Crazy Hot (25 page)

“Well, he got what he wanted, and now we'll see if he leads us to what we want,” he said grimly. “Wait here. Hawkins and I will check out the warehouse, and then I'll take you to Steele Street to be with your sister and your grandfather.”

“And where are you going to be?” As if she didn't know he was going after Roper.

“Staying out of trouble,” he promised her with a smile, and then he disappeared out the door.

Damn. She turned back to the louvered windows.

She'd never known such horrible people existed so close to her world. She wasn't naive. She knew there were criminals and murderers, rapists and kidnappers everywhere. She'd just never knowingly seen one before, nor had a connection with one.

Seeing Roper Jones had given her a glimpse into Quinn's world, and what she'd seen frightened her.

But it was over now.

She rubbed her arms, feeling a shiver course over her skin even in the ungodly heat of the warehouse rafters. Maybe she'd feel safer once they got to Steele Street.

Turning from the windows, she glanced around the office where Quinn had made such sweet love to her. Scattered papers littered the floor. An out-of-date calendar had fallen open onto the seat of the desk chair.

What in the world had happened to her today? she wondered. What had happened to Regan McKinney, mild-mannered fossil preparator, sexually shy organizational freak, and all-around Goody Two-shoes? Had she lost her ever-loving mind?

Without a doubt,
came the answer, which she didn't find in the least comforting. Nothing about the whole night had been comforting, except for the way she felt in Quinn's arms. For all the intense sensuality and passion of their lovemaking, he was a comfort, an ease to the loneliness she spent far too much time ignoring. He was the connection outside herself she'd given up hoping to find—but at what cost had she found him?

Her gaze strayed back to the louvered windows and the now empty warehouse floor. Yes, she assured herself. The whole thing was over, but if it was over, why didn't she feel safe?

C
HAPTER

23

W
ILSON WOKE WITH
a start. Hell, he always woke with a start nowadays. He seemed to have only two speeds left in his old age, dead stop and wide awake.

It was dark in the room, with only a faint line of light coming from the bathroom. The boy, Johnny, had gotten into the habit of leaving the bathroom light on for him, so he could find his way in the dark if he needed to get up.

Johnny.
A brief smile curved his lips. That's right. He remembered now. Johnny was the boy's name, and the two of them had come to Steele Street for the night, where Dylan and Hawkins and Quinn Younger kept all their cars.

His smile broadened. Everything upstairs in the old noggin was working for a change. Sleep always brought an improvement in his memory, but this morning he seemed to be particularly lucid, just like in the old days, by God.

Except it wasn't morning yet.

The clock said two, when he looked, and when he glanced toward the window, he could see it was still dark outside, with only the street lamps to cut the gloom.

Darn it. He hated it when he woke up in the middle of the night. Hated to waste his brightest moment on nothing but worrying about how, or if, he was going to get back to sleep.

Forget that, he thought. He had too much to do to waste time or brainpower worrying about anything. He had a
Tarbosaurus
nest to explore, and a whole heck of a lot of rough-cut diamonds to pick out of the nest's plaster jacket.

Diamonds! My God.
That's what he'd been trying to remember. The whole darn nest was encrusted with diamonds, and he was pretty darn sure they were stolen. Why the heck else would they be hidden in the plaster jacket surrounding the fossil? No self-respecting paleontologist would have stuffed diamonds in a fossil's plaster.

Only a smuggler would do that.

Yes, he'd had it all figured out a few days ago, then gotten all rattled again, but if the fossil was a
Tarbosaurus,
then it had come from Mongolia, and there was no shortage of smugglers in Mongolia or over the border in Russia. With the diamond mines of Siberia directly to the north, it wasn't inconceivable that some Russian had decided to export some resources for personal gain. Heck, the whole of Russia was made up of nothing but bandits anymore, with everyone out for themselves and a quick ruble, or better yet, a quick American dollar, if they could get it.

From what he'd seen in the nest, some smart Ivan had been set to make a whole lot of American dollars, or something else equally as lucrative.

Well, the smart Ivan wasn't looking so smart now. He'd been foiled, but good, by the Steele Street boys. All Wilson had to do was get his wrinkled old butt down to the museum and start working on the fossil, digging out those diamonds. Heck. Right when he needed a darn car, he didn't have a darn car.

Regan would just have to take him down to the museum. She was a good girl. She always did what she was told, and the museum was just a couple of miles down the street.

Except Regan wasn't at Steele Street, he remembered. When she'd left earlier in the evening with Quinn, she'd told him she was going to go to the Southern Cross Hotel to stay with Nikki.

Well, darn. He'd just have to wake up the boy, Johnny.

Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, he got up and made quick work of getting dressed. There was nothing like getting a start on the day with all the old cerebral lightbulbs burning bright.

Once dressed, he went looking for the boy. No one answered his knock on the door next to his, but he'd no sooner gotten the door open than a big grin spread across his face. Turning back around, he closed the door behind him. His luck was definitely on the upswing. Only one person on the planet had a mop of purple-and-black hair that stuck up all over, and that mop was peeking out from under the covers in Steele Street's second guest suite.

If his granddaughter Nikki was here, no doubt Regan was, too. She watched her little sister like a hawk.

Chuckling at his good fortune, Wilson hotfooted it down to the next room, and sure enough, when he knocked, Regan called out.

“Come in.”

He opened the door to find her sitting on the side of the bed, still fully clothed and looking as tired as she sounded.

Well, that was no good, but he hadn't spent years getting two teenage girls off to school every morning without learning a few things about motivation.

“Come on. I need you to take me down to the museum, so I . . . uh,
we,
can get to work on that
Tarbosaurus
nest.”

“It's two o'clock in the morning, Grandpa,” she said, blinking owlishly. She looked a little like hell warmed over. If possible, her clothes were even more wrinkled and mussed up than they had been earlier in the evening, and her hair was an out-and-out mess.

“Which doesn't leave us with much time, honey. Come on. We've got to get going.”

“For the
Tarbosaurus
nest,” she said blankly, lifting her head and staring at him from across the room again, as if she didn't quite believe what she'd heard—and implying that if he had half a brain, he wouldn't believe what he'd said, either. “I just got back from the warehouse, and there is no
Tarbosaurus
nest.”

“Not at the warehouse, no,” he explained, frowning. Regan was usually quicker than this. “Johnny and I took it to the museum and put it in your lab before we came to Steele Street tonight. Hawkins was going to have it shipped out with the rest of the bones he's been having me work on these last couple of weeks, but I couldn't let him do it. So come on. We've got work to do, and by God, we've got to get on it.”

Her eyes grew big and round. She blinked and blinked again.

“You stole a stolen fossil and put it in my lab?” She sounded a bit incredulous, and not at all happy, but she'd change her tune once she saw the thing—and all those diamonds.

“Not just a fossil, honey, although a find like that is a miracle in itself, but somebody stuffed the plaster jacket full of crystallized carbon.
Diamonds,
honey! And I think we ought to get them all out of there,” he said, letting his enthusiasm spill over into his smile.

“Diamonds?” she repeated woodenly, going all owlish on him again.

Well, that was his girl all right. Strictly by the book. He let out a sigh. Someday she was just going to have to let herself get a little shook up. She couldn't spend her whole life following the rules. She needed to live a little, have a little adventure—and today was the day.

“A
Tarbosaurus
nest chock-full of diamonds, and we've got to get them out of there. I don't want some cop coming down and confiscating our nest just because it was used to smuggle stolen gems.”

“No,” she said slowly, maybe coming around a little bit. “I guess we wouldn't want that to happen.”

She narrowed her gaze at him, and he narrowed his gaze right back at her.

“Time's a-wasting,” he said carefully.

“Are you sure, Grandpa?” She was looking directly at him, right into his eyes, giving him her own version of the old steely-eyed stare. “Are you sure you took the fossil to the museum, and that the packing was full of diamonds?”

“I know I've given you reason to doubt me lately, but on this I'm absolutely positive.”

Regan sat back a little on the bed, mulling over her grandfather's impossible story. In the end, she decided the story was too impossible not to believe. Well, maybe not the part about the diamonds, but the rest of it, yeah. She believed him. When he smiled like that, and his eyes twinkled, how could she doubt that he knew exactly what he was doing, where he'd been, and what he needed to do?

But diamonds? Where in the world would he have come up with that if there weren't— She stopped in mid-thought, his explanation suddenly making more sense than anything else that had been going on all night.

This was what Roper had been looking for all along, she realized with a start. He didn't want old dinosaur bones.

Roper Jones wanted diamonds.

“Okay, Grandpa,” she conceded, feeling excitement pump into her veins even as she wondered if she, too, was losing a little bit of her mind. “Let's take a run down to the lab.”

It would just be a short trip. Just a little zip down the street and a quick in-and-out into the museum and then back to Steele Street. If he was wrong, there'd be no harm done.

But if he was right—holy cow.

C
HAPTER

24

S
OMETHING WAS WRONG
, Hawkins thought, walking into the back room of the Jack O' Nines, staying well into the shadows. The fit Roper had thrown out at the Lafayette warehouse had been classic Roper Jones: a little theatrics, a little fuck-you-all bullying, and a whole lot of frayed nerves.

But Hawkins didn't like what he was seeing in the Jack. Roper was still as a stone where he sat at his table, nothing moving but his cold blue eyes now and then, and the knife he was flipping in his hand. Roper's main man, Louie Lazano, was nowhere to be seen, and the two trucks full of dinosaur bones were sitting in the alley.

Hawkins checked to see who else was in the room and saw two guys at the bar who had to be the Chicago boys Roper had sicced on Regan McKinney.

Hawkins took a long drag off his cigarette. It had sure taken Vince Branson and Gunnar Linberg a long time to get here from Cisco. They didn't look too happy about having followed their own tracker—the one Quinn had put in with the dinosaur bones—here to the Jack.

They'd been duped, and everybody in the Jack O' Nines knew it—especially Roper.

“Cristo,” Roper called out, and Hawkins swore under his breath.

“Jefe,”
Hawkins responded, calling Roper the boss and walking toward his table.

“Where's Kevin?” Roper caught his knife one more time and simply held it in his hand—ready.

Shit,
Hawkins thought.

“He went to his girlfriend's house, after we checked out the garage.” It was a reasonable lie.

Roper grinned, and it was not a pleasant sight. “He's going to find himself on the street—in pieces—if he doesn't quit fucking around.”

Hawkins shrugged.
“Es una verga.”

“Yes. He's a stupid prick all right, but you're not. What did you find?”

“A couple of leads. Maybe a couple of places where Younger hangs out. I'd like to go and check them—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Roper interrupted, holding up his hand for silence. His gaze had gone to the door.

Louie was entering the room, brushing white dust off his fancy suit, looking angry enough to explode. White dust coated his bald pate, and it didn't take a rocket scientist to know Louie had been in the trucks with the bones—a fact Hawkins found curious as hell. Louie was not a hands-on type of guy.

“Nothing,” Louie said to the unasked question in Roper's eyes, when he reached the table. “We've got
nothing
.” His voice was low and dangerous. Threatening—and that was a helluva new twist, for Louie to threaten Roper. “You lost control over this deal weeks ago, and now we've got nothing. You've blown the whole thing.”

“I didn't blow anything, Louie,” Roper spat back, the knife coming back to life in his hand. “We'll go with what we've got.”

“And that's what I'm telling you. You've got nothing. Nothing but a couple of truckloads of dinosaur bones and plaster dust.”

There was a trick to being invisible, and Hawkins was working it overtime, not moving, barely breathing, listening like hell, but looking off to the side, as if he weren't completely focused on the two men.

“If the Russians fucked up the shipment, that's their problem. Stupid Russians. I'm giving Chicago what we've got, and I'm taking the big fat cut I've earned.”

“All you'll get is all of us killed,” Louie growled back under his breath. “The bones have been missing for two weeks. What do you think, Roper, that Younger wasn't all over them? That he didn't find—”

Louie shut himself up and glanced at Hawkins. With a jerk of his head, he told him to back away.

Hawkins did just that, wandering back toward the pool table, but keeping all his attention focused on Louie and Roper.

Russians and Chicago. Shit. Roper was no more than the middleman in this deal.

At the table, Hawkins turned sideways and managed to hear plenty.

“The boss in Chicago didn't set you up out here to make this kind of mistake,” Louie growled. “You were supposed to broker a deal, Roper, a real simple deal. The Chicago bosses send you the Pentagon's guns, and the Russians send you the payoff. All you had to do was get those two things to line up in Denver. The Russians get their fancy new guns to sell to all their Middle Eastern friends, and Chicago gets rich. But you blew it, you idiot. You blew it.”

Roper leveled Louie a killing look. “Screw you,” he said, not bothering to keep his voice low. “I'm tired of being in the middle of these guys. I don't care who owed who a favor.” He was getting a little white around the gills, maybe going into berserk mode, which, having seen it more than once, Hawkins wasn't looking forward to seeing again. People got hurt when Roper went berserk.

Louie leaned in close to whisper in Roper's ear, and Roper flushed.

“Yeah,” Roper said, agreeing with whatever Louie had just said, suddenly sounding calmer. “Yeah, you're a real smart guy, Louie, real smart. That's probably exactly what happened.” In one fierce, vicious move, he rose to his feet and struck, burying his knife into Louie's abdomen up to the hilt. “Real smart, and real dead.”

Louie let out a strangled gasp of agony, grabbing the knife, but Roper didn't let him have it. He twisted the blade in deeper, and Louie fell to his knees, with Roper crouching in front of him, still holding in the knife.

Holy shit,
Hawkins thought, inadvertently taking a step back.

“Don't ever threaten me, Louie. Not ever.” Roper looked up at two of his men who had been watching him and nodded toward the bar. Before Vince Branson and Gunnar Linberg even knew what was coming, Roper's guys leveled their guns and shot the two Chicago men—clean hits.

Fuck
. His heart racing, Hawkins did a quick scan of the room. Every guy in the Jack was frozen in place. No one had seen a triple homicide coming down the pike.

Hawkins let out a slow breath, trying to keep his heart from pounding out of his chest, and told himself it might be time to be looking for a new line of work. This sucked, big-time.

“Danny, Brad, grab your crews. You're going with me,” Roper called out. “I've got a stop I need to make. The rest of you, clean up this mess, then get your asses out to the hangar.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Hawkins saw four guys bend down and drag Branson and Linberg toward the back door.

“Cristo,” Roper said.

Fuck.

“Jefe.”
He strolled across the room.

“Go get this Younger asshole for me. Check out those places you found and bring him out to the Avatrix hangar at the old Stapleton Airport. I'll meet you there. If he stole from me, I'm gonna turn him into beef jerky. If you don't find him, I'm gonna turn
you
into beef jerky.”

Great. That was just the sort of incentive he and Quinn liked—the fucking beef jerky threat.

R
EGAN
had been in the museum at night many times over the years, helping to host fund-raisers, chaperoning the yearly Dinosaur Campout, and often just working extra hours to get a job done, or to get a time-sensitive piece ready for shipping or display. She'd never once felt nervous. Never. Until tonight.

Her hand shook as she tried to fit the key into the lab door. She'd had the same trouble with the keypad on the outside door, fumbling the code twice, before Wilson had just taken over and gotten them inside.

She'd had less trouble getting Betty out of Steele Street. Johnny had been pretty skeptical about helping them, but he'd also been half asleep and no match for two very insistent adults used to being in charge.

When she finally got the door open, she hit the bank of switches on the wall and flooded the lab with light. For the last few weeks, she'd been working in the glassed-in lab where the public filed by and could watch the preparators at work. She and everyone else were always careful to make sure any displayed work in progress was labeled for easy identification—but she'd be damned if she knew what to call the fossil now commandeering the middle of her worktable—“Possible
Tarbosaurus
nest stolen by my grandfather from a man who stole it from a criminal who stole it from somebody else who stuffed it full of stolen diamonds, but please don't call the cops” seemed a bit wordy.

But, oh, God, what if it really was a
Tarbosaurus
nest? And what if it really was stuffed with diamonds?

“Ah, yes. Right where I left it.” Wilson chuckled and went straight over to the rocklike fossil lying on the table. The chunk of stone and plaster, and hopefully, fossilized eggshells and bones, was about four feet wide and three feet across, and despite the danger it represented, it beckoned to her.

But Regan found herself hesitating. It occurred to her that getting her fingerprints all over the damn thing might not be in her best interest. But then, she hadn't stolen it; she was retrieving it. She doubted if Steele Street would press charges against Wilson, either, considering how they'd gotten themselves into this mess by hiring him in the first place.

Somewhat reassured by her train of logic, she finally let a measure of her excitement seep through, and seep through it did, making her fingers tingle with anticipation. As far as she knew, this was the first Cretaceous carnivore nest ever discovered. It was certainly the first she'd ever gotten her hands on.

Wilson was well into removing the hastily reassembled plaster jacket he'd put on the fossil, before she allowed herself to get in on the action. The two of them had always been a team while Regan was growing up, and they easily fell back into the familiar rhythms of working closely together.

As they pulled the plaster away, the fossil inside appeared, including what appeared to be eggs, two broken open and one still intact. Regan wanted nothing more than to work on those eggs, to scrape away at the surrounding stone and free them, to check for embryonic skeletons and the bones of prey that might have been left in the nest.

Then Wilson pulled out the first diamond, and then the second and on to the third, until he quickly had a pile of ten. Good God. It was just like he'd said. The whole jacket was full of diamonds, hundreds of them. Regan could hardly believe her eyes.

Most were no bigger than marbles, some much bigger, each one looking more like colorless glass than a potential brilliant cut. Some were still embedded in a matrix of kimberlite. Some were round, others more squared off, some triangular, all of them together worth a fortune, a bloody fortune.

My God,
she thought, picking out another diamond and putting it in a small canvas bag Wilson had gotten out of one of the lab's cupboards. Nothing about working on fossils went quickly, not even a diamond harvest. For her, and for Wilson, too, the greater treasure was underneath the plaster and the gemstones, the nest with the fossilized eggs. Years of study would go into the nest—along with a fair amount of glory.

Visions of
National Geographic
and
Smithsonian
flashed through her brain. Maybe even a television documentary.

As they worked, Regan found herself finally relaxing into a controlled state of excitement. This is what she did. This was her life, the quiet confines of the paleontology lab, bones millions of years old fossilized into stone, and mysteries to be unfolded from the rock—and this time, diamonds.
My God.

She loved the work. It kept her life on a smooth track. There were surprises, delights, and epiphanies aplenty even in her normal working day, but they all came at a slow, manageable pace. Absolutely nothing happened at a hundred and twenty miles per hour. It was contemplative work not given to startling or heart-stopping moments of terror.

Except . . .

She held herself suddenly still, catching a movement in the darkened museum out of the corner of her eye. The hair on the nape of her neck slowly rose, sending a purely fear-induced bolt of panic down the length of her spine.

Something was out there.

Or someone.

Wilson chatted obliviously along beside her, giving her an unnecessary lecture on rough-cut diamonds concurrent with a recap of Jack Horner's famous discovery of hadrosaur nests in Montana, and the naming of the genus
Maiasaura,
“good mother lizard.”

Good mother lizard, indeed. If someone had broken in to the museum, why weren't alarms sounding all over the place? And if it was a guard, why was he lurking about in the dark? Or was the whole thing just her imagination?

She was too scared to go over and simply look out the window. Something was telling her not to give away her hand like that.

She glanced at the phone on the desk in the corner next to the lab door. Taking a deep breath, she started over. It was well past time when she should have called Quinn. She'd made the mistake of allowing herself to get sidetracked by the nest, letting her excitement override her common sense.

Her legs felt stiff as she walked, a dead giveaway, she was sure, if someone was actually watching, not only for where she was headed and why, but that she was scared senseless.

On the other hand, she tried to reassure herself, what—or who—could possibly be out in the museum? She was probably being ridiculously silly, just jumping at shadows, because the whole day had been nothing but one momentous, life-altering event after another, and at some point a girl just had to yell “uncle.”