Crazy Wild (26 page)

“Do you have the exact location?”

And oh, hallelujah, she nodded her head. “It's in a book of poetry my father gave me.”

“And where's the book?”

His question hit a wall of silence, a solid brick wall of silence.

“Cody?” She couldn't clam up now. “Come on. You've got to tell me.”

Or not.

“No,” she said, her voice distressed. “O'Connell was killed for knowing about all this.”

And everything O'Connell had known should have been in the intelligence reports, but a couple of big pieces were missing out of those reports.

“You told him about your father? About the book?”

“Yes.”

Damn CIA. They'd probably considered those two huge facts proprietary information and given them to their own guys, but not to anybody else. It was one way to keep people from trampling all over an investigation, but it made it damn hard on other people who were out there in the field, people like SDF.

It looked like SDF was going to ace them out anyway—maybe. He decided to go back around to the beginning.

“What else can you tell me about Sergei Patrushev?”

“He's rich, obscenely wealthy, but you probably already know that, and he likes to party. There's always a crowd with Sergei.”

“Which included you, most of the time.” It wasn't a question. She'd been seen everywhere these last few months.

“He liked to keep me with him. I was a valuable commodity.”

He'd seen her in the little silver dress. He knew exactly why she'd been so valuable, and it hadn't all been about the warhead. If she hadn't been an asset on the party scene and with the buyers, Sergei would have kept her under wraps.

“As dumb as it sounds, in pretty short order, I was the most famous party girl in the Czech Republic, even made it into a few magazines, quite a few, actually.”

“So does this mean we can look forward to an accidentally released Dominika Starkova video sex tape showing up on the Internet?”

To his amazement, her smile faded and a wash of color came into her cheeks.

Whoa.
Some of the air went out of him. He'd only been teasing her.

“Cody?” This he had to know.

“No,” she said. “There's no sex tape.”

“But there's something.”

“No. Nothing.” She shifted her gaze to the computer screen and took hold of the mouse.

“You're the worst liar I have ever seen.”

There was something, all right. Something he wasn't going to like. He could tell, because without even knowing, he wanted to hit something, like the desk, or the wall, or probably some guy, because her “nothing” did not sound like a simple ex-lover, sex tape or no sex tape.

“What kind of nothing?” he pressed a little harder.

“How about a none-of-your-business nothing.” She wiggled the mouse around, avoiding his eyes.

“How about an I'm-making-it-my-business nothing. And if you were wondering, this counts as fight number two. Dish it up, babe.”

She met his gaze with a much maligned sigh. “You're being . . . being—”

“Proprietary?” He helped her out. “We made love, Cody. That makes you mine for as long as I can hold you, even if it's only for tonight. Territorial? Damn straight. Ridiculous? No. Vengeful? In a heartbeat, if someone has hurt you.”

“How about nosey?”

“Definitely. I need to know everything about you, for your sake. For mine.”

“
Oh.
Oh, I see.” Her expression instantly changed.

She'd just had an epiphany. He didn't know what the hell about, but he knew an epiphany when he saw one.

“Of course, well,” she continued. “I haven't . . . well, so I didn't, but, well—”

He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, watching her, fascinated. He'd said something to make her blush, and he couldn't wait to figure out what exactly that had been. His “getting to know everything about you” line had been pretty straightforward since they'd left the loft.

“Well.” She let out a breath, as if steeling herself. “To begin with, there was this boy, very sweet, but it was his first time, too, and we weren't together that long.”

Oh, wow. She was going to give him her sexual history, literally from the beginning. No one had ever done that before. He sat back in his chair, completely nonplussed. He usually didn't do this scene at all. He was usually careful enough that he didn't have to do this scene. Yeah, he definitely wanted to know what had put that look on her face when he'd joked about the sex tape. Something had happened to her, something sexual that had made her very uncomfortable, and he needed to know what that had been, for her sake, for his sake, just like he'd said—but this litany-of-old-lovers thing. He wasn't going to stop her, because the more she talked, the more he learned, and that was his job, but God, she was actually starting from the beginning.

“And then there was another boy, but again, nothing to worry about there, and then I was engaged to Alex for four years. He was a professor of cultural anthropology.”

Okay. They'd just covered a whole lot of ground without much action, and nothing sounded too freakin' bizarre yet, unless the anthropology thing was going to include the sexual initiation rites of some obscure Bohemian hill tribe in which the professor had forced her to participate. That would be bizarre.

“We broke off just before I went to Prague to visit my father.” She gave him a quick glance.

Okay. Things happened. Guys left, and he couldn't say he was anything but damn glad that the fiancé had split.

“So what about you?” she asked, and he felt a little something shift and quake inside him.

“Seven,” he said, and that was all he was going to say. He'd read somewhere that seven was a workable number of ex-lovers to admit to having—not too wild, not too tame.

Seven, and he was sticking to it.

“Seven?”

“Seven.” He wasn't going to go into this, ever. He was not a kiss-and-tell kind of guy. Problems he'd had with relationships were fair game, but not the sex.

“So what happened after Alex?” Who he was guessing was the dumb guy who didn't like going down on girls.

“I was alone after Alex, and after a few months, I went to Prague.”

And before Prague, had what? Jumped a girlfriend? He could live with that, even if it was going to give him crazy ideas which a smart guy would just keep to himself.

“Of course, in Prague everybody thought I was sleeping with everybody except them. It's just what people think at these parties, and . . . um . . . one guy in particular really had a problem with that, and with me always turning him down.”

Okay. Now they were getting somewhere. This was not going to be one of those stories with a kinky, but basically harmless ending. He took a breath and shifted in his chair.

“Who was it?”

“I don't think the name is important, it's just—”

“It is,” he said. Damned important.

“Creed.” More color washed into her cheeks, which simply fascinated him. She had the softest skin, and if some bastard had hurt her, he was going to have to work damn hard not to hunt him down. He was an operator, not a vigilante—and he needed to keep reminding himself of that. Still, he wanted the name.

“Yes?” he said, when after a few more seconds she didn't go on. What? She thought she could stop now?

“I'm sorry.” She made a small dismissive gesture with her hand. “I shouldn't have brought it up. It doesn't matter.”

Wait a minute. It did matter.

“You didn't bring it up. I did, and you need to tell me what happened.” She could not leave him hanging like this. “If you were hurt, I need to know.” It was a rule somewhere, in the good-guy handbook.

“I wasn't hurt, not like you mean, so it . . . it isn't anything you need to worry about. It wasn't rape.”

The pencil snapped clean in half in his hand.

Well, he was really fucking glad to hear that.

He tossed the broken pieces of the pencil onto the desk and forced himself to take a breath.

“I'm sorry about forgetting to use a condom with you, but I didn't have one,” she said, coming way out of left field again and pretty much blindsiding him.

“That's my line. All the way.” And he meant it. He should have been more responsible. But they needed to get back to this guy, and this “wasn't rape” thing. What the hell did that mean?

“You don't need to worry. That man used a condom. Actually, he used two, because he was so sure I was sleeping around.”

Geezus
.

The color in her cheeks wasn't because of embarrassment about her sexual history. It wasn't embarrassment at all. It was pure distress about this guy and whatever he'd done to her, which she
was
going to tell him.

“Why wasn't it rape, Cody?” He had a pretty strict interpretation of the crime, and it came down to one thing: If a woman didn't want you, you needed to back off and rethink your plan.

“Because I didn't say no.” She did her best to meet his gaze, but only about half succeeded, which made him feel badly for her. “It was that night, at Karlovy Vary, and it was all so surreal—but I still could have said no, and I didn't.”

The breath went out of him again. Karlovy Vary. He had an all-too-clear picture of what it had been like in the warehouse that night, and surreal probably didn't quite cover it.

“Did he threaten you?”

She shrugged. “With this man, every move he makes is a threat, every word he speaks. It's the way he is.”

“Patrushev?”

She shook her head. “Sergei doesn't feel that way about me, not at all. He likes a different type of woman.”

Okay. He was done. He knew who it was. He could see the whole thing, from start to finish, including the two condoms. It didn't take a genius to figure out how violence turned into sex, or to understand how easy it was to take advantage of a terrified, confused woman who couldn't figure out how to say no while someone was forcing themselves on her—not after what she'd just seen.

And the look on her face when he'd teased her about the sex tape? That had been pure shame.

“Without full consent, you don't have a mortal sin,” he said.

Her gaze lifted to his from where she was perched on the edge of her chair.

“It's a very big deal, the full consent, and without it, you don't have a mortal sin. You can work this one off.”

“But I'm not Catholic.”

He lifted off the leather thong with his saint's medal and crucifix and slipped it over her head. “Now you are.”

“I don't think it's this easy.”

“Sure it is.” He took her hands in his. “Repeat after me: Hail, Mary, full of grace; the Lord is with thee . . .”

C
HAPTER

27

S
KEETER WAS SO
damn close to those earrings, she could almost taste them. Her tracking device had red-lined, and she was standing right in front of a steam pipe that was coming straight out of the ceiling—probably all the way from the fifth floor, if her luck held.

Luck. Right. She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. She was sweating. In a basement where there were icicles hanging from the ceiling, she was sweating.

She wasn't running on luck. She'd pushed her luck right over the edge and into a bottomless abyss. Every warning bell she had was clanging so loud in her head, the only way she could hear herself think was to focus on the earrings.

Get them and
go
—that was the message she was getting, but there was one slight problem. She was standing on tiptoe and holding the tracker as high above her head as she could get it, but there just happened to be an elbow in the pipe just past where she could see through the hole in the ceiling—which meant she had to get up there and take apart the pipe at the elbow. The earrings, if her tracker was as good as she thought it was, would be lying in the bottom of the turn.

She flashed her light around on the floor, until she found a few wooden crates piled up against the wall. The first one she moved set loose a flurry of rats. She danced around them a bit, and they scurried over her boots, and thankfully, disappeared back into the shadows. She didn't like rats, but she wasn't going to scream about them. She used to scream for rat encounters, but living on the street, it hadn't taken her long to figure out screaming scared her a whole lot more than it scared the rats.

Taking hold of the first crate, she dragged it over to the pipe, then hauled a second one over to set on top—which should just about do it.

Now all she had to do was get on the crates, shimmy up the pipe a little, find a place to set her flashlight so she could see what she was doing, and somehow take apart a corroded pipe that was probably four times older than she was.

Piece of cake.

That's why she traveled with a tool belt.

It took some doing, and about twenty minutes of banging away and wiring up her flashlight, twenty minutes of bracing herself against the subfloor and hoping her right foot didn't slip off the crate or her left leg come off from around the pipe, but finally, finally, the damn thing was coming apart. She didn't carry a big old pipe wrench on her belt. Who would? So she'd had to make do, but making do was what all gear heads did.

Jerking and tugging, and being damn thankful for every pound of weight she'd ever pressed, she managed to get the pipe to turn enough that she could shine her flashlight down inside.

Ho-lee mo-lee
. There they were: two shiny, sparkling, gem-encrusted crosses, each one no bigger than her pinkie fingernail. She reached down inside, caught them up in her hand, and was just giving herself a mental high five, when she felt the cold bore of a gun press against the small of her back.

The next sensation was equally ominous: Someone took her gun. She felt the lift of the weight, the slide of someone's hand, and the cold wave of dread that washed down her spine.

THERE
was a bedroom in the office. As a matter of fact, there were three very elegant suites set up to accommodate overnight guests—but Creed wasn't going there. He was manning his post, and kissing Cody Stark, and trying to decide if he really had it in him to do it one more time.

Yeah. Sure he did, but this sort of half-arousal thing they had working, with her in his lap and his hands under her clothes and her mouth all over his face, nibbling on his ears, kissing him back—hell, it was great, kind of a long, slow hum where a guy could just float and really explore her body. Her breasts were so soft and full, not big, just full, her skin so silky. There was nothing on a guy's body that felt like breasts, and the way she was straddling him on the chair gave him full access to her amazingly curved tush—but he was showing a little caution there. If he got too far down her pants, his slow hum was going to turn into a John Frusciante riff and they'd be deep into achingly hot and sweet sex in a heartbeat.

Which maybe wasn't such a bad idea after all.

He'd no sooner had the thought, though, than the Humvee screen blipped on. Cody was kissing his neck, and he watched over her shoulder as a white-and-yellow-striped line undulated across a green skin.

“Hold on, babe,” he said, kissing her cheek and wrapping his arm around her waist as he leaned forward to pick up the phone.

A couple of button pushes got him Dylan.

“Is that you at the Humvee?”

“Yes,” Dylan said, not sounding any too happy about it.

“South Morrison?”

“Roger that.”

Skeeter's ass was grass.

“Any sign of her?”

“No. I'm going in. What do you think? Start in the basement?”

“'Fraid so, boss. Go straight through the party. There's a stairwell behind the stage, and the rest of the building lays out from there. You'll be looking for a boiler.” The boss was the least mechanical of the lot of them. “Do you even know what a boiler looks like, Dylan?” Creed really had his doubts.

The boss's “Fuck you” cleared up some of his doubts, but not all of them. Dylan could scam his way through anything—but being a great con artist was not going to find him the boiler room.

“She hasn't turned on her cell phone, has she?”

“No, sir.” Not bloody likely. The girl didn't want to be found out. She'd thought she could pull a fast one over at South Morrison and not get caught.

“If she should decide to call, tell her to—”

“Wait,” Creed said, leaning forward and clicking the mouse to bring up another screen. “She's on. Do you want to make the call or—”

The decision was made for them when Creed's cell phone rang.

“Hold on, Dylan. I've got an incoming,” he said, pulling his cell phone out of his pants pocket. “It's her.”

Except it wasn't her. When he answered, he got a man's voice with a German accent.

“We've got your girl, your Skeeter Bang. If you want her back, you'll bring us Dominika Starkova.”

Oh, Baby Bang, you've done it this time,
Creed thought, and felt his expression go from fucking grim to frightfully fucking grim in the course of a couple of seconds. He glanced up at Cody once, then focused his attention back on the call.

“You've got an hour,” the voice said. “Call then and I'll give you directions to the drop.”

The phone went dead, and Creed instantly went back to the land line.

“They've got her, Dylan,” he said, his voice tight. “But they're willing to make a trade. It's a pretty straightforward deal—Dominika Starkova for the punk rock girl.”

Geezus.

“Did you get a lock on the phone?” Dylan asked.

“Yes.” He zoomed in on the computer screen, pulling up a map of the city. “It's on the north side. Up in Commerce City. West of Colorado Boulevard.”

“Ten-oh-eight Robinson,” Dylan said.

“Definitely Robinson, and I'll take your word on the ten-oh-eight.” Creed was impressed. “How did you know?”

“Skeeter found a paper trail for one of Bruno Walmann's business cards. It ended up at a warehouse in north Denver.”

Dylan's photographic memory would have done the rest.

“How do you want to do this?” They weren't going to give them Cody, Creed knew that, but there was no way in hell they were going to let them keep Skeeter.

“Full-court press. I'm calling Royce and Lieutenant Loretta. With dead foreigners showing up all over the city, everybody's on edge. When everyone is in position, I'll move inside, and we'll roll the circus straight down their throat.”

Creed couldn't fault the plan, except for him not being part of it, but his priority tonight, his only priority, had been and still was to capture, detain, and protect Cordelia Stark. The whole “circus” idea would work. There was nothing like a hastily cobbled together interagency task force to create a diversion the size of Chicago. Inside the ensuing chaos, Dylan would be invisible. Skeeter hadn't nicknamed him “the Shadow” for nothing. Nobody moved with more stealth when the situation required it, and he'd have Skeeter on his side. The girl was far from helpless.

Superman had made damn sure of that.

SKEETER
had been in worse places. The old flophouse up on Wazee had been a lot worse than this tidy little warehouse on the north side, but the company on Wazee had been better. A couple of these guys were major freakazoids, especially the one named Reinhard Klein. The gorilla-looking dude had to be what was left of the Braun twins, but he didn't worry her too much. Big dumb muscle wasn't dangerous unless it got ahold of you. Not that she wouldn't be pretty damn easy to get ahold of right now. She was tied to a chair . . . for the moment.

She was scared, but functioning. This wasn't the first tight spot she'd ever been in. Nobody was insanely drunk or threatening to kill her. They would, if they thought it was to their advantage. She knew it. She wasn't stupid—or at least she hadn't been until she'd just had to go after those earrings.

She really needed to reorganize her priority list. Electronic gear, however attractive, was not worth her life. That was her new mantra: no dying for battery-operated devices. She needed to learn it and remember it.

That said, she had managed to slip the earrings into her pants pocket before they'd hauled her out of South Morrison, which was enough to make a girl wonder just how well she was learning tonight's little life lesson. But if push came to shove, she was ready to hand them over, so help her God.

As it was, she didn't think these tangos even knew she had the earrings.

Tangos, terrorists—yes, she was operating in real SDF territory now, even if this group didn't fit the hardened, moth-eaten picture she'd always had of terrorists. Almost everyone here tonight was in a suit. Freakin' three pieces on old Reinhard, with his slicked-back black hair and his cashmere overcoat. Definitely not the picture she'd had in mind.

Then there were the two MIBs, the Men in Black, except one of them was a woman. They all but screamed “cops,” except they were better dressed. They had the look, though, and the attitude, the deliberate calm, the steady, modulated voices. Bruno Walmann was brooding; the Braun boy was almost catatonic; Klein was moving and shaking, the power player; and the two MIBs were in control. If one of them actually did scream something, she was diving out of her chair, because something would
definitely
be coming down.

Reinhard stopped his pacing in front of her, for about the hundredth time, with his crotch right in her face. The rats in South Morrison had nothing on this guy in the creep department. He'd taken her hat and her sunglasses, which meant she was looking her worst, but that hadn't kept him from fixating on her.

He lifted her ponytail in his manicured hand. “For a moment, in the basement, I thought you were Dominika.”

Her hair slid through his fingers, and all she could think was “double wash, double rinse.”

“But you've been ruined. No,
liebling?
” He trailed a finger down her scar. “Too bad.”

Ruined was what he said, but all the signals she was getting said she hadn't been ruined enough to turn him off. Hawkins had taught her how to work a situation like this to her advantage. It was kind of gross, but geez, he'd even made her come on to him, and if she could kissy-face flirt with Superman, who was practically her
dad,
then she could do it with gross old Reinhard.

Here goes,
she thought, and lowered her gaze to his crotch. If this worked, she was going to lose all respect for men.

He chuckled, and ran his finger down her cheek. “How old are you? Fifteen?”

“And a half,” she said, lifting her gaze back to his.

He liked that. He liked it a lot. She could tell.

Pervert.

But she could live with that, especially if it got her untied and alone in a room with him.

Her cell phone rang, and Bruno flipped it open. She had to grin. Somebody at SDF headquarters was marking her position every time Bruno got on the phone. Somebody else would already be on their way—and that thought was enough to wipe the grin off her face.

Man, she hoped it was Creed. She didn't want to have to face Dylan for a while. If she got out of this in one piece, he was going to skin her alive and nail her hide to the garage wall.

“Herr Klein, they are ready to deliver at a location of our choice.”

“Perfect,” Reinhard said. “Tell them we'll call them back in thirty minutes and tell them where to meet us.”

Something told Skeeter it was going to be a long thirty minutes for her. Behind her back, she carefully slipped her needle-nosed pliers back into her tool belt. By her estimation, she'd gotten about halfway through the rope they'd used to tie her up. Maybe far enough to break it, but she hoped not far enough for anyone to notice.

They'd taken her gun in South Morrison, but not her tool belt—which had really made her wonder just how much these guys knew about tools—and because they hadn't taken her tool belt, they'd missed her switchblade underneath.