doors, and she’s almost finished wiring the elevators,” Skeeter said. “We should get down to the office. Cherie’s got another shakedown planned in an hour.”
He checked his watch. “What about her Quick Mart runs—how are those going?”
“Right on schedule, every day,” Skeeter assured him.
The Quick Mart runs were a long shot, sending Cherie out for coffee, making it look like the building was wide open for people to just come and go as they pleased. It was more bait, a low-percentage shot compared to the high-priced piece on the tenth floor, but Dylan was putting everything he had into play. If he didn’t get to J.T. first, Lancaster would, and that was a possibility he wasn’t willing to accept.
“Who’s on the street with her today?”
“Zach,” she said.
“Good.”
Zachary Prade was one of the original chop shop boys. An ex-CIA agent, he’d been so deeply undercover in the drug trade at one point that Dylan had lost track of him for years. Zach had “been there, done that” in dozens of hellholes around the world. He could more than handle Cherie’s coffee run.
Dylan stood up and offered Skeeter his hand, and after a moment of meeting his gaze, she took it and let him pull her to her feet.
He held her there for a moment, then cupped the side of her face with his palm and leaned down to take her mouth with his. The bad girl was all his, and she proved it with her kiss, melting into his arms, holding him close as he slid his hand down her neck and over her breasts, before letting it come to rest low on her belly. Yes, this girl was his, for now and forever.
Deep down, he knew she was scared for all of them, for what their investigation had uncovered and what it could mean for their future, but she would obey. He didn’t have a doubt. There’d be no takedown of Randolph Lancaster until he gave the order, and he would when the time was right. Chances were, the team would survive Lancaster’s betrayal despite the damage he’d done.
Conroy Farrel was a different matter. The chances of all of them surviving a live capture of the beastly creature J.T. had become were far, far slimmer. He was a warrior at heart and a monster by design—and there wasn’t an operator at Steele Street who didn’t know it.
CHAPTER TWO
Ketamine hydrochloride. Special K. Monkey Morphine delivered in an automatic syringe shot out of a .22-caliber rimfire rifle. He knew the drill.
Yeah.
Conroy Farrel rubbed the side of his neck where he’d been darted two months ago in Paraguay. With all the cutting-edge psychopharmaceuticals pumping through his bloodstream, he would have thought he could handle a few cc’s of the date-rape drug.
Think again, Con, old boy.
The ketamine, a hallucinogenic animal tranquilizer, had damn near twisted him up and tranquilized him into the fifth dimension for weeks, and the guys who had doped him lived across the street from where he was standing in a Denver, Colorado, alley. Worse, far worse than the doping, they’d stolen his girl.
He’d come six thousand miles to get her back.
Con let his gaze slide up the length of the wildest, most contraption-like freight elevator he’d ever seen. It crawled up the side of the building at 738 Steele Street, all iron and steel, looking like a gothic suspension bridge set on end and, somehow, oddly, familiar—damned familiar. Shrouded in the shadows cast by the setting sun, all he could think was that the elevator reminded him of the bridge that spanned the Kwai River just outside Kanchanaburi in western Thailand—not that he liked to think about Thailand too often. Bangkok had been nothing short of brutal on him, half a breath away from the deep sleep. Or maybe less than half a breath. Resurrection, he was sure, was the only thing standing between him and eternity.
And the only thing standing between him and his girl was the building across the street. If she was in there, he was going to get her, and if she wasn’t in there, he was going to get whoever was and ask them once where they’d taken her—only once. Scout was tough, as tough as she’d needed to be to survive alone in Southeast Asia, before he’d finally tracked her down on the streets of Bangkok. They’d celebrated her eighteenth birthday in Rangoon, her nineteenth in Vientiane, her twentieth in Phnom Penh, her twenty-first in Da Nang, and her twenty-second in Amsterdam—a promise he’d