Crazy Kisses (9 page)

“Here.” Kid pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. “I’ve already called.”

Smith looked down and read what was on the paper:
738 Steele Street, Denver, Colorado.
A code was scrawled across the bottom.

He knew what it was, Superman’s private home address, and home of the Shadow, Dylan Hart, a guy buried so deep, Smith didn’t know anyone who had ever worked with him, or anyone who would recognize him if they saw him, except for Kid and the other guys from SDF, a special operations team notorious for their unorthodox methods and high success rate. Seven thirty-eight Steele Street had resurrected General Buck Grant’s career. It was where they made guys like Kid Chaos Chronopolous.

“There’s a girl at SDF, at the Steele Street address, Skeeter Bang—”

“Skeeter Bang?” he interrupted. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No.” Kid shook his head. “She runs things for SDF. Make sure she knows to keep Nikki at Steele Street, and tell Nikki to stay put until I get there. I don’t want her out of Skeeter’s sight until we know for sure who was behind tonight’s attack.”

Nothing tricky there. It was all standard operating procedure. It just wasn’t his SOP, a fact sent doubly home when he glanced at Nikki McKinney.

Okay. This wasn’t good.

She’d gotten this look on her face like she was going to burst into tears any second, and he meant
any
second, which was just the sort of thing he took pains to avoid.

Great pains. C. Smith Rydell and crying women were like oil and water. They didn’t mix, not even if you shook them, and he’d definitely gotten shook up with a few—more than a few, actually. Certainly enough to know this one didn’t want a thing to do with him, enough to know the only person who had a prayer of getting her to Denver without her falling apart was Kid Chaos, the guy she was looking at as if her life depended on it.

He glanced back at Kid, but his partner looked ready to bolt.

Christ.

C. Smith nodded in the girl’s direction. “You need to be the one taking her out of here,” he said, continuing in Spanish and pocketing the damn piece of paper. Not that he was going to need it. No way in hell.

“No,” Kid insisted. “I need to get patched up, go back to the house, see what I can find. These guys are after me, and I need to do something about it.”

All true, but Smith wasn’t buying it. The look on his face must have said as much.

“Okay,” Kid gave in, his voice lowering, even though he stuck with Spanish. “I need a break.” He glanced at the woman. “She’s . . . she’s—”

“Hot,” Smith supplied.

“Screw you,” Kid said, barely managing a grin, which quickly faded. “She’s engaged.”

“You told me that weeks ago.”

“Yeah, well, things happened tonight.”

“So?” Things happened all the time. It was human nature.

“So, regardless of what happened, she was checking out of my place when Conseco’s guys showed up.”

Oh, now he got it, and it sucked. Big-time. No wonder Kid looked like hell. Nothing took more starch out of a guy than making love to a woman he was crazy about only to have her split in the middle of the night. Man, that hurt.

Kid was tough, as steel-bellied as the next Marine, but he looked about as broke up as the girl. Of course, having two dead guys bleeding all over your kitchen floor and one bleeding out in your garden made for one helluva night. According to the agents downstairs, the transvestite had been clean, no record, no previous arrests, no drug habit—just somebody in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Nikki McKinney had been in the same damn place at the same damn time. If he’d been Kid, he’d want her out of Panama, too, no matter who she was marrying.

But what Kid was asking—
damn.
It was impossible. No way was Smith going to let his night take a nosedive on such a crappy plan.

“I don’t do the crying thing,” he said, nodding in the girl’s direction.

“She’ll be okay,” Kid was quick to promise—too quick.

“I don’t think so, Chico.”

“She’s just a little blown away right now.” Kid made a small dismissive gesture with his hand, his expression pained. “She’s been doing great, but it was, well, it was ugly. About as ugly as it can get. I’m sure the guys filled you in.”

“Yeah.” They sure as hell had, and he was impressed. Kid had kicked some major ass, but the boy was missing a major point here: Kid was the one with the half-million-dollar bounty on his head, and
he
was the one who needed to get his ass on a plane back to the States.

“Sorry,” he said, eyeing the girl again. “But whatever needs to be done, I can guarantee she wants to do it with you, not me.”

The office was pretty good-sized, but not big enough to keep Smith from hearing Nikki McKinney let out a little sob, which just proved his point and hardened his resolve. Spending the next nine hours with a crying woman was real close to the top of his “Avoid At All Costs” list, right under untimely death and a desk job.

Kid took a deep breath, swore, then swore again.

“All right,” he said, after a couple more long moments. “Sure. Fine. I can take her home. Have them bring a car around to the back door.”

“There’ll be a Boy Scout badge in it for you,” Smith promised, not quite managing a grin.

“Screw—”

“Me. Yeah. I got it the first time,” he said under his breath, watching Kid turn back to the desk.

C
HAPTER

8

Denver, Colorado

T
HERE WERE ONLY
two things Travis didn’t either respect or admire about Skeeter Bang, and those were her sunglasses and her ball cap. The rest of her was extremely hot, extremely tough, extremely smart. Everything about Skeeter Bang was extreme—including her aversion to letting anybody see the scar that ran diagonally across her forehead and through one of her pale blond eyebrows.

It wasn’t pretty, but neither was it as disfiguring as she seemed to think, and the ball cap and sunglasses she wore to hide the scar made it damn near impossible to read her sometimes.

Like now.

She’d gone very still, the envelope still in her hand.

Then he felt it, a slow heat crawling up his spine, and he knew why Skeeter had gone so still.

Jane Linden was awake.

Jane.

He didn’t dare turn around, not yet. The girl tore him up like none other. He had no explanation for the way he felt about her, kind of wildly, crazily in lust. She didn’t seem to know he was on the planet. But a sweet, awful yearning had hit him hard the first time he’d seen her, the first instant, and over the last two weeks, it had only gotten worse.

“Here,” he said, extending his hand to Skeeter. “I’ll, uh, put it with the other ones.”

Four other envelopes had been delivered to the gallery tonight, all of them for someone named Robin Rulz, but nobody named Robin worked for Toussi’s. Considering the grubby little group of kids who had been delivering the envelopes, Travis didn’t think Robin Rulz actually had a thing to do with Toussi’s. The kids had just made a mistake—all five of them, one right after the other, all night long.

Right.

He looked down at the envelope, and sure enough, it had the same return address printed on it as all the others, a business logo for an Oriental rug company just off Speer Boulevard.

“I’ll take these back to the Castle Import Rug Company today or tomorrow. They’ll probably know who this Robin Rulz is.” It was the best idea he had.

“There is no Castle Import Rug Company anymore,” Skeeter said, the slight shift of her head telling him she was looking at him now, not the girl. “They were closed down a few years back. The importer, a guy named Greg Stevens, is still doing time in Canon City for felony abuse of child labor laws and trafficking in heroin. The drugs came in his shipments of rugs, and he used a bunch of homeless kids to distribute through downtown, called them the Castle Kids. Overall, he was pretty small-time. He didn’t have a lock on the trade, but because of the kids, they put him away with the maximum sentence.”

And as quickly as that, the whole mess with the envelopes got a whole lot stickier than Travis ever would have imagined possible up until Nikki’s sister, Regan, had gone and fallen in love with Quinn Younger last summer. Since then, every time he turned around, he’d found himself knee-deep in street gangs, derelicts, murder, mayhem, and guys like Quinn, Kid Chaos, and Superman, a.k.a. Christian Hawkins, who took it all in stride.

“So he’s in prison, and the kids are still running wild on the streets? Handing out envelopes?” None of this was making any sense, yet.

She shrugged. “The police caught a few of the Castle Kids and handed them over to Social Services. Most of them were never found. They just melted back into the landscape, disappeared on the streets.”

“Like the five who showed up here tonight.” That much, at least, was damned obvious.

“Yeah. I think so. Robin was one of the kids who never got caught, the oldest, the one who held them together and got them a new gig.”

“Doing what?” A new gig didn’t sound promising, not for a bunch of former drug dealers, even pint-sized ones.

Behind him, he heard Jane stir in her makeshift bed of chairs, and it took every ounce of control he had not to turn and look at her. It seemed that’s all he did these days, look at Jane and fill up with longing like some sixteen-year-old virgin. He both loved it and hated it. Loved the sheer high of wanting her. Hated to think he was never going to get her, but, man, the girl defined the words “hard to catch.”

“Petty theft, pickpockets, running a few scams. After they regrouped, they started calling themselves the Castle Rats, which sounded a lot tougher than Castle Kids.”

Maybe to a bunch of twelve-year-olds. Castle anything sounded like a video game to him. He looked at the envelope in his hand, then thought to hell with it and tore it open.

“I don’t think they’re dealing drugs anymore,” he said, pulling out a five-dollar bill. “This isn’t a night’s work of selling anything I’ve seen on the street.”

“No,” Skeeter said. “It’s not drug money. It’s tribute.”

“Tribute?” What an odd term, but she sounded damned sure of what she’d said. “For this Robin guy?”

“Robin Rulz isn’t a guy.”

Travis just stared at her, letting that bit of 411 sink in with all its implications.

“And from the looks of this”—she gestured at the money in his hand—“I’d say the Rats want her back.”

Yes. He was getting a nice clear picture now. Former Castle Rat, princess of the underground, and leader of a street gang becomes art gallery shopgirl whose mere presence was enough to turn him into a stumbling idiot. Oh, this was just great.

Damn.
Up until last summer, he’d led a pretty sheltered life, a good life, building his cabin up in the canyon and running his sexual imprinting business down in Boulder, sidelining as an EMT, working at a snail’s pace on his doctorate, rock climbing on his days off, and modeling naked for Nikki.

A soft sound behind him warned him Jane was rising from the chair, and he braced himself.

There had been no crime in his life, no criminals, no ex-juvenile delinquents trying to make good, though more than a few guys he’d met thought his sexual imprinting business was just a scam to get his hands on a lot of women. It wasn’t. He took his techniques very seriously, and he never hooked up with his clients.

“I’ll take the envelope, please,” Jane said, coming up behind him, proving every word Skeeter had just said, and in two seconds nearly doubling the amount of words she’d spoken to him since he’d shown up at Toussi’s two weeks ago and first seen her helping Katya unpack one of Rocky’s pieces.

Taking a steadying breath first, and feeling like a fool for needing one, he turned to face her—and damn. Even with all his preparation, all his getting ready, she still made his heart catch—
wild Jane
.

She wasn’t classically pretty, not by a long shot. She had a tiny scar along her cheekbone and another one across the bridge of her nose. They were nothing like Skeeter’s, just small imperfections that somehow made her more exotic than she already was—which was plenty. Her eyes were almond-shaped and the palest green he’d ever seen, her nose slightly upturned with a dusting of freckles, and her hair was so dark and silky, he’d dreamed of it sliding over his skin for nine nights running—not fantasized, but dreamed. Subconscious. Unbidden. Nine nights in a row.

It was a little crazy. He was so hyperaware of her, sometimes he swore he could feel her breathe.

“Uh . . . sure,” he said, handing her the envelope and the money.

She didn’t say thank you. She didn’t say anything, just stuffed the money in her pocket, glanced at the envelope, then looked back up at him.

That’s all it took. He got the message loud and clear: She’d like the rest of them—
please
. He didn’t have to go far, just a few feet over to the stairs where he’d put them on a step.

It was the strangest thing. She talked to Katya, Suzi, and the other girls who worked in the gallery, her voice soft and low, slightly husky, but she’d hardly said a word to him, getting by with a nod here, a shake of the head there, a slight shrug for his more open-ended questions. It was like she practiced being quiet and her favorite person to practice on was him. He knew she practiced being invisible. He’d watched her do it, fade into the background, make herself still. About half of the people who came into the gallery never knew she was there, even if she walked right by them. It wasn’t just that people didn’t always pay attention to their surroundings. It was the way she did it, never approaching anyone directly, always coming up on a person’s weaker side or in a blind spot. The other half of the gallery patrons barely noticed her—but not him. He’d actually hurt himself a couple of times, running into stuff because he was so busy noticing her he’d forgotten to watch where he was going.

It hadn’t been too embarrassing, though, because she didn’t notice him, ever, not even when he was falling on his face. It was the damnedest thing, having someone, especially a woman, be so unaware of him.

He handed the other envelopes over.

“So you’re Robin Rulz,” he said, thankful his voice didn’t crack.

She gave him a quick glance, which very clearly said “yes,” then went back to shuffling through the envelopes, turning each one over.

Cripes,
he thought, borrowing one of Skeeter’s favorite words. Maybe if he stood on his head and juggled flaming swords he could hold her attention for more than a nanosecond.

Then again, maybe not. She didn’t seem like the flaming swords type.

Hell.

He watched her flipping through the envelopes and saw that each one had a letter from the alphabet written on the back. He hadn’t noticed any letters when he’d handled them, but it looked like she’d expected to find them. She shuffled through the envelopes twice, quickly, shifting the order, her expression growing more and more grim.

When she looked up, it was to Skeeter, not him.

“This won’t be a problem. I promise. Tell Superman I’ll take care of it. Tell him I would have taken care of it when I first got here, but I thought they’d all gotten picked up when I left. I thought they’d all be in foster homes by now.”

“Apparently not,” Skeeter said, crossing her arms over her chest and tilting her head to one side, her feet slightly apart.

It was a very considering stance, and Travis couldn’t help but wonder what in the world she was considering. If it was kicking ass, it wasn’t going to be much of a contest. Skeeter was all long legs, sleek muscles, and mad skills—and Jane wasn’t.

Jane was curves.

Soft lips.

Silky.

“You guys never got caught,” Skeeter went on. “Ever, none of you, not once, not by anyone. That’s what the legend was all about. You pulled more wallets in LoDo in two years than the rest of the city combined, and no one ever laid a hand on you. So why would they all suddenly get picked up?”

Jane just looked at her, her expression unreadable, except for the tension Travis felt coming off her in waves—unreadable to him anyway, but Skeeter seemed to figure it out.

“You called the cops on them yourself.”

“Kondo was only ten when I left,” Jane said. “And he wasn’t the youngest. How old was your crew when you got hurt that night up on Wazee?”

Skeeter stiffened ever so slightly, and Travis went all ears. He’d been trying to get Skeeter’s story out of her since the night they’d met, but the girl did not talk about what had happened to her face. It had been violent, that was obvious from the scar, and bloody. He knew from his EMT work that head wounds bled like hell. Jane, however, knew the facts, or at least the rumors.

God, he had led a sheltered life.

“Older than yours,” Skeeter said after a long moment. “Old enough to take care of themselves.” She turned her attention to him. “The triptych was the last piece, right?”

“Right.”

“Then you owe me four hours, and I’ll see you tonight at the show.”

She was leaving? Just like that?

“But—” he started to say, then stopped. But what? Don’t leave me alone with Jane? Hell, all he’d wanted for two weeks was to be left alone with Jane. He’d made more excuses to hang around Toussi’s than made sense with his schedule, practically delivering Nikki’s pieces for the show one at a time. He’d even started hand-delivering Rocky’s work, which had caused the artist to immediately ask “Who’s the girl?”

Not much got by Rocky—except Nikki. She’d sure gotten by the guy, or the other way around. Travis didn’t know what was going on for sure, and Nikki wasn’t talking, no matter how many questions he asked. But she’d stopped crying, and that was a helluva improvement over the last year.

Skeeter had already moved to the alley door and was slipping on her jacket, the fur-lined leather one she’d gotten for Christmas and didn’t go anywhere without. He would have offered to walk her to her car, but she would have laughed him off the planet. All Skeeter Bang ever expected out of a guy was for him to watch her back when the bad boys threw down and the shit hit the fan, and she could damn well be depended on to return the favor.

“Okay, then,” he said. “Tonight.”

“You’re done here, too, right?” she asked, but somehow, the way she said it sounded more like an order than a question.

“Finished.” He nodded, intrigued. Skeeter had never given him so much as a suggestion about what to do, let alone an order.

“Headed home?”