credit for being the first ones to get it right. She had a helluva lot better chance of bringing him down than any guy.
He waited for an answer, but whatever she was thinking, she was keeping it to herself.
“Do I know you?” he asked, trying a different tack—and, much to his surprise, scoring.
She blushed, a wash of pink rising under her skin as she turned away and looked out the passenger-side window.
Fascinating—it was personal, all right, whatever it was between them.
So just how well had he known her, he couldn’t help but wonder, and if he’d known someone like her, how in the hell could he have forgotten her?
Stupid question. Souk’s soup had taken so much of his life. But it hadn’t taken him, what he was at his essence, at his core, because he was still that: a soldier, a warrior, a gunfighter to the marrow of his bones.
“The guys who are after me,” he asked, giving Corinna’s rearview mirror another quick glance. “Are you working with them? Are you one of the operators at Steele Street?” She’d been armed, and he could A-1 guarantee every one of these guys out on the street tonight was packing something.
“No.” She shook her head, and he watched in wonder at the silky movement of her hair, the dark slide of it across her shoulders, the flow of it down across her breasts—and he believed her. She wasn’t like the woman who’d been holding Scout on the tenth floor. The auburn-haired operator was serious business, and Jane was nothing but trouble.
Personal trouble.
Hell. Like he needed any more of that.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Steele Street’s basement was an interesting place, its concrete walls faced with green and black granite, a low-lit lap pool shimmering down its middle. There had been a time when Dylan had used the pool almost every night, swimming laps when he couldn’t sleep. Now he slept with Skeeter.
There were stacks of clean white towels on a rack next to the door, a water cooler, a few comfortable deck chairs and chaise lounges—and there was one simple metal chair, nothing fancy, no cushion on the seat, just an attached rope and pulley setup that Dylan wouldn’t want to trust his life to, not on a bet. The chair had a high back, the better to duct-tape a man’s upper body to, and two good, strong metal arms, the better to secure a man’s wrists and elbows with more heavy-duty duct tape. The chair had four metal legs, and, currently, a man’s legs were taped to two of them, one leg good and strong and the other a medical mess.
“So how’s your day going, Sam?” Dylan asked.
“Fuck you,” the man sitting in his boxers taped to the chair said. Sam Walls had six-pack abs, bulging biceps, one thigh the size of Vermont, and another deeply scarred and shriveled. Except for the glaring deformity, he was juiced, more than juiced. He was superjuiced, Souk juiced.
Frankly, Dylan was damned impressed that Quinn and Kid had been able to snatch him without resorting to a ballistic solution.
“I don’t know who you think you are, asshole”—Walls ground the words out between clenched teeth—“but you made a big mistake dragging me in here.”
Yeah, yeah, Dylan thought, he’d had a lifetime of making these kinds of mistakes and gotten paid damn well to do it.
“I’m the guy who owns you now.” Motivation, he guessed. Kid and Quinn had been damned motivated, and his guys were not without a fair amount of skill. Jet jockeys weren’t normally known for their hand-to-hand combat expertise, but Quinn was a street fighter from way back, and then there was that stretch Kid had done with the Marines in Recon. Yeah, that was usually enough to put a guy ahead of the pack—way ahead.
“Bullshit,” the man sneered. “Assaulting a federal officer will get you life, boy.”
Boy? That was new. Not many people called Dylan “boy.”
“Federal officer of what?” he asked. “Who do you work for, Sam? What agency?”
The basement was warm, maybe even too warm, especially for an extended stay, which Dylan could see in Sam Walls’s immediate future.
“One that can take this place apart at the seams, asshole.”
Dylan nodded, even though that wasn’t the answer he’d wanted.
He was standing at one end of the pool deck, in front of where the securely bound Walls was strapped into the metal chair placed directly under a bright light hanging from the ceiling. Quinn and Kid were both standing behind Sam, far enough away to be out