by Tara Janzen
“Kid,” Nikki said, turning and looking behind them. “I think the building is on fire. I smell smoke.”
The unmistakable smell of it came to him on the air, and just as quickly, a blast of searing heat rolled up the stairwell.
Geezus. “Come on, babe. Let’s go.” Holding her hand, he took off up the stairs.
If things had been great before, they were perfect now. The friggin’ gangsters had set the club on fire.
Another door banged open—the second-floor door, he guessed—and the noise level tripled, girls screaming and squealing, guys shouting, feet pounding, lots of shoving, pushing, and swearing.
Kid could run, but a frozen, shivering Nikki trying to do stairs in a pair of stiletto heels practically put them in reverse. He swung her up on his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, the banana-clipped pistol still in his hand, and he took off.
He was fast, a verifiable track star, but within seconds, two Locos in do-rags passed him like he was standing still, and the horde kept coming, panic turning them into world-class Olympians. It was going to be a freaking circus on the roof, especially since from what he could see, the guns-to-dudes ratio was running at about fifty percent.
Worse than all of it was the smoke. It was quickly getting thicker, becoming a pall. The people below him were struggling to breathe. Drug lords and gangbangers were one thing. Fire was another. It struck solid, cold dread in his heart. He couldn’t outshoot it or outwit it, and he wasn’t at all sure he was going to be able to outmaneuver it. Going up in a burning building was a bad idea, and he knew it, but there sure as hell was no way to go down, not in the stairwell, which was beginning to feel like it was on fire.
He hoped to hell Skeeter had gotten out of the bar.
At the fourth-floor exit, he fought his way to the door, but it didn’t open. Doing his best to hold back the tide of people threatening to sweep him and Nikki away, he put her down next to him, in the small eddy of space he made with his body.
“Hold on to me!” he yelled above all the noise, and felt her hands tighten into fists on his shirt. Then he put his shoulder to the door. It gave a little, which encouraged him, so he hit it again, harder. Something was blocking the door from the other side. If he could move it just a few inches, he and Nikki could slip through. Their chances of getting out of the building from the fourth floor were better than from the fifth, and the roof was going to be a disaster.
Then the worst happened. One second Nikki was behind him, holding on to him, and the next she was gone, swept up in the tide of panic and people rolling like a juggernaut toward the top of the building.
“Kid!” she screamed, then disappeared from sight.
Shit. Kid threw himself into the crowd, using every physical advantage he had to fight his way up the stairs. In glimpses and pieces, he saw her up ahead of him, barely keeping to her feet, and his first fear became that she would get trampled. Then someone knocked her down, and the next time he saw her, she’d lost his coat and her dress was torn.
Goddammit. He had to get to her—but he couldn’t, and the smoke and the heat were getting worse.
When he burst out onto the roof, it wasn’t much better, but he didn’t think Nikki was behind him. Everything in the stairwell had been sweeping up, carried by the force of all the people trying to escape.
There were dozens of them, maybe a hundred, coughing, wiping tears from their eyes, running this way and that, trying to figure out which way to go. But he didn’t see Nikki anywhere.
Then he felt a stray breeze cut through the smoke billowing up all around. So did everyone else, and still caught in the crowd, they all stumbled toward it. In just a few feet, he realized that despite all the smoke, only the front half of the building was on fire. The flames were bound to spread and turn the whole building into a chimney, but they hadn’t yet, and help had to be on the way. Loretta’s SWAT team and the DEA, the FBI, all those guys must be getting close.
“There’s a fire escape,” someone yelled, and everybody swarmed in the guy’s direction.
Kid held himself against the crowd, searching faces. Then he saw her, and his blood ran cold. Two men had hold of her arms, dragging her along. The third had a gun to her head. They were all moving with the crowd, heading for the fire escape, and in the next instant they disappeared into the smoke and all the people.
“Conseco!” he shouted, his feet moving him forward, slowly at first, then faster. “Juan Conseco!”
It was hard to make himself heard over the sounds of the fire and all the crying and shouting and running. It was even harder to keep Nikki and the Colombians in sight. Smoke was drifting everywhere. People were in the way. His gun was drawn, ready, but there wasn’t a clear shot, not in the smoke and confusion.
“Conseco!” He had to get them to stop. “Soy el asesino fantasma! ¡Estoy aquí!” I am the ghost killer. I am here.
Here for you, you sonuvabitch.
He called out again, working his way through the crowd, and when the smoke cleared again, he saw them.
They’d stopped and closed ranks, and they were waiting, looking for the man they’d come to kill.
Nikki had gone limp and was being held up only by the large man who had his arm around her waist. Juan Conseco was on the man’s left.
The third man was nowhere in sight.
A dozen people were between him and the Colombians, and Kid waited for the space to clear.
Over by the fire escape, it was pandemonium. But Kid didn’t give the chaos a thought. His mission, the focus of every ounce of energy he had and every breath he took, was staring at him from behind the two semiautomatic pistols pointed through the crowd, straight at his head.
That was their first mistake.
“El asesino fantasma,” Conseco called out over the distance separating them. A smile crossed his face. “So, my ghost killer, in the end it comes to this? That el asesino is outgunned?”
Kid didn’t think so, not with only two guns to his one, and Nikki useless as cover.
A fresh surge of panicked club-goers stumbled between him and Conseco before the first group finished passing through, all of them doubled over, coughing from the smoke, and oblivious to the danger they were in.
Kid bided his time, counting the split seconds before he’d have a clear shot.
Then he felt the muzzle of a gun come to rest on the back of his neck.
The third man.
“Drop your weapon.”
“Tío Drago.” Conseco’s smile broadened. “Un momento, por favor.” A moment, please.
One moment, please, before Conseco let Uncle Drago blow his head off, Kid figured.
Fuck. He wasn’t worried about himself. Having your head blown off was a pretty fucking painless way to go, especially with the muzzle pressed against a guy’s brain stem. Hell, no. He wasn’t going to feel a goddamn thing. But that wasn’t what was going to happen to Nikki.
Kid let the .45 drop to the ground, then took a breath, staying calm.
Conseco wanted a moment for a reason, and every single moment he took worked in Kid’s favor.
“Thirty-six men, el asesino,” the cocaine king called out, “and still you have failed. Your brother’s true killer is alive and well, my friend.”
Fuck you, Kid thought.
Conseco’s smile faded, and Kid saw all the hatred he felt for the man being returned in full measure.
“For the true believer,” the man said, his voice low and deadly, “the sign of the cross is the sign of salvation.”
With a slow, deliberate motion, Conseco drew a line down the middle of his chest, then another from side to side.
Kid got the message, loud and clear, and he took another breath, waiting.
“It will be a bloody salvation for the woman, too, you fucking ghost killer.”
Double fuck you.
“Drago—” Conseco began, but Kid had already moved, twisting and striking out at Drago even as the man fired. The shot went wild, but somebody sure as shit
hit Drago. Kid felt the slug impact the man at his back, felt him slump over.
Another shot came out of somewhere, then another. Kid saw the man holding Nikki stagger back, his hand coming up to his chest. He saw Nikki fall to the ground.
And he saw Conseco’s eyes grow wide in shock as he looked down at himself. Then another shot hit him, and another smacked into the man who had dropped Nikki.
A fucking 9mm, Kid thought, diving for the .45 caliber he’d dropped. In the split second it took him to fire off two shots of his own, the party was over.
Nikki was pushing herself up, coughing. Kid raced over and knelt by her side, drawing her to him, while he scanned the crowd, trying to figure out who had fired.
From out of the smoke and darkness came just about the last person he would have ever expected: Nikki’s angel, Travis James, holding Kid’s 9mm like he knew what he was doing.
And he obviously did.
“Are we clear?” Travis asked.
“Clear,” Kid said, still not quite believing what had happened. “Skeeter?”
“We got separated in the bar, but the last time I saw her, she was kicking down a door.”
“Good girl,” Kid said.
“The best,” Travis agreed, kneeling next to Nikki and shrugging out of his coat. “Hey, babe.”
“Hey,” she said weakly.
Travis put his coat around her, and Kid pulled her closer. Her arms went around him.
“We’ve got to get off this roof,” he said. There were still people running around all over, jostling for the fire escape.
“Yeah,” Travis agreed, looking around. He started to rise, when they both heard it, the sound of sirens.
The cavalry, the fire department, and Lieutenant Loretta had arrived.
CHAPTER
24
SKEETER HAD KICKED a door down, but not without getting a little sooty and scorched first.
“Geezus, Kid. When you bring a party to town, you really bring a party to town.”
They were all sitting in Kid’s 1967 Pontiac GTO, a beautiful beast named Corinna, watching the Aztec burn down, the gangsters get busted, and Fast Jack trying to talk Lieutenant Loretta out of taking him downtown.
The heater was going full blast, and Nikki was cuddled up next to him in the front seat, her wrists bandaged by one of the ambulance crews.
Loretta wanted to talk to him, to talk to all of them. It had been a helluva night, again, and it was far from over. He was going two for two, and still racking up kills, but his weren’t the ones he was thinking about.
“God, I couldn’t believe it when that Blood set his Zippo to those damn curtains. Everybody knows the Aztec is a dump just waiting to burn.” For a change, it was Skeeter in motormouth mode, sitting in the backseat with Travis, almost single-handedly carrying the conversation.
“Was a dump,” Kid said, watching another whoosh of flame shoot up from the roof.
Gang wars and cocaine kings had been a lethal mix.
He lifted his gaze to the rearview mirror and looked at Travis. What in the hell, he wanted to ask, has Skeeter been teaching you down on the firing range?
Plenty, was the obvious answer, but Kid would bet anything that Superman’s hand had been in a lot of what he’d seen tonight. Shooting well was one thing. Shooting to kill was an entirely different animal, and nobody taught the importance of winning the fight better than Christian Hawkins. Every day, in every way, no matter the odds, no matter what you had to do—win first.
Travis had won the fight for all of them.
From the backseat, the guy shifted his attention from Skeeter and met Kid’s gaze in the mirror.
Kid gave him a short nod, and after a long, thoughtful look, Travis nodded back. Then he returned his attention to Skeeter.
“Once I got the door open, it was an ex-o-dus, I tell you. I almost got run over, getting out of there.” Skeeter continued her ramble, with no end looking to be in sight, until Lieutenant Loretta’s knock on the driver’s side window.
“You know the drill, Peter,” she said, bending down to look in the window after he rolled it open. “Downtown. My office. Let’s go. And Mr. James, if your life is going to get any more exciting, you’re going to need a concealed carry permit.”
Yes, sir, it was going to be one helluva long night.
NIKKI was safe, Travis told himself for the hundredth time.
Kid was safe. Skeeter was safe. The party was over. The gallery was a mess.
And he’d killed three men, unless those last two went on Kid’s tally. Travis knew for sure Kid’s rounds had put them down, where they’d still been standing after his.
Everyone had left Toussi’s, even Suzi. There was no one left except Jane—and him, because he’d come here instead of going home after the endless debriefing at the police station.
He brought his hand up and dragged it back through his hair, looking around. All these paintings of him, he thought, and none of them quite right anymore.
His life had taken a turn.
“Travis?” Jane said, crossing the gallery.
In answer, he held his hand out to her, and to his amazement, she walked over to him and took it in her own.
“Do you want to sit together?” she asked.
“Sure.” Sitting was probably a good thing for him to do for a while. He needed to think.
Together, they walked over to one of the gallery’s large upholstered couches, and again, she surprised him by sitting close and letting him have his arm around her.
She was warm and solid, and after a moment, he pulled her deeper into his arms, holding her close.
“That was scary tonight,” she said. “What happened to Nikki.”
“Yeah.” And she didn’t know the half of it.
“I don’t want to be alone tonight,” she said. “Not in here. Not after what happened.”
“I thought you might like some company.” It’s why he’d come back, to check on her, make sure she was okay, knowing she might not want to be alone.
“That’s not an invitation or anything.”
He grinned. He’d known that, too. “Yeah, I pretty much figured out you didn’t want to sleep with me, when you told me I scared you and ran off.”
“I never said I didn’t want to sleep with you.”
He slanted her a look. “Do you?”
Sex would be so wonderful right now. To just get lost in her body. To be warm and naked and let the whole thing get completely hot and out of control.
He’d love to do that.
Really love it.
“No. Not tonight. I still haven’t figured some things out.”
Well, he couldn’t blame her there. He, too, had a few things he hadn’t figured out.
“About me?” he asked, just in case he could explain something, anything, and have a chance to sleep with her. It would be so perfect. He’d take such good care of her.
“No, about me.”
Yeah, well, she was pretty much a mystery. That was for damn sure, he thought, letting out a sigh.
“Sometimes talking to someone else can help you figure stuff out about yourself,” he said. It was true. He got paid seventy-five dollars an hour to listen to people talk about themselves. Once he had his doctorate, that price was going through the roof. He wasn’t greedy. He just had plans that he wasn’t sure the traditional medical community would be interested in financing. Or rather, he’d had plans. He wasn’t sure now, what he needed to do.
Nikki had been kidnapped, right out from under his nose. What kind of a dream world had he been living in?
He needed to find out.
Slacking off in Boulder, safely ensconced in academia, he’d thought his EMT work was about as gritty as it could get. It was important; he knew that. But it was also always after the fact. People got hurt. People died. And after whatever awful thing that was going to happen happened, he went in and picked up the pieces.
So who tried to keep the pieces from breaking in the first place? Wh
at kind of man did that take?
“And sometimes it’s nice to just be quiet with someone,” she said.
“Sometimes.”
“It’s almost morning. Can you stay until then?”
She was so beautiful, so different, and he had a feeling her pieces had been broken lots of times and nobody had come to help her pick them up.
He needed to think about that, and about what had happened tonight, about what he’d done, and how easily he had done it. He hadn’t questioned his actions for a second. There hadn’t been time. Skeeter had spent months working with him, Skeeter and Hawkins, and tonight, when he’d finally made it to the roof, when he’d seen Nikki hanging from that bastard’s arm, limp, and when he’d seen Kid with a gun being held to his head, there had been no hesitation, no decision to be made, and no regrets. He’d done as he’d been trained.
“Yes,” he said. “I can stay until morning.”
“NIKKI?” Kid asked, coming back across his loft to where he’d left her in a pile of blankets and pillows in front of the fireplace. He had a mug of cocoa for her, and another shot of tequila and a beer for himself.
It was way past wind-down time.
“Hmmmm?”
“Are you still awake?” He’d bundled her up pretty heavily after her bath, and after setting their drinks on the table, he got under the blankets with her.
“Hmmmm,” she sighed, wrapping her arms around him.
He’d brought her to Steele Street after they’d finished at the police station, wanting the rock-solid security of the place. Conseco was dead, and Drago, and Kid hoped to hell the bounty had died with them, but only time would tell.
Travis had gone back to Toussi’s to be with the dark-haired girl; at least, Kid figured the girl had been the reason he’d gone there. Skeeter had been too wired to come home, and she’d hit the streets, taking Corinna and heading toward the Midnight Doubles, the illegal car races that took place east of the city, but Kid had learned a long time ago not to worry about her.