Loose Ends Page 15

  His gaze narrowed.

  “What happened to your knee?” It was skinned, and it hadn’t been when he’d first seen her in LoDo.

  “Well,” she said slowly, “a couple of lifetimes ago, when I was in the Steele Street garage just minding my own business, somebody threw a grenade at me, and I fell to the floor and scraped the hell out of it.”

  As the somebody in question, he didn’t have much to offer. He’d have thrown the flash bang even knowing she was going to get her knee scraped, but he’d rather she hadn’t gotten injured. There weren’t many perfect things in the world, but she was one, the way she’d looked walking down Wazee, owning the street.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt … much.”

  Hell. He let out a long breath.

  “Okay, it hurts a lot, but it’s just a scrape, and I’m getting a bruise from where I hit my head.”

  “At Tatsunaka’s.” He remembered her mentioning it—and him dismissing the complaint. She’d been scared and shook up, but for someone who looked like a catwalk queen, she was pretty tough. He’d figured that out the instant he’d seen her hot-wiring the car.

  “Yes. See?” She turned in her seat and pulled her hair back from the right side of her face, and, yes, he could see a little swelling on her forehead near her hairline, and maybe a little bruising, too.

  He was so tempted to reach out and touch her face, smooth her hair back from the bruise and tell her she was going to be fine. But of course she was going to be fine, and she didn’t need him telling her anything, and it was damn near suicidal for him to touch her.

  Hell. He usually had more sense. The blue pills were always a crapshoot and always messed with his head a little.

  She messed with his head, too, all by herself, just sitting there, with or without a scraped knee and a bruised forehead. Within the confines of the car, her scent surrounded him, seeped into his senses and made him long for something he didn’t know if he’d ever had—a woman like her, a refuge, someone he could count on to watch his back. Someone to love.

  “So where are we going?”

  “I’m looking for a restaurant,” he said, choosing the truth, always a good plan.

  “Oh.” She sounded a little surprised. “What are you … uh, hungry for? Mexican, Chinese, sushi, cheeseburger and fries?”

  You, he thought. Somebody so gorgeous it hurt. A smart, tough, unafraid girl with the tactical sense to draw down on him. Up against anyone else, she’d have had a better-than-average chance of coming out on top, way better.

  “A nice place, that’s all. Something you would like.”

  It didn’t matter to him. He wasn’t planning on eating. He put Corinna back into gear, his gaze automatically checking the rearview mirror while they waited for the light to change.

  “Jane,” he said her name again, thinking it over. “Jane what?”

  “Linden,” she answered with barely a moment’s hesitation, which told him way more than she probably knew. Nobody in his business gave their name away that easily. She was pure civilian, all right. “I manage an art gallery over on 17th.”

  Well, this was getting damned interesting, right down to employment addresses, and she was a manager, no less. He was impressed.

  “What were you doing at Steele Street?” he asked, thinking why the hell not? He seemed to have a willing conversation partner.

  “What were you doing at Steele Street?” she shot back. “Besides practically blowing the place up?”

  Taking a cue from her, he kept his thoughts on that one to himself. She didn’t need to know anything about Randolph Lancaster.

  “All righty, fine,” she said, not bothering to hide her frustration. “I was headed home from work to get ready for—oh, cripes.”

  “Ready for what?” He had an idea, and there was no reason on earth for it to bother him, but it did.

  “A date,” she said, checking her watch, her brow furrowing. “Damn.”

  Well, hell.

  “I live just a couple of blocks from Steele Street,” she said, opening her purse and rummaging around inside. “So it wasn’t really out of my way, and when I saw you, I knew I had to … well, I had to, uh, go tell Superman.”

  “Superman,” he repeated, hearing her whisper another damn under her breath while she continued digging through the contents of the zebra bag. “You mean the Hawkins guy in the green Challenger?”

  She nodded, starting to pull stuff out of the purse—a makeup bag, a wallet, what looked like a day’s worth of mail—and piling it all in her lap, which reminded him that he had a few of her things himself. “He’s the best friend you ever had, right next to Creed, and that’s the God’s truth.”

  So she’d said.

  “Creed. The guy in the Chevelle Super Sport.”

  She nodded. “You were all a bunch of car thieves in the old days, when you were teenagers, and then everybody got busted, but Dylan, the boss, made it all okay, and now I don’t really know what you guys do, but I’d lay money down on you doing it for the government, and the only reason I know anybody at Steele Street is because … well, you and uh … Superman ran into me, sort of, one night outside the Blue Iguana Lounge.” She was still piling things up in her lap, a small brush, sunglass case, coin purse, keys on an elaborate key chain with all kinds of charms and baubles on it. “And then a few years later, Hawkins married Kat, and a few years after that, when I moved up here from Phoenix, Kat hired me to work in her gallery—end of story.”

  Geezus.

  Nobody in his world blabbered on, not without a load of Sodium Pentothal jacked into their system. But more than likely, she was dead-on about the Steele Street boys working for the government if they were involved with Lancaster, and he knew for damn sure she was dead-on about the carjacking crew. He’d done it. He’d known it the instant the guy named Hawkins had called her name. The juice, the smell, the sound of ratchets and wrenches, of burning rubber and grinding gears, it had all suddenly been there in his mind.

  “Didn’t anybody ever tell you not to talk to strangers?” Really, she was so far out of the box, it was a little unnerving.

  “You’re not a stranger,” she said, letting out an exasperated sigh and jamming everything in her lap back into the striped purse. For a moment, she just sat still, her eyes closed. Then, after voicing a weary, muttered “What the hell,” she turned and faced him, meeting his gaze straight on. “You’re John Thomas Chronopolous. That’s your real name.”

  John Thomas.

  He sat back in his seat.

  All right, sure, whatever she thought. Like he’d said, he must have been somebody before he’d become Conroy Farrel, and he guessed there was a ring of truth in the name somewhere … somewhere just outside his ability to verify.

  John Thomas Chronopolous.

  It beat the hell out of a lot of names he’d been called, but it didn’t quite give him the same memory jolt as when he’d seen Peter, Kid Chaos, standing in the garage. That guy’s name sure as hell had come to him in a crackling flash of light and truth, which was great, just what he needed, more crackling, flashing, lightning bolts of long-lost truth firing up the dead brain cells in his memory banks. Enough of those and maybe he’d figure out who he used to be and what in the world had happened to him between Then and Now, or he’d get the mother of all headaches and the pain would break him, crack his head straight open, from skull to gullet.

  In the six years of life he remembered, there had been no shortage of physical suffering. For the most part, he’d been able to manage it with the dwindling stash of rainbow-colored gelcaps he’d taken from Souk’s lab in Bangkok. But time was running out on him, time and pills, and when his little rainbow beauties were gone, he’d be right behind them: gone. Before that happened, he wanted Lancaster dead.

  John Thomas.

  Geezus, he thought, reaching for his jacket and taking her gun out of the pocket. Very methodically, he released the magazine, let it drop into his hand, and then slid the cart
ridges out one by one.

  He believed her, whether he had a clear memory of the name or not—and that was a definite “or not.”

  “Here,” he said, dropping her empty gun, the empty magazine, and the handful of cartridges into the open top of her purse. “When we get to the restaurant, you might want to start putting that all back together.”

  She gave him a look that said he could eat worms and die and immediately starting fishing the cartridges out of her purse.

  “What about my knife?” she said, very genteelly leaving off the implied “you jerk.”

  He pulled the pearl-handled beauty out of his front jeans pocket and handed it over. She knew how fast he was. He figured she wasn’t going to try to shank him or shoot him. No, they’d had some kind of personal relationship. She was on his side.

  The light changed, and he pressed on the gas, letting the GTO rumble and crawl down the road, keeping just under the speed limit.

  Despite her babbling on, Jane was a smart girl, too. Once he drove off, it wouldn’t take her too long to put her weapons in order and figure things out, and then she’d go home. Tonight would just be an odd entry in her Dear Jane diary. By the time she woke up in the morning, he’d be halfway to South America or on his way to Bangkok.

  Either way, it didn’t matter to him. He just needed to stay on the move, working his mission, and getting Wild Thing out of the car was the next step.

  Three streets down, he found what he’d been looking for and pulled to a stop in front of a stucco building. A bright blue neon sign of a howling wolf graced the building. The place was about halfway down the block, midway between a stretch of bars and clubs, and it looked busy, with lots of people inside.

  “Mama Guadaloupe’s?” she asked, giving him an incredulous look he didn’t quite understand, like maybe it was a strip joint in disguise.

  Glancing up through the windshield, he read the words flowing in pink neon script above the blue wolf, then checked the clientele through the window. It was family night in there, all the way, not a strip club.

  “Yeah,” he said. “This looks good.”

  “It is good,” she said, her tone very sure. “The best Santa Fe gourmet in the city.”

  Well, great. Maybe she could get dinner while she was waiting for her ride—and that was that, time for good-bye, the big adios, time to exfiltrate her out of the front seat. He’d take her inside, get her settled in Mama’s, and she’d be fine, a whole helluva lot better off than she was with him—and he hated having to admit that.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “Slow down. I see the car up ahead, in the next block, parked on the right,” King said. A blond bruiser, he weighed in at one ninety-eight, all muscle, with a “recon” high-and-tight haircut. Dressed in civvies, a pair of jeans with a gray T-shirt and a double-X brown hoodie, he looked like the biggest and cleanest-cut hoodlum ever to hit the streets of the west side. His face was hard and chiseled, lantern-jawed, and devoid of expression. His boots were pure military issue, flat black and lace-up, and he had a reputation for getting the job done, whatever the job.

  “The woman is still with him,” his partner said. Rock was driving the Jeep SUV Lancaster had rented for them at the airport. Rock’s head was completely shaved, and he was far more comfortable in a combat zone, any combat zone, than he ever felt in a city not under fire. At two hundred fifteen pounds, he was the bigger of the two, a muscled, flat-faced, square-headed war-fighter wearing desert tan cargo pants and a long-sleeved Corps T-shirt with an unbuttoned gray shirt over the top.

  Both men carried .45-caliber pistols in paddle holsters concealed on their right sides and sheath knives on their left, with razor-edged folding knifes in their pockets.

  “You take the woman,” King said. He didn’t care if they were after the damn-near-mythical Conroy Farrel or not, it wouldn’t take the two of them to take the man down. Farrel was a Bangkok boy, just like them, but they’d had better juice, the Gen X soup. If Lancaster had sent them in the first place, instead of all those now-dead CIA agents, Farrel would be ancient history by now.

  “Shit,” Rock whispered, and King knew it wasn’t because of being stuck with taking the woman. Farrel had gotten out of the car and was going around to the passenger side. “This just got messy.”

  He was right. Farrel and the woman were going inside the restaurant, a place called Mama Guadaloupe’s. Extracting two people from a car on the street was one thing. Getting them out of a crowded restaurant, when at least one of them had the potential of putting up a helluva fight, was another.

  “I’ll take a black syringe with me,” he said. Doping the bastard was the best bet. The trick would be getting him out of the restaurant before he collapsed. He and Rock could always bring Farrel around once they got him to Lancaster’s suite at the Kashmir Club.

  Rock pulled to a stop two cars behind the GTO, and they both got out of the Jeep. As they passed the Pontiac, Rock bent down and slashed the tires—standard operating procedure.

  Inside the restaurant, he and Rock found a place at the end of the bar, ordered a couple of beers, and started looking around. It didn’t take long to spot their targets, even in the crowd. The pair was getting settled into a table, the woman sliding out of her coat and hanging it on the chair, the hostess still chatting them up and handing them their menus. For dining purposes, their location sucked. For what King had in mind, it was perfect. The table was back by the kitchen, where everybody and their dog was swinging by, toting food out and dirty dishes in.

  “Hot damn,” Rock said.

  King concurred. The woman was a stunner, like a fashion model, the way she was dressed, all sexed up in a short-short gold dress and hot little black boots, her hair so long and dark, so silky shiny. And her face. Christ. He’d laid a woman like her once in Dallas, a girl too rich and beautiful for her own good who’d just wanted a walk on the wild side.

  He’d given it to her.

  “I think we’ll just mosey over there, Rock, and let Farrel see that you’ve got a gun on the woman. My guess is that he’ll want to go real peaceful-like. Come on.”

  He stood up, and he and Rock started across the room. It didn’t take Farrel long to spot them, either, and as soon as he did, King lifted the right side of his hoodie, just enough to give Farrel a glimpse of his .45. Next to him, Rock let his hand graze the outside of his shirt, letting his pistol print for a brief second, with the added gesture of pointing at the woman.

  Farrel would get the picture real quick—any sign of a fight, and the girl was a goner. Rock’s first shot was for her.

  Cretins, Monk thought, watching King and Rock weave their way across the restaurant dining room, flashing weapons and telegraphing threats against the woman with Conroy Farrel. He could see it all through the front window, feel it all, and he’d have expected better of men working for Randolph Lancaster.

  They had what he wanted more than anything, and they didn’t deserve it. They didn’t deserve their position in Lancaster’s life.

  It made him sick in his heart.

  Threats were for weaklings. If he’d wanted the woman dead, he’d have killed her. One good backhand would take her head off, damn near literally. There’d be none of this mincing around with guns.

  Mama Guadaloupe’s—he glanced up at the sign, squinting even behind his sunglasses. It was no accident that he’d found Farrel here. Monk knew everything about Farrel and his former life in Denver as J. T. Chronopolous, all the places he’d liked to hang out, the houses and apartments where he’d lived before moving into 738 Steele Street. Monk knew where he’d gone to school and what recruiting office he’d gone to when he’d enlisted in the Marines. He knew some of the women he’d been with and where they were now. He knew what cars J.T. had owned and a few that he’d stolen, and he knew Mama Guadaloupe’s had been his favorite restaurant, a home away from home. J.T. had been a legend here, and Monk had mapped out a route of J.T.’s most important places, putting his reconnaissance plan together while he�
��d still been in Bangkok, spreading his maps and schedules and data across Dr. Patterson’s desk while chewing on the good doctor’s bones.

  He’d tasted like chicken.

  Monk wasn’t a cannibal. He was a survivor, an animal in every vicious, feral sense of the word, an animal with a human’s brain. He was exactly what Lancaster had promised him he’d be, the ultimate warrior, with no boundaries, no barriers, no conscience. When he succeeded in his task, Lancaster would welcome him into the fold, into the inner sanctum of his most loyal and fearsome soldiers.

  And there, in the light of Lancaster’s rising sun, Monk would shine like the unholy terror he was.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “We’ll take them out the back, through the kitchen,” King said, crossing the dining room, heading for Conroy Farrel and the woman.

  Going through the kitchen might cause a bit of ruckus with the staff, but it was the quickest way out and beat the hell out of maneuvering two hostages at gunpoint back through the crowded dance floor.

  “Con,” he said like they were old friends, coming to a stop in front of the table where Farrel sat with the woman. He smiled warmly, cocked his head a little to one side, and relaxed his shoulders. “I remember you from school. East High, right?”

  Actually, he knew everything about Conroy Farrel, from his blood type to his shoe size. He knew the day he’d been born, where he’d been baptized and where he’d been busted, where he’d graduated, when he’d enlisted, and King knew the day he’d “died.” In truth, he knew more about Conroy Farrel and where he’d come from than Conroy Farrel did. King knew he’d started out life as John Thomas Chronopolous. He knew why the SDF boys had snatched Scout Leesom, why they wanted Farrel back, and he knew, whatever he was called, exactly when the man would die for the last time—finished, smoked, ain’t no never coming back.