Loose Ends by Tara Janzen

knowing he’d been a street kid just like her. It had made their unexpected friendship and affinity for each other more real, made what had happened that one crazy night between them less embarrassing and more of something to believe in.
    She’d been wrong, and maybe she was wrong now. Maybe Conroy Farrel was a man who had been changed with plastic surgery to look like J.T. and he really was an enemy of the Steele Street crew.
    Oh, God, that opened up a whole new realm of danger … and yet he’d picked her up off the garage floor and put her in the car, and in the seconds when she’d been cradled in his arms, she would swear that for the briefest moment, he’d pulled her even closer against his chest and pressed his face into her hair.
    She didn’t know what to think, except that she needed to get out of the damn car and do
something
to keep the situation from turning into everybody’s worst nightmare. She reached for the door handle again and another damn explosion rocked the night, sending her back into the seat with a whole new game plan:
Catch my breath, stop shaking, and figure out how to get the
hell
out of 738 Steele Street
.
    And now that she thought about it, wasn’t she sitting in one of the fastest pieces of iron to ever come out of Detroit?
    She looked and there wasn’t a key—no such luck. But there were plenty of wires under the steering column.
    Moving quickly, she opened her zebra bag and started looking for the knife she always carried: a pearl-handled, four-inch frame lock with a partially serrated blade.
    Con entered the tenth-floor loft and locked in on the woman standing in the middle of the room:
Five feet five inches. One hundred and fifteen pounds of female curves and hard muscle. Auburn hair, blond streaks. Glacial, calculating stare, and a .22-caliber rimfire rifle perfect for delivering tranquilizer darts
.
    Dangerous.
    And staring down the muzzle of his Wilson Combat .45, she had to be thinking the same thing about him.
    He saw no reason to kill her. Scout and Jack were clean away, with the concussion part of Jack’s flash bang still echoing in the air. The woman hadn’t flinched duringthe explosion, which took more than nerves of steel. It had taken a lightning-fast process of sequential logic: She would have already been informed of the flash bang explosions in the garage and figured out that a team working together to rescue Scout Leesom would be using more of the same, not throwing fragmentation grenades at each other.
    So she’d held her ground, and in the same heartbeat that it had taken for him to assimilate all the information, he stepped back out the door and started down the hallway.
    Her first tranquilizer dart sailed past less than an inch from his arm. She was fast, but not fast enough, not against him. He could hear the two men following him round the landing between the ninth and tenth floors, and judging from their speed, he had half a minute to come up with an alternate route.
    He chose the door across the hall. It wasn’t locked, and as soon as he was inside, he understood why. There wasn’t anything inside the room, not even a whole floor, and where there wasn’t any floor, there were trees growing up from the level below, tropical trees.
    He didn’t hesitate.
    He knew where he was going, and that was
down
. He swung himself through the hole in the floor, with the trunk of one of the trees at his back. He felt a tug at his ear, knew he’d lost his radio earpiece and mike, and dropped into a jungle—plants everywhere, the loamy scent of soil, the soft heaviness of humidity, and somewhere, the sound of a waterfall, the rush of noise, the splashes, the swirling eddies, and the lapping of the water up against the tile edges of the pool.
    Yeah
, he knew the rock-faced water feature, remembered welding the frame, the heat of the molten metal, the brightness of the sparks through his welding mask, the craziness of the idea from the get-go, a waterfall onthe ninth