Crazy Cool (26 page)

“Yes, sir.”

“Where the hell is Herman?” the big man grumbled, looking around for his valet.

“I think Lily Beth is using him in the drawing room.”

Big Jon harrumphed and pointed toward the closet. “Well, I want to wear the gray suit today, Albert. You know the one I mean.”

“Yes, sir.” He knew exactly which suit Big Jon meant.

“Could you get on the laundry again about the starch in my shirts? Herman tells them, but they’re still not getting it right. They’ll listen to you.”

“Yes, sir.” Albert headed for Big Jon’s closet.

“And I’m going to need a reservation for next week in D.C. for a private dining room. You pick the restaurant. I’ve got some Saudis coming in, and you know how nervous the Saudis get in Washington.”

Albert knew exactly which restaurant to call: the one currently giving him a ten-percent commission off the top of the tab. There wasn’t a maître d’ in Washington, D.C., who didn’t know the score and how he allocated Big Jon’s business. He wasn’t above using Big Jon’s name to throw his weight around.

Inside the closet, he went straight for the rack of gray suits.

“My brown shoes need some buffing. You know the ones. Can you remind Herman he was supposed to take care of that yesterday?”

Yes, he could, and yes, he knew the exact pair Big Jon was talking about. When you were riding a man’s coattails to the top, it paid to know the state of his shoes.

S
KEETER
woke on a start, her eyes wide open, her heart pounding.

Oh, hell. Oh, hell. Oh, damn.
She swung out of bed, her feet hitting the floor at a dead run. Steele Street was under attack. An overwhelming wave of danger had crashed into her dreams and set off every alarm signal she had in her brain. And when she raced to the window, the swarm of police cars on the street down below bumped the alarm up to red alert.

She grabbed her hat, her customized PDA, and her cell phone on her way to the door, and punched a series of numbers into the phone at the same time as she lit up every number in her Class A phone book. Racing out the door, she hit “Send All” and dashed down the hall to Superman’s. She heard his cell alarm go off even as she started pounding on the door.

“Hawkins!” she yelled. “Superman!”

Inside Hawkins’s loft, Katya watched in amazement as Christian burst from pure somnolence to action figure in the space of seconds. He literally hit the floor running.

“Get your clothes on,” he shouted back at her from the door.

At first all she could think was that the world was coming to an end, and she didn’t have any clothes. She’d left her dress in the car. By the time she remembered her suitcase was in the bathroom, and figured out it wasn’t Armageddon, just one person pounding, he’d swung open the door and dragged a girl inside, a girl wearing a ball cap pulled low on her face, a pair of black leggings, and a white sport bra.

He was still buck naked, but the girl didn’t even bat an eyelash.

“Who else is here?” he snapped, sliding a big bolt home on the door.

The girl was frantically entering code on what looked like a PDA keyboard, and every couple of seconds, a different-colored light flashed. “Johnny left for Commerce City about five o’clock this morning. Quinn spent the night in Evergreen. Kid is still in Boulder. That means it’s just us.” The girl looked up from the tiny screen, her gaze landing on the bed, where Kat was still stuck in nonmotion mode. “Just the three of us. Hi.”

“Hi,” Kat managed, trying hard to even think as fast as these two, let alone move as fast. But Hawkins was right. Whatever was happening, she wanted to face it dressed.

She slipped off the bed, wrapped in one of his sheets, and padded her way down the hall. Partway to the bathroom, she heard a truly crude curse escape him, and she stopped long enough to turn around and see what was going on. He’d grabbed his pants from last night and was shucking into them next to the windows.

“
Kee-rist,
there must be ten cop cars out there.”

“Double Christ,” the girl breathed. “
Marines.
Where in the hell did they get Marines?”

“Buckley Air Force Base would be my best guess. Well, hell . . . a fucking stretch limo just pulled up.”

“Shit,” they both swore at once.

Even before everything they’d just said could fully sink in, an unmistakable sound rattled through the building. The old freight elevator was going down.

The man and the girl both looked at each other.

“Nobody has that kind of authorization,” Hawkins growled between his teeth. “Raise Dylan. Tell him we need General Grant on board
now
.”

He raced back toward his spare room, passing Kat by, but the girl took a moment to stop and notice her.

“Superman, we’ve got a bunny in the headlights here.”

He came back out, took three long strides to her, kissed her hot and solid, and then pushed her toward the bathroom. “Get your clothes on, Kat. I’ve got a real bad feeling that your mother is coming to call, and I’d sure hate for her to find you naked when she gets here.”

That was enough to galvanize her, enough to almost make her sick. Alex had called her mother—how could he have done this to her? He knew. He knew everything.

As she slipped by the girl into the bathroom, Hawkins handed out a gun. The girl took it and slipped the holster over her shoulder, while punching numbers into her cell phone.

“Geezus, Hawkins. Don’t tell me we’re going to shoot it out with the cops?”

“Hell, no,” he said from inside the spare room where he was picking up a pistol and some ammunition.

“Double geezus, not the Marines?”

He gave her a look that said
Are you nuts?

“Then we’re firing on the limo?” An idea that, judging by her voice, didn’t make any sense at all.

“Damn straight.”

Kat shut the door and dove for her suitcase, her blood racing. She not only didn’t want to be naked, if her mother showed up, she did
not
want to look like she’d been rolled over and tumbled in his bed all night. That was none of her mother’s business. Absolutely
none
of her business.

H
AWKINS
came out of the closet with his Glock loaded and headed straight for Katya’s purse. “Skeet . . . I just want you to look all twitchy and unreliable and armed.” He turned Kat’s phone on and hit the redial. The number for Toussi Gallery came up.

Skeeter shot a glance toward the door. “I
am
twitchy and unreliable.”

“Yeah, right.” He put the phone to his ear and heard it ring. “Just play it up. Buy us some time, if we need it. Make them nervous.”

“I’m not drawing on a Marine.” She was adamant.

“You won’t be drawing on anybody. You don’t have any ammo.”

Skeeter started to sputter, but he cut her off with a raised hand. “Get Dylan. Get General Grant. Get us somebody. Okay?”

A guy on the other end of Kat’s cell phone picked up, and he took a good guess. “Zheng?”

“Yes!”

“Hawkins.”

“Yes! Thank God! Why didn’t you guys pick up the phone yesterday! She’s on her way.
On her way.
Do you copy? You have to get Katya out of there!”

“Too late for that, and I’m guessing you mean the senator? Your boss?”

“Boss, my ass. Yes, Marilyn Dekker hired me to watch out for her daughter, but hell, you know Kat. How long do you think I held out before I was her man? Figuratively speaking . . . of course.”

“Of course. So you didn’t rat her out to the senator two nights ago?”

“Hell, no. If I had, she would have been here this time yesterday. You’ve got to know that.”

Yeah. Hawkins guessed he did.

“So what happened? Or was it just the newspaper coverage that brought her to Denver?”

“I wish.” Alex let out a big sigh. “Senator Dekker had a campaign stop already planned for Denver this morning, but . . . Look, where are you? I’ve got some stuff you really need to see. A lot of stuff.”

“You know the alley called Steele Street? Four blocks north of the gallery?”

“You’re right here? In the neighborhood? All this time? Hell.” He sounded so dejected.

“Halfway up the alley is a door. Key in nine-three-seven-one-eight, and I’ll have Skeeter override the biometric reader. We’re on the eleventh floor. Watch out, we’re covered on the street side with cops and Marines.” Hawkins hung up and looked to Skeeter. “Well?”

She shook her head, and punched in another set of numbers. After about five seconds, a big smile split her face. She tossed the phone to him.

“Dylan, it’s Christian,” he said. “All hell is breaking loose here. I think somebody wants my ass pretty bad. Did General Grant ever come up with a name on our last assignment?”

“He got as far as a company called Western Armament Corporation, before he got stonewalled. What do you mean all hell? Senator Dekker?”

“And a platoon of Marines I’m guessing she pulled out of Buckley for a morning drill around Steele Street.”

“She brought the Marines?” Dylan didn’t sound like he believed it. Hell, Hawkins didn’t believe it, and he was looking right down at them on the street below.

“And ten police cruisers.”

“Shit. I’ll call Lieutenant Bradley first. At least you won’t end up in jail—for very long.”

“I don’t want to end up in the friggin’ brig for very long, either.”

“General Grant can get them pulled off. That just leaves you with the senator.”

“The hell it will.”

“Christ, Hawkins. It’ll take me half a day to get a senator off your ass.”

“Then get on it, please.”

“Just stay put. They can’t get into Steele Street.”

“Dylan. They are
in
Steele Street. They commandeered the old freight elevator. Any minute now, we are going to hear the Corps storming up the stairs singing ‘From the halls of Montezuma,’ and unless I figure out a way to chain myself to the plumbing, I don’t think
staying put
is going to be an option. The few, the proud, and the brave are here to haul my ass away, and judging by the size of the detachment, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”

Silence, then, “Where’s Skeeter?” Dylan was definitely concerned now, and frankly, Hawkins was glad to hear it. Steele Street was supposed to be friggin’ impregnable—and it was, unless somebody had the codes and was able to bypass or compromise the scanners. It was an inside job. The only question was—inside what? And the answer to that had to be the Department of Defense. No one at Steele Street would compromise their security. No one.

“She’s with me.”

“Do you still have Ms. Dekker?”

Have her, had her, going to have her again—at least he’d planned on it until the troops had arrived.

“Yes.”

“Kid and Quinn?”

“I’ll get to Kid, but let’s keep Quinn on the outside. He’ll be more help there.”

“Okay. I’ll do what I can on this end. Either way, I’ll be back tonight.” Dylan hung up, and a few minutes later, Hawkins saw about half the cops get back in their cars and leave.

He punched in another number. Yes, it was eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning, but he wanted his lawyer.

“Francesca?” he asked when she answered.

“This had better be good, Christian. It’s Sunday.”

“I need a house call. Immediately.”

It took her all of two seconds to decide. “Sure. I could use a couple of grand. I’m starting my clock.”

A couple of grand. Hell. But yes, he could easily see that racking up today.

There was some good news. Skeeter had managed to access the freight elevator through the computer connection to the main office on the seventh floor, and it was now stuck between floors, but given its age and condition, she wasn’t sure how long her freeze would hold.

In one of the spookier moves of the morning, Alex Zheng showed up about three minutes after Hawkins had called him, making both him and Skeeter wonder if Alex should be called The Flash.

So approximately fifteen minutes into their whole ordeal, they’d cut the enemy in half, gotten an ally on board, had two reinforcements heading into the city, and were just getting down to the stuff Alex had brought, when the bathroom door opened.

Geezus,
Hawkins thought, picking his jaw up off the floor. How did she do that?

She was all sleek and lovely, and hot, and perfect again. All “don’t touch my mouth” and “don’t touch my hair,” when he knew he’d done nothing but touch her all night long. She was dressed in black slacks and a sleeveless black top, her black spike-heeled sandals, and big silver hoop earrings.

He hadn’t packed any silver hoop earrings. Where did she come up with this stuff?

She looked cool and creamy, like that double-dark-chocolate, triple-whipped-cream mocha latte she’d spilled all over Roxanne, and it was all he could do not to tell her to lock herself back in the bathroom and not come out until the whole thing was over.

He didn’t want her mother anywhere near her, and he’d bet his first million that her mother felt the same way about him.

C
HAPTER

23

T
HE FIRST THING
to give way was the old freight elevator. They actually heard it break free and drop half a floor, before the cables caught and saved all within from certain death—which wasn’t really a bad thing. It was just damned inconvenient.

Alex—who had not been kidding when he’d said, “I’ve got some stuff you really need to see. A lot of stuff.”—had already shown him and Kat and Skeeter the bloody piece of prom dress, which had made Kat almost faint, and quite honestly, had almost done the same thing to him. It had a lot more blood on it than the first piece. He’d forgotten, over the years, just how badly she’d been hurt.

“You were a prom queen?” was all Skeeter had said, but she’d said it half a dozen times, at least. “An actual prom queen? So that crown last night was yours?” A question that, for some reason, had prompted her to hit him on the shoulder, and Skeeter never pulled her punches, figuratively or otherwise. “You should have told me, Superman. A friggin’ prom queen.”

“Friggin’ prom queen” sounded more like an expletive than a compliment, or like what Bobba-Ramma would have been, but Katya seemed to know the girl was impressed.

Hell, who wouldn’t be. Ten minutes in a bathroom to go from emotionally exhausted, wild-woman lover to cool downtown chic chick? That had to be some kind of a record.

“Now here’s the strange stuff,” Alex said, emptying an envelope out on the kitchen table. “A man named Ray Carper gave these newspaper clippings to Travis James last night on the street. Travis brought them straight to me.”

“Who’s Travis James?” Hawkins asked.

“Nikki McKinney’s model,” Skeeter said, surprising him. “He walked me home from the gallery last night. Ray must have heard we were looking for him and come up to Travis on his way back to Toussi’s, thinking he was Creed.”

“Why would Ray think this guy was Creed?” Hawkins asked at the same time as Katya said, “Creed Rivera? I remember him being a lot . . . well, tougher looking than Travis. Bigger.”

“Yeah,” Skeeter said to Katya. “He is.” Then she turned to Hawkins. “He’s a dead ringer, though, Superman.”

“Creed’s blond now?” Katya asked.

“No,” both Hawkins and Skeeter said.

“For God’s sake . . . It
doesn’t
matter,” Alex finally interrupted. “That is not the point here, people. The point is
what
the old man gave Travis. Look.”

He spread the articles out on a table.

“Now, I’d guess you all know the case as well as I do, maybe even better, though it’s about all I’ve been working on for two days—besides the McKinney show,” he quickly amended. “Which went beautifully, by the way.”

He hadn’t won Katya back over yet, but she at least gave him a nod.

“Anyway, there are some interesting connections here, if everything else the old man said is true.”

“What else did he say?” Hawkins asked, skimming the articles. He remembered most of the ones about the Traynor murder, but there were also some about the Jane Doe that summer, and then yesterday’s headlines about Ted Garraty. There was even a clipping about Lost Harold.

Alex pulled a sheet of paper out of his pocket, snapped it open. “This is what Ray Carper told Travis. We went over it and over it, and I think he did a pretty good job of remembering.” He looked at the paper, starting at the top. “‘That whore shouldn’t a died like she did. The boys were just damn rough with her. I saw it, saw the whole thing, but nobody wanted to listen to old Ray. They called her Jane Doe, but her name was Debbie Gold. She’s been six feet under for thirteen years, her and that Traynor boy, and old Lost Harold. The same damn wild ones did them all in, but it looks like one of ’em got their own back last night at the Gardens.’ ”

Alex looked up from the paper. “I was able to get a copy of the coroner’s report on the Jane Doe they pulled out of the river on July first that summer. Don’t ask,” he said, before Hawkins could even get the question out. “It states that the body had been decomposing between three or four weeks, the best estimate he could come up with, given the corpse’s waterlogged condition. So sometime between June third and June ninth, approximately, a group of guys who’d been hanging around LoDo, these ‘wild ones’ Ray was talking about, roughed up a whore who was turning tricks for them. She died, and they threw her in the South Platte. And if Ray is right, one of those guys was Ted Garraty, good friend of Jonathan Traynor the third.”

“Jonathan would
never
have killed anyone,” Katya said, coming to her friend’s defense. “And he would
never
have had sex with a prostitute . . . or . . . or any girl.”

Well, that was a new twist she hadn’t shared before, Hawkins thought.

Alex’s eyebrows had risen. “The senator’s son was gay?”

Katya nodded.

“And he never came out?”

She shook her head.

“Prom night was June fifth that year,” Hawkins said. “Well within the time frame for the night of the whore’s murder.”

“You think the same guys who were after Katya in the parking lot did the whore instead?” Skeeter asked.

It’s what Hawkins was beginning to think, but all he said was “We need to find Ray Carper.” All those years ago, when he’d talked to Ray, Hawkins had thought he was talking about Katya and her struggle in the parking lot—a girl getting worked over by a group of boys, the one who died, he’d said—but Katya hadn’t died. Ray hadn’t shown him any newspaper clippings back then. He’d never mentioned Debbie Gold or Jane Doe, just a girl in a pretty dress.

“If he was between Toussi’s and Steele Street last night, he’s probably still in the neighborhood,” Skeeter said. “He doesn’t get too far from Coors Field.”

“We need to bring him in—except right now, we can’t get out.”

“Quinn knows him. Let’s have him pick up the old guy and take him over to the Oxford Hotel.”

“Make it so, Skeeter.”

The girl started punching more numbers into her phone.

“There’s more,” Alex said. “Jonathan Traynor was murdered just four days after the dead prostitute floated to the surface of the river—something that could spook any boy into a bad case of the guilts, if he was guilty of murdering her, or knew the people who had murdered her, like maybe a group of boys whose first attempt at a gang bang didn’t go so well on prom night.”

“Quinn—” Skeeter started to say, when they heard it: the Marines, marching up the stairwell.

Hawkins turned to Katya. He very much wanted to tell her how much he loathed her mother, for everything she’d done, for everything she was doing, but he didn’t.

He looked back to Alex. “Do we let them in? Or make them go through my Tomás Alejandro doors?”

“They get in either way, and if we let them in, we can save the doors.”

He was right, but Hawkins didn’t have to like it. “Skeeter, finish up with Quinn. I want you in the back, up against a wall; pull up a chair, stay out of trouble. Kat—”

God, Kat. Your mother is coming in here like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and I want you anyplace else but here.

“Kat, why don’t you take a bar stool behind the kitchen counter. Alex, you and I are the forward guards.”

He walked over to the doors and threw open the bolt. Hell.

Then everything went suddenly quiet. It didn’t last long, but when the marching started up again, the Marines were heading back
down
the stairwell.

Thank you, Dylan . . . and thank you, General Grant.

Yet Hawkins knew they’d only dodged the bullet. There was every possibility the Marines would be back . . . just as soon as Kat’s mother figured out how to circumvent Grant’s hastily concocted—and timely—orders. And if not the Marines, Marilyn Dekker would find another band of merry men to get the job done. The woman was relentless—possibly insane. The Marines, for crying out loud.

“How many people does the senator have with her right now?”

“Five—her secretary and four sycophants,” Alex said.

That made him laugh.

“Any of them armed?”

“Two.”

“Well, suddenly, we have an even playing field.”

Alex just looked at him as if he were delusional. “You never have an even playing field with a senator. Never.”

“She can’t be feeling too confident.” Hawkins checked his watch. “Twenty-five minutes ago, she had an army, and now she’s down to the honor guard.”

“Tell yourself what you want, she already fired my ass and is considering charges, and she actually likes me. You, on the other hand, are the bane of her existence.”

“She told you that?”

Alex lowered his gaze for a second, before bringing it back up and casting a guilty glance in Katya’s direction. “I was fully briefed on all aspects of Katya’s life, including what the senator thought was your current situation. She never lost sight of you, although her information about you being a car salesman is obviously no more than a very good cover for whatever the hell it is you actually do.”

“So you don’t think she’s the one who got me assigned as Kat’s bodyguard at the Botanic Gardens two nights ago?”

“I don’t know. If she did, she didn’t tell me, which wouldn’t make sense, because she was very concerned about Katya returning to Denver. Your name came up in any number of conversations we had, and I was told to guard against any contact being made, doing whatever it took.”

“Like maybe setting up a murder that would inevitably include my name, or possibly frame me and get me tossed back into the state pen?”

“No.”

Alex didn’t elaborate any more beyond his one-word answer, which made Hawkins fairly inclined to believe him.

“Are you a shooter, Alex?”

“No,” the man said, paling slightly. “An ex-cop, yes, but not a shooter, not the way you mean.”

“Well, I am,” Hawkins told him, his meaning clear. “And if they take me out of here, I’m holding you personally responsible for Kat’s well-being.”

Alex paled even more. “I can’t imagine that Senator Dekker has gone to all this trouble without at least getting an arrest warrant and possibly the keys to Leavenworth.”

Despite the situation, he had to grin. “I can’t, either.” And that was the bitch of it, but he was starting to like Alex. Efficiency, intelligence, and that nifty speed-of-sound move he’d made this morning were easy to like, not to mention his blunt honesty.

When the knock sounded on the door, he checked his watch, then glanced at Skeeter. “Where’s Kid?”

She looked at the GPS on her PDA. “I-25 and I-70, the Mousetrap,” she said, referring to the elaborate intersection of the two main freeways running through Denver. It was a toss-up whether or not Kid would get to Steele Street before Hawkins got hauled downtown.

No one bothered to answer the door. Hell, Dekker’s entourage had already broken into the building. It was pretty obvious they were coming in whether they got an invitation or not.

Sure enough, there wasn’t a second knock before the cops and politicos breached the door.

Hawkins immediately realized that he had not sufficiently prepared himself for the sight of Marilyn Dekker up close and personal. He spent enough time keeping up with current affairs and going in and out of Washington, D.C., to know what she looked like, so it wasn’t the way she looked per se that twisted his gut. It was that she was on his turf with her pageboy helmet of brown hair, her squared-off shoulders, those damn skinny legs, and her sensible shoes. He hated her beige three-button suit, her nude hose, her pearl earrings. He was sure she smelled like mothballs but was damned if he was going to get close enough to confirm his suspicion. He hated the tight, pinched line of her mouth and her squinty pea green eyes. He hated the sanctimonious tilt of her chin and her righteous confidence.

He watched her march into his loft, and he tried, so help him God, he tried to find one single aspect of her outfit, or her face, or her personality, or spirit, or even her aural sheath that he didn’t loathe—because she was going to be the grandmother of his children.

It was enough to make a guy lose his lunch.

Lieutenant Loretta Bradley was keeping step with her, and when Marilyn stopped and took an imposing stance in the middle of his living room area, the lieutenant proceeded forward alone. She was a large woman, not overweight, just tall and big-boned, with a nice solid face, her nose a little too big, but with eyes to match of a beautiful, almost golden brown. She kept her hair short and colored anything in the red range. Over the years he’d seen it go from chestnut to carrot, to almost pink once.

No one had laughed.

“Cristo,” she said calmly.

“Loretta,” he acknowledged her greeting.

“I’ve got a warrant for your arrest, and your fingerprints all over a Remington .308 we found at the Botanic Gardens the other night.”

Well, that sucked.

“Read him his rights, Carl.”

While Carl read him his rights, Hawkins took a minute to breathe and think through this latest unfuckingbelievable turn of events.

“The only Remington .308 I ever shot was at Quantico, three months ago.”

Loretta met his eyes without flinching. “That’s what Dylan thought.”