Hotter Than Wildfire (6 page)

 
“That’s highly confidential information,” Ellen said sharply. Information that could get her killed.

So this was Sam Reston.

Ellen looked at him carefully. Though he didn’t look like Harry Bolt at all—Reston was dark-haired with rough features; Bolt was dark blond with fine, angular features—they shared a look. Tall, impossibly strong, self-possessed.

And they both looked really dangerous. Not for the first time, she wondered whether she’d made a mistake in coming here. If she was wrong, if Kerry had somehow steered her to the wrong place, she could have sacrificed her life for nothing.

These men spirited away endangered women. You’d think that there would be softness and kindness in their gaze. That they’d be sort of like social workers, only taller.

These two men looked worlds away from being social workers. If she were told they were crime lords or killers, she’d believe every word.

No softness, no kindness, no discernible mercy.

What had she done?

There was silence in the room for a minute, two. Ellen’s throat was too tight and dry for her to even think of speaking.

“Well?” Harry Bolt fixed her with an unblinking stare, light-brown eyes fixed as in an eagle’s gaze, and just as impersonal. “You are Eve, aren’t you?”

Yes.
And I have just given you enough personal information to track me down. If you’re not going to help me, I’m done for.

No.
Of course not. What a ridiculous notion. And excuse me, I need to be somewhere else right now.

Yes. No. Yes. No.

“Yes,” she blurted out, as if some seal across her lips had just been shattered. Except for her agent, no one else knew. Well, maybe her boss, Mario, because beneath his laid-back tattooed exterior he was really smart. Still, he’d never asked and she’d never told. “Yes. And I’m afraid that might be the way my former boss found me, though everyone on the production side signed a confidentiality agreement.”

She’d made Roddy swear to secrecy and they’d drawn up the confidentiality clause together. She knew enough legal lingo to make it airtight and to make anyone think twice about selling out to the tabloids. The musicians had played in a separate room, with a separate entrance and had never even seen her, only heard her. She’d insisted on that.

Roddy hadn’t really taken her seriously, but he had seen the marketing potential. At a time in which anyone in the media ran a website, blogged, friended on Facebook, Twittered, had RSS feeds and was linked in, a mystery identity was a sure-fire publicity gimmick.

Harry Bolt addressed Sam Reston without taking his eyes off her. “So, Sam, this is Nora Charles, aka Eve. She got our number from Dove. Eve, this is Sam Reston, the man who helped your friend.”

She was vibrating with nerves, sweat trickling down her back and between her breasts. She knew her pale skin would be ice white with stress.

Sam Reston didn’t even try to shake hands with her; he must have seen that she was on the knife’s edge. He simply nodded soberly, said, “Ma’am” in a low voice and sat down next to his partner.

He addressed his partner without taking his eyes off her. “Harry? Sitrep.”

Now both of them were looking at her intently. Most stares come off as aggressive, but theirs didn’t. Just…intense. Like they were listening carefully to what she said, but other information was coming their way from her eyes, her hands, her feet. Maybe even her gut.

“Ms. Charles is an accountant. She worked for a company…in the South?” He raised his eyebrows slightly.

Ellen nodded shakily. She’d spent a lifetime getting rid of her cracker accent but there was still a Southern tilt to her voice, particularly under stress.

Harry Bolt continued. “At a party, a company employee told her that the owner of the company stole a big sum of money from the U.S. government in Iraq. Twenty million dollars.”

Now it was Sam Reston’s turn to raise his eyebrows.

“That employee died the next day. His forehead met a bullet. Men came for her and she ran. Her boss told the police and the media she’d embezzled a million dollars, maybe killed the guy who talked.”

Her heart ached a little every time she heard that. She’d worked so
hard
to create a respectable life for herself and it was in shattered shards around her feet.

“I didn’t,” she said quietly.

Sam Reston frowned. “Of course not.”

There was silence in the room.

“Can we know the name of who’s after you?” Reston finally asked. “To help you, we need to know the nature of the threat.”

Could they know the name? Ellen sat, heart thudding. Every cell in her body screamed,
No!
She’d spent the past year never mentioning that name to anyone.

On the other hand, it was entirely possible she was the last person on earth to know that Gerald Montez had stolen twenty million dollars from the U.S. government and had killed at least one person to keep that secret.

If she died, someone had to have this information.

Ellen didn’t know these two men. But she did know that at least one of them had helped a friend survive violence and build a new life. She wasn’t endangering them. Both of them looked perfectly capable of taking care of themselves.

And…and she’d kept this lonely secret so
long
. It had shattered her life. Something in her longed to let it out, as if telling them could somehow lift this dark cloud of evil hanging over her, blighting her life.

She pulled in a deep breath and told them a secret she’d nearly died to keep.

“The company’s name is Bearclaw. My former boss’s name is Gerald Montez.”

The air in the room changed, like an electrical charge had been run through it. The two men looked at each other.

It was just a glance, the merest flicker of the eyes, but it touched off a wildfire of panic inside her.

She was used to masking her feelings, so they probably wouldn’t realize that inside she’d just gone into red alert, panic pulsing in her head like the deep siren in a submarine when a torpedo is heading its way.

Oh God!

They knew Gerald. They knew Bearclaw.

They were probably friends. They were certainly in the same business, probably did business together. Might even have an interest in covering up Gerald’s crimes.

In a flash, Ellen realized that she’d been insane to seek protection from men who were exactly like Gerald. A year on the run, and she’d just placed herself in the enemy’s hands.

She could barely breathe, as if a giant hand had squeezed her rib cage. She had to will herself to think straight.

Whether she lived or died depended on her actions in the next minute.

“Here,” she said smoothly, opening her backpack. “I have photos on my cell phone, I can show you…” She stopped, frowning.
Not too much, don’t overdo it, just look faintly puzzled.
“That’s strange…”

Look up and to the left, trying to remember something. Cool, casual.

“My cell phone isn’t here…Oh!”
Eyes wide, remembering. Stand up, moving slowly,
even though her body was screaming for escape. “Oh my gosh! It must have dropped out of my backpack downstairs when I checked the street number. I’ll be right back.”

Move briskly, don’t run.

She didn’t even give them a chance to react. In a second, she was out into the reception area. She beamed a dazzling smile at the receptionist. “Forgot something,” she trilled. “Be right back!”

In the hallway, the elevator was just closing its doors. She’d kept herself in shape, doing calisthenics in her run-down apartment every day, and a good thing, too, because she ran and caught the door by a hair, punching the ground floor button so hard it was a miracle she didn’t punch her way through the metal.

It took forever. Finally, the doors dinged and she flew out through the huge glass street doors, blinking in the bright sunlight. And again, the goddess of runaway women was with her, because a cab swerved to the curb and let out a passenger.

She must have looked like a wild woman. The taxi driver threw her a startled look when she flung herself into the backseat and panted out the address of the small hotel she’d booked for the night. “Double the fare if you can get me there in ten minutes!”

The taxi driver was young, and looked like a college student. “Yes,
ma’am
!” he grinned and stood on the accelerator. There was a squeal of tires and she was pressed against the back of the seat. Good. As long as the driver didn’t get them killed on the way, the faster she got to her room, the better.

Could they track her down? She thought it over. She hadn’t called the Bird in Flight number from her cell phone but from a pay phone at the Greyhound station. The hotel she’d found was just over a mile from there, though. Would they be able to track her down?

Probably. These guys would have enormous resources at their disposal, including manpower.

And she hadn’t even had a chance to sleep yet. She’d just washed up a bit before going to RBK. So now she’d have to leave, fast, and go…

Her mind pulled a blank.

Go where?

She’d plan that when she got to the hotel. Right now her entire being was panic bolted on top of exhaustion.

God, she was tired. The whole weight of the past three days, of the past year, was settling on her shoulders like a concrete mantle. She was usually pretty good at making snap decisions, but none that made any sense to her were coming at the moment.

Run. Again. But to where?

Georgia, Seattle, San Diego…geographically speaking, her next stop should be in northern New England, even though she hated the cold. Hole up in Maine or Vermont.

And how the hell to get there? Undetected by Harry Bolt and Sam Reston, who scared her almost as much as Gerald Montez? Gerald swaggered around, and he was dangerous because he could be unstable and had a violent streak to him.

Harry Bolt in particular struck her as dangerous, because she could clearly see the intelligence in his eyes.

Having a violent man after her was scary; having a violent, intelligent man after her was terrifying.

Oh, God.

She closed her eyes, overwhelmed, shaking. What next?

She drew a complete blank. Well, check that her cell phone was off, for one. It was a cheap prepaid throwaway and she made a point of keeping it turned off, using it only when absolutely necessary. RBK Security wouldn’t have it, but you could never be too cautious. Or paranoid.

Ellen scrabbled in her purse and her eyes widened when she realized that she’d told Harry Bolt and Sam Reston the sober truth.

She really
had
left her cell phone behind. Not outside the building but in the hotel. The hotel she was going to have to leave as fast as possible.

The streets got a little meaner, then meaner still and then the cab pulled up in front of her hotel. Ellen paid and rushed toward the entrance.

A big hand grabbed her and slammed her against the side of a car while someone ran toward her with a gun. Pain streaked through her and the world blackened at the edges.

 
Harry met Sam’s eyes and refrained from wincing. Sam’s eyes were so bloodshot it was as if he had opened up his veins and drained them right into his eyes. Nicole’s morning sickness had clearly been preceded by a whole lot of night sickness.

Well, Sam was married to a stunningly beautiful woman he was crazy about and who loved him right back. They were expecting a much-desired little girl. What were a few sleepless nights in comparison to that?

Nothing.

“Montez,” Sam growled. “That son of a bitch.” His red eyes blazed. “Going to bring that fucker down.”

Bearclaw was hated all throughout the U.S. military, but especially by SpecOps soldiers. Montez’s men were not encouraged to show restraint and had no rules of engagement at all, unless you count
getoutofmywaymotherfuckerorI’llshoot
as a rule of engagement.

Four very good men had died badly as a direct result of Bearclaw’s brutality, and Harry knew of at least two instances in which Bearclaw men had brought down fire on soldiers’ positions through sheer carelessness.

“Oh yeah.” Just the thought of Gerald Montez going after Eve made Harry’s stomach roil. Montez was a scumbag who made money off the backs of U.S. soldiers. Bringing him down was going to be a pleasure. No way was Montez going to touch Eve, he’d make sure of it.

Speaking of which…

Oh, fuck.

“
Goddammit!
” Harry stood up so suddenly his chair thudded against the floor.

Sam’s red eyes turned his way. “What?”

“She’s gone. She ran.” It pulsed through Harry in one electric moment of understanding. Eve had run out. Something had spooked her—something they’d said, something they’d done—and she’d run. Eve was now in the wind, with Gerald fucking Montez after her.

Every hair on Harry’s body stood up. He could feel the hairs on his forearms scraping against the stiff cotton of his dress shirt. Fear pinged in every cell of his body.

Harry wasn’t used to fear. Anger and outrage, yeah, sure. But fear? He hadn’t been afraid of anything since Methhead Rod had killed Crissy. The worst thing that could ever happen to him already had. His own death was nothing in comparison to seeing Rod slam his little sister’s body against the wall and watching her crumple to the floor in a pool of blood.

Well…right now was close. Eve was a woman of rare, almost mystical talent, a vulnerable, haunting beauty.

Eve knew something that could hurt Gerald Montez, who was utterly merciless. Montez wouldn’t think twice about wiping her off the face of the earth, but not before skinning her alive first, to find out what was in that beautiful head that could hurt him.

He’d already ruined her life. He’d planted evidence of her embezzlement and the murder of the man who’d ratted on him. With local law enforcement in his pocket, she didn’t dare ever show her face.

Harry didn’t even want to think about what Gerald could—and would—do to Eve if he caught her. Which he would. He’d tracked her to Seattle, and Montez was no dummy. She was probably running straight into a trap, right…fucking…
now
.

Sam’s eyes widened as Harry turned to one of the three top-of-the-line computers on his desk. He punched two keys and a clear image of the street outside their building appeared, crisp and clean.

“Fuck,” he breathed. “There she is.”

The monitor showed Eve running toward a taxi that had stopped to let a passenger out in front of the entrance. A second later the taxi pulled away, tires squealing.

Harry punched a key and the frame froze. He zoomed in on the license plate, highlighted the frame, copied it and entered it directly into a database he kept current for just such an occasion as this, in which speed was vital.

The database was a roster of TPMS IDs. The Tire Pressure Monitoring System probably was helpful for car safety, but it was fabulous for tracking down vehicles. Tire pressure measurement devices transmitted pressure data constantly to the onboard computer, each car with its separate ID—a safety measure that as a by-product was a quick way to track any vehicle manufactured since 2007.

The cab was a 2008 model Prius.

A soft ping and the ID was on his second monitor, superimposed on a map of San Diego.

“Sam!” Harry ran to the weapons locker, fitting himself with a light Kevlar vest, a shoulder holster with a Kimber 1911 and three magazines hanging from his belt. Comms system in ear.

He took the gun from the right-hand side of the locker. All the guns there were cold. Unregistered, untraceable. If Montez’s men were around, this was going to be a kill.

He slung a jacket on to cover the whole thing and raced to the door. “Have Henry bring my SUV up from the garage. I’ll call you from the vehicle. Keep following that cab and patch it through to my SUV’s GPS. And kill the security cameras where the cab stops.”

It was Harry who should have been at the computer. He was better at it than Sam. Sam was good at strategy; Harry was good with computers. But he’d have to leave Sam to take care of the monitors, because no way was anyone going after Eve except himself.

Sam moved to the chair in front of the monitor. He knew he wasn’t as good with computers as Harry was—few people were—but Harry trusted him to do this.

“On it.” Sam set up the transfer of the image to the onboard computer in Harry’s vehicle. “You just make sure she doesn’t fall into Montez’s hands.”

“You got it,” Harry growled, and raced out.

Henry, the garage manager, must have had his spidey senses working overtime, because he had Harry’s Cherokee idling at the curb, driver’s-side door open, when Harry burst out of the front doors. Harry peeled out, keeping an eye on the GPS screen.

“She’s going down Lark,” Sam’s calm voice came over Harry’s earpiece.

“Yeah, I can see it.” Harry was driving as fast as the road and traffic would allow. The cab was four blocks ahead of him. The light was still yellow at the intersection ahead…

Harry braked suddenly and pounded his fist on the steering wheel in frustration. A big delivery van suddenly appeared on the cross street, moving slowly. Harry would have run the red light, but now he was forced to wait.

Though no sound penetrated the soundproofing in the car, he knew his tires were screeching as he took off the second the light changed. Heads turned as smoke rose in the rearview mirror.

He was treating the vehicle badly, but who the fuck cared. The important thing was getting to where Eve was going fast enough to stop Montez’s thugs from grabbing her if they were waiting for her.

With every second that passed, Harry was more and more certain that she was walking into a trap.

He punched a number on the screen, the office. It took about five seconds to get through. All of RBK Security communications went through a proprietary satellite, which was owned by a company based in the Bahamas and seemingly located in Canada, and their calls couldn’t be snarfed out of the air like most Bluetooth-based comms.

“Sir?” It was Marisa, who looked after the Lost Ones. She’d been a lost one herself and she was ferociously protective. No man trying to track down one of “her” girls would ever find out from Marisa that his victim had been to RBK.

“Marisa!” Harry barked. “Did this Nora Charles call from a cell?”

Tapping sounds, then Marisa’s calm voice. “No, sir. She called from a pay phone from…” More tapping sounds. “The Greyhound bus station on West Broadway.”

A light turned yellow up ahead and Harry gunned the engine viciously, pounding his way through the intersection, wrenching the steering wheel to avoid a teenager driving a Mustang. The gap was down to two blocks.

“Thanks, Marisa.” Harry felt a little spurt of relief. If Bearclaw got hold of Eve’s cell phone, they’d trace the number she’d called to RBK. Still, good luck with that. That one number, never used for ordinary business, was also registered in the Bahamas but routed through Canada. They’d never trace her through the number. But they could trace her through the phone itself, if she’d kept it on.

He could only pray that she’d turned the cell off wherever it was.

She was staying at the Curtis Hotel, he discovered, as the small red dot that was the cab stopped. With a voice command, Harry immediately superimposed a map of businesses over that spot and saw the name. It was only a block away.

He pressed the pedal down as far as it could go, taking in the scene at the hotel at a glance. One hand on the wheel, the other pulling out his Kimber.

No sooner had the cab pulled away than two men emerged from the shadows. Big men, armed. Overkill to pick up one lone woman. The first one to reach her pulled her arm up behind her back and slammed her into the side of a van.

Eve turned white with shock and slumped, dazed.

The fuckhead slapped her hard, pulled her arm up even more, bending down to give her instructions. He started man-handling her toward an off-white Transit panel van that had pulled up to the curb. The other guy opened the van’s back doors. The van’s cargo bay was empty except for blankets on the floor. The guy opening the bay was holding a .45 auto down along his leg.

Eve dug her heels in, clearly understanding that if she got in the van, she’d never get out again. She pulled against the arm holding her, outmatched, but not giving in. Harry watched her struggle, watched Fucker 1 backhand her again while Fucker 2 watched.

Seeing that, seeing her hurt, Harry’s blood boiled. He shook all over with rage, except for his hands. His hands were steady and knew precisely what to do.

In a second he’d braked, shouldered the door open and leaped out onto the street before the vehicle stopped rocking.

He raced toward the man holding Eve. The man slammed her against the Transit’s side again and reached inside his jacket. His reactions showed he’d had training, but he didn’t have enough training to stop Harry. There wasn’t enough training in the world for that.

Every instinct as a soldier told Harry to go for the armed guy first. It was practically written in stone. When facing an armed man and an unarmed man reaching for the gun, go for the gun that’s in sight.

But Harry couldn’t stand to see Eve manhandled for even a second longer. He ran straight up to the guy holding Eve, moved sideways fast in a smooth leg sweep, catching him as he lost his balance, pressing against him hip to hip, then rolling his hip to hold the guy in front of him as a shield.

Armed Guy had started shooting, controlled bursts from his automatic, but he was hitting the man in front of Harry. Harry braced against the impact of the bullets hitting the body he held in front of him.

The armed man stopped shooting and turned his gun on Eve, but Harry’s gun was up and firing. A double-tap to the head and he dropped like a stone, only a star of pink mist dissipating in the air marking where he’d stood.

The whole thing had taken no more than three seconds.

Eve was on the ground, unconscious, but there was one more guy to worry about before Harry could help her. The van door slammed shut on the other side—the driver’s side. Harry dropped to the ground and put a round in each ankle, watching bone splinters pepper the ground. Ignoring the screams, he raced around the front of the van and placed a round in the screaming man’s head without a second thought.

There was no doubt that these fuckers’ orders had been to bring Eve in alive if possible—dead if not. All three were armed—flipping back the jacket of the man who’d manhandled Eve showed a well-used holster and a Glock 17 seated in it, undrawn. He’d trusted his big fists to subdue a lone woman.

Harry gave him a vicious kick in the side, sorry that the fucker was dead, because he wanted to kill him all over again. He told himself the kick was to see if he was still alive, but that was bullshit. Some primitive part of him wanted to cut the fucker’s chest open, rip his heart out and feed it to the dogs. Touch Eve and you died.

He looked down and his heart stopped. Just stopped for a long, horrendous second.

No.

This couldn’t be. He closed his eyes for a second, sure that when he opened them again, he’d see bare asphalt at his feet and three very dead men scattered around the vehicle and that was all.

Life couldn’t be that cruel. In the nanosecond in which this thought flashed through his head, every cell in his body rejected it as false. Life could definitely be that cruel. The cruelty of the world was never-ending, fathomless. The fact that something would break your heart was almost a guarantee that it would happen.

He opened his eyes again, the scene unchanged.

Eve, lying on her back, utterly still, blood staining her white shirt, staining her arm, pooling around her back. As he watched, a rivulet of blood broke from the pool and followed a groove in the asphalt invisible to the naked eye down to the edge of the curb, where it started dripping into a grate.

Harry dropped to his knees, because his legs wouldn’t hold him up any more.

No, no, no.
The words were a heavy drumbeat in his heart.

No.

He refused even the thought of it. He hadn’t been able to save Crissy, but
by God
he was going to save Eve, whose voice had saved his own life.

He was supposed to
save
her! That was the way it was supposed to be. Not once in the wild ride here, or while fighting Montez’s goons, had it occurred to him that he wouldn’t be able to save her.

He
had
to save her. He had to save her to save his own soul, because it felt like his own life’s blood dripping down onto the street and draining into the gutter, instead of hers.

He couldn’t let the monsters win all the time. His life had to have some meaning, some ability to stop the monsters, at least once.

Kneeling, Harry bent over her, tears pricking his eyes. The last time he’d cried had been over Crissy’s lifeless body. The sweetest little girl in the world, destroyed by a monster. He’d cried until he’d blacked out.