Free Loose Ends by Tara Janzen Page B

smoke and debris with his carbine leveled at Red Dog, a typical damn grand Traeger entrance. Scout dashed past the woman, who’d easily blocked the chair but now suddenly seemed to be frozen to the floor. Red Dog didn’t make a move to stop her, and Scout didn’t ask why. The tenth-floor balcony door was less than ten yards away. Escape.
    Jack signaled to her that they were going over the side on his rappelling line, then pulled a flash bang off his tac vest and lofted it past her into the room.
    It all made perfect sense to her—ten floors on a rope. They’d pulled the move before. They’d pulled a lot of moves and maneuvers together over the years, before they’d gotten all sixes and sevens with each other. Still running full-out, Scout gauged her timing, and she and Jack came together in a fluid slide of bodies melding into one entity bent on escape, arms coming around each other, legs leaping in rhythm for the balcony railing.
    Headed over the side, she looked back, one fleeting glimpse before the grenade landed, and saw what had riveted Red Dog’s attention and her rifle: Con, standing in the front doorway, his gun drawn, his gaze and the muzzle of his .45 locked on the auburn-haired shooter.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Stay down!
That’s what Christian Hawkins had yelled at Jane on his way out of the garage, and, sure, she could do that. As a matter of fact, her legs were too damn wobbly to do little else. And she’d scraped one of her knees raw when she’d landed on the garage floor. Her ears were ringing. Her breath was shallow, her senses reeling.
    My God!
It had been Conroy Farrel standing next to Corinna, not Hawkins, and that only meant one thing to her: Conroy Farrel was John Thomas Chronopolous.
    J.T
.—back from the dead. Her heart was pounding, and aching, and the building seemed to be coming down around her ears. The last explosion from somewhere above on the higher floors had sent a tremor racing down through the walls of the garage. Corinna had trembled, and scrunched down in the passenger seat, her hands over her ears, Jane had trembled with her.
    J.T., my God
. Hawkins had been in full-out kick-ass mode, his gun drawn, his war face on, and Dylan had been right behind him, a rifle to his shoulder and held at the ready.
    She had to warn them. This was so awful. If one of them accidentally killed J.T., it would be too horrifying. He was alive, and she didn’t understand any of it, how it could be possible. They’d buried him, but so help herGod, she’d seen him, and she’d seen the photo on the driver’s license, and it was J.T. Somehow, someway, those bones in Sheffield cemetery were not J.T.’s. He was here, in Denver, trying to blow up Steele Street with hand grenades—and she didn’t understand any of that, either.
    Stay down
, Hawkins had told her, but she needed to pull herself together and go find them, tell them who they were chasing, before disaster happened.
    Still shaking, she reached for the door handle, and
hell
, another explosion sounded from up above, rocking her world one more time, and she buried herself back in the seat.
My God
. There was no getting into the middle of this business, not without making it all worse. Hawkins and Dylan wouldn’t shoot J.T., she told herself, not once they saw who they were after.
    But what if J.T. really is bent on destroying the building and everyone in it?
The thought flashed across her mind. She’d seen him throw those grenades, and he’d looked like he knew exactly what he was doing, and if he did, then he needed to be stopped—and she didn’t even want to think about that. The scars on his body hadn’t come without a price, and some of the prices people paid changed them forever.
    Forever and ever
—and just the thought hurt. That J.T. could have come back as an enemy of the chop shop boys. She knew they’d all run wild as teenagers, stealing cars and getting into nothing but trouble, and she admitted that on some level she’d liked