Extreme Danger (McClouds & Friends #5)(59)

He already felt like shit about it.

“Fuck you,” Tam whispered. She hung up.

He picked up the phone, wound up and slammed it into the mirror. Right between the reflected image of his own glaring eyes.

Crash. The mirror shattered, making a depressed well in the center surrounded by radiating cracks. Sharp shards of mirror glass hung askew and pattered into the sink.

Seven years of bad luck. He stared at the mirror. Like any kind of luck could top what he’d been having lately.

Chapter

14

K ristoff was bored in the new house. There was nothing to do yet. No one wanted him to help, after his failure in the control room on the island. The Vor was in a foul mood and caution dictated staying as far out of his way as possible. So Kristoff huddled in the back suite, his nerves still badly rattled by what had happened the night before.

In fact, he was surprised the Vor hadn’t killed him by now, for not reacting fast enough. Perhaps it just hadn’t occurred to him yet.

He felt guilty. He’d been staring off into space, imagining how it was going to be to f*ck that girl when his turn came. Watching Arkady with her on the vid screen had gotten them all worked up.

And then, out of nowhere. Poof, boom. He was gone, with the girl. Leaving four corpses behind, like a blood-sucking demon from hell.

He pulled out his laptop and logged on, surfing the porn sites. He sifted through the trash that interested him less, perversions and fetishes, gay, S&M. He was a traditional man, with traditional tastes.

Oral. Yes, he liked oral. He typed in his brand new American word, “blow job,” into the search engine.

Millions of hits. He sorted, clicking on the pictures. He opened his pants as he admired the girls, their gleaming, painted lips distended around various outsized phalluses, and stimulated himself idly as he perused their wonderful variety. All colors, shapes and sizes, but none as pretty as the girl on the island. Her tits had been without equal.

He clicked on another jpeg, enlarged it, and stared at it, jaw sagging. Not possible. It was like magic. He had been thinking of her, and there she was. The girl from the island.

But it was a normal photograph, not porn. She was looking back over her shoulder, her long dark hair swirling in the breeze. She looked harried, distressed, her mouth open in some reproof as she flapped her hand at whoever was snapping the picture. She wore glasses.

He read bits of the text with some difficulty.

Rebecca Cattrell, long-suffering fiancée of our naughty Don Juan, was unwilling to comment about her man’s mangled member…everyone wants to know about the famous blow job that ended in scandal, heartbreak, and a million-dollar lawsuit, to say nothing of the emergency room…has already been permanently entered in the annals of urban myth…

Kristoff’s erection wilted from the sudden lack of attention while excitement of another kind burgeoned in his belly. He tucked himself briskly back into his pants, picked up the laptop and carried it down to the dining room. This might help offset last night’s disaster.

Pavel was serving a huge cut of thick steak to the Vor. Seared on the outside, red on the inside, bleeding all over the plate. The Vor was attacking it with his usual ferocity.

What he had on the screen gave him just enough courage to approach the table and endure the flinty look the Vor gave him.

His boss sawed off a pink chunk, and stuffed it into his mouth. “What could be important enough to interrupt my meal?” he hissed.

Kristoff placed the laptop on the table, and angled the screen towards his boss.

Zhoglo stared at it. The chewing action in his plump, distended cheeks slowed, and then stopped. He gulped down the lump of steak unchewed, and began to laugh.



“You worthless, stinking turd,” Ludmilla hissed at him in Ukrainian. Her heavily made-up dark eyes looked daggers at him through the oversized vid screen in Davy’s and Seth’s big underground workshop, and her crimson cupid’s-bow mouth worked furiously. “I want nothing to do with you and your stupid schemes, your suicidal urges. Tell your stupid men to go away and leave me be. Tell them to f*ck off. I do not want to die.”

After Tam’s scolding, and Becca’s parting shot, Nick was inured to females spitting insults at him. Good thing, too, because Milla was without equal in that department. She was the Olympic athlete of the filthy epithet in Ukrainian, and not too damn shabby in English, either.

“Your best chances are with us now, Milla,” Nick repeated patiently for at least the tenth time. “As soon as I get a fix on him, I’ll go after him and take him out. And you’ll be free and clear.”

“Hah! You said you’d kill him before, you fool, and you did not manage it. And you leave me out there swinging in the wind, and you tell me you want more from me now? Pah!”

“You’ll be free and clear,” Nick repeated obstinately. “And Aleksei will be avenged.”

That had been a risk. He knew that Aleksei, Milla’s first husband, had been slaughtered by command of Vadim Zhoglo over twenty years before, but he didn’t know if she had been genuinely fond of him or not. Aleksei had been a pimp too, and Ludmilla had been one of the girls in his stable before he married her and began showing his young wife the ropes of the trade.

Judging from the downturned, suddenly old-looking sag of her mouth, she had genuinely liked him.

“What do you care for Aleksei?” she snarled.