we go from here?” he asked. He still wasn’t comfortable with himself and all he was trying to absorb. It made it hard to be comfortable with anyone else—except Jane. The wild girl wasn’t about memories. She was about now.
“The firing range,” Kid said without missing a beat, as if where in the hell else would a couple of guys with an afternoon on their hands go. “We got some really cool guns in last week, and nobody’s been up there yet to try them out.”
Hoo-yah, J.T. thought, because really, where else would a couple of guys go, especially guys with cool new guns to shoot?
Hours later, after a long session of gunpowder therapy and the briefing on the operation with Dylan, Hawkins, and General Grant, J.T. headed for home, which to his ever-loving pleasure was Jane’s place on Blake Street. So far, he and the Wild Thing had a damn good thing going.
The elevator door on the office floor closed, and just as he reached out to press the ground-floor button, he heard something that changed his mind. Someone else had moved onto the firing range, and he knew who.
Hell. He knew where he needed to go, and he knew it wasn’t going to be easy.
The elevator stopped on the armory floor, and J.T. took a pair of ear protection muffs off a row hanging inside the car and slipped them on. When the door opened, it was onto the range and Creed blasting away with short bursts of a customized Para-Ordnance P14.
Creed emptied two more magazines and put a fresh one in before he acknowledged J.T.’s presence with a brief glance. He slipped the gun in his shoulder rig and put a light jacket on to conceal it before he looked up again.
“We’re going for a walk,” Creed said, picking up a small backpack. “Do you have all the meds you need for the night?”
When J.T. nodded, he headed down the stairwell.
J.T. didn’t hesitate to follow him. Something about this man compelled him, more even than Kid, or Dylan, or any of the other operators of SDF. Creed Rivera was a breed apart, even in the wild bunch of Steele Street.
The sun had been down for an hour when they hit the alley, but the day’s heat was everywhere, rising off the bricks and steaming off the asphalt. They fell into an easy stride together, and J.T. didn’t think too much about where they might be going, until from one block to the next, they crossed from the busy, upscale section of historic Denver, into the railyards between Union Station and the South Platte River. From there on, the terrain took a decidedly uncivilized turn.
And so it went for hours, with Creed on point, a night march following the winding course of the river through concrete corridors and industrial wastelands, through low-end neighborhoods and natural areas where the trees grew thick and the bushes thicker.
By midnight, they’d reached the outskirts of the city—and still Creed kept leading him on, to what, J.T. didn’t have a clue. But the guy was good, easy to follow, and sure of his direction, north.
A few times Creed signaled him, alerting him to other creatures and men moving in the night and changes in their course, and the communication was seamless, so fluid. They moved well together, with far more ease than he’d ever managed with Scout or Jack. It was like slipping back into his skin.
In a small clearing with a fire ring, Creed stopped, and J.T. could tell the Jungle Boy had been there before. That maybe these long walks through the wild side of Denver to the back of beyond happened fairly frequently, and probably at night.
Creed started a fire in the stone ring, and J.T. added sticks and dried brush to the flames—and he sat down and waited.
If this was all there was, he was fine with it. The march had been a good one on a long spring night. His muscles were warm and tired, his head clear, and he liked being outside.
“I remember the guy who cut you,” Creed said, glancing up from stirring the fire with a stick. “If you want, I can tell you the story of how Kid and I tracked him to Puerto Blanco.”
“Puerto Blanco,” he said. “That’s a tough town.” Oh, yeah. He wanted to hear this. Sitting cross-legged at the side of the fire, he leaned forward—and Creed began.
“It started in Colombia, right after your funeral, when Hawkins and Kid lit