Bad Attitude (B.A.D. Agency #1)(23)
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

Jack went stiff and turned a bit gruff. “I don’t know nothing about that. I didn’t do nothing.” It was obvious he wasn’t big on thank-yous, but she could tell that he’d done it all right.

There was something incredibly endearing about Jack. He was like an overgrown kid and a crazy uncle
all mixed together. No wonder Steele liked him.

“Hey,” Jack said to Steele, “is it just me, or does she really look like that actress, Angelina Jolie?”

Syd cringed. “I do not look like her—she looks like me. Only I’m shorter and fatter.”

Jack made a rude noise. “I don’t know about the shorter part, but the weight looks good to me. What’cha think, Steele?”

He gave her a hot once-over. “I couldn’t agree more, Jack. But watch it. The lady doesn’t like being told that.”

Jack snorted. “What woman don’t like to hear she’s pretty? She’s not one of them feminists, is she?”

Syd arched a brow. “Is there something wrong with feminists?”

“No, I suppose not. But they’re the only kind of women I can think of what wouldn’t want to hear they look good. Unless you’re just weird or something. You’re not weird, are you?”

This coming out of the mouth of Jack? Yeah…

“Not particularly, no.”

“Well, good. I got enough weirdness for the lot of us. Don’t want to share it.” He winked at her.

Laughing, Syd headed for the trunk to pull the suitcase out before Steele could get it.

“I’ve got it,” Steele said sharply.

She gave him a droll stare. “You’re shot.I’ve got it.”

“Shot?” Jack asked, his brow creased in concern as he walked over to them. “Where’d they get you?”

“Shoulder.”

“Nah,” he said irritably, “where were you when they shot you?”

“A hotel.”

Jack shook his head and tsked. “I taught you better than that, Slim. What were you thinking by trying to hide out there?”

Steele pointed to her. “I told her it was a bad idea, but it’s hard to argue with a woman while you’re bleeding.”

Jack snorted. “Hard to argue with a woman, period. Only time a man wins with one of them is when the woman is either on TV or dead. I don’t supposed you’d want to kill her?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Figures.” Jack limped over toward her and pulled the suitcase out of her hand. He reached into the trunk for the other suitcase. “Follow me down before anyone else gets shot. Especially before I get shot, ’cause that would just ruin an otherwise nice day.”

Syd opened the car door to retrieve Steele’s weapon case.

“What have you gotten me into?” she asked Steele under her breath as they followed after Jack.

“Nirvana. With Jack we have a way to ID the hired gun and set up a place to take his ass down.”

She hoped so. They needed to get this assignment under way, and the best way was to neutralize the unknown variable.

Jack tossed the suitcases into the trapdoor, where they landed with a solid thud before he crawled into the darkness after them. Syd gave Steele a sheepish look before she followed suit. The trapdoor led to a small elevator-type car. Roughly four feet by four feet, it held the three of them fairly easily. But even so, she felt a bit claustrophobic.

A damp, earthen scent clung to the car, along with what seemed to be wet dog. How weird was that?

“Are you sure about this?” she asked Steele.

“I trust him.”

But she noted that his face had its own pallor as Jack flipped a switch that closed the trapdoor above them. Lights came on an instant before they fell downward about six feet. Then they moved sideways for a few minutes before descending again.

“Where are we going?” she asked Jack.

“My house. I had it built about three years ago down in these old mining shafts.”

Syd was aghast at his mindset. “Aren’t you afraid of a cave in?”

“Ah, we all die eventually. At least this way no one has to go to the trouble of burying me.” He grinned at her.

She looked up at Steele. “I don’t find him funny. Do you?”

Steele laughed. “Relax. If I know Jack, he has more ways to escape out of here than Harry Houdini.”

“Yeah, see, and that proves my point. What killed Houdini? A stupid accident. But for one moment of stupidity, he’d have grown old with his Bess and been happy as a pig in shit. Notice I ain’t young, and if I die, old Cletus would kick my ass for leaving him all alone down here.”

“So your friend lives with you?” Syd asked.

“Of course,” he said as if offended by her question. “Where else would I put my dog? See, Cletus has this thing for cheese, but since he has no thumbs he has to have me to give him his cheese on his food every night. If I die, no one else knows about Cletus and the cheese, and poor old Cletus would lose his mind. So I can’t die until he does. See how that works?”

Heaven forbid the dog go without cheese. “And how old is Cletus?”

“Two years. So you got at least a decade before you have to worry about me turning suicidal or croaking down here from a cave-in.”

She looked over to Steele again. “Does this rationale make sense to you?”

“That’s Jack-Logic. It makes total sense.”

Well, then, who was she to argue? If it worked for them, it worked for her.

Y-e-a-h…

After what seemed like miles, the car came to a stop. Instead of the roof opening like it’d done on the surface, the side slid open to show her a huge, open room that had to be at least two thousand square feet…of NORAD and considering the fact that she had been to the military underground installation…

“Afraid of nukes?” she asked as she glanced around the computers, which were eerily state-of-the-art.

Jack shook his head. He took the suitcases over to a beat-up brown leather sofa and sat them on it. “Nukes don’t scare me. The spooks do. You know they know everything about us now. Where we live, how we shop. Everything. They’re going to be bar-coding our clothes soon.”

He tapped twice on his head. “Imbedding them RFID chips in our brains so that as we walk around they can have our entire lives at their fingertips. Did you know you can’t make a phone call that half a dozen people don’t hear first, and you don’t even know it?”

Steele gave her an amused look. “Yeah, those spies areeverywhere.”

Jack snorted. “I know everyone thinks I’m crazy. But I’m telling you, I spent way too many years of my career at the Pentagon. People would die if they knew what I did, and that was years and years ago. I don’t want no one to know that much about me. Which is why I left the Pentagon and went back into special ops training. I’d much rather be left out in the dark with nothing but my rifle to protect me. But not even that’s enough for them. Hell, no. They still call and bug me with stuff, and that after I retired a year ago.” He shook his head. “They never really let you go.”

“Yeah, I know,” Steele said as he headed for one of the twelve computers Jack had up and running on three long buffet tables. “So what all are you hooked into?”

Jack headed back toward him. “Ever-thing. Who you want to spy on?”

“Need to search police personnel records.”

“What state?”

Moving to stand behind the men, Syd cringed at the hopelessness of what they were attempting. How could they find one man out of thousands? “Can we search all?”

“Done.” Jack took a seat and pulled his hat off.

Syd arched a brow as she saw the tinfoil that lined it.Oh, don’t tell me he’s one of those weirdos who wears tinfoil on his head to keep the aliens from reading his mind. “So if you’re so paranoid about the Feds, Jack, why do you live this close to D.C.?”

He cast her an offended look. “I’m not one of those psychos who lives out in the woods of Montana, thinking there’s some government conspiracy against them. Some of them are just plain weird.”

Uh-huh…. She had to force herself not to smile at his indignation.

“Now, I know you think I’m off my rocker, but trust me, I ain’t. I like being here so that I can talk to my buddies who keep me tied into the hotbed of everything.”

“Such as?”

“Well, shadow agencies and such. There’s this one in particular that I like to follow. I got curious about six months ago when I was reviewing the government budget. There was this insurance agency that had a huge budget that just didn’t make sense to me. So I did some checking, and sure enough, it was a cover group. Bureau of American Defense.” He gave her a penetrating stare. “You ever heard of ’em?”

She didn’t answer.

“Yeah. Thought so.” By his tone she knew he knew she was one of them.

“I think Joe needs to hire someone else,” she said to Steele.

Jack blew air out of his mouth. “He ain’t got nothing I want, but that Tee woman…I might be persuaded. I’ve noticed she spends a lot of money on them high-end dog biscuits. Cletus would probably like some of them too. And that special padded dog bed she bought…well, it could work.”

Syd gaped. She wasn’t sure if she should be angry at his snooping or impressed. Steele had been right. This guy was a godsend, and they really did need to put him on payroll.

“So,” Jack said, changing the subject, “I take it you’re looking for someone in particular.”

Steele nodded. “But we have no name.”

“All right, give me the description.”

Syd filled him in on the details while Steele went over to sit in a leather recliner. He looked tired, but still handsome, as he adjusted his seat. She couldn’t imagine how much pain he must be in, and yet he said nothing at all about it.

If they weren’t being chased, she’d make him go to bed and rest. But what good was that, when he might be forced to get up in just a few minutes to confront who knew what evils would leap out at them?

He lifted a remote and turned on the wall of monitors that showed different angles of the topsoil. Their BMW and the old Chevy were plainly visible on one screen. The highway where they’d entered was on another one, and other areas of Jack’s land were equally covered.

“How many acres do you have?” Syd asked Jack while he typed in the information she had given him.

“About a hundred, give or take a few.”

Steele laughed as he flipped the monitors from one scene of the property to the next. “Nice setup, Jack.”

“Oh, yeah, hit number four on the remote.”

Steele did. The center monitor lit up with CNN.

Jack made a frisky sound with his teeth. “You hit eight, and you get the Playboy Channel.”

Shaking his head, Steele cast a sideways glance toward Syd. “I better not go there, huh?”

She gave him a hot stare. “Not if you want to keep all parts attached.”

Jack made another odd noise—he seemed to enjoy that. “You his woman?”

“No.”

“Why not?” he asked as if the thought shocked him.

“She finds me irritating.”

Jack scratched his head as he digested that bit of news. “Then why’s she here?”

“I’ve been asking myself that every minute since I met her.”

Syd let out a disgusted breath. “I’m his spotter.”

Jack looked impressed. “Really?Dayam, boy, my spotter never looked like this. They always picked men to help me line up my sniper coordinates. Who knew they’d be training women one day? Maybe I got out of the Army too soon, huh?”

She met Steele’s less than agreeable stare. “I’m sure Steele is thinking he didn’t get out soon enough.”

Steele didn’t comment as Jack continued the search. After a few minutes, several thousand files came up.

“Oh, this is hopeless,” Syd breathed as she surveyed the results. It would take days to skim them all. “It’s worse than finding a needle in a haystack.”

“Hey, Jack? Can you cross-reference those results with a cop who has sniper training who was discharged from duty? One who now resides in the D.C. area?”

“Sure. You know a car make and model? I can cross reference with vehicle records too.”

Syd actually got a tingle at that. Could it be that easy? “Black Escalade. 2005.”

“Three of them,” Jack said a few seconds later. He pulled them up on his monitor.

The first two were African-Americans who were still working for the police force, but the third…

He’d been discharged two years before for a weapons violation. “Steele? You might want to come see this.”

Before he could get up out of the chair, Jack sent the picture to the center monitor. “That what you looking for, Slim?”

Steele grinned at the sight of the dark-haired man they’d seen in the hotel. “Hell, yes. Gator, you’re a genius.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

Syd ignored them while she read the man’s dossier. He had been accused of drug trafficking, two assaults on his ex-wife, and shooting an unarmed college student. The last was what had finally gotten him thrown off the Baltimore police force.

But it was the last bit that had her smiling every bit as much as Steele. “It says he’s currently employed by our favorite security agency.”

“That’s our bastard,” Steele said in a voice reminiscent of a proud father. “Can you find his current location, Jack?”

“Give me about ten minutes.”

Syd watched as he pushed her aside and pulled up enough private records on the man to make Andre proud. But it was his cell phone that ultimately nailed him.