Crazy Sweet (10 page)

CHAPTER

12

H
IS WIFE had the most amazing ass in the world, Dylan Hart thought, tilting his head to one side to better see through his office door, watching Skeeter bend over the computer desk in the main office on the seventh floor of Steele Street.

She did it on purpose, just for him, wearing pink fishnet hose, a little white lace miniskirt, and a pink-and-white striped bustier.

He knew it.

She knew it.

And Superman knew it.

“Cut the crap, Dylan.”

“Tell her to cut it out,” he said, grinning. Her hair was all piled up on top of her head in a messy ponytail twisted around and held in place with a pair of bright red chopsticks to match the skinny red patent leather belt around her waist and the red patent leather four-inch spike heels on her feet, her “catch me/fuck me” shoes.

He’d caught her a couple of times in those shoes.

He’d caught her a couple of times in nothing but those shoes.

The memory flashed, a few brain cells caught on fire and went up in smoke, and suddenly, this very important meeting he was having with Hawkins needed to come to an end.

Schooling his features, he checked his watch.

“Aren’t Kat and the kids due back in a couple of minutes?” Superman was up to a brood of two, Alexandria and John Thomas Hawkins, with another one on the way.

“You’re becoming dangerously transparent, Dylan.”

And hot, he thought, his gaze straying back out the door.

Skeeter was being bad.

She bent deeper over the desk, widening her stance, and his imagination went into overdrive, filling in a lot of—

“Dylan?”

Details. Hot, erotic details.

“Dylan?”

Two weeks, that’s how long he’d been gone. Two long, dreary weeks in London, researching a name General Grant had given him: Sir Arthur Kendryk, Lord Weymouth. It hadn’t taken two weeks for Dylan to surmise that Grant was justified in being concerned about the man. Kendryk had insulated himself from the criminal elements of his organization with thousands of yards of red tape and innumerable layers of legitimate business dealings, but the ties were there. Dylan’s job was going to be sorting through it all and stealing what he needed in order for Grant to be able to take his suspicions to the undersecretary of defense at the Defense Department. International arms dealing, influence peddling, and drug trafficking on the scale Kendryk seemed to be involved with posed a credible security threat to the United States.

Which meant, of course, that Skeeter’s sweet ass was going to have to wait.

He leveled his gaze back at Hawkins.

“So she went to El Salvador after the Panama mission,” he said, the “she” in question being the “she” who was always in question at SDF, their stringer, Red Dog. “Why?”

“The guys at the DEA say Tony Royce has opened a branch office there, in a town called San Luis. He’s working with
Mara
Plata, using the gang as a rung of bottom-feeders to get a foothold in Central America.”

“She needs to stop fucking around with Tony Royce.”

Hawkins gave a short nod. “You’ve told her. I’ve told her, and sure as hell Travis has told her. But there isn’t anybody in this office who doesn’t know she went to Uzbekistan when Royce was trying to put together a deal with Gul Rashid—a deal that fell apart.”

“We’ll take Royce out when, and if, Grant tells us to take him out.” Which couldn’t be any too soon to suit Dylan, especially since his London trip. The whole Rashid deal was getting a lot of play in a lot of bad places, and one of the names that had gotten attached to the story belonged to a man connected to Arthur Kendryk.

Dylan hated it when his enemies started connecting to each other. It made the hair rise on the back of his neck, because if there was one thing he and Hawkins didn’t believe in besides Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, it was coincidences of any kind.

“Unless Red Dog gets to Royce first,” Hawkins said. “There have been other deals she’s blown for him, Dylan. At least two I can verify, and a couple of others I can’t, but which seem to have her fingerprints all over them.”

Shit.
The woman needed to be reined in, before she did irreparable harm to herself or SDF. But no matter what she’d done or hadn’t done, if it started to look like Royce was trying to flank SDF in retaliation for Red Dog’s sabotage, Dylan didn’t doubt that Grant would authorize the man’s summary execution. It was an order Dylan would gladly carry out himself. He’d been there the night Gillian Pentycote had been tortured, and he cut her a lot of slack because of it, but there were limits.

The SDF operators were loose cannons, they were cowboys, and they were a good many other things, but they weren’t out-and-out pirates. They could—and would—act when no one else seemed able to, which Dylan figured was what had prompted White Rook to sponsor an outfit like SDF in the first place, but they had a line they didn’t cross, the one drawn for them by General Grant.

It was the only line they needed—most of them. Red Dog was the exception. Sometimes he wondered if there were any lines she wouldn’t cross, and sometimes he wondered what he might have to do, if she went too far.

“Is Rydell still in Panama?” C. Smith Rydell could be trusted to act, to get a job done without making a mess of things or exposing SDF to unwanted scrutiny. A DEA agent for years before he’d joined the chop-shop boys on Steele Street, he knew how to cover his ass and his tracks.

“I already sent him to El Salvador. He’s in San Luis tonight. I tasked him with intercepting Gillian, but he’s ended up on his own. She showed up in Commerce City about two hours ago.”

“Good.” At least they knew where she was.

The ringing of a phone out in the main office caught his attention. The look on Skeeter’s face when she answered it had him straightening up in his chair, tuned in to his wife.

She turned more fully toward him and met his gaze. After a couple of seconds, she put the caller on hold.

“You might want to take this,” she said. “The call is showing FBI encryption, but it’s not a government number, and the point of origin appears to be New Jersey. Atlantic City. He’s asking to talk with you, personally.”

“Route it through your system,” he said. “Record and trace, and put it on my speaker.”

She turned back to the phone in the office, and almost immediately, the “incoming” indicator lit up on his console.

“Hart,” he said.

“Mr. Hart,” the voice on the other end said. “My name is Ruben Setineri. I’m calling on behalf of a mutual acquaintance with
info
rmation regarding the itinerary of a subject that may be of interest to you.”

The man’s name alone was enough to garner Dylan’s undivided attention. He glanced at Hawkins, who looked equally intrigued. Ruben Setineri was a prominent, if somewhat notorious, New York attorney who represented Francis Tiburon, an East Coast mob figure.

What in the hell, Dylan wondered, would Frankie T’s lawyer be doing calling this office on a secure line? The look on Hawkins’s face said he was wondering the same damn thing.

“I’m listening,” he said.

“I have been instructed to tell you that a Tony Royce, traveling with five companions, has boarded Frontier Airlines Flight one-twenty-one from Las Vegas to Denver,” Setineri said. “The flight is scheduled to arrive an hour from now.”

“I understand,” Dylan said. “Anything else?”

“No,” Setineri said. “Have a pleasant evening, Mr. Hart.”

The indicator light winked out.

Dylan knew Skeeter had recorded the call, but he went ahead and jotted the
info
rmation down on a notepad anyway.

“Talk to me,” he said to Hawkins, tossing the pen aside when he was finished.

“Frankie T’s got it in for Royce,” his second in command said. “That’s obvious. There’s no other reason to give him up to us. So now we know Royce is trying to elbow his way in on Sin City’s drug trade, and with his usual charm, pissing people off left and right.”

“Why is he coming to Denver?”

“Because while he’s been pissing off Frankie T, Red Dog has been pissing him off, and somehow, somewhere, someway while she was in El Salvador, she let him know where to find her. Knowing Gillian, it was probably by engraved invitation with a self-addressed and pre-stamped RSVP card. I’ll put in another call to Smith, see if I can get through to him this time and find out what in the hell has been going on in San Luis these last four days.”

“What about the FBI encryption?”

Hawkins gave him a resigned grin. “Business as usual, boss. You know it, and I know it. FBI surveillance picked Royce up in Vegas, but a hundred bucks says they don’t have a warrant for him, and not enough balls to get one. The CIA has declared him strictly hands off. He’s got too many ‘insurance’ files on too many of the people he worked with, and too many of them are too close to retirement to take a stand. So the FBI goes to the mob and gets Frankie T to give him up to us. We get the dirty work, and all the Feds get to sleep at night. Like I said, business as usual.”

Yeah, that’s exactly the way Dylan had figured it, too. Business as usual—totally convoluted.

“You better call Grant,” Hawkins said.

“Yeah. And you call Smith.”

“Roger that,” Hawkins agreed. “And we’re going to need—”

“Yeah,” Dylan interrupted and turned in his chair to look out his office door. “Skeeter, get me Lieutenant Bradley.”

“Check line two,” she answered. “I’ve already got her on.”

That was Steele Street, a well-oiled machine.

Dylan hit two. “Loretta.”

“Mr. Hart,” came a cool, competent female voice on the other end.

“I need a favor.”

“Of course you do.” She didn’t sound any too happy about it, but that was just Loretta, his favorite lieutenant at the Denver Police Department. He’d been sixteen the first time she’d saved his ass, a skill she’d had plenty of opportunity to hone over the years on all the chop-shop boys.

“Flight one-twenty-one from Las Vegas is arriving at Denver International in an hour,” he said. “I need surveillance on a group of passengers.”

“Do you have names?”

“One. Remember Tony Royce?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” she said dryly. “As a matter of fact”—he heard papers being shuffled—“I received a ‘person of interest’ bulletin two days ago on the ex-spook-turned-entrepreneur, one of those ‘if located, do not approach, contact originating agency only’ things. In this case, it’s the DEA, so I’m guessing he’s up to his ears in drugs.”

“And other things,” Dylan confirmed.

“How many people are traveling with him?”

“Five. I could use surveillance footage on all six, what kind of luggage they pick up, and what they’re driving when they leave the airport. I’m going to send someone out there, now.”

“I assume you don’t want the Feds to know about this just yet.”

“Give me what you can, Loretta, a few hours at least, and maybe I can save both of us a whole lot of trouble.”

She let out a small snort. “That’s not the way it usually works when SDF hits the streets, and they’re my streets, Dylan, every single one. As a sworn peace officer, I’d like some assurances that you’re going to keep the gunfire and body count to an acceptable level.”

“What’s acceptable?” He knew. She knew. And she knew he knew, because it never changed.

“Zero.”

“You know I always do my best.”

“Keep it contained, Dylan, and if you fail, and this thing turns violent, I expect you to let me know
before
it happens.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Give me Skeeter, then,” she said. “The department still has a full-time unit of cops at DIA. They can report directly to me, and I’ll transmit the footage to your office.”

“Thanks, Loretta,” he said. “There’ll be a little something extra in your Christmas stocking this year.”

A short laugh escaped her. “Make it Buck Grant, and you’re going to buy yourself a whole lot of Get Out of Jail Free cards.”