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“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, activated the speakerphone and laid the device down on the bathroom countertop. 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 fucking pool. The night before the big Z showed up.”
“Oh, God,” Tam moaned. “Men and their fucking 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 pool house 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 fucked yourself, me and Ludmilla, to bail out this clueless honey’s ass, hmm?”
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.”
“Hmmph. 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 fucked 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, sawing off more hair. “Get your nose out of my wallet.”
“Just looking out for my own interests, darling,” she purred.
“Front me the money,” he suggested. “I’ll sell my condo and pay you back.”
“I will hold you to it,” she warned. “Kind of amusing to think of you huddled under a bridge in your cardboard home. As I dine by candlelight. On fine china.”
“Whatever blows your skirt up, Tam.”
She made an irritated sound. “This is in the interests of killing him now, no? You are finished with whatever other foolish heroic notions you had before? And don’t expect me to believe that you care about Ludmilla’s safety. Your hero complex doesn’t go that far.”
He thought about the flinty-eyed, bleached-blonde Ludmilla, and shrugged inwardly. “I don’t actively wish her any ill,” he hedged. “And yes. It is in the interests of killing him. Now, anyway.”
Tamara made a disgusted sound. “Get it right this time. I should have hired a sniper to take him out from a distance.”
