can’t go to. I don’t mind!”
“You’re running up a staircase when you could have waited for the elevator,” Josh told him irritably. “You can take a bus to a tourist attraction.”
“So I’m invited?” Grace sounded mildly out of breath, and a part of Hunter was reassured—he hadn’t been bullshitting about being hurt. “As long as I can walk?”
Josh’s sigh on the other end was pronounced. “If your feet hurt, I’ll hang out in the hotel with you, and as long as nothing’s doing, Molly can go with Julia.”
“What about me?” Stirling asked. “I like mountains.”
“Anybody but me and Grace can go to Grouse Mountain,” Josh said with a certain amount of grim humor. “We’re in room 1518.”
“And we’re in luck,” Stirling muttered. “Because your friends are in 1617, and there’s a connecting door between 17 and 18 on all the floors. Grace, you can rest for a while and totally check out the ventilation system—I’m pretty sure you can get into their room easy. But we need to know when those two guys are leaving.”
“Don’t worry,” Hunter said. “I’ve got that covered.”
“Wait a minute,” Josh said.
“Wait a minute,” Stirling and Molly murmured.
“Great!” Grace said. “I’ll take the stairwell to the sixteenth floor and wait until they hit the elevators.”
“No!” Hunter barked, right as his elevator door opened and he found himself looking down a hallway to where Tazo and his companion had just rounded a corner.
“Hunter Rutledge,” Tazo exclaimed. “Is that you?”
“Stirling, is the package in the room?” Hunter murmured through his teeth even as he smiled at Tazo and waved.
“As far as I can tell,” Stirling said. “We have no way of knowing if they took the gem out of the box or not.”
“We’re going to guess not.” Tazo was a hired gun—a mercenary. He and Hunter had worked jobs together, and while Tazo had followed orders to do the killing when he’d screwed up, he’d never made the decisions himself. You did what you were paid to do. And Hunter needed him out of the way—and nowhere around Grace.
“Tarkasian!” Hunter said out loud, turning fully to Tazo as he approached. “Who’d you kill to end up in Vancouver?”
Tarkasian—slick, pale-skinned, dark-haired, dark-eyed, with impeccably sculpted caterpillars above his eyes—gave a thin, thin smile from ripe, full lips. Hunter had never found him the least bit attractive, but God, had the guy been able to get laid. Mostly by women, but he didn’t discriminate. He gave his companion a smirk. Tarkasian’s companion—same coloring but thinner, slighter, wiry as a spider with thin lips and a knife-blade nose—smirked back.
“I’m Tazo here,” he said, and Hunter nodded because that happened.
“Body count wasn’t too high, this time,” the companion said. “Doing a few favors for a friend is all.”
“Friend got a name?” Hunter asked, all professional. That was standard with mercs—shoptalk.
“Kadjic,” Tazo said, shrugging. “Could work for worse.”
“His fuckin’ cousin for one,” said skinny-Tazo. “Man, I was there when some guys got made by Interpol on a botched job.” He held up his palm, which showed the neat round burn from a cigarette in the center. “I got lucky. He used a cigar with the guys who were actually at the scene. He used to decorate his exes by carving his initials on their flesh—whether they were alive or dead.”
Hunter, Tazo, and skinny-Tazo all shuddered. That there was a merc’s nightmare. You could get asked to do all sorts of things when you hired your military skills out, but dealing with a sadistic nutcase was always the one you feared the most. Hunter knew that Josh’s Uncle Danny had dated Kadjic’s cousin for a brief time, and he’d seen the outline of keloid scars pushing against a thin shirt. Putting the two things together made him even more respectful of Danny—not less. It took some strength to pull yourself out of a hole made by trusting the wrong man.
“So, soft job?” Hunter asked, not sure how much these two guys had been briefed. In the background, he heard Grace over coms, a muffled echo around him, as though he were shuffling through a ventilation shaft. Somewhere nearby came a mechanical thump, like a heater coming on, and Grace’s low swearing hummed in his background as he listened for Tazo’s answer.
Hunter kept his expression completely even as Tazo replied, “Pickup and delivery. Nothing simpler. In fact, was just going out for a beer now that we’ve got the pickup done. Want to come with?”
“Sure,” Hunter agreed. “I was going to drop something off in