Loose Ends Page 19

  “That’s—”

  “Uh, Skeet,” Gillian interrupted her. “Whatever you’re thinking, stop. I noticed the boss is a little tense right now, and I actually think we can all do our jobs just a bit better if you’re safe at Steele Street, and he’s not breathing fire down the back of our necks.”

  What a crock.

  “I was kicking ass—”

  “When I was still shuffling papers,” Gillian interrupted her again. “And since then we’ve taken a lot of names together, but—”

  “We had this conversation two months ago, Red.” Skeeter had been the one who’d given Gillian the code name Red Dog, and over the last few years, the two of them had kicked butt from Kandahar to Caracas. They had a reputation, the highest, among a small, intensely skilled group of people, the people who did the same job they did, top-rung, elite military forces. They were the SDF girls, the Ghost and the Darkness, Hell and Fury, Skeet and the Dog.

  “And this time we’re both being overruled. The leader of this pack says you go home, and this is not the time for any of us to step outside the lines. We’ve got a lot at stake.”

  Coming from Red Dog, that was quite a statement. That girl had been reborn outside the lines.

  “Copy that,” she said, sucking it up. She knew Gillian and Travis wouldn’t miss anything in the room, and if the girl, Scout, and the guy who had rescued her showed back up at the Star Motel, she knew Gillian and Travis would bring them in.

  J.T. was another ball game altogether. Even after having witnessed most of it firsthand, she was still set back on her heels by how quickly he’d eluded them at Steele Street. They’d had everybody on him.

  “Skeet, I don’t see you moving.” Gillian’s voice came through the Bazo.

  Geez.

  “Moving. Roger and out.” She turned the key in the ignition and pulled out onto Meldrum Street.

  “Whoa … oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. Don’t turn into the motel,” Scout said, ducking down in the seat next to Jack in the Buick Regal. “Just keep moving. Keep driving and take the next left. We need to circle around again, but don’t come back by the motel.”

  Jack didn’t question her orders. She’d obviously seen something.

  But he looked, and yowza. Whoa, whoa, whoa was right, a gorgeous, bodaciously built blonde in a slinky dress and combat boots was getting out of a car on Meldrum, a couple of blocks up the street from the motel. Geezus. He’d died and gone to heaven.

  “The blonde?”

  “How in the hell?” she answered, which was no answer at all. She peeked up and looked over the seat through the back windshield. “You didn’t happen to drop a motel receipt when you came through that door on the tenth floor, did you?”

  “You’re kidding me,” he said, not quite believing it. “She’s from Steele Street?” Scout knew he wouldn’t have left so much as a fingerprint in that building, let alone a forwarding address.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “Her name is Skeeter Bang-Hart, a real serious piece of work, and she’s heading up the street. They must have somebody else up there, backing her up.”

  Jack didn’t have to work too hard to detect the awe and admiration in Scout’s voice, and he was surprised. They didn’t run into too many women who had what it took to impress Scout.

  He made the next two left-hand turns, went up the hill for another two blocks, and started to slow down.

  “Keep going,” Scout said. “I see another car that looks like trouble. We need to come in behind it.”

  He glanced down the cross street and saw it, too, the tail end of something that looked vintage, well cared for, and muscled under the hood—a gold GTO, undoubtedly Steele Street iron. He kept cruising and took the next cross street over to Meldrum, where he pulled to a stop, far enough away to be discreet but where they could see the gold Goat off on a side street, the blonde walking toward it, and, at the bottom of the hill, the rattrap Star Motel.

  This was all just getting too damned interesting for him. How in the hell had they found the Star? He had only one answer, and it didn’t compute.

  “They got Con.” Sonuvabitch. Now what?

  “No way.”

  “You got a better explanation?”

  “Even if they’d gotten him, he wouldn’t have given us up. You know that.”

  And he did.

  Torture wouldn’t have worked on Con, and the only two people he cared about were sitting in this Buick Regal on Meldrum. SDF couldn’t have leveraged the information out of him.

  “Something sure as hell happened, because they are sure as hell all sitting there waiting for us to show up.”

  “Ah, hell,” she whispered.

  Yeah, he saw it, too, the woman from the tenth floor, the redhead, got out from the GTO’s passenger side, and a blond man got out from behind the steering wheel.

  They’d just tripled their trouble.

  Make that doubled.

  After a few moments of conversation, Skeeter Bang-Hart slid into the Goat’s driver’s seat and drove off.

  Funny how that didn’t make Jack feel any better.

  “Her name is Red Dog,” Scout said. “And that’s Travis with her. She calls him the Angel Boy. They’re married.”

  How wonderful for them. Married. Hell. The only girl he was interested in marrying was hooking up with a college professor.

  “And they’re headed down to the motel,” he said, watching the two operators pass the gray car the blonde had left on Meldrum and keep walking down the hill.

  “Did you guys travel clean?” Scout asked.

  “We always travel clean.” Red Dog and the Angel Boy wouldn’t find anything in the room that could identify him or Con, but they’d find a few items of interest to folks with an operational turn of mind.

  “I could call her,” Scout said.

  Ohh-kay.

  He slanted her a curious, disbelieving glance. “And ask her to please not break into our motel room?”

  “She gave me a phone,” Scout said, pulling said item out of a pocket in her pants. “It only calls one number. Hers.”

  “So you can turn Con in whenever it seems convenient.” It wasn’t a question.

  “She says she can help him.”

  “Help him what?” He couldn’t believe they were still having this conversation.

  “Survive.”

  Well, that sent a chill down his spine, striking a little too close to home.

  “Survive Lancaster’s goons?” More than likely, Lancaster had brought someone besides his B team to Denver. Karola and Walls were both flawed examples of Souk’s twisted art. Lancaster had plenty of the good stuff to choose from and a couple of soldiers he seldom traveled without, in particular two men named King and Rock.

  Jack wouldn’t have minded meeting them in a dark alley, but he didn’t want Scout anywhere around when he did.

  “No.” She shook her head, looking at the phone in her hand. “She says she can help him survive until next year, maybe the year after that. Maybe longer. It all depends.”

  “On what?” He was surprised he could even choke the words out. This was the subject he did not want to discuss with her, the one where she realized Con was dying.

  Hell, he didn’t want to have this conversation with himself.

  “On what Souk gave him, and—”

  “Everything,” he said, his voice cold. “The bastard gave him everything.” And your father, too—but he couldn’t tell her that.

  Suddenly he needed a little air. He rolled the window down and watched Travis, the Angel Boy, who didn’t look anything like a “boy” at all, cross the street into the motel parking lot, guessing that nobody went around calling somebody the Badass Angel MoFo from Hell, because that’s what the guy looked like, more than tough enough, and his girl did, too. She circled the motel, going around back.

  Yes, that’s the way he would have done it, just in case someone inside the room decided to make a run for it. Put the big guy on the door, because that’s where the shit real
ly hit the fan, and put the girl who looked like she could kick everybody’s ass on the back. Actually, she looked like she could handle the door.

  Any door.

  As a matter of fact, watching her move reminded him of something—or someone.

  “Is there something I need to know about her?” he asked Scout.

  “Her real name is Gillian Pentycote.”

  “You know what I mean.” God, the woman moved so smoothly, with so much power and grace. She was lithe, and strong, and—

  “Souk injected her with XT7 four and a half years ago, and needless to say, she hasn’t been the same since.”

  Oh, hell, no.

  “I thought Shoko was the only woman he ever juiced.” And she’d turned out so demented as to be almost worthless. Her only value had been as a psycho-bitch pet for Erich Warner, one of the few men in the world who could have afforded to feed her. The woman had come out of Souk’s lab with some very twisted appetites.

  “She’s not like Shoko,” Scout said. “Not at all. She lost her memory completely, just like Con, but she’s gotten a lot of it back, working with a Dr. Brandt at Walter Reed.”

  “Walter Reed Medical Center?” He couldn’t believe this conversation. “Forget it. The place is part of the system,” he said, dismissing the whole thing out of hand.

  Con had been part of the system when he’d been sold. Randolph Lancaster had his hands in everything in Washington, D.C., from the State Department, to the CIA, to the Pentagon, and probably to Walter Reed. He was a power broker at the very highest levels of government, and most of the people whose strings he pulled never even felt the tug. He was that much a part of the status quo.

  “I think we need to consider our options,” she said, still with the phone in her hand.

  Not that option.

  “I know they didn’t buy you, Scout.” The girl couldn’t be bought. “So what did they do to make you think that giving him up was in any way the best thing for him? I’m just damned curious.” And he just didn’t damn believe it.

  “Convinced me,” she said. “That they could help him. Red Dog is proof. You know the kind of headaches Con gets. She doesn’t get those anymore. And the pain and the shakes? Hers are almost completely under control. You’ve seen Con. You know what he goes through sometimes, why he takes all those pills. I’ve just been guessing at it these last few months, but you’ve probably known. Known he’s dying.” She stopped to take a breath. “And you didn’t tell me.”

  Her words fell on him like a five-hundred-pound weight.

  Guilty.

  He rolled the window on the Buick down a little farther, tried to get a little more air into the car.

  Down at the motel, Red Dog had disappeared around the corner of the building, and the Angel from Hell had his ear to the door, listening. All he’d hear was the television they’d left on.

  After a second or two, the guy moved back from the door, standing off to the side, up against the brick wall for the same reason Con and Jack had chosen the dump in the first place. It was old and built solid. The whole damn building was brick, in desperate need of a major remodel on the inside but built to last on the outside.

  Travis knocked and said something, and Jack could just imagine what—something like “This is the manager. We’ve got a fire in the lobby, and the fire department wants us to evacuate,” or “So sorry. This is the manager, and somebody just broke a window out on your car.”

  Jack might have fallen for either one of those, especially the car window, especially in this neighborhood.

  But Travis didn’t get any action off the ruse, because Con was hell and gone somewhere in this damn city, and Jack was sitting up here on this hill, doing his best to breathe in some fresh air and avoid the subject at hand. Con dying was more than he could bear, truly, let alone share with someone, even Scout—especially Scout.

  Red Dog came back around the building then, no doubt signaling Travis that there was no way out the back of Room 107. In many old motels, the bathroom had a window that opened out the back, but not at the Star.

  With the two of them together, the entering of the room went very smoothly. Red Dog lined up with Travis, and one of them must have electronically scrambled the lock. Jack couldn’t see which one, but Travis opened the door and entered first, his gun drawn and ready to go, go, go.

  It was a short trip inside. Jack and Con were a pretty tidy crew, and all the really good stuff, like the laptop and the laser microphone, was in Jack’s backpack in the back of the Regal.

  In less than five minutes, the two had looked their fill and come out of the room empty-handed, heading back up the hill to their stakeout car, no doubt leaving the place exactly as they’d found it. No reason to tip their hand at this stage of the game.

  “What are we going to do here, Jack?” Scout asked him, watching the whole scene down at the motel as intently as he was watching it.

  The woman, Red Dog, was amazing, so sleek. She moved like a cat, one of the big ones, with a supple, easy grace, radiating strength and power with every step. She and Travis got back in their car and settled in to wait.

  “They don’t have him, Scout,” he told her. “If they did, they wouldn’t be wasting their time here. You were bait, a way to get to Con, nothing more, and I’m even less. I’m just the pain in the ass who stole their bait. It’s Con they want, not us.”

  “So what are we going to do?” she repeated her question. “I’ve got the phone.”

  Fuck the phone, he thought.

  And it rang.

  Except it wasn’t hers. It was his.

  Geezus. He whipped his phone out of his pocket.

  “Go,” he said.

  “Location?”

  It was Con. It couldn’t possibly have been anyone else, but Jack was still damn relieved to hear his voice.

  “Three blocks south of the motel, up on the hill. We’ve got a surveillance team, two people, a block north of us. They’re confirmed SDF operators.”

  There was a brief silence.

  “Do you know how they found the place?”

  “No, but they broke into the room, stayed a couple of minutes, and came back out.”

  He heard Con swear under his breath.

  “Did they take anything?”

  “Not that we could see. They came out empty-handed, and neither one of them is wearing a jacket.”

  There was another brief silence, and Jack thought he could hear sirens in the background.

  “Where are you?”

  “On the west side of town.”

  Jack could tell Con was moving.

  “We had a visual sighting of Lancaster on our way out of Steele Street.” Jack gave him the news. “No possibility of a mistake, and we ran into Rick Karola and Sam Walls immediately thereafter. We tailed Karola to a downtown hotel called the Kashmir Club.”

  “Kashmir Club? So it’s a hotel. Rock Howe confirmed it as Lancaster’s location, so we’re in. King Banner is here, too, but he and Rock are both out of the equation, which means Lancaster is way down on his team.”

  Damn. It had been a busy night all over.

  “We should regroup.” That was putting it mildly.

  “We need something close to the Kashmir Club—”

  Oh, Jack could see where this was going.

  “—but not too close.”

  They were going in, dropping on Lancaster tonight.

  He was all for it.

  “There’s a hotel, the Armstrong,” he said. “At Champa and 14th.”

  “Roger. Turn on the news and lay low until I get there. King and Rock are bound to be the breaking story. I’m temporarily on foot, heading away from the circus over here. King and Rock caught us in a restaurant, very public, very messy. Some shots were fired, but they’re both alive. Listen to the reports in case somebody comes up with something we can use.”

  “Copy.” Con had stopped to eat? “Who’s us?”

  “Unplanned hostage,” Con’s voice came over the phone.
“She slowed me down.”

  Jack just bet she had, especially if they’d stopped to grab a bite to eat. Geezus. He was starting to get a little confused.

  “Are you on your own now?” A legitimate question, if he’d ever heard one.

  “Affirmative. I’ll meet you at the Armstrong. Out.”

  “Roger and out.”

  He turned to Scout, and she looked as relieved as he felt.

  “We’re not turning anybody in to SDF,” he said. “We’ll tell Con everything you’ve seen and heard, and I’ll confirm about Kid, and then we’ll do exactly what he tells us to do.”

  “That’ll be a first.” She gave him a pointed look.

  Which he ignored. So he’d been running a little wild these last few months. He’d settled down since she’d been gone, for a whole eight weeks now, and he had something else to say, something kind of new for him, but it was pressing him hard, and he needed to get it off his chest.

  “I’m sorry, Scout. I’m sorry I wasn’t in Paraguay when these pendejos dropped in on you and Con.” If he’d been with them when Erich Warner and SDF had all piled in on top of the river house, chances were she wouldn’t have been captured, and he’d thought long and hard about that. “I’m going to be sticking a lot closer to home for a while—for a long while.” He’d thought damn hard and long about that, too. Whatever happened with Con, he really did need to be with her when it all came down. He couldn’t run from the fallout, no matter how many college professors she was seeing.

  “I’d like that,” she said.

  Okay, then—he slanted her a quick look, surprised as hell. She’d like him hanging around. For the last couple of years, she’d usually been so angry with him that he’d gotten in the habit of staying as far away from her and Con as possible.

  But this was great.

  Perfect.

  And too damn late. She’d gone off and found somebody, but he’d take it as long as he could, hanging around while she and old Karl billed and cooed, and if things went bad with Con, he’d take it no matter what. The whole Denver thing was just too god-awful, and he’d sworn nothing bad would ever happen to her again, not on his watch.