she was trying to think and figure things out and wasn’t having much luck doing either.
Yeah, they made a helluva pair. He was spiking at about a hundred and three degrees now, and she looked like she’d been hit by a Mack truck.
“It was self-defense, Jane. You saw the whole thing,” he said, trying again with her hair, lowering her hand away and sifting through the new tangle. “There were witnesses. Everyone in the kitchen saw what went down. You wouldn’t have been charged with anything if you’d stayed.” He didn’t know much, but he knew that.
“No.” She shook her head. “N-no, no, it’s worse, the two of them all broken up, so broken it’s awful, and the cops know me, from way back.”
Well, yes, he’d busted those boys pretty hard, and so had she, but it was the “way back” part of her statement that got his attention.
“I-I couldn’t stay,” she kept on. “I c-couldn’t take the chance … and … and—” She gulped in a breath and brought her hand up to cover her eyes—and she stood there and trembled.
He was headed there himself, out-and-out trembling territory, headed toward the shakes, and if things didn’t go his way with that second blue pill, maybe there was a seizure of some god-awful sort in his near future—very near future.
Hell. He looked back to the sidewalk and the people coming out of the bar and the Italian place. About another thirty seconds or so and there’d be enough folks outside for him and Jane to step into the crowd and make their getaway.
Shifting his attention back to her, it took a lot of what he had not to just pull her close, lift her up into his arms, and carry her away from this mess—but that would definitely get the cops’ attention.
“Did you do time?”
He wasn’t going to ask himself why that was the first question that came to mind, except for some odd little inflection in her voice telling him it wasn’t nearly as incomprehensible as he was going to wish it was, and when she just stood there, silent and trembling, with her hand still over her face, he knew it was true.
Perfect. He’d entered the country under a name he’d made up himself six years ago, and so far he’d illegally accessed a building and set off a few explosive devices. He’d stolen a car, easily committed a hundred or more traffic violations, kidnapped a woman, trespassed on all kinds of private property and damaged most of it, was knee-deep in assault and battery—and out of half a million people in Denver, he’d hooked up with a felon.
Somehow, somewhere, he couldn’t help but think that there had been a time when he’d spent most of his life on the right side of the law—just one more thing he’d lost, his legal bearings.
Hell.
“Cañon City?” he asked, flat-out curious and figuring if she’d been sent up to Super Max in Florence, she’d still be behind bars.
“N-no.” She shook her head. “The Immaculate Heart School for Young Women … in Phoenix.”
He looked down at her, more than a little nonplussed. The Immaculate Heart School for Young Women? That wasn’t exactly his idea of a lockup.
“What did you do? Steal the Communion wine?”
She shook her head again. “I … I killed a man,” she said, her voice barely audible. “Back when I was a kid. A gangbanger junkie over on Blake, me and Sandman. The cops haven’t forgotten. They never forget.”
Yeah, well, so now it was official. She’d shocked the hell out of him.
And geezus. She was right, cops didn’t forget murder.
And yes, he was damn sorry he’d busted King and Rock so hard that she seemed to have gone into damn near instant posttraumatic stress disorder. And for the record, who in the hell was Sandman?
He had about a hundred questions, and not a one of them relevant to the mission at hand. She wasn’t his problem. Scout was the reason he’d come to Denver, and Lancaster was the reason he was going to stay until the job was done. Everything always came back to Lancaster—not to waiflike beauties with sketchy pasts who had somehow fallen into the middle of his deal and locked on to him like a heat-seeking missile.
“The junkie grabbed one of my kids, thinking we had drugs on us,” she said, going on, explaining something that didn’t need an explanation. In his book, gangs and junkies and trouble went together like peanut butter and jelly—and, yeah,