Crazy Sweet (20 page)

CHAPTER

25

W
ELL, THAT TOOK about five minutes to go straight to hell,” Hawkins said over his radio.

Not about five, exactly five.

“Fuck,” Dylan said, then thought it, just for the hell of it.

So much for all his well-laid plans for the night, all his running around like a goddamn chicken trying to keep all the other chickens out of trouble. Loretta had been right. SDF on the streets meant blood on the streets.
Shit.

“Now, in our own defense,” Hawkins continued, “let it be noted for the official record that we have the whole ‘emergent threat’ thing covered. Royce’s guy drew first.”

“And Red Dog aerated him.”

“You know, Dylan, they’re both damn good. Travis got a three-inch group and she got a clean heart shot on that boy, at night, in the rain, with only ambient light, using a pistol at forty meters.”

“Where is she now?”

“Ahead of me, boss. She and Travis took cover in Sand Creek. Royce’s other three guys followed them in. I’m three blocks behind them at the garage with the dead guy, and when I left Geiss Fastener, Zane Lowe and Royce were still in the Expedition, waiting things out. Waiting for somebody to bring them Red Dog, dead or alive, I’d bet.”

“Hold on, I’ve got Grant on the line,” Dylan said, catching Skeeter’s signal. He picked up the phone. “Hart.”

“I’ve got good news and bad news,” Grant said.

“Give me the bad news.”

“She not only visited Royce’s place in San Luis, she tagged his walls with
Red Dog three-oh-three
.”

Dylan refrained from a sigh, but sometimes, just sometimes, he felt like he was in charge of a bunch of juvenile delinquents. That’s the way Steele Street had started, him and a crew of teenaged boys with nothing but time on their hands and getting into trouble on their minds—and sometimes it didn’t seem like things had changed much.

“Obviously, it took him all of about two seconds to decode that one,” Grant finished.

“And Rydell?”

“In the middle of a riot. San Luis is burning tires in her streets tonight. I checked with State, and there’s a rebel group up in the mountains trying to stir things up again on the coast, oust the new
presidente,
the sort of thing El Salvador had hoped it had outgrown. State’s not putting any odds on this rebel group. It’s made up mostly of the farmers displaced by the new coffee consortium put together by the government, a few actual military types, with the whole thing backed by an overly politicized faction of the Catholic church.”

“Is Rydell going to be able to get out of there in the morning?”

C. Smith Rydell was scheduled to be at Steele Street tomorrow night for a debriefing of the Panama mission.

“If he has to swim, he’s out of there, according to him.”

“Then I’ll expect him.” One thing Rydell could do was swim, with a wounded and bleeding partner under one arm, up a flooded river, with piranhas on their asses the whole way, according to Kid Chaos, a guy not given to exaggeration of any kind. Kid was a sniper. “Accuracy” was his mantra, and he meant one hundred percent. He worked with the facts. “What’s the good news?”

“I’ve got your finding. State is taking a step away from Royce. The DEA has decided they’ll be better off without him, and the CIA is just plain tired of him being an embarrassment to their fine organization. If you don’t take him out, they will.”

“So now we’re doing the CIA’s dirty work for them?”
Jesus.
What next? Dylan wondered. There was no such thing as a clean deal in this line of work, but sometimes, it got a little messy even for him.

“Take him out, Dylan,” Grant said, his voice growing sober. It was an order, not a request. “He should have been ours two years ago.”

Yes, he sure as hell should have been.

“Yes, sir.” Tony Royce wouldn’t be leaving Denver alive.

CHAPTER

26

W
HAT DO YOU MEAN Johnson is dead?” Royce said from inside the big-ass SUV he’d rented at the airport, yelling into his phone. “You’ve only been gone for a goddamn half hour.”

“He’s dead, sir. He’s got four holes in him, one through the heart,” his man, Orlin, said.

Fuck
. He should have brought more men. He would have thought that five of the meanest son of a bitches in the world would be enough to take out one slightly deranged, five-foot, five-inch woman.

“And where the hell is his body?” Royce hadn’t planned on dragging any dead bodies home, for Chrissakes.

“Close to her apartment at the garage.”

“Strip him of any identification, and I mean any goddamn piece of whatnot the asshole has on him. Let the Denver cops figure out who he is.” Goddamn Johnson, getting his ass waxed in under an hour. Maybe Royce needed to reevaluate his recruiting procedures.

When he didn’t get an immediate answer from Orlin, he felt another shitty piece of news heading his way.

“What?” he demanded. He didn’t like to be kept in suspense.

“They got to the body first,” Orlin said.

“Who?”

“SDF.”

“How?” he snapped. “If you were with fucking Johnson, and he was shooting at her, what the fuck did she do? Walk into your line of fire to get at him?”

Her medical report said she was tough, physically enhanced, but she wasn’t bulletproof. She wasn’t freaking Superman.

But somebody was.

Shit.

“We were flanked. Somebody was shooting at us from behind.”

And Orlin had the balls to admit it, or the stupidity. Royce wasn’t sure which, but something had suddenly become crystal fucking clear.

“You better keep your head about you, Orlin, or you won’t make it, either. Christian Hawkins is on your ass. Now get out there, and get me that girl.”

Goddammit.
Royce shut his phone, then pulled his Springfield out of his shoulder holster and checked the load.
Goddammit.

Skeeter Bang was a dangerous bitch.
Geezus
. She’d taken his fucking eyeball right out of his head.

Her boy toy, Dylan Hart, had been a razor-sharp thorn in Royce’s side for more years than he cared to remember. Royce had done his damnedest to kill the guy two or three times and hadn’t been able to pull it off.

Creed Rivera and Kid Chaos Chronopolous were relentless, especially on the hunt, two sides of the same ruthlessly dangerous coin—hot and cold, wild and controlled.

And Christian Hawkins was Superman, the one SDF operator Royce avoided like the plague. He’d always stayed away from Hawkins’s missions, even when he’d been with the CIA. The guy wasn’t more brutal than the other operators. He wasn’t tougher, or meaner, or more dangerous with a gun—it seemed Red Dog was garnering that designation.

But Christian Hawkins was something—something Royce hadn’t quite been able to put his finger on, and that bugged the fuck out of him. It unnerved him in a way he resented, but hadn’t been able to change, not in all the years he’d been tracking Special Defense Force.

So he stayed away from the guy.

And the last goddamn thing he wanted to know was that Superman was out there in the dark, somewhere close, patrolling the streets and backing up Gillian Pentycote.

He looked to Zane, sitting behind the wheel of the Expedition, on the radio with one of their guys.

“You’re sharp tonight, right? Ready for anything?”

Zane looked over at him and nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said.

He better be.

“Good,” Royce said. “You just stay sharp.”

Zane nodded again.

Good,
Royce thought.
Good.
But somehow it didn’t make him feel any goddamn better.

TRAVIS had one goal, to stay behind Gillian and still keep up with her.
Geezus,
she was running like a freaking gazelle. They both knew Sand Creek like the backs of their hands, and he’d given her an unmistakable signal to get her ass down into the creek bed.

With the first shot, Royce’s men had made themselves fair targets. Nobody was going to get fried for killing any of the Damn Dirty Dozen, but the vacant lots stretching between the garage and the dry creek didn’t offer much cover. There were still at least three guys in the streets behind them, and that was if Zane Lowe had stayed with Royce at Geiss Fastener.

Hawkins hadn’t vouched for Zane’s whereabouts. Superman was on the other side of the garage, in the alley trying to lock onto the positions of Royce’s men. They’d deployed from the Expedition, not traveling as a pack, and the only one Hawkins had pinpointed was the one he’d followed, the one Travis and Gillian had killed.

Geezus,
what a beautiful shot she’d made. And she’d gotten it off before he’d hardly let go of her.

Nobody was that fast.

Nobody.

And the way she was running.
Fuck.
Something was wrong, and it scared the hell out of him.

Her body was such a mystery, sleek and lean, and unpredictable. Tonight, when she’d come, she’d gotten so hot. He’d loved it, but in the back of his mind, he’d known it wasn’t right, wasn’t good, not for her temperature to rise that much, that quickly.

She dove for a hole in the fence, and he was right behind her, sliding under the chain link and dropping down the bank into the section of the creek they called the Junkyard. Dumpsters, abandoned cars, a couple of freight containers, there was even a junked walk-in cooler. It was all great cover from freaking paintballs, but Royce’s men had pulled subguns and pistols out of the back of the Expedition.

Those assholes, to come gunning for his girlfriend.

He’d said “Yes, sir,” to Dylan, and he’d meant it. He’d understood from the beginning what it took to be a member of SDF, and he knew what it took to live with himself, and he knew enough to take himself off the team, if he ever doubted on what side of those lines he stood.

It had happened once before, an SDF operator taking himself off the team. Zachary Prade, one of the original chop-shop boys, had done it, walked away and dropped off the edge of the earth. No one had ever said why, but Travis didn’t think it had been because of a woman, and certainly not a woman like Red Dog—because there had never been another woman like Red Dog.

She was headed toward the Fort, two freight containers that had been piled on top of each other, with an observation post they’d rigged on top of the mound of metal. They had time to scramble up the containers before any of Royce’s men could have had a chance to get behind them. At the top, they took cover behind a slab of steel plate Johnny Ramos had welded together. The plate had a hole cut out of the middle of it. Travis slid into place behind it and caught his breath.

Gillian wasn’t even breathing hard.

Rain was running down everything, pooling on top of the container.

She pulled her Contender out of its holster inside her vest, then quickly made a roll of material out of her Nomex hood and her fast-rope gloves and laid the roll on the “sill” of the steel plate. Resting the Contender with its .223 barrel on top of the material, she took up her firing position.

They both knew the distance from the Fort to everything they could see. It had all been measured with a laser range finder many times. With the .223, there wasn’t much out there that she could see that she couldn’t “reach out and touch” real up close and personal with her pistol.

Still, he was surprised at the speed with which she acquired a new target and took a shot. The boattail bullets flew at well over Mach 2 and produced a loud sonic
crack
along the entire trajectory that, close up, was almost loud enough to drown out the muzzle blast.

It rung his chimes.

“Tell Gillian thank you,” Hawkins said in his ear a couple of seconds later.

Hell.

“Who’d she get?”

“Whoever was on my ass,” Hawkins said. “I’ll go take a look.”

“Matchsticks,” Dylan had called these guys, and Travis was beginning to understand exactly what he’d meant.

He wasn’t inclined to tell her to shoot less, and yet the night had barely begun and she’d already killed two men, and he wasn’t sure how she’d even found that last damn target—not as quickly as she had.

He pulled a pair of compact binoculars out of his vest and scanned the streets and buildings on either side of the SDF garage.

“Where are you?” he asked Hawkins, keying his mic.

“On the south side of Thompson’s Body Shop. You’ve still got at least two guys out here, somewhere.”

“The south side?” He knew the body shop, and if Superman was on the south side of it, he was headed away from the fight.

“We’ve been given a green light on Royce,” Superman said. “From Grant himself. I’m doubling back to Geiss Fastener, before Gillian spooks him into next week.”

Travis understood. Heavy losses so quickly at the beginning of the fight might make the man decide to cut and run, and Royce was the real prize here tonight, not his goons. He needed to be neutralized, permanently. Royce had tracked Gillian right to her home base in Commerce City. She wouldn’t be safe anywhere from here on out. Travis did not want him to get away, not when he was within range and General Grant had sanctioned his termination.

He lifted his face away from the binoculars and glanced at Gillian. She wanted the hit. She’d made this all happen here tonight, and she would want to be the one to take out Royce.

They could run the creek bed and come out within a block of the Geiss parking lot. If Royce’s other two guys wanted to try to follow them through the Junkyard, it was going to be the last bad decision they made.

“We’ll follow Sand Creek,” he said to Hawkins, checking the neighborhood through his binoculars again. “We’ll come up on Enright Street, and head straight south to Geiss and meet you there.”

“I’m on Burgess,” Hawkins said. “And I’ll let you know if that changes. You’ll see my Sheila on Enright.”

At Steele Street, a “Sheila” was any of the highly maintained but completely nondescript cars they used when a low profile was important.

Skeeter had given him Adeline, who was anything but nondescript, but Travis knew she’d done it for a reason, and as long as Travis got Addy home in one piece, there wouldn’t be a problem. Quinn would never begrudge the death of a car to save a teammate—but Quinn did love his cars.

“Roger,” he said to Hawkins, keying his mic. Then he looked at Gillian. She didn’t know Royce was in the neighborhood. She didn’t know Hawkins had been on his tail since he’d landed in Denver—and part of Travis wanted to keep it that way.

But that option really wasn’t available. They were in this fight together, whether he liked it or not. There was no way to leave her behind, no safe way.

Looking at her, he was still so angry he could hardly see straight—but that was all going to have to wait. They had one job right now, a job made up of two very specific tasks: Kill the bad guys, and survive.