Crazy Cool (3 page)

C
HAPTER

3

K
ATYA DIDN’T KNOW
which was her most serious problem: the utter depth of her own stupidity, the number of G-forces pushing her back into the bucket seat of the rocket she was riding, or Christian Hawkins. It looked pretty much like a toss-up to her. Any of the three could prove to be lethal.

Her pulse was racing like a freight train.

It was the car that had cleared her brain, the sound of it, the feel of it. She’d lived her whole life gliding along the world’s roads in her mother’s Cadillacs, her father’s Town Cars, her own little Mercedes when she’d hit sixteen, and a never-ending series of boyfriends’ Beemers, Hondas, and SUVs. But at eighteen she’d tasted power, the bone-shaking, body-trembling, pulse-pounding power of more cubic inches than any sane underwriter would insure. The night Hawkins had pulled her out of the middle of a drunken fraternity-boy brawl in LoDo, he’d taken her home in the kind of car that put the bad in badass. “Get in the car, princess” had been his first words to her, spoken as he’d stood between her and the unruly group of young men who only minutes before she had called her friends—before they’d decided the night’s game would be to see who could get a piece of Katya’s prom dress, before the game had degenerated into getting a piece of Katya, before Jonathan had pulled out a knife to cut off a piece of pink tulle and, in his drunken clumsiness, cut her.

It had been incredibly stupid to get in a strange boy’s car that night, a fact she’d been too hurt and frightened to assimilate until he’d gotten in with her and started the engine. She’d never been in a car that came to life in every metallic molecule all at once, growling and shaking, and she hadn’t been in one since—until tonight.

She’d thought it was Alex covering her as she lay facedown on the lawn, stunned by the first explosion. She’d thought it was Alex who’d lifted her into his arms. Her secretary was buff beyond a doubt, but not much bigger than she was, a fact that had come into play when, partway across the garden, she’d come around enough to realize Alex seemed taller than usual, and bigger, and that the body she was cradled against went beyond merely buff into the “ripped” or “cut” category.

But oh, no, that hadn’t been a big enough clue for her. With the fireworks exploding and sparks raining down, with her head breaking and her heart pounding, she’d taken the coward’s way out and clung to the strongest, closest thing she could find.

She was good at hiding from the truth, and the lion who’d pranced his way down the yellow brick road to Oz had nothing on her in the cowardly department. She’d tried being brave once, thirteen years ago to be exact, and her mother had systematically badgered and argued and screamed and all but beaten the inclination out of her.

So there it was, the sad truth. Her one chance to build a little character had ended in failure.

Too bad, because it sure looked like she could use a little character in her current situation. Her party-girl résumé was hardly likely to reassure Christian Hawkins that any sacrifices he’d made on her behalf had been well worth the effort.

Christian Hawkins. Her gaze went to where he gripped the steering wheel. The back of his hand was broad, powerful looking, the veins prominent beneath his skin—but it was the tattoo that extended just beyond the snow-white cuff of his dress shirt that held her attention, the dark curve of ink, the merest hint of what snaked up his arm and lay beneath the rest of his shirt. No one who had ever seen him naked would ever forget. No one who had seen him naked would ever, ever mistake him for another.

Christian Hawkins. Oh, God. It took every ounce of strength she had not to just bury her head in her hands and burst into tears.

H
AWKINS
looked over at his passenger, and his mouth tightened. She looked like hell, her hair all wild and tangled, her face smudged with dirt and grass stains, and the slit in her little black dress split to halfway up her rib cage. He could see her underwear. One tiny black satin strap arching over the smooth curve of her hip. Unfuckingbelievable. He’d worked through his anger at her years ago. The only thing he felt for her now was complete and utter indifference.

And yet she was making him sweat.

Given how much she paid for her clothes, he would have thought they would hold up a little better. But that wasn’t the worst of it. He could handle underwear, even hers—and he resented like hell that he had to specifically notate hers. The worst of it was the look on her face. He knew women, and he knew Bad Luck was on the verge of crying, which was the last thing he needed.

“I’m taking you to Doc,” he said, keeping his gaze firmly on the street ahead. “He’ll check you over, make sure you don’t have a concussion or anything.”

Silence met his announcement, a long silence so deep he could almost hear her pulling herself together.
Come on,
he silently encouraged her.
You can do it. Don’t cry on me, Dekker. Not tonight.

“I—I don’t have a concussion. I have a headache.”

Good, he thought. She’d done it. Composed herself and saved them both from a messy, emotional scene.

“I’m sure Doc will have something for it.” Doc had everything, including, at one time, too much gin thinning his blood and a shade too many narcotics fogging his brain, which was why his medical license had been revoked twenty years ago.

He heard her swear softly, and looking over, saw her lower her head into her hands.

“Déjà vu.” The words whispered from her mouth on a weary sigh.

Well, hell. Some things didn’t change, he could have told her, and Doc was one of them. It was true: Thirteen years ago, Doc’s was the first place he’d taken her—though he’d offered the police station as an alternative. The local precinct certainly hadn’t been his favorite place, but if she’d wanted to press charges, he’d have been willing to back her up. Of course, they would have first had to ditch the car he’d been driving, a stolen Chevy Malibu—very recently stolen, a 1969 SS 396 with three-deuce carburetion, and without a doubt the hottest Chevelle he’d ever driven.

She’d chosen Doc’s, and the former surgeon had put a few stitches in her arm and offered her a dizzying array of pharmaceuticals to stave off the pain. To his surprise, the pretty little prom princess hadn’t had a clue what she was looking at, so Hawkins had grabbed a couple of Percodans and shelled out fifty bucks for the call.

“He’s cleaned up his act since then.” Clean and sober, Doc Blake now ran the neighborhood AA meetings, but he was still open for his unofficial late-night business, especially for the street kids.

The sound she made from behind her hands was indecipherable, but came damn close to sounding like a very unprincesslike snort.

Fine. She could think what she wanted, but he was calling the shots.

“Y-you can just take me home,” she said after another long moment, lifting her head up on a steadying breath and dragging one hand back through her hair. “Please. I’ll call my own doctor from there.”

Please.
He liked the sound of that. He liked it a lot, but her request was impossible.

“I’m sorry. I may be able to take you home later, but I’m afraid first it’s going to be Doc’s.”

He felt more than saw her turn in her seat and level her gaze at him.

“May be able to take me home later?” she repeated. “Are you kidnapping me?”

Ah, he thought. There it was, the regally cool tone of voice only a prep-school girl and senator’s daughter could pull off.

“It’s not exactly kidnapping. There won’t be a ransom note, but we need to make sure you’re safe, and we won’t be able to do that until we figure out who blew up all those palm trees while you were standing under them.”

Her answer was another long bout of dead silence, which he didn’t for a second misinterpret as acceptance.

“Y-you think somebody was trying to hurt me?” she finally said, her voice a shade too breathless to continue qualifying as regally cool, a degree too hesitant to maintain even the illusion of icy calm. Dammit. “And who’s ‘w-we’? Do you mean the man you were talking with at the party?”

“Don’t panic, Ms. Dekker,” he said calmly, and took his advice for himself. “I work for the Department of Defense, and we don’t know that anybody was trying to hurt you. That’s what we’re going to try and find out.” She was just a job tonight, just a job in a black satin thong.

O-kay.
He shifted in his seat.

“If you want to give your mother a call, I’ll give you a number in Washington where she can verify that my partner and I were at the Gardens tonight under the authority of the DOD. My only request is that you don’t give her my name, at least not yet. It’ll be up to my partner to decide how much she needs to know.” He tried to sound as reassuring as possible. He wanted the full ice-princess package here tonight. He needed the ice-princess package. That was the picture of her he’d nurtured all those months in prison, because what had nearly driven him insane were the memories of her heat—hot mouth, hot love, hot temper.

And all of it was the last thing he wanted to be thinking about.

“Department of Defense?” she finally said. “
Our
Department of Defense? You’re kidding, right?”

Her confidence in him was downright heartwarming.

“No.” He wasn’t kidding, dammit. He’d turned out just fine, no thanks to her. Was that so damn hard to believe?

She mulled his answer over for an annoyingly long time.

“So my mother didn’t hire you to be my bodyguard tonight?”

Good God, no. “I think I’m the last person your mother would hire for any reason, but especially for watching over you.” He hoped Dylan got in touch with Grant soon and figured this mess out.

“H-how can she verify, if I don’t tell her your name?” she finally asked.

Good question, but he didn’t like the sound of the voice asking it. She was going to lose it, if he didn’t get her calmed down.

“I’ll give her a code and route her through someone she knows,” he said. “She has more than a few friends at DOD.” It was Marilyn Dekker’s
only
redeeming quality. She was an all-American, blue-blooded hawk from the top of her no-nonsense, dirt-brown pageboy haircut to her black patent leather pumps. Every time he saw her, he wondered where Kat had come from. That the blond bombshell and Mrs. G.I. Joe shared a genetic base was hard to imagine. Marilyn Dekker was built like a linebacker, one square block on top of another, and Kat had more curves than a cyclone.

“No.” The word came out dangerously breathless, yet damnably insistent. “I don’t think so.”

“No?” He shot her a quick glance. “What do you mean, no?”

“No, I’m not . . . n-not going to call my mother.”

Perfect. She wasn’t going to call her mother, but she was going to hyperventilate herself into a dead faint. He could hear her over there on the other side of the car, each breath coming faster than the last, each one shallower than the one before. So much for the ice-princess package. She was going into full meltdown mode.

“Take a deep breath,” he advised. “Please.”
For my sake
.

“I . . . I—” Her voice caught in her throat.

Ah, hell. She wasn’t going to make it. Easing down on the brake, he quickly slid Roxanne down through her gears and pulled over.

“Put your head down.”

“C-can’t.”

Okay, that was his fault. He’d buckled her in using Roxanne’s three-point harness. Moving fast and sure, he reached over and undid the seat belt with one hand, then put his palm over her nose and mouth as he gently pushed her head toward her knees.

The last thing he wanted was for her to faint, but this . . . this was crazy. He was in a car with Katya Dekker, and she was holding on to him like her life depended on it—one hand gripping his wrist, the other cupped around his hand. And she was breathing on him like a package deal of bolt-on boost, fast and cool on the inhale, warm on the exhale.

A small, tearing sound drew his gaze downward, and he watched in calm disbelief as her dress slowly ripped another two inches, maybe three. She was going to come out of it in about two more seconds, with him practically on top of her.

There was a lesson in here somewhere, he was sure. Or maybe he’d offended some ancient, pre-Columbian god while he’d been in South America—because this was a test.

“Breathe,” he reminded her when she stopped for a couple of seconds.

She did, and this time kept going, sounding like she was starting to get the hang of it. In. Out. In. Out. Going slower, getting steadier.

Hell. He turned his face into his shoulder and looked over her head out the passenger-door window.

Katya Dekker. He didn’t deserve this.

He didn’t have any room for her anywhere in his life. No room for regrets, or anger, or memories. No room for anything. She didn’t exist for him. That’s the way he’d arranged things. That’s the way he liked things.

But for someone who didn’t exist, she was taking up a helluva lot of room in his car.

C
HAPTER

4

H
OW ABOUT SOMETHING
for panic attacks?” Hawkins asked Doc Blake. “She just about hyperventilated herself into a coma on the way over.”

Doc peered up at him over the rims of his bifocals, turning from his shelves of neatly organized and labeled drugs. Hawkins knew he got them from a couple of ER doctors over at Denver General who figured any help Doc Blake could give out was better than some fool kid dying on the street because of an overdose or an infection.

“Maybe if you quit scowling at her, she won’t be so nervous.”

Scowling? He wasn’t scowling at her, or if he was, it was for his own self-protection.

“She’s—”
What in the hell
? he wondered, leaning a little to the side to better see into the examining room. Doc had left the door open, and Kat was standing next to the exam table doing . . . what? His gaze dropped down the length of her body, then ran back up right along with his pulse. Four-inch heels did amazing things for her legs, especially in the oddly twisted, hipshot stance she’d taken, trying to safety-pin her dress together over her hip.

Geezus.

He forced his gaze back to Doc. “She’s the . . . uh—” His mind went blank. All he could think was that even dressed she looked half naked.

“I know who she is.” Doc came to his rescue with a jaundiced lift of one bushy, white eyebrow. “But maybe you need a reminder.”

His gaze slid back to the examining room. Yeah, maybe he did.

“There were people lobbying for the death penalty for the way that Traynor boy died,” Doc reminded him.

Yeah. It had been ugly. Real ugly.

And Bad Luck Dekker was beautiful—if a guy went for that whole long-blond-hair, green-eyed look.

Right.

She’d finally gotten the pin in place and was smoothing her dress down. It was absurd, of course. She needed about a hundred safety pins to really do the job.

“Lots of people seemed to come up dead that summer,” Doc continued. “The Traynor boy, Lost Harold, and the floater they fished out of the South Platte River.”

Lost Harold was a wino who had keeled over with a massive seizure down by Union Station. Being kind of a reclusive-type wino, it had been three days before he was found in the jumble of cardboard boxes he’d been calling home. The floater was a woman, Hawkins remembered, a young woman, and she’d been in the water a long time before some hapless jogger had seen her body caught up in a tangle of trees.

“My record’s clean, Doc,” he said, returning his attention to the portly older man. “I didn’t kill the Traynor kid.”

“Somebody did,” Doc said flatly. “And a lot of people thought Manny Waite’s confession was just a little too pat for an alcoholic who’d been living on the street for twenty years and hadn’t managed a coherent sentence in ten.”

Hawkins got his point. As grateful as he’d been for Manny the Mooch’s confession, he’d had a hard time picturing the old buzzard getting up enough gumption to murder anyone. According to Manny, he hadn’t acted alone, which had made his story a whole lot more plausible, but the pusher Manny had fingered as Traynor’s other killer had never been found—and since Manny had died of cancer shortly after, probably never would be.

A couple of years after Hawkins had been released, when he and Dylan had accumulated a little pull through their government work, they’d made some inquiries, trying to get ahold of the investigation, but by then the case had been sealed tighter than a Colfax Avenue street-boy’s—

Well, it had been sealed pretty damn tight.

“She bought Suzi Toussi’s gallery down on Seventeenth,” Doc offered. “It was in all the papers about a month ago, Senator Dekker’s daughter coming back to Denver.”

Well, hell,
Hawkins thought.
This really is old home week.

He knew Suzi Toussi. He’d bought a number of pieces from Toussi’s over the years, paintings and sculpture. The gallery was just a few blocks from Steele Street in LoDo, and it was where Quinn Younger’s new sister-in-law, Nikki McKinney, was having her first big showing tomorrow night. Dylan had bought a few paintings through Suzi’s gallery, too.

But Dylan hadn’t dated her.

Hawkins had—up until the night the two of them had accidentally run into Creed in a Larimer Square bar. Suzi had taken one look at SDF’s jungle boy, and Hawkins had been history. Suzi was nice, a lot of fun, but he couldn’t say he’d missed her, or that Creed had done him anything but a favor by taking her off his hands.

Katya Dekker did not fall in the same easy come, easy go category. She’d been stolen from him, and he’d felt the loss every day he’d been in prison, and for way too many days after he got out.

“I haven’t been in town much lately,” Hawkins said, filing Doc’s information away, though he was sure Dylan was already checking out the Toussi connection by now. Katya must have donated a painting to the art auction, probably the Oleg Henri, since that’s the one she’d been helping move.

“The gallery’s just two blocks from where they found the Traynor boy’s body.”

Something in Doc’s tone made Hawkins narrow his gaze. “Are you saying you think she did it?”

“Somebody did,” the older man repeated. “Somebody besides Manny the Mooch and maybe a drug dealer nobody else in LoDo ever saw.”

Maybe, Hawkins silently agreed. It wasn’t like he hadn’t thought the same thing a thousand times, but whoever the other killer was, it had not been the prom queen.

He slid his gaze back to the examining room. She’d been sound asleep when he’d left her in bed that night, absolutely worn out. The loving had been crazy between them, so very hot. It had haunted him, the things they’d done—and he’d had two long years in lockdown to go over every last detail.

Fuck,
he swore to himself, then had to fight back a wry curve of a grin. Yeah, they’d done that, too. Their last night together was the night he’d taught her the difference between all the sweet love they’d shared and just how far he could really take her.

They’d ended up in the bottom of the shower with her melting against him and crying, and him holding her and praying he hadn’t given himself a freaking heart attack at nineteen. She’d been so beautiful, lying between his legs, naked in his arms, the water pouring down on them, her lashes wet and spiky against her cheeks, her breath coming soft and fast against his chest, her skin flushed. Holding her, he’d known he could go to the very edge of the universe and not see a more beautiful sight—and he’d given her his heart.

Bad, bad, Bad Luck Dekker. She’d been the end of him, but she hadn’t killed Jonathan Traynor, not alone, and not in cahoots with Manny the Mooch.

“It wasn’t her, Doc,” he said, believing in her innocence as much as his own. Whoever had put a bullet in Traynor’s brain had also shot him up with a load of smack big enough to stop his heart. The gun had never been found, but the needle had been lying in the alley with the boy, without a fingerprint on it.

Hawkins knew that under the right circumstances, anybody was capable of murder, but Katya Dekker hadn’t put a gun to her ex-boyfriend’s head, and she hadn’t stuck a needle in his vein, not with enough premeditated cunning to clean her prints off the syringe. As for Manny the Mooch, he couldn’t have premeditated a late-night leak, let alone a murder.

“Watch yourself. That’s all I’m saying.”

Fair enough. “How much longer?” he asked, nodding toward the examination room.

Doc glanced back to where Katya was working on her dress with another safety pin, and a big grin split his face. “Twenty minutes,” he said, heading back toward the room. “Maybe half an hour.”

Hawkins stopped the old man with a heavy hand on his shoulder. Now he was scowling, without a doubt.

“Five minutes,” he said in warning when Doc turned and looked up at him. “And keep the door open.”

He let the old man go and pulled his cell phone out of the inside left pocket of his suit coat. The right side was where he kept his Glock 9mm in a shoulder holster.

He punched in a number and put the phone to his ear, keeping his eye on the doc and Katya.

“Yeah,” Dylan answered on the second ring.

“It’s Hawkins. What’s going on?”

“Fireworks. The shells were planted in the fake palm trees. Electronic detonators. The auctioneer is a little scraped up, but mobile. Some of the paintings are torched. The place is crawling with Denver cops, and the lovely Lieutenant Loretta Bradley is in charge. I’m sure she’ll give us a full report when she’s finished. That’s the good news.”

“And the bad news?” The way the night had gone down so far, there had to be bad news.

“They found a corpse in the cottonwoods. Double-tapped between the eyes, a clean hit.”

Hawkins let that nasty piece of information sink in for a couple of seconds, then took a deep breath.
Holy shit.
“Anybody we know?”

“Not yet.” Dylan’s voice came over the phone. “It spun him around a bit, blew off the back of his head, and he landed in some bushes. I have to give the cops credit for getting the area cordoned off and for keeping everybody out of it until homicide gets here. We’ll know pretty soon.”

He knew what Dylan wasn’t saying. He was thinking the same damn thing.

“It couldn’t possibly be Ted Garraty, right?”

“The odds are four hundred to one. Four hundred and fifty-five to one if we include the caterers and auction staff.”

Shit.
He’d wanted Lotto odds on that one.

“Who’s the Asian guy who was talking with Ms. Dekker?” Pure professionalism all the way—that’s the way he was going to deal with her. She’d be Ms. Dekker to him until he handed her off to Dylan, or until hell froze over—whichever came first.

“His name is Alex Zheng, and he’s rabid about losing her, but I gave him the secret handshake, and he’s going to hold off calling in the Marines or the senator for about another thirty seconds. If you don’t give her back by then, he’s going to do his worst.”

Hawkins wasn’t too worried about the guy’s worst anything. “Tell him to call Gunny Howzer at Quantico. If it’s gotta be Marines, that’s who I’d want coming after me if I’d been snatched and grabbed.”

“Zheng spent six years with L.A.’s finest, before coming on board with Katya Dekker five years ago.”

“If he’s her bodyguard, she needs a new one.” It was a flat statement of truth.

“According to him, he’s her secretary, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find Senator Dekker’s phone number tattooed on his butt.”

Neither would Hawkins.

“So are we giving her back?” He didn’t like the idea, which surprised the hell out of him, but it was the logical thing to do. With that kind of connection, Katya didn’t need him.

“Probably,” Dylan said, but with the same hesitation in his voice that Hawkins felt.

“Okay. Tell Zheng we’re hell and gone from the Botanic Gardens, but if he wants his girl back, he can meet us at her place.”

There was a slight pause. “Yeah, well, it seems her place is his place, and he already suggested you meet us there. They live in a loft above the Toussi Gallery on Seventeenth.”

Well, that made everything just about fucking perfect.

Hawkins took another deep breath and asked himself again why he’d quit smoking. He was on day three, which was two more days than he’d made it the last time he’d quit.

“We’ll be leaving Doc’s in a couple of minutes.” He shifted his attention back inside the examining room and couldn’t help himself—his gaze went over her from the top of her streaked blond hair to the tips of her pink polished toes.

Of course she had a boyfriend. She probably had a dozen.

“You want some advice?” Dylan’s voice came back at him.

“No.”

“Don’t make any stops,” Dylan told him anyway.

A brief grin flickered across Hawkins’s mouth.

“Right.” He hit the disconnect button and slipped the phone back in his inside pocket. What could Dylan possibly be worried about? That he might tape her to a lamppost on East Colfax and take the highest bid? Or dump her in a bad part of town and hope she made it out in one piece?

Well, he had news for the boss. He’d matured way beyond such petty revenge. Way beyond. He was a civilized guy, a member of an elite, hand-picked United States force used solely at the discretion of a two-star general who reported directly to the secretary of defense. In the years since prison, he’d cruised his way through dozens of embassy and consulate parties from Washington, D.C., to Riyadh. He’d gone through a receiving line once in Houston and come face-to-face with Marilyn Dekker. Without so much as a blink of his eye, he’d introduced himself as Niles Hahn, a name guaranteed to slip even the most determined minds, shaken her hand, and moved on.

Or maybe Dylan was afraid he’d try to hustle Bad Luck into Roxanne’s backseat and jump her bones.

Well, he’d matured way beyond that, too. Way beyond—no matter how much of her dress was falling off. His business now was getting her to Toussi’s, dumping her back on her boyfriend, and then calling General Grant and finding out what in the hell was going on, so he could get the hell back on a plane to Colombia.