Free Crazy Cool by Tara Janzen Page B

people slowed down as they grew up. Most people at least braked for red lights, and most people used the forward gears just a wee bit more than reverse.
    Hawkins didn’t seem to care about any of that. In truth, she wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d driven the car sideways.
    But they were stopped now, somewhere in the warrenlike urban landscape of the west side, with downtown all lit up to the east, and she was grateful, so grateful to be parked outside the sleaziest-looking place she’d ever seen. Mama Guadalupe’s gave new meaning to the term “hole in the wall,” and she couldn’t wait to get inside and call a cab to take her home.
    If he wanted to disappear for a couple of days, that was fine by her. But he was doing it alone. She didn’t care what he was doing with the Department of Defense; if her mother wasn’t involved, it didn’t have anything to do with her.
    Yes, it was a strange coincidence about her and him and Ted all being at the Botanic Gardens for an art auction, but in that group, Christian Hawkins was the odd man out. She was an art dealer, and Ted Garraty was a rich man who patronized the arts, especially when Denver society was involved.
    She’d pulled herself together at Doc’s. She’d done some thinking, and if she could just get out of this beast of a car, she was sure she could keep herself together very well without Christian Hawkins’s help.
    She reached for the door handle, then stopped.
    On second thought, maybe she should just ask to borrow his cell phone. The windows on the club were boarded up behind iron bars. The door was a slab of industrial-strength steel. Rainbow-colored graffiti covered the outside walls, relieved only by the pit marks, or possibly bullet holes, in the dirty beige stucco. A vacant lot with two junked cars and an overturned Dumpster bordered the club to the north.
    He’d taken her to nicer places at nineteen. The club didn’t look like anyplace a government guy would hang out, unless he was a Force Recon Marine looking to work off a little excess energy in a bar brawl.
    No, she decided, looking over at him. His hair was way too long for a Marine, and his manners were too crude—and that was saying a lot.
    Bad Luck.
That’s what he’d called her, what he’d probably been calling her for the last thirteen years—and she wasn’t even going to touch his “Darth Vader in Chanel” comment.
    She should definitely ask to borrow his cell phone, but she wasn’t speaking to him, which left her in a bit of a bind.
    “This will only take a minute,” he said, getting out of the car.
    Was he going to leave her in the car? In this neighborhood?
    She went for her seat belt with one hand and the door handle again with the other, but he beat her to it, coming around the front of the car and opening the door for her.
    Avoiding his presence, his very existence, to the best of her ability, she got out of the low-slung bucket seat and pulled her dress down as best she could—which wasn’t very good.
    “Here,” he said, slipping out of his suit jacket. “Put this on.”
    Her eyes immediately fastened on what the jacket had been concealing. He was wearing a gun. The dark straps of a shoulder harness slid down his arms as he shrugged out of it and casually released both the gun and a couple of extra magazines. The harness and the magazines went back in the car, the gun went into his left pants pocket, which absolutely ruined the line of his slacks.
    A gun. None of the guys she’d ever met from the Department of Defense had carried guns. They’d all been paper pushers. A smart girl would call her mother, if she ever found herself in this much trouble, and she was plenty smart—but she’d be damned if she called
her
mother.
    “No, thank you,” she said in a voice that said he could go to hell and take his jacket with him.
    Hawkins grinned. He’d take her angry any day. It beat the hell out of taking her scared—and oh, yeah, he’d done that once, the very