Loose Ends (41 page)

He grabbed a red pill and put it under his tongue to melt, and he lay there, watching everything unfold around him like a strobe-lit dream, his body rigid with pain … 
Monk dismissing him with a sneer
—yeah, you, too, buddy. Up yours.
Jane reaching for him, screaming his name, and Monk pulling her in closer, lifting her off the ground
—sorry, baby, so damn sorry.
Monk reaching down and claiming Lancaster’s body. The blonde holding her injured arm close to her side and backing away from the beast
.

Whatever the pill was going to do for him, it wasn’t going to do it soon enough. Fuck! With another ungodly effort, he got to his hands and knees and willed himself to get back in the fight.

Geezus, Jane
. He needed to find his gun. It was the only chance she had. There’d be no outmaneuvering a pistol barrel jammed in the bastard’s ear. He could deliver that payload, by God.

The blonde was pleading with Monk now, begging
him to release Jane, making promises, offering deals, but the bastard just kept walking backward, carrying Jane and dragging Lancaster and watching the blonde, heading toward the elevator—which was oddly jammed open with no car stopped on the floor and with a bright yellow M spray-painted on the wall above it.

Everything about the elevator setup screamed danger to him, danger and death, and Jane was headed straight into it.

Geezus
. Where was his pistol?

“Tell Red Dog to get her ass up here,” Dylan shouted into his radio, running full out for the thirteenth floor. “Tell her I need everything she’s got.

Skeeter was alive. He could hear her voice, hear her shouting, and she was shouting for Jane. He hoped to hell that meant Jane was alive, too.

His job was to keep them that way.

The door to his and Skeeter’s loft was open. One look inside told him what he needed to know, and he went in with his gun drawn and leveled at the ready.

His wife had been injured, and that pissed him off, but she wasn’t captive.

J.T. had gotten the shit beaten out of him by the fucking huge albino in the middle of Dylan’s living room. Lancaster was dead, and Jane was headed to a very nasty end in the elevator shaft.

There was only one solution: to tattoo his fucking name across MNK-1’s forehead with his .45.

Piece of fucking cake.

Bam, bam, bam
. The sonuvabitch was fast, faster than Red Dog, which was ungodly fast, fast enough to keep Dylan from getting solid hits.

So he adjusted, without ever taking his finger off the trigger or pausing in his shots.

Bam, bam, bam
—he landed those in the guy’s chest,
which didn’t slow the bastard down or get him to release Jane.

Bam, bam …
Dylan released the empty magazine out of the pistol, letting it fall to the floor as he slammed a fresh mag home … 
bam, bam
.

He never stopped shooting, but he did change his mind and his target. Those last four shots had gone into Lancaster. Sure he was dead, but Monk was dragging him around like a teddy bear. The old man had value beyond reason—a good guess that turned into a cold fact when Monk roared and dropped Jane to pull Lancaster in closer, protecting him.

Dylan liked tough girls, and despite looking like she’d been wrung through the wringer, Jane scrambled like a true street rat. The instant Monk released her, she dropped low, out of his line of fire, and took off like a shot.

And there were plenty of shots. Dylan never let up.

Bam, bam, bam
—and Monk roared again.
Bam, bam, bam …
reload like a fucking speed demon … 
bam, bam, bam
.

Then
bambambambambambam
. Red Dog had arrived. There were no “grazing” shots delivered by Red, or by Kid, who had entered the room a mere second behind her.

Two more guns came into play—Quinn and Hawkins lining up on either side of him and Red and Kid, cutting the pie, widening the kill zone.

Lancaster was a pile of mush in a bloody, shredded shirt and there was no reason on earth for Monk to still be standing. But he was.

They had him locked down in a crossfire with only one way out: the elevator shaft.

Good luck with that,
pendejo
, Dylan thought, reloading for the last time.
Bam, bam, bam
.

Monk fell to his knees at the open doorway of the
elevator shaft, and Dylan hoped the guy’s little personal struggle with getting shot about a thousand fucking times wouldn’t deter him from what must look like a pretty good plan.

It didn’t.

With a final roar, Monk tightened his hold on Lancaster’s limp body and lofted himself onto the elevator cable.

It was a short ride.

The first claymore exploded inside of a second—
Boom!
—and the rest came in quick succession—
Boom! Boom! Boom!
—all the way down to the sixth floor as the beast and his maker fell down the shaft.

Nobody holstered their weapons. They were SDF, and they never took death for granted. If Monk had a head left, Kid would put a bullet in it. The bastard had proven damned difficult to kill. They wanted to make sure they kept him that way.

True to form, Kid leaned into the open elevator shaft and squeezed the pressure plate on the tac light bolted onto his subgun.

Pop, pop
—he threw a couple of rounds down the shaft, then turned and headed straight for J.T.

“Call Loretta,” Dylan said to Hawkins. “Sweet-talk her into sending her best cleanup crew.” It was going to be a mess in the elevator, but the bulk of the building was damn near indestructible.

Taking long strides across the loft, he made his way to Skeeter’s side. He deliberately did not reach out and pull her in close, and without him saying a word, she answered his questions.

“I’m fine. It’s just the shoulder. I swear.”

He looked around, saw a chair, and pulled it over for her. “Sit,” he said, then gave her a quick kiss on the side of the face.

The last two people to reach the scene finally made it
to the thirteenth floor—actually in damn good time, considering where they’d come from.

“Creed,” he said, working his way back over the debris strewn all over the place. “Go get the Humvee and bring it up to the seventh floor. We’ve got injuries.”

Skeeter’s wasn’t life threatening, but he couldn’t say the same for J.T.

Jane had raced to his side and was all over him, one of her hands on his face, the other on his chest as she leaned close, talking to him with tears running down her cheeks. Kid had knelt and taken hold of his brother’s arm. And there was the badass who’d given the CIA a run for their money for six long years, holding on to a girl, his hand on her waist, and listening to every word the younger man leaning over him had to say.

“Travis, get us a stretcher,” he called out. “We’re going to have to transport J.T. Gillian, get over here and tell me what you think is going on with him. He looks like hell. Quinn, get Dr. Brandt on the horn and tell him to get on the first flight out of D.C.”

He reached J.T. and knelt down next to Kid, who didn’t look like he would relinquish an inch of space by J.T.’s side. Dylan didn’t blame him. “What’s happening here?” he asked.

“I-I don’t know,” Jane said. “He’s got pills. He takes pills, but I don’t know which one to give him.”

Dylan saw the gelcaps spilling out of J.T.’s pocket, and he knew exactly what they were. He’d seen Gillian take hundreds of the things, all of them prescribed by Dr. Brandt.

“Gillian!” he shouted out.

“Here, boss,” she said, kneeling.

She reached for J.T.’s face, her palm down, like she was going to check his temperature, but the man caught her wrist faster than she could retreat.

“That’s a good sign,” she said, glancing up at Dylan,
then looking back to J.T. “What color pill did you take?”

“Red.”

She nodded and sifted her fingers through the pills on the floor. “I had a run-in with Dr. Souk four years ago,” she said. “Things didn’t go well with me, but I’m good now. Very little memory loss. No shooting pains in my arm. No headaches like the one you’re having now.” She shifted her glance to meet his gaze. “Flashing white lights? In long streaks?”

He nodded.

“Yeah, those can get bad. I’m surprised you’ve lasted this long without help.”

Dylan remained silent, watching the two of them, listening to Gillian and seeing J.T. slowly release her wrist. Kid looked tense as hell, overcome with emotion and maybe fear. He had his brother back, but nobody knew what that really meant.

Gillian continued what she was about, resting her palm on J.T.’s forehead, then along the side of his neck.

“You’re spiking,” she said, shifting her attention back to the pills. “And you’re getting the shakes. That’s a bad sign.”

Indeed, J.T.’s body had started trembling.

“You’re going to lock up here in a minute or two,” she said, putting her hand back on his forehead. “A full-out seizure will hit you when you get to a hundred and four degrees. I’ve seen it, Con. I’ve been there, and it’s a long way back. I can teach you a few things, though, to help you out, if you live long enough.”

Picking one of the pills up, she touched it to her tongue. It was a deep, eggplant purple, and Dylan didn’t know what in the hell it did.

“Klorizapat,” she said, looking down at J.T. “You ready for this?”

He gave a short nod, she put it in his mouth, and that was it.

Two seconds later, he went out like a light.

Fuck
.

“Travis!” Dylan yelled. “Where’s that stretcher?”

Con came back to consciousness in a hospital and immediately felt a jolt of fear. The lights were low in the room, the windows dark with night. Bad things happened to guys while they were out cold in hospitals—unless they had a guardian angel.

A strong hand came to rest on his shoulder. “It’s all right, J.T. I’ve got your back.”

Con glanced up.
J.T
.—he still didn’t know much about that name, but he knew the man sitting next to his bed was his brother whether he remembered him or not, and that was a definite “or not.”

“Kid … Chaos.” He spoke the name slowly, surprised at how raspy his voice sounded.

The hand on his shoulder tightened.

“It’s good to see you awake,” the guy said, and his voice sounded a little tight, too. “Do you need anything?”

A memory of you, Con thought, but shook his head no. Kid Chaos looked like everything Con would have wanted a brother of his to be, and, faced with the younger man, he felt the loss of his old life more keenly than he could have anticipated.

“I know this is hard for you right now,” Kid said. “Hard for everybody to figure out, and I want you to … uh, know there’s no reason to push the situation any more than you’re comfortable with. Not on anybody’s
account. Dr. Brandt is a good guy, one of the best, but the … uh, truth is, your memory will either come back, or it won’t, and we’ll deal with it either way. You take your time.”

Con narrowed his gaze and tilted his head a little to one side. “Did you practice that?”

An instant grin flashed across the younger man’s face. “A little,” he admitted. “It’s been six years, bro. I wanted to get the first words right.”

“You did.” In spades. This was hard on everybody, a six-year gulf full of grief and pain on all sides.

A moment of silence drew out between them, so many questions, so many unknowns.

“You look tired,” he said, and the younger man nodded.

“I’ve been waiting for you, J.T.,” Kid said, his voice low, his words heavy with the emotion Con could see in his face. “I’ve been waiting for you for a damn long time.”

Without a thought, Con reached up and pulled his brother in close, his arms tightening around Kid’s shoulders.
God
. He knew what it was like to wait for the dead, some part of your mind not accepting that the person you loved was gone from you forever.

Peter Chronopolous. Kid Chaos. J. T. Chronopolous
. It was a lot to work through. Take your time, Kid had said, and Con knew the value of those words.

“Thanks.” He tightened his hold on the younger man for a long moment before letting him go—except for taking hold of Kid’s hand. He was exhausted, drifting back into sleep, but he wasn’t ready for his little brother to leave him. Not yet … not yet …

The next time he woke, morning sunshine was streaming through the windows, and another angel was waiting for him. A beautiful woman with long dark hair, freckles across her nose, and a warm smile leaned over the bed.

God, he was glad to see her, to know she was still with him, that she hadn’t been a dream.

“Hey, babe,” he said.

“Hey, cowboy.” She took his hand in hers, and he remembered something.

His brow furrowed. “There was a guy here earlier.” His brother.

“There’s been a lot of guys here,” she said. “It’s standing room only out in the hall, but you’re talking about Kid. He’s been here since you got here. He actually came in with you, and he hasn’t left. He’s just down in the cafeteria right now, getting some breakfast. How are you feeling?”

More awake now than when he’d been talking to Kid.

“Better.” Way better. Bruised, roughed up in places, like a train had hit him, but better. He reached up and felt stitches in his head and another bolt of fear shot through him.

“No, no, baby,” the woman murmured. “It’s okay. You were hurt in the fight, and the doctors here stitched you back together. Nothing else happened.
Nothing
. I haven’t left your side.”

He believed her. Yeah, now that he thought about it, he didn’t have that queasy, what-the-fuck-happened-to-me feeling he’d always had in Bangkok whenever he’d woken up. And he wasn’t strapped into this bed, not like he’d been strapped into Souk’s gurneys.

“Monk is dead, right?” he asked, remembering where he’d been and what he’d been doing when the lights had gone out. “Somebody got him?”

“Everybody got him,” she said, offering him a cup of water. He lifted his head up and took a small swallow. “Everybody at Steele Street, the whole team. Hell, if I’d had a gun,
I
would have gotten him.”