Cutting Loose (23 page)

“Tell me where it is.”

Zach couldn't see the guy's face, nothing above the man's shoulders, which were broad and muscular, beefy under his suit jacket.

“That'll be tough,” he said. “There's a warehouse on Nineteenth, near Market, with a loose brick in its west wall. I left a chalk mark on the sidewalk a block farther north.”

“Then Ms. Robbins comes with me. We'll follow you. Open your door, Lily.”

“No,” Zach said, fast and low, making the word a command. “She's handcuffed to the seat. She stays with the car.” Even as he spoke, he took a chance, reaching down for Lily's hand. She understood completely, and in one smooth move, he had the cuff back around her wrist and was lifting it to show the guy, at least show him the illusion of the cuff around her wrist.

“So where's your fucking key?”

“Lost it. The guy in there probably has one,” he said, jerking his chin toward 738 Steele Street. “My dead-drop buyer wants the bracelet. This guy is paying for the woman.”

He heard the man with the gun swear.

“Back up real slow,” the guy said. “If I lose contact with her head, I pull the trigger.”

Interestingly enough, Zach had heard those words before, too, in Vientiane, on the Mekong River. He'd gotten that woman out alive. He was going to get this one out alive, as well.

He put Charlotte into reverse and started backing up very slowly. The garage door was almost up now, and he could see Dylan coming down the stairs at the back. He hoped to hell the guy with the gun didn't see him, but he didn't speed up. He just kept Charlotte to a crawl, slow and easy, taking her back out of the alley.

“The pickup at the dead drop will take place in about fifteen minutes,” he said. “We need to get over there.”

“What's your name?” the guy asked him.

“Alejandro Campos.”

The guy let out a short laugh. “Yeah, Campos. I heard your name from somebody else. Didn't know you ever made it this far north.”

“Only for special occasions,” he said, holding Charlotte to a crawl. Not an easy task.

Next to him, Lily was white-faced, and holding perfectly still. The
pendejo
had one of his hands twisted into her braid, which made Zach a little queasy, and he had that big fucking gun jammed up behind her ear, which made him downright sick. And he still had his finger on the trigger, which made him very angry and very cautious.

Once Zach got Charlotte on the street, the guy told him to stop.

“Put on the parking brake and get out of the car very slowly. Don't look back at the car, not even for an instant. Move toward that gray Saturn and put your hands on top of its roof.”

The gray Saturn was parked less than ten feet away.

“Spread your legs, and wait for my associate. We're changing places. You're going to drive my Lincoln, and I'll drive the Mustang.”

He got out of Charlotte and started walking, and the next sound he heard sent a bolt of sickening dread down his spine. It was a solid thump and a soft, startled cry, then silence. The bastard had hit her, probably knocked her out.

Zach took the final steps to the Saturn and placed his hands on top of the gray car. He didn't look back at Charlotte, didn't look to see what kind of shape Lily was in, and then it was too late. He heard the guy shift the Mustang into first and saw him take off up the street, cross Eighteenth, and wait in the middle of the next block. Dylan hadn't made it out into the alley yet, but he would have heard Charlotte leave. The sound was unmistakable. He was probably already on his phone, asking SB303 what was up.

Goddammit.
The sonuvabitch had hit her.

He heard the Lincoln pull up behind him, and to anyone walking down the street, he knew nothing looked out of place. He was just a guy leaning on a car. The only odd thing might have been if anyone had noticed the woman coming up behind him and giving him a quick frisk—and it was definitely a woman. Her hands were small, her touch lighter than a man's. She found his Para almost instantly and slipped it out of its holster like a professional. His two knives came next. She pulled one out of his pants pocket and the other out of an ankle sheath.

“Get in the car,” she said when he came up clean everyplace else. She hadn't actually shoved her hands in his pants pockets, just patted them down from the outside. She'd gotten his wallet, but she was welcome to it. He didn't keep anything important in his wallet when he was on the job, just a fake I.D. and a boatload of cash.

He was happy to get in the Lincoln Town Car and get closer to Lily.

Once he was behind the Lincoln's steering wheel, he headed northeast, along Wazee. The woman in the car with him was beautiful, very elegant, with auburn hair, and a 9mm Sig in her hand. She was wearing a black V-necked sweater, low cut, and a pair of cigarette jeans, tight, with red heels, and she was dripping in diamonds—bracelet, necklace, earrings. She looked rich and spoiled and like she could be dangerously bitchy—emphasis on the dangerous.

“What's your name?” he asked, and saw Charlotte slip in behind him as he crossed Eighteenth.

“He calls me Kitten,” she said, and Zach cast her a quick glance.

Geezus
. Kitten. She had a voice like twelve-year-old Scotch, rich and smooth, full-bodied, with just a touch of huskiness.

“What's his name?” It never hurt to ask.

“He doesn't have a name, sweetie, and he's not happy right now, so don't make him mad, okay?”

She was smooth, all right.

Lily had put her Colt in Charlotte's console. If she could get to it, she could even out the odds real damn quick.

The next cross street was Nineteenth, and he turned right and then parked a block up. There was a loose brick on the west wall of a small yellow warehouse on the corner, something only a street kid would know about. It had been used to stash stuff since God knew when. He wasn't worried about showing the guy the chalk mark. There wasn't one, but there was no reason to go looking for one, either. All the guy wanted was the bracelet.

Charlotte pulled to a stop behind him, and he could see Lily slumped down in the passenger seat, then saw her raise her hand to the side of her head, where the bastard must have hit her. He tried not to think about it, concentrating instead on the guy with no name. The man got out of the Mustang at the same time that Zach got out of the Lincoln. Kitten stayed in the car.

Zach only had to stall for a minute. That's all it would take. SB303 was still tracking Charlotte, and Dylan had to be on his way, especially if SB303 had gotten a look at Charlotte's new driver.

Unlikely, he realized a couple of seconds later, when the first thing the guy did was throw the Bazo out on the street at Zach's feet.

“I broke your toy,” the guy said, his gun leveled at Zach's chest.

Yeah, broke. More like ripped it out by its hardwired guts and smashed the screen. So much for Dylan coming to the rescue.

“It's down here,” he said, not giving anything away. He was alive, Lily was alive, and he actually had what the guy wanted, most of it, anyway.

At the side of the building, it took him a minute to remember which brick was loose.

“What's the problem?” the guy asked.

“No problem. It's just been a while.” About twelve years.

“A while, like what, half an hour.”

“Yeah.” Asshole.

He tried one brick, then another. The guy's phone rang, and he answered it without a flicker of distraction. His gaze didn't leave Zach, and his gun held steady.

“Where?” the guy said. “Coming south or from the west?”

The guy didn't take his eyes off him, but Zach looked in both directions and saw a silver Mercedes crossing Eighteenth and heading their way.

“You're out of time, Campos.”

No, he wasn't. He jiggled the loose brick free, noticed the cavity was full of junk, and pulled a classic bit of sleight of hand, blocking the guy's line of sight for a second with the brick while he pulled something out of his pocket.

Without a word, he handed the guy the macramé bracelet.

The man grinned and made his first mistake—and it only took one. He lowered his gaze to see the bracelet, and Zach nailed him, parrying his gun hand and slamming him hard up against the brick building, hard enough to hear a loud crack, hard enough for his head to bounce off. Zach twisted the gun out of his hand, and the guy fell to his knees, but he didn't fall over.

Zach didn't give a damn. It was enough. He was running for Charlotte. If Kitten was calling in a warning, then he needed to get the hell out of there.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the Mercedes speed up. He knew Kitten was watching the silver luxury car, but any second she was going to look to see what her partner was doing, and when she saw him on his knees, Zach was betting she was going to level her Sig out the window and go for him or Lily.

He wasn't going to give her the chance. He was only seconds from Charlotte, and then he was inside and sliding the Mustang into first and hitting the gas hard. He'd be goddamned if he got trapped between a damn Mercedes and a damn Lincoln Town Car.

He pulled out onto Nineteenth as fast as Charlotte could take him, which wasn't nearly as fast as he would have liked, not with traffic getting in his way.
Goddammit.
All he had to do was get past the Town Car before Kitten could pull her pistol and take aim. And by the skin of his teeth, he did, hitting the street with a bit of luck and a carefully controlled drift to get him heading in the right direction, which was “away.”

Nothing could have gone smoother—except for the searing pain suddenly engulfing his body.

Oh, fuck.
It stole his breath.

He shifted up into third, tearing down the street, getting away.

Away from that goddamn dangerous Kitten, who had just shot him with her goddamn Sig.

He felt Charlotte's right rear tire get blown out and was barely able to hold her on the road.
Goddamn. Goddamn.
That had been no 9mm. The Mercedes was on his ass and tearing into him with something a whole helluva lot bigger than that.

Another bullet hit Charlotte, something big enough to come through her trunk, slip through her backseat like butter, and scream through the interior to cut down the length of his thigh.

Fuck.
He was trying to think, trying to keep his head clear, but it wasn't working. The Mercedes was behind him, gaining, and the Lincoln was tearing out after the Mercedes.

Fuck.
He'd run out of time, all of his time, all at once.
Goddamn.
And he hadn't seen it coming, not like this.

No time. There was no time.

He turned the next corner, not even bothering to shift, just spinning the wheel, using the brake and clutch, and letting Charlotte ride the drift. Lily was talking to him, her voice high and agitated, but he couldn't hear a word she was saying. He had an awful lot of stuff on his mind, most of it looking like it had hit a fan, and he was having trouble piecing his thoughts together.

It was just the pain. It would pass, and then he'd be fine. It was just the initial shock of getting hit, and of course the blood, which he could feel running out of him.

Goddammit.

When he saw a squad car up ahead, cruising its beat on the street, he didn't second-guess the one complete thought he got. He slid Charlotte to a tire-squealing stop, sending up a billow of smoke and almost slamming straight into the POS.

“Get out of the car,” he growled, and when she started to speak, he cut her off. “Don't fuck with me, Lily. Get out of the goddamn car
now
!”

He could take care of himself, but he couldn't take care of her. Not like this.

The two officers in the squad car were scrambling out, pulling their guns, and she must have understood—she either got out of the goddamn car, or somebody was going to get hurt. Probably him.

As soon as she slammed the door, he took off again, putting her completely out of his mind. Gone. He had one goal now. Only one.

He took the next turn, and drove through five more, weaving his way back toward Steele Street, and now he was two blocks north of it, with the cops calling him in, and the Mercedes and the Town Car still on his ass.

Perfect. He'd counted on it.

He had not been interested in any half-assed standoff with these assholes and the Denver police, with him in the middle of it, and Lily standing right next to him. For what these guys were after, shooting it out with the cops was well within their risk quotient.

Zach had taken that option away from them. If they wanted what they'd all come for, they had to come for him, or so they thought.

He tasted blood—
Dammit, this can't be good.

Slamming down on the clutch and the brake, he pulled Charlotte to another rubber-burning stop. Then his foot slipped off the clutch. The Mustang's Cobra jet engine died, all 428 cubic inches of it, stopped dead.

Fuck.

He pushed open the door and half slid, half fell onto the pavement. Squealing tires and a flash of headlights were the last things he heard and saw before he rolled under the car and started his fall into darkness.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN

Saturday, midnight—Denver, Colorado

At least her watch worked, Cherie thought, its tiny tritium numbers glowing in the dark, showing her the time, midnight, and no doubt irradiating her, but not enough to be the end of her.

No, she thought. Her end was going to come from getting herself so damn lost in the absolute heart of Denver that she would become a trivia question in the city's history books, an urban legend, an enduring mystery.
Dammit
. She was right in the middle of the damn city, and she was nowhere, trapped in a wasteland of tunnels. Not the huge ones carrying the city's utilities. There were people in those tunnels, maintenance people, engineers, safety inspectors.

No. She was lost in the old abandoned tunnels, where all those kinds of people had worked years and years ago, but where nobody came anymore.

She slid the light from her flashlight down both sides of the next intersection of byways, and chose to go right for no special reason. She'd given up on reasoning her way out of here. The one thing she was good at hadn't been doing her any good.

No, sirree. No safety inspector was going to save her down here. There was only her in these damn tunnels, lost and all alone. Just her—
and oh, my god
. What was that?

She turned her head to the left, listening. She'd heard something, some faint echo. She took a step to the left, then another, and she heard it again—street noise. Honest-to-God street noise. If she could find where it was coming from, and if there was any kind of an opening, she would be saved.

By her watch, it took her another half an hour, not because of the distance, but because of the labyrinth of tunnels she had to negotiate to close the distance between her and where the street noise originated, where it had penetrated into the underground world below Denver. When she felt fresh air, she knew everything was going to be okay.

Propelled by sheer relief, she picked up her pace, moving faster, splashing her way through the tunnel streams, following the fresh air and the increasing noise. Her flashlight beam careened off the walls with her uneven gait over the piles of debris in the tunnels—until she came to a sudden stop.

The air was strong where she stood. She could actually feel it blowing against her cheeks, and the noise was pure, no echo, as if she could almost reach out and touch it. But there was something else, something at the edge of her sight that had stopped her cold.

She lifted her flashlight higher, and—
oh, my god.

A dead body was piled in a heap on the tunnel floor.

A less smart girl would have run screaming in the other direction and gotten herself lost all over again. Cherie moved forward, and when she saw blood running down the man's arm and pooling in the upward curve of his palm, she moved even faster.

Oh, my god
. She dropped to her knees beside him. He was still breathing. He had short dark hair and a long-healed scar running down the side of his face, and was wearing expensive clothes. She put her hands on him, one touching his shoulder, the other feeling his brow. He was alive.

“Oh, geez. Okay. I'm going to get help.” She'd hardly been able to help herself. “Just hang in there, okay?” God, that sounded so lame.

She looked around, sliding the light from her flashlight along the walls—and then she saw it, an old ladder bolted to the side of the tunnel. She tilted her flashlight up. Her way out was at the top of the ladder, but she couldn't leave the man. She needed help.

Grabbing her cell out of her pocket, she was about to dial, when she heard footsteps coming her way.
Oh, God
. She froze where she was, hoping whoever had hurt the man wasn't coming back to finish him off. Just the thought was enough to get her to her feet, ready to run if she needed to run, while her fingers raced over the phone's touch pad. Then a figure came into view, and she felt a wave of relief so huge, it almost swamped her.

“Gillian.” She breathed the name.

Instead of saying anything, though, Gillian raised her finger to her lips and shook her head. Then she pointed up.

Cherie looked in that direction, and heard the sound of voices mixed with the car noises coming from the street.

Silently, Gillian knelt by the man and slid the beam of her flashlight over his face. She didn't look at him for more than three seconds before she rose to her feet.

That's when Cherie noticed the other person with her—Gabriel Shore. Like Gillian, he was being very quiet. Unlike Gillian, when he knelt by the man, he started checking him for injuries.

Red Dog stood perfectly still and listened for a moment, her gaze angled up toward the street, then she slid up the ladder like a snake and disappeared from view.

Cherie's heart was pounding. Something was going on, something dangerous, whatever had been going on all day and kept everybody so busy.

After no more than a few minutes, during which time Cherie prayed the wounded man would not die on her, a huge rumbling roar shattered the silence. Her hands instinctively went over her ears.
Oh, freaking geez
. She knew that sound. It was one of Steele Street's babies, one of the cars, and someone had just started it up right on top of her head.

In seconds, the noise moved, fading to a mere rumbling purr, and Gillian came back down the ladder.

“I've got an ambulance on the way,” she said, coming over to be by the man and sliding a large folding knife between her belt and her jeans. “Gabriel, go topside and direct them down here. Cherie, are you okay?”

“Yes.” Yes, she was fine. “Who is this guy, Gillian? What's he doing here?”

Kneeling down again, Gillian put her hand on the man's forehead and gently traced a long scar down the left side of his face.

“This is Zachary Prade, Cherie,” she said. “Last of the lost chop-shop boys.”

Cherie looked at him. She knew the name. She probably shouldn't, but like Skeeter, she did a lot of poking around at Steele Street, and Zachary Prade had been the lost chop-shop boy for as long as she could remember, for as long as she'd worked for Dylan. Three years ago, they'd lost another, and amidst a wave of grief and regrets, they'd all had to face the fact that he was never going to come home. In the jungles of Colombia, South America, J. T. Chronopoulos had been lost to them forever.

But this one was back.

Bleeding, broken, and collapsed, but still breathing.

“Is he going to make it?” she asked.

“Yeah, baby,” Red Dog said. “He's going to make it.”

The sound of sirens broke the night, and Cherie sent up another prayer.

         

Spencer normally ran a six-minute mile. He was doing a little better than that, pounding the pavement. That asshole Campos had cheated him. Even with his ears ringing, and Mallory screaming at him and blasting away with her Sig, he'd torn into the bracelet, and there'd been nothing in it, no polymer strand with microdots, just damn macramé. He'd shoved it in his pocket, raced back to the Lincoln, and Mallory had hit the gas, going after the bastard—and after a short, hot chase, the bastard had led him here, to another goddamn alley, him, and Mallory, and damn Grigori Petrov in his silver Mercedes, with the cops on all their asses.

Jesus
. The alleys in Denver were fucking crazy places. Spencer knew what he'd just seen in this one, and it was so unexpected, so surreal, it had spooked the holy living hell right out of him.

Jesus
. He kept his legs pumping, heading back toward the Town Car and Mallory. Petrov was on his own, and Spencer's money said he was doomed.

Alejandro Campos had disappeared. Spencer could live with that. The muscle car had smoked to a screeching stop, the driver's door had opened, and the guy behind the wheel had disappeared. Okay, fine. Shit happened.

Petrov had reached the Shelby ahead of Spencer, and for a split second, Spencer had thought The Chechen had killed Campos, knifed him or something. So Spencer had come in fast, the Recon Tanto in his hand, ready to cut the truth out of Petrov, hurt him in whatever way was necessary to get what he wanted—the damn polymer strip with the damn microdots that should have been woven into the damn macramé bracelet—and then get the hell out of Denver.

But there'd been no Campos in the Shelby Mustang, no one behind the wheel, just Petrov tearing through the car, looking for the same damn thing Spencer wanted. Then the damnedest thing he'd ever seen had happened: Gillian “Red Dog” Pentycote had slid out from under the Shelby Cobra, right at Petrov's feet, right out from between the Mustang's chassis and the street, as if she'd simply coalesced off the pavement or something. There was no mistaking her. He knew the girl, and everyone knew she wasn't normal. She'd been enhanced, changed right down to the molecular level by some drugs she'd been given, some real cutting-edge psychopharmaceuticals out of Thailand. Everybody knew how dangerous she was, how nearly superhuman she'd become.

Everyone knew she'd killed Tony Royce, and Zane Lowe, and half a dozen of their guys in Denver five months ago. Everyone knew she was lightning fast and had deadly skills, with weapons or without. But
geezus,
nobody had said she could fucking
materialize
out of fucking nothing. No wonder all those guys had died. Kendryk was fucking nuts to want her back. Crazy to put a bounty on her.

Still, Spencer might have taken her on, if it hadn't been for the damn cops, sirens coming from all directions.

Sure, he might have risked his life for two million dollars and maybe one more chance at the damn encryption code.

But maybe not.

She'd gotten The Chechen. He'd heard the guy go down, hard and fast, heard Petrov grunt in pain. It could have been him, and the knowledge added an extra edge of speed to his final fleeing strides.

Breathless, and more unnerved than he would ever admit to anyone, he reached the Lincoln Town Car and lofted himself into the passenger seat. Mallory was already gunning the engine.

“Hit it, Kitten,” he said. Whatever the hell had just happened, he was going to sort it out someplace far from Denver, Colorado.