Crazy Cool (5 page)

Her voice came to a dead stop.

“Garraty,” he finished for her. So she’d seen him, too. Ted Garraty had been one of the boys in the alley that night. Their names had all come out at his trial, all the rich boys with no manners who hadn’t done an hour’s worth of time for terrorizing their little prom queen. There had been no charges pressed against the Wellon Academy boys, not a single one—but when Jonathan Traynor had shown up dead in that back alley, every one of those bastards had pointed their finger at him and declared him a murderer. “Did you talk with him?”

“N-no,” she said, her face suddenly pale. “I was avoiding him, but you, me, and Ted all in the same place—that seems a . . . a little odd, doesn’t it?”

Yeah. And seeming odder all the time—and if the stiff turned out to be Garraty, he probably wasn’t going to be getting back to South America anytime soon, which didn’t do a damn thing to improve his mood.

He had pulled his cell phone out of his pocket to punch in Dylan’s number when it rang.

“Hawkins,” he answered, putting the phone to his ear with one hand and throwing Roxanne up into neutral with the other.

“Okay. It’s bad,” Dylan said.

“Garraty.” He knew it. He knew it down to his bones.

“Yeah. Garraty,” Dylan said. “And he had a piece of stained cloth in one of his pockets, and I’m not talking a handkerchief. The cops bagged it up as an unidentified textile, but when I looked it over, it reminded me a helluva lot of that piece of bloody prom dress they found in Jonathan Traynor’s pocket—pink and kind of gauzy.”

Everything inside Hawkins froze for one god-awful split second. Then he swore.

“That’s what I thought you’d say,” Dylan said.

Hawkins shifted his attention out the window and reached up to loosen his tie. Unfuckingbelievable. Another Prom King boy had been murdered.

Whatever was going on, Hawkins had a bad feeling he was in it up to his ass and getting set up for another fall.

“You check your horoscope lately?” Dylan asked.

Hawkins let out a short laugh. This was way beyond a bad horoscope.

“I don’t think it was me who got this all stirred up.”

“How long has Katya Dekker been back in Denver?” Dylan asked, reading his mind.

“A month. Long enough for somebody to decide they had some unfinished business.” That was his take on it.

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Dylan said, then paused for a second before continuing. “We’ve got to make some quick decisions here.”

Yeah, Hawkins knew it.

“Our orders were just for the party, and the party is over,” Dylan continued. “Which means I’m free to go back to South America, right now, tonight—or I can stay and work with you on this, let Kid and the Marines finish up in Colombia.”

“I work fine alone, and you know it,” Hawkins said after a long pause. He didn’t like being within a million miles of this mess, but Dylan was right. He couldn’t just walk away from it. Not now. But he didn’t like Dylan going back to Colombia without him. With Creed in the hospital, he was the best jungle fighter SDF had left.

“Okay. I’ve got a call in to General Grant, and he’s going to go up the ladder on this one to see who made the initial request to have us work the party. He’ll contact you when he’s got something,” Dylan said. “I can be wheels-up to Colombia in three hours on a transport out of Peterson. I’ll give the NRF rebels one more day, and if they haven’t released J.T.’s body by then, we’ll go back in after them.”

“No.” Hawkins sat up a little straighter. “That’s no good.”

“I’d call in an air strike, if I could,” Dylan said, “but I don’t think the U.S. ambassador would back me on that. The oil companies probably would. They’d love to blow the leftist bastards to hell, but even though they own half the Colombian army, they don’t run it.”

“Our boy isn’t a hundred percent.” Hell, Kid might not be fifty percent by now. Or even ten, and he’d be running on bloodlust, not brains, which was a good way to get killed. He was young and tough and the best shooter SDF had, but they were bringing his brother home in a body bag—if the rebel forces would just give him up.

Hawkins needed to be in Colombia. He didn’t want Kid and Dylan going up against the rebels without him, especially with the Marines who had been down there ordered out. God, the mission was so far off the books, there wouldn’t be anybody there to back them up after the Marines left—and they would leave.

SDF operators were expendable. That was the whole point of their existence, but nobody could afford to have the Corps associated with a black ops mission where things had gone wrong.

“Maybe you should wait for me. This thing at the Gardens with Bad Luck, give me two days and—”

“Bad Luck?” Dylan interrupted on a short laugh. “Please, tell me you’re not calling her that to her face.”

Hell. He just had, but that was beside the point.

“I could be in Colombia by Sunday night.”

“And Katya Dekker?” Dylan asked. “She’s in this up to her neck.”

“Simple. If we don’t have a suspect in our sights by Sunday morning, we turn everything we’ve got over to Lieutenant Bradley. I’ll have a little talk with Alex Zheng and put him and”—he paused for half a second—“Ms. Dekker on a plane to Washington, D.C.”

“Send her back to Mommy?” Dylan asked.

Basically, yes.

“Yes,” he said.

“I’m sure the senator would make one helluva bodyguard.”

“Definitely up to the job,” Hawkins said. “Darth Vader in Chanel wouldn’t have anything on her.”

“Well, that’s a fascinating visual there—and amazingly accurate.” Dylan’s voice came back at him over the phone. “But I think you’re being overly optimistic about Sunday morning. You’re going to have to trust me and the Marines on this one, Superman.”

Superman. Right. Hawkins wished to hell he
was
Superman.

“You know I’ll bring Kid home,” Dylan continued.

“Yeah.” He dragged a hand back through his hair. “I never should have left him, though, not for this, no matter who was handing out orders.”

“We left a full squad of Marines with him—he’s not exactly alone. And if we don’t follow direct orders, you and I end up in Leavenworth with a rap sheet a mile long. You know it as well as I do.”

Yeah, he knew it. The chain of command for SDF was short, but it was as ironclad as that of any branch of the military, and saying “No, thank you” was not an option without serious repercussions.

“I’m going to talk with Lieutenant Bradley before we leave. Give me half an hour. I’ll stop at the gallery with Zheng on my way to Steele Street and let you know what she’s got, and you can take it from there. Do you want me to call in Skeeter?”

“No.” That was a no-brainer. Hawkins could interview a LoDo art dealer and her gay secretary without Skeeter backing him up. His only doubt was whether he could do it without a cigarette. He didn’t think so, not tonight, and not this art dealer. Besides, moral support wasn’t really Skeeter’s strong point. Fooling around with Kid’s electrical gizmos, spray paint, and combustion engines was Skeeter’s strong point.

What Dylan really wanted to know was whether he could handle Katya Dekker on his own. She’d broken him once, and no other person alive could say the same.

“I’ll check in with you when I catch up with Kid,” Dylan said. “We should be back in Denver by tomorrow night.”

Hawkins didn’t like the plan, but he didn’t have to like it—and despite everything, this might be the chance they hadn’t thought they’d ever get: a chance to find out who really had killed Jonathan Traynor III.

“If you end up flying out of Panama City in that rat trap of a Cessna Miguel Romero calls a plane, be sure and check the duct tape on the passenger-side door before you take off,” he said.

“Right.” Dylan let out another short, mirthless laugh and hung up.

Hawkins looked at the phone for a second before closing it and slipping it back inside his suit jacket. Well, hell. Despite possibly being handed the opportunity of a lifetime to clear his name for good, everything had worked out just exactly the opposite of what he’d been hoping for—the exact opposite.

Perfect.

“Darth Vader?” his nemesis repeated from across the front seat of the car. “In Chanel?”

He wasn’t going to respond to that. No way.

Instead, he let out a breath, careful to make sure it didn’t sound too long-suffering and fed up, careful to keep his gaze focused straight ahead. He was stuck with Bad Luck, up close and personal, for at least two days. Probably longer, if he was completely honest with himself, and he couldn’t afford to be anything less than completely honest with himself, not with a thirteen-year-old murder, an hour-old murder, and Katya Dekker all dished up on his plate and practically sitting in his lap—and J.T.’s death weighing on his soul.

Mama Guadalupe’s—that’s where he needed to go to find Mickey Montana, and Mickey was the guy he needed to find. An undercover cop whose loyalties were as slippery as two eels in heat, Mickey had been working LoDo a long time, long enough to have been around during the Prom King murder. Luckily for Hawkins, Mickey’s favorite hangout just also happened to be the only place in town where they sold his brand of cigarettes.

He reached for the gearshift and slid it back into reverse. A quick stop, a little chat, a pack of Faros—just one pack, he swore—and then he and Alex and Katya could all sit down at the gallery and take this thing apart—which should prove to be damned interesting.

He’d never had a chance to talk to her after his arrest, never seen her again after his conviction. In all those hours he and Dylan and Mickey had spent going over the case, trying to figure out who could have set him up for the Traynor murder and why, she’d been the missing piece. She was the only thing he’d ever had that anyone else would have wanted, the only thing worth committing murder over—and somebody had done just that. Not Manny the Mooch, not some drug pusher no one had ever been able to find—but somebody who’d wanted Kat for himself. That’s what he’d always figured.

And after thirteen years, he was finally going to get his chance to nail the bastard. Coming up for air to double-tap Ted Garraty was going to be the murderer’s final and fatal error.

Twisting to the side to look over his shoulder, he braced his hand on the back of the passenger seat and released Roxanne’s clutch. The Challenger roared back down the alley. At Seventeenth, he braked hard, looked behind him, and, when the traffic broke, gunned the motor and shot across the street to the alley on the other side, heading south.

He noticed the way she froze in her seat, noticed the startled look of fear on her face, but did his best not to pay it too much mind, because it wasn’t her startled fear that was threatening him at the moment.

It was her dress, with the two tiny, ineffectual safety pins, and the curve of her breast he was trying so hard not to see, and it was the way she smelled, part female, part perfume, part pure Kat.

Roxanne was never going to be the same, not after a night with Bad Luck. Hell. He was never going to be the same.

I
S
Garraty dead?”

“I never miss, Birdy. You know that,” the big man said, closing the French doors behind him. The house was a mansion, old brick and old money and a couple of servants who didn’t ask questions about the comings and goings of guests.

“What about the rifle?”

“The Remington?”

Had there been another gun besides the Remington? Another gun besides the rifle he’d paid five thousand dollars for some underpaid grunt at the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia, to steal off the firing range? The rifle he’d had this reject Army Ranger drive all the way across the country so he could use it to kill another idiot in Denver?

“I left it on the roof, just like you said.”

Perfect. The police would find it, and find Christian Hawkins’s fingerprints all over it. This time when the street scum went down, he was going to stay down. Birdy’s employer had waited years for justice to be served again, and it was Birdy who was going to give it to him—again.

“And the fireworks?”

“They kept everyone distracted.”

A stroke of genius. A dramatic stroke to be sure, but everything about the Prom King Murder had been dramatic, a media circus full of spectacle. Birdy had wanted to recreate that atmosphere, to savor it, and besides, he liked a little drama, if it was of his own making.

“How about your part of it? How’d that go?” the ex-Ranger asked.

Perfectly, of course. Birdy always executed his own plans perfectly.

“Katya Dekker needs better locks on her doors,” Birdy said drolly.

C
HAPTER

6

Rosalia, Colombia

I
T WAS HOT,
a hundred fucking degrees even at midnight.

Kid Chaos watched the last drop of condensation roll down his beer bottle onto his hand. Eight empty shot glasses were lined up in a neat curve on the other side of the beer, flanking a fifth of the local firewater, real rotgut cane whiskey. The bartender called it
aguardiente.
Kid called it novocaine, but the only damn thing it was numbing was his hunger. He hadn’t eaten in two days, not since Hawkins had left, and he hadn’t stopped drinking since the Marines had been extracted late this morning.

It was stupid, not eating, but every time he tried to eat, he threw up. The only thing he could keep down was beer and rotgut.

The Marines had offered to go UA for him, Unauthorized Absence, so he wouldn’t have to stick the god-awful waiting out alone, but he’d turned them down. They’d had their asses on the line for him and J.T. for three weeks, long enough for a mission that had gone bad, and actually, it was easier being alone—easier to get drunk, easier not to talk.

And the waiting was over now. It had ended about oh- seven-hundred that morning.

Lifting the fifth, he tilted it and ran it over the top of the shot glasses, filling them all. Eight was his lucky number. He didn’t know why. He’d been eight when his mother had finally left for good. In eighth grade when he’d crashed his brother’s motorcycle and broken his collarbone. Eighteen when he’d joined the Marines.

Setting the bottle aside, he picked up one of the shot glasses and downed the whiskey.
Geezus Kee-rist.
He sucked in his breath and gave his head one hard shake, waiting for the fire to go out or work its way into the empty pit that was his gut.

How in the hell, he wondered, was he living on this stuff? Or maybe he wasn’t living on it. Maybe it was killing him, and that’s why it felt so bad.

A movement in the corner of the room made him go still, except for the finger he tightened around the trigger of his M249 SAW, the big motherfucking machine gun cradled in his lap.

The drunk at the far table gave him a woozy look, then dropped his head back down in a puddle of spilled booze and passed out all over again.

Kid eased up on the trigger. He and the drunk were the only two people left in the shack that passed as a cantina in Rosalia, Colombia, a collection of hovels and huts a couple of kilometers from the infamous Caño Limón pipeline. Everyone else had cleared out at oh-two-hundred, at exactly the same time a beat-up old pickup had roared through town and made a real quick delivery, dropping a long box off the bed without bothering to stop.

It was just as well that they hadn’t stopped. The SAW put out seven hundred rounds a minute, enough to have stopped them and their truck permanently.

He reached for the next shot, lifted it to his mouth, and knocked it back with hardly a shiver. The second one always went down easier. By the time he hit the fourth, they’d be sliding down like twelve-year-old Scotch.

And yeah, it was killing him. He could tell, because he felt like he was dying. Dying from the inside out without a mark on him, which was more than the rebels had granted his brother.

J.T. had been marked hard. Cut. Beaten. Mutilated.

Kid had looked.

He lifted the next shot in line and downed it in one swallow.

Oh, yeah, he’d just had to know if it was really J.T. in the box. So he’d looked.

His fingers curled around the fourth glass. He downed the shot and squeezed his eyes shut on a gasp as an excruciating wave of pain clamped down hard on his stomach, riding him. Sweat broke out on his brow and upper lip. Jesus save him, he didn’t want to be sick again. He didn’t have anything left to throw up.

Rigid with pain, he endured, until slowly, inch by inch, the pain eased off. The nausea passed, and he slipped back into simple, abject misery. Misery unlike anything he’d ever known. Misery outside his comprehension.

God, he felt so fuckin’ awful. If the whiskey didn’t kill him, the sheer, utter awfulness of how he felt might do the trick. How did people survive this kind of pain? He could hardly breathe.

J.T.’s body had been desecrated—invincible, bigger-than-life J.T. Just being his little brother had given Kid enough street cred to overcome his natural geekdom. It hadn’t really mattered that he’d been too good at math and way too interested in computers. J.T.’s reputation on the street had been big enough to cover both of them, even though Kid had never spent a day on the street in his life. J.T. had made damn sure of that.

The fifth shot went down without a hitch. He didn’t have a choice but to endure from one minute to the next. Devil dogs didn’t give up, and he was a devil dog to the core, a devil dog with mayhem in mind. Murder and mayhem. He was trained in the art of killing. He had a warrior’s soul, and the men who had killed his brother were going to die. Creed would want to be part of the mission—if he lived. Hawkins was who Kid needed back with him right now. Superman. Dylan was a diplomat, a con man, the brains of Steele Street and SDF. Hawkins was just the man of steel.

He and Hawkins could take the motherfuckers out. He’d be back out there already, if it wasn’t for J.T.

He didn’t have to look at the box on the floor to know it was there. The box weighed on him. It held him in his chair, at his post, no matter how tired he got, no matter how drunk. He wasn’t leaving J.T. alone, not for a minute.

And he
was
drunk. So drunk, he hurt. So drunk, he’d practically paralyzed himself.

Not that it mattered. All he wanted was to get J.T. home. He’d made his radio call to Miguel for a pickup. He’d been less successful making contact with Steele Street, but he could call from Panama City once Miguel dropped him off. It would just be a matter of hours then, not days, until he had J.T. home.

Home . . . for one minute, he let his mind dwell on the word and what it meant. He’d met a girl his last night in Denver—met her, saved her life, made love to her, and fallen in love. A wild girl, an artist who painted naked men. Nikki McKinney. After the first week here, slogging through the jungle, it had all started to seem like a dream, those hours with Nikki. The hell of it was, he was afraid it might be seeming that way to her, too. A guy couldn’t make a phone call in the middle of a covert op. God, she’d been a virgin when they’d made love, and he’d up and left her in the middle of the night—and he’d done nothing but want her ever since.

She was so beautiful, just thinking about her was enough to make him ache.

He reached for the next shot glass, then stopped when he heard the sound of an engine approaching. He rose silently to his feet. It wasn’t a plane engine. It was a truck.

He was drunk all right, but there was a part of his brain that was lucid, and it was in complete control as he slipped across the bar to the door. The night was pitch-black, and Rosalia was quiet, except for the approaching vehicle.

A flash of light to his right brought his head around. Headlights were cutting through the trees, following the curve of the road leading into the village. There was no way to know who was coming, friend or enemy, so Kid waited, his body angled close to the door frame, the SAW ready.

The vehicle’s speed was a bad sign. It wasn’t slowing down. When somebody opened fire before the truck even completed the last turn into the two-bit town, Kid automatically dove out the door and off the side of the porch. The thatched building was no protection from bullets.

He hit the ground hard and rolling as a fusillade of automatic gunfire cracked and spat from the back of the truck in one long continuous burst, all of it aimed at the cantina. The flames of homemade incendiary grenades followed, arcs of flame flying through the air and landing with the crash of gasoline-filled soft-drink bottles—Molotov cocktails, South American style.

His finger had tightened on the trigger, and the SAW was blazing in his hands. The fight was over in seconds, the truck careening out of Rosalia.

Shit.

His mind was clear now, crystal clear, the blood and adrenaline pumping through his veins, his heart pounding. Flat on his belly, staying absolutely still, he stared at the two lumps lying in the road, waiting to see if one of them moved. Off to his side, the cantina had gone up in a whoosh of flames, the thatch catching fire like tinder and engulfing the whole building in seconds.

He wasn’t moving to save the drunk, who probably hadn’t survived the hundreds of rounds of automatic- weapon fire that had gone into the cantina—and he wasn’t moving to retrieve J.T.’s body. Hell, no. It was way too late to save his brother. He was going to let the fire be what it was: a funeral pyre.

He took a breath, forcing himself to concentrate. The rush of instant fear and instant instinct was over, and the rotgut was flowing back into his brain. He took another breath and waited.

They might come back.

Hell, they
would
come back. He was getting the picture loud and clear. No more gringos were going to leave Rosalia alive, if the NRF rebels had their way.

For two long minutes, Kid continued to lie absolutely still, hidden in the undergrowth of the jungle. Heat from the fire bellowed up with a slight breeze, nearly scorching him on one side, but he could take the heat. Bottles snapped and exploded inside, their contents adding fuel to the flames.

One by one, the residents of the village appeared from out of the darkness, fearful, whispering. No attempt was made to save the cantina. It was already gone.

When neither of the men in the road moved, he carefully got to his feet, swaying slightly. A throbbing pain at the side of his head brought his hand up to check it out. His fingers came away smeared with blood.

Measuring every step, he pulled his sidearm from the holster on his hip and started forward. They looked dead, but Kid had been trained well, trained not to take chances. And it was training, rote and religious, that made him fire a single round into each man’s head.

He stood there in the middle of the muddy track, his chest heaving, his heart breaking. Behind him, flames lit the night sky. J.T. was gone, completely gone. His warrior spirit purified in the flames of one last battle.

It was over. Everything was over.

Kid checked his watch. Dawn was only a few hours away. If he survived the rest of the night, Miguel would come and pick him up at dawn—and then he could go home. Home to Nikki.

All he had to do was survive the rest of the night.

W
ELL
, Hawkins’s driving hasn’t changed at all,
Katya thought. Most people slowed down as they grew up. Most people at least braked for red lights, and most people used the forward gears just a wee bit more than reverse.

Hawkins didn’t seem to care about any of that. In truth, she wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d driven the car sideways.

But they were stopped now, somewhere in the warrenlike urban landscape of the west side, with downtown all lit up to the east, and she was grateful, so grateful to be parked outside the sleaziest-looking place she’d ever seen. Mama Guadalupe’s gave new meaning to the term “hole in the wall,” and she couldn’t wait to get inside and call a cab to take her home.

If he wanted to disappear for a couple of days, that was fine by her. But he was doing it alone. She didn’t care what he was doing with the Department of Defense; if her mother wasn’t involved, it didn’t have anything to do with her.

Yes, it was a strange coincidence about her and him and Ted all being at the Botanic Gardens for an art auction, but in that group, Christian Hawkins was the odd man out. She was an art dealer, and Ted Garraty was a rich man who patronized the arts, especially when Denver society was involved.

She’d pulled herself together at Doc’s. She’d done some thinking, and if she could just get out of this beast of a car, she was sure she could keep herself together very well without Christian Hawkins’s help.

She reached for the door handle, then stopped.

On second thought, maybe she should just ask to borrow his cell phone. The windows on the club were boarded up behind iron bars. The door was a slab of industrial-strength steel. Rainbow-colored graffiti covered the outside walls, relieved only by the pit marks, or possibly bullet holes, in the dirty beige stucco. A vacant lot with two junked cars and an overturned Dumpster bordered the club to the north.

He’d taken her to nicer places at nineteen. The club didn’t look like anyplace a government guy would hang out, unless he was a Force Recon Marine looking to work off a little excess energy in a bar brawl.

No, she decided, looking over at him. His hair was way too long for a Marine, and his manners were too crude—and that was saying a lot.

Bad Luck.
That’s what he’d called her, what he’d probably been calling her for the last thirteen years—and she wasn’t even going to touch his “Darth Vader in Chanel” comment.

She should definitely ask to borrow his cell phone, but she wasn’t speaking to him, which left her in a bit of a bind.