Loose Ends Read online

  “Don’t waste my time,” he warned the guy.

  “There … there might be someone, an operator besides Farrel who’s … enhanced, or whatever all these guys are. We were in Bangkok, and—”

  “We?”

  “Lancaster and I, two weeks ago,” Crutchfield said. “He had an appointment somewhere in the city. I didn’t go with him. I don’t know where it was, or why he went there, but he came back to the hotel very disturbed, distraught. He … I don’t know, he …” His voice trailed off.

  “Continue,” Dylan ordered.

  The lawyer squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. “Randolph looked really shook up, panicked, and he had a few drinks. Maybe more than a few, and he started talking, mumbling, about some Navy SEAL who’d become an abomination. That’s what he called it, an abomination, a twisted mistake, a creature that had been crying out for him, calling his name over and over—and he blamed himself, said some crazy things about experiments going wrong in a lab somewhere. He’s been spooked ever since, like I’ve never seen him.”

  Not good, Dylan thought. Not good at all. Navy SEALs were pirates to begin with, the real wild cards in the elite warrior deck, and with Souk dead, he could only imagine who might be out there trying to continue the demented doctor’s work.

  “Tell me everything you know about the SEAL.”

  “That’s it,” Crutchfield said. “That’s everything. I don’t know what kind of lab makes guys like Farrel and Banner, but this one scared him. It scared him badly.”

  “You know more.” People always did. “Think back to the hotel that night and tell me what else he said.”

  Crutchfield just stared at him, his face blank, and then his expression suddenly changed.

  “Monk,” he said. “That’s what he called the SEAL, Monk.”

  Perfect.

  Dylan keyed the mike on his radio and contacted Skeeter.

  “We’re looking for a guy named Monk,” he said. “He was a Navy SEAL. It’ll be a recent entry in the LeedTech files.”

  Quinn dropped the rope and walked over to retrieve Crutchfield’s phone from the pile of stuff they’d taken off the guy. Dylan watched him scroll down the contact list and press the send key. Randolph Lancaster was about to get a call.

  Coming up behind Crutchfield, Quinn held the phone to the lawyer’s ear and a gun to the back of his head. From the sudden look of blank, unadulterated terror on the man’s face, Dylan figured he could count on Mr. Crutchfield’s full cooperation.

  Walking back over to the pool edge, he pulled a piece of paper with a carefully scripted statement typed on it out of his pocket. He waited until he heard Lancaster answer, then held the paper in front of Tyler’s face at eye level—and the guy did great, just great.

  “It’s me,” Crutchfield said, reading the lines. “I’ve got her. I’m bringing her up. Let me in.”

  As soon as Crutchfield was finished reading, Quinn cut off the call, and Dylan hit a number on his own phone. When the Boy Wonder answered, he said only one word. “Go.”

  The party had started.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  “Are you sure this is okay?” Jane asked.

  “Yes.”

  Well, he was wrong, she thought, shifting uneasily on her feet. No way in the world was it okay to be breaking into this bungalow tucked into the last lot on a dead-end street, especially when he was taking way too damn long to do it. Baby-blue clapboard and green trim made the house the most colorful home on the block. The multilayer gardens surrounding the place turned it into a gem hidden in a jungle of trees, budding bushes, and flowers coming into bloom. The place smelled wonderful, and she could hear a fountain bubbling and splashing from somewhere around back.

  It was an unexpected and oddly disconcerting oasis in a night of violence and fear. They’d been on the run for hours and had suddenly washed up in a quiet, pastoral corner of the suburbs.

  She looked back to the east, and the neighborhood instantly went to hell. A police cruiser was rolling into view. It stopped at an intersection two blocks away, its lights flashing, its siren silent, then slowly turned in their direction and began easing its way up the block.

  Oh, cripes.

  “Here,” she said, stepping closer to him and taking the lockpicks out of his hands. “Let me do this.”

  He didn’t resist, and she wasn’t surprised. He’d started trembling right about the time she’d stopped, about halfway up the street. He could hardly hold the picks, and his skin was hot—too hot to be anything but bad.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, sliding the second pick into the lock alongside the first one. “You’re shaking all over.”

  “Fever,” he said, taking a match out of a small container affixed to the house and dragging it across the striker. The match flared to life.

  “Are you sick?”

  He shook his head no and touched the flame to an incense brazier set on a small iron table next to the door.

  “What are you doing?” She was feeling for the pins in the lock but was watching him.

  “Something I’ve done before.” The coals ignited, and he sniffed the air. “Copal, sweetgrass, and sage, to purify and protect. This house has a lot of ritual associated with it.”

  The brazier started to smoke in earnest, infusing the air with an aromatic scent, earthy and feminine. In a couple of more seconds, she had the door open, and they were slipping inside with the police cruiser still a full block away. Not until after he’d closed the door behind them did it occur to her that they might not be alone. The house was dark, with only one small light turned on in the back, in the kitchen, a “welcome home” light.

  “So you know the person who lives here.” That was a comfort.

  “I’m not sure.”

  O-kay, she thought, so maybe not so much of a comfort. From the entryway, the house looked as well kept and brightly decorated as the outside. Colorful rugs covered a wood floor. The couch and chairs were all upholstered in cream-colored canvas with an abundance of striped serapes and a dozen or so pillows piled on them. The coffee table had a blue slate top, and a fire had been laid in the fireplace, ready to go. She didn’t sense another person in the house.

  What she did sense was the sanctity of the place. It threatened to be her undoing, the quiet warmth and security of this small home on the west side. She’d been running on ragged energy shot through with bolts of terror all night. It was what had kept her going. If they really were safe, if she didn’t need a boatload of adrenaline jacking her up to stay alive, then she needed to stop where she stood, before exhaustion dropped her like a stone.

  “Maybe … m-maybe we should sit down.” It seemed a reasonable idea. Her knees were weakening, whether it was time to give in to exhaustion or not.

  “Go ahead,” he said, lifting the curtains at the living room window and peering out.

  She headed toward the chair nearest the fireplace but stopped short when cop car lights flashed through the curtains.

  “Tell me they’re not stopping,” she said, hoping against hope.

  “Can’t,” he said. “They pulled up in front. Come on.” Turning away from the window, he took her by the hand and pulled her along with him, across the living room and deeper into the house.

  “Can we even get out the back without them seeing us?” Damn—she stumbled trying to keep up.

  Without missing a beat, he turned partway around and swung her up into his embrace. She landed in his arms with a small oomph. Cripes, he was strong.

  “We’re not going out the back,” he said. “We’re done running.”

  In theory, maybe, she thought, plastered up against his rock-hard chest, clinging to him, but her reality check was still saying “run like hell.”

  In three more steps they were through an archway and in a wide hallway with doors opening off into bedrooms and a bath, with another arch leading into the kitchen. It was the center of the house, a small space with a bookcase against one wall and a bench against another.
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  A couple of car doors slammed shut outside, and what little was left of her adrenal gland crackled and snapped back to life—and there she was again, in fight-or-flight mode, and if it wasn’t going to be the back door, it was going to be fight. But, man, if this was showdown time, they needed Superman and Dylan. They needed Creed and Skeeter, with a side order of Travis and Kid. There was no one else she trusted.

  Except for him, she realized. From the minute he’d first grabbed her and put her in Corinna, he’d done nothing but try to get her out of this rolling disaster.

  “We—” she started, but he caught her gaze and touched his finger to his lips.

  “Shhh …” he said so softly she could barely hear him. Shhh … of course, shhh, but—

  “We can’t blast our way through a bunch of cops,” she whispered. Honest to God, they couldn’t, and the hall wasn’t exactly the hiding place of the century.

  “They won’t come inside.” He carried her to the farthest corner and sat down with his back against the wall, effortlessly lowering himself to the floor as if she weighed nothing in his arms. God, he was strong, superhuman strong, but he was wrong about the cops.

  Nobody knew cops like a street rat, and in her experience, if the cops wanted in, they came in—done deal, no questions or permission asked. Hell, she’d been chased by cops into some of the sketchiest hidey-holes in the city. They were like weasels, unstoppable by any barrier known to man when they wanted something. She’d been dragged out of places by her feet and dragged out by her hair. It had always been damned discouraging, not to mention painful.

  But the cops were only one of their problems.

  Sitting in the shadows, cradled in his lap, she got the full up-close-and-personal lowdown on his physical condition, and it was not good. He was burning up, and his muscles were twitching under his skin, like something really bad could happen any second. Considering the way the whole damn night had gone down, there wasn’t a doubt in her mind that it would—something bad, any frickin’ second.

  A flashlight beam angled into the hallway from one of the bedroom windows, and she leaned in closer to him.

  “I have aspirin in my purse,” she whispered in his ear. “A whole bottle, if you need it. Or do you have another pill you can take?” Or more like half a dozen or so.

  He shook his head no, and a wave of frustration washed through her. What in the world was she going to do if he collapsed? She’d be damned if she’d let the cops have him, and she sure as hell wasn’t going back out into the dark without him. She didn’t want to get caught, either, not and spend the rest of her days in the slammer—not for a crime she hadn’t committed, and not for the one she had. Sure, she’d shot King and Rock, but she hadn’t been the one who’d killed them—and neither had he. She knew that down to her bones.

  Another beam of light danced across the bathroom window, and she drew herself in closer to him, all but laminating herself to his chest, and the closer she got, the tighter he held on to her, but whether that was for her sake or his, she didn’t know. He felt like he was falling apart, and she wasn’t in much better shape.

  God, that … that thing in the alley. It had torn King’s arm off and snapped those men’s necks, and it was still out there somewhere. A tremor of fear snaked through her, and she buried her face against his chest, wishing everything out there in the night trying to get them would just go away.

  Well, hell, Con thought. He heard the police walk back around to the porch and rattle the front door. When that didn’t get them anywhere, they shined a flashlight through the window again. He reached down and gently took hold of Jane’s ankle, pulling her foot back a few inches, out of the cops’ line of sight. He’d been in tough places before, and this most definitely wasn’t one of them—except for her being there.

  The flashlight beam danced partway down the hall again, and she leaned closer into him, clinging to his side, curling into his lap. He could smell her, the soft fragrance of her skin and the edge of her surrender to all the wrong things, like fear and exhaustion.

  He wasn’t in much better shape, shaking like a damn leaf.

  Geezus. They made a pair.

  The flashlight moved away, and he stretched one of his legs out, lifting his hip a slight bit and shoving his hand into his front pocket, searching for the small plastic case he’d taken off King Banner when he’d frisked the man.

  He hadn’t lied to her. He didn’t have another pill he could take, but maybe King did.

  He found the case, pulled it out, and flipped open the lid, being careful not to spill the contents.

  “You didn’t always look the way you do now,” he said, keeping his voice low and tipping the case this way and that into the flashing light coming through the curtains from the squad car. “The way you’re dressed. The way you wear your hair.”

  She lifted her head from his shoulder, and he glanced up, catching the curious look she gave him. Yeah, he was pretty damn curious about his memories of her, too, why they were there in his mind, so clear, so undeniable.

  He shifted his attention back to the case. It was full of gelcaps, all the colors, including the ones he’d run out of a few days ago. That sorry bastard King Banner hadn’t been any better off than he. No matter how Souk had sold his research to Lancaster, every soldier who’d been through Atlas Exports was playing a losing game.

  “Jane,” he said her name. Jane Linden. But that wasn’t the whole truth. “You have another name.” A name he’d heard many times. And the mere fact that he recalled it made something shift deep inside him, like a widening crack in a fault line. “They called you Robin Rulz.”

  And he knew why. It was a shout-out to Robin Hood, with the wild girl ruling the streets instead of the forest, stealing from the rich to feed all those grimy little brats who had always been underfoot everyplace she’d gone. He picked a white pill out of King’s case and put it under his tongue.

  Geezus.

  He tilted his head back and closed his eyes, and he breathed—deep and slow, soft and easy. With luck, and King’s meds, he just might make it through the night.

  The cops continued to rustle around outside, shining their lights everywhere and talking on the radio, and through it all, the white pill slowly dissolved until it was nothing more than a citrus taste in his mouth.

  “That was your street name, Robin Rulz,” he said, waiting for the first wave of relief to wash over him.

  He didn’t have to wait long.

  “I thought you’d lost your memory.”

  “So did I. For forever, I’d figured, but since I got to Denver, things have been changing for me, especially since I saw you on the street.”

  “Me?” She sounded disbelieving, then let out a short laugh. “Do us both a favor, and don’t remember too much about me.”

  Yeah, he understood. She’d had a helluva life.

  “Too late,” he said. “I think I’ve just about got it all: the kids, your street-rat days running a crew for that bastard who got sent up for importing heroin through his rug business. That must be how you got in trouble with that junkie, you and Sandman.”

  She stiffened in his arms, swearing under her breath, and tried to push away from him.

  “Hey, hey, don’t go anywhere, not yet,” he whispered, pulling her back.

  He kept his hold on her gentle but firm, and after a moment, she relented. She wrapped her arms around herself, keeping her distance, but stayed within the protective shelter of his lap.

  “You got a rough start,” he said. “There’s no shame in that, and as soon as you saw another way, you took it. That’s the best any of us can do.” And she’d done it in spades. No one looking at her would ever see the grimy kid she used to be. He’d been looking at her all night and hadn’t seen anything but—

  Trouble.

  Hell. He let out a sigh and relaxed more deeply into the corner, feeling the shakes slowly fading away. The white pill worked fast, and he was starting to feel pretty good, like he was going to mak
e it through the next few hours.

  She felt good, too, all soft curves, silky dress, and even silkier hair, long and loose and sliding down his T-shirt, catching on his arm. He wanted her, but he sure didn’t see that going anywhere.

  Outside, he heard a pair of car doors slam shut, and then the flashing lights faded from the windows. The cops were leaving. It was time to move.

  “Come on,” he said, gathering her close and standing up. He let her feet slide to the floor, and as soon as he knew she was stable, he released her and headed into the bathroom. “Can you make us some coffee, maybe see if there’s something in the fridge to eat?”

  There would be. The kitchen in this house was always stocked, the woman who lived here always generous in a thousand ways that had kept him coming back year after year.

  This place … this place … He stopped and looked around. He’d come here for a reason. He just wasn’t sure what it was, or who the woman was who owned it.

  Nothing was as clear to him as the Wild Thing. Every time he looked at her, another image from the past slid across his mind. Some of them not so great, like one night when he’d caught her on the street, literally, he’d had his hands on her, holding her, and she’d been a mess, coughing, her nose running, wearing a jacket two sizes too big, and yet under her straggly hair and dirty face, he’d seen a kindred spirit, a survivor, a fighter.

  She’d been up to no good. He knew that but nothing more about what she’d been doing that night.

  From out of nowhere, another memory flashed across the corner of his mind, of a powerful hand, a man’s hand, and a strong wrist, and the tattoo that snaked up both of them and disappeared under the cuff of a pale gray shirt. A sudden pain had him lifting his hand to his heart, and for a split second, it was hard to breathe. Then the moment passed, but not the memory.

  Yeah, he knew people here. He’d had a life in this city, one at least as rich and rough as hers, and maybe it was still there for him, if he wanted it.

  “Sure,” she said, turning toward the kitchen, going to make the coffee.