Hotter Than Wildfire (16 page)

He was hungry and he wanted another round with Ellen as soon as she could manage it.

She turned her head, looked down. “Uh uh. Don’t even think about it. Not until you feed me first. There are, like, rules.”

“Oh yeah, I know.” Of course there were rules. Not letting your lover go hungry was right up there. He smiled at her, his head hitting the pillow, the edges of his field of vision going gray, black.

“Get food right away,” he mumbled. “Rest my eyes first.”

Ellen made a little clucking sound of exasperation. “Big bad warrior, can’t even stay awake. I think I’ll do a little foraging in your kitchen, see what’s there.”

“Do that,” he slurred sleepily. He tried to remember if there was any actual food in his kitchen, but couldn’t get his head to work that much. He could feel his extremities. That was more or less it as far as a functioning brain was concerned.

He heard rattling noises from the kitchen, the smell of coffee reaching into the bedroom. The ping of the microwave. She’d obviously found something to work with.

Maybe he could wheedle her into bringing him breakfast in bed. Oh yeah. Feeding each other whatever she’d drummed up, sipping coffee. He had a small jar of honey somewhere; he could drizzle a little over her breasts and lick it off.

On that very happy thought, his mind drifted, went away.

Until he heard a sharp crash, the sound of glass breaking, and Ellen’s scream.

He was out of bed in an instant, heart pounding as he scrabbled for his Glock. He ran into the living room, not knowing what to expect but ready for anything.

Ellen was sitting on a chair, laptop open, a shattered glass on the floor, shards glinting in the morning sunlight. Water was still spreading out over the floor.

A hand covered her mouth. She was that icy white color again.

She turned to him, desperation in every line of her face and burst into tears.

Seattle

  “All over the news. She can’t help but see it.” Montez closed down the Yahoo News site and turned around. “That’ll rattle her.”

“Oh yeah.”
Yiah.

Piet looked into the rearview mirror of the rental SUV. It showed the rain-spattered street of secondhand-clothing shops, pawn shops, a palm reader, a Chinese laundry and the Blue Moon. Kerry Robinson was coming on duty at noon. Montez would have waited until she came off her shift. It would be dark then, less chances of anyone seeing them.

But Piet had argued that in tracking, time was of the essence. They had a bead on where Ellen had been—San Diego. And she was with someone. Every day that passed was a day in which she and her unknown protector could decide to move on, and they’d lose her again. Not to mention the fact that two big shocks in close succession were more likely to throw her off course than two big shocks that were separate.

Montez thought it was all bullshit. That Piet was just anxious to get the job done and get away. But what the hell could he do? And if he were truthful with himself, he wanted this over, too. Yesterday. The bitch had taken way too much time and attention, had taken him away from work at a really tough moment, when he needed to concentrate to keep his company afloat.

He hadn’t argued with Piet and so here they were, at five to noon, on a rainy Seattle street.

Christ, Montez thought, looking out of rain-spattered windows, what lousy weather. How could anyone live here? It was all so gray and empty. Everyone looked like drones, even the kids. Even the losers who frequented the Blue Moon. Out-of-work day laborers, drunks, guys who looked like they hadn’t shaved or washed in a week. They all trickled there into Loser Central.

The street was almost empty. A car went by every five minutes, moving slowly because of the rain accumulating in the gutters. And every single goddamned person crossing the street stopped at the red light, even if the street was empty and you could see into fucking Canada, standing in the pouring rain until the light turned green, and even then, they looked both ways before crossing.

Crazy.

He missed Georgia. He missed the warmth and the sunshine. He missed his men, who were properly deferential, not like Piet, who half the time pretended he wasn’t there. Everyone treated Montez well back in Georgia. His men, local LEOs, who shot for free at his ranges, and women who knew he was rich.

A massive spurt of rage went through him at that thought. He never favored one woman over another. They tripped in and out of his bed and they all got a little something—a gold necklace, a pair of earrings—but no one got more than anyone else.

He’d been willing to make a big exception for Ellen. Hell, he’d been willing to
marry
the bitch, and look how she repaid him! He should have—

“There she is,” Piet said quietly, and Montez wrenched his mind back from where it was seething. He put himself back into the op zone, where everything was cool and emotionless. Fast and efficient. Get the job done and get out.

“Let’s go,” Piet said, and shouldered the door open.

 
San Diego

  “Any more news?” Harry asked quietly.

Mike flipped his cell phone closed and shook his head. He’d been San Diego SWAT for a couple of years and though he was now a partner at RBK Security, he still had lots of buddies in law enforcement, men he’d trained with in SWAT training courses. He’d called the friend of his at Seattle PD they’d called earlier to check out the whereabouts of Roddy Fisher.

Before the cops even made it to Fisher’s house, his dead body had showed up.

“No. The news agencies got it all. Except for the fact that apparently the guy’d been buried and dug up.”

“Wh—what?” Ellen looked up at Mike. Her face had lost all color. Even her lips were white. She was shivering uncontrollably though the day was warm. Harry had put a blanket on her shoulders, but it didn’t seem to help.

“Besides the—the signs on Fisher’s body—” Mike took one look at Ellen and censored what he’d been about to say. The signs of torture. “Besides those, they found some clumps of dirt on his body. Not much. Forensics says the clumps of dirt are consistent with the chemical makeup of the mountains surrounding Seattle, one in particular. Cougar Mountain.”

“That’s not much help,” Harry said sourly. “Only narrows the area to about a hundred square miles. Maybe more.”

“Yeah.” Mike checked a pad where he’d taken notes. “This isn’t for public consumption yet, but the way they’re figuring it, the guy was buried then disinterred. By the state of decomposition of the body, they’re figuring he was killed seven days ago, maybe more. That’s about all they’ve got. No leads, no clues. We might suspect who did it, but so far there’s no evidence linking anyone, let alone Gerald Montez, to the murder.” He closed his notepad. “But I’m going to send my pal an e-mail telling him to look into Gerald Montez’s whereabouts, and why.”

Ellen looked up, her face miserable. “Local law enforcement around Prineville is in Gerald’s pocket. He cultivates officers. Offers them free shooting time, gives generously to police charities, hires some guys from the police department from time to time. He pays them very well. I don’t think you’ll get any help from them. Gerald could be standing over a dead body with a smoking gun in his hand and they’d look the other way.”

“Well, you can be sure Seattle PD isn’t in Montez’s pocket,” Mike said grimly. “And my guy there is a good guy. No one’s going to buy him off. Ex Marine.” He said it as if it clinched his argument. Mike was incredibly proud of having been a Marine and he kept in contact with former Marines all over the country. Marines were good guys.
Semper fraternis.
The second half of the motto. Always brothers

Harry was former Delta. Delta operators were sneaky and calculating. It was the nature of their job, a lot of which was undercover. It wasn’t impossible to imagine a former operator sliding over to the dark side. Not a Marine, though.

Ellen looked like she was having trouble taking it all in.

Harry sat down next to her and put an arm around her shoulders, feeling the deep shudders going through her. She leaned into him gratefully, huddling against him as if for warmth.

His natural impulse was to pace the floor, a way of shaking the rage that pulsed through him. But Ellen needed his warmth and strength, so he had to tuck the rage away and concentrate on her.

And, of course, the fucker after her. The one who’d massacred her agent.

It was all over the news now. Partly because Roddy Fisher was a really big name on the Seattle music scene and partly because of the way he’d died. Tortured, shot in the head, then his long-dead, naked body handcuffed to a railing in Kerry Park.

The park’s security cameras had been blanked at a quarter to four in the morning, when the body had apparently been displayed. At 3:45 the cameras had blanked; at 4:20 they came back on and Fisher’s body had appeared.

It was really hard for Harry to even think with Ellen so terrified and distraught next to him. It had taken the three men and Nicole half an hour to convince her that she wasn’t responsible for Fisher’s death.

That would be the fucker Montez.

“Here, sweetie, drink up.” Nicole placed a cup of tea in Ellen’s hand, which shook as it emerged from the blanket. Harry cupped his hand around hers so she wouldn’t spill boiling tea all over herself and he nearly winced at how icy cold her hand felt. She was in shock.

He’d told Nicole to put a ton of honey and a finger of whiskey in the tea.

“Go ahead, honey. Drink,” he said quietly, lifting his hand toward her mouth. She shuddered again and sipped.

“Thanks, Nicole.” Ellen looked up, tried to smile for Sam’s wife, and Harry’s heart nearly broke. Her world had been shattered once again. Sam and Mike were standing, tense and angry, spoiling for a fight.

Harry was really, really glad they were on his side, because right now he was a wreck. He’d lost all his analytical powers and was tuned exclusively to the shivering, lost, beautiful woman by his side.

“I’m so sorry, Nicole,” Ellen whispered for the hundredth time. She looked at Harry, Sam and Mike. “I’m so sorry to have involved you in all of this. I need to go, to—”

“
Bullshit!
” Harry exploded. He felt like his head was going to blow apart.

“Dude, can it.” Mike’s deep bass was steady. “You’re not helping.” He crouched down in front of Ellen and took her free hand, enclosing it in his two huge hands.

“This is not your fault. None of this is even remotely your fault, Ellen. Montez is a bad guy and he has to be stopped. We’ll do it because that’s what we do. You don’t worry about us.”

Ellen swallowed convulsively, her long white throat working. Her mouth was trembling, tears at the corner of her eyes. “What if something happens to you? To Harry or Sam or you or…or
Nicole
? Because of me? I couldn’t stand it. I’d rather be dead. This is my fight. I can’t drag you guys into it.”

“We’re already in,” Sam said grimly. “No turning back. So you need to go over everything again for us. Tell us everything you know. The more intel we have, the better we can find this fu—asshole and take care of him.”

Ellen breathed shakily, in and out. Harry held her even more tightly against him. Another shudder ran through her.

She’d been on the run for a year. She’d been shot. They should get off her case. “It’s okay, honey,” he said gently. “Maybe some other time—”

“No!” Ellen threw her head back, eyes closed, clearly gathering her strength. When her eyes opened again, the shivering was gone. Hands and gaze steady. She stayed like that for a minute, two. Harry could actually see her resolve shaping. “I can do this. If you guys are taking him on, you need all the ammunition I can give you. I can’t let you down.”

Harry saw Mike and Sam exchange glances.
Good girl.
The words were in the room, though they didn’t say them aloud. At that moment, Harry admired Ellen more than anyone he knew.

He and Sam and Mike had made sure that they were well equipped to deal with the monsters in the world. They were all super-proficient with weapons of every shape and size, and Mike—well, Mike was probably one of the best sharpshooters in the world. They were all big, strong men, trained in martial arts. They’d all been in firefights and had prevailed. They had all the tools in hand to track down and destroy someone like Montez.

But Ellen…shit, Ellen had nothing in her to fight him with. She was alive because she was smart and thought fast on her feet and because luck had been on her side. She was brave, but bravery without skills to back it up was really just another way to get yourself killed.

Ellen was beautiful, incredibly talented, and kindhearted. In another, better world, that would make her respected and admired. In this world, where men like Gerald Montez ruled, that made her roadkill.

Harry’d lost Crissy. He hadn’t been able to protect his baby sister, no matter how hard he’d tried. The sweetest little girl in the world, and an ogre had snuffed her out like a candle.

This stopped, right here, right now.

Ellen was
not
going to fall in Montez’s hands. Not now, not ever.

And he, Harry, was going to have to pull his head out of his ass, PDQ, because his blind fear for her wasn’t any use to her at all. She needed him razor sharp and cool, not this trembling wreck of a man, terrified of losing her just as he’d lost his sister.

“Start at the beginning, honey.” Everyone’s head turned to him, which meant he’d been sounding like a lunatic before. Harry nodded his head—
don’t worry, I’m back
—and Sam and Mike dipped their heads slightly—
glad to hear it.
“From when you ran. The reason you ran. You said you’d been working for Bearclaw for a couple of years, right?”

“Yes. More than two years.” She was sitting upright, voice clear and steady, hands clenched tightly in her lap. “I kept coming up against inconsistencies, things that bordered on fraudulent accounting. He thought I wouldn’t notice anything. He hired a CPA because the law required it, that was all, but he was fiddling the books. That was clear to me by the first week on the job.”

Man, did you hire the wrong woman,
Harry thought.

“So like I said, there was this big company party on the eighteenth of May, at the Hyatt Regency. One of Gerald’s minions, Arlen Miller, comes up to me, puts his arm around my shoulders and starts telling me how lucky I am to have hooked up with a guy as smart as Gerald. He was so drunk you could have lit his breath. I didn’t really listen at the beginning, and I’m sorry now that I didn’t. But all I wanted was his heavy arm off my shoulders and to get home. He was talking about something that happened in April 2004 in Baghdad and how Gerald was the Man. And that the Man had taken twenty million. Then Gerald looked at him and this guy turned paper white. Gerald looked scary mad.”

Harry knew what happened when men like Gerald Montez were enraged. Everyone turned to him.

“Harry,” Nicole said, blinking. “Did you just
growl
?”

He shook his head sharply, getting rid of some bad thoughts. He picked up Ellen’s hand and brought it to his mouth. “Remember you’re safe now.”

Sam and Mike looked at each other again. Harry didn’t give a shit. This was his woman. One thing for sure—Sam understood. He’d tear the throat out of anyone who threatened Nicole.

“Can you try and remember more about exactly what this man, this Arlen, said?”

Ellen sighed. “I’ve tried over and over, but he was so drunk. Half of what he was saying didn’t make sense. Arlen mentioned another name, but I haven’t been able to find any mention of him in any database. Malowski. Or Makorski. Something like that. Arlen was really, really stewed.” She wrinkled her nose. “And he had a sort of speech defect, like a lisp. He sprayed spittle—
ew.
I was too busy trying to stay away from his breath and the spray.”

“Nicole,” Sam said.

“On it,” she answered, going to Harry’s laptop.

She switched it on and disappeared. To all intents and purposes, Nicole was no longer in the same room with them.

Harry was really, really good with computers, but Nicole was better at research. That hurt. She ran a translation agency and was used to carrying out major research for her translations. Her agency had a list of expert collaborators that spanned the globe, men and women who did online terminology research for a living, and they communicated daily. She also had low-level clearance to check government databases. As a result, Nicole could find anything.

“So you ran when this guy showed up dead?” Sam looked at Ellen.

“Yeah,” she answered softly. “I spent three months on the road, and I ended up in Seattle.”

Three months on the road. Harry didn’t have to ask what that had been like. Three months from anonymous motel to flea-bitten boardinghouse, because those were the kinds of places that didn’t require ID. Sleeping lightly, looking over her shoulder.

Sam leaned forward. “So Montez got to your agent. How’d he know where to look? You kept Eve under cover.”

Ellen shook her head. “I honestly have no idea. I was really careful. The records were produced by a shell company that I set up very carefully. Registered in the Caymans and with no connection to me. Paying my taxes took real creative accounting, let me tell you.”

“Were you this big draw at the bar where you worked?” Sam asked.

“No. The bar’s clientele is…well, let’s say
messed up
. Most of them don’t pay too much attention to anything. I can’t imagine anyone there connecting the waitress who sang a few nights a week with Eve. Except, of course, for Kerry.”

“Kerry?” Mike swiveled his head, frowning.

“Dove,” Harry and Mike said at the same time.

Mike’s frown deepened. “You guys met? Talked? What are the odds? That’s not good.”

No, it wasn’t. Kerry was supposed to stay undercover forever. Never let her secret out.

Ellen turned to him. “I don’t know, Mike. The Blue Moon is sort of tailor-made for…for women like us. The owner wants us off the books and he doesn’t care at all what our background is. If we can do the work—and it’s not rocket science—he pays on time and asks no questions at all. The customers are mainly sad men who don’t even look at us. There aren’t that many jobs you can get without showing up on any books. And Kerry was…she was lonely.”