Loose Ends

by Tara Janzen

  He liked tough girls, even if she wasn’t tough enough to take him on.

  In a move so smooth she couldn’t have seen it coming, even if he’d told her what he was going to do, he took her gun the same way he’d taken her knife. A lot of guys could have done it, but not a lot of guys could have done it without hurting her.

  He didn’t want to hurt her.

  But he did want her out of his car. He checked the gun’s safety, put it in his jacket pocket, and then looked up into the rearview mirror again.

  “You’re running out of—” Oh, hell. The green Challenger had just turned the corner, two blocks back.

  He spun the wheel and popped Corinna’s clutch, getting back into traffic, and when he saw the gold GTO pulling up to the corner at Wynkoop and 15th ahead of him, he had only two words for Jane.

  “Buckle up.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Jack had spent four long days and three even longer nights up on the roof of the Bruso-Campbell Building formulating his plan, testing it out in his mind, going over it and over it, until he’d had all the kinks worked out—all the kinks, except this one.

  Geezus. He wouldn’t have had the balls for this kink, even if he had dreamed it up. Or maybe fantasized was the more accurate word, because, baby, this was as close to his favorite forbidden fantasy as he’d ever gotten, the fantasy that made him glad Con couldn’t read his mind, the one where he was plastered up against Scout, hip to groin, her long legs tangled with his, her bodacious breasts pressed against his chest, her beautiful, wondrous face so close he could have kissed her.

  And in another world, some alternate reality in a galaxy far, far away, he might have kissed her, but not here, with the Denver skyline falling away above them and twilight descending, sending shadows streaking across her face. They were jammed into a corner of Steele Street’s gothic freight cage with a red 1970 Chevelle with black racing stripes taking up most of the space and a good damn bit of the breathable air.

  He still had his arm around Scout’s waist from their drop over the side, and he was painfully aware of exactly how careful he was being to keep his touch impersonal, to keep from holding her the way he wanted to hold her, the way he needed to hold her.

  A hundred feet—that’s how much rappelling line he’d brought to the party, enough for them to drop six floors to the old freight elevator. There was no top to the cage, so he and Scout had landed right on the lift’s platform, where he’d planned to spend a couple of seconds unhooking the rope from his harness before they climbed down to the street. But two seconds had proven to be a second and a half too long. They’d no sooner landed than the garage door into the building had opened up and the Chevelle had roared in and come to a sudden, screeching halt.

  He and Scout had melted back into the shadows so fast, the guy in the car hadn’t noticed. He knew this because the guy in the car hadn’t gotten out and tried to shoot his ass. It was dark. They’d been on the near side of the lift, where none of the interior light reached, and they were now laminated together, squeezed behind a support beam in the corner off the car’s rear bumper, both of them being as damned invisible as they could get.

  They were good at it, with him mostly in black and gray and Scout about the same in a two-tone olive drab/charcoal gray T-shirt and a pair of gusseted dark cargo pants. Stillness, that was the key, and they’d both gone mannequin.

  Except Scout’s heart was racing, her breath coming fast and shallow, and she was shaking, a low-level trembling she couldn’t seem to control—but man, she’d nailed the escape without missing a beat.

  “Jack,” she whispered his name, and he gave a short nod, letting her know he’d heard her and was ready to receive whatever information she was ready to give.

  “Jack …” A short sob escaped her, and every cell in his body went on instant alert. This wasn’t about intel.

  When she sobbed again and her hand tightened on his waist, he instantly went into caveman mode, protecting what was his, pulling her in close, lamination-level close, and holding her tight. Scout crying?

  Fuck. What had those bastards done to her?

  They would die for it. He knew that damn much.

  “Scout? What happened?” He was thinking the worst, so help him God. “Whatever they did, baby, you’re safe now,” he whispered a promise he could keep. “I’m here. I’ve got you.”

  And she whacked him, a solid torso hit. “You’re never here. That’s the damn problem.”

  True, but geezus. He’d just blown up a building and thrown himself over the side of it for her.

  She hit him again, but it was halfhearted at best, and then she crumpled against him, holding him like she wasn’t ever going to let him go.

  Which would be damn fine by him. He’d been ready for her for a long time.

  Too ready.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Sorry I wasn’t with you in Paraguay. You and Con needed me, and I was—”

  “His name isn’t Con,” she broke in, her words harsh in his ear, her hands tightening on his waist.

  The news set Jack back on his heels—not that he hadn’t been expecting it for years. Hell, he’d been looking for the boss’s real name since the day they’d met.

  “What do you know?” he asked. If she had a name, everything changed.

  “He has a brother, here, at Steele Street, and a whole family, a father, aunts, uncles, cousins,” she said through her tears. “He has a past, Jack, and it’s here, in Denver.”

  Okay, that was great, really great, if it was true. All over the world, no matter the job at hand, the three of them had always been looking for clues to Con’s past, and maybe Scout had fallen into the mother lode. Maybe.

  “He was a Marine, like my dad, Recon.”

  And that explained a lot.

  “They told me his name is J. T. Chronopolous.”

  Geezus. For something they’d wanted for so long, the name was surprisingly hard to hear.

  “Sounds like you had a helluva eight weeks.”

  She nodded, still trembling.

  “Okay,” he said, moving ahead with the plan. “Let’s get out of here, and then we’ll figure out what to do.”

  She nodded again and, to his everlasting disappointment, pulled away. He wasn’t surprised. She got only about an inch of distance, but he felt every long millimeter of it.

  Yard after rattling creaking yard, the elevator ground its way down to the alley with the car rumbling and shaking. In all the diversionary tactics he and Con had gone over, there hadn’t been one that included a mass exodus of Steele Street’s classic muscle cars, but he noticed when, besides the Chevelle in the cage with them, another big-block monster, a midnight blue GTO, tore down the street. Moments later, another automotive street machine streaked past—the green 1971 Challenger the redhead had driven to the Quick Mart.

  So where was everybody going? he wondered. For reinforcements? Or was it total surrender, an out-and-out retreat?

  A small eternity of her silent tears later, they slid by the third floor, and he stifled an exasperated groan. The lift was taking for-fricking-ever, and he’d just about reached his maximum Scout Leesom saturation point, had about all he could take of breathing her in, of feeling her sadness and not being allowed to help. She owned the word “tomboy,” but she smelled like a girl, felt like a girl. Worst of all, when they were this close, even with that damn inch between them, she felt like his girl.

  And his girl was wound tight, the tension rolling off her in waves, and, more than likely, a boatload and a half of it was directed at him. There were a few things he didn’t know about her, like how she looked in a dress. But he knew how she felt about him: angry, day in and day out. It wore at him. The last time they’d been in the same room had been the day she and Con had come down to the Florida Keys to drag him back into the fold—his last great failed escape.

  What had that woman’s name been, the blonde’s? he wondered, watching a white 4 painted on the fourth-floor garage door s
lowly disappear above them.

  Ah, Maggie, it came to him. That was right.

  A big white numeral 3 slid into view, and the lift kept descending, and still neither of them moved.

  Well, Maggie didn’t know how close she’d come to finally getting him banished forever. Scout had been so tight-jawed furious with him. And all he’d been doing was trying to forget her.

  It never worked. Never.

  For a moment, no more, he closed his eyes and inhaled the scent of her hair, let it fill his senses, but he didn’t move. He didn’t spread his fingers wider across the small of her back. He didn’t pull her back in closer to him.

  Closer into love, closer into inevitable disaster.

  There was no winning, not here, not between them.

  He’d tried to forget her hundreds of times, thousands, sometimes with another woman, most times just with the sheer adrenaline rush of living as far out on the edge as he could get. So he took jobs even Con walked away from, and he took chances no sane man would hazard, and he did his damnedest not to cross her path.

  But here he was again, crossed every which way he could get and as close as he’d ever been.

  The freight cage rolled past the second-floor garage door with its big painted 2, and a heightened sense of readiness passed through Scout to him. He understood. He was ready, too. He couldn’t have her, but he could get her out of Steele Street and out of Denver.

  The elevator finally came to a grinding halt in the alley, and the Chevelle took off like a bat out of hell, all smoke and tires and rumbling exhaust. Scout was only half a second behind the car, bolting for the cage door, when he grabbed her and held her back.

  “Wait,” he said softly, his attention caught by a black Mercedes sedan slowly turning the corner up 19th at Wynkoop. The car was crawling along, making the rest of the traffic go around it. The back window was about a quarter of the way rolled down.

  He didn’t know the car, but he knew the pale blue gaze and the leonine head of white hair of the man in the backseat. Scout would, too. The mission room in Con’s flat in Bangkok was plastered with images of the man: Randolph Lancaster, the spymaster.

  Geezus Kee-rist. He tightened his grip on Scout and saw her shift her attention to the street and pick up on the Mercedes—and he felt her moment of recognition.

  The window rolled up, and the sedan pulled to the curb. A man got out, not Lancaster, but a real piece of work named Rick Karola. At least that was the name he went by now. Who knew what his name used to be? Not Con, and not Jack, but Jack would bet that Lancaster knew the guy’s former name, rank, serial number, and to the dollar what he’d been worth when the spymaster had chosen him to headline an Atlas Exports invoice.

  Things hadn’t gone so well on that deal, and Karola had ended up as a short-term memory lab rat with a storage capacity of about two weeks’ worth of current data, enough to get a job done. He was a big, blond, rawboned guy with a butch haircut wearing a light gray suit. His eyes always had a certain vacancy in them, but he was supremely tough, hard as nails, and Lancaster held his leash. Jack had gone up against him twice, but being as how the last time had been over a year ago, odds were that old Rick wouldn’t remember him, the poor slob.

  But there was no sense in pushing his luck.

  “Come on,” he said, moving Scout forward, his hand still around her arm. They needed to get out of the alley and away from Steele Street as quickly as possible. Even with all those cars leaving, there were still people in the building who would want Scout back and his head on a pike. The unexpected, unprecedented addition of Lancaster and his goons to the party made it even more imperative that he and Scout exfiltrate inmediatamente.

  Geezus. Lancaster out in the open. Jack could see his and Con’s original plan of getting on a plane to Paraguay going up in smoke. This was a rare and golden opportunity for some major mayhem, for final justice. Con’s personal hit list of some of the worst scum on the planet had been whittled down over the last few years. Tony Royce, an ex-CIA spook Con remembered showing up at Dr. Souk’s Bangkok lab and spending way too much time staring at him and Garrett Leesom like they were rats in a cage, was dead. Erich Warner, the obscenely wealthy, psycho German underworld drug dealer who’d bankrolled Dr. Souk’s experiments, and his bitch-girl bodyguard, Shoko, were dead. The demented Dr. Souk was deader than a doornail, his brains blown out by someone in Washington, D.C., which left Randolph Lancaster as the last loose end. The whole twisted, evil enterprise named LeedTech would disintegrate without Lancaster at its head.

  And then maybe Con could rest. He needed it, especially if Scout’s intel turned out to be true. Everything would change then. Jack knew Scout had been on the boss’s case to slow down, to back off the mission a bit, maybe even take on an extra operator. But she was wrong. An extra operator wasn’t going to turn this trick, and Con wasn’t about to slow down or back off while Randolph Lancaster was doing his dirty deeds. No matter what he needed, the boss knew what he had to do: Step up and move fast before everything unraveled.

  Because, baby, things were unraveling, and nothing faster than Con. Geezus. Jack saw it, had been seeing it for a while, and maybe that was another reason he’d been on the run.

  Maybe he didn’t want to be there when the end came.

  Maybe he didn’t want to watch it happen and know there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to stop it—no grand heroics, no last-minute coming to the rescue.

  No way to watch Scout’s heart break.

  So he’d been steering clear, keeping busy, and staying as far away as he could get—until these Steele Street boys had taken her.

  Hell. He was back in now, deeper than he’d ever been, because there was no walking away after seeing Lancaster on the street. Even with Dr. Souk dead, the bastard was still running his LeedTech enterprise, using a knockoff lab in Bangkok and, from what Jack and Con had been hearing these last few months, coming up with some pretty weird stuff, altered warriors who made Karola’s life look like a cakewalk.

  He needed to be stopped.

  The minute he and Scout were out of the cage, she moved away from him, which was to be expected, but it still demoralized him, like he needed more of that. He turned away from Karola, keeping a steady walking pace—until a man stepped into the other end of the alley.

  He and Scout both ambled to a stop, and he reached down and took a pack of cigarettes out of a cargo pocket on his pants. After knocking one a little ways out of the pack, he offered it to her and produced a lighter out of his other pocket.

  “Sam Walls,” she said, wiping the tears off her face before taking the cigarette and bending over his hand for a light.

  She was right.

  Sam Walls, lowest of the low, another lab reject Lancaster had taken into his personal stable of wetwork wonders. This guy had been around for a long time. Despite his muscular build, the man had a squirrelly look about him, his dark hair a little long, a little greasy, his nose too thin, his jaw too weak. Sam had a great memory and a bum leg he’d gotten during some reconstruction work in Bangkok that hadn’t gone his way. It made him slow but not stupid, whereas Karola was stupid but not slow.

  They made a helluva team.

  So did he and Scout.

  “Karola,” she said, and even without the question being spoken, he agreed. Of the two assholes moving in on the alley, he’d rather take on Karola.

  “You want to be my drunk girlfriend?” he asked softly.

  Her answer was to stumble and lean into him.

  “You som-va-va-bitch!” she yelled, and let fly with one of her fists.

  He grabbed her close, and caught her fist before she could land a good blow.

  “All right, all right,” he said, annoyed as hell and making sure not to keep his voice down. “You wanna drink yourself sick and throw up all over yourself, fine. Do it. But not on my dime, babe.”

  “Not your babe!” She dropped her cigarette and swung at him again, and with all the visible disgust he could muster, he st
arted hustling her back the other way, heading toward Rick Karola.

  “The hell you’re not,” he said, lengthening his stride and half lifting her off her feet to make sure she kept up. “I own you, babe, and you’re going home.”

  “Not your babe!” She tried to pull away, and he jerked her in even closer.

  There were people on both sides of the street ahead of them, filling the sidewalks, and plenty of traffic, and Jack didn’t hesitate to call out.

  “Tommy!” he hollered, lifting his free hand to wave, his gaze focused past Rick Karola, out of the alley, while still keeping the guy in sight. “Joe! Hey, guys! Wait up!”

  Coming off the sidewalk and heading into the alley, Karola angled himself toward the opposite side of where Jack and Scout were walking out. Jack would have done exactly the same thing. The last thing a guy with a job to do needed was to get involved with a couple of drunks stumbling along having a domestic dispute, especially if they had friends, also possibly drunk, hanging in the wings. It wasn’t an insurmountable mess, if one of the drunks was your target. If they weren’t, it was just a mess.

  Jack had a gray Buick Regal parked in a garage two blocks over, and the plan had been to head to the rally point, the Star Motel in one of the northern suburbs, where they’d meet up with Con and the three of them would wait out the night. The flight to Paraguay left at seven a.m.

  Lancaster changed all that.

  He and Scout needed to light somewhere long enough to contact Con and come up with a new plan and see what the boss wanted to do with her intel.

  “Karola!” he heard Walls yell behind them, from the far end of the alley. “It’s fucking Traeger and the girl! Stop them! Wake up, man!”

  Too late.

  Scout was already breaking into a run, and even with crowds of people in her way, she’d be impossible to catch. The girl was quick, and Jack was right behind her, guarding her six.

  At the end of the block, they rounded the corner, and Jack tagged her on the shoulder. She understood and ducked into the next doorway, a coffee shop Jack knew had a helluva double-shot latte and a small courtyard out back with a gate opening onto a private parking lot for some high-end condos. The alley driveway into the lot emptied out onto Wynkoop Street.