Crazy Love (15 page)

CHAPTER

16

M
OVING QUICKLY
and silently across the loft, Skeeter pulled a black Nomex hood out of her uniform pocket and pulled it on over her head, covering her hair and most of her face. At the balcony, she carefully looked over the side.

Sonuvabitch.

She’d heard them from inside the vault, and now she could see them—dark shapes, four of them, entering the office from the lawn, using the same entrance she had, and spreading out from the door.

They were either here for Dylan or they were here for Godwin—and she’d left both of those things lying in the vault, pretty much in the same damn position—helplessly exposed.
Cripes.

She looked back over her shoulder, checking. The bookcase was securely closed, but that wasn’t going to keep him safe for long. Chances were, anyone who had bothered to break into Whitfield’s office knew where Whitfield’s vault was hidden.

One of the first things Superman had ever told her—and he’d only told her once, in a tone that had said he didn’t ever want to have to tell her again—was to never, ever, ever think the other guys didn’t know what they were doing. Their lives were as much on the line as hers, and like her, they weren’t in the game to fail.

That wasn’t to say there weren’t guys in the game who weren’t a few French fries short of a Happy Meal. Amateurs abounded among the thugs of the world. She tilted her head to better peer around a spindle.

Two of the men were sliding through the office, moving with the stealth and silence of real pros, which told her plenty about the kind of trouble she was in. One of the other two men hadn’t gotten much past the door, though, and the last guy had gone back outside, and neither of them, inside guy or outside guy, was holding his weapon at the ready. The guy outside had his subgun pointed at the ground, just letting it hang from his hand, like he either didn’t know how to use it or didn’t think he was going to need it.

All the better for her.

She checked the first two men again. They’d both carted a subgun to the party, too, the perfect weapon for close-quarters combat, hostage rescue, and hostage taking.

She didn’t doubt for a second which end of the kidnapping scale these boys were on, both the pros and the amateurs. Anybody dressed in black and sneaking around a senator’s private office in the middle of the night with a submachine gun slung over their shoulder and a semiautomatic pistol holstered on their body was up to no good—herself included.

A brief, hissed exchanged of words at the door proved it. She didn’t know the Indonesian language from shinola, but she knew an Asian dialect and an Asian accent when she heard it, and she suddenly knew with absolute certainty that she and Dylan were in desperate danger.

She also knew they’d been set up. There wasn’t a coincidence in the world big enough to bring Skeeter Bang, Dylan Hart, and four Jai Traon pirates together inside Arthur Whitfield’s office.

Hamzah Negara was still after Dylan, and someone had arranged the Godwin file to be the bait that brought them all together.

Holy freaking cripes.
They needed to go over Dylan’s Everybody Who Wants to Wax My Ass spreadsheet again.

Rising to a half crouch, she slipped back into the shadows along the bookcase and moved to intercept. Just as she’d expected, one of the men had headed directly for the stairs. He knew where the safe was located, and whether he was after Godwin or Dylan, that was the place to start.

She pulled her combat knife out of her sheath. Her plan was to take him out as silently as possible and buy herself a few seconds to come up with the next part of her plan, the one where she got three more of these guys before they got her.

Geezus,
she wished Kid was here, or that Dylan was in his right mind, or that they’d waited at the hotel until Travis had arrived, anything to give her more of a tactical advantage.

The squawking of a comm unit blew that possibility all to hell.

Everyone in the office froze.

Then the squawking came again—from outside.

These bad boys had not slipped by the grounds guard, she realized. They’d brought him with them, right on their heels, and he was calling for backup.

Okay, she thought. That could work for her or against her.

“Halt! Drop your weapon! Move away from the door!” the guard’s voice came from outside.

Against her, she decided. The guard had called for backup, but he wasn’t waiting for it—and he should have. Oh, yeah, she had a flash of insight that said he should have waited.

This was bad, bad, bad. She saw it all in an instant: The guy was working his last shift. Even as she saw it, she was drawing her Para and leveling it at the fourth intruder’s head, the guy outside who had swung his submachine gun up and was—

Blam-blam-blam.

Kerr-ack. Krack.
Her .45 took the fourth pirate down, but it was too late for the guard. He’d been hit, maybe not mortally wounded, though. She could hear him swearing and gasping outside the door.

She’d delivered killing shots. She always did. Every single time. The pirate was gone, flat on the ground with a double-tap through the heart.

And all hell was breaking loose.

Out on the lawn, waiters and caterers were running, the backup guards were arriving, their weapons drawn and comm units giving off static. People were talking, yelling, some woman screamed.

It was all background noise, background commotion, and had nothing to do with what Skeeter was doing for this second, and the next, and the one after that, ad infinitum, until her immediate threats were neutralized.

Two pirates were coming up the stairs now, the first man and the guy from inside the door. She’d lost sight of the second man—
dammit.

She covered the top of the stairs with her muzzle, looking for the flash of movement that would give her opponent away. She’d resheathed her knife. Silence was no longer on the menu. Survival was. Her shots had revealed her position, and even though she’d moved and hadn’t stopped moving, the Jai Traon knew they had an enemy in the loft.

The sudden, instantaneous rising of the hair on the back of her neck had her twisting to the right. Something grazed her cheek. A foot, she realized, a foot trying to take her head off. It hit her hand instead, with terrible force, and knocked her pistol away, and she knew that could be the last mistake she was ever going to make, losing her weapon in the middle of a fight. The second man had made it to the loft without using the stairs, and he was in ninja mode. She didn’t have time to wonder why he hadn’t just shot her. He had a subgun slung across his back, but he was coming at her like Bruce Lee in
Fists of Fury.
She ducked, and kicked, and struck out with the side of her hand, a stunning blow if she could have landed it, but it slid off the man.

Then her hand was caught from behind. She went with the hold, turning into it and bringing her leg up and out in a stunning roundhouse kick that went straight to her new opponent’s solar plexus. He went down, hard, doubled over, but the first guy was still on her, and she could see pirate number three launching himself in her direction.

Any one of them could have shot her, or tried to cut her with a knife—or at least given it their best effort—but no, they were hand-to-hand fighting, and even leaving the killing blows out of that.

They wanted her alive, which was not a comfort. Far from it. The realization only spurred her on to fight harder, faster against the two pirates still standing. Then the guy she’d put down started getting back to his feet.

She was good, but the pirates were well trained, and two of them were damn good—too good. She’d gotten in a couple of powerful hits, even heard something crack, but she wasn’t going to hold off three Jai Traon. She was drenched in sweat, her head was ringing from some blow she hadn’t been able to completely block. When the third man finally stood up, she knew the end was near.

Lights were coming on all over the grounds, floodlights. She could hear people running down the hall, heading toward the office. Someone was shouting orders. All the sounds and sights of crisis and response were happening, quickly, all around her, and the fists and feet kept coming.

Block. Parry. Strike.

They were all running out of time.

Then one pirate ran completely out of time, suddenly, irrevocably. The suppressed shot was a clean hit, and coming out of the barrel of a .45, it all but blew his head off.

Dylan.

He stepped out from behind the bookcase just as the office door flew open on the main floor—and it was an exodus. One of the pirates let loose with his subgun, blowing out the second-floor windows from the loft to the manicured lawns below, and both men went through the hole, leaping to the ground.

She and Dylan weren’t too far behind. He’d grabbed her arm almost instantly and dragged her with him to the opening.

Two shots came from the main floor and buried themselves into what was left of the molding around the broken glass—but by then, she and Dylan were in midair. Again, training took over, and Skeeter landed as softly as possible, keeping her body loose and flexed, letting her legs take up the shock. Then they were off and running.

CHAPTER

17

S
TILL HOLDING
on to the Honda’s door handle as if his life depended on it, which he was damn sure it did, Travis looked down at the book that had ended up in his lap after Red Dog’s last wild lane change.

Her picture was on it, along with some guy’s.

He tilted his head to one side, reading the type down the spine, and realized it wasn’t just any guy’s picture. It was her ex-husband’s—Kenneth and Gillian Pentycote, and they’d written a book Regan McKinney would love, something about the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum.

He looked over at the woman driving.

Gillian was a pretty name, much prettier than Red Dog, and writing a book about anything concerned with Paleocene Eocene Thermal situations was over-the-edge academic.

And she’d left all that behind to work as a glorified secretary for General Grant in the hell-and-gone annex?

Not just a rough divorce, he decided, but one of those cataclysmic divorces.

“Still in the process of what?” she asked, and it took him a moment to remember what they’d been talking about.

“Cutting back on my client list in both my traditional therapy and sexual imprinting practices.” Might as well get that out there, he thought. A full sixty-five percent of his sexual imprinting clients were recovering from divorce. It was possible that Red Dog could benefit from his professional ser vices. Not that he was going to offer. He wasn’t. He’d listen to her talk out her troubles all night long, if the gods smiled on him and gave him half a chance, but he didn’t want to be her therapist, with all the ensuing legal restrictions and responsibilities. Hell, no.

“S-sexual imprinting?” She cast him a quick, wary glance, which pretty much told him all he needed to know. “What in the world is…s-sexual imprinting?”

Wow.
She could hardly say the word. Old Ken must have done a number on her—not that sexual deconstruction didn’t work both ways. It did.

“Not necessarily what it sounds like,” he assured her. “It’s a combination of traditional talk therapy combined with massage and other types of bodywork designed to help people overcome…
geezus
…sexual dysfunction.”

She’d just gone through a red light.
Red,
as in
Stop.
Traffic was slowing down all around them, but not her. She just kept going, finding every open space and using it to keep going, and going, and going. For a second, it crossed his mind that she might have had some kind of tactical driving training.

“I…I have a small counseling clinic in Boulder, where I see clients and do research for a paper I’m—”

She hit the brakes to keep from plowing into the back end of a truck that had rumbled out in front of them from a side street, and he had heart failure.

That was it, the last straw, the bottom line. He was driving. He wasn’t the kind of guy to get heavy-handed with a woman, but she’d just—double-clutched her Civic into first, dodged the truck, and was power-shifting her way back up the gears.

It occurred to him then that, despite the absolute chaos of the ride, they were making record time and he didn’t have a scratch on him.

“Who taught you to drive?”

“My brother. He used to be a terror on the streets and the track. Now he’s an Army Ranger in Afghanistan.”

Yes, he could see potential Ranger tactics in her driving, a lot of effectively directed aggression and equally effective evasion combined in a strategy to never give up ground.

Hoo-yah.

He took another look around the inside of the car, and discovered there was a sort of order in the chaos. Clothes—jeans, shirts, a couple of sweaters, but no underwear—were mostly stacked on one side of the backseat. Papers and files were mostly stacked on the other side, though her driving tactics had made a jumble of them in the middle. Books, magazines, and CDs were everywhere. All the gadgety stuff was in a box behind the driver’s seat, spilling out a little, but mostly in the box, all things with wires and buttons and dials, including an expensive-looking alarm clock.

“You didn’t move your alarm clock into your new place?” That seemed curious.

She let out a short laugh. “If I’m lucky enough to fall asleep, I don’t want anything waking me up.”

The tsunami of divorces.

“I have a yoga sequence I could—
geezus
…”

She whipped a left-hand turn into the underground parking garage of the Lafayette—barely avoiding getting sideswiped by a limo—plunging them into a dark labyrinth of concrete pillars and silent cars.

And finally,
finally,
she slowed down to a reasonable speed—but it was too damn late for him. He felt rode hard. That last bit of “life flashing before his eyes” had done him in.

It had been a black limo, with a grille and a hood ornament, both of which had been bearing down on him at eye level, just inches from the passenger side of the Civic.

Goddamn.
He slid down in his seat and closed his eyes, still clutching the door handle—
goddamn.

He’d barely gotten out of Colombia with his ass intact, only to have it put back on the line on the streets of Washington, D.C.?

He rested his other hand low on his abdomen, a few inches from the stitches that went down his left side. His injury hadn’t been bothering him all day, but it did now—
dammit.
The next time Nikki painted him, there was going to be one less wound she had to imagine. The narco-bastard’s knife hadn’t caught him deep, just deep enough that stitches had been a good idea.

Travis had caught the narco-bastard deeper, though, buried his blade to the hilt in the guy’s neck and jerked it hard. It was amazing, really, how much strength it took, even with a razor-sharp blade, to cut a guy’s throat, almost as amazing as how much blood there had been.

He’d been covered in it.

Drenched.

At the end, when it was finished, Creed had come over, taken one look, and helped him to his feet. “Good work” was all he’d said.

No questions. No doubts.

With Creed, like with Kid and Hawkins and Quinn, it always came down to one simple thing—winning the fight. It was a good lesson to learn, to win at all cost, at any cost, no compromise, and the thing that amazed Travis the most was how easy the lesson had been to learn, even for a guy who had taught graduate-level courses in the art of compromise.

The two things were not mutually exclusive, the art of killing and the art of compromise, but there were situations that simply could not be mediated, not in the real world. There was no negotiating with evil. Until the night Nikki had been kidnapped, he hadn’t realized how closely evil could linger, undetected, or how quickly it could strike.

Still, he’d killed three men in Colombia, which brought him up to six, and yeah, he had a feeling he was the only guy at SDF counting bodies, and typically, for a goddamn philosophy major, there was no way for him not to have to think and work his way through the facts of his last mission—something he wouldn’t have had time to do if he’d gotten killed in a freaking Honda Civic on his way to the hotel from the airport.

Geezus.
Red Dog needed to come with a warning label.

He let out his breath and took another, trying to ease his way into a calmer state, to ease himself away from the sharp pain in his side. She’d jacked him up with that last blast of near-death experience, and it was going to take a moment or two for him to come down and find his balance, a moment for the underlying dull ache in his stitches to dissipate. He knew what had happened. He’d gotten whacked by her book, and now he hurt like hell—
dammit.

“Mr. James?”

He took another breath.

He wasn’t answering to “Mr. James.” Someone who had almost gotten him greased could at least call him by his first name.

“Travis?”

That was better, but he still wasn’t inclined to break his concentration enough to reply. He needed to breathe himself through this. The car had stopped moving, though, and that was a good thing, very helpful.

She turned off the engine, and that helped even more.

“Sir?”

Oh, hell, no. He wasn’t going to answer to “sir,” not this side of the grave she’d almost put him in. His heart was actually racing, and that pissed him off a little. He’d already been fried before he’d gotten on the plane, let alone in her car. He’d had a helluva week. His resources were low, and he needed to get back up to speed. He had a job to do tonight.

He heard her shift her position on her side of the car, felt her move closer.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered—and that didn’t sound good. “You’re bleeding.”

That sounded even worse.

He opened his eyes and found her looming over him, her gaze riveted to the left side of his chest.

“Oh, my God,” she repeated.

He glanced down and blanched.

Fuck.
He was bleeding, all right.

“I need to get you to a hospital.” She started to slide back behind the steering wheel, but he grabbed her before she could get too far.

“No.” He wasn’t doing it. He wasn’t letting her start the damn car again and take another shot at doing him in. “It’s fine. Really.”

“No, it’s not, you’re—”

“Bleeding. I know. I had a couple of stitches put in last night, or this morning, actually, and I just got hit by the book you wrote, that’s all, during the last turn, into the parking garage.”

While he was in the middle of explaining his version of events, a version borne out by the book still in his lap, the corner of it angled toward the bloody smear on his T-shirt, his phone rang.

It could only be one person.

“Travis,” he said, answering.

“Stay put.” Skeeter cut right to the chase. She sounded breathless as hell. “We’re done here. Whitfield’s is one big amazing mess right now, and we’re getting out of it ASAP.”

“Are you okay?” He could hear all sorts of commotion going on in the background, sirens and, if he wasn’t mistaken, maybe even gunshots.

“We’re good. I’ll explain more when we get there. Just stay put at the hotel. We’ll come to you.” She hung up, and he did the same.

Then he glanced at Gillian, and she looked guilty as hell.

“I am so sorry,” she said when he’d finished slipping his phone back in his jacket pocket.

“Don’t be. I’ll live.” As long as she didn’t restart the car and go careening off again.

“I know, but I—oh, I have a first-aid kit,” she said, her voice brightening, which suited him a whole helluva lot better than her feeling guilty.

“Great idea.” First-aid kit, sure, he could do it, let her patch him up a little. “If you’ve got some gauze pads or something.”

“I do. I know I do.” She leaned back between the seats and started digging around through her stuff, one knee on the console, her tush in the air—and suddenly he felt better. A lot better.

She had
very
nice legs.

And the shoe that had come untied? He was very tempted to push it off her foot and let it fall to the floorboards, just sort of help her come a little more undone. That’s what he needed more than another gauze bandage—somebody soft and warm and supple wrapping her legs around him. It’s what he’d wanted all day.

Okay. For weeks.

And weeks.

Geezus,
he had such a one-track mind.

But, my God.

She leaned farther into the backseat, and a sigh lifted his chest. This was great. This was amazing—the lovely curve of her thigh just inches from his face, the hem of her skirt barely keeping her modest. He knew if he leaned forward even the slightest bit, he could probably see her underwear, but he didn’t do it. The whole underwear thing, and how much of it he ever got to see, was strictly her call—and he knew it was the last thing on her mind right now, even if it had just become the first thing on his.

“Here it is,” she said, a note of triumph in her voice.

She moved into her seat, the kit on her lap, and he slipped out of his jacket, tossing it over the back of the seat. Then he reached for the bottom of his T-shirt.

“Oh. Oh, my goodness,” she said, as he carefully pulled the T-shirt off over his head, revealing the extent of his bandages. “Wh-what happened to you?”

“Classified.” He really couldn’t tell her, and working for General Grant, he knew she would understand. But the knife cut started on his left side, under his arm, and curved around toward the front.

There was blood on the bandages, not a lot, but enough to have soaked through in spots and stained his T-shirt.

“If you’ll just put another piece of gauze over this, I think that’ll be good enough for tonight,” he said, looking the situation over. He’d see Doc Blake tomorrow, back in Denver. Tonight, he had a job to do.

When she just sat there, the first-aid kit clutched in her hands, he glanced up.

Okay,
he thought.
This is good.

She had that shell-shocked look on her face again. It wasn’t the first time the sight of him half-naked, or completely naked, had put that expression on a woman’s face. It happened all the time. It was why Nikki painted him, and why those paintings sold for tens of thousands of dollars. Mostly he liked it. Sometimes, rarely, it annoyed him. And sometimes, every now and then, it really worked for him.