Loose Ends (36 page)

“Where is Con?” she asked, still pacing.

That was the real problem here, not the hotel, and if Jack had known where Con was, trust him, he’d have been there by now, and they’d be making their getaway.

“Are you hungry?” he asked. He could use a meal, that was for damn sure.

“You’re going to eat? Now?” She looked dumbfounded by the concept. She also looked stressed out, out of sorts, and like she could sizzle and fuss herself into going ballistic any second. “You could eat with all this going on?”

“Yes”—he tried to use his calmest tone of voice—“I’ve eaten hanging upside down off a bridge in a snowstorm. I’ve eaten in the dark, jammed sideways in a ventilation shaft for six hours. Hell, I’ve eaten street food in Bangladesh and rattlesnake in the Sonoran Desert. Trust me, I can eat room service in a four-star hotel.”

“Very funny, Jack. You make me so … so damn …”

Words seemed to fail her, but Jack had a few, starting with furious, as in “you make me so damn furious.” It seemed to be his specialty. And for him, he would have picked horny, as in “you make me so damn horny.” Because she did, flat out.

Or maybe it was this damn room. It was made for
decadence.
Geezus
. The ceiling was twelve feet high, and all the walls were covered in baby blue wallpaper with a lot of ornate stuff everywhere. The bed was huge and piled high with brocade pillows, and the whole thing looked about as silky, sexy, and soft as she did.

Who had skin like hers, he wondered, besides her? Not most girls, he knew that much. Scout’s skin was so smooth and creamy. He figured she must taste delicious—like he was ever going to find out.

“Steak,” he said, heading past her for the phone. “I’m ordering one.” And under any other circumstances, he would have added a bottle of Patrón. “If you want to stay mission-ready, Pansy, I suggest you order—”

“What did you call me?” she cut him off in midsentence, her voice sharp.

“Pansy,” he said, daring all and damn the torpedoes. “Pansy Louise Leesom, baby, that’s you.”

“
Nobody
calls me Pansy.”

“Well, I’m starting,” he said, on the move again, heading toward the phone and his steak. It was time to set a few things straight between them, and Pansy was one of those things.

But the girl was quick. She grabbed hold of his arm as he passed and held him where he stood—and he let her.

She opened her mouth to say something smart-ass and probably mean, then changed her mind and came out with the truth. “Nobody’s called me Pansy since my mom died. It was my dad who always called me Scout. He said he needed me to be strong.”

And that just tore him up.

Jack could just imagine her as a little girl, with her hair all wildly curly. She’d have been the cutest little Pansy Louise ever.

“The people at Steele Street,” she said. “They knew about my mom, and they knew a lot about my dad being a Marine, but they don’t know what happened to him in
the end. They didn’t know that, Jack. Con does, I’m sure, but it’s one of those things he won’t talk about ever, so I think the worst, and I look at Con, at how he’s scarred, and I wonder what happened to my dad.”

Oh, man, he couldn’t go there. She was tough, but she wasn’t that tough.

Hell, he wasn’t that tough, and he’d seen it.

“Do you want me to go back in there and see what I can find out?” He would, and she knew it, and maybe he would find something he could tell her, something bearable that would fill in the empty places for her. No matter how much they fought, she knew she could count on him, that he would go straight into the fires of hell for her. That was how they rolled, together, a team.

“No,” she said, shaking her head and looking away, releasing him. “I don’t want you going back into Steele Street, but God, I wish Con was here.”

Yeah, he did, too.

“So what about this Dutch guy you met in London?” He didn’t really want to know, but he could be polite. What he wanted was to pretend she would always just be with Con, taking care of the boss, while Jack ran around the world taking care of business. “Con said his name was Karl.”

“Karl is—”

“Wait a minute,” he cut her off, and was damned grateful for the excuse. “Look at this.” He directed her attention to the television.

Geezus
. Two guys had been torn apart over on the west side of Denver. The news stations weren’t identifying them, but from what Con had told him, Jack figured it was King Banner and Rock Howe—but they were dead. Con had left them alive.

Fuck
.

Now, who in the hell had dropped them? he wondered.
King and Rock had been two of the most skilled scumbags on the face of the earth.

And the hostage Con had talked about was a woman named Jane Linden. The station kept her picture up in the corner of the screen, asking people to call in if they saw her. The rest of the screen was full of cop cars and an ambulance, lights flashing, and lots of uniformed people running around.

“Cripes, Jack. There’s a manhunt going on out there,” Scout said. “These people think Con killed King and Rock and that he kidnapped that woman, and they’re out for blood.”

It didn’t look good, and then the night really went to hell.

His phone rang.

He took it out of his pocket and keyed the receive button. “Go.”

“Are you at the hotel?” Con asked.

“Yes.” Jack still had his eyes on the television. “We’re watching the news, and your party over on the west side is all over it. Everybody out there covering the story is pretty wound up. I hope you’re watching your ass.”

“I am. Stay put at the hotel. I’ll be there in an hour, maybe two.”

An hour? Two? What the hell was the boss going to be doing for an hour or two?

“Why so long? What’s up?”

“Complications.”

“The girl?” Jack was looking right at Ms. Jane Linden, and, yeah, she looked plenty complicated to him.

There was a brief pause before Con spoke again.

“We got what we came for. You keep Scout safe. That’s the job, your only job. I’ll contact you, if I need you.” And he signed off.

Well, hell. Jack looked over at Scout, who was looking
at him like she wanted to know what was going on—and all he could think was that so the hell did he.

Standing inside the India Gate suite at the Kashmir Club, Con hung up the phone. There had been no forced entry here, not by him or anybody else, but there had been a struggle.

A streak of blood on the wall looked like somebody had been slammed into it with a fair amount of force. The painting above the smear was hanging crookedly. One lamp had been knocked over in the suite, and a chair had been pulled off center, as if someone had grabbed on to it or been knocked into it.

Con had a good idea of who that someone had been—Randolph Lancaster—and he didn’t need Jack or Scout for what happened next. Where he was going, their presence was a complication, not a help. He knew who had taken Lancaster, and he knew where they’d taken him: 738 Steele Street.

Cool and smooth in the gusting rain, hard and hollow like his heart, Monk climbed hand over hand up the old freight elevator at 738 Steele Street, an old-style contraption of iron and steel, of I-beams and bolts, a beast from the machine age. He’d seen the cameras trained on the alley below and had crawled the wall to avoid them. The building was old brick with lots of handholds for the strong.

The girl was out cold.

Balancing on a strut, he wiped the rain from his face and looked up to see lightning crackling across the sky. He’d taken a sheet off a clothesline on Secaro Street and wrapped it around Jane, securing her in a cotton cocoon. Slung over his shoulder, sodden wet and limp as a rag, she wasn’t giving him any trouble.

Somewhere inside the building there would be a safe place to stash her, a hidey-hole no one would ever find, a private place where he could come back to her when he finished with Farrel and Lancaster. She would be his prize then, his gift to himself, his warrior’s tribute.

Thunder rolled in after the lightning, and he kept climbing. At the seventh floor, the old elevator ended, and light shone from every window. With one blow, he could break the glass and enter, but when he swung over
and looked inside, his breath caught for a suspended moment, and he stayed his fist.

Three—he counted the people in the high-tech office. Two for killing, the men, both dark-haired and heavily armed, and one for stealing and keeping, the one on the communications console—Skeeter Bang-Hart.

She was more beautiful in real life than in her photographs, unexpected, like the woman over his shoulder, a fantasy vision of long-ago nights, of rough city streets and the men who ruled them, and of the women who ruled those men. She was one of those women, pale of skin with a scar on her face and a Glock tucked under her arm in a shoulder holster. Her hair was long and silvery, her body lithe and strong. He could see the supple movement of her muscles beneath the thin material of her dress, and he was riveted by the sight.

He wanted her, the same way he wanted the girl in the golden dress, viscerally, like a heated need in his blood, and in an instant, he made his decision. If nothing else this night, she, too, would be his tribute, his by right of victory and plunder.

Tonight, he ruled the world.

The truth welled up inside him and filled his heart with desire and his throat with a howl he dared not give voice to—not if he was to fulfill his mission.

She would be his, though. He promised himself.

Grasping the sill and leaning back, he looked up the side of the building. The floors directly above him were dark and had balconies. He would enter from up there, secure both of the women, and go hunting for Farrel and Lancaster.

He took one more look into the office, at the woman, then swung himself over to the next handhold and began climbing higher up the side of the building, moving toward the balcony a few yards above him.

*   *   *

Skeeter stood in front of the comm console in the main office at Steele Street, frozen in place, listening to Hawkins on the radio. Zach and Quinn were with her, hearing the same damn bad news, and she’d routed it to Dylan down in the basement. Kid was scheduled to return to the office any minute to relieve Quinn—but Skeeter doubted if anyone was going to get relieved tonight.

“It was Monk. We’re sure of it.” Hawkins’s voice was calm and steady, but Skeeter’s pulse was racing. “Creed saw him cut through the neighbor’s yard. MNK-1 is fast, faster than Red Dog.”

Lancaster’s beast, the one who had twisted King Banner’s arm off and taken a bite out of it—
geezus
, it made her blood run cold, and the bastard had snatched Jane and taken off with her just seconds after J.T. had disappeared from Alazne Morello’s. SDF was losing on every front.

Jane
. Skeeter had to fight a desperate urge to hit the streets and find her friend.

“Have you called Gillian?” Dylan asked, his voice terse. No one else could track like Gillian, not even Creed.

“Yes, and the Jungle Boy is with her at Alazne’s,” Hawkins said.

“How far out are you?” Dylan asked.

“Five minutes.”

“Call me when you get here,” Dylan said. “We need to be ready to deploy the instant we get word on Jane.”

Hawkins no sooner signed off than the hairs along the back of Skeeter’s neck suddenly rose straight up.

She whirled toward the window at her back and saw a pale flash of something slip off to the side.
Geezus
. A bolt of lightning crashed in the night sky, and for an instant, she wondered if that’s what she’d seen, a precursor of the lightning strike.

Bull
, she decided. She’d never been afraid of lightning in her life, and no matter how bad the night had become, she wasn’t a girl who jumped at shadows.

Striding over to the window, she drew her Glock .45 out of her shoulder holster.

“Do we have a problem, Skeeter?” Zach asked, drawing his own semiautomatic pistol.

“I’ve got a bad feeling, that’s all.” And she knew that was enough for him. It was enough for everybody at Steele Street.

At the window, she threw open the sash and started to look out, but Zach stepped in front of her.

“Let me do this,” he said, then carefully checked out the edges of the opening before venturing a bit farther out to see all around.

Skeeter held her tongue, knowing nothing was going to keep these boys from trying to rein her in.

Quinn had taken up a position on the east wall, where he could see out his side.

A loud roll of thunder bellowed and rumbled above the city, and when Zach ducked his head back inside, he was wiping rain off his face.

“I’m heading upstairs, going to check things out.”

“Did you see anything?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean you didn’t. Is Kid on his way up here?”

“Should arrive any minute,” she said, checking the time on her computer screen.

“Good. When he gets here, we’ll—”

The sound of breaking glass and a scuffling thump came from the floor above them, and the three were off like shots, weapons drawn, heading for the stairs. They cleared the single flight in seconds and came out onto Steele Street’s state-of-the-art shooting range, a large open area that took up half the eighth floor. The other half housed the armory workshops and weapons rooms.

Quickly, one by one, they cleared the range and the rooms, working their way back to the workshop directly above the office, only to find it empty save for the wet footprints leading out of it and the broken glass on the floor below the window.

Skeeter reached the glass and bent down to pick up a blood-smeared piece. When she brought it to her nose, every “Spidey” sense she had red-lined with the smell and weight of the intruder.
Sweet geezus
. Dread coursed through her veins. Then came the cry, a muffled sound of panic and fear coming from the floor above them.

Jane
. She knew it down to her bones.

“Get back to the comm. Call Creed and get him here,” Zach said, running for the stairs that led to the ninth floor. Quinn was already hitting the first step.