by Tara Janzen
Sometimes he wondered if either of them would survive the trip she was on.
“I’d sure take a piece of that,” the man at the table continued, his voice hoarse in a way Travis understood only too well—which did nothing to improve his mood.
“Forget it,” another guy said. “That one would just as soon gut you as fu—”
Travis reached back, grabbed the last man by the scruff of his collar, and hauled him around until they were face to face.
“Don’t,” he said, very clearly, very succinctly, and very, very calmly. Rising from his barstool, he pulled the guy’s face even closer to his. “Don’t say it. Don’t think it.”
Fear flashed through the man’s eyes, and Travis understood that, too. It had been a hard two years since the night Red Dog had lost her first life and started on her second, and those two years, on the front line with Special Defense Force, a group of black ops warriors based in Denver, Colorado, had changed him. Only one person ever mistook him for anything close to an angel anymore.
Letting go of the man’s shirt, he started toward the end of the bar and the woman standing there, waiting for him.
Gillian Pentycote—that had been her name before Dr. Souk, a maniacal physician in the employ of a drug lord, had shot her full of an experimental “truth serum” called NG4 and stolen her memory. By the time Travis and his friend Skeeter B. Hart had gotten to her, there had been nothing left but her screams and four images burned into her brain—only four.
His steps faltered for the barest fraction of a second, less than a heartbeat’s worth of pause. Walking on, he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
The faces of the two men who had hurt her were half of her short-changed memory bank: Dr. Souk, his dark and dirty hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and open-mouthed death shock when Travis’s .45 caliber slug had punched a hole in his chest—a memory Travis wouldn’t wish on anybody, let alone a woman, even one with Red Dog’s resume; and Tony Royce, the CIA agent gone bad who had set her up for the torture she’d endured strapped into Souk’s dental chair.
Tony Royce, whose face Skeeter had cut open with her knife.
Tony Royce, who had escaped that night and disappeared.
Tony Royce, who Red Dog hunted with a vengeance born of desperation.
It was her desperation that kept Travis always on edge. She was a gun for hire. She went to bad places and did bad things to bad people, and so far, every time she’d come back to him. But time was running out. He felt it with each passing day, with each mission she survived. He felt it when they worked together, and he felt it when she went out without him, like she had this time.
“You’re late,” he said, coming to a stop in front of her and taking hold of her arm. Contact, that’s what he needed, physical contact.
“Things came up.” The huskiness of her voice told him how tired she was, how run down.
“Four days late.” He tried to keep the frustration out of his words, and failed.
“El Salvador is kind of a long ways away.” She ran her hand back through her short auburn hair, sending a little more of it sticking up on end. She was a wild girl, the wildest.
El Salvador?
“The mission was in Panama,” he said, his jaw tight. Fucking El Salvador?
“I took a side trip.”
Which was the last goddamn thing he wanted to hear. Her “side trips” only had one motivation—Tony Royce.
“What did you find?”
“Nothing. It was a rumor.”
And that was a lie. He could tell by the way she avoided meeting his eyes.
He tightened his hold on her. He wanted the truth. He needed to know, but she never gave him what he wanted, and barely gave him what he needed. She had a head full of bits and pieces, and that’s all she ever offered of herself—except in bed.
Geezus.
Sex wasn’t love, though, and it wasn’t trust, and though he didn’t know a damn thing about love anymore—and in retrospect doubted if he ever had—he did know about trust—and he wanted hers. It was the only way he could ever keep her safe.
She’d been laying a trap for Royce since she’d walked out of rehab, and any day, the bastard was going to catch the scent and come after her. It was what she hoped for, what she prayed for, that the man who had stood over Gillian Pentycote and watched her lose her mind would come for the woman she’d become. That Royce would come for Red Dog.
It was all she wanted, and the only thing he feared—that Royce would find her somewhere, sometime, someplace when he wasn’t by her side. Some goddamn place like El Salvador.
A moment passed. Then she lifted her gaze to his, and looking down into her eyes, he suddenly didn’t give a damn if she lied, and he didn’t care that she pushed him hard and kept him on edge. Tonight, she was back. She was safe. And even if she didn’t know who she was, she knew she was his.
“Take me home, Angel,” she whispered, closing her hand around his shirt and leaning against him, tearing him up and turning him on at the same time. “I’m tired. The Panama deal, it was rough.”
Angel—that was her third memory, the way Skeeter had described him to her. And she remembered his face, the face of the man who had made love to her that night, before she’d been abducted, before Souk had injected her—before her life had taken a sharp left into hell.
Take me home.
It was the one thing he could do—take her home…and take her.
Still holding onto her arm, he turned her around and started for the door, but she stopped after two strides and looked up at him again.
“Don’t you have something for me?” she asked. She always asked, and he always had something for her, whatever she wanted.
But he knew what she meant, and he reached into the front pocket of his jeans. Inch by soft silky inch, he pulled out a scrap of black lace.
“A new bra?” She reached for the small piece of lingerie.
“No, baby. Panties.” Super-short, boy-cut underwear, the bit of stretchy lace would sit low on her hips and curve up over her ass, leaving a lot of bare bottom for his profound personal enjoyment—and she thought he bought the stuff for her.
Yeah. Right.
With a smile that damn near slayed him on the spot, she took the underwear and shoved it into her own pocket. “I hope they fit.”
They fit. He knew the shape of her body better than he knew his own. Their relationship was very “hands on”—his hands on her, and his hands were the only hands on her, ever. Nobody touched Red Dog except him, not even her mother, which broke the woman’s heart, the way everything that had happened to her daughter broke Lydia Shore’s heart—especially what her daughter had become.
Mercenary. Contractor. Whatever anyone called it, the job was the same. A week ago in Thailand, he’d heard the word assassin connected to her name, along with a price tag that guaranteed Gillian could provide for herself in whatever manner she chose, for as long as she chose to stay in business.
Assassin? Maybe. Unsung hero, just as likely, especially considering the kind of men Red Dog took down. It was all a matter of semantics and point of view. There wasn’t an SDF operator at Steele Street or a combat soldier in the employ of Uncle Sam who hadn’t been tagged an assassin by somebody, somewhere. But Red Dog wasn’t an SDF operator or a U.S. soldier. By most standards, she was unemployable, except in the niche Christian Hawkins and Kid Chaos had trained her to fill.
Sometimes lately, Travis wondered what in the hell Superman and the Boy Wonder had been thinking, but in the beginning, he’d understood what they were doing only too well. She’d been so lost when she’d first come out of her drug-induced coma, so detached. Hawkins had given her something to hold onto: physical training. Her memories were gone, but she was alive. Her body worked, so Superman had worked her hard, made her fight for herself. Then Hawkins had given her to Kid, and Kid had taken her to a Department of Defense—DOD—remote training camp high in the Rocky Mountains and taught her how to fight for her country
.
Panama had been the seventh job she’d taken that hadn’t included him—and it was her last. He was finished with not knowing where in the hell she was, or what in the hell she was doing, or even if she was alive. Nothing felt right, not when she was out on her own.
And then to disappear off the face of the earth—well, hell, that was way more than he had the strength to endure anymore, especially when he was in goddamn Thailand, thousands of miles away.
It was General Grant himself who had hired her to work with C. Smith Rydell in Panama, the newest member of the SDF team, and it was Grant who had called Hawkins and congratulated him on his protégé’s latest successful mission. So if everything had gone so well and the job was finished, Hawkins had wondered, why in the hell hadn’t she come home?
Travis had wondered the same damn thing when Superman had called him, and by nightfall he’d been on a plane home.
Fuck. Four days—that’s how much time had passed between when she’d left Smith in Panama City and when she’d checked in with Hawkins and told him she was headed back to Denver. Four days—plenty of time for her to have gotten herself into more trouble than she could handle.
Going to El Salvador. Alone.
He needed to clip her wings, lock her in, tie her down, whatever it took to keep her in his sight. The DOD didn’t give a damn if she lived or died, as long as she accomplished her missions, but he cared—too much.
Sliding his hand to her waist, he started toward the door again. Beck’s Back Alley Bar was in an industrial section of north Denver called Commerce City, tucked between the refineries and the factories on a strip of street eight blocks west of the Steele Street Commerce City garage. The garage was an annex to the SDF headquarters in LoDo, the only place in Denver with enough security to suit him. Hawkins and the boss of SDF, Dylan Hart, had both offered Gillian one of the upper floor lofts at Steele Street, but the bad girl wasn’t looking for security. She didn’t want to be hard to find.
Quite the opposite, and it unnerved the hell out of him.
“Give me your keys,” he said, opening the door for her and heading toward the 1967 Pontiac GTO parked in front of the bar. Chrome bumpers, bright trim, and six coats of wet-sanded and polished Signet Gold paint gleamed in the summer sunlight of late afternoon. Coralie was her name, Corinna’s sister, and with a 360-horse Ram Air 400 under the hood and a four speed Muncie on deck, she was as bad as the girl who drove her.
He unlocked the car and handed Gillian in before giving back the keys.
“Straight home?” He wanted to make sure.
“Straight.” She nodded, sliding into the butter-soft, custom black leather interior.
“Five minutes, then.” It shouldn’t take more, not in Coralie, but he never took anything for granted, not with her.
“Two, if we blow the lights,” she said, glancing back up at him.
He grinned and shook his head.
“Not on my watch, babe. Five minutes.” He turned and headed toward his Jeep.
Behind him, he heard the GTO start up, the deep rumbling purr of her engine and headers echoing in the back alley. Coralie had been a gift to Gillian from Dylan, a classic piece of muscle for the woman they’d all been too late to save. The boss had been the target that night, not a sweet faced, tousle-haired, thirty-year-old “wannabe” assistant trying to work her way up the ladder in General Grant’s office.
She still had a sweet face, sweetly exotic, except when seen from the bore end of an M40 rifle or her TC Contender single shot pistol. “Sweet” wasn’t the word that came to mind in those situations. She had a Glock 17 long slide reworked to a .40 Smith and Wesson in her fanny pack, and a seven-inch Recon Tanto sheathed in her boot—razor sharp. He’d seen the clip of her folding knife hooked over her pants pocket. He knew if he looked, he’d find a 12-gauge tactical shotgun under Coralie’s front seat, a flat black beauty called Nightshade that Gillian kept loaded with double-ought buck and rifled slugs.
Two knives, a shotgun, and a semiautomatic pistol, just to visit the neighborhood bar. Nobody touched Red Dog. No man could get a hand on her, not on his own.
But Royce wouldn’t be alone when he came. The ex-CIA agent had recruited a dozen of the most notorious mercenaries operating on the international scene to headline his underworld organization, every one of them a hardened criminal, the kind of men who would kill each other for the right price. The DOD had dubbed them the Damn Dirty Dozen, and they were on wanted lists from London to Laos, their reputations the stuff of people’s nightmares.
Travis knew each of them by name, face, and rap sheet. He’d made it his business to know, and if Tony Royce had moved into El Salvador, they’d been there with him—with Red Dog not nearly far enough behind.
She was going to get herself killed, unless he got to Royce before Royce got to her—so he hunted. He followed the mercs, he followed the money, he followed the deals, always looking for the man who stayed hidden behind it all—Tony Royce. Two weeks ago, a source had pinpointed the former government agent in Bangkok. But when he and Kid had gotten to Thailand the trail had been cold, and it had stayed cold—until now.
Gillian was wrong. El Salvador wasn’t far away, not at all. Travis would be there in a matter of hours.
Rounding the tail end of his Jeep, he glanced down at his license plate—SRCHN4U—and a brief smile twisted his lips. He’d spent his whole life searching for something—the astral plane, the perfect meditation, the solution for other people’s problems—but nothing had ever compelled him with more deadly and serious intent than the search for the man who had destroyed Gillian Pentycote’s mind and turned her into a highly professional, highly paid covert operator who only knew herself by the code name Red Dog.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tara Janzen lives in Colorado with her husband, children, and two dogs, and is now at work on her next novel. Of the mind that love truly is what makes the world go ’round, she can be contacted at www.tarajanzen.com. Happy reading!
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A Dell Book / July 2006
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2006 by Tara Janzen
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Dell is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
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www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-440-33615-0
v3.0