Crazy Kisses (17 page)

“Arrested?
Geezus,
Travis,” Connor said as soon as they cleared the door, his tone as disbelieving as Skeeter’s had been earlier. “You’ve never been arrested in your life. So do you want to tell me what you were doing such a damn good job of not telling Lieutenant Bradley? And why do you have a size five tennis shoe tread mark on your left cheek?”

A tread mark. Crap. Travis used his sleeve to wipe it off. That had to look at least as stupid as it sounded. Damn Rats.

“Buy me a cup of coffee, and I’ll tell you anything you want to hear.” He gave his cheek another swipe. “Add breakfast, and I’ll tell you the truth.”

Damn, it felt good to be out of the police building.

“Don’t forget I’m a cop, okay?” Connor said, completely serious. “I don’t want to have to arrest you myself.”

“Nothing illegal happened tonight, Connor. Strange, maybe, but not illegal.”

“So how about you start with the strange thing that happened to your wallet,” his friend said. “Like it disappearing. Did you get rolled or what?”

“Rolled hard,” he admitted. “By a pack of Rats. Skeeter, are you coming to breakfast? Connor’s buying.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” she said, and Connor’s grin returned in full force.

“We can talk about
Star Drifter,
” he said to her, then turned his attention back to Travis. “Rats, huh?”

“Lots of Rats, dozens of them, and a wild urban jungle girl named Jane.”

“Of course, there’d be a girl,” Connor said. “Was she hot?”

Travis smiled. Jane had kissed him, and it didn’t matter that he’d been rolled, robbed, and arrested. It didn’t matter that the only thing she’d ever called him to his face was Mr. James, or that badass Raymond wanted her old turf and Fast Jack wanted her back.

She’d kissed him,
really
kissed him—and that was all that mattered. He could handle the rest of it.

“Oh, yeah. She’s hot,” he said. “
Dangerously
hot.”

C
HAPTER

15

T
HEY TORE THE PLACE
apart, Kid. You’ve got nothing left but the walls.”

Kid stood in his kitchen at Steele Street, phone to his ear, listening to C. Smith describe the mess Conseco’s men had made of his house in Panama. Nikki was sitting on the floor at his coffee table next to the windows, drawing on paper she’d taken out of his printer while she waited for him to make the coffee.

She’d slept like a baby the whole way home, hardly bothering to wake up even for the plane change in Dallas. She’d been exhausted, but was definitely back on board now, scribbling away with a pencil.

“Sorry, Chico, but you really need to sell your little tropical bungalow.” Smith’s tone was flat-out serious. “It’s way too far south of the border, way too close to Colombia, and man, it’s been com-pro-mised. You’ve got enough blood on the floors to qualify as a House of Horror.”

“Screw—”

“Me. Yeah. I got it, but I mean it.”

Kid finished pouring water in the coffeepot and switched it on.

God, it was good to be home, even if he had kind of forgotten how much stuff he’d crammed into the place. His loft looked like a sporting goods store that had gone berserk. The ceilings were fifteen feet—plenty high enough for him to have installed a climbing wall on the north end and racks for his gear on the south end. He had two kayaks propped up in one corner and three bikes housed behind the couch. Snowboards and skis went on the racks, along with his ropes and rappelling gear. Backpacks and sleeping bags went anywhere and everywhere.

“I know a woman here in Panama City and—”

“You know more than one woman in Panama City,” Kid interrupted, remembering the last time the two of them had taken R&R. The weekend had gotten pretty wild, but he’d managed to come out of it without getting engaged to anyone.

C. Smith let out a short laugh. “Yeah, well, this one sells real estate, and I could give her a call for you.”

“Sure. Give her a call.”

It was time to let go, probably time to let go of a lot of things. Never J.T. His brother would be with him until the day he died. He just didn’t want that day coming any sooner than necessary, and that meant staying out of South America for a while.

Goddamn,
what a helluva night. He could still hardly believe how quickly Conseco’s men had found him.

“Maybe you could quit that fringe group you work with and come on over to the DEA,” Smith was saying. “You could take my old job in Afghanistan. You’d love it. Beautiful country, lots of wide open spaces, plenty of action, and it beats the hell out of Iraq.”

“I’ll pass.” He’d done some time in Afghanistan with the Marine Corps. It wasn’t any worse than a lot of places he’d been, but he liked working at SDF. “Besides, if the intel we found at that airstrip on the Putumayo pans out, Conseco could be waiting for me in Afghanistan as easily as Colombia.”

“Good point.”

“Did you call Rosa and tell her not to come in?” He didn’t want his Panamanian housekeeper anywhere near the house, not while it was such a hot spot for trouble.

“Yes. Our guys took the bodies to the morgue, but the rest of the mess is going to be here a while longer, especially the one you made with Sanchez and Mancos. That’s going to take paint, Chico. Maybe a sander. Definitely some plaster.”

“What about Conseco?”

“We’re going over every inch of the place, trying to confirm whether or not the big boss was actually here. The man they picked up with the fer-de-lance tattoo is backpedalling like crazy on his original story, but a few of the things he said earlier have checked out. A privately owned Learjet did set down at Albrook late last night, and the plane does match the description that we have of Conseco’s.”

“What about my neighbors? Are you getting anything out of the interviews?” Kid wasn’t pinning many hopes on it.

“A big zero. Nobody saw anything. Of course, I gotta tell ya, everyone I’ve talked to around here today has been as hungover as hell. What is this part of town? Party central?”

“Absolutely.” It’s what J.T. had loved about where he’d lived in Panama City. The privacy of the properties, the friendliness of the neighbors, and the wildness of the parties. “What about Nikki’s suitcases?”

“Still under house arrest—hot pink, mock croc, with her initials stamped into the leather, and I don’t like that.”

Kid’s brow furrowed. He didn’t like it either. “Are you sure about the initials?” He didn’t remember any initials.

“It’s subtle, but they are definitely there, along with a small angel stamped in next to the letters.”

“Did you find anything else that might identify her?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean Conseco’s guys didn’t. I noticed she had her purse at the Parrot, and I’m hoping you can tell me that her passport and plane ticket and all that kind of stuff was inside and not lying around somewhere in the house.”

“Yeah. She had it all with her.” But he still wasn’t happy about the damn initials. “See if you can get her luggage released as soon as possible, and just have the suitcases sent here.” The coffee stopped dripping, and Kid poured Nikki a cup.

“I’ll do what I can. How’s she holding up?”

“Pretty good.” Actually even better than that, he thought, watching her rise from the floor and pad across the loft toward the bathroom. There’d been no more nightmares while they’d been in the air, and she hadn’t mentioned the incident at the house since they’d landed. She’d just been so damn glad to be home. He felt safer, too, like now maybe they could talk reasonably, like a couple of adults—instead of like one adult and one insanely jealous asshole.

Right.

“Great,” Smith said. “I’ll check back in with you later. Sooner, if we come up with anything.”

“Thanks.” Kid hung up the phone and started over toward the table with Nikki’s cup of coffee.

Paris was at the top of his agenda this afternoon, right under the same heading where he’d put Rocky Solano, in what he was hoping would become her out-box. Her in-box only had one item, him, and after all the thinking he’d done on the plane, he was fairly confident of his ability to get her around to his side. No matter what, he was the man she’d made love with last night. They’d been electric together, an instantaneous firestorm. A connection like that had to mean something. It had to mean a lot.

It sure as hell meant a lot to him.

His confidence in his mission stayed high all the way across the room, right up until he leaned over the table to set down her coffee and took a glance at what she’d been doing with her pencil and paper.

Then his heart stopped—for all of a second. Then two.

Savagery.
Brutal. Unadulterated.

Kid was looking right at it, and it looked exactly like him. It
was
him. Nikki was too brilliant of an artist not to have depicted him exactly as he’d been—deadly, his face contorted with fury, every muscle in his body tight with lethal intent. She’d drawn him with Hernando Sanchez’s head in his hands, his knee in Sanchez’s back, and blood all over the floor. It was unmistakable.

It was also a helluva thing to have to look at, a helluva thing for her to have remembered in such excruciatingly accurate detail.

It was enough to make him sweat.

He picked up the top drawing.

Geezus
. Was this the nightmare that had woken her up? Him?

His gaze went over the bold harsh lines and the subtle shading of the sketch, and he felt something turn over in his chest.

Fuck.
Even he didn’t want to see himself with his war face on.

He let the paper drop back on the table with the others and stood for a minute, looking around his loft, taking it all in, trying to breathe. It had been months since he’d been home, but nothing had changed. Skeeter made sure of things like that. No matter how long their missions might last, no matter how far away the job might take them, the SDF guys came home to the place they’d left. With very little warning, Skeeter would have food in the fridge, the heat turned up, fresh sheets on the bed, half a dozen morning papers stacked on the counter, and towels warming in the bathroom.

The trip home from Panama had taken a good portion of the day, and late afternoon light was slanting in through the huge wall of windows facing out toward the city. Kid was a morning person. When he’d first started working for SDF, he’d shared J.T.’s loft for convenience’s sake. He’d kept it because of the morning light.

On a clear day, the sun broke across the straight edge of the eastern horizon like a blade. Night was always drawn up from the ground like a veil.

He checked his watch. She had only a couple of hours before her show opened at Toussi’s, a couple of hours before her real life started back up again—the life that up until last night had not included a guy with a half-a-million-dollar bounty on his head.

He’d promised to run her up to Boulder, to her house, so she could get some clothes, but someone else would have to do that now.

He let his attention fall back to the drawings, his gaze going over each one. Where necessary, he pushed a paper aside to better see the sketch beneath.

She was so good.

They were all variations on the same theme: Peter Chronopolous the Destroyer, and carnage, lots of motherfucking carnage.

The ones where he’d shot Mancos the first time weren’t quite as bad as the rest. She’d left the guy’s corpse out of her point-blank view of him firing the .45, and instead given that grisly thing a few pages of its own, all of them as incredible as anything she’d drawn of Sanchez.

Goddamn.
She shouldn’t have seen the aftermath of the head shots. He’d been so careful, so fucking split-second careful with both of them.

But somehow she’d seen it all, drawn it all, and nobody was better. Even with just a regular number two pencil, he could tell the difference between a shard of skull on the floor and a splatter of brains on the wall. He didn’t know how she’d done it, made the difference so incredibly clear, and he wished like hell that she hadn’t.

Fuck.

Just thinking about her seeing the killings made him feel a little faint. That he’d burned those images into her memory banks made him sick.

Geezus.
Nothing was ever easy—and nothing was going to change. He was a marked man, with his life forfeit every single day. He’d thought he could leave
el asesino fantasma
in South America.

He’d been wrong. A half a million dollars changed everything.

He heard her start the shower in the bathroom, and he knew he had to make a choice. He could go in there with her and pick up where they’d left off in his bed. She’d welcome him. He knew it. She’d slept on him all night long on the plane and kept close to him all day, her hand sometimes reaching out just to touch him, just to make sure he was still by her side.

So yeah, he could go in there.

Or he could grow up.

He couldn’t change what he’d done. He
wouldn’t
change it. But the choices he’d made had come with a price, and there was no decision about whether or not it would be paid. The price was Nikki, and the deal had been closed. What happened next between them wasn’t about who she’d slept with, or who she hadn’t slept with. It wasn’t about sex, or even about love. More than anything else, it was about Paris. It was about her life, her whole life. His path was set. She was just starting out on hers. She was young and talented, and the world was just waiting to lay itself at her feet.

And that’s what he wanted for her, even more than he wanted her for himself. Twelve hours ago, he would have said that was impossible. On the plane, he’d decided beyond a doubt that there was nothing he wanted more than to have her for himself.

He’d been wrong.

This was easy.

Leaving everything on the table, he walked back into the kitchen and picked up the phone.

“Skeeter,” he said, when she picked up. “Where are you?”

“Down on the firing range, shooting with Travis. Where the hell are you?”

Perfect. He’d known Skeeter and Nikki’s model had become good friends over the last year, and there was probably no one Nikki would be happier to see than Travis.

Well, maybe her “no, not really” fiancé, but he didn’t think Rocky Solano was anywhere in the building—which, for as easy as this was for him to do, was a damn good thing. He was walking away from her, yes, but he had no intention of actually handing her over to some other guy. Given the “no, not really” situation, he figured Rocky was probably already hell-and-gone out of the running.

“I just got home. I’ve got Nikki with me. We’ve had an interesting night. Left three dead guys in the house in Panama. I want you to come up here and debrief her, get the facts, let her tell you everything. Bring Travis with you. I’m sure she’ll be glad to see him.”

“Juan Conseco’s guys?” Skeeter asked.

“Two were Conseco’s, the third guy was one they did.” He knew she wasn’t supposed to have had access to the Top Secret file of the work he was doing for the DEA, but he also knew Skeeter.

“Whoa, Kid. Congratulations.”