Crazy Hot (6 page)

Son of a bitch,
Quinn silently cursed. Dylan really had done it. He'd contacted old Doc McKinney and brought him in on the operation—for reasons Quinn was damn well going to find out—and then he'd paid McKinney off with free rides in Betty and one of the Porsches.

And the 911? He wasn't going to tell her, but “Contact Quinn Younger in Cisco, Utah, for 911” didn't have a damn thing to do with a Porsche 911 and everything to do with what the old man should do if he found himself in trouble and needed help. Dylan was the only one who could have told Wilson about Cisco.

He'd been wrong. Things weren't looking up. They were going straight to hell, and if they all weren't damned careful, they were going to take Regan McKinney, her grandfather, and her kid sister right along with them.

C
HAPTER

6

W
ORK, WORK, WORK.
They were going to work him to death—and it would almost be worth it. He had a whole warehouse full of dinosaur bones to catalogue and identify.

Wilson McKinney hummed to himself as he moseyed from one plaster-covered fossil to the next, his glasses low on his nose, checking the numbers against his clipboard.

The men running around had really gone after the femurs and the tibias, looking for their missing guns. Yes, he'd figured that much out, that the guys at the warehouse had lost a bunch of guns, though why in the hell they thought someone would be hiding guns in dinosaur bones was beyond him.

Foolishness, pure foolishness. It was a good thing they'd called in an expert—namely him.

Of course, it was too darn hot to really be working with nothing but a darn fan blowing on him. All a darn fan did was blow the darn air around. Air-conditioning was what the darn warehouse needed. Air-conditioning.

Not that he couldn't take it. He'd been in a lot hotter places than a warehouse in . . . in—well, wherever the hell he was. Hell, yes, he'd been in hotter places than this. Spent his whole darn life in hotter places, digging up bones.

Though, swear to God, he'd never dug up anything even half so interesting as the three-hundred-pound peach of a fossil he'd found over near the generator, on table four.

His face split into a broad grin. Just wait until Regan got a look at number 42657. By God, he ought to just give her a call—and he would have, by God, if his darn phone worked, but he'd forgotten the darn charger. There was a phone in the warehouse. He heard it ringing every now and then, but he hadn't figured out where the darn thing was. He would, though, and by God, then he'd give Regan a call.

Oh, well. He'd be home soon, and he could tell her all about it. He ought to be telling a lot of people about it. There were still a couple of folks left in the warehouse, and if he could remember any of their darn names, by God, he'd call them over and show them a thing or two about dinosaurs.

But who could remember names, when it was too darn hot to remember anything?

A particularly round specimen caught his eye on table seven, and he wandered over to give it a closer look. He was sure he'd opened it up, but he'd better check it, just to make sure.

S
O
you did sell him the cars?” Regan asked, and Quinn found the disappointment in her voice heartening. Somehow, after the last wild hour, she must have still been harboring a hope that he wasn't quite as bad as he seemed.

Interesting.

He shrugged. “Let's just say he got to borrow Betty for a while.”

“And who would let him do that, if it wasn't you?”

Quinn wasn't about to give her Dylan's name, not yet.

“One of my partners” was all he said.

“Who?” she demanded, but he just looked at her. “Okay, then what about the Porsche?”

Yeah, what about the Porsche. He was still thinking about the Porsche, too. “We did have one we were looking to unload, but your grandfather isn't exactly a regular on our client list.”

“Of course not,” she said, sounding thoroughly offended again. “He never—” She stopped suddenly when the computer came to life.

A series of numbers flashed on the screen. Quinn hit a key, and a message scrolled across the monitor at the same time as it came through a speaker.

“
Skeeter here. All clear in Boulder
,” a young voice said.

Quinn adjusted the volume. “Did you get a visual?”

“
That would be affirmative.
”

“Nikki's fine,” he interpreted for Regan. “Skeeter, I need you to call Superman, tell him we're coming in. I'll call the boss myself.”
Or not,
he thought, already knowing what Dylan would think of him and Kid breaking cover.

“
Copy that.
”

Quinn hit another key. “Kid. What's your ETA?”

“
Seven o'clock tonight.
”

“Great.” A quick smile curved Quinn's lips. “I'll have Regan call you in.”

At least that had been the plan, but when he glanced over at her, she didn't look in the mood to cooperate.

“Skeeter is our . . . office manager,” he said with a smile. An encouraging smile, he hoped. “The computers are Kid's. Something he's been fooling around with, a wireless laptop with internal cell phone components on a closed satellite network with GPS. Do you want to call Nikki and tell her Kid Chronopolous is going to stay with her until you get home?”

“Why shouldn't I call the police instead?” she retorted, sounding like her mind was already made up, lifting her chin just enough that she could look down her nose at him, and suddenly he was back in that tent in Rabbit Valley. She'd been surprised when he'd walked in on her, but no more surprised than he'd been, and he never could have said who had recovered first—though his money had always been on her and the princess-to-pauper gaze she'd leveled at him. She hadn't been frightened. He'd realized that real quick. Badass jokers on the streets were afraid of him—but not the professor's granddaughter. No, she'd just looked down her prissy little nose and stared at him.

He'd loved it, absolutely loved it—there she'd been, practically naked and giving him attitude. He'd noticed her before, had been watching her, but that was when he'd fallen in sixteen-year-old love. Letting his gaze take a quick trip down her body and back had turned that split-second, initially pure and breathless feeling into molten lust. For an encounter that couldn't have lasted more than a minute, it had had one hell of an impact on him.

He'd pretty much ricocheted between love and lust the whole rest of the summer. Both reactions had made it impossible for him to work up the guts to talk to her. Every time he'd seen her, in his mind he'd seen her naked.

Some things never change,
he thought, mildly disgusted with himself. He wasn't a kid anymore, and she certainly deserved better than him continually imagining her without her clothes on, but there it was anyway.

Her skin was amazingly soft, though. Any guy who had touched her would notice—which made him wonder what had happened to her husband, a story he probably wasn't going to get any time soon.

“I asked you a question.”

“Yeah, you did,” he said, stalling until he could get his mind back on what she wanted to talk about. “Why shouldn't you go to the police? Because the police don't have a clue where your grandfather is, and I do.”

The answer to her question was as simple as that. He hadn't known before—not about the doc and not about the contents of those crates—but Betty had clinched it for him. Old Doc McKinney was working for SDF. There had been dinosaur bones in those crates, and Dylan had gone to the dinosaur man for help.

“So where is he, damn it?” she demanded. “Is he okay, or what?” The faint tremor in her voice stole some of the force out of her question and made him feel guilty as hell.

“If he's where I think he is, he's fine.”

She was quiet for a long minute on her side of the Camaro, but he could feel her looking at him.

Turning his head, he slid his gaze over her. Her hair was falling down all over the place, her lips were pale, and her skin was flushed with heat. Most women would look like train wrecks under those circumstances. He'd never seen anything more sexy in his life.

“And if he's not where you think he is?” she asked.

“Then I'll find him.”

And that was a promise.

W
ELL,
that settles it,
Christian Hawkins thought, slipping his cell phone into the back pocket of his jeans and pulling out a lighter and a pack of cigarettes. His whole day had just gone to hell. His boss at SDF, Dylan Hart, had just confirmed it.

Leaning back against the old warehouse where he was working with Doc McKinney, Hawkins, sometimes known as “Superman,” knocked a cigarette out of the pack.

Uncle Sam was pulling the plug on them. Dylan's trip to Washington, D.C., to plead SDF's case on a bunch of dinosaur bones had come to nothing. Not even General Grant had been able to save the mission. Hell, Quinn had almost died stealing the damn things, and now the government didn't want them—not that Hawkins blamed them. Who the hell would want a bunch of old dinosaur bones, except old man McKinney?

Guns. That's what they had been looking for in the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe rail yards two weeks ago. They had been looking for a stolen shipment of cutting-edge military assault rifles commissioned by the Pentagon.

Hawkins bent his head low over the flame of his lighter and inhaled until his cigarette was lit. Then he snapped the lighter shut and shoved it and the pack back in his pocket with his phone. He took a long drag and looked over the warehouse's parking lot. The place made him uneasy, and not because of the rusting piles of gutted cars, abandoned shipping crates, and junkyard trash.

The warehouse was too isolated. They were sitting on the interstate with Denver twenty-five miles to the south, Boulder fifteen miles west, and nothing but endless prairie to the east. A single FBI agent was inside the building, watching Doc McKinney sort his way through all those tons of bones. Two weeks ago they'd had three agents working in shifts around the clock, and in about five more minutes, they weren't even going to have the one.

Hell.
Dinosaur bones. They were a logistical pain in the ass and the most unlikely method of smuggling any of them had ever seen. They'd had to cut each plaster jacket to see what was inside, and McKinney was refusing to have the fossils moved until they'd finished replastering all of them.

They'd traced the wooden crates back to Seattle, but where the bones inside had come from was a mystery. Old man McKinney predicted it could take months, years, or maybe forever to figure out where the fossils had originated. To top it all off, the old doc had fallen in love with a three-hundred-pound specimen he'd made clear he wasn't going anywhere without.

Hawkins didn't have time to baby-sit either the doc or the bones. As far as Roper Jones knew, Hawkins was still working for him, and he'd been called in for the night shift. Hawkins could use Quinn and Kid right about now, but Quinn's cover as a low-lifer named Jeff Frazier had been blown all to hell, and if Roper had his way, the all-American hero was as good as dead the minute he stepped back inside Denver city limits.

The bones and Quinn—Roper wanted both of them back, and he wanted them bad, which was why Quinn had been shipped to Cisco with Kid to baby-sit.

Leaving only Skeeter in SDF's Steele Street office.

Hell, Hawkins hadn't even gotten through the last time he'd tried to reach the little nerdzoid. So much for the dashboard-laptop-phone combo that should have connected him to Skeeter's Jeep. It didn't work. His gadgets never worked. Kid said it was because Hawkins let off too much electromagnetic energy, whatever the hell that meant.

Kryptonite, Skeeter had further explained. “You're like raw kryptonite, giving off an interstellar force of exponential power and frying the heartsheath of the laptop's unprotected motherboard.”

Sometimes Hawkins wondered if Skeeter's lightbulbs were screwed all the way in.

Alerted by the sound of a metal door opening, he pushed off the wall and flicked his cigarette onto the asphalt.

Special Agent Tom Leeder, a big, burly guy in a dark suit, walked over to him. “Sorry, Hawkins,” the FBI agent said, lifting his hands and shrugging in resignation, “but this is it. I'm outta here. If the old man finds anything tonight, let me know, and I'll have agents all over this place.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” The old man wasn't going to find anything. They'd already cut open all the plaster jackets and come up with nothing. One case of assault rifles, that's all he'd wanted. One frickin' case of OICW prototype assault rifles. Was that too much to ask for a lousy four months' work? With the FBI working from the top down and Steele Street working from the bottom up, they should have found them by now—if the guns had ever actually been slated for an exchange in Denver. Hawkins was beginning to have his doubts.

“We'll have a crew up here from Buckley Air Force Base in the morning to get everything packed up and shipped out.”

“Where are the bones being sent?” Maybe with a little bit of the right wheel-greasing, Doc McKinney could still have a chance at his three-hundred-pound fossil. Steele Street owed him that much for dragging him into this.

“Into the abyss of bureaucracy.” Leeder flashed him a grin. “An official warehouse someplace where even the guy who loads them off the forklift won't know where they are.” Lifting a hand in farewell, the agent turned to leave, then stopped. His expression sobered. “Things are heating up all over. If the cops can get that pimp on Wazee Street to talk, Roper Jones is going to get nailed for killing that whore a few weeks ago. And then the shit's really going to hit the fan. Watch your back.”

Hawkins nodded, appreciating the tip even though Leeder's warning was not exactly a news flash. Hell, Hawkins knew the situation was heating up. Roper's primal nerve endings were fraying right down to their synapses over the missing crates. It was a dangerous condition for a guy who was at best a meaner-than-hell sociopathic son of a bitch. The question they hadn't been able to answer was
why
.