Loose Ends (19 page)

Keeping Corinna to a low rumble, Con turned onto the street fronting the Tatsunaka Produce buildings and headed back into the neighborhoods of the west side. He knew what he was looking for—a restaurant, or some other public place where Jane could either call a taxi or make a phone call to get picked up, a place where he could dump her. Without the Steele Street guys on his ass, he could take the time to get the job done, to just get out of the car and physically pry her out of the passenger seat.

The sooner the better. This deal was done, the escape over. He needed to check in with Jack and Scout, see where they were, what their ETA was for the Star Motel, and then head there himself.

Or he could drive all night long … just drive, on and on and on.

He reached up and rubbed the side of his arm where the Halox dart had gotten him through his coat. His skin was hot at the injection point, and
fuck
, there was swelling, tenderness, just like with the damn ketamine.

Well, hell.

He could fire Corinna up and try to outrun the drug. Jack knew as much as he did about maybe saving his ass one more time, if he could get to the motel and his med kit. But
geezus
, he was tired of running.

Fucking Halox. He didn’t know if he had it in him to get through another stretch of the kind of hell ahead of him—physical collapse, the endless twisting pain, the anguish, the fucking doubts of whether he’d make it and what kind of condition he’d be in even if he did survive, if he’d be too physically destroyed to function, or if his mind would finally break.

He’d seen all that and worse happen to stronger men than he at Souk’s.

A wave of heat pulsed to sudden life across his upper chest, raising his body temperature a dangerous number of degrees for the space of a heartbeat. Sweat broke out on his brow. Then as quickly as it had come, the heat was gone, but probably not for long.

Fuck. Stronger men than he
.

He shoved his hand in his pocket, pulled it out full of pills, bet the house on one of the blues, and shoved the rest back—and he kept driving, taking the turns slow, looking over the city and wondering about every damn thing in his life. At least the greenies had finished off the headache the reds hadn’t quite killed. Time alone would tell if all that and a blue were going to do him a damn bit of good.

Yeah, time would tell, but he was running out of time. He felt it with each passing day.

A small beep coming from his jacket had him reaching for his cellphone. He pulled it out of the jacket’s inside pocket and quickly read the text message:
Mission accomplished. Report
.

A smile almost curved his mouth. He’d report in as soon as he dropped off his passenger, but his boy had done good, damn good. Scout was safe, and she was going to be a treasure trove of intel. She’d been with these Steele Street guys for eight weeks, and he knew her. She wouldn’t have forgotten a word, not a fact, not a breath any of them had taken.

But
hell
. He had to let that girl go, too.

He’d done plenty of private bitching over the last four years about Jack Traeger, plenty and then some, but Jack was who she’d need in the months ahead, and Paris was where she’d go. He had an apartment there she loved, and he’d put her name on the lease.

Jack knew where most of the money was, and Con had encrypted the data on the accounts Jack didn’t know about and put it all on a flash drive he’d left with a tech stringer they used out of Nevada, a U.S. Army vet named Miller. He’d get it to Scout.

Garrett Leesom’s girl was smart. She’d figure out the account codes, and when she looked at the numbers, she would know she was set for life. No more hanging on the edge, no more skirting the dark side. No more missions.

Reaching up, he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and then turned on the car’s windshield wipers. While they’d been underground, night had fallen, bringing a drop in the temperature and a late spring rain. The cool drizzle ran down Corinna’s glass and was swept away in long, curving arcs by the wiper blades. Water pooled in the gutters. Steam rose from the streets.

He’d known he was an American citizen. Jack had told him. But he hadn’t known Denver, Colorado, was his hometown—not until today.

Maybe he wouldn’t leave the city.

Maybe he shouldn’t.

Christ
. He had a brother.

A brother he didn’t really remember, so what did it really mean?

Not much, he decided. Not enough. No matter how much he wished it could be otherwise. It was too late. Whatever life he’d lived in this place, it was gone. Denver was an interlude, not a change in direction. The
mission was still Randolph Lancaster, destroying the man and his company, LeedTech.

He pulled to a stop at a red light and checked the cross traffic going by, looking for big-block monsters, any trouble headed his way, and a place to say good-bye to Wild Thing. There were a few businesses at the intersection, but none of them met his criteria. The junk and stuff store was closed for the night. The bar was a hole-in-the-wall dive. The gas station looked like it was just waiting to get knocked off, and the other corner was an empty field.

He could play this game all night long, trying to find the perfect place to let her go, when what he needed was to just do it and move on.

“Where are we going?” she asked him from the other side of the car.

Good question, he thought, turning and looking at her, giving in to an impulse he’d been trying to resist. He let his gaze drift over the shadowed delicacy of her face, the curves highlighted by the golden sheath of her dress, and down the long silky length of her legs.

His gaze narrowed.

“What happened to your knee?” It was skinned, and it hadn’t been when he’d first seen her in LoDo.

“Well,” she said slowly, “a couple of lifetimes ago, when I was in the Steele Street garage just minding my own business, somebody threw a grenade at me, and I fell to the floor and scraped the hell out of it.”

As the somebody in question, he didn’t have much to offer. He’d have thrown the flash bang even knowing she was going to get her knee scraped, but he’d rather she hadn’t gotten injured. There weren’t many perfect things in the world, but she was one, the way she’d looked walking down Wazee, owning the street.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt … much.”

Hell
. He let out a long breath.

“Okay, it hurts a lot, but it’s just a scrape, and I’m getting a bruise from where I hit my head.”

“At Tatsunaka’s.” He remembered her mentioning it—and him dismissing the complaint. She’d been scared and shook up, but for someone who looked like a catwalk queen, she was pretty tough. He’d figured that out the instant he’d seen her hot-wiring the car.

“Yes. See?” She turned in her seat and pulled her hair back from the right side of her face, and, yes, he could see a little swelling on her forehead near her hairline, and maybe a little bruising, too.

He was so tempted to reach out and touch her face, smooth her hair back from the bruise and tell her she was going to be fine. But of course she
was
going to be fine, and she didn’t need him telling her anything, and it was damn near suicidal for him to touch her.

Hell
. He usually had more sense. The blue pills were always a crapshoot and always messed with his head a little.

She messed with his head, too, all by herself, just sitting there, with or without a scraped knee and a bruised forehead. Within the confines of the car, her scent surrounded him, seeped into his senses and made him long for something he didn’t know if he’d ever had—a woman like her, a refuge, someone he could count on to watch his back. Someone to love.

“So where
are
we going?”

“I’m looking for a restaurant,” he said, choosing the truth, always a good plan.

“Oh.” She sounded a little surprised. “What are you … uh, hungry for? Mexican, Chinese, sushi, cheeseburger and fries?”

You
, he thought. Somebody so gorgeous it hurt. A smart, tough, unafraid girl with the tactical sense to draw down on him. Up against anyone else, she’d have
had a better-than-average chance of coming out on top, way better.

“A nice place, that’s all. Something you would like.”

It didn’t matter to him. He wasn’t planning on eating. He put Corinna back into gear, his gaze automatically checking the rearview mirror while they waited for the light to change.

“Jane,” he said her name again, thinking it over. “Jane what?”

“Linden,” she answered with barely a moment’s hesitation, which told him way more than she probably knew. Nobody in his business gave their name away that easily. She was pure civilian, all right. “I manage an art gallery over on 17th.”

Well, this was getting damned interesting, right down to employment addresses, and she was a manager, no less. He was impressed.

“What were you doing at Steele Street?” he asked, thinking why the hell not? He seemed to have a willing conversation partner.

“What were
you
doing at Steele Street?” she shot back. “Besides practically blowing the place up?”

Taking a cue from her, he kept his thoughts on that one to himself. She didn’t need to know anything about Randolph Lancaster.

“All righty, fine,” she said, not bothering to hide her frustration. “I was headed home from work to get ready for—
oh, cripes.
”

“Ready for what?” He had an idea, and there was no reason on earth for it to bother him, but it did.

“A date,” she said, checking her watch, her brow furrowing. “
Damn.
”

Well, hell.

“I live just a couple of blocks from Steele Street,” she said, opening her purse and rummaging around inside.
“So it wasn’t really out of my way, and when I saw you, I knew I had to … well, I had to, uh, go tell Superman.”

“Superman,” he repeated, hearing her whisper another
damn
under her breath while she continued digging through the contents of the zebra bag. “You mean the Hawkins guy in the green Challenger?”

She nodded, starting to pull stuff out of the purse—a makeup bag, a wallet, what looked like a day’s worth of mail—and piling it all in her lap, which reminded him that he had a few of her things himself. “He’s the best friend you ever had, right next to Creed, and that’s the God’s truth.”

So she’d said.

“Creed. The guy in the Chevelle Super Sport.”

She nodded. “You were all a bunch of car thieves in the old days, when you were teenagers, and then everybody got busted, but Dylan, the boss, made it all okay, and now I don’t really know what you guys do, but I’d lay money down on you doing it for the government, and the only reason I know anybody at Steele Street is because … well, you and uh … Superman ran into me, sort of, one night outside the Blue Iguana Lounge.” She was still piling things up in her lap, a small brush, sunglass case, coin purse, keys on an elaborate key chain with all kinds of charms and baubles on it. “And then a few years later, Hawkins married Kat, and a few years after that, when I moved up here from Phoenix, Kat hired me to work in her gallery—end of story.”

Geezus
.

Nobody in his world blabbered on, not without a load of Sodium Pentothal jacked into their system. But more than likely, she was dead-on about the Steele Street boys working for the government if they were involved with Lancaster, and he knew for damn sure she was dead-on about the carjacking crew. He’d done it. He’d known it the instant the guy named Hawkins had called her
name. The juice, the smell, the sound of ratchets and wrenches, of burning rubber and grinding gears, it had all suddenly been there in his mind.

“Didn’t anybody ever tell you not to talk to strangers?” Really, she was so far out of the box, it was a little unnerving.

“You’re not a stranger,” she said, letting out an exasperated sigh and jamming everything in her lap back into the striped purse. For a moment, she just sat still, her eyes closed. Then, after voicing a weary, muttered “What the hell,” she turned and faced him, meeting his gaze straight on. “You’re John Thomas Chronopolous. That’s your real name.”

John Thomas
.

He sat back in his seat.

All right, sure, whatever she thought. Like he’d said, he must have been somebody before he’d become Conroy Farrel, and he guessed there was a ring of truth in the name somewhere … somewhere just outside his ability to verify.

John Thomas Chronopolous
.

It beat the hell out of a lot of names he’d been called, but it didn’t quite give him the same memory jolt as when he’d seen Peter, Kid Chaos, standing in the garage. That guy’s name sure as hell had come to him in a crackling flash of light and truth, which was great, just what he needed, more crackling, flashing, lightning bolts of long-lost truth firing up the dead brain cells in his memory banks. Enough of those and maybe he’d figure out who he used to be and what in the world had happened to him between
Then
and
Now
, or he’d get the mother of all headaches and the pain would break him, crack his head straight open, from skull to gullet.

In the six years of life he remembered, there had been no shortage of physical suffering. For the most part, he’d been able to manage it with the dwindling stash of
rainbow-colored gelcaps he’d taken from Souk’s lab in Bangkok. But time was running out on him, time and pills, and when his little rainbow beauties were gone, he’d be right behind them:
gone
. Before that happened, he wanted Lancaster dead.

John Thomas
.

Geezus
, he thought, reaching for his jacket and taking her gun out of the pocket. Very methodically, he released the magazine, let it drop into his hand, and then slid the cartridges out one by one.

He believed her, whether he had a clear memory of the name or not—and that was a definite “or not.”

“Here,” he said, dropping her empty gun, the empty magazine, and the handful of cartridges into the open top of her purse. “When we get to the restaurant, you might want to start putting that all back together.”