by Tara Janzen
“This . . . this was a bad idea, my coming here,” she said around the ice, reaching for the seat belt clip. “And I . . . I think it's time I left.”
“No.” He shook his head, and she paused for a second. Then she rushed ahead, her fingers scrambling for the clip.
“I'll . . . uh, just take my own car, thank you.”
He put his hand over hers, stilling her frantic movements, and her gaze slammed back into his.
“You don't have a car anymore,” he told her, lying just enough to get his way—because he was going to get his way.
Thinking faster than he'd expected, she immediately swung her gaze around to the Porsche.
He did grin at that. “Nope. That's Kid's car, and I don't think he trusts you. He thinks you're with the bad guys.”
“The bad guys?”
“Vince—”
“Branson and his friend,” she filled in, surprising him again. “Are those the men you stole from?”
That little deduction startled a laugh out of him. Even only halfway with the program, she was quick, damn quick.
“Maybe,” he admitted. Branson worked for Roper Jones, and SDF had definitely lifted merchandise from Roper Jones, the unusual shipment of crates Quinn had nearly gotten himself killed intercepting in the Burlington Northern's Denver rail yards.
Crates full of plaster casts, the old dinosaur doc missing, and Regan McKinney in Cisco—the connection had been forming in his mind since the moment he'd recognized her. He wasn't the only car thief and lower-downtown hustler who'd been handed over by the courts to Wilson McKinney that summer. Dylan Hart, Christian Hawkins a.k.a. Superman, J. T. Chronopolous, Zachary Prade, and Creed Rivera had sweated out three months in the professor's dinosaur bone beds with him, too.
Something was telling him that while he'd been laying low in Cisco, Dylan had gone looking for help with those crates in the wrong place—the worst place, if it had put Roper Jones and his goons on Regan McKinney's tail.
CHAPTER
4
JEANETTE.
That's what he called his ugly car. Jeanette.
Regan popped another ice cube into her mouth and stuck one more in her cleavage. Without the heat eating her brain, she'd decided she wasn't going to die.
Quinn Younger, Air Force ace and national hero, may have fallen on bad times, but he wasn't a cold-blooded murderer. By his own admission, he'd had no intention of shooting those men. The boy wonder did his dirty work for him, and the boy wonder was headed to Denver, in his own car. God knew there wasn't room for him in the Camaro, not even if there had been another seat, not with the equipment Quinn had been throwing in the back.
She was still sucking on the ice cube he'd given her when Kid Chaos burst back into the barn.
“They've backed off another hundred yards, parked behind the bluff, the idiots,” he reported. “They can't see shit . . . uh, anything from back there.” He cast her a quick, almost guilty glance. He was carrying the stuff out of her car, all of the stuff, including her purse—which he began looking through.
Great, she thought. The boy wonder was too chivalrous to swear in front of a woman, but didn't give a whoopty damn about rifling through her purse. Lucky her, she'd fallen in with gentlemen thieves.
“I saw them,” Quinn said. “Didn't Branson lose three of his fingers in an explosion?”
Kid looked up from her purse, a sudden grin on his face. “Yeah,” he said. “A block of C4 blew up part of a meatpacking plant in Chicago where Roper was holding a load of Colombian cocaine. Branson was there. No wonder he's so damn nervous.”
Regan listened, silent, a lump forming in her throat that didn't have a thing to do with her ice cube. Her Ford Taurus had been a good car, a great car. It had never had a name before, but for the last five minutes, she'd been calling it Quinn Younger's Big Mistake. He couldn't just order Kid to dump her car somewhere and get away with it.
Her car. Gone. Just like that. Nobody stole Ford Tauruses. Her insurance agent had told her the Ford Taurus had a theft quotient of damn near zero, which had been a big selling point in its favor—for all the good it was doing her now.
She would get her car back. She swore she would. Boulder was only half an hour from Denver. She could easily get home and go to the police and tell them about her stolen car and everything she'd learned in Cisco about Vince Branson and the guns and the cars and the two men in the middle of it all—and if they hadn't thought she was crazy before, that ought to clinch it for them.
Damn. She groaned. This sort of thing was not supposed to happen to her. It was light-years worse than anything her globe-trotting parents had ever been involved in—except her parents had died in some godforsaken South American country, buried under a pile of pre-Columbian earthquake rubble, and she wasn't going to die, not here, not today, so help her God.
“Who is Nikki McKinney?” Kid asked, and Regan's head jerked up.
“Her younger sister,” Quinn answered, before Regan could think of a lie. “Why? What's up?”
Kid showed him a letter he'd pulled out of her purse. “Nikki McKinney's address matches the one on Regan McKinney's driver's license.”
Quinn ducked down to look in the Camaro's window, his expression grim. “Does Nikki live with you?”
“It's no business of yours who lives—” Regan started defensively.
“Listen to me, Regan.” He cut her off, his voice low and deadly serious. “Vince Branson is not someone to mess with. If he and his buddy picked up your tail at home this morning, then everyone in that house is a target.”
Regan felt the blood drain from her face. She'd been so concerned for Wilson these last few weeks, it hadn't occurred to her that she or Nikki might be in danger—and yet look where she'd ended up.
“Yes,” she admitted, praying she was doing the right thing. “We live with Wilson, the same house where you visited him that time.”
Something changed in his face. She couldn't tell what. “He told you I was there?”
“He was very proud of you,” she said, not bothering to hide the past-tense implications.
Quinn straightened up to look over the top of the car, speaking to Kid. “Call in a nine-one-one to SDF, and get Skeeter over there to do a little recon and stick until you get there. Regan will call and let her sister know you're coming. Now go.”
Kid had shoved the letter in his pants pocket and had been moving the whole time Quinn was talking. When Quinn gave the final order, he was halfway inside the Porsche.
Then he stopped, and with a muttered curse, he stood back up.
“Don't even think it, Kid,” Quinn said before the younger man could get a word out.
“Damn it, Quinn. You know my orders. I'm not supposed to let you out of my sight.”
“Do you want Skeeter to do the intercept?” Quinn's voice rose incredulously, making Regan wonder what was wrong with Skeeter.
Kid obviously knew, because after swearing a small blue streak, he got back into the Porsche and fired up the engine. The car instantly came to life with a low, purring rumble.
Quinn ran toward the barn doors, moving faster than Regan would have thought possible for a man with a limp. When the doors began rolling open, the Porsche was there, nosing out. Three seconds later, it was gone in a cloud of dust.
Regan didn't know whether to be relieved or not.
Probably not, she decided, going with her gut instinct.
Retrieving her purse from the driver's seat where Kid had tossed it, she opened it up and looked inside. As she'd suspected, he'd gone through everything, right down to her tampon holder and her cough drops—and he'd confiscated her cell phone.
Damn it.
She dragged her hand back through her hair, looking around for Quinn. She found him by the stairs, zipping up a duffel bag. He would have to give her a phone. He had to if he wanted her to call Nikki.
When he was finished zipping the duffel, he headed back to the Camaro and dropped the bag in the trunk. The last thing he put in the car
was one of the laptops. The other computer had gone with Kid.
He leaned in through the passenger window, taking up all of her space, and slid the thin computer into the main slot on a metal box bolted to the car's frame between the gearshift and the engine firewall. A screen on the box blinked to life.
“I'll get a couple of cold drinks, and we're out of here,” he said, slipping back out the window.
She released an unsteady breath and stuck another ice cube in her mouth. So far, things weren't going very well. Not only were Wilson and her car missing, now she and Nikki were in trouble up to their necks, and she still didn't have a clue as to why.
It was possible Branson and his buddy didn't have anything to do with her—but they definitely had something to do with Quinn Younger. And from what she'd seen, Quinn Younger definitely had something to do with her grandfather's disappearance.
Six hours, that's what it had taken her to drive from Boulder to Cisco. Six hours to make the biggest mistake of her life.
Okay, maybe the second biggest, she reconsidered. Marrying Scott Hanson had been a huge mistake.
Quinn dropped the hood on the Camaro, getting it to catch with a final solid push, before he slid in behind the wheel and handed her a bottled drink.
He gave her a quick once-over, and a familiar grin curved his mouth—familiar, she realized, because of the People magazine photo still taped to the inside of her closet door.
The reminder made her blush. She really should have taken his picture down years ago.
“Feeling better?” he asked. “You're looking a little flushed again.”
“I'm fine,” she said curtly, and his grin broadened.
“Great.”
Something in his smile made her glance down at herself. One look was all it took for her to close her eyes and groan. Her lavender silk shirt was sodden, plastered to her breasts and nearly transparent in its delicacy. Between the sweat and the melting ice cubes and the time spent cozying up to her bag of ice, she looked like the first runner-up in a wet T-shirt contest.
She automatically crossed her arms over her breasts, hoping the action wasn't too obvious. Then he turned the key in the ignition, and all thoughts of modesty were drowned out in the rumbling roar of the Camaro's engine.
Her eyes flew open, and her arms shot out to either side, her hands clinging to whatever she could find to hold on to—the door panel on her right, and the gear console on the left. The whole freaking car was shaking and grumbling and growling. He pressed down on the gas, revving the engine, and the growling turned into an out-and-out roar.
Holy Mother of God. Wilson's Dodge hadn't sounded or felt anything like this.
Eyes wide, knuckles white, she looked at Quinn and wasn't the least bit reassured to find him frowning at a gauge. Something was wrong. He revved the engine again, and the resulting surge of power poured through her from the tips of her toes up the length of her spine.
She felt like she was riding a rocket. Jeanette was a beast—all ugly on the outside and pure animal from the rims up.
He gave the gauge a tap, and when it didn't budge, bent his head down to peer into the maze of wires snaking around where the other half of the dashboard should have been. A few seconds of fiddling and a startling shower of sparks later, the needle on the gauge swung into action, responding with a smooth swinging arc to every ounce of pressure he put on the gas pedal.
Satisfied with the working of the gauge, he began inching the car out of the barn. Like a prowling tiger, the Camaro crawled across the dusty floor. A whole new fear took hold of her.
“W-wait . . . Kid said those guys are still out there. What if they're just waiting for us?”
“Oh, they're waiting for us all right,” he assured her, “but they'll never catch us. We're going to outrun them.”
Regan braced herself, remembering how Kid had taken off in his Porsche. But Quinn held them to a crawl, making the mighty Jeanette shoulder her way through every rut and over every ridge in the dirt road. Ahead of them, the highway out of Cisco stretched to the horizon with no Kid in sight. She twisted around in her seat. The road behind them was clear, except for the blue nose of the SUV peeking out from behind a low hill and a flash of sunlight glinting off something in the window.
“They've got binoculars.” Her heart was racing, her palms sweating. “They've seen us and . . . and they're heading this way.”
“And they're too late.”
Or so he said, but even once they made it onto the asphalt, he kept the car in first, growling and rumbling and crawling along. Regan's stomach started tying itself into knots, and she quickly revised her estimate of their travel time. At the rate they were going, they'd be lucky to make Denver by next week, if ever.
She looked behind them again and felt sick. The SUV was on the road, accelerating.
Then Quinn shifted into second gear. Third, fourth, fifth, and sixth came in smooth, rapid succession, each gear change forcing a quantum leap in their acceleration. Her heart jamming in her throat, she watched the speedometer with growing alarm.
Sixty miles an hour had been a mere heartbeat from first gear. She missed seventy, the number went by so fast.
Eighty was smooth.
Ninety, and she started digging her fingers into Jeanette's hide.
One hundred.
She glanced up, and he flashed her a grin, the wind whipping at his hair, one hand easy on the steering wheel, the other on the shifter.
One hundred and ten.
One hundred and twenty and oh, shit . . . they were flying, Jeanette low to the road, roaring, the beast unleashed.
CHAPTER
5
LACE BRA.
Quinn kept his eyes on the road, mostly, but he couldn't help but glance over to the passenger seat every now and then.
She was wearing a lace bra beneath her wet shirt. The delicate tracery outlined against the lavender silk was unmistakable.
Lace.
God, it had been a long time since he'd kissed a woman. Since he'd undressed a woman.
He hadn't thought about it much lately, which probably said something about him he didn't want to know. He sure as hell hadn't thought about it since the rail yard rumble. At first, he'd been too busted up. Then Dylan had shipped him to Cisco and buried him in the desert to keep him out of the way. He knew Roper Jones wanted him dead. News of the hit had traveled fast, fifty thousand dollars fast, but, hell, it wasn't the first time Quinn had been on somebody's hit list.
It was just the first time Dylan had thought he might actually get hit.
Quinn didn't blame him. The disaster in the BN&SF rail yards had been the first time he'd needed somebody to scrape him off the street. Bullets had been flying; he'd been beaten and bleeding like a stuck pig from a head wound and an ugly gunshot that had torn open his shoulder. His knee had been wrenched damn near backward, and Hawkins had come out of nowhere, straight through the middle of the fucking melee, and gotten him out alive, if half dead counted as alive. Quinn hadn't been too sure at the time. Neither had Hawkins—but he hadn't admitted it until a few days later, when he'd dropped by the hospital.
“‘Keep breathing, you son of a bitch'?” Quinn had asked, repeating Hawkins's words to him in that frickin' alley. “Is that the new SDF triage directive?”
Hawkins had just grinned. “I didn't haul my ass back down there and put it on the line to drag out a corpse.” Tall and dark-haired, dressed in suede pants and a chocolate brown silk shirt, Hawkins—“Superman”—had draped himself with typical long-limbed elegance into one of the hospital's utilitarian armchairs. For being such a badass knuckle-dragger, he had a disconcerting habit of occasionally showing up looking like a GQ poster boy.
Quinn had tried to grin back, and failed. He'd hurt everywhere. His leg was in a brace, his face tight with the stitches below his eye, and his shoulder even tighter.
God, what a way to make a living.
Wait for the drop, and when it comes, steal Roper blind. That had b
een the Defense Department's directive to SDF. No rules, take everything you can get, any way you can get it. Quinn and Hawkins had been working together for four months, working as far inside Roper's criminal empire and as far outside the law as their pasts could take them—and Hawkins's past was good for five to ten on any given day of the week. Superman was so connected with Denver's underworld, the government guys they worked with sometimes wondered what side he was really on.
Christian Hawkins had made his reputation years ago with the high-profile murder of a senator's son in lower downtown. Hawkins hadn't offed the kid, but he'd gone to prison for it. That gave him more chops than most on the street and made him invaluable as an undercover asset for SDF when they were on home turf. When it came to Christian Hawkins, only a few very select friends knew he wasn't bad.
“How's your cover?” Quinn had asked, biting back a grimace of pain when he tried to turn his head. That had been his biggest concern after the rail yard fiasco, that Hawkins had finally blown his cover by coming to his rescue.
“It'll hold. It always holds.” Hawkins had shrugged. No problem.
Quinn hoped to hell it wasn't a problem. Roper Jones was the scum of the earth, but up until last year, he'd been strictly Chicago scum. Now he was moving out of drugs, bookies, extortion, and prostitution into international arms deals—or so government intelligence had reported.
General Grant, SDF's commanding officer at the Department of Defense, wanted to nail Jones's ass, preferably before the CIA got him, but all Quinn and Hawkins had found so far was a lot of dirty money, a little stolen jewelry, and a few kilos of Colombian cartel cocaine. It was enough to put Roper away, yeah, but not what Uncle Sam wanted. If there were exotic guns running through Denver, so far they hadn't been Roper Jones's guns.
There hadn't been any guns in the rail yard crates either, not unless they'd been packed inside plaster casts. The only other time Quinn had seen so much plaster had been the summer he'd spent jacketing dinosaur bones for Doc McKinney at Rabbit Valley. He could see right now that he was going to have to ask Dylan again what in the hell had been in those crates that was important enough to have almost gotten him killed. Dylan's original answer of “Nothing we're looking for” was starting to look bogus.