Extreme Danger (McClouds & Friends #5)(148)

“Shut up, you lying butcher,” Nick said. “I know exactly what you’re doing. Step back. Right now. Or I will blow your head off.”

Light flashed on the scalpel as Mathes’s hands went slowly up, his mouth twisting in impotent rage. The urge to jump on the guy and kill him with his bare hands almost overwhelmed Nick.

He blinked back angry tears. Sveti’s face was so white, so hollow. There was a fresh bruise under one eye, an old greenish-yellow one under the other. What had they done to her?

“Which of you dirtbags is the anesthesiologist?” he demanded.

The shrinking, not-me demeanor of the others singled out by elimination a pudgy woman with close-set eyes. He pointed. “You?”

She shrugged. Her eyes were sullen and dead above her mask.

“How long will she be out?” he demanded.

“Ten minutes. Unless I give her more.” Her voice was flat.

There was a flurry of movement behind him, a terrified gabble. A shriek. Nick jerked around. Mathes was holding a pistol on him.

Bam. Mathes shrieked at the gunshot. His pistol flew in a lazy arc over the operating table. It crashed, slid into the corner.

Mathes fell to his knees, cradling his right hand. If you could still call it a hand. It was now a mangled mass of blood, splintered bone and tendons.

None of the crowd of doctors made any move to help him.

Seth gave Nick an apologetic shrug. “I probably should have just wasted him, but I wanted to zap the hand that did the dirty work. And besides, I liked the idea of the fun he’ll have in prison, once the inmates find out that he gets off on gutting little kids.”

“Fair enough,” Nick said. “Thanks.” He turned back to the anesthesiologist. “Where are the rest of the kids?”

“What kids?” The sulky bitch was holding out on him.

He gestured with his gun at the moaning Mathes, blood dripping down onto the floor. “Do you see that f*ckhead? Do you see his hand?”

“Yes,” she said reluctantly.

“Do you want to be next?” he asked. She shook her head. “Good,” he said. “Then let’s try this question again. The kids?”

She blinked, staring at the gun. “Downstairs somewhere. Never been down there. None of us have. They brought her up in the elevator.”

“They? Who’s they?”

“The ones who take care of the kids,” she snapped.

Take care, his ass. He thought of how thin Sveti was, of the bruises on her face. “How many of them are there?”

“Two that I’ve seen,” she said. “A man and a woman.”

Nick glanced at Seth. “I’m going on down.”

Seth looked troubled. “Alone?”

“You stay with Sveti,” Nick said. No way was he leaving her alone with a roomful of people who’d been about to cut out her heart.

“Problem solved,” Tam said coolly from the doorway.

All eyes cut to her. They could hardly help it. She strutted into the room on four-inch silver heels, shimmering, gleaming, violently blond, an elegant silver Walther PPK in her hand.

“I’ll go with you,” she said. “The cops are on their way to pick up the rest of this garbage.” Her narrowed eyes swept the huddled doctors.

“Good,” Seth said. “Go on down, then. I’ll just make sure none of these guys decides to leave before that.”

The elevator functioned without a key. Evidently, once you got this deep in the guts of this killing factory, they were no longer worried about security. Five levels of sub-basements. He glanced at Tam, who gave him a your-call shrug.

He hit the bottom floor. It seemed symbolically appropriate.

The door ground open onto another corridor, but this one was less finished, with snakelike tubes running along the ceiling and a gray concrete floor. On the left, the corridor dead-ended after twenty yards. On the right, there was an L turn after fifty.

They turned right.

The sound of frantically slapping feet froze them in their tracks. Rasping, panicked breaths. A man careened around the L-turn, wild-eyed, knees pumping high, gun in hand. A maniacal goblin of a man with greasy blond locks straggling from his oily pate.

He screamed shrilly at the sight of them, reeled back, and jackrabbited off the way he came.

Nick and Tam gave chase. A door slammed. They peered around the corner. They were blocked by heavy duty doors, with a small window of wire reinforced glass. They sprinted for it. Locked and barred.

Beyond the window there appeared to be nothing other than still more of that endless f*cking corridor. Nick smashed the glass with the butt of his gun. There were kids wailing, far away down the corridor.

Nick slammed the door with his fists. “We’ve got to get in there! He’ll kill them so that they can’t testify!”

Tam yanked his elbow. “Get back around the corner.” She lifted the gem studded grenade necklace off her neck. “It will blow the door, but that’s all. The kids are far enough away to risk using this.”

She pulled out the jeweled pin as they turned the corner, and bowled it on the fly with graceful skill. It slid to the end of the corridor and came to rest against the door.

Tam sank down next to him. “Five…four…three…ears, Nikolai!” He stuck his fingers in his ears as she mouthed one.

Just in time. The sound slammed every molecule of his body against every other molecule. They looked around the corner. There was a jagged, twisted hole where the door had been. Cinder-block rubble, a cloud of choking dust. They sprinted through it. The yellow-haired man lay on his face about thirty feet from the door, screaming hoarsely in Ukrainian.