All Jacked Up Read Online Free

know, wrong place, wrong time.” She stopped touching him, and he could all but see her ticking points off on her fingers. “You knew my name, where I work, what I look like, and God knows what else about me. I’m just a librarian. What could you possibly want with me?”
    He shrugged, regretting it when pain ripped through his shoulder again. “You know something,” he said.
    “I know a lot of things.”
    “Not modest, are you?”
    “So far you’ve called me stupid and egotistical, and those are just the things you’ve said out loud. Considering that I could cause you a lot of needless pain, you might want to say something nice right about now.”
    “You’re not fat.”
    “Stop, you’re making my knees weak.”
    He twisted around far enough to see her face, nearly grinning at the deadpan look she shot him before she went back to building a bandage out of gauze and tape. Okay, maybe she wasn’t all bad. She might look like a strong breeze would blow her over, but there was a good, stiff backbone in there somewhere, and at least she wasn’t boring.
    “Earth to Jack.”
    He started, realizing he’d completely let his guard down. Again. He scowled to make up for it.
    “So what do I know that people are willing to kill me over?”
    “Something that doesn’t come out of books.”
    “Not fond of books, are you?”
    He could hear the disapproval in her voice. Or maybe it was his own experience coloring her words. Either way it irritated the hell out of him. “I’ve got nothing against them; they just don’t stack up against practical experience.”
    “Really? Well, I’d stack my book learning up against your practical experience any day.”
    “If I’m taken out before we figure out what you know, it might come to that.”
    A little line appeared between her brows. He’d noticed she got that look from time to time, usually right before she did something he didn’t like. He braced himself, but she only pressed the bandage onto his back, closed the first-aid kit, and set it on the seat behind her. “Maybe if you tell me who was shooting at us, I can tell you what I know and then I can go home and you can go . . . wherever it is men like you go to unwind after abducting perfectly innocent women.”
    Like straight to hell, her tone said.
    All Jack said was, “Maybe,” because he didn’t want to tell her who was after her. She’d held up so far, but the reality of what they were facing still gave him a cold chill.
    “If you have to stall for time while you think about your answer, that means I can’t necessarily believe what you tell me. Of course, you did abduct me at gunpoint.”
    “Don’t remind me.”
    “You still haven’t answered my question.”
    “Fine. They work for Pablo Corona.”
    “Pablo Corona,” she repeated.
    “Yep.”
    “The guy who controls the cocaine trade for half of South America?”
    “That’s the guy.”
    “The guy who supposedly wiped out a whole village in Colombia, men, women, and children, because a goat peed on the wheel of his Hummer?”
    “Corona the Butcher,” Jack said with a terse nod. “He kills for amusement and reportedly eats the testicles of his male victims because he believes it will give him eternal life and the virility of a stallion. At last count he had a harem of at least twenty women but he has fathered no children, which means the best thing you can say about him is that at least he can’t procreate. He’s mean, evil, vindictive, and probably crazy, but he’s also a genius. No government, including ours, has found a way to stop him, and since there’s a ten-million-dollar bounty on his head, some of the nastiest mercenaries in the world have taken their best shot at bringing him down. They’ve all failed.
    “If even half of what is said about him is true, you’d better pray one of his hit men gets to you first, because if he gets his hands on you . . .” Jack didn’t even try to finish that sentence. Even if there had been a way to