Crazy Love (9 page)

CHAPTER

9

D
AMMIT.
She’d lost them.

Skeeter stopped at the corner and looked all four ways of the intersection. There were no Asians anywhere in sight.

Dammit.
She reached up to pull her ball cap lower over her face—an automatic action—then remembered Dylan had made her take it off. She swore again under her breath. She felt naked without her cap, exposed, not that anyone around her seemed to be noticing the scar that angled across her forehead. No one in the café seemed to have noticed, either, which was probably something she needed to think about, but not now. Dylan was right behind her.

“The hotel is in the other direction,” he growled, taking hold of her arm.

He was absolutely right, but he didn’t sound any too happy about it.

Well, he could join the club. She wasn’t any too happy, either.

“We’re not going to do this,” she said, checking behind her one more time. Damn minivan caravan, cutting across her line of sight like that and making her lose the Asians.

“Not do what?”

She turned and faced him square on. “Not do the ‘you run and hide like a good little girl while I take on the bad boys’ routine.” As far as she was concerned, the whole damn mission had just taken a sharp turn into a PSD, Personal Security Detail, with Dylan being the Personal part and her being the Security Detail.

Back in front of the belt shop, she’d felt a flash of fear come off him, and nothing could have surprised her more. For three years, she’d been hearing the stories of Hart and Hawkins, and fear wasn’t part of them, ever. What she’d felt hadn’t taken any ESP, either. It had been in his eyes, in the sudden draining of color from his face. He’d been scared, which just begged the question—what in the hell had happened to him on Sumba? Besides, of course, getting drugged with God only knew what kind of chemical crap and being chained to a wall.

She wasn’t a fool. She knew what the bloody mess around his wrist meant. He’d been shackled, and those stitches weren’t there for decoration. He’d been cut, tortured.

“We’ll do any routine I order,” he said, either missing her point entirely or underestimating her, again.

“Okay,” she said, stepping closer to him, her hand still on the pistol inside her tote. “You’re right. We should be back at the hotel.” Anywhere but on this damn corner, out in the open. They’d walked all over Georgetown, especially the area around Whitfield’s mansion. It was tourist season, and they’d seen dozens of Asians—but these men had set something off in him, and that set her off.

She all but tripped the next taxi that came down the street, and in under twenty minutes had him back in their suite, under lock and key, with enough ammo between her and the door to hold off a small army.

“You’re not being very subtle,” he said when she went to the windows and pulled the drapes closed.

“I’m not trying to be.”

“I don’t need a bodyguard, Skeeter.”

“You were damned nervous for a moment back there on the street,” she said, putting it kindly.

“Damned scared,” he corrected her.

She stopped cold in the living room, set back on her heels. The last thing she’d ever expected from Dylan Hart was a confession of fear. It was just one step more likely than a confession of love.

“I’ve got your back, Dylan. I swear.” She wouldn’t let anything happen to him. At least not anything she could prevent. Yet she knew the possible worst of what could hurt him was completely out of her control—the damn drugs Negara had given him. She’d done some research while he’d been in the shower earlier, and nothing she’d learned had eased her mind. He was in danger just standing there.

“It’s not my back I’m worried about, babe, and it wasn’t me I was scared for back on the street.” He held her gaze for a long moment, long enough for her to get the message and know what was coming next. “You’re done, as of right now. You can stay here in this room tonight, or you can go home, but you’re not going to Whitfield’s, not even Whitfield’s driveway.”

Skeeter didn’t blink. She was a smart woman, smart enough to let him think what he wanted, but actually, she
was
going to Whitfield’s, all over Whitfield’s, any place and anywhere she thought she needed to be. What she wasn’t going to do was argue with him about it. Arguing would only complicate an already complicated situation.

“Jai Traon pirates have tattoos on the backs of their hands,” she said. “Their left hands.”

“I know.”

Of course he knew, and now he knew that she knew, too. Whatever he thought he’d seen, what he’d expected to see was Hamzah Negara’s men, dogging him.

“Do you want to tell me about Sumba?”

“No.” The word was concise, clear. “What I want is for you to stow this gear or, better yet, get Grant’s guys to come back and pick it up. What I want is to get a couple hours of sleep before I hit Whitfield’s tonight, and what I want is room service and a blood-rare steak before I go.”

“Carnivore.” It wasn’t a judgment, it was a fact.

“In every way.” He held her gaze for another second before nodding at all the gear. “Make it so, Skeeter.”

She watched him turn and walk away. He didn’t completely close the door to his bedroom, which she knew was more for her benefit than his. Although, who he thought could possibly get into their suite with her on guard was beyond her. Nobody was getting in—and the equipment she’d requisitioned wasn’t going anywhere.

Make it so?

She was going to make it so, all right.

Pulling out her cell phone, she speed-dialed General Grant’s assistant.

“Red Dog” came a perky voice on the other end.

“Red Dog, it’s Skeeter. Where’s the Mercedes I ordered this morning?”

“I’ll be pulling into the hotel’s parking garage in about fifteen minutes.”

“Good. Come to the room when you get here. We’ve got gear to load up.”

“Roger that.”

She hung up the phone. That’s what Skeeter loved about Red Dog. The woman didn’t need to roll out a mile of red tape in order to cut to the chase. Since Red Dog had been assigned to Grant’s staff a month ago, the whole organization had been running a lot smoother.

The way Skeeter was going to make sure things ran smooth tonight, and there was nothing better to smooth out any rough edges that might crop up than a suppressed .45 semiautomatic pistol, or an HK UMP45, in case any of those rough edges had Jai Traon tattoos on them. She wasn’t taking chances, and she wasn’t traveling light.

She looked around at the gear and made a command decision: It was all going with her.

But Dylan was right. There was a lot of it, and after another minute of standing there looking at the weapons she’d chosen, and not doubting for a second the instincts that had made her order so much gear in the first place, she made another command decision: She needed backup, somebody besides the guy she was protecting, somebody she wouldn’t have to set aside her weapon for in the middle of a gunfight so she could mainline him a yellow Syrette.

Yeah, that’s the guy she needed, and she knew right where to find him.

CHAPTER

10

K
ID CHAOS
Chronopolous was a genius. So was Skeeter Bang, and their brilliance didn’t show to a better advantage anywhere in Steele Street than up on the eighth-floor firing range.

Travis James finished reloading the spare magazines for his Glock 21 and keyed a shooting drill into the computer.

A lot of the folks at SDF would disagree with him, citing instead the awesome race-quality tune-ups Skeeter did on the brute-powered muscle cars in Steele Street’s garages, or her uncanny clairvoyance that Hawkins swore she used to anticipate the lead on a moving target. Kid, they would say, was one of the most elite snipers to ever come out of the U.S. Marine Corps, an institution known for breeding and birthing some of the greatest snipers the world had ever known, like the legendary Carlos Hathcock—and they’d be right.

But for Travis’s money, one of the coolest benefits of all that technical, mechanical hoodoo voodoo and marksmanship skill was the firing range on the eighth floor and the computer program Skeeter and Kid had designed to run it.

He loaded a magazine into the Glock, chambered a round, then released the magazine and topped it off with another cartridge before loading it back into the pistol. With the spare magazines on his belt and the Glock in his holster, he was ready to go. Forty shots for ten targets, some stationary, some moving, and he was going to blow the hell out of all of them in record time.

Yeah, it was good to be home, especially in one piece, even if one of those pieces was being held together with ten stitches. He and Creed had gotten fucked in Colombia. Two of their guys had been wounded, one seriously, and both he and Creed could just as easily have been whacked. The mission had been to hook up with a patrol from the Colombian Marine Corps and go with them to set up some highly classified surveillance equipment at an airstrip hidden in the jungle on the Colombian/Venezuelan border. Creed had cut his teeth on similar missions. Travis had been with him on the last two. But this time they’d walked into an ambush. A band of Colombian rebels had been waiting for them, and there was nothing the narco-terrorists would have loved better than to have caught a couple of gringos in with the Colombian Marines.

Well, none of the narco-bastards were going to catch anything ever again.

Creed had been ruthless.

Travis flipped the pistol’s safety on and put it in the holster strapped to his thigh. He’d been pretty fucking ruthless himself.

He’d known what the job was when he’d first started coming to Steele Street to work out with Skeeter, not just in the weight room and on the mats, but in here, on the firing range, shooting thousands of rounds of ammo. Every time he’d pulled the trigger, he’d known exactly what the real-life goal had been: to trade paper targets for flesh and bone. No one knew better than he did what a bullet did when it hit a chest cavity. He’d been an EMT long enough to have been called out on a few shootings. He’d seen death. He’d picked it up off the street and scraped it off the highway.

But to become an instrument of death—he hadn’t seen that in his future a year ago, and he sure as hell hadn’t seen himself doing what he’d just done in Colombia, not what he’d done with a knife.

Fuck.

He stretched out his right arm and rolled his shoulder, trying to release the kinks he’d gotten during the long plane ride home without moving his left side too much—and he waited.

Hawkins had trained Skeeter so she could protect herself. But Travis had come to Steele Street with a different goal in mind—to protect others. He was no Kenshi the Avenger like Skeeter drew him in her comic books, but if some badass wanted to go mano a mano with someone, especially someone Travis loved, like a Colombian drug lord had done last year with his friend Nikki McKinney Chronopolous, they were going to have to go through him first—and he’d made himself damn hard to go through.

The screen color changed on the computer, and he stepped up to the firing line.

He took a breath, relaxed, and let the anger leave him. Shooting was both a science and a skill, and both were best practiced with cool, calm deliberation.
Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

It wasn’t the deaths in Colombia that bothered him, not most of them. When he shot at somebody, he damn well expected them to die. That was the whole plan. He was no one-shot, one-kill, thousand-yard, cold-zero sniper, but he spent a helluva lot of time making damn sure he could hit what he aimed at with a handgun.

Without warning, the lights snapped on at the other end of the range, starting the timer and revealing the random pattern of targets he’d asked the computer to position. With smooth, gunfighter-fast precision, he drew his pistol and started unloading his first magazine. When it was empty, a smooth, tactical reload gave him another thirteen cartridges to run through his Glock—
Bam! Bam! Bam!
The .45 caliber bullets smacked through the targets, one shot after another. His second reload found him cleaning up on the moving targets, trying for at least three shots on each. Four on every target was the goal, as tightly grouped as he could get them, but he hadn’t done it yet, not with moving targets in the drill.

When he’d run through his ammo, he released the pistol’s slide, flipped on the safety, holstered the gun, and walked down the range to get his targets.

He’d never pulled a trigger in anger, not even in combat. It was the main reason Creed put up with him, the FNG, the Fucking New Guy, on his missions, Travis’s Zen-like imperturbability.

Still, he didn’t think Creed wanted to know his Psych-major partner had minored in Mediation and Conflict Resolution, not when Creed’s idea of conflict resolution more often than not involved a seven-inch, military issue, combat knife—just like Travis’s.

Fuck.

He reached in his pocket for a handful of extra cartridges and began methodically reloading one of his magazines.

There was nothing cool and calm about a knife fight.

He slid the last cartridge into the magazine and then reloaded his pistol, performing the same procedure as last time, as every time—racking one into battery, then releasing the magazine and sliding in an extra cartridge.

His sidearm was always loaded plus one—always. And he was never without it.

He stepped over to the computer to restart the drill, when his phone rang. A quick look at the screen brought a smile to his mouth.

“Hey, Baby Bang. How’s tricks?” It
was
good to be home, with Skeeter being one of the main reasons. “And where are you?” He’d really been looking forward to seeing her when he’d gotten to Steele Street. But the only people in the building had been Hawkins and Katya, a very, very pregnant Katya, and Cody Rivera, Creed’s wife.

“Am I roaming at twenty gazillion bucks a minute,” she asked, “or are you back in Denver yet?”

“Denver.”

“Then tricks are good, even if you didn’t tell me that Dylan had authorized you for active duty.”

“I was going to,” he said, feeling a pang of guilt, but not much of one. “Eventually.”

“Have you been with Creed in Colombia?”

“Yes.” And Baby Bang would have had no business being there.

There was a short pause, while she digested his answer. She’d never been on one of Creed’s jungle trips. She’d always gone with Superman, which typically was a different kind of mission, but she’d know what it had been like up there on the border. She’d been around Steele Street long enough to know. She knew the history better than he did.

“You okay?” she asked, her voice making the question so much more than the obvious.

“I will be,” he said honestly. Experience was what he lacked, not courage or the commitment to get the job done. With experience, he’d have more resources for putting things in perspective. He knew how it worked. It was just tonight that was rough, coming home to the real world and being alone.

“Then how fast can you get on a plane to Washington, D.C.?”

A welcome sense of relief washed through him. That’s what he needed, to get the hell out of Dodge.

“Half an hour, if there’s a flight. What’s going on?” His bags were by the eighth-floor elevator, still packed. Creed had gone upstairs to his jungle loft and his wife, but Travis had headed straight for the firing range. Nobody needed a third wheel for their postmission reunion with their sweetheart, which was always a guy’s first priority. It would have been Travis’s, too, if he’d had a sweetheart, but he was batting a big zero in that department. He seemed to be on the most amazing streak of bad-luck love, never wanting the women who wanted him and never being able to hold on to, or even get his hands on, the women he wanted. The last “love of his life” he’d fallen for, a wild girl with a lot of issues she hadn’t been able to give up yet, had moved to the coast, the West Coast. She went to school during the day, worked in Katya’s Los Angeles art gallery at night, and always answered his e-mails—but that was as far as he’d gotten in five months, which looked like a strike-out to him.

So he was giving it a rest, swearing off love, working hard instead, and trying not to think too much about sex—because he wasn’t getting much, and he sure wasn’t getting any tonight, which broke his heart. He could use sex tonight, something to take the edge off. Colombia had been such a fucking mess.

“There’s a flight,” Skeeter assured him. “And I need backup. Log on to a computer and download the Whitfield/Godwin file and all the Hamzah Negara files. You’ll find the access codes to the black files on Negara engraved on Babycakes’s headers. That’ll get you up to speed. The problem we’ve run into here is the possibility that Negara’s Indonesian pirates were less than a block from Senator Whitfield’s mansion in Georgetown this afternoon. I’ll make your reservation from this end, pull some strings if I have to. You just get your butt out to DIA. Red Dog will pick you up at Dulles.”

“Red Dog?”

“General Grant’s new assistant. She’s damned efficient, a real go-getter. Wants to get into State.”

Travis knew Skeeter meant the State Department. He also knew that General Grant’s office in a hell-and-gone annex about a thousand light-years from the Pentagon was a place people hit on their way down, not on their way up. Somebody should probably fill Red Dog the Go-getter in on the facts—somebody other than him. He was done with being the nicest guy on the block.

“So what does Red Dog look like? Who will I be looking for?”

Skeeter let out a short laugh at the questions, and yeah, he understood.

“She’ll find you,” Skeeter confirmed. “But just in case she goes temporarily blind, you’ll be looking for five feet five inches of bright-eyed serious in sensible shoes, with—you guessed it—red hair. Have a good flight, and I’ll see you tonight.”

Red hair, of course, and Travis figured she probably looked like a dog. That’s just the way his life had been going.

IT
was going to be a long night, Tony Royce thought, looking at the rows of surgical tools neatly laid out on a gleaming, stainless steel table in the center of the room—a long, endless night for Dylan Hart.

The table was set up next to a dental chair bolted to the white-tiled floor. The walls were also tiled in white. Even the ceiling was covered in white ceramic tiles. Everything, everywhere was tiled and white, for easy washdowns and quick cleanups.

He was quite impressed. The room was an exact copy of one in Negara’s medical building on Sumba, right down to the drain in the floor. This building was so well hidden in the trees on Negara’s Virginia estate, Royce hadn’t even seen it when he’d arrived.

“You will stay for the festivities?” Negara asked.

It wasn’t a question, and Royce didn’t assume for a second that it was.

“Of course. I wouldn’t miss them.” Not often, but every now and then he felt a small pang of remorse for the turn his life had taken, but it never lasted long enough to make much of an impression, and it was never these situations that generated the emotion. He’d been in rooms like this many times over the years, officially, under orders, and righteously assured that he was one of the good guys—one of the good guys strong enough to stomach what it sometimes took to keep the world safe for democracy.

Then, somewhere along the road, he’d started thinking he was keeping the world safe for capitalism, and from there it had been a very short jump to keeping the world safe for current political expediency. It hadn’t been too much of a leap from there into independent contractor status and keeping the world safe for his own financial gain.

None of it ever made him lose sleep. Tonight’s “festivities” wouldn’t, either.

“You were right about the girl,” Negara said. “She is quite memorable, and for a small fee, she was remembered checking into room four eighteen at the Hotel Lafayette.”

God, he was good.

Royce smiled. “I’m pleased the information was useful.”

“Quite.” Negara also smiled. “And perhaps you can be of further use to me.”

He didn’t like the sound of that, but was very casual in his reply.