Crazy Kisses Read online

“Sorry you got all tied up, babe,” she said, striving for sweetness or a little bit of a coo and at least a semblance of contrition in her voice, and failing. She just didn’t have a coo in her. “I’ll have you out of this real quick.”

  But not too quick. That was for damn sure. Not when he was breathing fire and shooting daggers at Fast Jack and the other Rats milling about on the stage.

  Bending down to untie his ankles, she decided to keep his arms tied and the gag in place for another minute or so, until he could get a better look at the situation. The man had more degrees than God, like a gazillion of them from the biggest university in the state, and she had absolute faith in his ability to figure out what the odds were against them. Going mano a mano with the Rats was not the way out of this mess. This was going to take skill and finesse.

  “Kiss, kiss, kiss,” the chant continued, bugging the crap out of her. She’d seen the way the women who came into the gallery looked at him. Over the last few weeks, she’d seen dozens of women, literally, gawk and stare and damn near drown in their own drool looking at Nikki McKinney’s paintings of him. It wasn’t just that his face fit together in all the right ways, or that he was stark naked. There was something in his eyes, the way he looked in the “ascending” paintings, something so open, so easy, so . . . so . . . compassionate, she guessed was the right word, like he cared about you without even knowing you. It wasn’t real, of course, but it did make a person want to pour their whole heart out to him.

  And she had, kind of, a few times at night, after everyone else had gone home and she’d been alone, just sort of confessed her sins to the golden angel hanging on the west wall, until she’d gotten them all out, the big ones, the little ones, and even the deep dark secret ones she could barely admit to herself.

  It was ridiculous, she knew, but she’d felt better for it. Then two weeks ago he’d shown up at the gallery, a real guy, just walked in the back door one afternoon carrying another painting, and she’d damn near died on the spot.

  She still hadn’t recovered. Logically, she knew he hadn’t heard a word she’d said, but in her heart, he knew way too much about her for her to be comfortable doing anything but flat-out ignoring him. Worst of all, and what really made her feel stupid, was that for a short while she’d actually felt absolved, like he’d forgiven her for all her trespasses, this makeshift angel in a painting.

  Well, that had all been blown to hell, probably literally, which was no comfort, and here she was, trying to save his hundred-thousand-dollar butt—and yeah, she knew that was probably a low estimate.

  She pulled at the knots on the old shirt the Rats had used to shackle him, and wondered how in the mother-loving world she’d been so careless as to let him follow her. He never could have done it in the old days. She’d gotten lax, grown soft—grown up.

  Another round of catcalls came out of the darkened theater, and she had to work to tamp down her anger. They should have grown up, too. They shouldn’t still be here, sending tribute, needing her, wanting her back for whatever reason Fast Jack had dreamed up. A lot of the original crew was gone. Lulu and Ricky were married and living in Colorado Springs. Sandman had been busted and was doing time in the Buena Vista detention facility. Cruzer had contacted her about a year ago. He’d been in Las Vegas, running some games, and he’d wanted her to join him. He would always have a place for her, he’d said. There were half a dozen others who had gotten too old to be Rats and drifted away, looking for bigger scores or a chance at something better.

  But for every one who’d left, three had taken their place. Somebody had been recruiting, and that somebody had to be Fast Jack Spencer. He was up to something. Nobody needed a pulling crew of a hundred kids.

  With Travis’s ankles untied, she rose back to her feet and bent her head close to his. He still had a grip on her coat, was still holding her close.

  “I’m not going to let them hurt you, Mr. James,” she whispered, reaching for the knots on the clothesline cord they’d used to gag him. “It’s okay for you to let go of me.”

  Apparently, though, it wasn’t. He didn’t let go. If anything, he pulled her even closer.

  Fine, she thought. If it made him feel better to have hold of her coat, she could live with it. He sure wasn’t the first.

  “I’m going to get you out of here, but you have to let me handle this my way,” she continued very softly, for his ears only, working on the knots and having to work ridiculously hard not to just bury her nose in his hair. Nikki’s paintings hadn’t lied about his hair. It was amazing, thick and silky and a hundred shades of blond, and geez, it smelled good, like warm sunshine with a hint of lavender. What guy’s hair ever smelled like sunshine and lavender? “If you’ll just let me do all the talking, things will be fine.” She hoped. “Okay?”

  He nodded, and she tilted her head back to glance at his expression to see if it had improved.

  It hadn’t.

  She leaned forward and whispered in his ear one more time. “I’m serious as a heart attack here, Mr. James. I’m going to need cooperation. Just follow my lead. And don’t worry about the knife.”

  When she looked at him again, his eyebrows were drawn together, his gaze narrowed, and she knew that she’d at least gotten his attention.

  “He’s no fighter. You’re right about that, Jack,” she said, raising her voice a little so everyone standing around them could hear, and hoping to hell Mr. Travis James was getting the message. “But then that’s what he’s got me for.”

  Enough said. She stuck her hand in her pocket and pulled out a knife. It rested lightly in her fingers, the back of the case up against her palm, and with a press of the release, the blade sprung free, razor sharp.

  The chant of “kiss, kiss, kiss” faltered to a halt, and the kids closest to her stepped back. Even Fast Jack shifted his weight to put a little extra distance between them.

  She’d pulled the knife, silver and engraved, and every Castle Rat knew the history of the blade—where it had been, what it had done, and who had done it. Robin Rulz.

  The Rats weren’t going to mess with her, ever. But Travis James was on shaky ground. He was too old—all of twenty-three—too clean, and wearing way too much Abercrombie & Fitch to be anything except the enemy to them, even if he was her “boyfriend.” They didn’t know he was important. They didn’t know he counted, and they sure as hell didn’t care that Katya Hawkins would can her butt if she brought him home all roughed up. And Superman—hell, Superman would toss her back to the she-wolves in Phoenix so fast it would make her head swim. The only place worse than the Immaculate Heart School for Young Women was jail, and so help her God, she wasn’t going back there, either.

  “He was wearing a real nice coat when we left LoDo,” she said, carefully sliding the knife under the triple skein of cording wrapped across his mouth.

  The coat magically appeared from out of the dark on her left and was dropped in a pile at her feet.

  “He had a nice watch, too.” She cut through the first cord, keeping the blade away from his face and away from his hair. The knife was wicked sharp. “I can’t imagine you guys missed that.”

  The watch came from her right, lightly tossed onto the coat.

  “And a ring, a silver ring he was wearing on his right hand.”

  It landed next to the watch as she slit the second cord.

  “And a gold-and-silver cuff bracelet.”

  That one started some chatter, some confused whispering on the outskirts of the crowd.

  She pulled the knife out from under the last cord, leaving it uncut, and gave them all a steady look. “Come on, guys. There was only one bracelet. Cough it up.”

  It took a few more seconds, but the bracelet appeared, brought forward by one of the younger kids and carefully set on the coat.

  “You don’t have to fight for him, Robin,” Jack said. “Not here. Not with us.”

  “No trespass price,” she said. Forty-seven dollars wouldn’t cover it—not even close—and neither wou
ld his nice watch. More often than not a trespass price involved a can of spray paint and maybe somebody’s car, or their house, or the place where they worked, or even their body. Or maybe the Rats would just take something from the trespasser, like the front wheel of their car, or a piece of their house, or maybe they’d give him an impromptu haircut and spray paint his head. Whatever, it was never lethal, but it was all unacceptable.

  Fast Jack agreed with a nod, and satisfied, she turned back to Travis and sliced through the last cord, letting them all fall away.

  “Kiss, kiss, kiss,” the chant started back up.

  Well, she wasn’t going to kiss him. Not in this lifetime.

  “Cut my hands free,” he said, shifting sideways on the chair, his voice low and tight. It wasn’t a request.

  She looked down and swore under her breath. Underneath the tape and rope and all the other whatnot they’d wrapped around him, they’d used wire on his wrists. His skin had been rubbed raw in places.

  “Don’t send any more messages to Toussi’s,” she said to Jack, her own voice pretty damn tight. She started with the tape, pulling it off, then tore away some Silly String they’d sprayed on him. Oh, the little Rats must have thought that was hilarious. “If you want to talk, meet me at Connie’s Bagels Sunday morning. Eleven o’clock.”

  Connie’s was neutral ground.

  “Sunday morning may be too late,” Jack said.

  Something in his voice caused her to glance up.

  “It’s the Parkside Bloods. They’re pushing us out. They want the Empire. Raymond says he’ll only talk with you.”

  So that’s what this was all about. She should have figured. Well, she didn’t want to talk to Raymond the Blood King ever. That part of her life was over. She went back to working on Travis’s wrists, cutting through a piece of rope.

  Crap. Even the Parkside Bloods knew she was back.

  “How in the hell did you last this long, Jack?” Honestly, she was beginning to wonder. “I’ve been gone for two years. They must have made a play for the Empire before this.”

  “No. Raymond got busted about the time you disappeared. Peanut took over, but he had his hands full holding off the Locos, but somebody capped Carlos. Baby Duce took over, and the Locos pulled back to the west side, so the Playboys started pushing in from the north side, and when Raymond got out, he started pushing back, and the Empire is getting caught in the middle.”

  “The last damn place you can afford to be,” she said. With the rope gone, she closed her knife and started carefully unwinding the wire from around his wrists, all the while wishing she could sink straight through the floor and just disappear all over again. This was not her life anymore, but Travis James was hearing all of this junk like it was her garbage to sort out—gang crap, turf wars, homies getting killed.

  “I know that, but—”

  “Then you know how it works.” Dammit. “The Rats survived because we stayed out of everybody’s way, low-key. You take enough to get by, but not so much that somebody wants to take from you. You don’t fool with the gangsters or the dealers or their clients. The Rats have always been a small group, strictly hit-and-run. You’ve got too many, Jack. You’re making too much noise.” A hundred freaking kids. It was crazy. He was crazy. He had to know all this. “You can’t act like a gang, not without being a gang, and the Rats have never had gang firepower. They’ve never had guns.”

  “We do now, Robin,” a small voice said.

  For a second, she was struck dumb. Fast Jack had armed the Rats? It was a death warrant.

  She stared at him, speechless, then had to look away.

  She couldn’t deal with this. Couldn’t even look at the kids. She was wearing a blue sweater, dammit, a beautiful blue silk sweater, and had shoes to match. That was her life now. Matching shoes. Not Parkside Bloods and Locos and Carlos getting capped.

  “My name is Jane,” she said. “Jane Linden. There is no Robin Rulz anymore. I’m not Robin Hood or robbing fools.”

  “We can’t do it without you, Robin,” Jack said, almost, but not quite, looking pitifully helpless. He really didn’t have it in him to be helpless, not Fast Jack. He was a fighter from way back. They’d done it together, fought against Greg Stevens at Castle Imports.

  “Jane,” she repeated. “My name is Jane.”

  “Jane. Jane. Jane,” the little Rats started up.

  God, they were relentless.

  And Travis James was finally free.

  She slipped the last loop of wire off his hands and knew she was never going to live this down. Her new life was over, her clean slate muddied all to hell.

  He leaned over and scooped up his stuff before rising to his feet and shoving it all in his pocket. He looked like a Nordic god compared to all the grubby gremlins clustered around the chair.

  “So what are we doing here?” he asked, taking hold of her hand like it was the most natural thing in the world, like he really was her boyfriend. “Leaving, staying, waiting for Raymond, or kicking a lot of very little ass?”

  That set off some giggles—but not from her. Good God. He was holding her hand.

  “We’re . . . uh, leaving,” she said, but she didn’t know how. She felt a little paralyzed by the hand-holding thing, like her feet wouldn’t quite move. And she was simply amazed at his self-control. He was still angry. All the signs were there, the edge in his voice, the tightness of his jaw, the tension in his arm, his stance, but he wasn’t giving in to it. He wasn’t whacking anybody, or grabbing a kid, or shaking somebody until their teeth rattled, all of which she’d seen more times than she ever wanted to remember.

  “You’ve still got my wallet, right?” He reached down and snagged his coat.

  His wallet.

  Right.

  “In my back pocket,” she remembered. She’d put it there after she’d returned his cards.

  “Then let’s get out of—”

  “Hush,” one of the kids said in a voice tinged with panic, her nose all but twitching as she took up a stand at the edge of the stage. Everyone instantly went still. There was no sound, no milling, no sniffling, only the tinny, muted strains of Fantasia echoing through the theater.

  Then the warning cry came: “Cops!”

  The film was instantly switched off, throwing the whole place into darkness—and as one swarming organism, the Rats ran, melting off the stage, out of the seats, away from the aisles, disappearing, every one, and out of pure, gut-deep instinct, Jane disappeared with them, whisking Travis away with her, across the boards, behind the screen, and into the dark at the back of the stairs.

  CHAPTER

  13

  30,000 feet over the Caribbean Sea

  THROUGH THE WINDOW of his private jet, Juan Conseco watched the moonlit clouds course across the sky over the dark ocean below. Beside him, Drago was furious, delivering his polemic in a constant stream of Spanish punctuated by butchered English when he wanted to make a particularly damning point.

  “This is insane, insanity. Far worse than Panama. You will be naked in the United States, without friends, without protection.” His uncle had been stoically unhappy from the moment Juan had decided to make a bold, lightninglike strike at his enemy on his home ground, where el asesino fantasma would least expect it.

  “We have friends in every city in the United States, Uncle,” he corrected Drago’s latest mumblings. “In the major cities and the minor ones, in cities on their last gasp of life, cities with new industry and old. We are there, in all of them. You’ve gotten the name of our Denver connection from our man in Tijuana—¿es verdad? What was it again?”

  “Baby Duce.” Drago’s mouth thinned in disgust.

  Juan understood. His uncle didn’t like dealing with people at the street level. The regional distributors, the men with money, were as low as he liked to go. But Juan understood there was very little difference between himself and men like Baby Duce, and those differences had more to do with the cut of their clothes than the working of their minds. T
hat understanding gave him an advantage when dealing with the street lords. It was why he had taken over the family business when his father had died. It was why Drago had let him.

  “You told Baby Duce what we need?”

  “Yes,” Drago replied. “There is a club called the Aztec. Very popular, he said. It will be crowded tonight, and it has a basement where we will not be disturbed.”

  “Good.” Besides Drago, Juan had brought three of the other four men who had been with him in Panama City. The fourth man, the one he’d left watching Chronopolous’s house, had stupidly gotten himself picked up by the police. There would be no new information coming out of Panama City. If the man was smart, he would hold his tongue, or Juan would hold it for him.

  It had been a terrible thing, but he’d had to leave poor Sanchez and Mancos at the mercy of the Panamanian police. With the ghost killer within his grasp, there had been no time to do otherwise. He’d had no choice. Such was the nature of his business. Pray God the bodies would be treated with respect.

  He fingered the cross at his throat and said another prayer for his fallen men and for the capture of the hated gringo. The woman was the key now. She would lead him to el asesino fantasma. Juan had a thousand ways of getting information out of a woman, and if necessary, he would use them all. Nicole Alana McKinney would be praying for one of her angels to come and save her before he was through.

  CHAPTER

  14

  Denver, Colorado

  AGONY OR IDIOCY?

  That was the question.

  One of the little Rats trapped with him in the very small closet under the stairs farted again, and Travis decided on idiocy. That was how he was going to die, sheer idiocy, gassed to death by a ten-year-old with no self-control.

  “Robin,” a small feminine voice said from right up against his left leg. “Make him stop. I’m gonna be sick.”

  Yes, sir, that was the only thing missing from this intimate encounter—someone throwing up on his shoes.

  “Shut up, Blue,” another Rat whispered. “We’re s’posed to be hiding, and her name is Jane.”