Loose Ends

by Tara Janzen

  He heard her swear softly under her breath, the shock hitting home, but it took her less than a moment to rally, her voice growing hard.

  “All the more reason to pick up Crutchfield, Dylan, and you know it.”

  “And Kid is on it. He’s already at O’Shaunessy’s, but I need you here.” About another ten seconds and she was going to have him on his knees.

  “Dylan, my job is going up against bad guys. It’s what I do, and I—”

  He heard the insistence building in her voice, and he cut her off.

  “This isn’t about you, Skeeter,” he said. “It’s about me, and I need you here. If we lose Crutchfield, we’ll get him another day. If I lose you …” He couldn’t even say it.

  Thank God, she didn’t make him.

  “I’m turning around now.”

  “Good.” That was good. Very good. Now he could breathe.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  She’d shot him, the bitch. Shot him clean through the meaty part of his upper arm, in one side and out the other. Her next shot had grazed him, and the last had gone wide of its mark, but the bitch had hit him solid with her first bullet.

  It was a new dynamic, a woman with a gun, unexpected, most unwelcome. Worse, it had been one helluva shot, at fifteen yards, with him on the run and moving in on her fast and low. She wouldn’t be an easy catch, but he would catch her, and her helluva shot was going to cost her. She could have died fast and clean, but now she’d added to his pain, and he was vengefully angry.

  She would pay for his blood with her blood.

  It was justice.

  They both would pay, her and Farrel. The Bangkok beast had taken her from Monk, interfered in the kill, and sealed his doom. His death would not be a simple one, either.

  Monk cowered deeper into the trash and boxes behind the grocery store and tore off one of his sleeves to bind his wounds and stanch the flow of blood. Million-dollar blood is what Dr. Patterson had called it, and Monk couldn’t afford to lose it. MNK-1 had been worth a million dollars on the open market, all because of the chemically enhanced brew pumping through his veins and transforming him.

  Four months, that’s how long he’d been with Patterson in Bangkok, four months of being on and off a gurney while they’d injected him and transfused him and genetically cut away at little parts of him and added other parts for their experiments and their controls.

  And then Lancaster had come and gone, all in less than a single afternoon. Monk hadn’t had a chance to prove himself—until now.

  Farrel had the woman, and if Farrel was anything like Monk, there’d be damn little of her left by morning, nothing left for him.

  He felt a howl rising in his throat, raging to be released, but he held it in, tamped it down, and swallowed his pain, subsuming it with another need. More cops had arrived. They were cruising the streets and heading into the alleyway and parking lots, looking for him.

  They wouldn’t find him.

  With the sleeve tight around his arm, he worked his way to the edge of the grocery store’s loading dock and levered himself up onto the platform. From there, he climbed to the roof. A giant cottonwood tree overhung the gable behind the neon sign proclaiming Bagger’s Market to the world, and, grabbing hold of the biggest limb, he swung himself out and upward into the branches. It was easy from there to make it to the next tree, and, high up in the heart of that cottonwood, he settled in to wait. The ground was crawling with cops and cars now. They were killing him with their lights and sirens.

  They’d come in from both ends, east and west, and were everywhere, like the bits and pieces of trash littering the area. If she hadn’t shot him, he might have made it out of the cordon. He’d lost precious seconds taking the hit and tying up his wound—the bitch.

  He dug in his pocket for more silver gelcaps. Dr. Patterson had given them to him along with the glasses to help mitigate his searing sensitivity, and they worked—to a point. Huddled in the treetops, he breathed into the pain, his eyes squeezed shut, his hands over the glasses. Patterson had promised him new eyes, and if Monk had let him live, he might have gotten them. Except by then the die had been cast. Patterson would have as soon destroyed him as helped him.

  No. There had been no other choice. He’d had to kill Patterson, and he had to suffer now, but soon he would slay the bastard Farrel and take his remains to Lancaster—lay them at his master’s feet, and thus he would be welcomed home. Lancaster had the resources and the men to fix Patterson’s mistakes. Monk would be the whole, pure soldier he was meant to be.

  It wouldn’t be long now.

  Geezus. Con jerked Jane to a halt at the edge of the alleyway and pulled her back into the shadows with him. His heart was pounding, his pulse racing, and it pissed him off. If he was going down, he couldn’t afford to go down tonight, not in this damn alley.

  He reached in his pocket and pulled out a handful of pills. La vida loca, crazy, crazy frickin’ life, living on gelcaps and justice, or at least his version of it.

  He popped another blue gelcap in his mouth, hoped it damn well worked this time, and shoved the rest of the pills back in his pocket.

  Out on the street, a cop car roared up and came to a screeching halt. Then another did the same, with both sets of policemen quickly getting out of their vehicles—and he had to wonder what in the hell was going on. These guys were on the hunt, with more police coming in from every direction. Why?

  Two thugs on the losing end of a fight in an alley did not warrant this kind of law enforcement reaction. Even with gunfire involved, it seemed excessive. Or maybe he’d just been living in the Third World for too long.

  He and Jane were in a narrow walkway between an Italian restaurant and a club bar, and people were starting to come out of both buildings, wanting to see what all the excitement was about.

  He turned toward her and refrained from a weary curse. He wasn’t doing a very good job of taking care of her—or of getting rid of her. It had stopped raining, but the air was still damp, and she was shaking like a leaf.

  “Put your pistol back in your purse,” he said. “Are you cold?”

  “N-no.” Which only left option B—her being damned scared, and more than a little roughed up.

  Scraped knee, scratches on her arms and face, torn dress, and her jacket long gone back at Mama’s, and she was still exquisite, still looking like a woodland sprite, if Gucci had taken to designing woodland sprites this year.

  “Here,” he said, taking her arm and pulling her closer. “Lift your face, let me look at you.” He knew what he looked like. He was a rough-and-tumble, ready-to-wear type of guy with a knife wound in his side and blood running down his leg. Luckily, he was wearing dark jeans.

  She, on the other hand, needed some straightening up and some calming down if they were going to stroll into the crowd on the sidewalk without every cop on the block noticing that the beautiful girl in the gold dress looked like she’d been dragged through the alley backward.

  All they had to do was get across the street, into the neighborhood of old houses, and they could disappear.

  She tilted her chin up, and he combed through her hair with his fingers, getting a couple of the tangles and a few twigs and leaves out.

  Lovers.

  They’d been lovers, and he’d let her go. It didn’t make sense.

  He smoothed his thumb over the satiny skin of her cheek. “Why did I leave you?” He really needed to know.

  “W-work,” she said. “You had a job to do.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “With the Army. You told me once that your boss was a general.”

  In the big picture, that made perfect sense. Even without his memories, he’d known he was a soldier. All his skills, all his technical knowledge was tactical and weapons-based.

  Pulling up the edge of his T-shirt, he gently wiped the scratches on her face. She was a mess, her teeth chattering, the look in her eyes a distressed clash of confusion and fear.

  “I-I sh-shot
it,” she said, her voice trembling right along with the rest of her.

  “Shot what?” He went ahead and straightened her dress, but it had gotten torn again, and there was only so much he could do with it. So he rearranged the buckle on her belt to front and center and hoped no one would notice her clothes were a little topsy-turvy. She still had all her jungle bangles on her wrist, so that was good, and throughout it all, she’d kept a death grip on her zebra-striped purse.

  “I-I sh-shot that … that—that thing back there,” she said, her breath still not quite caught.

  He looked down at her for an instant more, then looked over her head to where they’d just come from.

  “What kind of thing?” He searched the shadows again for any movement other than the cops, who were moving everywhere. Geezus. They needed to get out of here.

  He checked the sidewalk to see if there was enough cover yet.

  “A-a ghost …”

  No.

  He didn’t think so.

  He didn’t know what she’d been shooting at, but he was pretty darn sure it hadn’t been a ghost.

  “… and I h-hit it … h-hit it hard,” she said. “My last shot might have missed, but I’m dead-on about my first one … d-dead-on, and it hit.”

  “Good,” he said, and gave her arm a quick, supportive squeeze, bucking her up, letting her know he was with her, proud of her. Hitting what you were shooting at was always good.

  Always. Though technically, he didn’t think nailing a ghost with a .380 did much actual damage. Geezus.

  “I-I shouldn’t have run. I sh-shouldn’t have left Mama’s.”

  No. She shouldn’t have run.

  “You would have been safer with the police,” he agreed, which was exactly what he’d told her, which he wasn’t going to mention, but if she’d done as he’d suggested—okay, ordered her to do—she wouldn’t have ended up blasting away at something in the alley—probably a rat, or a muskrat, or a raccoon, and he hoped to hell not a homeless person. Any one of those was enough to spook somebody.

  Not really.

  They were enough to spook a high-end girl who looked like she’d spent half her life getting a pedicure and the other half getting a shiatsu massage, no matter how good a shot she’d turned out to be at Mama’s.

  And hell, if it had been a homeless person, at least there were enough cops congregating back there to find him and give aid.

  “You d-didn’t do that, did you? To King and Rock. You d-didn’t tear them up like … like that, right?” she asked, dragging her hand back through her hair, tangling it all up again, her gaze locked onto him like she was trying to think and figure things out and wasn’t having much luck doing either.

  Yeah, they made a helluva pair. He was spiking at about a hundred and three degrees now, and she looked like she’d been hit by a Mack truck.

  “It was self-defense, Jane. You saw the whole thing,” he said, trying again with her hair, lowering her hand away and sifting through the new tangle. “There were witnesses. Everyone in the kitchen saw what went down. You wouldn’t have been charged with anything if you’d stayed.” He didn’t know much, but he knew that.

  “No.” She shook her head. “N-no, no, it’s worse, the two of them all broken up, so broken it’s awful, and the cops know me, from way back.”

  Well, yes, he’d busted those boys pretty hard, and so had she, but it was the “way back” part of her statement that got his attention.

  “I-I couldn’t stay,” she kept on. “I c-couldn’t take the chance … and … and—” She gulped in a breath and brought her hand up to cover her eyes—and she stood there and trembled.

  He was headed there himself, out-and-out trembling territory, headed toward the shakes, and if things didn’t go his way with that second blue pill, maybe there was a seizure of some god-awful sort in his near future—very near future.

  Hell. He looked back to the sidewalk and the people coming out of the bar and the Italian place. About another thirty seconds or so and there’d be enough folks outside for him and Jane to step into the crowd and make their getaway.

  Shifting his attention back to her, it took a lot of what he had not to just pull her close, lift her up into his arms, and carry her away from this mess—but that would definitely get the cops’ attention.

  “Did you do time?”

  He wasn’t going to ask himself why that was the first question that came to mind, except for some odd little inflection in her voice telling him it wasn’t nearly as incomprehensible as he was going to wish it was, and when she just stood there, silent and trembling, with her hand still over her face, he knew it was true.

  Perfect. He’d entered the country under a name he’d made up himself six years ago, and so far he’d illegally accessed a building and set off a few explosive devices. He’d stolen a car, easily committed a hundred or more traffic violations, kidnapped a woman, trespassed on all kinds of private property and damaged most of it, was knee-deep in assault and battery—and out of half a million people in Denver, he’d hooked up with a felon.

  Somehow, somewhere, he couldn’t help but think that there had been a time when he’d spent most of his life on the right side of the law—just one more thing he’d lost, his legal bearings.

  Hell.

  “Cañon City?” he asked, flat-out curious and figuring if she’d been sent up to Super Max in Florence, she’d still be behind bars.

  “N-no.” She shook her head. “The Immaculate Heart School for Young Women … in Phoenix.”

  He looked down at her, more than a little nonplussed. The Immaculate Heart School for Young Women? That wasn’t exactly his idea of a lockup.

  “What did you do? Steal the Communion wine?”

  She shook her head again. “I … I killed a man,” she said, her voice barely audible. “Back when I was a kid. A gangbanger junkie over on Blake, me and Sandman. The cops haven’t forgotten. They never forget.”

  Yeah, well, so now it was official. She’d shocked the hell out of him.

  And geezus. She was right, cops didn’t forget murder.

  And yes, he was damn sorry he’d busted King and Rock so hard that she seemed to have gone into damn near instant posttraumatic stress disorder. And for the record, who in the hell was Sandman?

  He had about a hundred questions, and not a one of them relevant to the mission at hand. She wasn’t his problem. Scout was the reason he’d come to Denver, and Lancaster was the reason he was going to stay until the job was done. Everything always came back to Lancaster—not to waiflike beauties with sketchy pasts who had somehow fallen into the middle of his deal and locked on to him like a heat-seeking missile.

  “The junkie grabbed one of my kids, thinking we had drugs on us,” she said, going on, explaining something that didn’t need an explanation. In his book, gangs and junkies and trouble went together like peanut butter and jelly—and, yeah, sometimes he wondered what that made him, with his stash of Souk’s magic elixirs.

  Hell.

  “It all went bad so fast,” she said. “There was a fight. He had his hands around my throat, shaking me hard, and I sh-shot him. Hawkins is the only reason I didn’t get tossed into the state pen.”

  He could see it, some damn junkie trying to literally shake down a teenage girl for cash, or drugs, or whatever, and he wished to hell he’d been there. At least this Hawkins guy had saved her from going to jail. One more thing Con owed him for—and then the craziness of the thought hit him.

  Christ. He was in trouble here.

  “I … I thought he was going to kill me, the junkie, and he probably would have, but the cops still wanted to lock me up, because I was a street kid,” she said. “You know how it is with street kids. They’re always in the wrong place, because they’ve got no place else to go.”

  Yeah. He knew that much. He’d seen them all over the world, but he’d never in all his life seen one even half as beautiful as her.

  “T-tell me,” she said. “Tell me you didn’t d-do it.�
�� She lifted her head, and her gaze met his straight on, unflinching, and in that instant, something changed.

  He didn’t know what “it” he hadn’t done, but with a sudden clarity of awareness unlike anything he’d felt in the last six years, he saw beyond the moment. He saw beyond her past, beyond the pale green allure of her eyes and the smoky smudge of her makeup, beyond her intelligence and her dead-on marksmanship. Here in the darkened alleyway, with her so close, he saw something else in her eyes and in her face, and it changed everything.

  He knew her.

  Really knew her.

  In the shadows, scraped and roughed up with her hair in tangles and her clothes askew, with the scar on her cheek and the freckles across her nose, he recognized her, the waif, the renegade, the street runner. He didn’t remember being her lover, but he remembered her hanging around the place on Steele Street, waiting and watching for him, and remembered fantasizing about her, the street kid with the intense green eyes, the stringy hair, and the wildly beautiful face. He remembered he’d been a soldier, and she’d been eighteen, too damn young and too damn skittish, a fascinating, feral creature of the streets, living off her wits and her skills.

  A pickpocket. The best Denver had ever seen.

  The thought no sooner hit than he swore: Sonuvabitch.

  He reached back for his wallet and felt the empty pocket, and he didn’t know whether to curse again or grin.

  She was good. Always had been.

  Oh, yeah. She was damn good, and he’d been completely spun up, mesmerized, staring into her incredible green eyes and not even noticing that when she’d stopped on the street and reached for him, she’d been stealing his wallet. She’d had about three seconds to recognize him, come up with a plan, and execute the lift.

  And she’d pulled it off.

  “Can I have my wallet back?” he asked, and after a slight hesitation, she shook her head.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “I lost it in the garage.”

  Well, she hadn’t denied it, and at least now he had a pretty good idea of how SDF had found the Star Motel, but he was still a little confused on one point.