Crazy Cool (22 page)

In the low light of the gallery and the alley, he looked like Creed—a lot. She was surprised Kid hadn’t mentioned it, but maybe a guy might not notice. Creed was taller, his hair the same length, to his shoulders, but not so blond, his eyes a stone-cold serious gray, and Creed looked as bad as he was, too tough to fuck with, but the resemblance was there. Skeeter bet there wasn’t a woman in the gallery who hadn’t been thinking about fucking this guy—and probably half the men had been thinking the same thing. He was that beautiful.

Which was still beside the point.

She’d found Kid. That had been the point. She’d tagged Nadine. That had been the point. And she’d reassured herself that Kid was with someone who cared enough to take care of him.

That had been the point.

Quinn and Regan had gone back to Stavros’s, but like Kid, Skeeter couldn’t take any more of the older man’s pain, not tonight. She’d spent most of the day with him, and yesterday she’d been down in Colorado Springs at the hospital with Creed, holding his hand, praying for him to wake up. They had him so drugged.

She’d driven Betty, a 1967 Dodge Coronet with a 327 under the hood, which was always a risk. The cops tended to notice bright red cars, and she’d lost her license a couple of weeks ago for street racing at the Midnight Doubles. She’d won, but geez, without her license, driving around just got a bit too damn risky.

She was more than licensed to walk herself home, but she couldn’t say the company was bad. Travis seemed like a nice guy, and like Nikki McKinney, Skeeter could really appreciate the sheer artistry of his face and body.

She’d like to draw him, though she could guarantee he wouldn’t come out looking like one of Nikki McKinney’s high-art angels in her hands. She’d pump him up a little, get him a little more stark, put him in tights and Lycra and call him . . . hmmmm. What would she call him?

The Avenger, yeah, that’s what he’d be, maybe the Scarlet Avenger, except he’d look better in blue. Maybe she could call him Kenshi the Avenger, give him his own
Star Drifter
story line.

“So how far are we going? Where do you live?” he asked.

“At Steele Street with the guys.”

“Not with your folks?”

It was an unexpected question. She wasn’t sure why he would think she lived with her parents, but she went ahead and answered it. “I have parents, yeah, but they’ve got . . . problems.”

“What kind of problems?”

She didn’t have to tell him any more. She knew that, but there
was
something really nice about him, something warm, like when he’d held her hand, something she trusted, which was weird. She didn’t trust too many people outside of the Steele Street regulars.

“Drugs, mostly, and alcohol, and poverty, and my dad had real issues with anger management, so I kind of moved out one day a few years ago, and a while later, I kind of moved in to Steele Street. I don’t hold anything against my mom so much. I was kind of a weird kid, like a changeling or something, and Steele Street is a whole lot better place for me to live.”

“A changeling?”

“I’m smart,” she told him with a short laugh. “Really smart.
Weirdly
smart.”

He stopped, and pulled her to a stop beside him. The look he was giving her was very thoughtful, and very curious. “How weird?”

“Well,” she started, taking a moment to consider just how much to tell him. Surprisingly, she decided to tell him more than most. “To begin with, in about thirty seconds, Kid and Nikki are going to leave the gallery.”

They’d crossed the street, but were still in line with the alley, and he turned to look back.

It took more than thirty seconds, more like a minute, but there was no denying when Nadine roared to life and eased out of the alley heading up Wazee.

He turned back to her, his gaze still so very thoughtful. “You do that often?”

“Often enough to freak some people out.”

“Like your parents.”

“Like my parents,” she agreed.

“But not the guys at Steele Street.”

“Hell, no.” She laughed aloud. “It takes more than a slightly clairvoyant teenage girl to rattle the guys’ cage.”

Looking down at her, Travis wished he could say the same, but he felt like his cage was getting rattled but good, and it didn’t have a damn thing to do with her clairvoyance.

It had everything to do with what she was making him feel, and how god-awful young he was afraid she might be.

C
HAPTER

20

A
LEX HAD FOUND
the cigarette. After everyone had gone, and there’d been nothing left but him and the party trash, he’d found it in a plate on the Lewis table—a cigarette butt.

He drained his glass of champagne and poured another. The culprit would ever remain a mystery, though he’d seen a rather punk-looking rocker chick in the gallery toward the end of the show.

Kids. Hell.

He slumped further down in his chair and passed his hand over his face.

The night had actually been a roaring success. They’d sold over half the paintings and booked two more showings for Nikki McKinney, who had finally shown back up, right at the very end—shown up just long enough to whisk one very gorgeous and very distraught young man out the back door.

The night had just been seething with angst, no small measure of it his own.
Damn it.
Marilyn Dekker. He didn’t have the strength for it. Really, he didn’t.

Facing the Dragon required balls of steel, and his balls felt like raisins—old raisins.

How in the hell was he going to tell the senator that he didn’t have any idea where her daughter was, except possibly she was with the man who’d gone to prison for killing Jonathan Traynor III, was beyond his ability to imagine. It was just too awful.

He drained his glass again and was reaching for the champagne bottle for a refill, when the small snick of a door closing upstairs froze him solid in his chair.

Oh, fuck.

It wasn’t a good sound, like maybe one of the gallery guests who was just getting around to leaving. Oh, no. It was a sly sound, a dangerous sound, faintly murderous from where he sat like a sitting duck on the main floor.

Well, hell. That’s why he carried a gun.

Swinging out of the chair, he pulled out his Colt and headed for the back wall, his gaze strafing the upstairs balcony.

No one was in sight, but the balcony was dark, low lit, with plenty of shadows for hiding.

If he’d had a choice, he would have called for backup. As it was, he was just grateful that wherever Katya was, it wasn’t with him.

Moving as stealthily as possible for someone who had to have been sighted, he slid up the inside rail of the stairway. He saw nothing, heard nothing, which made him think whoever it was had been going into his and Katya’s apartment, not coming out.

At the door, he listened carefully, then moved in, his gun at the ready. The lights were all on, which he’d done deliberately at the beginning of the evening. A small package tied with a pink bow was waiting just inside.

Shit.

Somebody had been there and made another delivery. Ignoring the package, he cleared the rest of the apartment and found Katya’s window open, but no perpetrator.

Hell. He was really starting to hate that window.

Sheathing his pistol, he went back to the package. He might have called Lieutenant Bradley, but she hadn’t exactly been all that helpful to him. So, being very careful to check for wires, he slowly opened the box.

What was inside made his heart sink way down deep into his stomach, where the whole mess of his insides churned in a nauseating knot.

It was another part of the dress,
the
dress, and it was covered in blood—rusty, dried-out, thirteen-year-old blood.

Shit.

Sitting down on the floor, he dropped his head back to rest on the door and pulled his cell phone out of his front pants pocket. There was only one number to call, the number on Dylan Hart’s business card. He’d tried it earlier and gotten an answering machine, but at least it picked up and he could leave a message—which was more than Katya was letting him do. It was time for somebody to let him into the game.

T
RAVIS
stood on the street with Skeeter Bang, outside an old brick building that looked like it might once have been a garage. There were big bay doors, three of them, running down the west side of the building, a couple of big
WEATHERPROOF
signs stuck in the windows, some Dumpsters parked against the wall, and one very nice, rather artistic iron door opening out onto the street. There was also a big freight elevator clinging to the side of the building like a geometrically constructed spider web, and they were waiting for it to descend.

Given the amazing cars Quinn drove, and the kind of money he seemed to have, Travis had expected the place to be a little more upscale.

“Sorry,” she said. “There’s a faster elevator on the other side, but this one gives such a great view of the city.” She gave a little shrug. “It’s going to take a few more minutes, but really, you don’t have to wait.”

“Actually,” he said, glancing down toward the end of the block, his attention drawn by the sound of voices. “I think I do.”

A group of guys had crossed the street, talking loud, taking up a lot of room, and walking like they owned the squalid stretch of turf that was just a few blocks too far north to qualify as a cool part of LoDo.

Hell. With luck the elevator would get there before the gang-bang posse, but listening to the damn thing screech and rumble didn’t give him much hope.

“Hey, hey, Skeeter Bang-bang!” one of the guys yelled out, and Travis’s “not much hope” got downgraded to “no hope.”

He felt her stiffen beside him, her gaze going to the end of the block. She swore under her breath, which didn’t do a damn thing for his confidence.

He wasn’t going to mention it, but really, if she was going to have a bit of the sight, wouldn’t this have been a better thing to have gotten a heads-up on than Nikki and Kid’s escape?

Like a swarm of wasps, the gang zoomed in on them, surrounded them, a few outriders floating on the edge, the king wasp front and center, demanding all the attention. He wasn’t the biggest, just the toughest looking, with his homeboy pants sliding off his hips, his shaved head, and enough tattoos on his arms to qualify him as a piece of art. There must have been about a dozen guys altogether. Too many to fight, too many to outrun from a dead standstill. Travis didn’t exactly see his life flash before his eyes, but his adrenaline was definitely pumping.

“What’s shakin’, baby Bang?” the leader asked.

In the two seconds before Skeeter answered, she did something amazing, something Travis wouldn’t have thought any fifteen-year-old could have done. It was all so subtle that if he hadn’t been fixated on her, trying to get a clue as to how freaked he should be, he would have missed the actual transformation. As it was, he saw the whole thing take place in the space of a single breath.

Turning to face the gang leader, she straightened her spine and broadened her stance, actually putting one of her legs in front of him in a damned proprietary move that told him to stand still and shut up, she was in charge—so subtle, so smooth, so damned unexpected.

“Hey, Gino, I heard you bet against me the other night,” she said, the accusation turning the tables on the punk, the edge in her voice downright cutting.

Attack certainly wouldn’t have been his first choice of moves—Christ, he’d practically minored in Conflict Resolution—but she hadn’t hesitated. He noticed something poking out of one guy’s jacket pocket, and he started to wish he had a gun, not that he could actually imagine himself using it, actually blowing a hole in one of these guys.

Kid had a gun, and Travis knew for a fact that he had blown holes in people with cold, deliberate precision. The guy was a sniper, ex-Marine. Kid had lots of guns, but he was safe with Nikki, probably heading to Boulder, which Travis wished to hell he were doing—with Skeeter Bang at his side—instead of standing in front of a dilapidated old building on a deserted street, getting ready to get the crap beat out of him—and that was probably the best-case scenario.

These guys had guns. He could practically smell them, and there was that suspicious bulge in that one guy’s pocket.

“You cost me, Skeeter baby. You cost me big.” The guy postured in front of her, his body language one hundred percent street cool. He had it working with the hand jive and the body dips, but there was real aggression behind all of it.

“Get a clue, Gino, I was driving Quinn’s COPO Camaro,” Skeeter shot back. “What did you think was going to happen? That I’d let Billy Thompson take me in the quarter mile with that piece of crap Honda he’s been screwing around with for a year?”

Hell, no. Travis didn’t even know what she was talking about, and he would have bet on her.

“You should’ve been watching the sheets, babe. You could’ve held back. Could’ve saved yourself a whole lot of trouble,” the gang leader said, his words an undeniable threat.

Travis watched the brim of her ball cap tilt, as if she were giving Gino a careful looking-over. When the brim leveled off again, a small “fuck you” smile curved her lips.

“The day I throw a race is the day it’s got something a helluva lot more important than your money riding on it.”

She was giving him a heart attack. Right here. Right now.

Gino made a move toward her, and in the next instant, she’d pulled a switchblade out of the sheath on her skirt. The edge glinted in the light from the street lamp, looking razor sharp.

“Don’t tempt me, Gino. You know how this all works. You fuck with me, Superman fucks with you, and you’ll never get it up again.”

Oh, shit.
Not with the knife, honey. This was a bad dream, a nightmare, and he was stuck in it with a girl.

The standoff lasted a small eternity, with neither side showing any sign of backing off. He would have backed off. Hell, if it hadn’t been for needing to take her with him, he would have backed off like a track star. He had enough adrenaline surging through him to outdistance these guys right off the blocks.

Just when he thought the tension was going to snap like a slap shot and all hell was going to break loose, somebody said something in the back.

“The fuck you say,” another guy responded, his gaze going straight to Travis, which Travis didn’t find at all encouraging. Then the second guy leaned forward and said something to the kid in front of him, who also moved his attention from Skeeter to him.

Something was happening. Travis watched the ripple of information work its way through the gang and up to Gino, with everyone seeming to back off a little, just sort of melt back toward the street.

When Gino got the word, the change was startling. The aggression went out of him like air out of a balloon, all the body tension, all at once, leaving him loose. Loose enough to slide back a step or two without it looking like a retreat.

“Hey, Creed,” he said, flashing a mouthful of friendly white teeth, finally deigning to acknowledge his existence. “Didn’t recognize you, man. Been a few years, hasn’t it, bro?”

“Creed Rivera,”
Travis heard someone say in the back. The kid who got the news kind of ducked, shooting Travis a quick glance, as if he expected a blow. Another guy leaned in, said something in his ear, and the two of them peeled off from the crowd and took off down the street, not getting far before they broke into a run.

“Yeah, a while,” Travis said, wondering who Creed Rivera was and how long these guys were going to believe he was him.

Long enough, it seemed. Gino took another step back, giving Skeeter some cryptic hand sign and a big grin.

“Next time, baby Bang, my money’s on you.”

“Hey, that’s great, Gino,” she replied, giving him what looked to be a genuine smile. “Really great. We’ll kick some ass, okay?”

“Yeah, babe.”

In seconds, the whole gang was back down the street.

“So what was that all about?” he asked, flummoxed by the whole event.

“Gino lost a grand at the Midnight Doubles a couple of weeks ago—and apparently, it wasn’t his grand to lose, so he’s strong-arming everyone on the north side, trying to save his ass.”

“You race cars?”

“Only illegally, so don’t be shouting it out anywhere. Okay?”

“Sure.” God save him. She’d pulled a knife, and he, for one, didn’t have a doubt in the world that she would have used it. He couldn’t imagine that things would have gotten better after that—quite the contrary. A shudder went through him, which made him feel foolish. She wasn’t shaking, not anywhere. She was watching Gino and his boys.

The gang of punks disappeared around the next corner, and she turned to him then, still smiling, and put her hand on his face. She tilted her head, and her smile broadened.

“I knew you looked like Creed. Kid didn’t mention anything, but I saw it.”

“And who’s Creed?” He liked having her hand on him, but he hardly had time to enjoy the feeling before she removed it.

“Creed Rivera was running these streets back when Gino boy still lived with his mother.”

An explanation that only confused him. “I’m just guessing here, but Gino looked older than me.”

That got him a laugh.

“I know,” she said, still grinning. “Aren’t people funny? He’s looking right at you and backing off, because his brain is telling him you’re Creed, and the whole time his eyes are telling him no way can you be Creed. You’re younger than he is. Fascinating.”