Crazy Love (20 page)

CHAPTER

23

W
ITH A
pocket full of underwear and a pair of taped-together glasses in his hand, Travis got off the elevator on the fourth floor of the Hotel Lafayette and headed down the hall to room 418. He didn’t get too far before he noticed something unusual. Gillian had left the door ajar.

Or someone else had.

He didn’t pause in his stride, but suddenly every warning signal he had went off. Continuing down the hall, he slipped the glasses into his jacket pocket, then reached behind his back and pulled the Springfield 1911 out of the paddle holster Skeeter had gotten for him.

Walking faster, every one of his senses on high alert, he racked a cartridge into the chamber. At the door, he stopped for a couple of seconds, listening and checking his line of sight.

The lights were on inside the room, but no one was talking, and there was no sound of movement.

Leading with the muzzle of the 1911, he slipped through the door. It took him all of ninety seconds to clear the three-room suite, including bathrooms, and it was clear. No one anywhere.

She could have gone for ice, but somehow he didn’t think that’s what was going on. Nothing in the suite was disturbed or particularly out of place, but it didn’t feel right. Then he turned and saw the back of the door. A large circle had been drawn on the panels, with three long lines running through it. The message was clear, and it made his blood run cold.

Hamzah Negara’s Jai Traon pirates had taken Red Dog.

S
KEETER
wanted to sigh, and she wanted to groan. Of all the damn things to have done, making love with Dylan Hart in the front seat of a broken-down 1985 Chevy Impala had to rank as one of the all-time bonehead moves of the century. Without all the heat and sex, and sex and heat, and all the sex absolutely
frying
her brain cells, she could see the incident for what it was—a mistake.

Colossal.

King Kong.

And she’d do it again in a heartbeat—which didn’t address their current dilemma.

Somewhere between “Oh, my God, Dylan,” and “Dylan, my God,” Doreen had died, stone-cold-death died. She’d given her last, but not before she’d dumped them in a Washington, D.C., ghetto. Of course, all Skeeter had to do was call a cab, if there was a cabbie fearless enough to pick up a fare at George’s Gas & Grub, smack-dab in the middle of the kind of no-man’s-land where a different gang owned every street corner.

Even a moment’s consideration of the fearless-cabbie possibility made it seem damned unlikely, which left her with only one place to go for help, the place she’d been going all day and getting everything she needed, the amazing Red Dog.

But before she could call Red Dog, she had to get herself off Dylan.

Right.

She didn’t want to.

She wanted to stay where she was, plastered to him, lying on top of him, cradled around him. He was holding her pretty damn tightly, too, like he didn’t want to let go of her, either.

I love you.
That’s what he’d said to her.
I love you so much.

Well, she wasn’t going to fool herself. Those particular words could mean a lot of things when a guy was inside a woman—and he’d definitely been inside her when he’d said them.

Dammit.
How could she have been so addle-brained as to let things get that out of hand? And what were her chances, really, of them getting out of hand again, later at the hotel?

Slim, she decided. Except for holding on to her like he was never going to let go, he had hardly moved since they’d finished.

Plus, if she remembered correctly, and she
did,
they had another problem she didn’t dare forget.

“How are you feeling?” she asked, and the question was neither polite nor rhetorical.

“Normal,” he said, proving that he understood exactly what she’d meant. “Except…except I’m, uh, a little rattled.”

“Rattled” was one way to put it, she guessed. Practically paralyzed with guilt was probably another way.

Double dammit.
She knew him, too well, and he wasn’t going to like himself for this.

Hell.

“Not too hot?”

“No.”

“Not too cold?”

“No.”

“Then we need to get moving,” she said without moving so much as a millimeter.

This was it, her one chance to be with him, and it was hard to let him go. He was going to come to his senses, and her party would be over.

Honesty required her to admit that if her phone hadn’t started ringing, she might have stayed exactly where she was for at least another week.

She pushed herself to more of a sitting position and pulled her cell out of her uniform jacket.

“Skeeter,” she said, meaning to slide off his lap, but
geez,
he felt so good, all naked beneath her.

His gaze immediately fell to her breasts, which were at best only about half covered by her lace demi-bra, and suddenly she was all hot again—everywhere.

“Uh, Hawkins, hello, yes, good to hear from you, fine, sure.” And then just as suddenly, she wasn’t so hot anymore. She was cold, and focused, and listening to every word. “Prince William County. Yes.”

She repeated the address out loud, nodding at Dylan, who was watching her with the same intensity she was giving Superman.

“Yes,” she said, and repeated a series of directions aloud.

Dylan was getting it, understanding every word. She could see it in his eyes.

“I agree,” she said. “I’ll wait for Creed and Quinn, and then we’ll go take a look. Just a second.”

Another call was coming in.

She put Hawkins on hold, and fifteen seconds later knew there was going to be no waiting for anybody. It was Travis, and his message was succinct: Jai Traon pirates had been waiting at the Hotel Lafayette, and they’d taken Red Dog.

Suddenly, Skeeter’s night was lying out before her just chock-full of opportunities for using that Knight Match SR-25 sniper rifle with the Litton Aquila 6X starlight scope attached.

CHAPTER

24

T
HEY’D BROUGHT
him the wrong goddamn girl. Tony Royce could hardly believe it.

How in the hell, he wondered, could anyone possibly mistake this little bit of myopic, auburn-haired fluff for a street-tough, blond-haired Amazon like Skeeter Bang?

These idiots had seen the photograph. Negara had passed it around to everyone in his office before he’d deployed them for the night’s work.

And they’d brought him Gillian Pentycote.

He tossed her wallet back into her purse.

He was disappointed, but Dr. Souk wasn’t. The doctor was carefully checking all his metal clamps and leather straps, making sure each one was tight on her body, but not too tight. Each device needed to be capable of restraining her, but not likely to cause any unforeseen damage.

Foreseen damage was the calling card here tonight.

They’d gagged the woman, but Royce knew that particular leather strap would be removed, and soon. Dr. Souk’s whole program of meticulously administered drugs and torture was designed to make people talk—and talk, and talk, and talk. Royce had heard people give up parts of their past they couldn’t have consciously recalled to save their souls.

Not that he expected much of interest out of Gillian Pentycote, formerly of the University of Arizona Environmental Laboratory, and currently living in a condo in Arlington, Virginia.

Disappeared. That’s all her family would ever know. That she’d disappeared one night, never making it home from whatever she’d been doing at the Hotel Lafayette. No one would ever guess that she’d ended up strapped to a dental chair in a secret clinic housed on one of Virginia’s most luxurious estates, tortured to death by one of the world’s most demented medical minds.

She knew, though. She was wild-eyed with the knowledge, and he took some hope in the fact. He’d love to see her fight for her life, even a little, rather than roll over and die without giving any show whatsoever. He’d never completely given in to his fantasies of terrorizing women, and he had to admit that he was more than a little excited to see what Dr. Souk came up with. In truth, he’d hardly given in to his misogynistic fantasies at all, making do at best with knocking a few women around, and a couple of times a little knife work. But mostly just knocking them around.

Women, he’d discovered at a young age, were no physical match for a man. It was ridiculous, really, how easy they were to break. Not ones like Skeeter Bang, which he knew was one reason he disliked her so intensely, but the smaller ones, like Gillian Pentycote, were pretty much at a man’s mercy—not that there would be much mercy here tonight.

A smile slid across his face.

Not much mercy at all.

He loosened his tie and checked his watch. He guessed it would take about two minutes for Dr. Souk to find out what Ms. Pentycote had been doing in Hart and Bang’s hotel room, and after that the real fun would begin.

R
ED
Dog.

The name raced through Gillian’s brain for about the millionth time—
Red Dog.

It sounded cool, sounded strong, like the name of a steady person who could handle herself.

Red Dog.

She wondered if that’s why Skeeter Bang had given it to her, so she’d have something to hold on to if things got tough.

Because things were tough for her right now, terribly tough. She was strapped into a dental chair in a white-tiled room that was so bright it hurt her eyes, and her heart was pounding like a jackhammer, and she could hardly breathe, and she had more than enough imagination to see where this was going.

There was a drain in the floor.

She’d seen it on the way in, when they’d dragged her into the horrifying white room, and her skin had gone instantly cold.

She was still so cold, terrified, trembling all over, and she couldn’t stop, and no one seemed to care or even notice. Certainly not the guards standing around the room, or the iron-faced man in the cheap suit and loose tie who had been staring at her with unrepentant disgust since her arrival, and certainly not the pathetically thin, sallow-faced Asian man in the white lab coat who was picking and choosing his way through dozens of stainless steel instruments and laying them out on a white cloth on a steel table with wheels.

And the syringes. She didn’t want to think about the syringes. They were lined up, too, some filled with a clear liquid, others with red, and a few with blue. She didn’t know why, but the thought of being injected with the colored liquids terrified her more than the thought of being injected with the clear liquid. Somehow, they looked like they would hurt very, very badly going in, especially the red one.

Or maybe the blue looked worse.

It was hard to tell with so much sweat running into her eyes, running down her face, making her damp in some places and downright wet in others. The white room was ice-cold, and she was sweating, and freezing, and shaking, and wanting so badly to just open her mouth and scream.

But she couldn’t open her mouth, and she couldn’t scream, and she was trying not to think about either of those things, because it just made her want to do them even more.

The leather gag was so tight between her teeth, pulling at the sides of her mouth. The metal clamps were so tight around her wrists and ankles, cutting into her skin. The light was so bright, hurting her eyes.

Red Dog.

The man in the white lab coat turned then and began pushing the steel table over to the dental chair, the wheels squeaking, the instruments rattling.

The iron-faced man had called him Dr. Souk.

Doctor. He didn’t look like a doctor. He looked like a nightmare, a maniac, his glasses thick and dirty, his black hair the same, his lab coat stained. He pulled the table to a stop at the side of the chair and gave her an unreadable look. Unreadable except in its utter disregard for her as a human being. She was an organism to him, a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood lab experiment with enough sentience to fear and respond. His eyes were black, and cold, and intensely calculating, absorbed with the small pinch of her skin he’d taken between his fingers.

Red Dog had made love with an angel.

She watched him choose a syringe, the blue one. She watched him set the tip of the needle to that small pinch of her skin.

That’s what she would think about—oh, God, help her, oh, God—Red Dog and the angel boy.

She felt the first prick.

…and the angel.

She felt the first sting of the liquid.

…angel…angel…angel…

And then she felt the pain.