by Tara Janzen
“No.” Geezus. Spray paint and hair—those were three words he didn’t want to hear together, not with any Rats attached.
Connor and Weisman were in the lieutenant’s office, a woman named Loretta Bradley, trying to negotiate his release. So far, he hadn’t been slapped with anything but a misdemeanor for trespassing. As far as he could tell, it really wasn’t what he’d done that was holding things up, but where he’d been caught doing it. Lieutenant Bradley had a lot of questions about the Empire, none of which he’d answered very helpfully. He’d been keeping the night’s events on the down low, sliding around the facts, which had worked out pretty well up until Connor had arrived and explained that he wasn’t the skater-boy vagrant he appeared to be. On his own, with his long hair and no wallet, he hadn’t bothered to correct the impression he’d given of being someone who’d maybe had a little too much to drink earlier in the night and had crawled into a ventilation shaft inside a closet behind the stairs in an abandoned theater on the wrong side of town to sleep it off.
Okay. Maybe the cops hadn’t bought his story, but he hadn’t exactly done anything wrong, either. Being inside a building with an open lock on its back door that was owned by a woman who didn’t have a clue who she’d rented it out to wasn’t the crime of the century.
Skeeter’s outfit was the crime of the century. There wasn’t a guy in the squad room who hadn’t checked her out twice and was maneuvering around for a third pass.
“Did you get dressed up just for me?” he asked. She’d left the gallery wearing a pair of cutoff jeans over black wool tights with a black sweatshirt. She’d shown up at the precinct dressed to kill in thigh-high boots with lug soles, a black leather miniskirt with a chain mail belt, and a pink angora sweater.
With her long platinum ponytail and killer body, she looked good enough to eat and like she’d hurt going down. Just the sort of thing to turn on a bunch of guys, any bunch of guys.
“These aren’t the Feds. These are the local cops, and it’s not a bad idea to put your best foot forward when you’re dealing with them,” she said with an absolutely straight face.
Especially if your best foot was in sky-high patent leather, he thought, and your sweater was fuzzy, pink, and tight. This whole pink thing was new with her, and he couldn’t help but wonder if Skeeter had the hots for somebody. He’d sure as hell like to know who. He’d love to know what kind of guy it took to spring her trap. Probably some cruiser down on the Sixteenth Street Mall with a purple Mohawk and enough tattoos to qualify as a piece of living art.
“Some of these cops remember me as SB-three-oh-three,” she went on. “I just wanted to make sure they knew I’d grown up.”
Travis wisely kept his thoughts to himself, but the words “grown up to be a Goth hooker” came to mind, though not quite as strongly as “grown up to be a comic book superhero,” because hookers did not have Skeeter’s muscle definition, which was awesome. Not juiced, just sleek and cool looking, like she’d worked for it. And not many people on any career track had her perfect, baby-soft skin. Nobody looked like Skeeter Bang in real life—except Skeeter Bang. She was damn cute from the neck up, her tough-girl sunglasses perched on a button nose, but man, from the neck down, she was pure kick-ass gorgeous.
So if there was a guy who’d flipped her switch, where was he? Travis wondered. He’d never seen her hang out with anyone who didn’t work for SDF or who wasn’t somehow connected with 738 Steele Street.
He didn’t wonder for long, though. The door to Lieutenant Bradley’s office was opening.
Connor and the other two cops came out first, with Connor not looking very happy, and for the first time, Travis started to get a little nervous. He rose to his feet. If Connor couldn’t get him out of here, who could?
Lieutenant Bradley followed the men out, busy looking through some papers, the expression on her face unreadable—until Connor and the cops stumbled to a stop in front of her and almost caused a pileup. Then she looked damned annoyed.
“Watch yourself, Weisman,” she barked, glancing up. Her attention, like everyone else’s, quickly went to Skeeter, who was impossible to miss, the pink queen of punk amidst a sea of police department blue.
This is it, he thought. Weisman couldn’t get his jaw off the floor, and the other cop wasn’t in any better shape. He was doomed. They were going to lock him up and throw away the key. The Rats had been right to run.
“Skeeter?” the lieutenant said. She was a tall woman, big-boned, her nose a little too large for her face. Even so, she wasn’t unattractive with her reddish hair and golden brown eyes—but she was damned imposing.
Beside him, Skeeter turned around, toward the group.
“Hey, Loretta,” she said, sounding genuinely pleased and more than a little relieved.
“So this Mr. James is one of yours?” the lieutenant asked, nodding in his direction.
“Yes, ma’am.”
The lieutenant gave Weisman, Connor, and the other cop another very annoyed look. Connor didn’t seem to notice. He was too busy grinning like a fool at Skeeter.
“Gentlemen, we’re done here. This incident is officially off the books as of now.” She turned to him. “Mr. James, you’re free to go.” Her gaze shifted to Skeeter. “Have Christian or Dylan give me a call.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Skeeter said, almost to the woman’s back. The lieutenant hadn’t wasted any time in burying her nose in her papers and heading back to her office.
Travis was nonplussed. That was it? Skeeter shows up, claims him, and he’s out?
“You know Lieutenant Bradley?” he asked her.
“We’re like this,” Skeeter said, holding up her hand with two of her fingers crossed.
“Yeah. Travis and I are the same way,” Connor said, stepping forward with his hand out. “Hi. I’m Connor Ford, the guy who couldn’t get him out of here.”
Skeeter took his hand. “Skeeter Bang.”
“Nice to meet you, Skeeter.” Connor was still grinning, his gray eyes sparkling with mischief and more interest than Travis knew was going to get him anywhere. He had sandy blond hair and a broad, open face. “Travis showed me some of the oekaki sketches you drew of him. I thought they were great.”
Which was all wonderful, Travis was sure, but this wasn’t the time to be gushing about art, or hitting on a girl. He wanted the hell out of there.
He put his hand to Skeeter’s back and gently but firmly directed her toward the door.
“You like manga?” she asked Connor, her feet thankfully moving in the right direction. Manga was the Japanese comic book art she did. Skeeter had given Travis some of the unfinished drawings she’d done of him, her oekaki, and he’d framed them and hung them in his cabin. In contrast, he hadn’t hung a single one of the angels Nikki had given him over the years. For Skeeter, he played a character, Kenshi the Avenger. It was fun, even though he didn’t think she had the character quite right, or that he was the right model for the job. Nikki, on the other hand, had everything right, sometimes painfully right. She knew him, every square inch of him. She stripped him to the bone with every angel she painted, and there was no mistaking that they were his bones. It wasn’t something he wanted to face over breakfast.
“Love it. Are you doing dojinshi?” Connor asked Skeeter, referring to the unofficial comics made by fans. “Or are you with a publisher?”
“No publisher,” she said, her smile warming with every Japanese word he spoke. “Not yet. But I’ve got a really cool story arc I’m working on called Star Drifter.”
Oh, brother, Travis thought. Once Skeeter started in on Star Drifter, it took an act of God to get her to stop.
“Great title.” Connor kept even with her, stride for stride, letting Travis hustle them all out the door. It was a bum’s rush, with all three of them the bums. “I’d love to see some more of your stuff. Are you showing anything at Toussi’s?”
“No. This whole week is just Nikki McKinney and Rocky Solano.”
“Rocky Solano, yeah
, I know him,” Connor said. “Met him at Nikki’s a couple of times. He’s an interesting . . . uh, guy. It’s amazing what some people can do with yarn and a couple pieces of string.”
“Yeah, right,” Skeeter said, letting out a laugh.
Connor’s grin broadened again, and then they were out the door, into the cold air and weak sunlight of a late March dawn without a precinct cop in sight.
“Arrested? Geezus, Travis,” Connor said as soon as they cleared the door, his tone as disbelieving as Skeeter’s had been earlier. “You’ve never been arrested in your life. So do you want to tell me what you were doing such a damn good job of not telling Lieutenant Bradley? And why do you have a size five tennis shoe tread mark on your left cheek?”
A tread mark. Crap. Travis used his sleeve to wipe it off. That had to look at least as stupid as it sounded. Damn Rats.
“Buy me a cup of coffee, and I’ll tell you anything you want to hear.” He gave his cheek another swipe. “Add breakfast, and I’ll tell you the truth.”
Damn, it felt good to be out of the police building.
“Don’t forget I’m a cop, okay?” Connor said, completely serious. “I don’t want to have to arrest you myself.”
“Nothing illegal happened tonight, Connor. Strange, maybe, but not illegal.”
“So how about you start with the strange thing that happened to your wallet,” his friend said. “Like it disappearing. Did you get rolled or what?”
“Rolled hard,” he admitted. “By a pack of Rats. Skeeter, are you coming to breakfast? Connor’s buying.”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” she said, and Connor’s grin returned in full force.
“We can talk about Star Drifter,” he said to her, then turned his attention back to Travis. “Rats, huh?”
“Lots of Rats, dozens of them, and a wild urban jungle girl named Jane.”
“Of course, there’d be a girl,” Connor said. “Was she hot?”
Travis smiled. Jane had kissed him, and it didn’t matter that he’d been rolled, robbed, and arrested. It didn’t matter that the only thing she’d ever called him to his face was Mr. James, or that badass Raymond wanted her old turf and Fast Jack wanted her back.
She’d kissed him, really kissed him—and that was all that mattered. He could handle the rest of it.
“Oh, yeah. She’s hot,” he said. “Dangerously hot.”
CHAPTER
15
THEY TORE THE PLACE apart, Kid. You’ve got nothing left but the walls.”
Kid stood in his kitchen at Steele Street, phone to his ear, listening to C. Smith describe the mess Conseco’s men had made of his house in Panama. Nikki was sitting on the floor at his coffee table next to the windows, drawing on paper she’d taken out of his printer while she waited for him to make the coffee.
She’d slept like a baby the whole way home, hardly bothering to wake up even for the plane change in Dallas. She’d been exhausted, but was definitely back on board now, scribbling away with a pencil.
“Sorry, Chico, but you really need to sell your little tropical bungalow.” Smith’s tone was flat-out serious. “It’s way too far south of the border, way too close to Colombia, and man, it’s been com-pro-mised. You’ve got enough blood on the floors to qualify as a House of Horror.”
“Screw—”
“Me. Yeah. I got it, but I mean it.”
Kid finished pouring water in the coffeepot and switched it on.
God, it was good to be home, even if he had kind of forgotten how much stuff he’d crammed into the place. His loft looked like a sporting goods store that had gone berserk. The ceilings were fifteen feet—plenty high enough for him to have installed a climbing wall on the north end and racks for his gear on the south end. He had two kayaks propped up in one corner and three bikes housed behind the couch. Snowboards and skis went on the racks, along with his ropes and rappelling gear. Backpacks and sleeping bags went anywhere and everywhere.
“I know a woman here in Panama City and—”
“You know more than one woman in Panama City,” Kid interrupted, remembering the last time the two of them had taken R&R. The weekend had gotten pretty wild, but he’d managed to come out of it without getting engaged to anyone.
C. Smith let out a short laugh. “Yeah, well, this one sells real estate, and I could give her a call for you.”
“Sure. Give her a call.”
It was time to let go, probably time to let go of a lot of things. Never J.T. His brother would be with him until the day he died. He just didn’t want that day coming any sooner than necessary, and that meant staying out of South America for a while.
Goddamn, what a helluva night. He could still hardly believe how quickly Conseco’s men had found him.
“Maybe you could quit that fringe group you work with and come on over to the DEA,” Smith was saying. “You could take my old job in Afghanistan. You’d love it. Beautiful country, lots of wide open spaces, plenty of action, and it beats the hell out of Iraq.”
“I’ll pass.” He’d done some time in Afghanistan with the Marine Corps. It wasn’t any worse than a lot of places he’d been, but he liked working at SDF. “Besides, if the intel we found at that airstrip on the Putumayo pans out, Conseco could be waiting for me in Afghanistan as easily as Colombia.”
“Good point.”
“Did you call Rosa and tell her not to come in?” He didn’t want his Panamanian housekeeper anywhere near the house, not while it was such a hot spot for trouble.
“Yes. Our guys took the bodies to the morgue, but the rest of the mess is going to be here a while longer, especially the one you made with Sanchez and Mancos. That’s going to take paint, Chico. Maybe a sander. Definitely some plaster.”
“What about Conseco?”
“We’re going over every inch of the place, trying to confirm whether or not the big boss was actually here. The man they picked up with the fer-de-lance tattoo is backpedalling like crazy on his original story, but a few of the things he said earlier have checked out. A privately owned Learjet did set down at Albrook late last night, and the plane does match the description that we have of Conseco’s.”
“What about my neighbors? Are you getting anything out of the interviews?” Kid wasn’t pinning many hopes on it.
“A big zero. Nobody saw anything. Of course, I gotta tell ya, everyone I’ve talked to around here today has been as hungover as hell. What is this part of town? Party central?”
“Absolutely.” It’s what J.T. had loved about where he’d lived in Panama City. The privacy of the properties, the friendliness of the neighbors, and the wildness of the parties. “What about Nikki’s suitcases?”
“Still under house arrest—hot pink, mock croc, with her initials stamped into the leather, and I don’t like that.”
Kid’s brow furrowed. He didn’t like it either. “Are you sure about the initials?” He didn’t remember any initials.
“It’s subtle, but they are definitely there, along with a small angel stamped in next to the letters.”
“Did you find anything else that might identify her?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean Conseco’s guys didn’t. I noticed she had her purse at the Parrot, and I’m hoping you can tell me that her passport and plane ticket and all that kind of stuff was inside and not lying around somewhere in the house.”
“Yeah. She had it all with her.” But he still wasn’t happy about the damn initials. “See if you can get her luggage released as soon as possible, and just have the suitcases sent here.” The coffee stopped dripping, and Kid poured Nikki a cup.
“I’ll do what I can. How’s she holding up?”
“Pretty good.” Actually even better than that, he thought, watching her rise from the floor and pad across the loft toward the bathroom. There’d been no more nightmares while they’d been in the air, and she hadn’t mentioned the incident at the house since they’d landed. She’d just been so damn glad to be home. He felt safer, too, like now maybe they could t
alk reasonably, like a couple of adults—instead of like one adult and one insanely jealous asshole.
Right.
“Great,” Smith said. “I’ll check back in with you later. Sooner, if we come up with anything.”
“Thanks.” Kid hung up the phone and started over toward the table with Nikki’s cup of coffee.
Paris was at the top of his agenda this afternoon, right under the same heading where he’d put Rocky Solano, in what he was hoping would become her out-box. Her in-box only had one item, him, and after all the thinking he’d done on the plane, he was fairly confident of his ability to get her around to his side. No matter what, he was the man she’d made love with last night. They’d been electric together, an instantaneous firestorm. A connection like that had to mean something. It had to mean a lot.
It sure as hell meant a lot to him.
His confidence in his mission stayed high all the way across the room, right up until he leaned over the table to set down her coffee and took a glance at what she’d been doing with her pencil and paper.
Then his heart stopped—for all of a second. Then two.
Savagery. Brutal. Unadulterated.
Kid was looking right at it, and it looked exactly like him. It was him. Nikki was too brilliant of an artist not to have depicted him exactly as he’d been—deadly, his face contorted with fury, every muscle in his body tight with lethal intent. She’d drawn him with Hernando Sanchez’s head in his hands, his knee in Sanchez’s back, and blood all over the floor. It was unmistakable.
It was also a helluva thing to have to look at, a helluva thing for her to have remembered in such excruciatingly accurate detail.
It was enough to make him sweat.
He picked up the top drawing.
Geezus. Was this the nightmare that had woken her up? Him?
His gaze went over the bold harsh lines and the subtle shading of the sketch, and he felt something turn over in his chest.
Fuck. Even he didn’t want to see himself with his war face on.
He let the paper drop back on the table with the others and stood for a minute, looking around his loft, taking it all in, trying to breathe. It had been months since he’d been home, but nothing had changed. Skeeter made sure of things like that. No matter how long their missions might last, no matter how far away the job might take them, the SDF guys came home to the place they’d left. With very little warning, Skeeter would have food in the fridge, the heat turned up, fresh sheets on the bed, half a dozen morning papers stacked on the counter, and towels warming in the bathroom.