Crazy Hot (26 page)

Sleep is what she needed, not a million dollars' worth of rough-cut diamonds and the world's most exclusive dinosaur nest.

Fine,
she decided. She would call Quinn, and then she and Wilson were heading back to Steele Street just as fast as Betty could take them, and given the engine in the red Coronet, Regan would bet that would be pretty damn fast.

All she had to do was make her call.

Finally reaching the desk, she stretched out her hand for the receiver—and froze, her gaze locked on the cruel face leering at her through the window in the laboratory's door. Her fingers trembled in sudden paralysis; her arm refused to move. So did her mouth, and her vocal cords, for if they hadn't, she most definitely would have let out a bloodcurdling scream.

C
HAPTER

25

O
NE THING ABOUT QUINN
, Hawkins thought as he pulled Roxanne to a stop on the corner of Fifteenth and Curtis in downtown Denver. He was always where he said he'd be. Getting out of the green Challenger, Hawkins approached Jeanette from the front.

“Hey.” He leaned against the Camaro's door panel. The heat of the night had hit him like a furnace blast when he'd stepped out of the Jack O' Nines. The club had air-conditioning. Of course, it also had three dead bodies in it, which definitely detracted from its dubious charms.

Hawkins sure could use a drink, about a pint of twelve-year-old Scotch ought to do it, a feeling that had only grown stronger when he'd seen Jeanette waiting for him on Curtis Street.

Hell. Jeanette was nothing but trouble out on the street tonight. Quinn should have stuck with Betty after dropping Regan at Steele Street.

“What's the situation report?” Quinn asked, cutting straight to the chase.

“Well, for starters, you've got a lot of balls parking Jeanette this close to the Jack O' Nines.” Hawkins knocked a cigarette out of its pack, stuck it in his mouth, but didn't light it. Not yet. “Balls that I would have thought would be at least slightly deflated from that stunt you pulled in Lafayette,” he said wryly, reaching for his lighter.

“Stunt?” Quinn repeated, then laughed. “Oh, right.” He had the grace to look embarrassed, but not for long. “Hell.”

“Yeah, hell is right. Roper just offed Louie and the Chicago boys in the Jack.”

“Shit.” Quinn sat up straighter. “You're sure they're dead?”

“God, I hope so. Louie was knifed and was still trying to hold himself together when I left. Branson and Linberg were shot point-blank. This night has gone from bad to worse and from worse to completely fucked faster than any night I can remember, and damn it, Quinn, I want both of us to walk out of it in the morning in one piece.”

“Fair enough,” Quinn agreed easily. “Look, I'm sorry, but Regan's out of it now. No more distractions. I swear.”

“Right. Out of it. So let's see what we've got.” Hawkins wasn't going to belabor the point, but he'd definitely felt a need to make it. He needed Quinn to be a hundred percent focused on the job, something he couldn't remember his friend ever having a problem with until Regan McKinney had gone looking for him. “From what I gathered from eavesdropping on Roper and Louie's conversation in the Jack, Roper's in the middle of the deal. He's the broker, not one of the players, with the Chicago mob and the guns on one side and the Russians and something missing in the dinosaur bones on the other.”

“Russians. Shit. We should have known it was Russian mafia buying the fucking guns. They've got every terrorist in the Middle East on their doorstep, looking to buy guns.”

“Yeah, and it looks like Chicago is only too happy to be selling them.” Dylan had a long and checkered past with the ex-KGB guys who ran the Russian mafia. It was one area no one at SDF liked to delve into too deep.

“So what's missing?”

“I don't know. I only know Roper expected to find something in the dinosaur bones he didn't find.”

“So we call Wilson?” Quinn asked. “Russians tie in real nicely with him thinking he had a Mongolian fossil.”

“A Mongolian fossil we couldn't find,” Hawkins reminded him. “Hell, he struggles to remember stuff in the middle of the day. Waking him up in the middle of the night is a long shot. No matter what he says, we'll have to check it out, and we don't have time to run down bad leads. Not now.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Finish this fucking mess before it finishes us. The deal is going down tonight, real quick, in the Avatrix hangar out at the old Stapleton Airport. Roper wants me to meet him out there with you, so he can turn you into beef jerky.”

“He'll have to get to me before I get to him,” Quinn said, an edge in his voice Hawkins didn't misinterpret for a second. There wasn't a guy at SDF who didn't want Roper Jones to go down hard.

“Yeah, well, before you two get to each other, I'm calling in the FBI for backup. We all go out to the Avatrix hangar, wait for Roper and the Russians to put their cards—and the guns, and whatever—on the table, and then bust the whole lot of them. Bad guys lose. End of story. As a bonus, I'll have Special Agent Leeder send someone over to Steele Street to question Wilson. If they come up with something, great. We'll use it. If not, we haven't wasted our time. Where's Kid?”

Quinn didn't say anything right away, but the look on his face was enough to trouble Hawkins.

“What the hell else has happened in the last fucking hour that I need to know about?”

“Dylan made it back to Steele Street while we were in Lafayette, and picked Kid up. They're both on their way to Colombia.”

Okay, that didn't sound good. Whatever intel Dylan had gotten must have been all bad news. “Did he say why?”

“J. T. and Creed missed their check-in, and a couple of Americans in bad shape have been reported up by the Panama border.”

“Okay,” Hawkins said, tamping down his concern and deliberately not asking for more details. They had a job to do, right now. “One thing at a time. Once we get the guns, we'll let the FBI sort the rest of it out. This damn thing has taken too long as it is. One of us can be heading to Colombia by morning to back them up.”

Quinn agreed with one word. “Avatrix?”

“Avatrix,” Hawkins repeated.

R
IDING
through the murky darkness of predawn, captive in the back of Roper Jones's Mercedes, Regan didn't have an ounce of heat left anywhere in her body. She was frozen numb with panic.
Terror
was really too mild a word to describe the talonlike emotion that had taken hold of her heart. Terror implied a certain heated chaos, or at least it always had to her.

Her only consolation was that whatever Roper Jones had in mind for her, he'd left Wilson out of it. He was safe, unharmed. One of Roper's men had tied her grandfather to a chair in the lab, and Regan knew it would only be a matter of hours before he was found.

For herself, she held out no such hopes. Since she'd reached for the phone in the lab and seen Roper Jones's face staring at her from the other side of the lab door, she'd lost all hope.

They'd driven east out of Denver, sticking to the city streets, and just moments before, she'd recognized the old Denver airport, Stapleton. One sign in particular was looming bright in neon against the night sky above one of the old hangars:
AVATRIX
.

It looked like a terrible place to die, but with no one knowing where she was, she was sure her fate was sealed. Roper didn't need her. He'd gotten both the
Tarbosaurus
nest and all the diamonds. He had it all. Everything. He'd won.

Never in her wildest dreams could she have imagined ending up like this, that her life would end in a grimy airplane hangar in a deserted airport in the middle of the night. That she would die at the hands of a criminal maniac. Even after just having had the wildest day of her whole life, it was hard to piece together how it had all come down to this.

“H-how did you get into the museum?” she asked Roper, who was riding in the backseat with her. The question had been torturing her. The museum was secure. She'd counted on that security without question, and it had let her down.

“My dearly departed friend Louie guessed where the diamonds might be, so my men and I came out to see if he was right. We didn't have to wait long before you showed up, and Brad here”—he gestured to the driver—“watched the old man finally punch in your code through a pair of night vision goggles. Couldn't have been simpler. Any idiot could have done it.” He squeezed her arm, then stroked it, and Regan wished she hadn't asked. Her skin crawled where he'd touched her, and she knew, deep in her heart, that he might do far more than touch her.

She had to escape if she could. So help her God, she had to escape.

The Mercedes pulled up in front of the hangar and was instantly flanked by another, matching sedan. Even before Roper pulled her out of the backseat, she had a bad feeling about the other car. Shadows were moving inside the sedan, shadows she couldn't pin down, until the doors were opened.

Suddenly, even rape paled in contrast to what she feared would be her final fate.

Two huge rottweilers bounded out of the car, unleashed, unchained, their bodies rippling with slabs of muscle beneath sleek, black-as-hell coats. But it was their heads that demanded her attention, large heads with drool gathered in the corners of their mouths. Gaping mouths lined with teeth. Massive jaws designed with one overall purpose in mind: to crush bone, tear flesh, and destroy life.

Roper called the beasts to heel, and as they padded past her, each one cast her a soulless glance filled with a single primal need to assuage: hunger.

D
ON'T
do it.”

Quinn heard Hawkins's warning, felt his hand on his arm, keeping him from taking aim at the men hauling Regan into the hangar, but his blood was running too cold to register the fear the sight had put into his heart.

They'd both parked a couple hundred yards away, but were watching the Avatrix hangar from closer in, from behind a stack of empty fuel drums.

“We need Kid,” he said, and truer words had never been spoken. Quinn wasn't a sniper, and neither was Hawkins. Both were good shots, but neither of them could hit a cold zero in the dark, on a moving target who was too damn close to the hostage to give them a clear shot—let alone hit five targets and two dogs.

“Leeder and the FBI will be here soon,” Hawkins said. “I'll call and have them bring in a sniper team.”

Soon wasn't going to be soon enough, and once Roper got her inside the hangar, it was going to take more than a sniper team to get her back out alive.

“We need to do better than that, and we need to do it right now.” Quinn knew it. Hawkins knew it, too.

“You know he's not going to hurt her until after the deal is made,” Hawkins said, his voice tight, the voice of reason. “You know it and I know it. He's going to wait for the guns to show up—which I highly recommend we do as well—and after all the wheeling and dealing is over, he'll have his fun. Except we'll go in, and we'll get the guns and save the girl and all go home happy.”

“Fuck you,” Quinn said.

After a long moment, he heard Hawkins sigh. “Yeah. Fuck me. I suppose you want me to turn you in to Roper and collect the fifty K he posted for the bounty.”

“Demand it, then use it to get Regan.”

“Fifty thousand dollars for a woman? You really think Roper is going to believe I'd pay fifty thousand dollars for a piece of ass?”

He held Hawkins's gaze steadily with his own. “Pay what he asks, just make him believe you'll pay anything. Don't leave without her.”

“Aw, hell, Quinn.” Hawkins looked away, shook his head, then swore again under his breath, before looking back up. “Okay, but don't come looking for me later, when you decide we could have done it my way and saved us all a whole lot of trouble.”

“Cuff me.”

Hawkins swore under his breath, gave him a baleful look, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a flex cuff. “
Kee-rist,
I hate this idea.”

C
HAPTER

26

T
HE INSIDE OF
the hangar was jammed full with freight—boxes, cartons, and containers—all of it haphazardly organized. Regan saw lots of electronics: flat-screen televisions, in-home theater components, computers, DVD players, and everything in between. There was a whole fleet of Mercedes-Benz sedans parked on the east side, and racks of gasoline barrels. Two large refrigerator compartments held God knew what, but they walked past stacks of crated caviar and wines, cigarettes and cigars. More than a warehouse, she realized. Avatrix was Roper Jones's commissary.

They continued on toward the back, to a place with a couple of desks sitting out in the open. Sweat was beading on her brow, even though she felt frozen.

At the desks, Roper had them all stop, but only the dogs got to sit. The men with him spread out, looking through the hangar, before coming back to the desks to confirm everything was in order.

Roper checked his watch.

“Danny, go open the hangar doors. Brad and Russ, go back to the car and get the fossil. The woman can work on it until the guns get here.”

“Guns?” she asked. “What guns?”

She had nothing left to lose by asking questions, and she had the faint hope that if he could see her as a real person instead of a hapless victim, he might treat her as such.

He smiled at her, as if pleased by her question. And then he told her. But something in his eyes told her the reason he was telling was because he didn't plan on her being alive long enough to tell anybody else.

“The big guns, baby.” He glanced down and picked up a sheaf of papers, then tossed them aside and turned on the computer on the desk. “The Pentagon wanted something to fight the fucking terrorists with, so they commissioned a new assault rifle for U.S. forces. It's real good for getting up close and personal in a fight, so naturally, we figured every terrorist group from al-Qaeda to Hamas would like a few so they could fight back.”

“You're giving away U.S. military secrets?” She was appalled.

“Not giving, selling.” He punched a few keys, and after a couple of seconds, a soft glow of illumination reflected onto his face from the monitor. “There's a difference, and it's a time-honored transaction. Free trade, they call it. It's how the American weapons merchants have armed the world. I'm just getting my share, that's all.” He tapped a few more keys, then looked up at her. “I get a few Siberian diamonds to take to Antwerp, and a whole new trade route opens up between Russia and the United States. It's the new world economy, the underworld economy, and I'm in. Business, that's all it is. Just business, with me in the middle to grease the wheels for all the world's fanatics.”

“Like who?” she asked.

He let out a snort of disgust and gave his attention back to the computer, ignoring her.

She looked around the hangar again, desperately seeking a way out and not seeing a damn thing. Then she spied a miracle—or the world's most awful disaster—walking down the middle of the hangar.

Quinn. He was handcuffed and roughed up, being pushed rudely along by a very sullen Christian Hawkins. In a flash, she understood what was happening, and she was both intensely relieved and thoroughly horrified. They'd come to save her, with Hawkins dragging Quinn in like he was a hard-won prize.

How in the world, she wondered, had they found her so quickly?

Then she knew: Hawkins. He'd been heading back to Roper when he'd left the warehouse in Lafayette. He was working both sides toward the middle. But from the looks of Quinn, she suddenly doubted whose side he was really on.

Don't be crazy,
she told herself. Hawkins and Quinn had been together forever—but Christian looked very cold, very hard, and like he didn't give a damn about the man he was shoving ahead of him.

“
Jefe,
boss man,” Hawkins called out, giving Quinn a final, rough push forward. “Here he is, just like I promised. How about that money?”

Roper looked up at the sound of their approach, and a truly diabolical expression came over his face.

“Cristo,” he answered, his teeth flashing white in a broad grin. “You found the son of a bitch.”

Hawkins grinned, a predatory curve that caused Regan's heart to miss a beat.

“For fifty thousand dollars, I would find you the devil himself.”

Roper laughed. “Yes, and bring him to me in chains. This is turning out to be my lucky night all the way around.” He walked over to where Hawkins and Quinn had stopped in front of the desk. In an instant, his laughter stopped and his smile turned grim. “You fucking bastard,” he said, grabbing Quinn around the back of his neck and squeezing hard. “Nobody steals from Roper Jones. Nobody. I'm going to turn you fucking inside out for even trying. What did you think you were going to do with my diamonds, huh? Keep them for yourself and the woman?”

Quinn gave him a long look, but no answer. Roper's face flushed, turning ruddy with anger. His eyes flashed an electric, dangerous blue, and for a second, Regan feared he might do something horribly violent, right then, right there.

“I'll take cash,” Hawkins interjected coolly. “Small bills.”

“Small bills?” Roper repeated, turning his attention to Hawkins and releasing Quinn. A short laugh escaped him. “You're fucking crazy, Cristo. No problems, eh?”

The rumbling entrance of a forklift drew everyone's attention to the hangar door. The
Tarbosaurus
nest was on a pallet, its uneven shape causing it to rock from side to side. Regan could hardly bear to watch, her breath was caught so tight in her throat.

“Small bills.” Roper laughed again. “Wait until you see this.” He waved the forklift over. “Put it here.” He cleared a place on the desk without the computer.

This is awful,
Regan thought, watching the two men named Danny and Brad manhandle the fossil of Wilson's dreams, dropping it on the metal desk with a thud. Plaster dust and shards flew off the fossil in a settling cloud, accompanied by a terrible cracking sound.

She bit back a curse. It sounded like they'd just broken the heart of the thing, fractured it right through the middle. What a nightmare. They hadn't been careful when they'd picked it up with the museum's portable hoist either. All they'd cared about was the plaster jacket and the small canvas sack Wilson had been using to put the diamonds in.

Roper had put the sack in the pocket of his suit coat, and now pulled it out.

“See what else you can get out of there, and put the rest of the diamonds in with these,” he ordered her, dropping the canvas bag next to the fossil. “And hurry up, we're running out of time.”

Time for what?
Regan wondered.
More mayhem? Murder?

She glanced at Quinn, hoping for a clue as to what she should do. The slight nod he gave her could have been her imagination. It was hardly a movement at all, but she followed his lead and turned her attention to the fossil and the hundreds of rough diamonds embedded in the plaster.

She'd hardly gotten started when some compelling force made her look back up. Her gaze collided with Hawkins's, and her heart caught in her throat.

Christian Hawkins was looking at her, looking long and hard, his eyes dark, intense, and filled with enough raw appreciation to make a shiver go down her spine.

His predatory smile returned, as if he knew exactly what had just happened to her inside the privacy of her skin, and with an insolence she wouldn't have thought possible, he let his gaze slide down the length of her body.

Suddenly she wasn't at all sure what was happening. She looked back to Quinn. He'd been hit, hard, more than once. She could see the swelling on his lip, the bruise starting under his eye.

What had Hawkins done? Beaten him? For the fifty thousand dollars?

Every doubt she'd ever had, every story she'd ever read about Christian Hawkins, came back to her in that moment. What did she really know about Hawkins, besides the time he'd done in jail, and the fact that Quinn trusted him?

Yet Quinn had been hurt, and Hawkins was the one turning him in to the man who had threatened to remove his head and feed the remains to the dogs.

As if sensing a change in their luck, the two rottweilers roused themselves from the side of the desk and padded around to the front. At a signal from Roper, low growls began emanating from their throats.

Whatever composure Quinn had been holding on to up until that point was clearly shaken by the sound. He slanted a glance to Hawkins and got a disdainful shrug for his trouble.

“This is your fucking problem, Younger, not mine.” He turned back to Roper, but first let his gaze slide over Regan again. “The money, if you don't mind.”

“Sure, Cristo,” Roper said slyly, following the path of Hawkins's eyes. “You can have your money, unless there's something else you want.”

A true grin curved Hawkins's mouth, and he let out a short laugh. “She's for sale?”

“Everything in this building is for sale, except his life.” Roper jerked his thumb in Quinn's direction. “I'm keeping that for myself.”

Regan watched, horrified, as without so much as a twinge of emotion, Hawkins turned his back on Quinn and walked toward her.

“Everything, huh?” he asked, coming to a stop in front of her and reaching up to slide his fingers up her cheek. “She's a bit of a mess.”

“She's had a big day, but if you want time to clean her up a little, I can get one of the Jack O' Nine girls down here with some clothes and makeup.”

Regan would have jerked away from him, but she was frozen to the spot by his callous betrayal. Quinn couldn't possibly have put his trust in someone who cared so little. Or could he have?

“No,” Hawkins decided after a lengthy pause. “I'll take her just the way she is. How much for half an hour?”

“Half an hour?” Roper laughed. “Touch her again, Cristo. Trust me, you're going to want more than half an hour.”

For the second time, Hawkins met her gaze, his eyes very dark, very intense, darker even than she had imagined. With his hand sliding back down her face, he moved closer to her and slowly ran his thumb over her lips, very gently from one side to the other, and against every rational thought in her head she felt the rest of the world begin to recede. Fear, she told herself, fear was making her feel so odd.

“Don't move, honey,” he whispered, before bringing his mouth down to hers and whispering again against her lips. “Don't move, and everything will be okay.”

His other hand came up to her waist and slid around to cup her bottom and pull her in closer to his body, until she could feel the long, hard length of his legs pressed against hers, feel the lean hardness of his torso and the steely strength of his arms.

She started to protest, and he pulled her even tighter, his mouth came down on hers even harder, and yet more sweetly, if a forced kiss could even begin to be sweet.

“Shhh,” he whispered, relenting just a little, before kissing her again. Some of his heat washed into her then, the heat from his pelvis, the soft, wet heat of his tongue sliding along her lips, asking for entrance. She gasped, just the slightest gasp, and to her horror, he took full advantage of her lapse, pressing his tongue into her mouth.

She trembled in his arms, with anger and shame, and an undeniable awareness that Christian Hawkins was a world-class kisser—and a world-class heel.

It wasn't until he broke off the kiss that she realized his hand was cupping her breast. Then she realized it all too much. Damn him. Damn him. Damn him.

She couldn't even look at Quinn.

“You're right,” he said to Roper without taking his gaze from hers. “I want her for an hour. Five hundred dollars.”

“You're a rich man tonight, Cristo. Live a little,” Roper cajoled. “Keep her until you've had enough. I'll have one of the girls figure the price.”

Which Regan figured would turn out to be the full fifty thousand dollars, no matter what Hawkins did or did not do with her—and he wasn't going to do much. She was going to make damn sure of that.

“It's a sucker's bet,” she said under her breath, so angry her voice shook.

In answer, he laughed, soft and low, and took her hand in his. “We'll see. Come on, sweetheart. There's a Motel Six just down the road.”

He was too strong to resist, and rather than be dragged, she did her best to keep up with him. It was only near the door that she dared to look back at Quinn. What she saw startled and confused her. She didn't know what kind of expression she'd expected, but it sure as hell hadn't been satisfaction.

H
AWKINS
hurried her through the door as quickly as he could. He had a death grip on her hand, and more than a few errant thoughts running like crazy through his head.

She was sweet. Damn, she was sweet. No wonder Quinn had been all over her in the warehouse. Even unwilling, she'd warmed to his mouth just the slightest bit, and the softeness of her mouth had done more than just warm him. Hell, one more minute of kissing a reluctant Regan McKinney, and he would have been as hard as the Rock of Gibraltar.

For friendship's sake, he was going to keep that information to himself. Quinn had been cool, but he'd probably strangle him in his sleep for getting an erection with his girlfriend.