Loose Ends (29 page)

“A-a ghost …”

No.

He didn’t think so.

He didn’t know what she’d been shooting at, but he was pretty darn sure it hadn’t been a ghost.

“…  and I h-hit it … h-hit it hard,” she said. “My last shot might have missed, but I’m dead-on about my first one … d-dead-on, and it hit.”

“Good,” he said, and gave her arm a quick, supportive squeeze, bucking her up, letting her know he was with her, proud of her. Hitting what you were shooting at was always good.

Always. Though technically, he didn’t think nailing a ghost with a .380 did much actual damage.
Geezus
.

“I-I shouldn’t have run. I sh-shouldn’t have left Mama’s.”

No. She shouldn’t have run.

“You would have been safer with the police,” he agreed, which was exactly what he’d told her, which he wasn’t going to mention, but if she’d done as he’d suggested—okay,
ordered
her to do—she wouldn’t have ended up blasting away at something in the alley—probably a rat, or a muskrat, or a raccoon, and he hoped to hell not a homeless person. Any one of those was enough to spook somebody.

Not really.

They were enough to spook a high-end girl who looked like she’d spent half her life getting a pedicure and the other half getting a shiatsu massage, no matter how good a shot she’d turned out to be at Mama’s.

And hell, if it had been a homeless person, at least
there were enough cops congregating back there to find him and give aid.

“You d-didn’t do that, did you? To King and Rock. You d-didn’t tear them up like … like that, right?” she asked, dragging her hand back through her hair, tangling it all up again, her gaze locked onto him like she was trying to think and figure things out and wasn’t having much luck doing either.

Yeah, they made a helluva pair. He was spiking at about a hundred and three degrees now, and she looked like she’d been hit by a Mack truck.

“It was self-defense, Jane. You saw the whole thing,” he said, trying again with her hair, lowering her hand away and sifting through the new tangle. “There were witnesses. Everyone in the kitchen saw what went down. You wouldn’t have been charged with anything if you’d stayed.” He didn’t know much, but he knew that.

“No.” She shook her head. “N-no, no, it’s worse, the two of them all broken up, so broken it’s awful, and the cops know me, from way back.”

Well, yes, he’d busted those boys pretty hard, and so had she, but it was the “way back” part of her statement that got his attention.

“I-I couldn’t stay,” she kept on. “I c-couldn’t take the chance … and … and—” She gulped in a breath and brought her hand up to cover her eyes—and she stood there and trembled.

He was headed there himself, out-and-out trembling territory, headed toward the shakes, and if things didn’t go his way with that second blue pill, maybe there was a seizure of some god-awful sort in his near future—very near future.

Hell
. He looked back to the sidewalk and the people coming out of the bar and the Italian place. About another thirty seconds or so and there’d be enough folks
outside for him and Jane to step into the crowd and make their getaway.

Shifting his attention back to her, it took a lot of what he had not to just pull her close, lift her up into his arms, and carry her away from this mess—but
that
would definitely get the cops’ attention.

“Did you do time?”

He wasn’t going to ask himself why that was the first question that came to mind, except for some odd little inflection in her voice telling him it wasn’t nearly as incomprehensible as he was going to wish it was, and when she just stood there, silent and trembling, with her hand still over her face, he knew it was true.

Perfect. He’d entered the country under a name he’d made up himself six years ago, and so far he’d illegally accessed a building and set off a few explosive devices. He’d stolen a car, easily committed a hundred or more traffic violations, kidnapped a woman, trespassed on all kinds of private property and damaged most of it, was knee-deep in assault and battery—and out of half a million people in Denver, he’d hooked up with a felon.

Somehow, somewhere, he couldn’t help but think that there had been a time when he’d spent most of his life on the right side of the law—just one more thing he’d lost, his legal bearings.

Hell
.

“Cañon City?” he asked, flat-out curious and figuring if she’d been sent up to Super Max in Florence, she’d still be behind bars.

“N-no.” She shook her head. “The Immaculate Heart School for Young Women … in Phoenix.”

He looked down at her, more than a little nonplussed. The Immaculate Heart School for Young Women? That wasn’t exactly his idea of a lockup.

“What did you do? Steal the Communion wine?”

She shook her head again. “I … I killed a man,” she
said, her voice barely audible. “Back when I was a kid. A gangbanger junkie over on Blake, me and Sandman. The cops haven’t forgotten. They never forget.”

Yeah, well, so now it was official. She’d shocked the hell out of him.

And geezus
. She was right, cops didn’t forget murder.

And yes, he was damn sorry he’d busted King and Rock so hard that she seemed to have gone into damn near instant posttraumatic stress disorder. And for the record, who in the hell was Sandman?

He had about a hundred questions, and not a one of them relevant to the mission at hand. She wasn’t his problem. Scout was the reason he’d come to Denver, and Lancaster was the reason he was going to stay until the job was done. Everything always came back to Lancaster—not to waiflike beauties with sketchy pasts who had somehow fallen into the middle of his deal and locked on to him like a heat-seeking missile.

“The junkie grabbed one of my kids, thinking we had drugs on us,” she said, going on, explaining something that didn’t need an explanation. In his book, gangs and junkies and trouble went together like peanut butter and jelly—and, yeah, sometimes he wondered what that made him, with his stash of Souk’s magic elixirs.

Hell
.

“It all went bad so fast,” she said. “There was a fight. He had his hands around my throat, shaking me hard, and I sh-shot him. Hawkins is the only reason I didn’t get tossed into the state pen.”

He could see it, some damn junkie trying to literally shake down a teenage girl for cash, or drugs, or whatever, and he wished to hell he’d been there. At least this Hawkins guy had saved her from going to jail. One more thing Con owed him for—and then the craziness of the thought hit him.

Christ
. He was in trouble here.

“I … I thought he was going to kill me, the junkie, and he probably would have, but the cops still wanted to lock me up, because I was a street kid,” she said. “You know how it is with street kids. They’re always in the wrong place, because they’ve got no place else to go.”

Yeah. He knew that much. He’d seen them all over the world, but he’d never in all his life seen one even half as beautiful as her.

“T-tell me,” she said. “Tell me you didn’t d-do it.” She lifted her head, and her gaze met his straight on, unflinching, and in that instant, something changed.

He didn’t know what “it” he hadn’t done, but with a sudden clarity of awareness unlike anything he’d felt in the last six years, he saw beyond the moment. He saw beyond her past, beyond the pale green allure of her eyes and the smoky smudge of her makeup, beyond her intelligence and her dead-on marksmanship. Here in the darkened alleyway, with her so close, he saw something else in her eyes and in her face, and it changed everything.

He knew her.

Really knew her.

In the shadows, scraped and roughed up with her hair in tangles and her clothes askew, with the scar on her cheek and the freckles across her nose, he recognized her, the waif, the renegade, the street runner. He didn’t remember being her lover, but he remembered her hanging around the place on Steele Street, waiting and watching for him, and remembered fantasizing about her, the street kid with the intense green eyes, the stringy hair, and the wildly beautiful face. He remembered he’d been a soldier, and she’d been eighteen, too damn young and too damn skittish, a fascinating, feral creature of the streets, living off her wits and her skills.

A pickpocket. The best Denver had ever seen.

The thought no sooner hit than he swore:
Sonuvabitch
.

He reached back for his wallet and felt the empty pocket, and he didn’t know whether to curse again or grin.

She was good. Always had been.

Oh, yeah. She was damn good, and he’d been completely spun up, mesmerized, staring into her incredible green eyes and not even noticing that when she’d stopped on the street and reached for him, she’d been stealing his wallet. She’d had about three seconds to recognize him, come up with a plan, and execute the lift.

And she’d pulled it off.

“Can I have my wallet back?” he asked, and after a slight hesitation, she shook her head.

“Why not?” he asked.

“I lost it in the garage.”

Well, she hadn’t denied it, and at least now he had a pretty good idea of how SDF had found the Star Motel, but he was still a little confused on one point.

“Why did you take it?”

“I-I thought you were dead, and then there you were on the street, and I had to know if it was really you, if you were really J. T. Chronopolous … and … and I need to know whether or not you did that to King and Rock. Whether you ripped King’s arm off and left it lying in the alley. You’re strong enough. I swear you are.”

And just like that, the whole night took another deep dive into the twilight zone.
Geezus
. King Banner’s arm had been ripped off?

Ripped off?

No wonder there were so damn many cops swarming this block. He looked over her shoulder, down the alley. This was bad. Explosions tore people into pieces, but there hadn’t been an explosion. So what in the ever-loving world could have—

It came to him then, just an idea, but a damned awful idea, that the Bangkok rumors he and Jack had heard were true. That Lancaster, dealing with a subpar Thai lab, had commissioned a monster—and possibly, for whatever reason, had brought the beast with him to Denver.

Either that, or there was a pack of wolves running loose on the west side, but even a pack of wolves couldn’t have worked that fast—and they wouldn’t have left the arm in the alley.

So what the hell else could it be, if it wasn’t a guy like him juiced to the next plane, where humanity took a backseat to violence? He’d seen it in Souk’s lab, when the good doctor’s mistakes stretched the bounds of the imagination—twisted experiments gone wrong, like Shoko.

“No,” he said clearly, meeting Jane’s gaze again. “When I went back, both men were exactly as we’d left them. One of the cooks had come out into the alley, but he was small and old, not big enough to do that kind of damage.”

“Something was.”

She had that right.

“Your ghost,” he said. “How good of a look did you get at it?”

“Not very,” she admitted. “What I saw was a pale blur in the darkness—something big, moving fast, maybe with long white hair, or maybe that was just a trick of the light.”

Big and fast he understood. A lot of the LeedTech warriors were big, and they were all fast. The long white hair—he didn’t know about that. He’d never come up against a LeedTech assassin with long hair, white or otherwise, and he didn’t want to tonight, not when he was heading toward his own personal Three Mile Island,
a meltdown at his core, and not when Jane was within a hundred miles of him.

“Come on,” he said. There were enough people on the street now, enough chaos to cover their escape, and they needed to move out. Somewhere up there on the hill, in that old neighborhood of winding roads, was a place where they would be safe. He could almost hear it calling to him, like a siren’s song.

Creed had seen some pretty wild things in his life, some real bad stuff, but nothing quite like this.

Standing in the alley behind Mama Guadaloupe’s, a few things were immediately obvious. First, a lot of people back here in the alley hadn’t seen much bad stuff. Two of the cops and a fireman had upchucked their suppers, and it looked like one of the EMTs was going to be next. Second, typically, there were at least four versions of the truth in two languages being tossed around. Last, but far from least, there was one bad motherfucker out there somewhere. King Banner’s arm had been twisted clean off at the shoulder and been tossed aside.

Amazing.

Shades of Beowulf came to mind, and the monster Grendel. He was also thinking about Red Dog, and what a man juiced like her would be capable of doing—a man like J.T.

It was a lot to think about.

“You got enough light?” he asked Hawkins, who was photographing everything with his cellphone. The detectives were going to be there any second, and they were traditionally territorial about their crime scenes. But Loretta had given Superman the go-ahead, and they were running with it under her firm command not to touch anything.

He was good with that—except for one thing. He sure would like to take the syringe hanging out of the arm still attached to King. He’d seen others like it. He knew what it was, and so did everybody else on SDF: a Thai syringe, strange stuff that the forensics lab here in Denver was going to have a helluva time deciphering.

“This place is lit up like the inside of a klieg light,” Hawkins answered.

Yeah, it was.

“You might want to get close-ups of their faces,” he said. “In case there’s family somewhere. If we can come up with a match in the LeedTech files Dylan snagged, somebody might get called down to a cop shop someplace to identify them.”

“Thank you, Mother Teresa.”

Yeah, yeah. Whatever. It was damn nice of Loretta to let them in on this, but he doubted if Dylan was going to be sharing the LeedTech files with her. That was going to be their piece of the puzzle.

He lifted his face into the night air and closed his eyes.

“There’s a lot of blood,” Hawkins said.