seem like a wise move.
Keep going. That was the better plan. She’d been lucky to get through the straggly, unlit stretch of cottonwoods, wild lilacs, old tires, and junked trash cans the first time.
God. It was the perfect hiding place for a maniac. If whoever had done that to Banner was back here, running fast and hard might have been the only thing that had kept her safe from him—or from it. Anything that could rip a man’s arm right out of its socket most definitely qualified as an “it.”
She clutched her side more tightly and forged ahead, her goal clear: the street on the other side of the buildings ahead. She’d dropped her phone when the first grenade had hit in the garage—good God, what a strange, bad night—but there was a bar or two on the other side where she could make a call, get a cab, and get the hell out of there.
And head straight to Steele Street. J.T. needed help, and she needed help to save him.
He’d tried to give her another way out, but there was no way out of this without him. Wherever he’d been these last six years, she wasn’t letting him disappear back there without some answers. She wanted them, and the guys at Steele Street deserved them.
She made it the last bit of way through the scrubby grass and was partway across the paved area, coming abreast a junked pickup truck, when a cry ripped through the night air and stopped her cold.
Fear, stark and utter and pure, nearly dropped her to her knees.
She wasn’t alone back here.
Oh, geezus.
She blasted into a run—and landed smack-dab in a pile of trash.
The cry came again, low and keening and agonized, and she was trapped, trying to dance her way out of a loose tangle of wire and cardboard.
Ohgeezus, ohgeezus, ohgeezus—terror was lodged so tightly in her throat, she could hardly drag a breath into her lungs.
Con slipped his phone in his pocket and gingerly lifted the edge of his T-shirt.
Fuck.
He had a bloody gash an inch long in the meaty part of his waist, no vitals hit, but hell. He’d known King had cut him, but in the heat of the fight, it hadn’t felt like more than a nick.
It was more than a nick. He’d been stabbed clean through, and it was definitely starting to burn.
Dammit.
He lowered the edge of his T-shirt and slipped out of his jacket. With his knife, he cut a long strip out of the sleeves and back and wrapped the material around his waist, good and tight, then tied the rest of the jacket over the top of the makeshift bandage to stanch the bleeding. Jack could fix him up better at the Armstrong.
Behind him, he could hear the police sirens still going, and they were starting to spread out. They would have gotten Jane by now, which was good, and would be looking for him, which was not good.
They weren’t going to find him, though, not in this back-alley labyrinth of dumpsters, loading docks, and parking spots. There were a dozen businesses fronting the street, and they each had their own area in the back. There were fences delineating property lines, a few cinder-block walls had been put up, some chains closing off a few parking spaces here and there. Overstock from the tire store had been stacked up inside a chain cage next to a garage door. Piles of empty boxes littered the alley behind a grocery store. A couple of homeless guys were bivouacked about fifty yards away from a junked car and a pickup truck parked under a couple of straggly trees.
Up ahead, he could see where the area opened out onto a street with an old but nice neighborhood of small houses on the other side. There’d be a car on one of those streets, something he could hot-wire.
The place was damned familiar, just like a lot of things in this city were familiar, including Jane.
He shouldn’t have kissed her. He had no business wanting things he couldn’t have, especially when what he really wanted had been delivered on a silver platter; Randolph Lancaster. Here in Denver.
The bastard was never going to know what hit him. Con wanted the LeedTech files, and there was damn little he wouldn’t do to Lancaster to get them. Considering what had been done to him six years ago, he figured he could come up with something that would get the bastard’s attention and get the job