Cutting Loose (5 page)

It wouldn't matter to her that she'd never actually met Prade. She'd know him inside and out, up until he'd disappeared off the map, and she'd think of him as one of Steele Street's, and she definitely knew his ride, so, yeah, she would have tagged Charlotte the same way she'd tagged Charlene, Jeanette, and Roxanne, and Nadine, and Angelina, and Mercy, and Corinna, and Coralie, everyone except Trina. She'd never tagged Dylan's 1965 AC Cobra 289. Even in the rare iron realm of Steele Street, Trina was untouchable, more than a car.

“A Bazo VJX-UZ468 700 series PC,” she said.

Okay. That sounded great, a Bazo VJ whatza widget, whatever the hell that was.

“With always-on high-speed Internet and full PDA capabilities, including cellular communications.”

And she'd gotten all that in the Shelby? Without leaving a trace? It was her trademark, not leaving a trace. Her first electronic installations in a few of the cars had been pretty crude, but she'd refined her techniques over the last few years and prided herself on leaving the dashboards and consoles absolutely pristine, without a mark or a telltale sign of her work anywhere.

“You got all that in the Shelby?”

“I stuffed it in the tape deck slot, just below the radio. Mustangs had an eight-track option that year, and the Bazo fit it like a dream.”

Excellent. He'd known from the get-go that he'd married a certifiable geekazoid nerd. Between her and Kid and a stringer they kept on contract, Cherie Hacker, there didn't seem to be anything that needed doing that couldn't get done—the cost be damned.

“Is this the rig everybody has in their cars now?” He was almost afraid to ask.

The look she gave him said it all, but she went ahead and gave him the answer he'd hoped he wouldn't hear.

“I'm a techie. Updating SDF's electronics is my job,” she said, her hands going to her hips, “and I stay busy, especially since you hardly
ever
let me do anything else. Don't think I haven't noticed.”

He'd hoped she hadn't noticed. He thought he'd been very clever, very subtle with the job rotations.

“I haven't been out of Denver in over six months,” she added, and it was definitely a complaint.

Tough. He was going for twelve.

“And during these last six months I have replaced all the original laptops I bolted into the cars with brand-new Bazo VJX-UZ468 700 series PCs, for the low, low cost of only seven thousand, two hundred and forty-eight dollars each, including custom fabrication and installation of every unit.”

A not-so-small price to pay to keep her close to home.

“We do work on a budget,” he reminded her.

“You work on a budget,” she said. “I work on computers and cars.”

They were having a fight.

How unusual, he thought, and how annoying. They'd been getting along great until she'd gotten out of bed.

“And nobody does it better,” he said. “Thank you.” He wasn't a complete idiot. “So you can raise Charlotte whenever you want?”

“Almost.”

“Almost?” What was with the “almost”?

“Cherie and I have been working on a small glitch on this end. It's strictly a transmitting situation in our system. All the Bazo PCs in the cars are transmitting just fine.”

He was glad to hear it, but his plan was to contact Prade, not to wait until hell froze over and Prade decided to contact them.

“Get Cherie on the horn and get her over here. I want Charlotte's Bazo transmitting and receiving within the hour.”

He didn't give her a lot of orders, but that had definitely been one, and she was shaking her head at him.

“What?” If she didn't like something, he'd rather find it out sooner than later.

“I've got a stolen car and an unknown perpetrator who was in my building last night, and I am not at all inclined to let this carjacking jerk know Charlotte is loaded. I say we track him down and apprehend his butt.”

Well, when she put it like that, his plan sucked. But she didn't quite have all the facts; and he was pretty sure he did.

“I think the carjacking jerk is Zachary Prade, and the connection is Albuquerque, Lily Robbins, and whatever went on in El Salvador.”

She shook her head again, not so subtly telling him his plan still sucked. “There wasn't anything about Zachary Prade in Rydell's report on the mission in Morazán.”

“No, but I got a look at Alejandro Campos when he dropped Rydell and the women at DIA, and…” His voice trailed off. He dragged his hand back through his hair.
Geezus
.

“And?” she prompted.

Lifting his gaze to the southern end of the city, he let out a short laugh. It was a fairly amazing turn of events, no matter how he looked at it.

“I think Zach has been in El Salvador for the last eight years,” he said, “working deep cover for the CIA. I sent a letter down through State to Langley, to see if I could get a bite, and suddenly Charlotte goes missing to Albuquerque.”

“What exactly are you saying, Dylan?”

“What I'm saying, sweetheart, is that I think Alejandro Campos is Zach, the last lost chop-shop boy.”

CHAPTER
SIX

Saturday, 5:30
A.M
.—Albuquerque, New Mexico

Parked two blocks east of Somerset at the intersection of Pike Street and Lawrence Avenue, in front of John and Shirley Brock's house, Lily came up with a great idea—honking the horn. That way, John and Shirley could come running out to save her…and see her half naked and handcuffed just before they got blown up.

Crap
. She slammed her hands down on the steering wheel.

Even in her neighborhood, there were probably only a handful of people who would think twice about detonating a small block of C4 to stop some idiot from blowing their horn at five o'clock in the morning. She could guarantee Alejandro Campos wasn't one of them. The minute she pressed the Shelby's horn, he'd know it was her, and that would be it, the last it, ever.

Dammit
.

She was shaking just a little, even in the warmth of the car. She probably needed a drink. Something stiff. Something on the rocks, like whiskey, or a straight shot, or two—and a shirt would be nice, maybe some pants, shoes, a handcuff key.

She'd seen
The Dukes of Hazzard,
and she knew a bootlegger's turn when she was in the middle of one, but she'd never been in the middle of one before, and her head was still spinning. One hundred and eighty degrees of lightning-fast turn with her stomach already in knots and the sheer mind-frying panic of the last five minutes had frayed her nerves to a razor's edge, and she was afraid she was going to come undone.

Right here.

Right now.

Handcuffed to a steering wheel in a sports bra and her jammie panties.

She tried to steady her breathing, tried to stay calm, but the facts of the situation were too horribly grim. She could see the blinking light of the cell-phone bomb in the backseat, every small green flash reflecting in the windshield, one right after another, like a countdown.

She could be blown up any second, and the fact was nearly incomprehensible—like having Alejandro Campos drag her out of her bathroom in a hail of bullets.

Oh, God.

A very unsteady breath left her on a long, shuddering sigh.

He'd saved her in El Salvador. She would never forget it, but she wasn't going to forget what he was, either—a drug lord, the dregs of the earth, the kind of man who handcuffed women to cars and profited from other people's misery. And if people weren't miserable enough, he lured them into it, for money, so he could live in his highland villa, surrounded by servants and—
oh, geez
, she'd killed the man with the ponytail.

She tightened her grip on the steering wheel to keep her hands from shaking, to keep her whole body from shaking. She'd killed him. She knew it beyond a doubt. She knew exactly where her shot had gone—center chest. The man's face had been missing in the next split second, and that must have been Campos's shot, but she'd fired first, and the guy with the ponytail was dead.

And in her house.

There had been blood everywhere.

Another shuddering breath left her.

Blink…blink…blink
—the green light flashed over and over, pushing her closer and closer to the brink of…of she didn't know what, but it wasn't going to be pretty.

And then things got worse.

Parked on Pike Street, she saw the Aston Martin go screaming past her down Lawrence Avenue, doing about a hundred miles an hour, and then she heard sirens, police sirens, but they weren't chasing the silver sports car.

Cold dread washed down her spine. Where was Alejandro Campos? Had he been captured at her house? Killed? And what were the odds, really, of some cop picking up Campos's damn cell phone and accidentally hitting the button that blew her to smithereens?

She was going to be sick.

As best as she could manage, she hung her head out the window and coughed, but nothing came up.

Fuck
. She all but collapsed in the seat, her cheek resting on the door frame. Someone would find her. Everyone would notice the car. As soon as people got their butts out of bed and started seizing the day, they would notice the Candy-apple Red Shelby Cobra and the not-quite-dressed woman handcuffed inside.

Oh, God. Oh, God.
She brought her free hand up and covered her face.
Oh, G—

“Move over, babe.” The order was growled at her, and the door came open.

She would have fallen out, except for Campos's taking hold of her.

“Come on, hurry it up. Hustle. Hustle.” He kept pushing her back toward the passenger seat, and being none too gentle about it.

And he'd taken her gun.

She hadn't forgotten.

She'd sat there like an idiot and let him take her gun. No matter what she finally ended up confessing to her dad, she was
not
confessing that part.

The handcuff slid around the top of the steering wheel, and her suitcase was shoved in over the top of the driver's seat, and her butt was in the air, and he'd taken her gun.

Goddammit.

By the time she got in her seat, she was strung from one side of the damn car to the other, and they were moving, which all but demanded that one of them pay attention. She'd kept the Shelby rumbling and rocking in neutral with her foot on the brake, but it was rolling now, rolling and picking up speed with the two of them playing Twister in the front seat.

“Step on the brake,” she said, swiping her hand across her cheek, wiping away the only tear that had gotten away from her. “Or find a goddamn gear.”
You…you bastard
.
You mealy-mouthed, drug-running sonuva
—

He glanced at her, and her silent tirade screeched to a stop, derailed by a wave of mortification.

She was
so
in her underwear.

“I—I want my clothes.” All of them, every stitch in her suitcase.

He shifted into first, and his gaze came back to her, sliding down her body in one long sweep, before coming up and meeting her eyes.

“Good idea,” he said. “As soon as I go through your suitcase, you can have all the clothes you want.”

The bastard, the mealy-mouthed, drug-running sonuva
—

“Oh, my god,” she said, her gaze falling on his shoulder. “You've been shot.”

         

Of course he'd been shot. He was always getting shot. This was the second goddamn time this month.

“Skinned,” he said. “Just caught me across the top.” But it hurt like hell. Blood had soaked through his T-shirt and was seeping through and staining his favorite, ruined Hugo Boss suit jacket, the charcoal gray one with the shredded, ragged-ass tear across the shoulder.
Christ.
He probably needed stitches. He was always needing stitches.

On the upside, that's all he ever needed, a few stitches. No matter how knocked around he got, or how many damn times he'd been shot, a couple of stitches here and there had taken care of the problem. The worst thing that had ever gotten ahold of him had been dengue fever.

“If you unhandcuff me, I-I could put pressure on the wound.”

How sweet.

“Nice try.” He had enough experience to know he wasn't going to bleed out from getting nicked across the top of his shoulder, and truthfully, he wasn't absolutely sure it was a bullet that had gotten him. It could have been any one of a hundred pieces of crap that had been flying through the air as he and Lily Robbins had dodged bullets and death trying to get out of her house. No shots had been fired during his last sortie onto Somerset. However he'd been skinned, he'd been skinned during the first fiasco.

But he'd gotten the suitcase.

Which didn't really mean he had the bracelet. Not yet. Not according to Rule Number One.

Crossing Lawrence at just under light speed, he slid Charlotte up into fourth. There was no traffic at five-thirty in the morning, but the sun had finally edged up over the horizon into BMNT, Beginning of Morning Nautical Twilight, a clearly defining moment for the barbarians of the world. BMNT was their hurrah.

Spilled coffee was his. There was no way to hit fifty miles per hour in under five seconds and have a cup of coffee stay put on the console. It was back there somewhere, in the backseat, probably in his gun bag, running out of the cup and sloshing through his ammo and spare magazines.

Dammit.

The blocks whizzed by under Charlotte's wheels, one after the other, taking them west through the neighborhoods and past half a dozen strip shopping malls. At five miles out, he felt they had enough distance from her house to make a stop. He either had the bracelet secured, or he didn't, and if he didn't, he was going to have to go back, cops or no cops.

Yeah, he was one of the good guys, too, but chances were, he wouldn't show up as a good guy in any database used by the law enforcement community of New Mexico.

Actually, there was no chance in that equation. His prints would have the Albuquerque chief of police doing a happy dance in the streets. Apprehending a notorious Central American drug dealer would just about make the guy's whole year, maybe even his whole career. Not that the good chief would get a conviction, but it was best to avoid the whole mess to begin with by not getting arrested—also known as Rule Number Three.

Yeah, he lived by that one hard.

Pulling over, he parked the Shelby on a tree-lined avenue. It might be a nice gesture on his part to take the cuffs off Lily Robbins, and he would, as soon as he had what he'd come for—Mark Devlin's macramé bracelet.

Stretching back between the front bucket seats, he popped the catch on her suitcase. It was quickly growing light enough to see, and what he saw did not make him happy.

“Do you always pack in a wind tunnel?”

“Wh-what do you mean?” She twisted around as best she could, which wasn't very much.

This wasn't right, he thought, staring at the contents of her suitcase. Her clothes were a mess, jumbled up, some of them folded, but most of them not. They looked pushed around…like somebody had pushed them around. Like maybe somebody who was looking for something.

He lifted a white blouse up—and swore under his breath.

“What?” she asked, trying to see over the seat.

Blood, fresh, a long smear of it, stained the blouse's sleeve. Buzz-cut Boy must have gotten hit by something, too. Zach hoped it had been one of his .45 caliber, 230-grain, full-metal-jacket, flat-point tactical handloads clocking in at nine hundred feet per second.

That would have hurt.

And it would have definitely slowed the guy down, which was exactly what Zach needed, because he had a sneaking suspicion he was going to have to go find Buzz-cut Boy real damn quick if he wanted that bracelet.

Dammit.
He started going through her clothes, piece by piece, carefully checking each item, shaking it out, taking his time in order not to make any mistakes, and hoping to hell Buzz Boy had made a mistake, rushed through the job, and left empty-handed. He hoped the bracelet would fall out of something, like her underwear. She had a lot of it, a lot of colors, a lot of styles, and she obviously liked lace.

He did, too—black, red, white, purple. Her suitcase definitely had its share of lace underwear. He picked up a demicut lace underwire bra, lime green with hot pink ribbons slinking across the tops of the cups.

Very nice, he thought, setting it aside and moving on to the next piece of clothing—the matching lime green panties with a hot pink ribbon slinking around the waistband.

Very nice.

She had jeans, and yoked shirts with pearly snaps, a tooled leather belt with a silver buckle, and an honest-to-God pair of chaps, brand-new, cream-colored with buff inserts.

Well, that had been a while, since he'd had the sex-with-a-cowgirl fantasy. He'd never actually had sex with a real cowgirl, but he had a feeling he had a real one handcuffed to his steering wheel. It was enough to make a guy think—make a guy think he better keep his mind on his business.

A pair of boots came next, slant-heeled, suede, and looking like they'd seen better days. She'd packed them inside a plastic bag, and after shaking them out—and getting nothing—he checked the bag.

And got nothing.

Then things got interesting—too interesting.

Beneath the bag with the cowboy boots was a taped stack of fifty-dollar bills. He moved a tiedyed aquamarine tank top and found another taped stack of bills. A little more careful moving of clothes, including a yellow-flowered shirt stained with blood, revealed a FedEx envelope with another taped stack of bills poking out of it. There were two more stacks inside. He didn't need to count the bills, or even run his thumb over one of the stacks. He dealt in cash, and he was looking at five short bricks of two thousand dollars each.

Ten thousand dollars in a FedEx envelope packed inside the suitcase of a woman in possession of an internationally volatile encryption code only said one thing to him: trouble. If anyone was going to get arrested in Albuquerque this morning, it might well be Lily Robbins, and it just might be him doing it.

He belled open the envelope, looked over the airline ticket, skimmed a very short letter written on expensive paper, and dropped it all back inside the suitcase.

“Wh-what are you doing?” she asked.

Wondering who in the hell you really are,
he thought.
And wondering who in the hell made you that offer.
There'd been no signature on the letter, and the return address on the mailing label was a Ship and Go Store in New York City.

The cash was preliminary at best, nothing more than traveling expenses. The bracelet was worth millions on the open market.

“I need the macramé bracelet you were wearing at my villa the night of the rainstorm,” he said. Ten thousand dollars in cash, and Buzz-cut Boy had left it untouched in the suitcase. Considering what the real prize was this morning, Zach would have done the same thing. “That's the one you still have, correct? That's the one you put in your suitcase? The pilot's bracelet?”