Crazy Wild (12 page)

C
HAPTER

11

F
OUR MINUTES LATER,
after searching the rest of the apartment and half of her dresser, Creed got to her bottom drawer. He no sooner opened it up than a low whistle left his lips. The not-so-blonde bimbo had the days of the week embroidered on her underwear, and if Creed said so himself, Tuesday looked especially fine.

She also had some money tucked into the corner of the drawer. He picked up the small bundle and let it flip, bill by bill, off his thumb—five hundred dollars, five crisp one-hundred-dollar bills stacked in a neat pile and held together with a green paper clip.

He pocketed the money before picking up Tuesday's scrap of white lace and pink rosebuds and lifting it into the light. It was definitely some juvenile sexual fantasy he should have outgrown that made the pristine, virginal pair an instant favorite. Friday, he noticed, was black silk with a single, strategically placed red heart—pure Dominika. Sunday was baby blue with embroidered daisies—Cody Stark. Thursday got all bad-girl again: hot see-through red with a black lace trim and a matching push-up bra.

Her entire wardrobe was like that: half punk-rock raver and half pure Bible Belt librarian. He knew because he'd been through the whole thing, from her closet to her dresser, to the suitcase he'd found under the bed, and besides the five hundred dollars in the dresser, he'd found the equivalent of another five hundred dollars in Euros inside the suitcase. There hadn't been any cash in the cardboard box she'd pulled out, but he'd checked the mailing label and noticed she'd insured it, had it sent General Delivery to Denver from Dresden, and signed for it today.

A thousand dollars, all of it in his pocket, because where she was going, she was going to need it, probably sooner rather than later. Confiscating her cash before the CIA hauled her off was the least he could do. Money could grease a few wheels in Leavenworth just like it did everywhere else.

What he hadn't found was a map, or a computer disk, or jump drive, or any kind of electronic storage device, which didn't mean they weren't there.

The sound of the water being turned on again in the bathroom made him pause. He lifted his head, listening. After a few more seconds he heard her rustling through her medicine cabinet—again. She'd flushed twice, which didn't surprise him. With all she'd been through tonight, her stomach was probably feeling a little weak.

He checked his watch. She'd been in the bathroom for almost six minutes now, a busy six minutes. He'd looked the bathroom over again before he'd let her go in alone, and the place was secure, a typical low-end bathroom in a low-end studio apartment: a single-piece shower/tub enclosure with a curtain, a commode, a sink with a cabinet underneath, a medicine cabinet above the sink, and a towel bar with some silky black fishnet stuff hanging off of it that had definitely caught his attention.

He went back to searching through her lingerie and enjoying it just a little too much. The woman had nice underwear, a nice stash of cash, and was living in a dump in a construction zone. When she'd said they were remodeling North Morrison, she'd meant daily, and from what he'd seen the job would last well into spring. They'd had to hike the four flights up and make their way around construction supplies on every floor.

Driving the few miles to her place had given him a chance to clear his head. He didn't know what he'd been thinking. He wasn't going to get laid tonight. Far from it. He was going to do his job and take her to headquarters. In his line of work, only an idiot would sleep with a black-market arms dealer—and there weren't any idiots in his line of work. Faulty judgment killed them off long before they got into Spec Ops.

So what was he doing with Tuesday's panties in his hand?

Nothing, he assured himself. Absolutely nothing. She was his wake-up call. That's all. He'd been hiding out under Mercy's hood for two weeks, but now he was back on the job, and it was time to come clean.

It was time to tell the truth.

Kid knew what had happened to J.T. Creed had told him everything—and Kid hadn't come home. Creed didn't know if he ever would. Apparently there was a girl, Nikki McKinney, an artist up in Boulder Kid had left behind. He'd talked about her damn near nonstop, but Creed didn't know if she was enough to pull Kid free of the bad places he'd been, of the bad things he'd done.

Ghost killers,
los asesinos fantasmas,
they'd all made names for themselves in South America, but especially Kid, and Creed felt guilty as hell about that, too.

The toilet flushed again—and every warning bell in his head instantly went off.
Shit!
He whirled on his feet and ran across the room. It was a fucking pattern—turn on the water, rustle through the medicine cabinet, flush the toilet. He didn't even bother to knock. He gave the door a roundhouse kick right next to the jamb at the lock plate. Everything splintered, and his foot almost went through the goddamned wall.

He jerked the door open on the tiny room—and it was empty. Totally fucking empty. Nobody there.
Nada
.

But she hadn't disappeared into thin air. He jerked the shower curtain off its rod. Nothing. Then he did a full 360. The silky fishnet stuff was missing from the towel bar, and there was about half a ton of makeup upended in the sink—bottles, tiny boxes, tubes, and a hundred, oh, hell,
two
hundred pencils of every color known to man, four or five kinds of hair spray and colored gel—all of it smelling overly sweet and flowery. There wasn't so much as a scuff mark anywhere, but she hadn't dematerialized and then rematerialized on the other side of one of these frickin' walls or through the ceiling.

That left the sink cabinet. Crouching down, he opened the small door. Nothing but three rolls of toilet paper and a box of tampons—he opened it up—with a tape player tucked inside.

Hell.
She'd chumped him good, but she hadn't slid down any pipes or gone through the heat vent.

He ran his hand across the back wall of the cabinet, and sure enough, felt a tiny notch.

He was so fucked.

Using the tips of his fingers, he pried the panel loose.

Son of a bitch.
There was a goddamned good reason she'd chosen an apartment on the fourth floor of a building where the elevators didn't work—because half of the fourth floor had been gutted. Behind the walls of her apartment was a no-man's-land—
and so it's down the fricking rabbit hole.

Squeezing himself into the cabinet, he started inching his way around the pipes and through the too-damn-small-to-make-this-easy opening. It was pitch-dark on the other side of the wall, but he didn't give a damn. The scariest thing in the dark was
always
him.

RIGHT
along here somewhere,
Cody thought, shining her penlight on the floor, following a board. Then she saw it, a splotch of yellow paint.

Four boards south.
She swept her light to the left and knelt on the floor. In seconds she had five hundred dollars in her coat pocket, getaway money to go with the two thousand in Euros she'd taken out of the cardboard box under the bed as she'd given him the photo album. She had another thousand in dollars and Euros squirreled away in her apartment, but if Creed Rivera was even only half as good as she thought he was, she could write that money off as lost, probably to Angelina's upkeep. Thank God she'd learned not to keep all her eggs in one basket. Twenty-five hundred wasn't much, but it was enough to get her out of town.

Sergei hadn't been a generous jailer, though he hadn't physically mistreated her either. But money had flowed like water at all of the bars and restaurants where he'd taken her to show her off, his little Dominika, his insurance policy, and the parties had always gotten out of hand—the booze, the drugs, the heat, the whores, the music. Sergei had wanted to make sure people saw her, and she'd made a point of picking up cash wherever she'd found it, off the tables and out of the pockets of men too drunk to notice. It had been Sergei's idea to dye her waist-length hair platinum blond. Turning her into a blond Russian bombshell, he'd said, but somehow, in Russian, the name had gotten twisted into the Blonde with the Bomb, which had suited Sergei just fine. He'd liked having her near him, like a pet.

She'd known her looks hadn't hurt, and she'd played them up to the max, seriously doubting that her father was going to come to her rescue. The minute he'd left Sergei's mansion, after making a touching good-bye with the slim volume of poetry, she'd known she was on her own. Sink or swim.

She hadn't figured her father was going to fare much better. After more than a decade of decadent living, however charming, urbane, and highly educated he was, she wouldn't have bet anything on his memory or him being able to even survive a trip into the wilds of the old Soviet frontier, let alone find anything there—and she'd been proven right.

Heart attack. Complete and total cardiac arrest had hit him in the mountains of Tajikistan.

God help her, she'd broken every law in the book since escaping Sergei's clutches—forged documents, illegal border crossings, out-and-out theft—and she'd known her freedom would be hard to hold.

But she was close again, so close she could almost hear it, almost feel it.

Staying very still, she switched off her penlight, and even in the dark, closed her eyes.

Yes . . . yes . . . yes
. It was there,
thank God,
the distant pulse of freedom, the driving force of it, the chaos barely discernible beneath the beat.

South Morrison
had
been condemned—and like any condemned place, it attracted the wild restless creatures of the night in hordes. In those places, with those people, Dominika Starkova ruled. She'd “been there, done that” with the world's wildest party crowd—the Russian Mafia on the move across Europe, east and west.

Saturday nights at South Morrison meant crystal meth and skullcaps, ketamine and kamikazes, latex and leather, and industrial-strength garage bands blowing each other out of the basement. All she had to do was get there. Out of the six or seven hundred people who always showed up at the underground party, she wouldn't have any trouble talking one of them into giving her a ride back to her car—and then she was gone and Denver was just a mistake she'd survived.

Flicking her penlight back on, she quickly made her way to the back stairs and started down to the street.

CODY
Stark's bathroom emptied out into the rubble and remains of another bathroom, and as soon as Creed left it, he lost the light from the hole. Wherever the hell he was now, he couldn't see his hand in front of his face, but he had it out there anyway, just in case the demolition crew had left another wall standing. In the Spec Ops community, they had a name for this kind of dark:
fucking
dark.

There had to be another door somewhere, or a window.

Since he couldn't see, he was following his nose. In her six and a half minutes of private bathroom time—a mistake he would
never
make again, a mistake Dylan never would have made in the first place, female prisoner or not—she must have put on enough makeup and hair spray to sink a battleship. He could smell it, the same overly sweet flowery scent from her bathroom. The question, of course, was why would a woman on the run take the time to fix her hair?

Did the King Kong boyfriend really exist? And was he scheduled to pick her up tonight? She'd still been dressed in her homeless-boy getup, unless . . . unless,
geezus,
that silky fishnet thing had been an outfit.

Now why in the hell would a person wear fishnet on the coldest freaking night of the year?

Then he heard it.

No. He felt it, the faint
thump, thump, thump-thump . . . thump, thump, thump-thump
of either the HVAC system getting damned creative—or of an electric bass running through an amp big enough to knock a couple hundred skinny kids on their asses. The hum of her refrigerator and the running of the building's furnace had been enough to drown it out in her apartment, but in no-man's-land, the sound was nearly tangible.

A shift in the rhythm and a crude riff put his money solidly on the bass. There wasn't an HVAC system in the world capable of generating a backbeat.

Suddenly, her escape plan was clear. The Prague party princess was back in business on Platte Street. All he had to do was find the party and he'd find the girl, and he damn well better find the party fast, or the girl was going to be gone.

He couldn't allow that to happen, and yes, it was personal. Damn personal.

On his next step, his boot came up against something solid. He reached out with his hand and found a wall.
Thank you, Lord.

Following it along, he was able to pick up his pace, and twenty steps farther on he came across a door. As soon as he opened it, he realized he'd been in a hallway for the last two minutes. Now he was home free, in a cavernous room with enough light coming through the windows to prove that she was long gone.