into his hand, and then slid the cartridges out one by one.
He believed her, whether he had a clear memory of the name or not—and that was a definite “or not.”
“Here,” he said, dropping her empty gun, the empty magazine, and the handful of cartridges into the open top of her purse. “When we get to the restaurant, you might want to start putting that all back together.”
She gave him a look that said he could eat worms and die and immediately starting fishing the cartridges out of her purse.
“What about my knife?” she said, very genteelly leaving off the implied “you jerk.”
He pulled the pearl-handled beauty out of his front jeans pocket and handed it over. She knew how fast he was. He figured she wasn’t going to try to shank him or shoot him. No, they’d had some kind of personal relationship. She was on his side.
The light changed, and he pressed on the gas, letting the GTO rumble and crawl down the road, keeping just under the speed limit.
Despite her babbling on, Jane was a smart girl, too. Once he drove off, it wouldn’t take her too long to put her weapons in order and figure things out, and then she’d go home. Tonight would just be an odd entry in her Dear Jane diary. By the time she woke up in the morning, he’d be halfway to South America or on his way to Bangkok.
Either way, it didn’t matter to him. He just needed to stay on the move, working his mission, and getting Wild Thing out of the car was the next step.
Three streets down, he found what he’d been looking for and pulled to a stop in front of a stucco building. A bright blue neon sign of a howling wolf graced the building. The place was about halfway down the block, midway between a stretch of bars and clubs, and it looked busy, with lots of people inside.
“Mama Guadaloupe’s?” she asked, giving him an incredulous look he didn’t quite understand, like maybe it was a strip joint in disguise.
Glancing up through the windshield, he read the words flowing in pink neon script above the blue wolf, then checked the clientele through the window. It was family night in there, all the way, not a strip club.
“Yeah,” he said. “This looks good.”
“It is good,” she said, her tone very sure. “The best Santa Fe gourmet in the city.”
Well, great. Maybe she could get dinner while she was waiting for her ride—and that was that, time for good-bye, the big adios, time to exfiltrate her out of the front seat. He’d take her inside, get her settled in Mama’s, and she’d be fine, a whole helluva lot better off than she was with him—and he hated having to admit that.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Slow down. I see the car up ahead, in the next block, parked on the right,” King said. A blond bruiser, he weighed in at one ninety-eight, all muscle, with a “recon” high-and-tight haircut. Dressed in civvies, a pair of jeans with a gray T-shirt and a double-X brown hoodie, he looked like the biggest and cleanest-cut hoodlum ever to hit the streets of the west side. His face was hard and chiseled, lantern-jawed, and devoid of expression. His boots were pure military issue, flat black and lace-up, and he had a reputation for getting the job done, whatever the job.
“The woman is still with him,” his partner said. Rock was driving the Jeep SUV Lancaster had rented for them at the airport. Rock’s head was completely shaved, and he was far more comfortable in a combat zone, any combat zone, than he ever felt in a city not under fire. At two hundred fifteen pounds, he was the bigger of the two, a muscled, flat-faced, square-headed war-fighter wearing desert tan cargo pants and a long-sleeved Corps T-shirt with an unbuttoned gray shirt over the top.
Both men carried .45-caliber pistols in paddle holsters concealed on their right sides and sheath knives on their left, with razor-edged folding knifes in their pockets.
“You take the woman,” King said. He didn’t care if they were after the damn-near-mythical Conroy Farrel or not, it wouldn’t take the two of them to take the man down. Farrel was a Bangkok boy, just like them, but they’d had better juice, the Gen X soup. If Lancaster had sent them in the first place, instead of all those now-dead CIA agents, Farrel would be ancient history by now.