sometimes he wondered what that made him, with his stash of Souk’s magic elixirs.
Hell.
“It all went bad so fast,” she said. “There was a fight. He had his hands around my throat, shaking me hard, and I sh-shot him. Hawkins is the only reason I didn’t get tossed into the state pen.”
He could see it, some damn junkie trying to literally shake down a teenage girl for cash, or drugs, or whatever, and he wished to hell he’d been there. At least this Hawkins guy had saved her from going to jail. One more thing Con owed him for—and then the craziness of the thought hit him.
Christ. He was in trouble here.
“I … I thought he was going to kill me, the junkie, and he probably would have, but the cops still wanted to lock me up, because I was a street kid,” she said. “You know how it is with street kids. They’re always in the wrong place, because they’ve got no place else to go.”
Yeah. He knew that much. He’d seen them all over the world, but he’d never in all his life seen one even half as beautiful as her.
“T-tell me,” she said. “Tell me you didn’t d-do it.” She lifted her head, and her gaze met his straight on, unflinching, and in that instant, something changed.
He didn’t know what “it” he hadn’t done, but with a sudden clarity of awareness unlike anything he’d felt in the last six years, he saw beyond the moment. He saw beyond her past, beyond the pale green allure of her eyes and the smoky smudge of her makeup, beyond her intelligence and her dead-on marksmanship. Here in the darkened alleyway, with her so close, he saw something else in her eyes and in her face, and it changed everything.
He knew her.
Really knew her.
In the shadows, scraped and roughed up with her hair in tangles and her clothes askew, with the scar on her cheek and the freckles across her nose, he recognized her, the waif, the renegade, the street runner. He didn’t remember being her lover, but he remembered her hanging around the place on Steele Street, waiting and watching for him, and remembered fantasizing about her, the street kid with the intense green eyes, the stringy hair, and the wildly beautiful face. He remembered he’d been a soldier, and she’d been eighteen, too damn young and too damn skittish, a fascinating, feral creature of the streets, living off her wits and her skills.
A pickpocket. The best Denver had ever seen.
The thought no sooner hit than he swore: Sonuvabitch.
He reached back for his wallet and felt the empty pocket, and he didn’t know whether to curse again or grin.
She was good. Always had been.
Oh, yeah. She was damn good, and he’d been completely spun up, mesmerized, staring into her incredible green eyes and not even noticing that when she’d stopped on the street and reached for him, she’d been stealing his wallet. She’d had about three seconds to recognize him, come up with a plan, and execute the lift.
And she’d pulled it off.
“Can I have my wallet back?” he asked, and after a slight hesitation, she shook her head.
“Why not?” he asked.
“I lost it in the garage.”
Well, she hadn’t denied it, and at least now he had a pretty good idea of how SDF had found the Star Motel, but he was still a little confused on one point.
“Why did you take it?”
“I-I thought you were dead, and then there you were on the street, and I had to know if it was really you, if you were really J. T. Chronopolous … and … and I need to know whether or not you did that to King and Rock. Whether you ripped King’s arm off and left it lying in the alley. You’re strong enough. I swear you are.”
And just like that, the whole night took another deep dive into the twilight zone. Geezus. King Banner’s arm had been ripped off?
Ripped off?
No wonder there were so damn many cops swarming this block. He looked over her shoulder, down the alley. This was bad. Explosions tore people into pieces, but there hadn’t been an explosion. So what in the ever-loving world could have—
It came to him then, just an idea, but a damned awful idea, that the Bangkok rumors he and Jack had heard were true. That Lancaster, dealing with a subpar Thai lab, had commissioned a monster—and possibly, for whatever reason, had brought the beast with him to Denver.