Cutting Loose

by Tara Janzen

  She slid the light from her flashlight down both sides of the next intersection of byways, and chose to go right for no special reason. She’d given up on reasoning her way out of here. The one thing she was good at hadn’t been doing her any good.

  No, sirree. No safety inspector was going to save her down here. There was only her in these damn tunnels, lost and all alone. Just her—and oh, my god. What was that?

  She turned her head to the left, listening. She’d heard something, some faint echo. She took a step to the left, then another, and she heard it again—street noise. Honest-to-God street noise. If she could find where it was coming from, and if there was any kind of an opening, she would be saved.

  By her watch, it took her another half an hour, not because of the distance, but because of the labyrinth of tunnels she had to negotiate to close the distance between her and where the street noise originated, where it had penetrated into the underground world below Denver. When she felt fresh air, she knew everything was going to be okay.

  Propelled by sheer relief, she picked up her pace, moving faster, splashing her way through the tunnel streams, following the fresh air and the increasing noise. Her flashlight beam careened off the walls with her uneven gait over the piles of debris in the tunnels—until she came to a sudden stop.

  The air was strong where she stood. She could actually feel it blowing against her cheeks, and the noise was pure, no echo, as if she could almost reach out and touch it. But there was something else, something at the edge of her sight that had stopped her cold.

  She lifted her flashlight higher, and—oh, my god.

  A dead body was piled in a heap on the tunnel floor.

  A less smart girl would have run screaming in the other direction and gotten herself lost all over again. Cherie moved forward, and when she saw blood running down the man’s arm and pooling in the upward curve of his palm, she moved even faster.

  Oh, my god. She dropped to her knees beside him. He was still breathing. He had short dark hair and a long-healed scar running down the side of his face, and was wearing expensive clothes. She put her hands on him, one touching his shoulder, the other feeling his brow. He was alive.

  “Oh, geez. Okay. I’m going to get help.” She’d hardly been able to help herself. “Just hang in there, okay?” God, that sounded so lame.

  She looked around, sliding the light from her flashlight along the walls—and then she saw it, an old ladder bolted to the side of the tunnel. She tilted her flashlight up. Her way out was at the top of the ladder, but she couldn’t leave the man. She needed help.

  Grabbing her cell out of her pocket, she was about to dial, when she heard footsteps coming her way. Oh, God. She froze where she was, hoping whoever had hurt the man wasn’t coming back to finish him off. Just the thought was enough to get her to her feet, ready to run if she needed to run, while her fingers raced over the phone’s touch pad. Then a figure came into view, and she felt a wave of relief so huge, it almost swamped her.

  “Gillian.” She breathed the name.

  Instead of saying anything, though, Gillian raised her finger to her lips and shook her head. Then she pointed up.

  Cherie looked in that direction, and heard the sound of voices mixed with the car noises coming from the street.

  Silently, Gillian knelt by the man and slid the beam of her flashlight over his face. She didn’t look at him for more than three seconds before she rose to her feet.

  That’s when Cherie noticed the other person with her—Gabriel Shore. Like Gillian, he was being very quiet. Unlike Gillian, when he knelt by the man, he started checking him for injuries.

  Red Dog stood perfectly still and listened for a moment, her gaze angled up toward the street, then she slid up the ladder like a snake and disappeared from view.

  Cherie’s heart was pounding. Something was going on, something dangerous, whatever had been going on all day and kept everybody so busy.

  After no more than a few minutes, during which time Cherie prayed the wounded man would not die on her, a huge rumbling roar shattered the silence. Her hands instinctively went over her ears. Oh, freaking geez. She knew that sound. It was one of Steele Street’s babies, one of the cars, and someone had just started it up right on top of her head.

  In seconds, the noise moved, fading to a mere rumbling purr, and Gillian came back down the ladder.

  “I’ve got an ambulance on the way,” she said, coming over to be by the man and sliding a large folding knife between her belt and her jeans. “Gabriel, go topside and direct them down here. Cherie, are you okay?”

  “Yes.” Yes, she was fine. “Who is this guy, Gillian? What’s he doing here?”

  Kneeling down again, Gillian put her hand on the man’s forehead and gently traced a long scar down the left side of his face.

  “This is Zachary Prade, Cherie,” she said. “Last of the lost chop-shop boys.”

  Cherie looked at him. She knew the name. She probably shouldn’t, but like Skeeter, she did a lot of poking around at Steele Street, and Zachary Prade had been the lost chop-shop boy for as long as she could remember, for as long as she’d worked for Dylan. Three years ago, they’d lost another, and amidst a wave of grief and regrets, they’d all had to face the fact that he was never going to come home. In the jungles of Colombia, South America, J. T. Chronopoulos had been lost to them forever.

  But this one was back.

  Bleeding, broken, and collapsed, but still breathing.

  “Is he going to make it?” she asked.

  “Yeah, baby,” Red Dog said. “He’s going to make it.”

  The sound of sirens broke the night, and Cherie sent up another prayer.

  Spencer normally ran a six-minute mile. He was doing a little better than that, pounding the pavement. That asshole Campos had cheated him. Even with his ears ringing, and Mallory screaming at him and blasting away with her Sig, he’d torn into the bracelet, and there’d been nothing in it, no polymer strand with microdots, just damn macramé. He’d shoved it in his pocket, raced back to the Lincoln, and Mallory had hit the gas, going after the bastard—and after a short, hot chase, the bastard had led him here, to another goddamn alley, him, and Mallory, and damn Grigori Petrov in his silver Mercedes, with the cops on all their asses.

  Jesus. The alleys in Denver were fucking crazy places. Spencer knew what he’d just seen in this one, and it was so unexpected, so surreal, it had spooked the holy living hell right out of him.

  Jesus. He kept his legs pumping, heading back toward the Town Car and Mallory. Petrov was on his own, and Spencer’s money said he was doomed.

  Alejandro Campos had disappeared. Spencer could live with that. The muscle car had smoked to a screeching stop, the driver’s door had opened, and the guy behind the wheel had disappeared. Okay, fine. Shit happened.

  Petrov had reached the Shelby ahead of Spencer, and for a split second, Spencer had thought The Chechen had killed Campos, knifed him or something. So Spencer had come in fast, the Recon Tanto in his hand, ready to cut the truth out of Petrov, hurt him in whatever way was necessary to get what he wanted—the damn polymer strip with the damn microdots that should have been woven into the damn macramé bracelet—and then get the hell out of Denver.

  But there’d been no Campos in the Shelby Mustang, no one behind the wheel, just Petrov tearing through the car, looking for the same damn thing Spencer wanted. Then the damnedest thing he’d ever seen had happened: Gillian “Red Dog” Pentycote had slid out from under the Shelby Cobra, right at Petrov’s feet, right out from between the Mustang’s chassis and the street, as if she’d simply coalesced off the pavement or something. There was no mistaking her. He knew the girl, and everyone knew she wasn’t normal. She’d been enhanced, changed right down to the molecular level by some drugs she’d been given, some real cutting-edge psychopharmaceuticals out of Thailand. Everybody knew how dangerous she was, how nearly superhuman she’d become.

  Everyone knew she’d killed Tony Royce, and Zane Lowe, and
half a dozen of their guys in Denver five months ago. Everyone knew she was lightning fast and had deadly skills, with weapons or without. But geezus, nobody had said she could fucking materialize out of fucking nothing. No wonder all those guys had died. Kendryk was fucking nuts to want her back. Crazy to put a bounty on her.

  Still, Spencer might have taken her on, if it hadn’t been for the damn cops, sirens coming from all directions.

  Sure, he might have risked his life for two million dollars and maybe one more chance at the damn encryption code.

  But maybe not.

  She’d gotten The Chechen. He’d heard the guy go down, hard and fast, heard Petrov grunt in pain. It could have been him, and the knowledge added an extra edge of speed to his final fleeing strides.

  Breathless, and more unnerved than he would ever admit to anyone, he reached the Lincoln Town Car and lofted himself into the passenger seat. Mallory was already gunning the engine.

  “Hit it, Kitten,” he said. Whatever the hell had just happened, he was going to sort it out someplace far from Denver, Colorado.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Sunday, 5:00 A.M.—Denver, Colorado

  “It’s five o’clock in the damn morning, Dylan, and I’ve been working this city way too hard all night long. This better be good.” The sound of a very unhappy woman came over the phone. “Damn good.”

  “I think you’ve got something that belongs to me, Loretta,” Dylan said, reaching for his coffee cup. “And I’d like to get it back as soon as possible.”

  “You mean the woman we picked up two blocks from Steele Street,” Loretta said, Lieutenant Loretta Bradley, Dylan’s favorite cop in Denver. She’d been saving his butt since he’d been sixteen. “The murder suspect out of New Mexico who got all but thrown out of a 1968 Shelby Cobra Mustang GT500KR, which I’m guessing goes by the name of either Charlotte or Charlene.”

  “Yes. That’s exactly who I mean.” He took a sip of coffee and relaxed back into his chair.

  “You want me to give up a perfectly good murder suspect?” the woman asked, clearly disbelieving that he had the gall to even ask. “What’s in it for me?”

  “A clear conscience.”

  She burst out laughing on the other end of the line.

  “Oh, that’s good, Dylan.” She laughed some more. “That may be your best one yet.”

  “It was self-defense, Loretta, not murder, and that’s how it’s going to come out. I’ve got a federal agent and an unnamable bureau of bureaucracy to back it all up. This one’s a no-go.”

  “Yes, the damn Feds have already shown up and riffled their way through my evidence locker.”

  In his office at Steele Street, Dylan set down his coffee cup, squeezed his eyes shut, and quietly rubbed his hand over his face. Geezus. Zach was freaking nuts, and Loretta was right. They’d all been working too damn hard tonight.

  “Did they get what they wanted?” he asked, reaching for his cup again.

  “Who the hell knows?” she said. “It was the Feds. I can tell you they did linger awhile over a scrappy little piece of plastic stuff my officers took off her, seemed to have quite a little conference over it, just between themselves.”

  “A piece of plastic?” Zach had told Dylan that he’d slid the polymer strand into her braid, securing it with her ponytail band, a measure that had obviously paid off. What Zach hadn’t told him was why the polymer strand was important enough to have sparked a couple of international incidents, the one in El Salvador three weeks ago, and again tonight on the streets of Denver.

  “Yes. It went in the evidence bag when they booked her,” Loretta said, “along with her rings, and earrings, and a necklace.”

  Well, that’s what Zach had been counting on, and Dylan had to admit that it had been a brilliant move, a classic bit of misdirection. Give the cops a murder suspect, drop her right in their laps, and there wasn’t a policeman in the world who would think twice about a piece of plastic in her hair.

  “Red Dog should be knocking on your precinct door any second now,” he said.

  “You sent the girl?” Loretta laughed again. “Well, at least you’ve got the brains to send somebody I like.”

  Yeah, he did. He knew Loretta had a soft spot for Gillian. Hell, Loretta had a soft spot for all of SDF’s kick-ass women. The lieutenant might have been staring fifty in the face, but she was one of Denver’s original kick-ass-and-take-names girls.

  “So how is that federal agent from the unnamable bureau of bureaucracy doing?” she asked. “I heard he got shot.”

  “Yeah. He did, but he’s going to be fine. The docs say he’ll be out of the hospital in a couple of days at the most. He’s tough.”

  “He always was,” Loretta said. “One of the toughest.”

  Dylan set his cup back on his desk and leaned forward in his chair, his hand back over his face. God. Goddamn.

  He let a moment pass, and then another.

  “Yeah, he was,” he said, lowering his hand and reaching for his coffee again. “Still is. Doc Blake is up with him now. Apparently, Zach went to see him the other night.” Doc Blake ran a very unofficial free clinic out of his place up on Seventeenth Avenue. He’d been running it and taking care of street kids for twenty years.

  “Good,” Loretta said. “That’s a good place to start, with the guy who put him back together. Geezus, he was a mess the night you found him, a bad thing to see, even for a hardened beat cop.”

  Yeah, that night. The night Dylan had found a skinny fifteen-year-old bleeding to death in an alley with his face laid open, really laid open, almost peeled back. Zach was just lucky his mother’s pimp hadn’t killed him for trying to interfere with his business.

  “Did you get Red Dog’s present?” He changed the subject. It was hard for him to remember that night. The pimp had really worked Zach over, done some bad things. Alazne knew. Zach had told her everything, and she’d sent him back a little changed, a little stronger, and in a whole lot better place within himself. Dylan would love her forever for that alone.

  “Grigori Petrov?” Loretta said. “Yes, that was one nice present. It’s going to make me look real good. Too bad the others got away.”

  Bayonne and Rush had disappeared off the street while Gillian had been dealing with Petrov, but Dylan was sure their time would come. The files Gabriel Shore had brought with him from Washington, D.C. all but guaranteed it.

  He looked out into the main office. Skeeter had her feet up on one of the desks and was sketching on a pad. From what he could see, it looked like one of her comic-book stories. She had tons of those things, and some pretty nice erotica she drew just for him.

  And finally, some of the night’s weight seemed to lift just a bit. Skeeter and erotica were his favorite mood-enhancing combination. It had never failed him. So suddenly, the night, what was left of it anyway, looked a little more promising.

  Except for maybe the two people sitting on the couch playing some sort of high-tech, light-speed video game—Cherie Hacker and Gabriel Shore.

  Dylan got the uncomfortable feeling he was observing a computer geek date. It was odd, like that opening mating ritual thing that had taken place earlier in the office, and like the handshake, this video-game-playing idea didn’t look like it had much potential to get the job done.

  Dylan considered himself a real smart guy, but not so smart that he and Skeeter ever played video games.

  “We’ll get them next time, Loretta.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “Next time.”

  After they hung up, Dylan watched the two computer geniuses for a moment longer. It was five o’clock in the morning, and they were playing a video game.

  They could have it.

  He was going to get his wife and take her to bed.

  Lily sat down next to Zach’s hospital bed in Denver General and took his hand.

  “Hi,” she said, and felt him squeeze her fingers.

  “Hi.” He was patched, and bandaged, and had an IV pumping him full of something
or another.

  “You look great.”

  He attempted a grin, and just about made it.

  “They let you out,” he said, sounding incredibly tired. “Good. Don’t worry. They’ll never get the murder thing to stick. We’re the good guys, and we can prove it.”

  “Yeah, we’re the good guys.” At least he was, the best guy, and she was so damned grateful to see him still all in one piece. When he’d dumped her on those cops, she’d been terrified she’d never see him again. “It was pretty cool the way you put that piece of plastic in my hair.”

  “You liked that?” He really looked like hell, but not critical. She figured the only critical thing in the room was her heart. It had been a helluva day.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Gave me kind of a shock to see it, but I liked how you did it. I hope it was part of your plan not to get it back, because somebody else confiscated everything they made me give up when they booked me.”

  “FBI,” he said, and yawned. “I called my boss. Told him to get somebody over there ASAP. The FBI is the closest Feds Denver’s got.”

  “So all’s well that ends well?” She hated to say it, but a few wild hours in a car with a man didn’t necessarily add up to anything, no matter how much sex they’d managed to fit into the day.

  “I hope nothing is ending,” he said, still holding her hand.

  “You’re not a lawyer or an accountant, Zach,” she said. He hadn’t precisely told her who he worked for and what he did. She had a feeling his job description wasn’t available for public perusal. She accepted that, and she understood what it meant.

  “I’m not a fool either, Lily,” he said. “Don’t write me off just yet, that’s all I ask.” He was fading, drifting off to sleep, but his grip on her hand didn’t lighten, not a bit. He yawned again. “A few things have come to an end lately, like El Salvador, and maybe more than that. We should talk…and celebrate.”

  “Celebrate?”

  “We did it, babe. We won.” His eyelids drifted closed for a second or two, then slowly lifted. “You should really be here when I wake up.”