Cutting Loose (24 page)

CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT

Sunday, 5:00
A.M
.—Denver, Colorado

“It's five o'clock in the damn morning, Dylan, and I've been working this city way too hard all night long. This better be good.” The sound of a very unhappy woman came over the phone. “Damn good.”

“I think you've got something that belongs to me, Loretta,” Dylan said, reaching for his coffee cup. “And I'd like to get it back as soon as possible.”

“You mean the woman we picked up two blocks from Steele Street,” Loretta said, Lieutenant Loretta Bradley, Dylan's favorite cop in Denver. She'd been saving his butt since he'd been sixteen. “The murder suspect out of New Mexico who got all but thrown out of a 1968 Shelby Cobra Mustang GT500KR, which I'm guessing goes by the name of either Charlotte or Charlene.”

“Yes. That's exactly who I mean.” He took a sip of coffee and relaxed back into his chair.

“You want me to give up a perfectly good murder suspect?” the woman asked, clearly disbelieving that he had the gall to even ask. “What's in it for me?”

“A clear conscience.”

She burst out laughing on the other end of the line.

“Oh, that's good, Dylan.” She laughed some more. “That may be your best one yet.”

“It was self-defense, Loretta, not murder, and that's how it's going to come out. I've got a federal agent and an unnamable bureau of bureaucracy to back it all up. This one's a no-go.”

“Yes, the damn Feds have already shown up and riffled their way through my evidence locker.”

In his office at Steele Street, Dylan set down his coffee cup, squeezed his eyes shut, and quietly rubbed his hand over his face.
Geezus
. Zach was freaking nuts, and Loretta was right. They'd all been working too damn hard tonight.

“Did they get what they wanted?” he asked, reaching for his cup again.

“Who the hell knows?” she said. “It was the Feds. I can tell you they did linger awhile over a scrappy little piece of plastic stuff my officers took off her, seemed to have quite a little conference over it, just between themselves.”

“A piece of plastic?” Zach had told Dylan that he'd slid the polymer strand into her braid, securing it with her ponytail band, a measure that had obviously paid off. What Zach hadn't told him was why the polymer strand was important enough to have sparked a couple of international incidents, the one in El Salvador three weeks ago, and again tonight on the streets of Denver.

“Yes. It went in the evidence bag when they booked her,” Loretta said, “along with her rings, and earrings, and a necklace.”

Well, that's what Zach had been counting on, and Dylan had to admit that it had been a brilliant move, a classic bit of misdirection. Give the cops a murder suspect, drop her right in their laps, and there wasn't a policeman in the world who would think twice about a piece of plastic in her hair.

“Red Dog should be knocking on your precinct door any second now,” he said.

“You sent the girl?” Loretta laughed again. “Well, at least you've got the brains to send somebody I like.”

Yeah, he did. He knew Loretta had a soft spot for Gillian. Hell, Loretta had a soft spot for all of SDF's kick-ass women. The lieutenant might have been staring fifty in the face, but she was one of Denver's original kick-ass-and-take-names girls.

“So how is that federal agent from the unnamable bureau of bureaucracy doing?” she asked. “I heard he got shot.”

“Yeah. He did, but he's going to be fine. The docs say he'll be out of the hospital in a couple of days at the most. He's tough.”

“He always was,” Loretta said. “One of the toughest.”

Dylan set his cup back on his desk and leaned forward in his chair, his hand back over his face.
God. Goddamn.

He let a moment pass, and then another.

“Yeah, he was,” he said, lowering his hand and reaching for his coffee again. “Still is. Doc Blake is up with him now. Apparently, Zach went to see him the other night.” Doc Blake ran a very unofficial free clinic out of his place up on Seventeenth Avenue. He'd been running it and taking care of street kids for twenty years.

“Good,” Loretta said. “That's a good place to start, with the guy who put him back together. Geezus, he was a mess the night you found him, a bad thing to see, even for a hardened beat cop.”

Yeah, that night. The night Dylan had found a skinny fifteen-year-old bleeding to death in an alley with his face laid open, really laid open, almost peeled back. Zach was just lucky his mother's pimp hadn't killed him for trying to interfere with his business.

“Did you get Red Dog's present?” He changed the subject. It was hard for him to remember that night. The pimp had really worked Zach over, done some bad things. Alazne knew. Zach had told her everything, and she'd sent him back a little changed, a little stronger, and in a whole lot better place within himself. Dylan would love her forever for that alone.

“Grigori Petrov?” Loretta said. “Yes, that was one nice present. It's going to make me look real good. Too bad the others got away.”

Bayonne and Rush had disappeared off the street while Gillian had been dealing with Petrov, but Dylan was sure their time would come. The files Gabriel Shore had brought with him from Washington, D.C. all but guaranteed it.

He looked out into the main office. Skeeter had her feet up on one of the desks and was sketching on a pad. From what he could see, it looked like one of her comic-book stories. She had tons of those things, and some pretty nice erotica she drew just for him.

And finally, some of the night's weight seemed to lift just a bit. Skeeter and erotica were his favorite mood-enhancing combination. It had never failed him. So suddenly, the night, what was left of it anyway, looked a little more promising.

Except for maybe the two people sitting on the couch playing some sort of high-tech, light-speed video game—Cherie Hacker and Gabriel Shore.

Dylan got the uncomfortable feeling he was observing a computer geek date. It was odd, like that opening mating ritual thing that had taken place earlier in the office, and like the handshake, this video-game-playing idea didn't look like it had much potential to get the job done.

Dylan considered himself a real smart guy, but not so smart that he and Skeeter ever played video games.

“We'll get them next time, Loretta.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Next time.”

After they hung up, Dylan watched the two computer geniuses for a moment longer. It was five o'clock in the morning, and they were playing a video game.

They could have it.

He was going to get his wife and take her to bed.

Lily sat down next to Zach's hospital bed in Denver General and took his hand.

“Hi,” she said, and felt him squeeze her fingers.

“Hi.” He was patched, and bandaged, and had an IV pumping him full of something or another.

“You look great.”

He attempted a grin, and just about made it.

“They let you out,” he said, sounding incredibly tired. “Good. Don't worry. They'll never get the murder thing to stick. We're the good guys, and we can prove it.”

“Yeah, we're the good guys.” At least he was, the best guy, and she was so damned grateful to see him still all in one piece. When he'd dumped her on those cops, she'd been terrified she'd never see him again. “It was pretty cool the way you put that piece of plastic in my hair.”

“You liked that?” He really looked like hell, but not critical. She figured the only critical thing in the room was her heart. It had been a helluva day.

“Yeah,” she said. “Gave me kind of a shock to see it, but I liked how you did it. I hope it was part of your plan not to get it back, because somebody else confiscated everything they made me give up when they booked me.”

“FBI,” he said, and yawned. “I called my boss. Told him to get somebody over there ASAP. The FBI is the closest Feds Denver's got.”

“So all's well that ends well?” She hated to say it, but a few wild hours in a car with a man didn't necessarily add up to anything, no matter how much sex they'd managed to fit into the day.

“I hope nothing is ending,” he said, still holding her hand.

“You're not a lawyer or an accountant, Zach,” she said. He hadn't precisely told her who he worked for and what he did. She had a feeling his job description wasn't available for public perusal. She accepted that, and she understood what it meant.

“I'm not a fool either, Lily,” he said. “Don't write me off just yet, that's all I ask.” He was fading, drifting off to sleep, but his grip on her hand didn't lighten, not a bit. He yawned again. “A few things have come to an end lately, like El Salvador, and maybe more than that. We should talk…and celebrate.”

“Celebrate?”

“We did it, babe. We won.” His eyelids drifted closed for a second or two, then slowly lifted. “You should really be here when I wake up.”

He'd saved the free world, and her, and thank God, he'd still had what it took to save himself.

“Okay, I'll be here.”

“I mean right here.” He pulled her closer. “Right here next to me. In the bed.”

“I don't think they like that sort of thing,” she said, holding back a smile, resisting the pull of his hand.

“We saved the free world, at least for now.” He did a little better with his grin. “We can do what we want, at least in here. Come on.” He pulled a little more, and even though her common sense told her not to be ridiculous, she went with ridiculous anyway, and with very little more coaxing, ended up stretched out next to him, drifting off with him into sleep.

“I…I don't even know your last name,” she said around a yawn of her own.

“Prade,” he said, and it was the last thing she heard.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE

Four weeks later—Chouteau County, Montana

Zachary Prade—she liked his name.

“This isn't Tahiti,” Lily said from where she was sitting next to him.

“Not even close, babe,” he agreed.

“I'm just about freezing my butt off.”

“Hang tight. It just takes a little getting used to, that's all.”

She rolled her head in his direction and opened one eye. “You have never done this before in your life, city boy.”

He just grinned and settled himself deeper into the stock tank. Above them, a windmill turned in the cooling breeze, and beyond the windmill, the Bearpaw Mountains jutted up into the sky, their peaks dusted white even in the middle of July.

“Definitely not Tahiti,” he said.

“I don't think we'll be seeing Tahiti any time soon.”

“No, me, either,” he said. They never had tracked down whoever had sent her the plane ticket and the money. It was an unsolved mystery, a loose end. He'd had his old boss, whose name Lily had never heard, from a place he'd never mentioned by name, put somebody on the whole Tahiti aspect of their day with the bracelet, and so far, Zach hadn't heard anything back.

They'd speculated a bit between the two of them, though, and the best he'd come up with was a true story about a pair of FBI agents who had worked a successful sting operation by sending criminals free plane tickets to Hawaii. There'd been a bit more to their scam than just the tickets, but the free plane tickets were what had turned the trick. They were bait, plain and simple, and people who took bait got hooked.

Of course, in Lily's instance, it had been the criminals who'd been offering the bait. The trouble was, there had been a lot of criminal elements after the bracelet. They'd get them tracked down, though, one way or the other.

“I think I like ranching,” he said.

She burst out laughing. “You haven't been ranching. You've been eating steak and biscuits three times a day, fishing in the mornings, trail riding in the afternoons, and today, lounging in a stock tank. You haven't been hot and sweaty and dirty once since you got here.”

At that, he arched an eyebrow in her direction, and she burst out laughing again. “That doesn't count.”

“We were in the barn, sweetheart,” he begged to differ. “You and me, hot and sweaty and rolling in dust in the haymow. Trust me, it counted.” He leaned over and nuzzled her neck. When he reached the tender skin just below her ear, he stopped and ran his tongue across her skin. “So what do you think of Denver?”

She leaned back and slanted him a curious glance. He was licking her neck and thinking about Denver?

“I think Denver is great.”

He kissed her again, on the cheek this time, and drew her close with his arm around her shoulders. “It's also about halfway between Albuquerque and Montana.”

“That's A-plus geography work.” She grinned, having some idea of what he was getting at. They had hardly been out of each other's sight in four weeks, and every single day had been the best of her life. They talked for hours, and made love for hours, and somehow, with him, she felt like she'd come home, like there wasn't any other place she needed to be. There were no siren calls to exotic lands, only the call to be with him.

It wasn't a feeling she ever wanted to give up.

“If this ranching gig doesn't work out,” he said, “I'm going to go live in a loft in LoDo, a really big loft on Steele Street. If you promise not to use up all the towels and steal all the covers, I think I could get you on at the loft, too. It might be a handy stopping-off place for you, when you're going back and forth between Albuquerque and Montana.”

“I'm not going back to Albuquerque.” She'd given it a lot of thought, and a move she'd made to please a husband she no longer had didn't seem like the best thing to stick with, and she couldn't bear the thought of going into her house again. She'd have to, sometime in the next few weeks, but Zach had already promised to go with her, and he'd promised her a cleanup crew would have the whole inside looking like new before they arrived.

“Good,” he said. “Then the loft could be a handy stopping-off place between Denver and Montana…or you could just stop in Denver, and Montana could be a sometime thing.”

She smiled, loving this conversation. It would definitely go in her diary, if she'd kept a diary: where it had taken place, who she'd been having it with, and she hoped, how it turned out. Love talk in stock tanks was every cowgirl's dream come true, even more of a dream come true than white-sand beaches, palm trees, and pink sunsets on the ocean.

         

She had a smile on her face, a real enigmatic Mona Lisa smile, and Zach was hanging over an abyss, declaring his love everlasting, laying his heart on the line.

And she was smiling. Enigmatically.

“You love the idea, don't you.” It wasn't a question. She loved the idea.

Her smile broadened.

“You're crazy about me,” he said. And yeah, he figured this was a good tactic. She could smile, naked in a stock tank, freezing her gorgeous ass off, and he'd just live in his little dream world—which, amazingly, looked exactly like his real world. Beautiful naked woman sheltered in the curve of his arm, love in her eyes, and an enigmatic, Mona Lisa smile on her face.

“Yeah, you're in love with me, I can tell.”

She just smiled, and started doing some very nice things with her hand below the water.

He settled her in closer and kissed her mouth. “You probably want to marry me in this stock tank, before we go back to Denver. You know, just take a chance on me.”

She just smiled, her hand never stopping its wondrous exploration of his anatomy, and so it went the way it had been going since he'd gotten out of the hospital, crazy hot sex almost every day—and yeah, that was part of the dream, too.

He didn't know what Alex had done with the polymer strand out of the bracelet, or how the U.S. government was going to leverage the information. His job had been to get the damn thing, and he'd done it. And the next job he was given, he'd do that, too, but he'd be doing it for General Grant over at the Department of Defense, via Dylan Hart at Special Defense Force, SDF. He was going back to 738 Steele Street. He was going home.

This whole little sidebar he'd worked for himself, this “saving the woman” part and fulfilling his “sex with a cowgirl” fantasy, that was the extra, that was for him.

And hours later, when they'd gotten back to the ranch house and warmed each other up in bed, when she finally said yes—yes to Denver, and yes to him. That's when he realized that from the very first moment he'd seen her, from the moment when he'd felt his world shift a bit on its axis, from that moment onward, the whole “saving the woman” part had actually been about saving him.