The Chaos Crew: Killer Beauty (Chaos Crew #1) – Chapter 2

BLAZE FLICKED between video feeds on his laptop’s screen with the frenetic energy that rarely left his wiry frame. He’d mounted eight discreet cameras around the mansion’s perimeter so we could monitor things after the job, and he zoomed in on one stream of video after another, each shrinking to join the row of smaller squares when he switched. He tapped his foot softly on the tiled floor of the deserted rooftop patio. The guy could never stay still.

Ages ago, his restlessness had irritated me, but now that he’d been part of the crew for years, I appreciated it. His mind was always in motion too, homing in on every important detail that could make the difference between a successful operation and a disaster.

The wrought-iron gate outside the mansion stayed closed and the sidewalks along the stone walls totally empty. This late at night, that wasn’t surprising. We’d counted on a lack of foot traffic. Out here in the suburbs, it wasn’t as if there was much nightlife. And with the damp pressure in the air hinting at a rain shower to come, who would want to be out anyway?

Talon watched the screen too, his hands resting on the top of the chair next to Blaze’s. “We didn’t miss anyone,” he said in his low, implacable voice. He glanced from the screen to the streets around us, although the long-closed restaurant we were camped out on top of was a few blocks from the mansion, too far away to really see without the cameras. The glow from the screen gleamed off his smoothly shaved scalp and glinted in his icy-blue eyes. “No hitches.”

“Obviously no one managed to put out a call for help either,” Blaze said with a grin, running his hand through the pale red hair that fit his chosen name, which fell to the collar of his shirt. Another tiny window on the computer screen was monitoring the police frequencies. “No cops, no nothing.”

Garrison propped himself against the edge of the table next to the laptop, his lips curving with his typical cocky grin. “The Chaos Crew doesn’t botch missions. Especially not when I’ve laid the groundwork.”

Of course, Blaze couldn’t resist arching his eyebrows at the youngest and newest member of our crew. “You mean like that time in Cairo,” he said teasingly.

Garrison glowered at him, the hazel eyes that seemed to shift in color depending on what he was wearing nearly black now in the dim light. “It was only my second time out, and someone forgot to fill me in on a key piece of intel.”

Blaze smiled cheekily back at him. “I didn’t forget. It was part of your training to see how you’d handle a gap. Good thing you recovered fast from that stumble.”

“But I did,” Garrison grumbled. “We got fucking paid. That’s what matters.”

“Enough,” I said before they could take their scrap any further. That one word from me was enough for them both to fall silent. I nodded to the laptop. “We don’t assume any mission is successful until afterward. We’re going to wait a little longer, just to be sure.”

I couldn’t blame them for being keyed up. We all were after a job like that, exhilarated by the rush of the violence, the blood splattered in perfect disarray, the justice seen through. If sometimes I enjoyed the carnage itself just as much as the justice, there was no need to acknowledge that to anyone else. But after another half hour or so, we could pack up, go home, and leave this scene behind us.

Blaze sat up straighter, his shoulders stiffening. “Hey, guys.”

As he clicked the trackpad to enlarge one video feed, the rest of us leaned toward the laptop screen. A woman had just stalked into view, walking alongside the stone wall, her arms tucked close to her sides and her head low. The waves of her long black hair veiled most of her face.

“A neighbor getting home late,” Garrison said, flicking his shaggy blond hair away from his eyes. “No big deal.”

“But she came out of nowhere.” Blaze frowned at the screen. “She didn’t show up on any of the other feeds, she was just suddenly there. I don’t know where she came from.”

“Look.” Talon pointed at the figure just as she passed the camera, motioning to her T-shirt. In the darkness, the feed didn’t show much in the way of color, but there was a dark smear on her chest that made my instincts ping in the same way my colleagues’ must have. “Is that blood?”

Blaze zoomed in, but she’d passed by, now angled away from us and heading toward the edge of the camera’s view. A tote bag bounced lightly against her back from where it was slung over her shoulder.

“She can’t have come from the house, right?” our tech expert said. “We did two full sweeps—we caught everyone who was on the manifest.”

We had, but I couldn’t shake the sense that this woman wasn’t just some random pedestrian either. It was too strange.

The Chaos Crew didn’t leave loose ends. I couldn’t let us leave them. That was how an operation could go to hell in an instant.

Talon lifted his gun. “We could kill her now.”

I shook my head. “We don’t have definite evidence she’s connected to the job.” Cutting her down would have been the easiest option, but it went against everything I stood for. We didn’t have many rules, but those we had, we held to. And “Kill no innocent bystanders” was at the top of the list.

No one died because of us who didn’t have it coming to them—not today, not ever.

But we couldn’t let her just walk away either, not when she might not be remotely innocent after all.

I snapped my fingers, already moving toward the stairs. “Garrison, you’re with me on foot. Talon, you and Blaze take the car. Keep me up to date on her movements. We’ll see where she goes from here and then make an educated decision.”

They sprang into action in an instant, taking my word as law. One of our other few rules was that no one challenged my leadership of the crew when I gave an order. It kept our team working as a unit. A highly sophisticated and efficient unit that didn’t make mistakes.

Until, maybe, now.

That possibility sat uneasily in my gut as we hurried down to the street. Blaze’s voice hummed through my headset. “She’s crossed Blantyre Avenue, heading east.”

“Acknowledged.” I picked up my pace, Garrison following close behind. The woman had a substantial head start on us, but we could close the distance quickly. I set my feet carefully even as we hustled toward her location, making only the faintest patter.

Coming up on the next corner, we slowed and peered around the bend. “She’s in our sights,” Garrison whispered into his mic.

The woman we’d spotted had made it to the end of that block, but she’d stopped by a sedan parked by the curb, which had given us more of a chance to catch up. What was she—

She yanked at something by the top of the window and then tugged on the door, which opened. She immediately dove into the driver’s seat.

I muttered a curse under my breath. She’d broken into the damn thing. I headed along the street as quickly as I dared, sticking close to the shadows outside the shops on the opposite side of the road, Garrison right behind me.

If she noticed us, she’d probably bolt, and we weren’t close enough yet that I was sure of chasing her down. If Talon and Blaze could get in place…

“Just coming around Carling St.,” Blaze reported, and in the same moment, the car’s engine revved.

“Fuck,” I snapped under my breath, and broke into a sprint. “She’s broken into a car and she’s already got it running. Get over here now.”

The stolen car’s engine sputtered into silence and then roared back to life. The woman who’d hotwired it in a matter of seconds peeled away from the sidewalk. I’d never seen anyone take over a vehicle that fast. Who the hell was she?

The chances of her being innocent were quickly dwindling.

“She’s getting away,” I hissed into the mic. “Where the hell are you?”

Our car whipped around the corner before Blaze needed to reply. It jerked to a halt beside us, and Garrison and I threw ourselves into the back seat.

The second Garrison had hauled the door shut, Talon hit the gas. The stolen car was just turning a corner up ahead.

“There,” I said with a jab of my finger. “The dark gray sedan. Follow her.”

Talon sped after her and swung around the same turn she’d taken. The sedan came into view a couple of blocks ahead of us, easy to spot in the gleaming streetlamps along this slightly broader road. Even here, traffic was sparse, only a few other pairs of headlights gleaming farther in the distance.

A heavy droplet of rain splashed on the windshield, briefly blurring the view. Another followed, and another, until Talon had to start the wipers going.

“You couldn’t catch her on foot?” he asked over the rhythmic tapping of the drops.

I grimaced. “The bitch is fast. She must have set a record hotwiring that car. I don’t even know how she broke into it to begin with.”

“Not exactly your typical pedestrian out for a stroll,” Garrison said in a wry drawl. “What are the odds that a woman who can hotwire cars in a split-second isn’t involved in this?”

I didn’t have an answer to that question. I narrowed my eyes at the car in front of us. Blaze licked his lips and clicked a few keys on his laptop, leaping from feed to feed. He was following along with the official traffic cams now. There wasn’t a government resource in this city he couldn’t find a way to infiltrate.

“Not very good,” Talon replied for me.

Garrison sank back in his seat. His breath was still a bit ragged from the jog to catch up with the woman—I’d have to remind him to get in more physical training on our days off. It wasn’t his main area, but we all needed to pull our weight in every way possible.

“We should just kill her and get it over with then,” he said. “Whether she has something to do with the job or not, she just committed a crime. So she’s not innocent, so the rule doesn’t apply.”

Blaze swiveled in his seat with another of his heckling looks. “And by ‘we,’ I assume you mean anyone other than you with your weak stomach.”

Garrison kicked the back of Blaze’s seat. “I just know what I’m good at. And I know that every move that woman’s made since the moment we saw her has screamed that she’s up to something.”

He was right, but at the same time, something about the situation still felt off to me. Killing the woman without sorting it out wouldn’t necessarily mean we’d fixed the problem, only that we had no way of telling what else might have gone wrong.

“We catch her and talk to her first,” I said. “Find out who she is and what she knows. Make sure there’s nothing else we missed. It’s no good tying off one loose end if that stops us from following it to a dozen others we didn’t know about.”

Garrison opened his mouth as if to argue but shut it immediately when I caught his gaze. He set his expression in a mask of indifference. Our social chameleon could put on whatever front we needed to get the players in position at the start of a job or ferret out information Blaze couldn’t hack his way to. Even I couldn’t tell which of the emotions that crossed his face were real. Were any of them?

It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except the security of this crew, and we couldn’t know how the woman might threaten that without confronting her.

The rain picked up to a heavier downpour. It washed over the windshield between the swift flicks of the wipers. The stolen car slowed, and so did Talon, drawing up less than a block from her brake lights.

“Stay as close as you can without spooking her,” I said. “We don’t want to lose her. As soon as she stops, we have to be on her ass.”

Even as I spoke, the woman took a sudden left turn. Talon fell back a little before following her. Two blocks later, she took an abrupt right. She hadn’t signaled either time.

Blaze spoke up cautiously. “Are we sure she hasn’t already gotten spooked? Did she see you before she grabbed the car?”

“We were too far back,” I said. “I made sure she didn’t see us—I hadn’t expected her to take off that quickly.”

“She was going straight ahead until a minute ago,” Talon pointed out.

The stolen car veered through a gas station’s lot and out the other side. Talon gunned the engine to hurtle after her.

Garrison folded his arms over his chest. “This is ridiculous. We should force her to pull over now instead of chasing her all over town.”

If we’d already been made, that was our best course of action. I exhaled roughly, and just then, one of the parked cars along the curb swerved into the street in front of our target.

Too fast, too close. The woman must have pulled hard on the steering wheel to avoid crashing into the other car, and the slick surface of the road sent her vehicle skidding. It careened across the road and rammed hood-first into a telephone pole. The screech of crumpling steel cut through the drumming of the rain on our roof.