Crazy Hot (11 page)

Quinn's motto before that summer had been: If a man could afford a Porsche, he could afford to lose one—or a Mercedes, or a BMW, or a Lincoln . . . or a 1966 Mustang. As an adolescent he'd actually stolen a lot of cars out of Boulder, he and the guys cruising up to the university town and raiding the streets, culling out the finest machines and racing them back to Steele Street.

Then Steele Street had gotten busted but good by the Denver cops, and all the street rats had run for their lives. Most had gotten away, but the inner core—Quinn, Dylan, Hawkins, Rivera, Prade, and J. T.—they'd gotten their butts landed in the city jail. From jail they'd gone to “juvie,” and from “juvie” to court, where Judge Campisano had sold them down the river to Wilson McKinney for his Job Training Partnership program.

A damn fancy title for slave labor, he'd thought at the time. But he would have dug those dinosaur bones out of the ground with his teeth to avoid going to the state penitentiary. It was the first time Quinn had ever been caught, ever actually been picked up by the cops—and he'd known he wanted it to be the absolute last time.

And yet, four years later, he'd still gone after Hanson's pony car.

It could have cost him everything, college and ROTC, his way out, his freedom. But he'd been so cross-eyed angry over the idea of Professor Hanson with Regan. What he'd wanted, he couldn't have, and the rest of it—hell, the rest of it hadn't seemed important in comparison, not right then when he'd been hurting.

“Don't we have someplace we're supposed to be going?” she asked, none too nicely.

“Yeah.” They did, but he wasn't ready to leave, not just yet.

He heard her sigh over on her side of the Camaro, a heavy—very heavy—much maligned sigh.

D
ENVER
.

It was a good place to be.

Wilson looked out the window of Johnny Ramos's pickup truck and absently nodded his head. The Denver Center for the Performing Arts was all lit up. On the other side of Speer Boulevard, the Auraria Campus was busy with students going to night classes.

He'd lectured there many times over the years and had always received a warm reception.

Denver was good.

Getting away from the warehouse before the Air Force showed up was good.

He twisted around in the seat as best he could and checked the crate he and Johnny had tied down in the bed of the truck. He didn't want the crate careening all over the place, and even though he'd packed it himself and carefully moved it with the forklift, he was worried about it. He didn't want to forget what he was doing with it, with the fossil inside. He didn't want to forget what he'd already learned about it or what he'd found in the surrounding plaster, and he certainly didn't trust the Air Force to ship it off somewhere and take good enough care of it.

He'd heard Hawkins and another guy talking, and he'd known he had to do something. The Air Force certainly hadn't taken good enough care of Quinn Younger, letting him be blown out of the sky like that. He hoped the boy was okay.

He stopped for a minute, stopped thinking and backtracked a bit. Then it came to him and he remembered. Quinn Younger had been rescued. He was fine, a hero, still friends with Christian Hawkins, who—it turned out—wasn't the cold-blooded murderer he'd been made out to be all those years ago. Both of them worked for Dylan Hart.

He was working for Dylan now, too, and he was supposed to tell Dylan everything he found, but Dylan was gone, so he'd told no one. It was important, though, what he'd discovered embedded like riprap in the
Tarbosaurus
's plaster jacket. It was important and strange, and he needed to remember.

A
Tarbosaurus
nest.
My God.
He had two, maybe three eggs—with embryos!—of the fiercest predator ever to walk the planet, a toothier Mongolian version of North America's
Tyrannosaurus rex
. His young competitors were out beating the badlands again, and he, washed-up old Dr. McKinney, had had a fossilized Cretaceous carnivore nest practically dropped right in his lap.

Of course,
Tarbosaurus
was just his first guess. It could be a
Tyrannosaurus
. He needed more comparisons, tests, X rays. He needed Regan with her light touch and her dental pick to clean away the detritus and stone. He needed to get the nest someplace safe and find out where it had come from. Provenance would quickly tell him if it was
Tarbosaurus
or
Tyrannosaurus.
The bureaucratic abyss of a nameless federal warehouse was not a safe place, and the place he and Johnny were supposed to be going, Steele Street, couldn't possibly be safe either.

He remembered it. The bust on Steele Street sixteen years ago had hit all the papers, closed down the city's biggest car theft ring, and netted him most of his first summer work crew.

There was only one place safe enough for a find of this magnitude, and it wasn't too far from where they were heading.

“Turn here,” he said to Johnny, pointing left, using his most professorial tone of voice, one no undergraduate had ever dared to gainsay. It had also worked pretty well on a dozen years' worth of juvenile offenders, and as he'd hoped, it worked on this one, too. He knew the look of hard living on the streets, and this kid had it.

The boy cast him a quick sidelong glance, but he made the turn.

“Sir,” he started. “Superma—I mean, Hawkins told me to take you to Steele Street tonight.”

Yes, he'd heard the orders, but he needed to go someplace else first. He looked back out the windshield. Their next turn was just up ahead.

Johnny Ramos reminded Wilson of Christian Hawkins a little bit. They were both dark-haired, with tall, rangy builds, but for all his machismo, the boy wasn't as hard-edged as Christian. Wilson doubted if he'd ever seen a man with harder edges than Christian. He was all angles and toughness and maybe a streak of mean.

Christian carried a gun, sometimes more than one. He also had a knife, not a useful knife like a Swiss army knife, but a switchblade, a killing knife, and most of the time he dressed like someone who knew how to use it—someone who
had
used it, with a bandanna tied around his head and wraparound sunglasses, in T-shirts and low-slung jeans and two-hundred-dollar Nike Airs. After Wilson's initial shock at seeing him, he'd recognized enough of the boy he'd once known to be comfortable working with him.

Still, he wished Dylan would return. Wilson wasn't good at keeping secrets, not anymore. He wasn't afraid of accidentally telling someone. What he was afraid of was that the secret would simply drift away.

So many things drifted away from him.

But not the crate. He wasn't going to lose the crate.

“Take the next right.”

“Sir—”

“This won't take long,” he assured the boy. “We're only going a few miles. You know where City Park is, don't you?”

Johnny gave the old man another long, dubious look.

But he made the right-hand turn.

C
HAPTER

11

H
OW WOULD YOU
want to go to hell? Blindfolded or eyes wide open?” Nikki McKinney asked.

Question number 308 by Kid's count.

“Eyes wide open, ma'am,” he said, as he finished hauling Travis, in harness and rigging, into the air. He secured the rope to the wall. Travis had said eyes wide open, too, but she'd blindfolded him anyway.

She'd also tied him up, gagged him, and put more paint on him, a hellish concoction of black and red.

It hadn't exactly been the erotic episode Kid had imagined it would be.

She was too intense, too intensely focused on the art. She was a little pushy, and tougher than she looked—and without actually coming out and telling him to back off, she'd made it damn clear that if he was going to be hanging around her studio, watching her, he was going to do it by her rules.

Kid didn't want to actually come out and tell her to back off either. But he hadn't busted his hump getting from Cisco to Boulder so he could spend the night watching Nikki McKinney put a naked guy through hell—literally. She wasn't actually hurting Travis, but she wasn't gentle with him, either. If Kid hadn't been there, Travis would have been at her mercy.

In her case, size was deceiving. She was damned relentless. Wherever she was trying to take Travis, helpless and naked, she was going to get there. For a hundred dollars an hour, Travis was perfectly willing to go.

Maybe Travis had been there before. Nikki had other angel prints and sketches stacked around the walls. Kid figured it was just his own bad luck not to have been called up on a night when she was photographing or drawing a female angel—not that he saw any female angels in her lineup. But watching her finger-paint another woman's body, a naked woman, would have definitely made his top ten sexual fantasies list.

Yeah.
A brief grin curved his mouth. Definitely top ten material—unless she'd bound and gagged the woman the way she had Travis. Binding and gagging were for-sure turnoffs in Kid's book. The other angels were all flying free, but she'd definitely headed into some new territory tonight.

He was only going to give her about another ten minutes. He'd done a couple of perimeter checks; everything had looked fine, but he wanted fresh intel, or he wanted out of the house.

So where in the hell were Quinn and the sister? An hour at the most, Quinn had said, and they were kicking that hour in the back. Kid checked his watch. Ten more minutes max, and he was putting in a call.

“Have you been there?” she asked.

“Ma'am?” He looked up to the platform where she stood behind her bank of cameras. Whatever else Nikki McKinney was, she was a bona fide gearhead. A snake pit of cables and cords connected her to the ton of equipment stacked on the platform, and she ran it all from a handheld control board.

Sweet. Very sweet. He was itching to get a better look at her setup, find out who had built it, and probably improve it. That ought to impress her.

Or not.

He'd never met anyone like her. Never even imagined anyone like her. He didn't know what in the hell impressed somebody who painted calendar boys on her living room walls and tied up guys like Travis on Friday nights.

“To hell and back with your eyes wide open,” she said.

See, that's what he meant. Who in the hell asked questions like that?

“Yes, ma'am,” he answered after a slight hesitation, because to deny it would have been to deny who he was. Still, he had no intention of elaborating.

“And what do you think? Am I close?” She gestured at the scene she'd created with the backdrop and Travis, with all her ropes and wings and paint and complicated lighting.

He followed the gesture with his eyes, looking the whole thing over, then told her straight-out. “I think you're naive.”

Incredibly naive.

“And you're not?” she asked with more curiosity than heat.

“No, ma'am. I'm most definitely not.” Long, hot, strange night, all right, he thought. The guys back in the 24th would never believe it.

Without a word, she ducked under the black cloth hanging off the back of the biggest camera and began setting off her show. She had eight versions of the lighting rigged up and went through them one by one, taking what she wanted. With the lights set, she sent some heavy punk rock music blasting through the sound system, four tracks of it all at once, two of them playing backward, fighting it out. Then she started the fans blowing—thank God. They were all drenched in sweat, and he figured she'd done that on purpose just to add another level of misery to Travis's appearance.

He didn't know why the guy did it, not even for a hundred bucks an hour. Double the going rate, Travis had told Kid, but then Nikki asked for a lot.

With the studio lights dimmed, Kid slipped off his sunglasses and stuck them in his shirt pocket.

“Travis,” Nikki said from under the cloth. “Whenever you're ready, I'm good to go.”

Kid had to give the guy credit. He seemed oblivious to the fact that he was naked, and for someone who had been tied up, blindfolded, gagged, and raised and lowered half a dozen times while she'd finished setting everything up, he was amazingly loose, amazingly calm—until she told him she was good to go.

Then he started changing, slowly and torturously, from a laid-back Boulder slacker dude into a fallen angel being pulled into the eternal sucking vortex of the inferno, lured and beset by the wretched demons flying off the canvas backdrop, bound by hopelessness. It was weird, watching it happen, knowing the guy was faking it and yet believing.

In his real life, Travis had told Kid, he was an EMT with the Boulder County Search and Rescue Squad. Given the pay scale of the job, modeling for Nikki was how he paid the mortgage on his place up the canyon.

Kid hoped to hell Nikki McKinney was getting what she wanted out of him, because this shot—
Geezus
—this shot made the fillet-o'-fish Narcissus pose look like a piece of cake.

Cameras were going off all over the place, at least two of them eating a constant whir of film, and Kid was mesmerized. For the first time since she'd opened the front door of her house, he wasn't focused on her. And as he watched the whole endless ordeal, with the music screeching and screaming and the lights flashing, with the wind blowing hot and acrid and Travis disintegrating in pain and despair, he realized her version of hell was closer to his than he'd thought.

It was the red paint. It looked like blood, as if the angel had been tortured.

Shit. Kid felt his jaw tighten. He was starting to feel a little fucked by her game. Where in the hell was Quinn? It was time to get out of there. He suddenly felt it down to his bones.

F
ROM
beneath her black cloth, Nikki tripped her shutters again and again, over and over, capturing Kid Chronopolous completely. She had five cameras on Travis, who was worth far more than she paid him—and two cameras on the ex-Marine, who was giving her everything for free.

Travis was amazing, and later, she would go through the whole session frame by frame, both video and stills, and print what she needed for the piece of work she had in mind.

But the ex-Marine. She watched him through the zoom on her Nikon, working carefully, breathing softly. She'd thought she'd take a few shots of him, record his reaction, take his portrait for her studio wall, all standard stuff—but there was nothing standard about him. He'd taken his sunglasses off when she'd started the show, and suddenly she was seeing him for the first time, really seeing him, and she couldn't tear her gaze away.

His eyes were dark hazel, bordering on brown with streaks of moss green, and so very serious, so very watchful of everything going on around him.

So very fierce.

It fascinated her, his fierceness, the way the high arch of his cheekbones fascinated her, and the lean angle of his jaw. He had a short nose, which added an incongruous level of cuteness to his chiseled features. His eyebrows were thick, dark lines, his skin flawless, something she seldom saw even in her fashion work. His mouth was wide and firm, and made her wonder how he would taste—and that was the most disconcerting thought she'd had in weeks.

She'd been wrong about getting him out of his clothes. He wasn't one of her college boys, despite the similarity in age, not even close. He was carrying a gun beneath his rumpled Hawaiian shirt, not in his duffel bag as she'd supposed, and his expression was nothing short of a warning to beware. She'd set something off in him, something he didn't like—which was the whole point of the piece,
Pathos VII
. Everybody had their own personal hell.

She pulled back through the lens, bringing more of him into view. No, she thought, he most definitely was not one of her football players, mountain climbers, or starving-art-student models.

Sniper. Bodyguard. She could see those things in him now, the heightened awareness, the physical readiness, and the predatory alertness of his expression. He was tuned for trouble—and he was not to be fooled with, not to be unwrapped for mere artistic indulgence.

Which made her want to do it just that much more. She wanted to paint him, bad, even if she had to do it with his clothes on. It was a curse, her stubborn dedication to artistic impulse—and every impulse she had was telling her to keep him for a while, not to let him go until she'd had a chance to explore him more thoroughly. And that simply fascinated her. She didn't keep anybody, for any reason, for any length of time.

How much trouble could one seventy-two-year-old man have possibly gotten into? she wondered. Wilson had definitely lost a foothold on some of his memory banks, but surely he couldn't have done anything that required armed guards for the house. Nothing that could have required a warrior of Kid Chaos's caliber.

Yet there he was, a warrior in her studio, an avenging angel.

She'd never had one before, but as she watched Kid, she found herself wondering what it would be like to have him.

To really have him.

And that was damned disconcerting.

Idle fantasy was not her realm. She imagined something; she created it. Going around imagining mak-ing love with an ex-Marine her sister had sicced on her for the night couldn't be good for her. Actually doing it—with a sniper, for God's sake—could lead to nothing but disaster, no matter how fascinating she found him.

Regan had been so wrong about him. He was no boy wonder, no boy.

He turned then, fixing his hawklike gaze on the Nikon's lens, and fearless Nikki McKinney, who had stripped down and painted over fifty men in her studio and never so much as blinked, felt an electric current of attraction sizzle all the way down from her head to her toes. Her cheeks grew hot, her heart damn near stopped, and she had to look away.

Ho-lee mo-lee.
She stepped back from the Nikon and swore under her breath. Then swore again and quickly tripped the shutter, hoping like hell she hadn't missed the shot. Flustered, she forced her concentration back to the video camera she had on Travis.

Damn.
Regan had been right about one thing: Trouble was definitely happening, right here, right now.