room.” She had the key. It was a no-brainer.
“Got that covered. We’re on it. You’re expected back at home base, and I’m not bucking the boss just so you can tromp around in some dingy old motel in your combat boots.”
She grinned. She’d been wearing heels earlier, but Gillian would know she’d changed before she’d headed out on the street. Good footgear was just good sense, and there was nothing like a pair of combat boots to let people know you were a girl who could do whatever, whenever, to whoever—and she could.
So why let Travis and Gillian have all the fun? Skeeter was beginning to feel like a bookmark in this mission, instead of the operator she was trained to be.
“That’s—”
“Uh, Skeet,” Gillian interrupted her. “Whatever you’re thinking, stop. I noticed the boss is a little tense right now, and I actually think we can all do our jobs just a bit better if you’re safe at Steele Street, and he’s not breathing fire down the back of our necks.”
What a crock.
“I was kicking ass—”
“When I was still shuffling papers,” Gillian interrupted her again. “And since then we’ve taken a lot of names together, but—”
“We had this conversation two months ago, Red.” Skeeter had been the one who’d given Gillian the code name Red Dog, and over the last few years, the two of them had kicked butt from Kandahar to Caracas. They had a reputation, the highest, among a small, intensely skilled group of people, the people who did the same job they did, top-rung, elite military forces. They were the SDF girls, the Ghost and the Darkness, Hell and Fury, Skeet and the Dog.
“And this time we’re both being overruled. The leader of this pack says you go home, and this is not the time for any of us to step outside the lines. We’ve got a lot at stake.”
Coming from Red Dog, that was quite a statement. That girl had been reborn outside the lines.
“Copy that,” she said, sucking it up. She knew Gillian and Travis wouldn’t miss anything in the room, and if the girl, Scout, and the guy who had rescued her showed back up at the Star Motel, she knew Gillian and Travis would bring them in.
J.T. was another ball game altogether. Even after having witnessed most of it firsthand, she was still set back on her heels by how quickly he’d eluded them at Steele Street. They’d had everybody on him.
“Skeet, I don’t see you moving.” Gillian’s voice came through the Bazo.
Geez.
“Moving. Roger and out.” She turned the key in the ignition and pulled out onto Meldrum Street.
“Whoa … oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. Don’t turn into the motel,” Scout said, ducking down in the seat next to Jack in the Buick Regal. “Just keep moving. Keep driving and take the next left. We need to circle around again, but don’t come back by the motel.”
Jack didn’t question her orders. She’d obviously seen something.
But he looked, and yowza. Whoa, whoa, whoa was right, a gorgeous, bodaciously built blonde in a slinky dress and combat boots was getting out of a car on Meldrum, a couple of blocks up the street from the motel. Geezus. He’d died and gone to heaven.
“The blonde?”
“How in the hell?” she answered, which was no answer at all. She peeked up and looked over the seat through the back windshield. “You didn’t happen to drop a motel receipt when you came through that door on the tenth floor, did you?”
“You’re kidding me,” he said, not quite believing it. “She’s from Steele Street?” Scout knew he wouldn’t have left so much as a fingerprint in that building, let alone a forwarding address.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Her name is Skeeter Bang-Hart, a real serious piece of work, and she’s heading up the street. They must have somebody else up there, backing her up.”
Jack didn’t have to work too hard to detect the awe and admiration in Scout’s voice, and he was surprised. They didn’t run into too many women who had what it took to impress Scout.
He made the next two left-hand turns, went up the hill for another two blocks, and started to slow down.
“Keep going,” Scout said. “I see another car that looks like trouble. We need to come in behind it.”
He glanced down the cross street and saw it, too, the tail end of something that looked vintage, well cared for, and muscled under the hood—a gold GTO, undoubtedly Steele Street iron. He kept cruising and took the