Avenging Angel (21 page)

Ignoring Jay, he pulled the duffel bag up front and took out the shotgun, a box of shells, and an extra magazine for his pistol. He had to get to Johanna, and to do that, he had to take out Rodrigo and Charlie.

Charlie
. The shock was numbing.

He got out of the car and walked down the middle of the street, almost a full block behind his quarry, angling himself closer to the line of parked cars. He had to move fast. Charlie and Johanna were already entering Pike Street Market, and all Dylan remembered about the place was how easy it would be to get lost in it. The market was closed this time of night except for a few restaurants, which only meant darker holes and more hiding places.

He would have preferred to keep everyone out in the open, but the only advantage he had was them thinking Jay had him driving out of town with a gun to his head.

Rodrigo had to be taken out first, silently.

Dylan kept to his side of the parked cars, staying low and moving quickly. His body told him it would never forget or forgive the punishment.

Charlie and Johanna disappeared into the market, and Dylan made his move on Rodrigo, coming up behind him and dropping him at the knees with a well-placed kick. Dylan let him fall to the ground, then came around to the side of him with the shotgun jammed in his ear.

“How many men does Austin have with him?” he growled, watching the man carefully as he picked up Rodrigo’s gun.

“Five.” The word was a bare gasp followed by a succinct curse. “I think you threw my knee out, Jones.”

The use of his name brought Dylan up short. Rodrigo had only known him as Dane Erickson.

“Five including you and Charlie?” he asked.

“Five including Charlie and Jay, who Tom must have taken out or you wouldn’t be here.”

“I took out Jay,” Dylan said, “and there wasn’t anybody named Tom in my car.”

Rodrigo cursed again, all the while lying on the sidewalk, grimacing. “So Jay got Tom, you got Jay, Charlie’s got Johanna Lane, and you’ve got me, you stupid son of a bitch, but I’m on your side, so it doesn’t count, unless you want to do me and explain it to Watkins later.”

There was another name, Watkins. Dylan had tangled with his bureau chief more times than he cared to remember, and always to his detriment.

“You’re FBI?” he asked Rodrigo.

The man nodded. “Charlie went bad. Nobody knew if you had gone over too. So they sent me in to watch you, and I’ll be damned if I could tell. When you grabbed Johanna Lane, we thought for sure you were going to carry through on the hit. Then Austin found Johnny Shepherd, and we knew you needed help.” Rodrigo looked up at him. “You’re a damn hard man to help, Jones.”

“Where is Austin waiting?”

“Bottom of the hill,” Rodrigo ground out. “In a parking lot across from the wharf.”

“Can you walk?”

In reply, Rodrigo pushed himself up, a laborious task that ate into Dylan’s time.

“You don’t have to worry about Austin,” Rodrigo muttered, barely managing to stand. “We’ve got ten agents converging on him. The plan was for me to walk Charlie and Johanna in, with Tom as my backup after he’d made sure you were all right. The problem now is that Charlie still has the woman, and you and I are screwing around on this hill.”

Dylan threw him his gun. “Back me up if you can,” he said, then he went after Charlie.

* * *

Johanna’s unease had grown to distrust with every step they took deeper into the labyrinth of Pike Street Market. When they’d first realized Dylan had already left, Charlie had immediately told her he knew where his ex-partner would go, especially if he was hurt. They had a good chance of catching up with him.

But Johanna didn’t like the fact that Charlie Holter had parked so far away from the meeting place. He’d apologized profusely, explaining the difficulty of getting a good First Avenue parking spot anytime of the day or night. The lot below Pike Street didn’t get nearly as much use, he’d told her, because people didn’t want to climb the stairs that snaked up the long hill.

It made sense, perfect sense, and she didn’t believe a word of it. Charlie had an answer for everything and he talked too much.

She stopped abruptly, all of her confidence centered in the gun she had in the palm of her hand, hidden inside the coat pocket—which was a damn poor place for her confidence.

“I’m going back up the hill, Mr. Holter. If you find Dylan where you think you will, tell him I’m waiting for him in the place we discussed.”

He looked at her for a moment, his smile unsure. “Dylan expects me to protect you, Ms. Lane. I can’t do that if you walk out of here.”

“I’m comfortable protecting myself.” It was a lie. She wasn’t comfortable. She was a nervous wreck.

“I can’t let you go,” he said, and her nervousness jumped the barrier into panic.

“I’m not giving you a choice.” She pulled the gun out and backed away from him, making sure the gun was pointing in the right direction. Even if Charlie Holter turned out to be a saint, she knew she was making the right decision for herself. Her intuition was going haywire with all the emotional upheaval of the past two days, but she didn’t like Charlie and she wasn’t going anywhere with him. If she’d thought for even one minute longer, instead of jumping at the chance to find Dylan, she wouldn’t have walked down the hill with him, let alone entered a deserted marketplace.

“Well, Ms. Lane, I’m not giving you a choice either.” He pulled a gun on her, and she knew she wasn’t in the presence of a saint.

They were in a standoff, until Dylan stepped into the picture.

“Drop it, Charlie.”

“Dylan!” Charlie smiled, but he didn’t lower his gun. “Tell the woman to relax, will you?”

“She’s a lawyer, Charlie. She doesn’t know how to relax.”

Johanna didn’t spare Dylan a glance. She was staring at Charlie’s gun, wondering what would happen if she squeezed her trigger and missed him. Who would get hurt? Would she or Dylan die?

“This is no good, Dylan,” Charlie said.

“I know about Austin,” Dylan countered. “I know you left the Bureau to work for him. I should have figured you couldn’t have bought your fishing boat on what the government was paying you, not the way you spend money.”

“Get out of here, Dylan. Go.” Charlie gestured with his free hand. “I only made a deal for the woman, not for you. We were together too long, partner.”

“Dammit, Charlie. You know it doesn’t work like that.”

The distant sound of people running up the stairs gave them all pause.

“Get out of here, Dylan!” Charlie cried. “I saved your life too many times to watch you die tonight! Get out!”

Dylan didn’t waver, and Johanna knew time had run out. Her hands trembling uncontrollably, she squeezed the trigger—and missed Charlie by a mile.

He swung on her, his gun leveled, and Dylan shot him. Two men broke from the stairway just as she was grabbed and dragged down from behind. She twisted her body to face her attacker and felt fear well up inside when she saw him. His black hair was slicked back off a decidedly Latino face, and all she could think was that he looked like somebody from a Colombian cartel, one of the Morrow Warner connections mentioned in the weekend newspapers.

With great difficulty he dragged her with him behind an empty wooden stall. She fought him all the way, until he managed to pin her beneath him and flash his identification.

“FBI, Ms. Lane. Stay down.”

The marketplace sounded like a shooting gallery on the other side of the stall. Her heart was racing furiously. She didn’t want to stay down. She had to know what was happening to Dylan.

The blast of the shotgun told her where he was. In the next instant he was almost on top of her as he slid into the place between the stalls.

“There’s too many men out there,” he said, talking to the FBI agent who was still holding her. “Your reinforcements have arrived, but I can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys. I’m going after Austin!”

“Dylan, no!” She lunged for him, but the man gripping her arm didn’t give her a chance. Dylan slipped away from her, running for the stairs. He almost made it.

One second he was in control, and in the next he was knocked sideways by the bullet that hit him. She rose to her feet in slow-motion horror, watching as he fell, and fell, endlessly down the stairs, until he fell out of view.

“
Dylllan!
” she screamed. “
Dyllllaaaan!
”

“There never was a Dylan Jones, Ms. Lane, as I have already told you on numerous occasions. The man you knew was Dane Erickson, and he is dead.” Chief Watkins was as polite as always, icily polite. “Your prying into this area will get you nowhere. If anything, I would think you’d be relieved to know the man who abducted you is gone.”

Johanna knew he was gone. He’d been “gone” for two and a half months. But she didn’t think he was dead. Austin Bridgeman was dead, though the account of his demise that the papers had given did not match up with the facts Johanna knew. Charlie Holter was dead, shot down by a man who’d trusted him implicitly and been betrayed, shot down to save her life.

But a man who had never existed couldn’t die. That was the flaw in their reasoning, or a sign of her derangement. Most days she wasn’t sure which.

She missed him with an ache that left her only in her dreams. She had gone on with her life, spending long weekends in Chicago with her parents, and the other four days in the newly redecorated offices of Wayland and Lane and in her apartment in Boulder. She wasn’t sure why she kept coming back to Chicago, other than to harass Chief Watkins and to remember what it felt like to be safe. She didn’t feel closer to Dylan there.

She had fallen in love out west, and after another weekend of trying to crawl back into the womb, she decided it was time to go home for good and stop leaning on her mother and father like a three-day crutch every week.

The plane ride back to Colorado was beginning to feel like a bus trip across town, she’d made it so many times since August. The holidays were coming, and she was going to try not to travel until they arrived. She’d never spent Thanksgiving or Christmas with Dylan, so the time of year shouldn’t have been bringing extra sadness. It was, though. She could feel it creeping up on her with every passing day.

He’d told her not to forget him, and sometimes in the middle of the night she despaired that she never would be able to forget him. Their time together had been too intense, his leaving had been too sudden, too unresolved.

I love you, Johanna. You have to know that
.

She knew it, and it was breaking her heart. She couldn’t forget him. She couldn’t let go of him. All she could do was find him.

* * *

“This is crazy, Johanna,” Henry said, dogging her steps into her office, crumpling the current page of their appointment calendar in his fist. “You can’t have that man come here. Everybody will think we’re involved in something sleazy.”

“I am involved in something sleazy,” she said, ignoring the pained expression her words brought to her partner’s face. “A man who saved my life has either died or disappeared and nobody cares except me. It doesn’t get much sleazier than that, Henry.”

“You know what I mean.” He threw the balled-up page into her wastebasket, then thought better of the action. “Having Albert Nathans come here is bad business. It doesn’t look good.” He bent over to retrieve the page, but apparently had no luck finding it. After tossing a few other papers out, he swore and went down on his knees to search through the basket.

“Mr. Nathans is an information broker, Henry. He is not a felon.”

“Only because he hasn’t been caught.” Finding the recalcitrant page, he stood up and flattened it on her desk, smoothing it with his hand. “It’s merely a matter of semantics.”

“We’re attorneys, Henry,” she said dryly. “It’s always a matter of semantics.”

Using a pen off her desk, he began methodically blacking out the words detailing her two o’clock appointment. “I’m going to put this back on Mrs. Hunt’s desk, in the appointment book. I will be in my office when Mr. Nathans arrives, and I will remain there until after he leaves. My mother will be taking dictation for the hour.”

“I think that’s a good idea, Henry.” She watched him scribble on the appointment page, then cast her eyes heavenward. Sometimes she didn’t understand herself. How could she have possibly chosen Henry Wayland as her best friend and partner, then gone and fallen in love with a man like Dylan Jones?

Two weeks later the only question she was asking herself was how much longer she would keep trying before she accepted the truth. Mr. Nathans’s highly unorthodox and probably illegal investigation had turned up five Dylan Joneses, none of whom had been her Dylan Jones.

He’d also found out that the FBI agent on the scene, Rodrigo Aragon, had been reassigned to some netherworld department in Washington D.C.

It was more than Watkins ever would have told her, but it wasn’t what she’d wanted to know. She wanted to know where Dylan was—alive or dead. She had to know.

* * *

“The woman is damned persistent,” Watkins said to the man across from him.