Crazy Sweet (4 page)

Christ
. Climbing onto the rail of the veranda, he grabbed the top-floor railing and swung himself up—and landed smack-dab at her white-platformed, spike-heeled, bow-tied feet.

She gasped and froze like a bunny in the headlights, all five feet and practically nothing of tanned legs, tight dress, dangerous curves, and blond hair.

He decided on the spot that unbeknownst to him all these years, candy-apple-red toenail polish was his favorite—something he might have been inclined to contemplate a little more deeply, except for the shouting coming from the courtyard and the sound of feet pounding up the outside stairs.

“Come on,” he said, wrapping one arm around her waist and his other hand around her upper arm, which left her with very little weight on her feet, which he most definitely used to his advantage, hustling her toward the door to his room. He had her inside before she could even begin to protest, let alone struggle. He quickly closed the heavy door, shot the top and bottom dead bolts home as quietly as possible, and pressed his ear to the wood, listening.

And that’s when he heard the unmistakable sound of somebody racking a round into the chamber of a semiautomatic pistol—except the sound was coming from behind him, not from out on the veranda.

Fuck.

He didn’t move for a couple of seconds, just rested his head against the door and silently swore at himself.

“T-turn around,” she said, and he figured that was probably not such a bad idea.

Pushing himself off the door panel, he slowly turned to face her and raised his hands to either side of his body. He had a Sig Sauer .45 in a holster jammed in his pants, riding in the small of his back, under his shirt, and he knew that even with her getting the drop on him, he could take her—but he wasn’t going to shoot her, or put her to the floor. Not yet. Not when she still looked like a bunny in the headlights. Not when she was still standing exactly where he had first put her, one step away, instead of gaining some distance before drawing her weapon. Not when her hands were shaking so badly he doubted if she could hit the broad side of a barn even at that distance. And not when she didn’t have her finger on the trigger.

Nope, both the girl’s hands and all her digits were wrapped around the pistol’s grip like duct tape. He wondered if she even knew there was a trigger, and he wondered how anyone who knew so little about how to hold a gun had known how to load one.

“My name is John Roland, and I work for the U.S. State Department.” That always sounded good to Americans in a foreign country. It shouldn’t, not necessarily, but it did—and her voice had definitely tagged her as an American. “Please lower your gun.”

“The—the State Department?” she repeated.

But she didn’t lower the gun. Not an inch.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You don’t look like you’re from the State Department.”

She had a point, a damn good one. He looked like a merchant marine on a three-day bender, but he was sticking with his story.

“My office, the embassy where I work, is actually in
Panama
. I’m here in San Luis on vacation.”

“I saw you sitting out in front of the bar across the street.”

Good girl. She’d been paying attention to her surroundings from behind those big sunglasses. He was surprised.

“Did you see the men come out of the villa’s gate?”

She nodded, and a blond tendril of hair slipped free from one of her bows and slid down the side of her neck to curl in the concave curve above her collarbone, which was where the plunging V of her halter top began, which for all the fascination it held wasn’t nearly as riveting as where the V of the halter top ended.

He took a breath.

“And the fourth guy coming up the street?” he asked. “Did you see him?” The one with the fucking AR15?

She nodded again, and another honey gold strand slipped free to slide across her shoulder. “Th-that’s why I came inside the hotel.”

He was more than surprised that she’d seen the fourth guy. He was impressed. She’d been standing at the cart, buying junk, and watching the street like a hawk, which really didn’t have a damn thing to do with how her skin looked up close, like satin—smooth, soft, and with a subtle sheen that was just a little mind-boggling.

The gun, Smith,
he reminded himself.
Keep your eye on the gun.

“Are you staying here?” He was going to have to take her down and take that damn gun, but he’d really like to do it without breaking her, a consideration that wasn’t usually within a hundred miles of his “Things to Do Today” list, not on any day of the week. Up until one minute ago, one hundred percent of the people who had ever pointed a gun at him had been on his “Take Them the Fuck Out” list, Monday through Sunday.

“D-do you have some identification? From the State Department?”

A good question, and no, he didn’t, but he went ahead and carefully lowered his right hand and turned slightly to his left, subtly shifting his weight and giving a damn good impression of someone going for his wallet—and in less than two seconds had her off balance, spun around, and planted solidly against the wall next to the door. Her hands were still gripping the pistol, but he had both of them pinned flat against the plaster above her head, his hip dug into her abdomen, and the V of his right thumb and forefinger around her throat.

Her face had gone instantly pale.

“Let go of the gun,” he growled. “Or I’ll snap your neck.” And that put her way beyond pale into “deathly pale” territory.

He felt her fingers relax, and he pried the weapon free. Then he released his grip on her and stepped away.

Yeah, he thought. It had been a good question, but it had also been one more mistake in a day full of mistakes, starting with her leaving whatever hotel she was staying at, which no way in hell could be the Palacio.

“Where are you staying in San Luis?” he asked, releasing the magazine out of her pistol. Next, he ejected the round she’d loaded into the chamber and let it fall into his hand—a .45, full metal jacket.

When she didn’t answer, he glanced up.

Perfect. She was trembling, all over, from the top of her French twist down to her toes, every inch of her—trembling. And suddenly he hoped very much that nothing fell out of her dress.

“What hotel are you at?” he asked again, trying to take a little of the growl out of his voice.

“Th-that’s none of your business.” She sounded about ready to faint, which was one of the last things he needed.

“It is if you want to get back there in one piece,” he said, then checked the magazine. It felt empty, because it was empty.

Sonuvabitch.

“You only had one cartridge?” That didn’t make sense. Nobody carried around a semiautomatic pistol with just one cartridge.

“C-cartridge?”

“Bullet,” he elaborated. And anyone who didn’t know the difference between a bullet and a cartridge shouldn’t be carrying anything around.

“There’s only one?”

“
Uno.
” He held up the round, and watched her beautiful, lush, candy-apple-red, trembling lips tighten just a bit, in the middle, but he couldn’t tell if it was because she was going to cry—
Please, God, anything but that
—or if she was angry.

“I—I paid for three.”

Three?

Well, that was just about the stupidest damn thing he’d ever heard.

“Who did you pay?” For three freaking cartridges to put in a seven-round magazine for a semiauto pistol that didn’t look like it had been cleaned since World War II.

“The man on the street, the one with the cart.”

Oh, geezus.

Suddenly he knew what had been in the bundle, and he knew why Royce’s men had come out of the gate, and it wasn’t because of a tight white halter dress and honey blond hair.

“Get in the corner, and don’t move. Not a muscle, and I mean it,” he said, drawing his Sig and gesturing toward the forward corner of the room, where he could keep her in sight, but where she’d be hidden behind the door if it was opened, something he wasn’t planning on allowing, but there were four guys out there who might be thinking differently.

Christ
. She’d bought a gun off the street, with one friggin’ cartridge, which was probably just enough to get her killed, and she’d done it in front of Royce’s guards, who would damn well know what kind of business Vendor Man conducted out of his friggin’ cart.

He stepped back over to the door to listen.

“I—I don’t think you’re with the State Department.”

“I am,” he lied without a second thought. He didn’t tell people his business—ever.

“You don’t look like anyone I’ve ever met from the State Department.”

That got her a look. “Which State Department, exactly, are we talking about?”

“The one in
Washington
,
D.C.
”

Geezus.

“I have friends there.”

Good. Great.

“Lots of them.”

Okay, he wasn’t going to run with that, even if she did look like a girl who might have a lot of “friends” anywhere she went.

“And none of them carry a gun.”

He wasn’t surprised. The job description for State Department pencil pushers didn’t usually include disarming beautiful blondes in ratty hotel rooms. No, that thrill-a-minute task was left to guys like him, guys who looked like the kind she’d probably spent her whole life avoiding.

“Y-you do,” she added.

Yes, he did, one with plenty of ammo, enough to get him out of the Palacio, if it came to that.

Him and her, too, dammit, if it came to that.

The woman really did need a keeper. It wasn’t going to be him, oh, hell no, but he could at least get her off Tony Royce’s street and back over to where the
turistas
played.

“Y-you look like you know what you’re doing. With the gun, I mean.”

He did, but he sure as hell didn’t like this particular turn of the conversation, no more than he liked what he was hearing through the door: the sound of men coming down the veranda.

“You scared me.”

He’d meant to scare her.

“And I don’t trust you,” she said.

Smart girl, he thought, giving her a quick glance where she’d pressed herself into the corner. She was all white swoops and polka-dot curves against the ancient, dull gold paint covering the walls.

“B-but I trust those men out there even less.”

A very smart girl, he decided, a very smart and shaking-like-a-leaf-in-a-class-five-hurricane girl who sounded like she was starting to hyperventilate a little.

“I’ll p-pay you five hundred d-dollars to be my bodyguard for the next five minutes.”

Smith lifted one eyebrow in her direction, then gave her a quick nod and shifted his attention back to the door—and he grinned. He couldn’t help himself. Five hundred dollars, and to think he’d been going to save her for free.

CHAPTER

4

W
HAT THE FUCK is this?” Tony Royce asked, looking at the photograph Zane Lowe, his top lieutenant, handed him.

“San Luis.” At six feet four and hitting the scales at two-fifty, Zane was a beast—a red-haired beast with a brain.

Royce looked at the picture again, more closely, and felt his jaw lock.

“This is my fucking house?” The windows of his suite at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas overlooked the whole glitzy, overlit, goddamn city—but his gaze was glued to the photograph that Zane had just printed off the computer, a close-up shot of a stucco wall with the number three written on it in red paint.

He’d seen that color of red paint before, four separate times, and every time he’d seen it, bad fucking news had followed. This time, the bad news had arrived first. The goddamn
Mara
Plata deal he’d been working had been one big goddamn waste of time. The piss ants had leaked the deal.

Now he knew why.

“Yes, sir,” Zane said. “The photographs were taken this morning.”

“And Manuel just decided to send them now?”

“Yes, sir.”

Sir
. That was goddamn right. He may have recruited his slag heap of operators out of the gutter, but by God, they either called him sir, or he called them out.

Zane handed him another photo, a long shot, and the full extent of the damage to his million-dollar property and the solution to a whole lot of his problems over the last two years suddenly became crystal clear.

“The stupid bitch.”

“Yes, sir.”

He glanced at Zane and found his beast grinning.

Zane had problems, psychological problems, but nothing that interfered with his job. Quite the contrary. Sadism was one of Royce’s preferred qualities in a job applicant. Not that any of his men had applied. Hell, no. He’d searched each one of them out and offered them the opportunity of a lifetime, to be part of an elite team of international drug-runners with the connections to broker deals and deliver smack from one corner of the earth to another, seamlessly, flawlessly, and by the hundreds of kilograms. Royce was the middleman to the middlemen, with the added bonus of offering a cartel-connected cocaine pipeline into the world’s most lucrative markets, and supplying a full line of special-use, high-tech pharmaceuticals guaranteed to blow the head off anybody unlucky enough to end up on the wrong end of one of his needles, a niche market he filled through his private medical staff in Thailand.

Other people could fight for justice, freedom, and the right to vote. He knew what the world wanted. The whole goddamn world wanted to get high, with or without a side order of democracy.

Bangkok, Hong Kong, Islamabad, Vientiane, Rangoon, and Bogotá, he’d known where to find his men, all American expatriates, all floating in black money, all connected to the global, underground economy of illicit drugs and mayhem for hire.

He looked back at the photograph, looked at it through his one pale blue eye. The other had been cut out, sliced right out of his fucking head by a blond bitch with a big knife. Skeeter Bang was still at the top of his hit list, but right under her was the bitch who called herself Red Dog.

The first three times she’d fucked with him, the only thing she’d written in her goddamn red paint was his name, Royce. That was all, just Royce, which had gotten him nothing except pissed off. Two months ago, though, in
Uzbekistan
, she’d given him “Red Dog,” and it hadn’t taken him too damn long to find out the only Red Dog on the planet with the skills to screw up one of his deals was a shadowy figure with an attitude. A woman, more than one source had decided when pressed, a woman with a badass Knight SR-25, and both she and the rifle were for sale to the highest bidder on a job-by-job basis—which still had not explained why she was on his ass and on his deals.

But he had a feeling it was all going to become clear real damn soon. She was baiting him, the fool, and he was only too happy to bite.

She’d ruined the paint on his Mercedes in
Miami
with her goddamn paint and screwed a million-dollar cocaine deal in the process. In
Uzbekistan
, she’d gotten to Gul Rashid, a warlord he’d been doing business with since the beginning of his now defunct career with the CIA, and somehow gotten Rashid to back out of delivering the ton of Afghan opium Royce had promised to a buyer in Marseille. Then she’d had the balls to leave her calling card in red paint on the sheets in his hotel room:
Red Dog
.

Now she’d gone the extra step.
Red Dog 303
—that’s what she’d painted on his million-dollar villa last night, right on the goddamn walls.

He hated women.

And this one, this goddamn Red Dog, he was starting to hate her worst of all.

He stared at the photograph and knew
Las Vegas
was going to have to wait. She’d pushed him too far.

“Where is area code three-oh-three?” he asked.

“
Denver
,
Colorado
,” Zane said.

Denver
?

Jesus.
He looked up from the photograph and pinned Zane with his steely, pale-eyed gaze.

“You know who’s in
Denver
.” Goddamn Skeeter Bang and her goddamn husband, Dylan Hart, and their whole goddamn crew of Special Defense Force operators—especially Christian Hawkins, the one they called Superman.
Shit.

“SDF,” Zane confirmed.

“Get on it,” Royce ordered. “If it’s Bang, I’m dropping a bomb on
seven thirty-eight Steele Street
.”

“And if it’s not?” Zane asked.

“Then it’s some new bitch they’ve got on board. No one of that caliber is working out of
Denver
without Hart and Hawkins knowing about it. Pull up everything you can find on SDF, including their stringers. We’re heading to
Denver
.”

Red Dog 303
—the skanky bitch was just begging to be taken out.

After another long moment of staring at the picture, Royce decided he could do a little better than that, even. It had been a while since he’d had some fun. He was due.

He was overdue.

With just a little extra effort, instead of a nice clean hit, he could give her something special. He never went anywhere without a few of his Thai goodies—and while she was screaming her brains out, he could have her sliced and diced.

Zane was the master.