by Tara Janzen
At the other end of the table, Hawkins choked on his cake.
Chapter Thirteen
Liam didn’t take his gaze off his brother. He couldn’t. For all his wild imaginings, Dylan Hart was not what he’d expected – not in any way.
The guy looked like him, shockingly so, but with another three inches in height, at least thirty more pounds of solid muscle, and a look in his eyes that said all the years Liam had spent playing Call of Duty, this man had been living it. And like everyone else Liam had met at Steele Street, his big brother had the world-wide lockdown on the word “calm.” Steady. Solid. Like a rock. In no way was Dylan Hart the wild freebooter he’d thought he’d find. Not a con man. Not a hustler who’d outfoxed Big Jack.
And sure as hell, he was no car salesman.
He was a man to be reckoned with – and Skeeter and Hawkins knew it even more than he did. He’d seen the subtle deference inherent in their attention to Dylan. His big brother was the boss, the captain of this crew of badass boys and girls.
Jeez.
“So, you know about the money,” his brother said.
Liam nodded. “It’s the only thing Big Jack ever talks about when he’s drinking, and he drinks a lot. He even took me to Geneva when I was sixteen, tried to pass me off as you to every bank in town. But no one had ever heard of Liam Dylan Magnuson – until we got to Credit Suisse. While Jack was arguing with the banker, I wandered off, and this guard comes over to me, an older guy, looks me square in the eye and says, “You are too young to be this man you claim to be. Go home before you get arrested.” So right then, bingo, I knew it was all true. The five million, and probably more by then, was sitting in Credit Suisse, and you were probably still out there, somewhere.”
“And you never mentioned this to Jack?”
“Never once in my entire life have I ever mentioned anything to Jack,” he said. “In fact, I have done my damnedest to stay as far away from Big Fat Daddy Jack as humanly possible.”
To Liam’s surprise, his comment got him a laugh – not much of one, but definitely a laugh.
“Well, you’re right. Our father put five million into a Credit Suisse investment account in my name, in your name, just before he died,” his brother said, returning to the subject at hand. “It’s worth a bit more today.”
Liam nodded.
“Half of it’s yours.”
Uh, no. No friggin’ way.
Liam shook his head. “No, thanks.” The last thing he wanted was to hang that damn money around his neck and spend the rest of his life worrying about who was coming up behind him, ready to wax his ass. Besides, he’d proven pretty damn good at making his own money. “No,” he said. “I don’t need your money.”
“And I don’t need yours.” His brother was succinct.
Liam nodded without agreeing to anything. “It’s not the reason I came looking for you, the money. Is there...uh...someplace where we could talk privately?”
Without hesitation, his brother rose from the table, taking his glass and picking up the bottle of Stranahan’s.
Liam retrieved his backpack and biting back a soft groan, grabbed a glass for himself. It had been a long couple of days since he’d left Chicago, and he had some rough edges and plenty of aches and pains he’d like to smooth out. Personal experience told him whiskey might do the trick.
Chapter Fourteen
At a private airfield south of Denver, Big Daddy Jack Dunstan hoisted his considerable bulk into the shotgun seat of a black Lincoln Navigator, all the while struggling to catch his breath.
“Where’s my damn oxygen?” he asked when he could finally get the words out. Goddamn Denver didn’t have much air in its goddamn air.
Owen, one of the two men loading guns and gear into the back of the Navigator, reached into the backseat and retrieved a portable oxygen concentrator for him. Gus, the other man, kept loading their gear in the back.
Daddy Jack checked the flow on the concentrator and fitted the tubing to his face. It took a few good breaths before he started feeling better, like he wasn’t going to goddamn die before he even got this show on the road.
He heard the SUV’s lift gate close at the rear of the vehicle.
“Seven thirty-eight Steele Street,” he said when Gus got in behind the wheel.
Gus and Owen were his handpicked “A” team, a matched set of shaved-head ball-busters, both of them built like slabs of granite. They were the best hunters he had - and no mistake, this was a hunting expedition, pure and simple.
“Got it, Big Jack,” Gus said, pulling up the Navigator’s GPS screen.
Twenty-three years. Jack had waited too damn long for this payday. Too damn long for that damn, thieving little bastard to raise his head long enough to get a bead on him.
But, by God, they had a bead on him now. All thanks to Robert Crandall Jr. of Crandall & Ellis LLP, a New York City law firm. One damn letter sent from Crandall Jr. to Liam Dylan Magnuson in Georgia four days ago, and the dominoes had started falling into place. Starting with Big Jack opening the letter no matter whose damn name was on it, to sending Tommy to Chicago with a copy of the letter to pick up the pansy-assed guitar player, to the guitar player making a run for it and leading them to the goddamn prize of the century - one damn domino after another, until the last one had hit pay dirt right here in goddamn Denver.
Nothing could have surprised him more.
All these years, he’d been convinced the money was in Switzerland. But no matter how many lawsuits he’d filed, or how many Georgia congressmen he’d sicced on those damn Swiss bankers, he’d never gotten a damn dime out of the place. He’d even taken little Liam once, tried to pass him off as the older boy, and gotten nowhere. It had all made him wonder if the money was even there. But if it wasn’t in Geneva, where the hell was it?
New York City.
According to the letter, Big Jack’s long dead business partner had stashed the older boy’s “inheritance” in New York City with Crandall & Ellis, and those bastards were waiting for Liam Dylan Magnuson to come and get it.
Jack could A-1 guarantee that was going to happen – pronto.
Yes, sir, the smartest thing he’d ever done was convince Margot to give her second boy the same name as the first. To carry on the tradition, he’d told her, but he’d always been thinking that if he ever had a chance at the money, well, by God, he wanted to have a Liam Dylan Magnuson to go claim it.
And wouldn’t you know it. The damn money had shown up, and Jack had not one, but two Liam Dylan Magnusons, and he was going to break whichever one he got his hands on first and drag him to New York to claim the inheritance Crandall & Ellis LLP had lost track of for over two decades. And then he was going to turn around and sue the bastard lawyers for keeping the money for so damn long. His money, no matter whose damn name was on it.
All these years, he’d thought the kid had gotten away with the money. He’d thought the kid had been so damn smart.
He’d been wrong. The kid had always been just a damn kid, while Crandall & Ellis LLP had been negligent beyond belief.
It was going to cost them.
“For my son, Liam Dylan Magnuson III,” the letter had said. “His inheritance, his patrimony, to be given to no other claimant.” The inheritance given to Attorney Robert Crandall Sr. by Liam Dylan Magnuson II twenty-three years ago for safekeeping. Given, and then forgotten when there’d been no Liam Dylan Magnuson III to be found. When Crandall Sr. had died recently, Crandall Jr. had found the Magnuson inheritance file in his father’s papers and instigated a new search using the internet.
It hadn’t taken the young attorney long to come up with a band named Never Celeste, fronted by Liam Magnus, a.k.a. Liam Dylan Magnuson.
Liam’s inheritance? Jack had thought, reading the letter. Not very damn likely. That damn five million, plus interest, plus damages, and anything else he found at the attorneys’ office belonged to Jack. He didn’t give a damn about the “no other claimant.” He had lawyers, too, lots of lawye
rs.
And today of all days, he was done screwing around. An hour before he and his team had gotten on the plane, he’d received a phone call. His trading partner in Atlanta had called to let him know the deal they’d been working on for the last four months had suddenly and inexplicably fallen through. Ted Patton of Patton Equipment, Inc. had walked away from the table. Gone, just like that. No reason given.
Ironically, just when he needed an infusion of cash more than ever, he was closer to his long-lost millions than he’d ever been.
He shifted in his seat to look over his shoulder at Owen. “Call the boys. Let ‘em know we’re here and to back off whatever the hell they’ve been up to.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell ‘em they’re going in with us to nab the old bastard.”
“Old bastard, sir?”
“The first son. The older brother Liam,” Jack grumbled. Nate packed a helluva punch, and that damn Bobby Lee had shot the guitar hero in the leg. Dragging a beaten-up cripple with him back east and propping him up in front of a bunch of New York City lawyers was too risky, looked too damn fishy, was too much like the Geneva fiasco. So, the smart move was to go for the real deal first. That bastard was kicking forty in the back and was no match for the juggernaut heading his way - Gus, Owen, and Big Jack Dunstan in the flesh.
He allowed himself a grin. Oh, yeah, that bastard’s day of reckoning had come. Big Daddy Jack was heading toward him like a Cruise missile on overdrive.
Chapter Fifteen
Liam winced as he eased into one of the leather chairs grouped around a coffee table at the far end of the loft. His brother’s home took up the entire top floor of the building and getting across it had just about taken his last ounce of energy. His head throbbed, his arm ached, and his gunshot wound simply hurt like hell.
“We can do this in the morning, if you want,” his brother said.
“No. Now is good.” He set his backpack on the table, determined to do what he’d come to do. The road to get here had been long and hard, almost the least of it what he’d endured last night.
He unzipped the pack’s main compartment and took out seven well-worn paperback books and put them on the table – adventure stories, tales of derring-do and treasure, of survival, of boys and dogs striking out on their own and conquering the wilderness.
“All these books are from the bookshelves in my room, which I eventually figured out must have been your room before it was mine, and there are a couple of themes here,” he said.
His brother picked up one of the books and let out a short laugh. “Every boy a hero, and every dog.”
“And books you loved enough to read more than once. In some cases” – Liam lifted a book held together with a rubber band off the table – “a book you read until it fell apart. That’s what caught my eye, and I figured, hell, if my long-lost brother loved this book so much, maybe I ought to read it.”
“Call of the Wild,” his brother said.
“Yeah. Great story. I ended up reading it a few times myself, and every time, I kept coming back to this.”
He slipped the rubber band off the book and handed the stack of loose pages to Dylan.
“If you look inside the front cover, you’ll see a “This Book Belongs To” stamp and beneath it are three handwritten initials – L. D. M. Those are my initials, and they were yours, but then someone has crossed out the initials and put their own name in the book, and he did the same in all these books.”
Liam watched his brother’s gaze run down the length of the page to the name.
“Dylan Hart.”
“Yeah,” Liam said. “That guy. And so I was always wondering, who was this kid who was screwing around in me and my big brother’s room, writing his name in our books? Who in the hell was this kid, Dylan Hart?”
Who in the hell, indeed? Dylan thought.
It took a helluva lot to startle him, but Liam just had, in spades.
Geezus. All those years of stealing cars and hiding out in Denver, he’d been one Jack London novel away from being found. Or rather – he glanced over the books on the table – two Jack London novels and five other adventure books, everything from Dogsong, to Hatchet, to Treasure Island and Kidnapped, all of them in a room Jack Dunstan had walked past every day.
He sat back in his chair, listening as Liam continued, watching him speak and gesture and pretty much all-around confound and amaze.
“Then one night, while Big Jack was bitching about the money, drunk as usual,” Liam was saying, “he said the damnedest thing, had probably said it hundreds of times, but I was never listening. That night, he said the only way that damn, smart-ass kid could have gotten out of Switzerland without him knowing it, was if that kid had changed his damn name.”
Indeed, Dylan thought. It had been the only way.
“At first,” Liam said, “I was only thinking what a great idea that was. That I’d have better luck running away and not getting caught, if I changed my name, too.” He reached out and picked up one of the books. “So, I got to thinking about a new name for myself. It could be anything, right? But it had to be cool, something easy to remember. And then, there it was.” He opened the front cover of Treasure Island and showed the inside to Dylan. “Right in front of me my whole life – Dylan Hart.”
He let out a short laugh and put the book back on the table.
“Trust me,” he said, lifting his gaze, “it was about half a second from that thought to knowing that if you were still out there in the world, that’s who you were, Dylan Hart.”
And so he was.
Geezus.
“It was a comfort,” Liam said, reaching out and pouring himself a short shot. “Finally knowing your name.”
“How old were you?”
“Fifteen,” he said, then tossed back the whiskey, finishing it in one swallow.
“But you didn’t try to find me.” The kid was obviously resourceful. He could have given it a go.
“No.” Liam reached for his backpack. “No one had heard from you in forever, not even Mom. You could have been dead, and I...uh, wasn’t ready for that. It was better not to know anything, than to know that.”
Dylan silently swore, feeling his control of the situation slip for reasons that had nothing and everything to do with the kid – and their mother. Mom, he had called her. But since Dylan had been fifteen, she’d only ever had one name to him – and he’d done his damnedest to forget even that one.
Cruising into downtown Denver, Big Jack twisted around to glare at Owen in the backseat of the Lincoln. “What do you mean those dumbass kids aren’t answering their phones?”
“I’ve tried all three of them, Jack.” Owen shrugged. “Left a message for Tommy to call, and one for Nate. Figured there was no sense in leaving a message for Ratface Raynor.”
“Dumbass kids,” Jack muttered. “How close are we, Gus?”
“Ten minutes out.”
“Don’t waste your breath calling again. Text. That’s all these idiots do anymore,” Jack said. “Text Tommy. He’s supposed to be in charge. Let him know we’re ten minutes out. He can wrangle the other two, get their asses in the Escalade, and get them to Steele Street.”
“Yes, boss.” Owen typed the message and hit send – and almost immediately got a reply. “They’re on their way, Jack.”
“About goddamn time.”
Lieutenant Loretta pocketed Tommy’s phone and turned to Weismann and the other assembled officers. “Saddle up, boys. This party is on.”
Chapter Sixteen
Margot.
Their mother.
Dylan put the Jack London book back on the table, then slid his gaze to the bottle of whiskey.
At seventeen, he’d almost drank himself into a coma one night, trying to forget the last time he’d heard his mother’s voice. It had taken her four days after his father had died to call. Three days after Jack and his goons had arrived and started putting the squeeze on him.
“Now honey, I’m telling yo
u, stop whatever you’re up to and get back to the hotel. Jack and his friends are still in Geneva. They’re looking all over for you, worried sick. I don’t know why in the world you would have run off, just being stubborn, as usual. Jack flew all the way there to take care of you, bring you home, but you have got to tell him where the money is. He knows your father took it, bless his soul, but that money belongs to Jack now, to the business – and we...we need it. So don’t give me any sass and get back to the hotel. Or call Jack, and he’ll come get you.”
Dylan had known that last bit for a fact. Jack and his crew had been tearing through Geneva, trying to find him, and it had taken everything Dylan had to keep ahead of the bastards. He’d been living on the razor’s edge and on the run for three days, fifteen years old, lost, and flat-out scared to death that if he didn’t move fast enough, wasn’t smart enough, someone was going to drag him out of the darkness of his grief and kill him.
He’d been right.
He’d thought Big Jack was coming to Geneva to help him get his father’s body home, to take care of the million things that had crashed down on him when his father had collapsed with a heart attack and died – but Jack hadn’t come to help him.
Jack had come to help himself. He’d come for the money. The only thing standing in his way was finding out where it was, and getting rid of anyone else who might have a claim, like the boy whose name was the same as the man’s who’d taken the money - Liam Dylan Magnuson.
And last night, Tommy Dunstan and two of his thugs had descended on his brother with the same evil intent for the same damn money – to torture and coerce Liam, until what? Until they went too far?
Leaning forward, Dylan poured himself and Liam another shot, and he wondered if he’d be feeling more settled if he’d slammed Tommy Dunstan into the wall a couple of times - hard.