Cutting Loose Read Online Free PDF

would all have sent men like him to find the bracelet and retrieve the code, except, unlike him, those men wouldn’t give a damn about Lily Robbins. Her death, if it came to that, would be one of those unexplained murders that no New Mexico cop shop would ever unravel. The guys who did his kind of work wouldn’t leave a trace. They were covert, and they were good. Lucky for Lily, Zach was pretty sure he was better than the Aston Martin boys.
    Coming up on the sports car, he quickly knelt down, activated and attached the tracking device, and memorized the license number. Nevada plates only meant one thing to him—Vegas wiseguys. He’d have names and sheets on them before noon.
    Yeah, he was pretty damn sure he had the upper hand on Somerset Street this morning, but he never took anything for granted. Never. That was what made him better—an acute sense of paranoia and a fear of dying. Not death. He didn’t have any fear of being dead. But, man, he’d seen the results of some very bad dying. The Far East, the Near East, all over Latin America, it didn’t matter where he’d been, people were butchers, and he wasn’t going out in pieces. No fucking way. He’d take a bullet to the back of the head any day over some of the things he’d seen.
    J.T. had gone out in pieces
—yeah, pieces. John Thomas Chronopolous, J.T., one of the original chop-shop boys of Steele Street. Zach had heard all about how the Special Defense Force operator had died in Colombia, and how J.T.’s youngest brother, Kid Chaos, had brought him home. Zach had even seen the photographs and wished so goddamn badly that he hadn’t.
    He came to the corner of Lily’s house and snuck a quick look at her back door. It was ajar, and there was no movement anywhere around it.
    Fuck.
The Aston Martin boys were already in the house.
    In half a dozen steps he was beside the door and took a quick look inside—a laundry room, leading into the kitchen, one step up. Even before the last piece of information snapped into place, he was moving forward, the safety on his Para flipped off and his finger on the trigger. Two guys from Las Vegas fanning out and sneaking into a woman’s house in New Mexico through the back door at five o’clock in the morning just about sealed their fate as far as Zach was concerned.
    Just about. He was always open to last split-second decision making, because once he pulled the Para’s trigger, there was no coming back.
    The kitchen was clear, the house quiet, except for the sound of a shower, which he hated. She might as well have put up a neon sign—“Naked, vulnerable woman in here.”
Fuck
. He followed the sound, moving silently, swiftly, every sense on alert. A door on his right was open onto a flight of stairs leading into a basement. Light from her bedroom showed a large footprint pressed into the carpet at the top of the stairs. At least one of the Aston Martin guys could be in the basement, maybe both. He wasn’t hearing any movement on the main floor. He sure as hell wasn’t making any noise. When he’d been taught “swift and silent,” his instructors had meant exactly that.
    Checking each door, each room, each opening, he finally reached the bathroom at the end of the hall. His mission, of which he was well aware, was to get the bracelet. That was it. Get the bracelet and get it to Alex—a simple, straightforward, closed set of commands. “Save the woman” was way down on the CIA’s priority list, and honest to God, it might not even have made the list.
    Okay, there was no “might” about it. “Save the woman” was not on the list.
    But here he was, and there were men in her house, and she was in the shower, and he was going to open her damn bathroom door and scare the holy fuck out of her, just so he could “save the woman,” and then he’d get the bracelet.
    So now he was up to Plan C,