Slashback (Cal Leandros, #8)(57)

He’d talk and he’d talk for free—the vodka didn’t count. Seven ninety-nine was practically free. What Boris did demand is you keep him company. He didn’t like to drink alone. When it came to passing along information, that wasn’t a preference. It was a rule. It was some Russian tradition, Goodfellow once mentioned when I brought it up. In Russia, if you were comfortable enough to get shit-faced with someone, that made you family.

I didn’t want to be Boris’s family, but sometimes you had to take one for the team.

“I am not at all fond of this plan,” Niko commented, sitting on the plastic he’d laid out. He assumed a lotus position that made my knees hurt just seeing it.

“It’s not my favorite either, but it’s how it works with Boris.” I sat on my own plastic and felt the mud beneath it give and slide in a wholly disgusting way. I slapped the water twice. Hey, it’d always worked on Flipper. “Boris. Hey, Boris, I have a present for you. Wake up and come play.”

I liked to think Boris was asleep and not finishing up gnoshing down on the leg of someone he’d dragged into his underwater larder. I’d like to think that but I’d likely be fooling myself. I waited a few more minutes and slapped the water again. “Come on, Boris. We don’t have all day. Keep us waiting and we’ll drink all the vodka ourselves.” I wasn’t too worried. There was nothing Boris liked more than company and vodka. He could be a few miles up or down the river. Vyodanoi were incredibly fast in the water. He surfaced in front of us in the next moment proving my point . . . about speed or love of vodka. Take your pick.

“Boris, buddy. The Ninth Circle is starting Two for Tuesday shots. You should stop by. Bring a date or a spore or whatever you’ve got going on in your social life.” I nudged Nik, who went ahead and dipped into his coat pockets for two shot glasses and a large glass tumbler for Boris. A vyodanoi’s tolerance for vodka was unbelievable.

Boris raised up to settle on what would be knees if he had bones. A vyodanoi looked like nothing more than a giant six-to seven-foot leech in humanoid form, a very blurry, caricature of a humanoid form. It had arms, but no hands or fingers. They tended to be brownish-gray with a sloping mudslide of a head, a sucker for a mouth, and a coloration sketched on its face in black lines to mimic a human’s nose, eyes, and brow. For a second in the dark or the shadows you might mistake them for human—only for a second, but with vyodanoi a second was all it took.

“Sobaka.” The sound of Boris’s voice wasn’t easy on the ears. It was a peculiar whistle, the sound of a drowned man whistling a dirge from underwater.

I opened the first, let’s be honest, vat of vodka as Niko murmured, “Sobaka? Russian for dog?”

“It’s short for beshenaya sobaka. Mad dog.” Goodfellow had also filled me in on that as he liked delivering bad news as well as random cultural facts. “It’s my nickname from that time Hob hired a ton of them.” And I hadn’t played so nice with them then. “Of all the things I’ve been called I can live with that one.”

Boris wrapped rubbery flesh around his glass and tossed the entire thing back in one swallow. “You’ve come to talk. So be not rude.” That was Niko and my cue to toss our own shot back. I didn’t drink much and Niko didn’t drink at all. It wasn’t a good idea when your mom had been an alcoholic or in our business when you had to stay sharp always. It didn’t make a difference how much I drank though or if I’d had a liver the size of Kansas: what we were drinking would still have tasted like a shot of turpentine. I should’ve sprung for the good stuff, if for Niko and my sake. The hell with Boris and his lack of taste buds.

“We want to know about Jack,” I said, filling up our glasses again. The faster my tongue went numb, the better. “He’s in town skinning people like the good old days in Jolly Old England. God Save the Queen and all that good crap. What do you know about that?”

“Jack mayashnik. Jack the Butcher. I know of him. Little, but I know of him.” The water sloshed around him. It smelled like cold metal. Boris smelled cold, period. The water washed away the blood he lived on and only left the cold.

He drank again and waited until we did the same. “I should’ve let you come alone. I’ll have to do a juice cleansing for a month to repair this damage,” Nik said.

“It might loosen you up,” I needled. “Turn you into Goodfellow or anyone who doesn’t think trimming bonsai trees is a wild and crazy Friday night.”

“If I did loosen up, I might start swatting the back of your head and not stop until your skull and what little contents it contains is crushed to a fine paste.” He turned his attention to Boris. We did need to wrap this up before morning light and the people that came with it. Vyodanoi were shy in the daylight. They’d eat a human—snack of choice—but they were shy outside the river even with coats and hats to help them blend in. “Boris, where is Jack in the city? How can we find him?”

“How can you find a single drop of rain in a storm?” Boris didn’t have shoulders to shrug with, but the tilting back and forth of his glass had the same effect.

“Hey, if I wanted a bad fortune cookie cliché, I’d take my vodka to a Chinese restaurant. Niko has more than glasses tucked away in his coat. He has a gallon jug full of salt. Happy f*cking birthday to you, Boris. So talk sense or we take you out like a garden slug.” You serve the wrong drink to the wrong customer at work, in this case a margarita with salt, and you find out new and interesting ways to kill certain species. That unfortunate vyodanoi had ended up a river of ooze down the unisex/species bathroom drain at the Ninth Circle. I had no problem doing the same to Boris if I thought he was holding shit back.