistake dragging me in here.”

  Yeah, yeah, Dylan thought, he’d had a lifetime of making these kinds of mistakes and gotten paid damn well to do it.

  “I’m the guy who owns you now.” Motivation, he guessed. Kid and Quinn had been damned motivated, and his guys were not without a fair amount of skill. Jet jockeys weren’t normally known for their hand-to-hand combat expertise, but Quinn was a street fighter from way back, and then there was that stretch Kid had done with the Marines in Recon. Yeah, that was usually enough to put a guy ahead of the pack—way ahead.

  “Bullshit,” the man sneered. “Assaulting a federal officer will get you life, boy.”

  Boy? That was new. Not many people called Dylan “boy.”

  “Federal officer of what?” he asked. “Who do you work
for, Sam? What agency?”

  The basement was warm, maybe even too warm, especially for an extended stay, which Dylan could see in Sam Walls’s immediate future.

  “One that can take this place apart at the seams, asshole.”

  Dylan nodded, even though that wasn’t the answer he’d wanted.

  He was standing at one end of the pool deck, in front of where the securely bound Walls was strapped into the metal chair placed directly under a bright light hanging from the ceiling. Quinn and Kid were both standing behind Sam, far enough away to be out of the light and yet close enough to make the man nervous—but probably not nearly as nervous as he should be.

  “Who was in the Mercedes with you?” Dylan asked his next question.

  “Fuck you.”

  “Randolph Lancaster?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “How many men did Lancaster bring to Denver?”

  The only answer he got was another sneer.

  Fine. The guy could have it his way.

  Dylan signaled Quinn and Kid, and his two operators stepped forward and picked up Sam and his chair. Without a word, they moved him to the deep end of the pool and set the back legs of the chair precisely on the edge of the deck so that the man was facing Dylan with the water behind him.

  There were a lot of reasons to push a captive taped to a chair into six feet of water, none of them good.

  Dylan reached up and angled the ceiling light to hit Sam squarely in the face, blinding him to the rest of the room.

  “I don’t think you’re a federal officer, Sam,” he said. “I think you’re a traitor to your country, and I think you’re here in Denver on a terrorist mission. What the hell happened to your leg?” The deep, gouged scar running the length of his thigh was a real butcher job. The shriveled mess of the rest of it, Dylan could only guess at, but it was a pretty damn good guess.

  “Combat, sweetheart.”

  “Where were you born?”

  “In a cross-fire hurricane.”

  Two brilliant answers in a row. One more brilliant answer would get the guy tipped bass-ackward into the pool.