Chimera (The Korsak Brothers #1)(79)
Right. Sure there wasn’t. But encouraged by his belief in me, I decided I could probably put up with a little urine. Putting it in our trash bag for later disposal, I returned to the conversation. “Uncle Lev will know I didn’t do it, but that doesn’t matter. If we’re there more than a day or two, it’ll get back to Miami via the grape-vine, and Konstantin’s son will send some people after me. They won’t be as scary as Jericho, but that doesn’t mean they can’t do us some damage all the same.” Damage was a nice euphemism for “kill us and dump us in the harbor.”
“All right. That makes sense, I guess,” Michael accepted doubtfully. Cheek to cheek with him, a sleek ferret head poked free of the blanket to fix me with a nearsighted glare. “But it’s still cold. And it’s still your fault.”
“The logic of a true student of the sciences,” I grumbled, but I started the car and set the heater on high. “We’ll find someplace to clean up and head to Lev’s. That reminds me; I have something for you.”
He took the glasses I retrieved for him from the glove compartment. I’d lifted them yesterday at a gas station. With cheap wire rims, the lenses were tinted tawny brown, but not nearly as dark as most sunglasses. Michael would be able to get away with wearing them inside without raising any eyebrows.
Releasing his death grip on the blanket, Michael turned the glasses over in his hands. “What are these for?”
“Your eyes,” I said matter-of-factly. “You can deny you’re my brother until the end of time, Misha, but if Uncle Lev sees your eyes along with the blond hair, he’ll have something to say. And we don’t have time to get into that with him.” Nearly twenty years older than Anatoly, Lev was basically retired. He had a few of his old crew who still hung around, but they were like him, in their early seventies and not as quick with the brass knuckles as they used to be. They might put a crimp in Jericho’s style, but they wouldn’t be able to hold him back for long.
I could see that Michael wanted to say something. Eyes distant under the fringe of unruly hair, he chewed at his lower lip before opening his mouth, only to shut it again. “Something wrong?”
He shook his head slowly at the question. “No . . . no. I’ll wear them.” Slipping them on, he raised both eyebrows. “How do they look?”
“You’re practically a movie star there—Brad Pitt all the way.” The glasses did work well enough at obscuring the differing color of his eyes, making them both appear an indistinct color, maybe brown, maybe hazel, maybe gray. “Just keep them on. Hey, we could always dye your hair again. There’s a whole rainbow of colors out there we haven’t touched on.”
He promptly retreated back into the blankets. “And let’s keep it that way.”
“No guts, no glory, kid.” The car had warmed up and I plowed it through the drifting snow. Not only would Lev be glad to see me, but he would feed us breakfast as well. It had been just over a week since I’d tasted home-cooked food, but it felt like years. I was looking forward to eating off china instead of from a paper bag.
By the time we swept through the wrought-iron gates that guarded Uncle Lev’s house, we were fairly presentable courtesy of the now-familiar gas-station-bathroom sponge bath. Michael was in jeans and a navy blue sweatshirt, the dressiest thing we’d managed to pick up for him along the way. I’d put on a black shirt and a pair of gray slacks that were miraculously unwrinkled from a week in a duffel bag. We weren’t exactly suave by any means, but neither did we look like we were living out of our car with nothing but a ferret and a half-empty jar of peanut butter.
I didn’t recognize the guy at the guard shack, and he fixed me with a suspicious glower until he received the all clear from the house. I was unimpressed. From the size of his gun, he had something to prove; at least Michael would have said so.
Parking the car on the rosy brick drive that circled before the front of the house, I climbed out into the lazy drizzle of snow. I shoved my chilled hands into my jacket pockets and started around the car. Michael joined me and stood looking up at the house with a slightly awed expression. It was something to see; there was no doubt about that. Three stories high with a multitude of leaded glass windows and masses of winter-brown ivy, it could’ve been shipped stone by stone from jolly old England. There were even miniature gargoyles on the roof that spouted water nonstop during the rainy season. It was a testament to the overblown, and Uncle Lev through and through.
As we stood at the door, I gave Michael a last once-over. “You ready? Comfortable with the story?”
He didn’t appear nervous, but considering the past ten years of his life, this was definitely small stuff and not to be sweated. “Nephew of the girlfriend you don’t have. Fairly simple. And if I forget, I’ve written it on my hand.”
I almost looked at the palm he overturned, but caught myself at the last minute. “To think I took a bullet for you,” I snorted as I pressed the doorbell. “And this is the thanks I get. Lip from a snot-nosed kid.”
Looking over at me, he haughtily pushed up the glasses with one meticulous finger. “The privilege is all yours.”
I swallowed the automatic groan that came to my lips as the door was thrown open by Uncle Lev himself. “Stefan, krestnik. My absent godson come home to roost,” he crowed as he pounced on me. Well, pounced can be a relative term when it’s applied to a man just shy of three hundred pounds. Pudgy hands seized me and patted me vigorously on the back before giving my cheeks the same treatment. “You’ve cut your hair. Finally, and after all the times Anatoly nagged at you.” He beamed at me and ran vain hands over his own hair. Slicked back and shockingly black for a man his age, it must have left a nice charcoal imprint every night on his pillowcase.