Cutting Loose (14 page)

“Yes, sir,” Cherie said.

And where in the hell was Hawkins when he most needed his second in command?

Disneyland.

Unfuckingbelievable.

There wasn't going to be enough coffee to get him through this day.

“Uh, Dylan.” Cherie spoke up again. “I got dropped off by limo this morning. We're going to need a car.”

Oh, God.

“And I suppose you'll want—”

“Roxanne.”

Roxanne, Superman's ride, a 1971 Dodge Challenger R/T in Sublime Green. Cherie loved the beast. She swore it brought out the highlights in her strawberry blond hair. Hawkins thought Roxanne was trying, so help her God, to bring out Cherie's inner NASCAR, so he'd taught her how to drive, but Dylan had ridden with her once, and once had been enough. He wondered how high Gabriel Shore's Thrill-O-Meter went, because he could guarantee Cherie was going to redline it.

“Roxanne,” he agreed. “She's down on the third floor. Gillian”—he turned back to Red Dog—“get them what they need and see them out.”

He watched the three of them get on the elevator, and then turned back to his desk. He needed to call the general and find out how Grant wanted them to proceed on this. Gabriel Shore's three-point plan, brilliant as it was, was a year-long project, minimum. The bounty on Gillian was an immediate threat. Two million dollars took his shadow warrior and put her directly in the spotlight, the last place any of them wanted to be.

“Dylan,” Skeeter called out to him from the main office. “This just came in. Listen. I'll run it back for you.” She turned up the volume on her console, and a dispatcher's voice came over the speakers.

“All cars prepare to copy information on a BOLO out of Albuquerque. A 1968 Shelby Cobra Fastback Mustang, red with white racing stripes: Be advised this car has twice been seen leaving a crime scene this morning, a fatal shooting on Somerset Street and a knife killing at the Sunset Motel on Santa Ana Drive. Proceed with caution.”

Fuck.

“Call him—”

“And tell him to get his butt off the interstate,” Skeeter finished his sentence, her fingers already flying over her board.

“And call—”

“Alex Maier. Tell him what's happened. He's either got to let us in on this, or—”

“Run interference with the New Mexico cops.”

Their eyes met across the length of the two offices.

“Are you sure about him, Dylan?” she asked. “Two bodies in a couple of hours. I don't know. If we're going to go out on a limb…” She let the question hang in the air.

“I'm sure.” He hadn't seen Zach in over eight years, hadn't spoken to him, but he knew who he was dealing with, and not because they'd worked the chop shop together. Those years were far behind them. People changed.

But Rydell had been damned impressed with Alejandro Campos, with the operation he'd run down in El Salvador, with the way he'd dealt with the situation. Dylan had heard the same from others over the years, and he'd always been damned impressed with C. Smith Rydell. They were all on the same team, no matter how many years had passed between them.

If he was wrong, if Zach had cut himself loose and crossed the line, then he'd be dealt with like anyone else who went rogue. And if Dylan was tagged for the job, he wouldn't hesitate.

“Make the calls, Skeeter. Let's do everything we can to get him back to Denver.”

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN

Saturday, 8:00
A.M
.—north of Albuquerque, New Mexico

Heat wave—Lily felt it building into the day, the wind blowing against her cheeks hot even at a hundred and twenty miles per hour.

Not Charlotte's top speed, Zach had said. The Shelby's top speed was over a hundred and thirty.

Zach, not Alejandro Campos. No last name had been forthcoming with the silent admission. So here she was, all but flying down two lanes of asphalt heading north, white stripes blurring, mirage beginning to rise on the horizon, sitting next to a stranger who oddly felt like so much more—and yet she felt so alone.

She tightened her arms around herself, taking little comfort in the Shelby's three-point seat belt system and the roll bar welded inside the car's frame. It wasn't a concourse car. The Cobra GT500KR was meant to be driven. It had been engineered, and designed, and built to be driven like a bat out of hell, and that's exactly what he was doing. But the fear of dying in a flaming ball of crashed Mustang metal wasn't what was eating at her. One thing Zach knew how to do was drive. Considering the sheer amount of pure American muscle under his control, he was amazingly smooth in all his actions. He'd coaxed the Cobra pony up through her gears, and done it in seconds. He didn't jam and jerk. He slid the shifter. He didn't stomp the pedals. He pressed them.

“Are you doing okay?” he asked, surprising her. At a hundred and twenty miles per hour, regardless of his skills, she thought it might be better if he kept his attention on the highway.

“Fine,” she lied. “Just a little hot.” Charlotte didn't have air-conditioning. What she had was horses and torque, pure power. Lily felt it in every square inch of her body, the roar in her ears, the rumble shimmying through the chassis and up into her veins.

“There's a bottle of water in my gun bag,” he said. “You're welcome to it, and as soon as we can stop, we'll get a few supplies.”

He was right. Water could only help. She had a little edge of panic working on her, and she really, really needed not to go there. She needed to take back some control, and she couldn't do it if she started crying.

So no tears, she told herself.

Take hold.

Buck up.

Drink water.

She unhooked her seat belt and leaned into the backseat. She found the bottle without any problem. It was shoved in an outside pocket.

“Lemon-flavored Perrier?” He had to be kidding. Lemon-flavored Perrier was his idea of a bottle of water?

“Yeah. We'll just have to make do, until we can stop.”

“No Gatorade?”

“No,” he said. “I'm not a big sports-drink aficionado.”

She wouldn't admit it for the world, but she was a real connoisseur of sugared electrolytes. She knew them all by brand name and flavor. But sure, she could make do with his ritzy water.

His gun bag was unzipped, and while she was stretched out into the backseat, she went ahead and took a quick look inside. It didn't take more than that for her to find her pistol, for all the good it did her.

“Are you going to give me my magazine back?” She'd watched him drop it into his pocket when he'd disarmed her. It was an eight-shot magazine, and she'd had her pistol loaded eight plus one. But she'd used the cartridge in the chamber.

And that's what was eating at her, that's what was making her skin hot, not the wind, not being thirsty or dehydrated, but killing the guy with the ponytail. His partner had a name now, Schroder, and somehow that made the dead man all that much more real, made what had happened all so much worse. She kept seeing him, the impact of her bullet into center mass, the explosion of Zach's bullet into his face.

“No,” he said. “Not until we get everything sorted out in Denver.”

“Sorted out?” she asked, easing herself back into the passenger seat, hating that her voice sounded so damn tremulous.

After buckling up, she clutched the water bottle to her chest and gave the lid a twist.

“What do you mean? What sorting out?” She really wanted to know, because she felt very shaky about all the things she didn't have sorted out this morning, which was everything.

“You'll be safe in Denver, but I'm not sure how long you'll be there. It could be we'll have to move you someplace else.”

That sounded ominous, and with her fingers still on the lid, she started to tremble above and beyond what the Shelby was making her do.

“What do you mean? Move me where, and why? Why can't I just go home?” Oh, God, was she whining? Whining was panic's kissing cousin.

“You've got a house full of cops right now, and that's not going to change for a while, and as it stands, we don't have a whole lot we can tell them.”

“I meant
home
.” Her real home, not the house where she'd been living alone for the last year, since she and Tom had split the sheets. “To the Cross, to my dad's ranch.”

“Yeah,” he said thoughtfully. “After you've been debriefed, that might work. It's a better idea than Albuquerque. I'll suggest it.”

Suggest it? To who the hell whom?

“Someone else is in charge here that I don't know about?” If so, she wanted a name. Now. Who in the world was going to make the decision, if it wasn't him? Not the girl in the computer. They'd just met. Was it Scorpion Fire? And what the hell kind of name was that? Or was it the “see you in six” guy? Or were those two the same person? Hell, she'd be more than happy to make the decision, if she could manage to escape without getting herself killed—and if he wouldn't track her down.

The thought sent another chill through her body. She had a feeling he was very good at tracking people down.

“My boss,” he said.

“Your government boss.” She didn't really believe him about working for the government. Government guys didn't drive 1968 Shelby Cobra Mustangs. They didn't race around with guns breaking into houses in the nick of time. They didn't kidnap women and handcuff them to cars, and they didn't set themselves up as cocaine kingpins in El Salvador.

That last thought gave her pause, because, actually, she could think of one kind of government employee who would set himself up as a cocaine kingpin and have information sent to someone called Scorpion Fire.

She gave Zach another, more careful look. He'd cut his hair since she'd seen him last. He'd worn it tied back in a sleek ponytail in El Salvador, but now it was short, almost severe, still the same silky black, but cropped close. It made him look very dangerous, a promise echoed in his eyes. They were the color of a cold sea—pack ice in green. His face was exactly the same as she remembered, and she seemed to have it chiseled in her memory banks—the underlying elegance of his bone structure, straight dark eyebrows, and a narrow nose leading to a firm mouth. And then there was the scar, a long-healed line of white tracing his hairline down the left side of his face. The story behind it had to be ugly.

He went by a different name in the States, and of all the damn things in the world to get killed over, the guy with the gray ponytail had chosen a nondescript macramé bracelet, a bracelet Zach had come thousands of miles to get from her.

If she put her mind to it, she could think of a lot of things that could fit in a macramé bracelet, the most obvious being information. Maybe it was knotted in Morse code.

“I know how it looks, Lily,” he said, “but I'm doing my best to get you out of the middle of this situation. The pilot put you here, not me, but in his place, I would have done the same thing.”

She didn't doubt it. The problem was, up until this exact moment, she hadn't had a clue what “situation” she was in the middle of, or what situation the pilot had been in, other than they'd both proved extremely dangerous.

But she'd just gotten her first inkling. Zach was right. This was about the pilot, who had been dragged into the church by guerrilla soldiers of the
Cuerpo Nacional de Libertad,
a rebel group fighting the Salvadoran government in northern El Salvador. This wasn't about drugs. Zach had said as much. This was about information coded into a nondescript, therefore easily hidden, bracelet that the pilot had not wanted to fall into the guerrillas' hands—so he'd given it to her.

This was about politics.

And political players with multiple names, who lived well in foreign countries, running drugs, and who owned hot cars in the States with absolute cutting-edge technology sliding in and out of their eight-track tape decks, only brought one thing to mind.

He was a spy.

And, oh, God, she didn't exactly find that comforting either.

“So you…uh, did get the bracelet back from Schroder? Right? I mean, you did tell the girl—SB303—to tell Scorpion Fire you had it.” She wanted to look at it again, see what she'd missed. She'd had it in her keeping for three weeks, but she hadn't had a reason to examine it, until now.

He shot her a curious look across the interior of the car.

“Don't get all excited,” she said. “SB303 gave you Schroder's name, and trust me, I'm paying attention. In my situation, you'd do the same thing. There's a dead guy in my house, and God only knows what you did to convince Schroder to give up that damn piece of macramé, and now we're hauling ass to the border, trying to elude the police, who I have
always
thought of as the people to go find when there's trouble, and it's hot, and those two guys tried to kill me this morning, and…and…” She gave it up, her words trailing off into a pool of silence marked only by the white stripes slipping away under Charlotte's wheels.

Damn him
. She was on the verge of an epiphany or a nervous breakdown, and she was going to hate him if the damn breakdown won out.

Six hours to Denver. He was crazy, and what was worse, he was right. At the speed they were going, they could get to Denver by lunchtime. She hoped to hell she made it, hoped to God her nerves lasted that long. They were unraveling one by one and simply letting go, bringing her closer to tears, and she wasn't sure how much longer she could—

“Let me tell you something about that dead guy,” he said, drawing her attention back to him and away from her tears.

She took a steadying breath. Good. She was listening.

“But you need to drink your water first,” he said, gesturing to the bottle she still had a death grip on in her hand. “Before you faint or something, and then, after you've had something to drink, I'll tell you about that guy.”

“S-so you did know him?” She finished screwing the lid off the bottle and brought it to her lips. The water was warm, but drinking it gave her something physical to concentrate on besides her fraying nerves.

“No, not him in particular.” He gave his head a small shake. “But I've known hundreds of guys like him, and they are all bad. They've got bad histories, and bad presents, and bad futures, every one of them. Ninety-nine percent have juvenile records. They graduate up into felonies, working for some street boss somewhere, or they go straight to the mob. Murder is part of their resume, along with extortion, kidnapping, assault of every kind you can imagine and a few hundred you can't. If they're out of Las Vegas, they're into prostitution. They're mean. They have mean jobs, and they live mean lives, and I can A-one guarantee you that if you had not had the skills and the mind-set to pull the trigger in the situation you found yourself in this morning, you would be dead. If your father is the one who taught you to protect yourself, whatever it takes, and how to do it, then you owe him a thank-you letter.”

Even as shaky as she was feeling, she knew all that, and her dad was going to hear about it, almost everything about it, and she could pretty much A-1 guarantee she'd be lucky to ever set foot off the ranch again for the rest of her life.

That had been another of Tom's big beefs with her father, that her dad had not wanted her to move to New Mexico. She was a Montana girl, Deputy Robbins had said, and Montana girls belonged in Montana, close to their dads, and not hell-and-gone to Albuquerque with some damn foreigner they'd met at a college fraternity party.

Her father had been right. She'd been a fool to marry Tomaso Bersani, with his exotic accent, and his exotic looks, and his exotic morals.

And here she was, getting ready to be a fool all over again.

She took another slow sip before lowering the bottle. “Why do you know so many bad guys like Schroder and his partner? Because of your drug business?”

He made a small, noncommittal movement with his hand. “I do all kinds of business, and part of any of my businesses is to know guys like them, and all over the world, those guys are the same, whether they're Asian, Latino, or straight out of Iowa. Honestly, I've known some pretty cruel bastards to come out of Iowa.”

“Is it your business to be mysterious?”

He let out a short, humorless laugh. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.” He laughed again and slowly shook his head. “Yes. You could definitely say that.”

He reached out for the bottle, and she gave it to him, and after taking a long drink, he gave it back.

“I'm going to get you to Denver, Lily, take you to a place where you'll be safe. It shouldn't take more than a couple of weeks for word to get out that the bracelet is no longer of any value, that it's been neutralized. At that point, all the guys like Schroder and his dead partner, they all move on to the next big score, and the name Lily Robbins stops meaning anything.”

“And what do you do, while I'm busy being safe in Denver, waiting to become blessedly anonymous again?” She really wanted to know.

“I do what I do best. Disappear.”

“Back to El Salvador?”

“No.” He shook his head again.

Lily took another slow swallow of water from the bottle, watching him. She'd seen how he lived in El Salvador, like a prince, with an elaborate villa, and dozens of servants and soldiers at his beck and call. He'd had a coffee factory, where he'd roasted and packaged his own special brand, AC-130. He'd brought her home on a private jet.