The Muscle Read online

  There wasn’t enough left to identify in the end, although DNA had confirmed both Paulie and Pinter. But that’s not what Hunter saw in his dreams. In his dreams, he saw skeletons, scorched and shaking, sitting in the burned-out husk of the limousine, jaws locked open in an endless scream.

  That had been eight months ago, and Hunter was beginning to realize he wasn’t ever going to shake that vision, not even in sleep, and his class on computers in criminal justice wasn’t much of a motivation to roll out of bed. But Hunter had depended on routine and order to get him through the last eight months, and today was no different. He sat through the lecture, making the occasional note about something that had been changed from when he’d gotten a similar course in the military, then all but sleepwalked back to the parking structure that held his car.

  Where he saw another one.

  God. These fuckers. So transparent. Watching their victims—usually females but sometimes a smaller, skinnier male who looked defenseless—waiting for a chance to strike. Sometimes it was just a purse snatching or a mugging, but others? Hunter was pretty sure he’d stopped something else entirely when he took those guys out.

  Because when he saw them, he always took them out.

  This guy was following a pretty college girl, the hood of his navy blue sweatshirt pulled over his face, his hands in his pockets. Hunter was positive he had a weapon in there, and that made it even better.

  These guys were proving to be what really got Hunter out of bed. He started tracking the predator through the garage on the heels of the girl, who was dressed fashionably but impractically in a miniskirt and boots, her thin wool coat pulled as far down as it could go. Hunter wondered if it was a waitressing uniform and felt bad for her. Any man who thought that was a good idea in Chicago in the winter should be forced to wear a Speedo to work. He watched her get into the elevator, the predator at her heels, and called, “Hold that door!”

  She did, thank God. Maybe she felt sorry for him in his short leather coat with no gloves. He gave her a brief smile and pushed the button one floor up from hers.

  When she got out, Hunter subtly placed himself in front of her would-be assailant, blocking him, and wasn’t surprised when he felt the point of a knife at his waist and heard a harshly whispered, “Out of my way, asshole,” as the doors closed.

  In one clean move, Hunter broke the guy’s nose with an elbow shot, and then, still using his elbow, went to work on his ribs, his liver, his kidneys, and anything else within reach. The door opened with a ding just as the guy fell to the floor, and to Hunter’s horror, a young man wearing black slacks, black boots, black fedora, and a black sweater under a black leather coat slid in, arching an eyebrow at the groaning mugger on the floor of the filthy elevator, holding his ribs.

  “Nice work,” he said. “I was waiting for Shaundra when she got out. She said you’d blocked this perp.”

  Hunter’s eyes went wide. “You were—”

  “This guy’s gotten three girls this month,” he said, jaw hardening. “One of them was Shaundra’s roommate. Apparently he likes miniskirts and boots—fucking perv.” The kid shook his head. “And he’s brutal. Lots of blood and tearing with this one. I hope he gets a fencepost up his ass. Anyway, nicely done. You want to help me drop this asshole in front of the local precinct?”

  “He’s seen my face,” Hunter rasped.

  The kid—God, how old was he?—dropped to his haunches, pulled out a small canister, and cold-bloodedly pepper sprayed the guy in the eyes, ignoring his scream as he stood up, wiped the canister down with an astringent wipe he’d pulled out of his pocket, and then went to work on his fingers. “Forgot the gloves. Goddammit. Anyway, good luck trusting him to identify anybody now. Here—they’ve got his DNA on file and the precinct’s around the corner. If we cut through the bottom of the garage, we can drop this sack of shit and retreat.”

  “And then what?”

  The kid grinned, a hint of Peter Pan in his smile, even though he had small, perfect masculine features with sloe-dark eyes.

  “Then I take you out to coffee.”

  And that had been how Hunter had met Josh Salinger, a young man who would never be his lover but would definitely change his life.

  After Josh Salinger showed him Grace

  HUNTER LIKED the shadows. He liked leaning against a wall or a doorframe or even sitting on the floor next to the couch, where people wouldn’t see him.

  When people couldn’t see him, they couldn’t account for what he might do, and when they couldn’t account for what he might do, he had the advantage.

  Right now, he was leaning in the corner between the wet bar and the wall, with a perfect view of the couch, conversation pit, and television in Josh Salinger’s parents’ basement.

  Of course, Josh Salinger’s parents—all three of them—had money, lots of it, so the basement was three times the size of any apartment Hunter had ever lived in and was comfortable as hell, with giant cutouts of every sport known to Chicago decorating the Chicago-red wall behind the couch. The furniture was red leather, the carpet was Cubs blue, and while it could have been an incredibly tacky sort of space, the gleaming bar and tiled kitchenette area, as well as the massive audio/visual setup, made it utilitarian and practical too.

  The practicality was the sort of class Hunter could really get into.

  He’d been invited to live upstairs in the mansion itself, and though he’d taken a room, he’d kept his loft in one of the high-rises off Wacker. Most of his apartment had been converted into a workout space anyway. His room at the Salinger mansion felt more like home.

  And here, in this covert corner of his home, he listened to Grace’s friend spill her problems to Josh Salinger’s Uncle Danny as if the slender little man could make all the world’s ills go away.

  For his part, Danny “Lightfingers” Mitchell—who went by Benjamin Morgan at the moment—listened, his sober, tip-tilted hazel eyes alight and mouth pulled up at the corner as though a comforting smile was only a breath away.

  “So, darling, Grace tells us—”

  “Grace?” The girl, Tabitha, frowned at Danny, who gave a little nod to Dylan Li.

  Who preened.

  “It’s what we call him,” Danny told her. “God knows why. Boy could destroy a china shop with one go-round, couldn’t he?” Danny spoke with a trace of a European accent, often slipping into a faux Irish brogue, but he could swear like any kid from the Jersey shore when put to it.

  Tabby smiled and went to wipe her eyes on her shoulder, but Felix Salinger, Josh’s father and the love of Lightfingers Mitchell’s life, beat her to the punch with an offered linen handkerchief—probably monogrammed.

  Well, Josh’s family was loaded to the gills, but from what Hunter could see, they’d earned it.

  “Dylan said you all could probably help me.” She looked around the den, seeming to notice the number of faces she didn’t recognize, and frowned. “I’m afraid I don’t understand how, though.”

  “We’re good at solving problems,” Danny said mildly, and Hunter snorted to himself. “We sort of host a think tank for special friends if they need a little bit of help.”

  Actually, they were a bunch of con men, mercenaries, and thieves. But that didn’t mean they weren’t nice people.

  Tabby sniffled and clung to the handkerchief. “It’s not a little help I need,” she said. “It’s a lot of help.”

  Danny patted her knee. “Oh, honey, how about you let us decide. But first, tell your Uncle Danny all about it.”

  Tabby nodded miserably and proceeded to outline a story of greed, protection, smuggling, and extortion that might have made their toes curl and their eyes grow wide if everyone in the room hadn’t seen a lot worse at some time in their lives.

  Still, as corruption went, this one ranked up there.

  TABITHA’S PARENTS were scientists and, like Dylan’s parents, had spent much of their lives abroad, doing research for an environmental defense fund to solve the pollution problem of
the world’s freshwater supplies. Tabitha had been raised mostly by her maternal grandfather since she was seven, and she’d come to love Aether Conservatory as much as Grace did. Given what Hunter had seen of Grace’s dedication to dance, that was possibly more than life itself.

  In the early days of the Conservatory, Artur Mikkelnokov had been scrambling for pennies, and a very wealthy family had offered their patronage to help get him off the ground. All they’d asked for in return was for Artur to bring gifts to their friends abroad whenever he traveled.

  Artur, sometimes with Tabitha or other students, had taken cheerfully wrapped gifts and left them with hotel concierges in Vienna, Italy, the Ukraine, Iran. Anywhere Artur’s dancers were invited to perform, Artur’s patron seemed to have a friend.

  “It was like… magic!” Tabitha said guilelessly, at which point Hunter fought to keep his own face expressionless. He was good at that. Paulie used to call him bombproof, but not everybody in the Salinger household had been specialty fighters in close-contact combat.

  He looked around casually and noticed everybody in the room, including Josh’s mother, blinking very, very hard to keep their eyes from widening with incredulity.

  “Magic,” Julia Dormer-Salinger said neutrally. “Imagine that, Felix. The coincidence of it all.”

  Felix Salinger, who was Julia Salinger’s ex-husband as well as Uncle Danny’s beloved, gave an imperceptible nod. “Amazing,” he said dryly. “Unprecedented.”

  Danny sent them both dirty looks and then turned back to Tabitha and urged her to go on.

  “It was a good system,” Tabitha said in complete innocence, “until the elder Mr. Kadjic passed away and left his nephew in charge.”

  “Andre?” Danny asked, his eyes sharpening.

  “Sergei,” she corrected. “Do you know him?”

  Danny shook his head, making eye contact with Felix. “Not personally, no,” he said with meaning. “But I’ve had dealings with his cousin, Andre. He is… unpleasant.”

  Tabby nodded. “Grandfather says the older gentleman, Vlad, was really kind. He gave me gifts and made sure Grandfather never had to take time away from his work to deliver the packages. But… but as soon as Sergei came along, it was different. Grandfather was suddenly making three and four trips a month. The Conservatory didn’t suffer because so many of Grandfather’s old students were now instructors, but it wasn’t good for his health. The last time Sergei was in our home, I asked him if, perhaps, Grandfather could retire from the gift-giving business, that he was exhausted. And Sergei… he came on to me, and….” She shuddered. “And he… I forget how he phrased it, but he asked me if I wanted to take over Grandfather’s job. He was touching my cheek, and I hated it, and Grandfather overheard him and shouted, ‘Nyet! Stay away from her or I won’t do your filthy work anymore!’”

  She took a deep breath and Danny let her, looking mildly surprised. “Do you know what he was talking about? Filthy work?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I didn’t then, but as soon as Kadjic was gone from our house, I asked Grandfather. He said that he hadn’t realized it until Vlad had passed away. Vlad had been so kind, to both of us, you see? Apparently for Vlad he’d been passing stolen goods—they kept calling them jewels, but….” She shrugged.

  “You don’t think they were jewels?” Danny asked. “The packaging could mask a lot of sparklies.”

  Tabitha nodded, but her eyes narrowed shrewdly. “I know you must think we’re terribly naïve,” she said, and everybody in the room—Josh Salinger and his parents, Stirling Christopher and his sister, Molly, Hunter, and even Good Luck Chuck, their munitions expert and driver—all shook their heads.

  “No!”

  “Naw.”

  “Oh, honey, not at all!”

  “Not to speak of.”

  “Of course not!”

  “Duh! Jesus, Tabby, haven’t I taught you better than that?”

  Everybody stared at Grace in disbelief, and Hunter, forced out of his stoic mask, covered his mouth so the little shit wouldn’t know Hunter found him amusing.

  “Grace,” he said mildly, which worked nine times out of ten to help Dylan Li control his wayward tongue and rabbit-hopping mind.

  This was, apparently, the tenth time.

  “I’m serious!” Grace snapped, and the amber eyes meeting Hunter’s were sparkling with irritation. “I’ve tried to teach her better! There are assholes out there who will take advantage of you. You know that!” He looked at Josh in supplication. “So do you. Jesus, Tabby. We wanted to keep you safe because we know the world isn’t! All those lectures we gave you—how could you not know you were smuggling diamonds for a Russian mobster?”

  A shocked silence ensued, and Hunter covered his eyes with his hands.

  As usual, Danny saved the day. “Well, yes,” he said, smiling in that completely disarming way that made him such a first-rate con man. “That was a bit careless of your grandfather, sweets. It’s true. But I think what Grace—erm, Dylan—is saying is that it’s going to be very hard to say no to Sergei Kadjic now, isn’t it?”

  Tabitha nodded miserably. “Grandfather didn’t know this, but most of those performances we’d been asked to do had been sponsored by friends of Vlad’s. He hadn’t just sponsored the dance troupe—he’d paid for the performances exclusively to give Grandfather a chance to carry the packages without rousing suspicion.”

  Hunter reassessed the girl, who was pretty, with tawny skin and an elegantly narrow face. She had been naïve because her Grandfather had protected her, but she was by no means stupid.

  And Danny saw it too. “And that is why you think it’s more than diamonds,” he said shrewdly.

  She nodded. “Diamonds are valuable,” she said, “but even a big, well-cut gem isn’t enough to cover the cost of moving a dance troupe across the world and staging a performance in a decent venue while still turning a profit. I….” She looked around at all of them unhappily. “I’ve seen enough spy movies, you guys. I think it’s something more, but I don’t know what.”

  Danny hummed thoughtfully, and the rest of the group waited. Hunter knew how to keep his body still, but his eyes moved restlessly from face to face, assessing.

  Chuck Calder’s big frame took up most of a large stuffed chair. He slouched, legs out and crossed at the ankles, as though he couldn’t think of anything more relaxing than tracking down a mobster to make him stop trafficking in stolen jewels, and his green eyes—a complement to the dark red-brown of his hair—crinkled up in the corners to prove it. Chuck had been in the military—and he’d been a getaway driver and safecracker once he got out of it. Not much bothered Chuck, but he did love a good chase.

  Josh Salinger, audio-visual whiz kid, competent actor and dancer, and college dropout, sat on the arm of the couch next to Uncle Danny, arms crossed, a look of still concentration on his pale, almost pixieish face. Josh had been born into the grift, as it were. Felix and Danny had been scoping out the Dormer mansion in Rome for a way to give payback to Hiram Dormer, who was a raping, coercive bastard. In the middle of the grift, Hiram’s daughter—Josh’s mother, Julia—had begged for their help, con men or not. In the end, Julia had married Felix as a way to keep herself and her child safe from her abusive millionaire father, and Felix and Danny had agreed to it because they wanted to protect Julia. For the three of them, hiding the relationship between Felix and Danny from her father, as well as keeping Josh and Julia in a little bubble of safety, had proved to be con-man graduate school for all involved—Josh included.

  Stirling Christopher, computer hacker and AV-set theater designer, sat on the floor under the wet bar, arms wrapped around his knees, gray-green eyes focused intensely on the people doing the talking. If someone was to accidentally look at him—and most of the crew tried to avoid that because they knew attention made Stirling uncomfortable in a crowd situation—he would have turned his face away. His skin was pale brown, and he liked to wear black. That meant he blended into the shadows even more seaml
essly than Hunter did, which made Hunter a tad jealous. He would have given a lot for Stirling’s level of invisibility.

  Just as Hunter had the thought, he saw Danny catch Stirling’s eye and wink before looking off into the distance again. A shy smile flirted on Stirling’s lean mouth, and Hunter’s chest warmed a little. That was Danny’s greatest gift—making people feel good. Hunter had seen him use it to get a mark to walk right into a box the mark had crafted all by herself, but when he was using it on family, it was all about the kindness.

  Stirling’s foster-sister, Molly, sat on the love seat, her long legs pulled up to her chest like Stirling’s, her riot of orange hair pulled up to her crown and left to spill down. Molly’s only disappointment in working for her brother’s crew was that every last one of the men were gay, which meant they were all competing for the same pieces of ass.

  Molly was the first to admit this was not much different from theater, where she used her talents as a costume designer and performer, but she still lamented the lack of available men.

  Felix Salinger and Julia Dormer sat side by side on barstools behind the couch where Danny was consoling Tabitha. Julia—as elegant, blond, and swanlike as her son was petite, dark, and pixieish—kept an ongoing silent conversation with her ex-husband, and Hunter figured that they were as close as most brothers and sisters were by now. He’d seen her act just as familiar with Danny, and he’d been a little envious of the three of them and the family they’d forged out of necessity and—even Hunter could see it—love.

  Hunter had served in the military. He knew how to use weapons effectively, but his body was an even more insidious weapon. Nobody expected him to pull death out of thin air, but he had, frequently, in some of the most brutal parts of the world.

  But physical violence was personal violence; nobody wanted to get too close to a man who could kill them with a shrug of his shoulders. Until Josh Salinger had recruited Hunter for this “think tank” of theirs, Hunter had always felt very much alone, even when he’d been part of a unit.