Crazy Hearts Read online

  Chapter Three

  5th of July, Denver, Colorado

  * * *

  Lieutenant Loretta Bradley of the Denver Police Department had never seen a ghost...until today in room 320 at Denver General Hospital. The ghost, an apparently “almost famous” rock musician who had the younger nurses all aflutter, had been found in an alley north of downtown with a Porsche key and two thousand dollars in his pocket, a black leather backpack slung over his shoulder, a gunshot wound on his leg, and eerily, given his face, a knife wound across his upper left arm. She knew three special ops bad boys with knife scars on their upper left arms, and nothing about this guitar hero said he belonged in their company – except that face.

  Standing by the hospital bed, looking down at the young man sleeping off a dose of painkiller, Loretta let out a long, slow breath. Nothing was ever easy – but this took the cake, the whole damn, triple layer, double Dutch chocolate cake.

  Even looking straight at the boy, she found it hard to believe what she was seeing.

  “Did they find the Porsche?” she asked the uniformed cop standing next to her.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Officer Weisman said. “Over on 60th, about half a mile from where the warehouse security guard found him in an alley.”

  “Impound?”

  “They’re picking it up now.”

  Loretta flipped the young man’s wallet open again and stared at the Illinois driver’s license – Liam Dylan Magnuson. She didn’t know the name, or his stage name, Liam Magnus, almost famous or not, but she knew the face – oh, hell yeah, she knew the face - the same way she knew the address and name scrawled on the back of a business card tucked inside the wallet – Uptown Autos, 738 Steele Street, Denver, Colorado.

  “Did you contact the Chicago police?”

  “Yes, ma’am. They’re checking the address on the registration and will get back to us as soon as they have something.”

  Loretta nodded and handed the young man’s wallet back to the officer before taking out her phone. She knew the guy who could clear up the mystery, maybe the only guy who could clear it up, but after a couple of rings, all she got was Dylan Hart’s voicemail.

  “Good morning, Dylan, Lieutenant Loretta here. I’m at Denver General with a man named Liam Dylan Magnuson, and I’d like you to come down here to confirm his identity. We’re in room 320.”

  Her next call went to Christian “Superman” Hawkins, Dylan’s second in command at Special Defense Force, SDF.

  “Yo, Lieutenant.”

  “Christian, I’m at Denver General staring at a problem named Liam Dylan Magnuson. You ever hear of him?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Loretta wasn’t surprised. She and Dylan’s crew were tight, and if she’d never heard of the guy, she figured it was a long shot that any of the SDF operators had ever heard of him either – except for Dylan Hart. She’d be surprised as hell if Dylan didn’t know him.

  But whether they knew him or not, every last operator on the SDF team would recognize the boy lying in the hospital bed, despite his long hair, pierced ear, and colorful tattoos.

  “He also goes by the name Liam Magnus as frontman and lead vocalist for a band called Never Celeste. Any of that sound familiar?”

  “No,” Christian said. “Not the stage name or the band. What’s up?”

  “That’s what I was hoping you could tell me. Can you get down here and take a look at him for me? He’s...uh, he’s – well, hell, just get down here pronto. We’re in room 320.”

  “Absolutamente, Jefe. Be there in ten.”

  “Do us both a favor and stick to the speed limit, Superman. I’ll see you in fifteen.” She hung up and slipped the phone back in her pocket.

  An older nurse came in to check on the patient, and Loretta and Officer Weismann stepped aside – but they didn’t leave. Someone had manhandled the boy, and with that face, until Loretta had a few answers, she and Weismann were staying put. Two younger nurses came in to dawdle and gawk, one of them with an honest-to-God autograph book in her hand, which wasn’t going to do the girl much good with the “almost famous rock star” still out cold – not that the young nurse seemed to mind.

  Watching her, Loretta wondered if she’d ever, at any age, had such a sappily smitten expression on her face.

  Maybe once, she silently admitted with a grin, thinking of the hard-assed SOB who’d stolen her heart - General Buck Grant, the man who’d created the SDF team out of a group of misfits, wild cards, and Marines.

  Weisman’s phone buzzed, and while he talked, Loretta let the nurses fuss and coo. But as soon as Weisman hung up, she caught the older nurse’s eye with a look that had the room cleared in seconds.

  “Chicago,” Weisman said when they were alone again. “The address is good, a pricey lakefront condo with a view and not a family member in sight. The condo is for sale, and no one has filed a missing person report.”

  “What about the other band members, or a manager or something?”

  “Chicago PD is trying to track them down. They’ll let us know when they’ve got someone.”

  Well, hell, she thought, looking back at the boy. After a moment, she tilted her head to one side.

  “Is that a Jimi Hendrix tattoo on his arm?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Weisman answered. “Looks like Hendrix got the worst of it last night.”

  Sure enough, Loretta thought. A neat row of stitches holding the knife wound closed went directly across Jimi’s face, a straight line of them beneath his eyes, giving Jimi kind of a “masked man” look. Liam Magnuson had a skull-and-crossbones tattooed over his heart, a three-inch scar, long healed, along his jaw, and a string of Latin words – Dum vivimus, vivamus – tattooed across his lean, six-pack abs. According to another of the young nurses who’d wandered into the room earlier, the guy also sported a really super cool bird tattoo on his back, like a crow in flight or something.

  Loretta didn’t doubt the super coolness of anything about this boy. Liam Dylan Magnuson exuded cool from his ninety-thousand-dollar ride and his designer leather jacket to his two hundred dollar haircut and the gold hoop in his ear. But if he thought he was a badass pirate with a Porsche, he didn’t know what real badass pirates looked like.

  He was about to find out.

  She heard the door open behind her, and with a single glance at the man entering the room, knew the boy’s life was about to change forever.

  Chapter Four

  Christian Hawkins stood by the hospital bed and tried to come up with an explanation for what he was seeing. He glanced at Loretta and opened his mouth to say something, then didn’t.

  Geezus. His gaze strayed back to the young man in the bed.

  Loretta had been vague on the phone, and one look at the boy told him why.

  It was déjà vu and what in the hell all rolled into one. The long hair, earring, and tattoos didn’t fit, but the face was a snapshot straight out of his past – Dylan Hart, SDF’s commanding officer, in his early twenties.

  He looked at Loretta again, but still didn’t know what to say.

  She shrugged in understanding. Lieutenant Loretta was a no-nonsense cop, nearly six feet of big-boned, “take names and kick butt” female with a tight bun of graying red hair coiled on top of her head, and a pair of golden brown eyes that in the right light made her darn near beautiful. Hawkins didn’t have to work very hard to understand why General Grant had fallen for her.

  “There are only two possible explanations,” she said.

  Yeah. Two.

  “Either Dylan was damn busy twenty-some years ago,” she continued. “Or he left a little brother behind when he reinvented himself and landed in the middle of my precinct jacking cars.”

  Yeah. Either one of those would explain the young man lying in the bed, Dylan’s son, or Dylan’s younger brother - but nothing explained why Hawkins had never heard of the guy, whoever he was. Not a word. Not in twenty-three years of watching Dylan’s back like it was his own. They were closer than brothers,
and now here was this kid with Dylan’s face and a skull-and-crossbones tattooed on his chest.

  Then it hit him – twenty-three years.

  “How old is Liam?” he asked.

  “According to his driver’s license, he’s twenty-two. He’ll be twenty-three in October.”

  Hawkins did a quick calculation and realized the kid hadn’t yet been born the summer Dylan had shown up in Denver. Could be Dylan didn’t know any more about the young man in the bed than he did. And at this point, probably knew less.

  “You said he’d been shot.”

  “His left thigh.”

  Hawkins lifted the sheet. “Skinned at damn close range,” he said, dropping the sheet and glancing up at the knife wound again before meeting Loretta’s gaze. “Whoever roughed him up was careful not to do any real damage.”

  “Not careful enough,” Loretta said. “We’re talking felony assault.”

  Someone opened the door behind Hawkins, and he turned to see an elegant blonde with a French twist, tight jeans, red heels, and a white T-shirt standing in the doorway with a dark-haired two-year-old boy on her hip. Looking at her, no one would figure her for a world-class operator and first-class sniper, but Hawkins had trained the girl himself, and Skeeter Bang Hart rocked a .308.

  “Holee freaking molee,” she said, her gaze locking onto the young man in the bed. “Dylan is going to...”

  “Dylan is going to what?” The man in question came up behind Skeeter, and Hawkins figured Liam Magnuson’s dance card was complete, and from the look on Dylan’s face, not in a good way.

  Dylan’s stone-cold gaze zeroed in on the bed with unerring accuracy, and after a long, slow look, he turned to his wife. Their gazes met, and in that instant, Hawkins knew Dylan and Skeeter both knew a whole helluva lot more about Liam Dylan Magnuson than he or Loretta did.

  Chapter Five

  On the northern outskirts of Denver, Tommy Dunstan stood in the shadows of a fast food joint, eating a hamburger and watching a Rix Towing truck roll up next to Liam’s Porsche with a flatbed trailer.

  Typical.

  Wherever the hell Liam had gotten himself off to, Tommy would have bet his left nut the kid would have been back for his car by now – but the damn car was leaving, and the jerk kid was still nowhere in sight.

  So, where the hell was he?

  Tommy had checked inside the drugstore across the street and the other two fast food joints behind him and come up empty handed. All he had was the car in the burger joint parking lot.

  But Big Daddy didn’t want the car. Big Daddy wanted the five million dollars his business partner, Momma Margot’s first husband, had stolen from him twenty-three years ago. That guy, Liam Dylan Magnuson II, had run off to Geneva, Switzerland with the money, and then up and died with no one but his oldest son there to witness what had happened to the five million.

  And that kid, damn Liam Dylan Magnuson number three, had been no fool, even at fifteen years old.

  Well, Big Daddy Jack was no fool either. He knew what had happened. With the old Liam dead, Daddy Jack’s five million dollars had been stolen by that fancy-shmancy, know-it-all son-of-a-bitch kid who’d disappeared. That’s what Big Daddy had always said, that the kid had taken the money and run like a goddamn thief, abandoning his poor Momma Margot and leaving his poor dead daddy lying alone on a cold slab in a Geneva morgue.

  Big Daddy said the kid had always been too damn slick for his own good, and too damn slick for anybody else’s. No matter how many times Big Daddy had searched for Momma Margot’s first son, no matter how many people Big Daddy had sicced on that damn kid, and no matter how much money he’d thrown at the problem, he’d come up empty handed every damn time, no kid, no money – until four days ago when a letter had arrived from a couple of big city, New York lawyers talking about an inheritance for Liam Dylan Magnuson.

  Well, hell, to this day, the only Liam Dylan Magnuson anyone could find on the face of the earth was the pansy-assed guitar player. And if the inheritance those lawyers were talking about was the same damn money that had been stolen from Big Daddy, and that money had been sitting in New York all these years, well, hell, the pansy-ass probably thought if he could get there first, he could get away with the millions and keep them for himself – which, Tommy admitted, in no way explained why the pansy-ass had headed west out of Chicago instead of east to New York.

  Screw it. Everything to do with that damn money had always been in a twist. Tommy took another bite of his sandwich. Damn New York City lawyers. Liam’s inheritance, my ass.

  That was his own damned inheritance – after Big Daddy passed, of course - and he was closer to getting it than he’d ever been.

  Across the street, a police car cruised into the drugstore lot where Tommy had parked his Corvette, and he instinctively stepped back, deeper into the shadows of the burger restaurant. The cop slowed to a crawl when he drove by the Crystal Red Stingray C7, and Tommy secretly flipped him off, the prick.

  “Look all you want, asshole.” No dumb cop was ever going to own anything as hot as Tommy’s red Corvette or for that matter, Liam’s 718 Cayman GTS. It was the only thing he and the jerk kid had in common, a love of hot cars.

  They could have been friends, or at least halfway decent stepbrothers. But little ole Liam, hell, he’d been a momma’s boy from the get-go, spending all his time inside playing the piano or a guitar, and caterwauling. God, how that kid could caterwauler. It had been pathetic, especially when all that time, he could have been out in the north Georgia woods where Tommy and his friends had kicked up trouble every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

  Sometimes they’d kicked up more trouble than was good for them – but that was all behind Tommy now. Daddy Jack had made sure of it. Tommy had a clean slate, or at least clean enough to have kept him out of prison.

  But ole Liam – his slate was a fine mess. He’d done worse than the law-breaking Tommy had done. He’d broken Daddy Jack’s rules and Daddy Jack’s trust, trying to steal his money. Rock and roll star, Tommy’s ass. Metallica, those guys were rock and roll stars, not Liam Jerk-off Magnuson.

  “Come on, come on,” he muttered, watching the cop. “Move on out of there.” He didn’t like cops, and he really didn’t like them hanging around his car, and he could A-1 guarantee they didn’t like him. Back in his younger days, he’d had the rap sheet to prove it.

  Tommy’s phone vibrated just as another cop cruiser turned into the burger joint’s lot.

  He checked the caller’s name and grimaced. Next to all these cops, this was the last thing he needed, but he didn’t dare not answer.

  Swearing to himself, he slid his thumb over the phone’s screen and took the call.

  “Hey, Daddy.”

  “Where in the hell are you, boy? Have you found Liam yet?”

  Hell, he’d spent half his life answering that one damn question.

  “I’m in Colorado, in Denver. Don’t have the kid yet, but I’m staring straight at his car.” Nothing good ever came from trying to sugarcoat anything for Big Daddy, but that didn’t keep Tommy from trying.

  “And he’s not in it?”

  “Uh...no, sir.”

  Nothing but silence met his admission, and in frustration, Tommy balled up the rest of his sandwich and tossed it in the trash. Dammit. This was where things always went bad between him and Big Daddy.

  “So how long have you been staring at his car, boy?”

  Goddammit.

  “’Bout an hour.”

  “Put Nate on the phone.”

  “Can’t. Nate ain’t here.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, I’ve been chasing that sorry-assed kid all night, and Nate and the boys just got a little behind in the Escalade. They’ll be here real soon, and we’ll nab ole Liam and get his butt back home. Ok?” Easy peasy. Couldn’t be simpler.

  Except now both cops had pulled up to the flatbed trailer and were walking over to the tow truck driver. Then things really went south.

&nb
sp; One of the cops pulled a key out of his pocket.

  A damn Porsche key.

  And wasn’t that just so awful interesting. If the cops had Liam’s Porsche key, then chances were the cops had Liam. Now what in the hell kind of trouble could the kid have gotten himself into out here in the Denver boondocks? He’d hardly been able to stand up after Nate had hit him a couple of times. Not to mention the blood coming off that little knife stripe Tommy had given him, and then there’d been the gunshot scrape on his leg. That sure as hell had gotten the kid’s attention.

  Tommy grinned.

  “Dammit, boy, you listening to me?” Big Daddy’s voice broke into Tommy’s reverie. “Or are you thinking? You know thinking isn’t good for you, boy. You listening to me?””

  No. Tommy wasn’t listening. The cop opened the car door and stuck his head inside the Porsche, then jerked it out real fast. He turned aside and coughed a few times, like something smelled real bad in the car, like maybe something or someone had died in there.

  Tommy’s blood ran cold.

  Bobby Lee had only shot the kid across the leg, barely scraped him with the bullet. Nobody died of a scrape, not even a pansy-assed singer in a rock and roll band.

  “No, Daddy, I...uh, got to...hell, I’m busy here.” He hung up and punched in Nate’s number, letting Big Daddy’s immediate callback go to voice mail. So help him God, if that dumb kid had gone and died on him, Tommy was going to kill him.

  “What?” Nate answered.

  “We got us a situation here, a bad situation. You got to...you - ” He narrowed his gaze, trying to see inside the Porsche parked on the other side of the lot. Liam had a two-tone leather interior, and the light gray part of the driver’s seat was all smeared with something kind of reddish black, quite a bit of it. The seat was a mess.