Loose Ends (25 page)

“Survive.”

Well, that sent a chill down his spine, striking a little too close to home.

“Survive Lancaster’s goons?” More than likely, Lancaster had brought someone besides his B team to Denver. Karola and Walls were both flawed examples of Souk’s twisted art. Lancaster had plenty of the good stuff to choose from and a couple of soldiers he seldom traveled without, in particular two men named King and Rock.

Jack wouldn’t have minded meeting them in a dark alley, but he didn’t want Scout anywhere around when he did.

“No.” She shook her head, looking at the phone in her hand. “She says she can help him survive until next year, maybe the year after that. Maybe longer. It all depends.”

“On
what
?” He was surprised he could even choke the words out. This was the subject he did not want to discuss with her, the one where she realized Con was dying.

Hell, he didn’t want to have this conversation with himself.

“On what Souk gave him, and—”

“Everything,” he said, his voice cold. “The bastard gave him everything.” And your father, too—but he couldn’t tell her that.

Suddenly he needed a little air. He rolled the window
down and watched Travis, the Angel Boy, who didn’t look anything like a “boy” at all, cross the street into the motel parking lot, guessing that nobody went around calling somebody the Badass Angel MoFo from Hell, because
that’s
what the guy looked like, more than tough enough, and his girl did, too. She circled the motel, going around back.

Yes, that’s the way he would have done it, just in case someone inside the room decided to make a run for it. Put the big guy on the door, because that’s where the shit really hit the fan, and put the girl who looked like she could kick everybody’s ass on the back. Actually, she looked like she could handle the door.

Any door.

As a matter of fact, watching her move reminded him of something—or someone.

“Is there something I need to know about her?” he asked Scout.

“Her real name is Gillian Pentycote.”

“You know what I mean.” God, the woman moved so smoothly, with so much power and grace. She was lithe, and strong, and—

“Souk injected her with XT7 four and a half years ago, and needless to say, she hasn’t been the same since.”

Oh, hell, no.

“I thought Shoko was the only woman he ever juiced.” And she’d turned out so demented as to be almost worthless. Her only value had been as a psycho-bitch pet for Erich Warner, one of the few men in the world who could have afforded to feed her. The woman had come out of Souk’s lab with some very twisted appetites.

“She’s not like Shoko,” Scout said. “Not at all. She lost her memory completely, just like Con, but she’s gotten a lot of it back, working with a Dr. Brandt at Walter Reed.”

“Walter Reed Medical Center?” He couldn’t believe this conversation. “Forget it. The place is part of the system,” he said, dismissing the whole thing out of hand.

Con had been part of the system when he’d been sold. Randolph Lancaster had his hands in everything in Washington, D.C., from the State Department, to the CIA, to the Pentagon, and probably to Walter Reed. He was a power broker at the very highest levels of government, and most of the people whose strings he pulled never even felt the tug. He was that much a part of the status quo.

“I think we need to consider our options,” she said, still with the phone in her hand.

Not that option.

“I know they didn’t buy you, Scout.” The girl couldn’t be bought. “So what did they do to make you think that giving him up was in
any
way the best thing for him? I’m just damned curious.” And he just didn’t damn believe it.

“Convinced me,” she said. “That they could help him. Red Dog is proof. You know the kind of headaches Con gets. She doesn’t get those anymore. And the pain and the shakes? Hers are almost completely under control. You’ve seen Con. You know what he goes through sometimes, why he takes all those pills. I’ve just been guessing at it these last few months, but you’ve probably known. Known he’s dying.” She stopped to take a breath. “And you didn’t tell me.”

Her words fell on him like a five-hundred-pound weight.

Guilty.

He rolled the window on the Buick down a little farther, tried to get a little more air into the car.

Down at the motel, Red Dog had disappeared around the corner of the building, and the Angel from Hell had
his ear to the door, listening. All he’d hear was the television they’d left on.

After a second or two, the guy moved back from the door, standing off to the side, up against the brick wall for the same reason Con and Jack had chosen the dump in the first place. It was old and built solid. The whole damn building was brick, in desperate need of a major remodel on the inside but built to last on the outside.

Travis knocked and said something, and Jack could just imagine what—something like “This is the manager. We’ve got a fire in the lobby, and the fire department wants us to evacuate,” or “So sorry. This is the manager, and somebody just broke a window out on your car.”

Jack might have fallen for either one of those, especially the car window, especially in this neighborhood.

But Travis didn’t get any action off the ruse, because Con was hell and gone somewhere in this damn city, and Jack was sitting up here on this hill, doing his best to breathe in some fresh air and avoid the subject at hand. Con dying was more than he could bear, truly, let alone share with someone, even Scout—especially Scout.

Red Dog came back around the building then, no doubt signaling Travis that there was no way out the back of Room 107. In many old motels, the bathroom had a window that opened out the back, but not at the Star.

With the two of them together, the entering of the room went very smoothly. Red Dog lined up with Travis, and one of them must have electronically scrambled the lock. Jack couldn’t see which one, but Travis opened the door and entered first, his gun drawn and ready to go, go, go.

It was a short trip inside. Jack and Con were a pretty tidy crew, and all the really good stuff, like the laptop and the laser microphone, was in Jack’s backpack in the back of the Regal.

In less than five minutes, the two had looked their fill and come out of the room empty-handed, heading back up the hill to their stakeout car, no doubt leaving the place exactly as they’d found it. No reason to tip their hand at this stage of the game.

“What are we going to do here, Jack?” Scout asked him, watching the whole scene down at the motel as intently as he was watching it.

The woman, Red Dog, was amazing, so sleek. She moved like a cat, one of the big ones, with a supple, easy grace, radiating strength and power with every step. She and Travis got back in their car and settled in to wait.

“They don’t have him, Scout,” he told her. “If they did, they wouldn’t be wasting their time here. You were bait, a way to get to Con, nothing more, and I’m even less. I’m just the pain in the ass who stole their bait. It’s Con they want, not us.”

“So what are we going to do?” she repeated her question. “I’ve got the phone.”

Fuck the phone, he thought.

And it rang.

Except it wasn’t hers. It was his.

Geezus
. He whipped his phone out of his pocket.

“Go,” he said.

“Location?”

It was Con. It couldn’t possibly have been anyone else, but Jack was still damn relieved to hear his voice.

“Three blocks south of the motel, up on the hill. We’ve got a surveillance team, two people, a block north of us. They’re confirmed SDF operators.”

There was a brief silence.

“Do you know how they found the place?”

“No, but they broke into the room, stayed a couple of minutes, and came back out.”

He heard Con swear under his breath.

“Did they take anything?”

“Not that we could see. They came out empty-handed, and neither one of them is wearing a jacket.”

There was another brief silence, and Jack thought he could hear sirens in the background.

“Where are you?”

“On the west side of town.”

Jack could tell Con was moving.

“We had a visual sighting of Lancaster on our way out of Steele Street.” Jack gave him the news. “No possibility of a mistake, and we ran into Rick Karola and Sam Walls immediately thereafter. We tailed Karola to a downtown hotel called the Kashmir Club.”

“Kashmir Club? So it’s a hotel. Rock Howe confirmed it as Lancaster’s location, so we’re in. King Banner is here, too, but he and Rock are both out of the equation, which means Lancaster is way down on his team.”

Damn
. It had been a busy night all over.

“We should regroup.” That was putting it mildly.

“We need something close to the Kashmir Club—”

Oh, Jack could see where this was going.

“—but not too close.”

They were going in, dropping on Lancaster tonight.

He was all for it.

“There’s a hotel, the Armstrong,” he said. “At Champa and 14th.”

“Roger. Turn on the news and lay low until I get there. King and Rock are bound to be the breaking story. I’m temporarily on foot, heading away from the circus over here. King and Rock caught us in a restaurant, very public, very messy. Some shots were fired, but they’re both alive. Listen to the reports in case somebody comes up with something we can use.”

“Copy.” Con had stopped to eat? “Who’s us?”

“Unplanned hostage,” Con’s voice came over the phone. “She slowed me down.”

Jack just bet she had, especially if they’d stopped to
grab a bite to eat.
Geezus
. He was starting to get a little confused.

“Are you on your own now?” A legitimate question, if he’d ever heard one.

“Affirmative. I’ll meet you at the Armstrong. Out.”

“Roger and out.”

He turned to Scout, and she looked as relieved as he felt.

“We’re not turning anybody in to SDF,” he said. “We’ll tell Con everything you’ve seen and heard, and I’ll confirm about Kid, and then we’ll do exactly what he tells us to do.”

“That’ll be a first.” She gave him a pointed look.

Which he ignored. So he’d been running a little wild these last few months. He’d settled down since she’d been gone, for a whole eight weeks now, and he had something else to say, something kind of new for him, but it was pressing him hard, and he needed to get it off his chest.

“I’m sorry, Scout. I’m sorry I wasn’t in Paraguay when these
pendejos
dropped in on you and Con.” If he’d been with them when Erich Warner and SDF had all piled in on top of the river house, chances were she wouldn’t have been captured, and he’d thought long and hard about that. “I’m going to be sticking a lot closer to home for a while—for a long while.” He’d thought damn hard and long about that, too. Whatever happened with Con, he really did need to be with her when it all came down. He couldn’t run from the fallout, no matter how many college professors she was seeing.

“I’d like that,” she said.

Okay, then—he slanted her a quick look, surprised as hell. She’d like him hanging around. For the last couple of years, she’d usually been so angry with him that he’d gotten in the habit of staying as far away from her and Con as possible.

But this was great.

Perfect.

And too damn late. She’d gone off and found somebody, but he’d take it as long as he could, hanging around while she and old Karl billed and cooed, and if things went bad with Con, he’d take it no matter what. The whole Denver thing was just too god-awful, and he’d sworn nothing bad would ever happen to her again, not on his watch.

He started up the Regal but didn’t turn on the headlights, keeping the car dark. Easing away from the curb, he backed up the hill and drove onto a side street before he made the U-turn to head back to downtown.

So everything was straight between them, except for the part about the blonde, the one in Key Largo, the only woman she’d ever actually seen him with. He wasn’t particularly discreet, except with Scout. For reasons he didn’t completely understand, he’d never wanted her to know about any of his fly-by-night romances, not a single one. He guessed he didn’t want her to think he was a jerk—for all the good that had done him. And maybe he had, in some odd way, just always wanted her to think he was available, in case she ever wanted to kick their relationship up a notch.

There had been nothing discreet about her and Con finding him shacked up in a tiki hut condo in the Florida Keys, and from the moment he’d opened the door and seen her standing there, instantly zeroing in on the little cocktail waitress cooking his breakfast in the kitchen, he’d wanted to apologize to her from the bottom of his heart. Maggie had cost him his last chance with Scout—and that was a loss that went way beyond sorry.

Now was his chance.

“I’m … uh, sorry about what happened, well, everything, actually, in, uh, Florida, with Maggie and all.” He
was wincing by the time he got it all spit out. It was embarrassing, really, what a crappy apology that had been.

And she must have agreed. Dead silence greeted him from the other side of the car. She’d gone so silent, he could feel the absence of sound sitting like a two-ton boulder on the seat between them.

What had happened?

One minute she’d been glad he was going to stay closer to home, and the next she was freezing him out.

So, great. He’d apologized and somehow made things worse.

Skeeter took the exit ramp off the interstate at 20th Street and was halfway to Blake Street when her cellphone rang. She’d just gotten off the computer bolted into Coralie’s dashboard, checking in with Travis and Red Dog. They’d photographed a medication chart in J.T.’s motel room and sent it to Dylan and to Dr. Brandt.

Hell, she loved Red Dog, knew what the woman had been through and what she could do, but she really didn’t want a world full of juiced-up spooks and operators muddying the alphabet soup of covert ops.

She reached for her phone, thinking it might be Dylan again, but when she looked, she didn’t recognize the number—which was damned odd.