Cutting Loose (3 page)

He owed Dylan Hart, and later, after he finished the Lily Robbins deal, he'd come back. At Steele Street, he could put Charlotte back on twelve-seconds-plus-change quarter miles.

Or else he'd take the Mustang and keep going, the way he always kept going: away. The eight years in El Salvador were the longest he'd ever spent anywhere, but he'd been there as Alejandro Campos, not himself, and Campos didn't have a history before his arrival in Central America. Zach Prade did, in spades, and there was no hiding from it here, not at Steele Street, not with Dylan, and probably not with Superman either.

Hell.
He'd come for Charlotte, not to get his life back. Not to pay overdue debts—but he did have one stop he had to make, one person up on Seventeenth Avenue he had to see before he left Denver.

He raised his left hand and touched the side of his face, the gesture almost unconscious, but not quite. The narrow line of his scar ran from above his temple down to his jaw, and being back in Denver made it impossible to be unconscious of it, of how he'd gotten it, or of the man who'd put him back together.

Yeah, he had some debts in Denver.

Lowering his hand, he lifted his gaze and followed the lines of Steele Street's open freight elevator where it crawled up the side of the building. All girders and cables, steel plate and ironwork, the whole of it looked more like an upended suspension bridge bolted into the brick than anything else—bolted deep, Gothic and sweeping, with a garage door opening onto it at every level.

He'd left Charlotte in her bay on the ground floor, pulled her in one long-ago summer night and said good-bye to everything he'd known. Patriotism hadn't exactly been his motivation, and even from the start, he'd been pretty damn cynical about making a difference in the world.

But the challenge—oh, yeah, that had grabbed him hard. Could a nameless kid from the American heartland survive in the farthest-flung reaches of the world as an agent of his government? Could a street rat from Denver take his skills into the underbelly of the world and come out in one piece, time and time again?

The answer was a resounding yes. He'd not only survived, he'd thrived, and sometimes he wondered what that said about him.

Not tonight, though. Tonight all it said was that he was going to get his car, and then he was driving to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and taking a small macramé bracelet from a sweet-faced schoolteacher who, if he did his job right, and he always did, would never have a clue how close she'd come to the edge of his world.

CHAPTER
THREE

Saturday, 5:00
A.M
.—Albuquerque, New Mexico

At exactly five
A.M
., Lily's incredibly annoying alarm clock screeched, and at five
A.M
. plus two seconds, she whacked it, unerringly hitting the off button. The damn thing could wake the dead, which was why she put up with it. Not that she'd needed the extra incentive lately. She hadn't had a decent night's sleep since she'd gotten back.

Sitting up, she swung her legs over the side of the bed, turned on her lamp, and reached for the Colt .45. She flipped off the safety and press-checked the chamber, making sure the first round was still loaded. Then she flipped the safety back on and headed for the bathroom, taking the pistol with her.

It was a crazy way to live, armed and dangerous for her morning shower, but that's the way life was going to be, crazy, until she was back on the Cross Double R…or unless she ended up lying under the French Polynesian sun with a beach drink in her hand.

Yeah, she'd dreamed about Tahiti, a warm-water blue sea washing up on white sand, a thatched hut and a slow-moving fan—and yeah, a dark-haired man. But that's all it was, a dream. The FedEx envelope and all the goodies stuffed inside were headed to Trace, Montana, and the Cross, right along with her, without a Tahitian island in sight.

         

From where he was parked half a block down on Somerset Street, Zach saw a light go on in Lily Robbins's house. A minute later, another light came on.

Early riser, he thought around a long yawn, reaching for his cup of gas station coffee. He'd made record time, he and Charlotte all but flying over Raton Pass and sliding into Albuquerque just before dawn, the hour of the barbarians, of which Lily Robbins was obviously one.

Five
A.M
.,
geezus.

Choking down a swallow of bitter brew, he set the Styrofoam cup aside and reached for his pack of smokes—cold coffee and a hot cigarette, a perfect combination for the ungodly hour. He lit up and settled in to wait. Charlotte was hardly the ideal stakeout car, a Shelby Mustang with racing stripes and headers, but he wasn't planning on staking out the Robbins place for very long. He and the pony had glided into place at a discreetly low and slow rumble, and once the lovely Lily left for the day, he was going inside. With luck, he'd find the bracelet and be on his way without her ever being any the wiser. It was a long shot, but he'd played worse odds and come out ahead more than once.

That was Plan A. Plan B, if he didn't find the bracelet, entailed paying Ms. Robbins a more personal visit; shorter odds, but infinitely more complicated.

He preferred simple.

And food.

Yeah, food would be nice, he thought around another yawn. Real food—croissants, chèvre, scrambled eggs, smoked salmon, fresh-squeezed orange juice with a thin slice of lime, maybe some papaya.

Maybe not.

His gaze locked on a low-slung sports car slowly turning the corner onto Somerset Street. Sitting up a little straighter, he took a last drag off his cigarette before stubbing it out in the car's ashtray.

Lily lived in a nice neighborhood, but not Aston Martin nice. She had a ten-year-old Ford short-bed pickup parked in her driveway, and her next-door neighbor's truck looked older than that. The expensive import was out of place and showing up at an odd time of day. In the morning, people were usually leaving their homes and neighborhoods, not arriving.

When the Aston Martin stopped in front of Lily's house, Zach reached into the gun bag he'd put on the passenger seat and withdrew a suppressor for the Para .45 semiautomatic pistol he carried in a shoulder holster. Somerset was a quiet street, and Zach planned on keeping it that way, no matter who parked in front of her house, and no matter what they had in mind. He could imagine a few things, any number of which could end quite poorly for someone, probably not him, and to the best of his ability, not Lily Robbins.

Van Zandt and Kesselring had played coy with the contents of the flash drive Devlin had been transporting, but during their briefing, Alex had laid enough information on the line to keep Zach's stomach in knots until the Fourth of July. “Russian Nobel Laureate Gone Bad in Iran” was a crappy headline in any language. When the laureate was an eminent nuclear scientist, and the bad part was her collusion with the Iranian government to expedite their enrichment of significant amounts of uranium, and the whole mess was documented on a flash drive whose encryption key had quite possibly ended up on a New Mexico schoolteacher's wrist—well, that's where Zach's stomach had started to knot up. Foreign policy issues aside, the loss of that kind of data was enough to get a senior station chief killed, let alone an expendable civilian like Lily Robbins. The problem being that she didn't feel at all expendable to him.

Reaching back in his gun bag, he pulled out a cool little tracking device he'd found attached to Charlotte's ammeter gauge when he'd stopped for his coffee. He dropped the tracker in his pocket, and threaded the suppressor onto the Para, and kept his eye on the Aston Martin, hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst.

He got the worst.

Both doors on the sports car opened at once, and two guys got out,
dos pendejos,
one with a thick gray ponytail, the other with buzz-cut white-blond hair. They didn't look like carpool buddies, or a couple of cousins dropping by for an early morning visit, and they sure as hell didn't look like they'd stopped for directions. No, the men looked like they knew exactly where they were and exactly what they wanted. They didn't hesitate when they got out of the car; they fanned, as in “fanned out,” each one taking a different side of Lily's house and heading toward the back.

Fuck them.

Zach didn't hesitate either. He rolled down the passenger-side window on the Shelby, moved the gun bag, and silently slid out of the car, no lights, no opening and shutting doors, no nothing, only him on the street and heading toward Lily's house with a suppressed .45.

Three weeks—that's how long it had taken the CIA to come back around to Lily Robbins, obviously long enough for other interested parties to draw the same damn conclusions about the American woman's involvement in the Salvadoran incident. He knew exactly what kind of people would have been sent after the literal key, and he knew who would have sent them: half a dozen governments, another half a dozen big-name dealers on the international black market, and a handful of shadow organizations that made their way in the world by straddling the line between legitimate and rogue. They would all have sent men like him to find the bracelet and retrieve the code, except, unlike him, those men wouldn't give a damn about Lily Robbins. Her death, if it came to that, would be one of those unexplained murders that no New Mexico cop shop would ever unravel. The guys who did his kind of work wouldn't leave a trace. They were covert, and they were good. Lucky for Lily, Zach was pretty sure he was better than the Aston Martin boys.

Coming up on the sports car, he quickly knelt down, activated and attached the tracking device, and memorized the license number. Nevada plates only meant one thing to him—Vegas wiseguys. He'd have names and sheets on them before noon.

Yeah, he was pretty damn sure he had the upper hand on Somerset Street this morning, but he never took anything for granted. Never. That was what made him better—an acute sense of paranoia and a fear of dying. Not death. He didn't have any fear of being dead. But, man, he'd seen the results of some very bad dying. The Far East, the Near East, all over Latin America, it didn't matter where he'd been, people were butchers, and he wasn't going out in pieces. No fucking way. He'd take a bullet to the back of the head any day over some of the things he'd seen.

J.T. had gone out in pieces
—yeah, pieces. John Thomas Chronopolous, J.T., one of the original chop-shop boys of Steele Street. Zach had heard all about how the Special Defense Force operator had died in Colombia, and how J.T.'s youngest brother, Kid Chaos, had brought him home. Zach had even seen the photographs and wished so goddamn badly that he hadn't.

He came to the corner of Lily's house and snuck a quick look at her back door. It was ajar, and there was no movement anywhere around it.

Fuck.
The Aston Martin boys were already in the house.

In half a dozen steps he was beside the door and took a quick look inside—a laundry room, leading into the kitchen, one step up. Even before the last piece of information snapped into place, he was moving forward, the safety on his Para flipped off and his finger on the trigger. Two guys from Las Vegas fanning out and sneaking into a woman's house in New Mexico through the back door at five o'clock in the morning just about sealed their fate as far as Zach was concerned.

Just about. He was always open to last split-second decision making, because once he pulled the Para's trigger, there was no coming back.

The kitchen was clear, the house quiet, except for the sound of a shower, which he hated. She might as well have put up a neon sign—“Naked, vulnerable woman in here.”
Fuck
. He followed the sound, moving silently, swiftly, every sense on alert. A door on his right was open onto a flight of stairs leading into a basement. Light from her bedroom showed a large footprint pressed into the carpet at the top of the stairs. At least one of the Aston Martin guys could be in the basement, maybe both. He wasn't hearing any movement on the main floor. He sure as hell wasn't making any noise. When he'd been taught “swift and silent,” his instructors had meant exactly that.

Checking each door, each room, each opening, he finally reached the bathroom at the end of the hall. His mission, of which he was well aware, was to get the bracelet. That was it. Get the bracelet and get it to Alex—a simple, straightforward, closed set of commands. “Save the woman” was way down on the CIA's priority list, and honest to God, it might not even have made the list.

Okay, there was no “might” about it. “Save the woman” was not on the list.

But here he was, and there were men in her house, and she was in the shower, and he was going to open her damn bathroom door and scare the holy fuck out of her, just so he could “save the woman,” and then he'd get the bracelet.

So now he was up to Plan C, and the sun hadn't even broken the horizon yet.

Aligning himself flush with the door frame, he reached over and turned the knob—and in the next instant, something crashed in the basement.

CHAPTER
FOUR

         

Inside the bathroom, Lily's heart jammed into her throat and the cup of water she'd been holding landed in the sink, along with a flurry of aspirin tablets out of her other hand.

Holy crap. What in the hell was that?

She lunged for her pistol and barely got her hand around it before the door swung open and a man stepped inside.

“Let go of the gun,” he ordered, his voice low and harsh.

Let go?

No way.

There was a man in her bathroom, and he had a gun leveled at her chest.

“Lily, let go of the gun.
Now.
” It was a command, but she could hardly breathe, let alone move.

He knew her name. Dark hair, broad shoulders, gray suit jacket over a black T-shirt, and stone-cold green eyes freezing her in place—she knew his name, too, and her heart was racing like a freight train. His gaze was fierce, direct, compelling, the scar running down the side of his face unmistakable. Her heart beat once…twice.

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a flash of movement behind him, and life slid into a time warp, where every second lasted and lasted, where the length of a breath hovered in one endless moment after another—plenty of time, an eternity to process it all: the crash from her basement, the man with the gray ponytail bursting out of her stairwell, a cold, blank look on his face, a gun in his hand, how he brought the pistol up, pointing it at her, or possibly at the man in front of her, who was dropping to his knee and swinging around, his gun firing at the same time as hers.

The sound was deafening, the blast of her .45 in a small, confined space and the clack of Alejandro Campos's pistol cycling a fresh cartridge into the chamber.

Campos had a silencer on his gun.

“Get—” He started to say something over his shoulder, then whirled around and grabbed her instead, jerking her out of the bathroom and all but throwing her onto the hallway floor. She heard it, too, the sound of someone pounding up the stairs. The white-haired man came out of the stairwell firing, and the time warp shattered at light speed.

No more orders were necessary. She understood perfectly. She was scrambling, one gun blast after another following her down the hall, tearing through drywall and two-by-fours, and Alejandro Campos was hot on her tail, returning fire.

Oh, my god.
She kept moving, scrambling, crawling, ducking, making a beeline for the door into her garage. At the end of the hall, without missing a beat or standing up, she wrenched the knob, pushed the door open, and tumbled through. Campos was with her. She could feel his energy, and his heat, and feel him moving, the brush of his shoulder, the strength of his arm when he pulled her to her feet and pushed her toward the door leading to the outside.

Even in early June the air was crisp and cool before dawn, the grass wet with dew, and she was barefoot, in her summer pajamas, and running—running through old man McCready's backyard, trampling azaleas and tearing through his prizewinning lilies.
Goddamn.
He already thought she was a blight on the neighborhood, and if he caught her, there'd be hell to pay, absolute years of endless nagging, but catching her dead was worse, so she ran, keeping up with Alejandro Campos—
so help her God
.

When they came out of McCready's yard onto Somerset, it suddenly hit her just how barefoot she really was—completely. And they were running down the street, hell-for-leather, heading toward a Fastback Mustang. Campos had taken her hand as soon as they'd left McCready's yard, and when they reached the car, he opened the door and swung her into the passenger seat. She hadn't even righted herself, before he was sliding in behind the steering wheel.

Not three minutes had passed since she'd been calmly getting ready to down her routine morning dose of aspirin to counteract her routine morning headache.

Maybe not even two.

But she hadn't really been calm in the bathroom. She'd been nervous, on edge, which was still eight hundred steps down the chart from the visceral panic she currently had churning through her veins—
crash, guns, shots, run
. Everything was happening so fast.

Or so she thought until Campos slipped the key into the ignition and gave it a twist. Suddenly, the term “fast” took on a whole new meaning. She had a feeling “fast” wasn't her running for her life. “Fast” was the Mustang, coming to life with an earthshaking, rumbling roar of headers and horses, a lot of horses, and a finely tuned set of headers.

She slid a glance across the interior of the car and instantly understood. There were cobras everywhere, embedded in the dash, on the shifter handle and the steering wheel, and embossed on the console armrest.

“Sweet Jesus,”
she breathed. She had her butt tucked into the bucket seat of a Shelby Cobra GT.
Oh, my god
.

         

Well.

This was so perfect.

He was sitting next to a half-naked woman and going fifty miles an hour in under five seconds down Somerset Street.

Black stretch sports bra and a pair of black, low-rise, boy-cut short shorts with lace trim—he'd thought women only wore those in his sex-with-the-gym-teacher fantasy. Or was that his sex-with-the-underwear-model fantasy?

Regardless, the girl could run like a freaking gazelle, and he was grateful—at least for that. The rest of the morning so far had been an unqualified disaster.

Clandestine, Zach reminded himself, shifting Charlotte up through her gears. He was a clandestine operator, not an overt operator, or a covert operator. Overt meant both the act and the actors in an operation were known. Covert meant the act was known, but not the actors.

But clandestine, which had been his personal fucking goal this morning, meant being invisible: Slide in, do the deed, slide out. Clandestine meant no one even knew anything had been done, let alone who had done it.

Leaving a faceless, gray-ponytailed corpse in a suburban bungalow with five of his tactical handloads buried in the walls broke all the rules of clandestine operation.

Zach didn't particularly like rules, and he didn't particularly live by them, but he had a couple he didn't screw with, two to be precise, both of them tested in the crucible of the back alleys of half the damn Third World countries on the planet. Suburban Albuquerque was not a damn Third World country, but that didn't mean the two rules didn't apply.

He glanced over at Lily and noticed her hair was coming all undone, whole swaths of silky dark strands slipping out of an already loose braid and trailing down over the tops of her breasts.

If he remembered correctly, and he did, her cleavage had kind of riveted his attention the first time they'd met. Which, as he remembered, and he did, had been under circumstances only nominally better than their current circumstances.

Perfect.

He was sure he was making a good impression.

He shifted his attention back to the street. Fifty-five miles per hour, sixty, sixty-five, another second gone, and then it hit him. Something was wrong.

He glanced at her again, his gaze going from one of her wrists to the other.
Sonuvabitch
.

“Where's the bracelet?” he asked.

“Wh-what?” Sapphire blue eyes cut him a terrified glance.

“The bracelet, macramé. The one you got off the pilot who died at St. Joseph's.”

“The macramé bracelet?”

“Where…is…it?” He said the words succinctly, trying to get them to sink in through the shock plastered all over her face.

She'd killed the guy with the ponytail, beating the bastard on the shot, beating Zach, too, and he wondered if she knew it, if she'd had time to realize her bullet had been ahead of his by the merest fraction of a second. It wasn't something he was going to tell her any time soon.

“It's…it's in my suitcase, in my bedroom.”

And now things were absofuckinglutely perfect.

He slammed on the clutch and the brakes, pulling Charlotte to the left side of Somerset as she rocked to a stop. Rule Number One: Don't assume anything. Ever.

Yeah, that one was chiseled in stone, and he hadn't assumed she'd be wearing a dead guy's cheap bracelet, not for three solid weeks. Actually, he'd thought it pretty damned unlikely, up until he'd opened the bathroom door and kind of forgotten about the bracelet. Yeah, for a minute or two there, it had all been about saving the woman, which brought him to Rule Number Two: Don't fuck with the mission. Ever.

Reaching over with both hands, he took hold of her wrist and disarmed her, twisting the Colt out of her hand. It was a short, sweet move meant to save them both a whole boatload of trouble. In quick order, he released the magazine, emptied the chamber, dropped the magazine in his pocket, and stowed the pistol in his gun bag. If she'd been a little quicker herself, she might have been able to use the Colt to influence current events. Not now, though, which was just as well, because he wasn't in the mood to be influenced.

Really not in the mood—and she was absolutely dumbfounded at how badly the last few seconds had gone for her. He could tell by the way her mouth had fallen open.

Cranking the wheel hard to the right, he threw the Shelby into reverse and gave her some gas. When Charlotte hit a ninety-degree angle, he threw her back up into first and slammed down hard on the gas, cranking the wheel hard left—a classic bootlegger's turn executed at the low end of the Thrill-a-Minute scale, smooth and fast, and without waking the neighbors.

With one hand on the wheel, he opened the top of the console and pulled out one of his cell phones with the other. He left the console open and keyed in a code while he drove.

“Can you drive a stick?” he asked.

“Y-yes.”

Good. Then there was the plan.

He had five minutes max, before Somerset was crawling with cops. Five minutes to get back in the house, get her suitcase, and if necessary, kill the other son of a bitch from Nevada—Plan D, and the goddamn sun
still
wasn't up.

It wasn't aesthetics that had given him the opinion about dawn being the time of barbarians. It was fact, cold and simple. It was an offensive time of day, as in attack, and that's exactly what he was doing.

He finished with the code and tossed the phone into the backseat. The screen was blinking.

“You are going to take the car and park two blocks east of your house,” he told her, “at the first intersection on the north end of that street. Do you understand?”

She nodded once when he looked over, and he got the feeling that despite the rather alarming sequence of recent events, she really did understand. If not, he could track her through the cell phone, not that he was going to tell her that.

“Do you remember me?” he asked her.

Again, she nodded once.

“And do you remember what I do for a living?”

Yes,
she nodded silently.

“Good,” he said. Knowing what he was would help her understand what happened next. People expected the worst from drug runners, and the worst was what he was going to give her, at least from her point of view. He could guarantee it.

Without further ado, he lifted a pair of handcuffs out of the console, slapped one cuff on her left wrist before she even had a clue what he was doing, and locked the other to the steering wheel. Then he pulled Charlotte to a rumbling stop half a block behind the Aston Martin and got out.

He couldn't protect her, if he didn't know where in the hell she was, and now he knew she'd be with the Harlot, come hell, high water, or a horde of barbarians.

He shut the door solidly behind him and leaned down to the window.

“You need to get on this side and drive,” he said, reaching for a fresh magazine off his belt clip and slamming it up into the Para. “I'm going back to get your suitcase.”

“You…you—” She finally got a couple of words out.

Bastard was probably the other word she was looking for, and he couldn't fault her for that. He'd be angry, too, if someone had handcuffed him, so he made sure his promise to her was very clear.

“If you are not on that street corner when I get there, I am going to key a code into my cell phone that will detonate a small block of C4 hidden inside the cell phone in the backseat. There will be an explosion. You will not be happy. Do not mess with me on this, Lily. Get to the corner and stay put.”

“You
bastard
.”

Yeah, he'd thought that was the word she was looking for.

“Don't flood the engine,” he advised, and without another word, turned and headed back toward her house.