Storm Kissed Part 2

That common sense sounded awfully thin inside her, though, because the pattern didn't make any sense. When that happened, she got real curious-and, according to some people, stupidly brave. But some people weren't there right then, and they didn't run her life; she did.

So, glad she had stopped at a p.a.w.nshop to buy a decent .38 a mile or so past the airport, she stepped out of the shadows and into the doorway, pasted a pleasant expression on her face, and said, "Excuse me?"

Within seconds, every one of them had marked her, eyes flicking to her and then to each other, and there was a subtle shift in the room as some jackets got twitched aside, other bodies got out of the line of fire. The smaller six faded into the background with the exception of the soldier-type, who stepped in front of his girlfriend with an expression of "you want a piece of her, you're coming through me." A couple of the others looked over at the table, then away when the guy with the bad leg got big and capable-looking all of a sudden, and a dark-haired woman coasted over to join him.

n.o.body drew down, though. They just waited, staring at Reese with an intensity that gave her a funny little skin-quiver, as though she had walked too close to a transformer.

Pulse upshifting, she held out her empty hands. "I'm not looking for trouble. I was invited." Sort of.

A pretty blue-eyed blonde off on one side glanced at the brown-haired man beside her. "We didn't invite you."

Okay. Bride and groom weren't the prospective clients. Didn't look like newlyweds, either; the rings weren't new, and they came across like a solid team. Were they renewing their vows, maybe? Or was this whole thing a setup? Reese didn't know, but she wasn't moving away from the door until she did.

"I invited her," said a big guy on the other side of the room, breaking the silence.

At that, the others gave way a little, telling her that he was the boss of this outfit. Wearing a charcoal suit with the slight awkwardness of someone who did better in jeans, maybe six six, two thirty, he was built like a bouncer and had killer blue eyes, dark, shoulder-length hair, and a jawline beard that made her think of a Renaissance fair. And he was vaguely familiar, but not from her present life.

Oh, s.h.i.t. Again, her new self said to run. Again, she stayed put. "Do I know you?"

He gave her a once-over with those brilliant blues. "Where's all the black leather?"

She was wearing low boots, trim pants, and a subtly studded blazer, all in muted earth tones. Professional, grown-up clothes. "Dog's show turned it into a cliche." Tipping her head, still not placing him, she said, "I could dig up the boots if you're interested."

"He's not." The smaller blue-eyed blonde moved up beside him and shot her a narrow-eyed glare.

Reese knew that look. Fallon hit her with it often enough. "You're a cop."

That intel eased her nerves a degree. Granted, there were cops who crossed the line, but fewer than the TV made it seem. More, she wasn't getting the "bad guy" vibe off this crew, and her instincts might not be infallible, but they had a d.a.m.n good track record. So who were these guys? A task force working the wrong side of the border? If that was the case, why did they need her? And why not go through channels?

Unless they had, and Fallon had told them to f.u.c.k off. That, she could believe.

The cop nodded. "And you're the bounty hunter."

Most of the others relaxed a smidge at that one. The bride's mouth went round in surprise and, Reese thought, recognition.

Filing that, she stayed focused on the boss. "I used to be a bounty hunter. Now I'm strictly private." She paused. "Where do I know you from?"

"Three years ago. A burned-out warehouse in Chicago."

"Three-" She broke off as her stomach knotted. Keeping the poker face that had saved her life more times than she wanted to count, she nodded and made herself breathe past the stab of pain. "Right. Strike. I remember."

Would've been better if she could have forgotten. She still had nightmares where she was back in the burned-out sh.e.l.l of Seventeen, breathing stale smoke as she crept up on the two men, one far too familiar, one an unknown who had a gangsta name-Strike-but wore normal duds and had shown up in a rented minivan.

With the other hunters closing in faster than she had antic.i.p.ated, she had nailed her target from behind with her souped-up Taser and had her two quasi bodyguards drag his a.s.s back to lockup. After that, she had chased the other guy-this guy-back to his rental, labeling him harmless. Then she had locked herself in her hotel room, binged on Ding Dongs, and cried herself empty. Which wasn't the point right now. The important part was where she had filed Strike under "harmless" back then, now her instincts said that the man facing her was deadly dangerous in his own right. Which meant that either he'd changed over the past three years, or he'd been playing her before.

What the h.e.l.l was going on here? And why did it have to be that day? The coincidence sucked.

A chill skimmed along her skin as a dead man's voice whispered, There's no such thing as coincidence. It's all just the will of the G.o.ds. Mendez had been big on quoting his writs when they made his point, especially toward the end of their time together.

Keep your head in the real world, she told herself. That part of her life had ended long before his death. Shifting the small black carryall so she could get to the gun tucked at the small of her back, she said cautiously, "I don't do find-and-grabs anymore."

"All you need to do is locate him," Strike said without a shift of expression or inflection. "We'll take care of the rest."

She should turn him down. h.e.l.l, she shouldn't have come out here in the first place. She was just starting to hit her stride in Denver after moving back from LA just under a year ago. She had a string of solid-if boring-jobs lined up and ready to go. And this crew had "questionable" written all over them. But that same questionability was what had her sticking. She knew what it felt like to be lost. Now she tracked down the lost and reunited them with their friends and family . . . or, if they were better off lost, she helped them stay that way. Saving the world one person at a time, Fallon had called it. And he hadn't even been mocking her. Not much, anyway.

"Tell me about the target," she said. Routine question, nice and open ended.

Strike's expression didn't change. "It's the same guy you bagged out from under me that day in the warehouse. Snake Mendez."

He said something else, but she couldn't hear him over the roaring that suddenly filled her head.

Mendez. Oh, Christ.

She had to lock her knees to keep from sagging when it all tried to come rushing back-memories, pain, guilt, betrayal, grief. Keep breathing, she told herself, struggling with her poker face. She couldn't go there again. Not now, when she was just starting to put her s.h.i.t back together. Not now, when losing him had nearly killed her before.

More, there were warning bells beneath the pain. What the h.e.l.l was going on here? How much did this guy know? Who was he working for?

Her instincts chimed in with a Time to go!

Feeling far shakier than she wanted to let on, she retreated a step toward the doorway. "Mendez is dead." She forced herself to say it, though the words tasted foul. "He was killed last year in Denver. The Varrio Warlocks got him."

His parole officer swore that Mendez had been playing it straight, but as far as she could tell, he had died as he had lived: trying to run the world one city block at a time.

"Wait." Strike stretched out a hand. "Don't go."

"You don't need me to find a dead man." Another step back put her in the doorway.

"He's alive."

The words didn't compute at first, coming one at a time, disconnected, echoing in her ears like someone screaming inside an abandoned warehouse. He's. Alive. He's. Alive. He's alive. He's alive . . . alive . . . alive. Not dead.

"Bulls.h.i.t." The word was little more than a whisper. "The VWs claimed the kill."

"They lied. Dez has been working with us in New Mex for the past year. He took off two days ago, and we need him back."

"He . . . " She trailed off as the numbness grew teeth and bit in.

Dez. The nickname had been reserved for the inner circle. And three years ago, Strike had called him "Mendez," just as she had used "Snake," trying to remind herself what he really was. Poisonous. A manipulator.

Hearing the nickname now meant . . . Jesus, she didn't know what it meant. But her instincts said Strike was telling her the truth.

They lied.

Her breath rasped in her lungs and the world took a big spin around her.

Dez was alive. Holy. s.h.i.t.

The blond cop said softly, "He was more than a paycheck to you, wasn't he?"

Strike glanced at her, surprised, then looked back at Reese more closely. "No s.h.i.t. What were you? Friends? Lovers?"

"We were . . ." What? She didn't even know anymore, couldn't think, could barely even breathe. Shock loosened her tongue and she blurted, "We knew each other as kids, as runaways. We watched each other's backs. At least we did until that night in the storm. After that . . ." Getting dizzy now, she pressed the back of a hand against her mouth. "Could I . . . s.h.i.t. I need a minute." Heart hammering sickly in her ears, she gestured back the way she had come, toward the restrooms she had pa.s.sed on the way in.

"Of course." The cop shifted on her feet, like she was going to offer to go with her.

Reese waved her off, swallowing hard. "I'll be right back."

As she headed for the ladies' room, struggling to hold it together, she felt twenty-some pairs of eyes follow her across the tacky-a.s.sed chapel and through the door to the hallway beyond, which took her out of their line of sight. Then, with tears blurring her vision, she bolted past the restrooms. And straight out of the hotel.

Fresh air. She gulped it, feeling like she was drowning while pedestrians skittered around her like rats, glaring and squeaking when she interrupted their flow. Then, blindly, she headed for the nearest alley.

She might not know Cancun that well, but she knew cities. She knew the taste and smell of them, knew their dark underbellies, and the creatures that ruled them. She also knew that if Strike and his crew went looking for her, they would start with the airports, buses, and hotels, all the normal places that normal people went. So, heart thudding in her chest, she headed for what her gut told her was the bad section of town, moving through a warren of narrow streets that rapidly dwindled to alleys, losing layers of respectability in the process, and coming to look like a thousand other alleys in any one of a hundred cities she'd worked in over the years.

Scrawny cats and lean, hard-eyed mutts of both the human and animal variety slunk in the shadows. And, as she worked her way deeper into the maze, moving fast but not too fast, she was aware of beady eyes watching her from shadows, and the way they shifted, sending a silent message flashing ahead: Grab her, we'll share.

A minute and three alleys farther in, a lean-hipped youth with shark-dead eyes and a four-inch blade dangling from one hand moved out from behind a Dumpster and gave her a spittle-flecked "Hey, baby, you looking for me?" in English rendered almost singsong by his thick accent.

She rattled back in varrio Spanish, "Get these cops off my a.s.s and you can have whatever you want."

"f.u.c.k that." He disappeared, and the shadows melted away. They wouldn't stay gone for long, but the threat of the cops had bought her a few minutes, a little s.p.a.ce to think.

Not that she wanted to think. It hurt too d.a.m.n much.

Dez. G.o.d. Throat so tight it hurt to swallow, she kept going until her gut told her she had gone far enough, and then picked out a narrow, open-ended alley that smelled pretty much like every other alley on the planet-a melange of p.i.s.s, body odor, and rot-with a spicy overtone that said she was far from home. Putting herself about halfway down the alley, she scoped out her exits, both horizontal and vertical, and leaned back against a padlocked doorway hard enough that her .38 dug into her lower back. Then she braced her hands on her knees, let her head hang for a second, and concentrated on not losing her s.h.i.t.

Dez was alive. Which meant... "Nothing," she told herself, hating that her voice cracked on the word. This didn't change anything.

She couldn't let it change anything. He wasn't her cowboy or her white knight, wasn't her best friend, wasn't her partner, wasn't anything. She had saved his life by putting his a.s.s in jail long enough for Fallon to get the guys who were gunning for him, and then cutting the deal that had gotten him out again. Word had it that he'd even straightened up-to a point-while he'd been inside. She doubted he had found G.o.d, but she had hoped he had found some perspective, and maybe even a few shreds of the guy he'd been at twenty.

That had evened them up. A life for a life. Which meant she didn't owe him anything.

Her stomach rumbled. Some people snacked when they were bored. She binged when things got out of control.

This isn't your problem. She didn't need to get involved-h.e.l.l, she shouldn't get involved. She should pa.s.s along the info, and let the task force decide what-if anything-to do about it. And if the thought brought a twist of grief and regret, she made herself ignore them both as she dug into her carryall, going for the false bottom where she kept a second set of IDs and a credit card that ought to keep her off the radar unless Strike and his people had major clearance, or a big-a.s.sed back door into the system.

Given that they were looking for Dez, the latter seemed a far stronger possibility. He hadn't been-wasn't?-an acronym kind of guy.

Dez. G.o.d. Could he really be alive? Her throat closed and a sob rattled in her chest, but she made herself keep going, her fingers shaking as she popped the bottom of the carryall. But then a strange tickle shimmied down the back of her neck and her instincts kicked hard.

Her heart lunged into her throat as she spun in a full circle without seeing a d.a.m.ned thing out of place. But then an electric crackle laced the atmosphere, displaced air whoomped, and Strike freaking materialized right in front of her.

As Reese stared in shock, he glanced around, locked on her, and looked profoundly relieved.

Relieved? What the h.e.l.l?

She went for her .38 as her mind scrambled, but before the gun was clear of her waistband, his expression shifted to one of f.u.c.king-get-it-done determination. Moving fast, he grabbed her wrist, twisted and chucked her gun, and then said, "Sorry about this."

Sudden vertigo slammed into her, tunneling her vision.

"What . . . ?" She reeled, tried to run, and staggered drunkenly instead.

Her brain went fuzzy and she felt herself falling, felt strong arms catch her in an impersonal grip. And the world went dark.

CHAPTER THREE.

Some immeasurable time later-maybe a few minutes, maybe a few days-Reese struggled back to consciousness. But instead of making it all the way there, she found herself caught, vulnerable, in the woozy dream state between asleep and awake, where she knew she should be afraid but couldn't muster the energy for panic.

Even more disconcerting, she wasn't alone inside her own skull. There was a strange presence there with her, controlling her. An unfamiliar voice echoed in her head, saying: Show us.

She was dimly aware that she was lying on a couch in a room that smelled spicy, like scented candles or incense. Strike was there, along with a younger, sharp-faced man who stared down at her, his gray eyes so intense they seemed silver. He was the presence inside her, she knew, without knowing how she knew it. Show us the night of the storm, he whispered in her mind.

She didn't want to go back there, didn't want to remember. But without meaning to, she did.

The images unspooled: She saw Dez, his eyes hot and wild as he kissed her and carried her to his bed, saw the lightning, heard the thunder, felt her body go cold as he headed for the door. Then things sped up in a scatter shot of images and sensations: She heard Jocko's warning; felt herself racing through the storm, only to arrive too late. She saw the mad glee in Keban's scarred face as he leaned over Dez, gloating; felt the pain as he turned and shot her. Then there was Dez's rage. Chaos. Lightning. Thunder. Screams. Things happening that couldn't be real.

The memories sped up, becoming a blur of the weeks that followed and the growing pain that came, not from her healing injuries, but from the way Dez had changed, how he kept trying to call magic that didn't exist, and how each failure had pushed him further over the line. His temper sharpened. He quit his job, then got p.i.s.sed when she cornered him about it.

Show me, the inner voice said. And she did.

"Don't you get it?" he snapped, boots thudding an angry staccato as he paced the apartment like a caged animal. "The 'work your way up' thing is a f.u.c.king pipe dream. The only way people like us can get what we deserve is by being creative."

In the past few weeks he had gained a good thirty pounds of pure muscle, shaved his head, and gotten tattoos to cover the handcuff scars: twin bands of strange symbols done in dark blue-green ink. He was turning into a stranger, and a scary one, but that didn't stop her from putting herself in his path, making him choose between stopping and mowing her down. He stopped very close to her. Glared at her.

She glared right back. "And by getting creative you mean working 'security'"-she scorned the word with finger quotes-"for the highest bidder?"

"How did-" He bit it off. "s.h.i.t. You f.u.c.king patterned me."

It was her uniquely odd skill, an almost savantlike ability to put together seemingly unrelated pieces of information into a pattern, and from there a prediction that Fallon's gang task force could use, like where and when a drug drop was likely to be, whether a particular drive-by was random or part of a larger whole, or-and this was something she was keeping far away from the cops-that Dez was hiring himself out as muscle for the Smaldone wannabes.

The two-bit mobster types were trying to step into the vacuum left by the demise of Denver's once-great crime family. They didn't seem to get that there wasn't any vacuum; the gangs had already filled the niche. But while the Smaldone Lites were figuring that out, they had a habit of getting messily dead. Thus the bodyguards.

She shook her head. "Jesus, Dez. How could you work for those guys after everything we've done to clean things up around here?"

His face settled into the impa.s.sive mask she had quickly come to hate, the one where shadows darkened his eyes to an unfathomable murk. "The money's good."

"It's a shortcut," she snapped, drilling a finger into his chest. It was like poking a building. "Your job-"

"Wouldn't have gotten me what I need in time," he interrupted.

It was the first she had heard of any deadline. Oh, s.h.i.t. Now what had he gotten himself into? Or, she had to ask herself, was he trying to buy himself out of something?

"You're getting a place of your own." She made herself say it. She had known he didn't like the way she had gone from practically throwing herself at him to "let's wait until we're getting along better," but she hadn't thought he would bail.