Free Crazy Cool by Tara Janzen

enough to have stopped them and their truck permanently.
    He reached for the next shot, lifted it to his mouth, and knocked it back with hardly a shiver. The second one always went down easier. By the time he hit the fourth, they’d be sliding down like twelve-year-old Scotch.
    And yeah, it was killing him. He could tell, because he felt like he was dying. Dying from the inside out without a mark on him, which was more than the rebels had granted his brother.
    J.T. had been marked hard. Cut. Beaten. Mutilated.
    Kid had looked.
    He lifted the next shot in line and downed it in one swallow.
    Oh, yeah, he’d just had to know if it was really J.T. in the box. So he’d looked.
    His fingers curled around the fourth glass. He downed the shot and squeezed his eyes shut on a gasp as an excruciating wave of pain clamped down hard on his stomach, riding him. Sweat broke out on his brow and upper lip. Jesus save him, he didn’t want to be sick again. He didn’t have anything left to throw up.
    Rigid with pain, he endured, until slowly, inch by inch, the pain eased off. The nausea passed, and he slipped back into simple, abject misery. Misery unlike anything he’d ever known. Misery outside his comprehension.
    God, he felt so fuckin’ awful. If the whiskey didn’t kill him, the sheer, utter awfulness of how he felt might do the trick. How did people survive this kind of pain? He could hardly breathe.
    J.T.’s body had been desecrated—invincible, bigger-than-life J.T. Just being his little brother had given Kid enough street cred to overcome his natural geekdom. It hadn’t really mattered that he’d been too good at math and way too interested in computers. J.T.’s reputation on the street had been big enough to cover both of them, even though Kid had never spent a day on the street in his life. J.T. had made damn sure of that.
    The fifth shot went down without a hitch. He didn’t have a choice but to endure from one minute to the next. Devil dogs didn’t give up, and he was a devil dog to the core, a devil dog with mayhem in mind. Murder and mayhem. He was trained in the art of killing. He had a warrior’s soul, and the men who had killed his brother were going to die. Creed would want to be part of the mission—if he lived. Hawkins was who Kid needed back with him right now. Superman. Dylan was a diplomat, a con man, the brains of Steele Street and SDF. Hawkins was just the man of steel.
    He and Hawkins could take the motherfuckers out. He’d be back out there already, if it wasn’t for J.T.
    He didn’t have to look at the box on the floor to know it was there. The box weighed on him. It held him in his chair, at his post, no matter how tired he got, no matter how drunk. He wasn’t leaving J.T. alone, not for a minute.
    And he
was
drunk. So drunk, he hurt. So drunk, he’d practically paralyzed himself.
    Not that it mattered. All he wanted was to get J.T. home. He’d made his radio call to Miguel for a pickup. He’d been less successful making contact with Steele Street, but he could call from Panama City once Miguel dropped him off. It would just be a matter of hours then, not days, until he had J.T. home.
    Home . . . for one minute, he let his mind dwell on the word and what it meant. He’d met a girl his last night in Denver—met her, saved her life, made love to her, and fallen in love. A wild girl, an artist who painted naked men. Nikki McKinney. After the first week here, slogging through the jungle, it had all started to seem like a dream, those hours with Nikki. The hell of it was, he was afraid it might be seeming that way to her, too. A guy couldn’t make a phone call in the middle of a covert op. God, she’d been a virgin when they’d made love, and he’d up and left her in the middle of the night—and he’d done nothing but want her ever since.
    She was so beautiful, just thinking about her was enough to make him ache.
    He reached for the next shot glass, then stopped when he heard the sound of