Extreme Danger (McClouds & Friends #5)(57)

He was pondering that heartening thought when the phone rang. He read the display. Aw, f*ck. It was Tamara.

He might as well get the red-hot-poker reaming session over with sooner rather than later. He picked up the phone. “Yeah,” he muttered.

“You idiot.” Her voice burned through the telephone line like acid. “You can’t even get yourself killed like a real man.”

He rolled his eyes as he stalked into the bathroom, and tucked the phone between shoulder and chin as he rooted through the cabinet for the clippers. The blades on the thing were dull for sure. He hadn’t cut his hair in over three years. “Thanks for your touching concern.” His lame attempt at irony reminded him of Becca’s prickly sarcasm.

Bravado, covering up that cream-puff interior.

“Concern. Pah. Stupid goat’s dick excuse for a man,” Tam hissed in Ukrainian. “I just got a hysterical phone call from Ludmilla. She thinks she’s going to get her tits cut off, and she has good reason to think so. Smooth move, Nikolai. Whatever the f*ck you did, it is going to cost me. I should never have tried to help you. You were supposed to kill him, you *! I thought you were on a suicide mission!”

Man, that bitch could be cold when she was inconvenienced. “I was,” he said. “Then it morphed into murder suicide. And I choked.”

“Morphed…what the hell are you talking about? Use short sentences, yes? Small words. What happened?”

He yanked the scissors out of the bathroom drawer, pushed the speakerphone button and laid the phone down onto the sink. He stared at his reflection as he held a thick, snarled clump of hair away from his head, and brutally scissored it off. It fell into the sink with a soft thud. “A girl,” he said.

“A girl? What girl?” Her voice was getting shrill.

“A girl happened,” he said, through clenched teeth.

“Wait a minute.” Tam hesitated for a moment. He could almost hear the gears crunching in her head. “You don’t mean to say you brought a girl to the—”

“Fuck, no,” Nick snapped, hacking off another clump. “She just appeared. She was staying on the island in another house. That house was supposed to be empty. I checked. Repeatedly. She showed up, out of nowhere in the middle of the night to use the f*cking pool. The night before the big Z showed up.”

“Oh, God,” Tam moaned. “Men and their f*cking hero complexes.”

“I tried scaring her,” he snapped, defensive. Best to skip the details. Tamara really would cut his balls off for a necklace. “She was tougher than I thought. She’d left her glasses at the poolhouse before I chased her off. She came back to get them the next day.”

“Don’t tell me. Let me guess. At the worst possible moment?”

“Ran smack into the Vor and his boys as they were coming up from the boat,” Nick said wearily. “Unfortunately, she was pretty. Zhoglo licked his chops and decided to have her for lunch.”

Tam made a disapproving sound. “So you f*cked yourself, me and Ludmilla, to bail out this clueless honey’s ass, hm?”

Nick’s silence was her answer. Her laughter had a bitter edge. “Didn’t have the guts to watch them cut her to pieces, did you?”

His throat bobbed as he tried to moisten his dry, ragged throat. “Didn’t have the guts to do the cutting,” he said. “Hate to say it, but I have my limits.”

“Hmph. You’re soft, Nikolai. Soft in the head, limp in the spine. But I bet there’s one part of you that’s as hard as a diamond, hmm?”

“Tam, it’s not—”

“I hope her sweet tail is worth it, jerk-off. I hope she f*cked your brains out. Not that she had far to go. I don’t think there was much rattling around in there to begin with. What am I supposed to do about Ludmilla? Any bright ideas on how I can keep her from getting her tits cut off, Nikolai? I’ve called in all my favors. Now I have to deliver some.”

He stared down at the scissors in his hand, pondering. Ludmilla was one possible point of future contact with Zhoglo that he might be able to exploit. Zhoglo was going to want to have a talk with Ludmilla. That was a big drag for the madam, but any woman who made her living taking advantage of helpless and destitute young women knew how to look after her own interests.

In this case, though, her interests and his were right in line.

“I’ll talk to Seth and Davy,” he said. “I’ll arrange twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance of her agency. Two guys constantly nearby, and ready for quick intervention, if he sends anyone to take her out.”

“Oh? Really? Do you have any idea how expensive that will be, my friend? Who’s going to pay for it?”

“I will,” he said rashly.

“You?” She cackled. “You’re an unemployed ex-fed. You will pay with exactly what winning lottery ticket? Exactly which rich dying uncle? You’re an orphan, Nikolai. I’ve seen your bank account, your tax returns. You’ve cashed in your last CD, you’ve borrowed against your pension. Unless you have an offshore account I haven’t noticed yet, your resources are all tapped out.”

“You invasive bitch,” he said mildly, sawing off more hair. “Get your nose out of my wallet.”

“Just looking out for my own interests, darling,” she purred.