Chimera by Rob Thurman Read Free Book Online Page B

either. I planted the end of the four-inch barrel firmly in the center of his pimply forehead. Could be he’d planned on stripping the car and trading the parts for zit cream. He froze, the shiny black eyes no longer empty. Fear, pure and simple, shone clearly, along with a desire to be anywhere but here. Tough love worked wonders.
    “Go home, Junior,” I said flatly. “You’re not ready to play with the big boys yet.” Only five or six years separated me from this piece of shit barely out of diapers—half a decade, but it may as well have been a lifetime.
    The knife clattered on the asphalt, shortly followed by his ass. Scrambling backward for several feet, he then flipped over to a crawl before lunging to his feet and running down the street. Half in front of the car, his friend still lay unconscious and obviously forgotten. There’s no honor among thieves and apparently no loyalty either. Sighing, I holstered the semiautomatic and bent down to slide my hands under the slack shoulders to drag him to the sidewalk. He was lucky. Some guys I knew would’ve driven over him and raided his wallet for the car wash money.
    It had all taken less than thirty seconds, but as I slid behind the steering wheel, Konstantin still pinned me with an expression of sharp annoyance. “ Tat? ” he demanded, fingers drumming on his suit-clad knee.
    “Yeah,” I confirmed. Tat referred to common thieves, unworthy of the respect given to their more murderously organized brethren . . . us. “And pretty shitty ones at that.” Pulling away from the curb, I raised a hand in a casual wave to the small knot of tourists gaping from the curb. This had been more fun in the sun than they’d bargained for, I was thinking.
    “Pity.” Gurov leaned back against the butter-soft leather of the seats. Closing his eyes, he linked fingers across a stomach amazingly lean for a sixty-year-old man.
    Raising my eyebrows, I repeated the word, curious.
    Face serene, he said, “Pity. If your heart was with your family, your work could be truly phenomenal.”
    Being phenomenal in a career of brutality; I wasn’t sure the two belonged in the same sentence . . . or in the same man. As for family, I knew who it was, and who it wasn’t.
    Gurov and the others didn’t even come close.

Chapter 5
    “ I hate you, you son of a bitch.”
    Unimpressed, I kept the night-vision goggles up to my eyes and replied absently, “No one held a gun to your head, Skoczinsky.”
    “Bullshit.” Beside me, he shifted on his stomach and with a snarl swatted at a buzzing mosquito. “It may as well have been and you know it.”
    He was right, even if I hadn’t known it at the time. The amount of money I’d offered Saul had made it almost impossible for his mercenary soul to refuse, but almost is just that—almost. What carried it beyond that was the question I’d asked, a simple one: What if it were your brother? It was a fairly desperate attempt on my part, and I hadn’t expected it to do much good. Some people don’t give a damn about the brothers they do have and some don’t have any at all. But sometimes those desperate attempts work best of all.
    It wasn’t a gun to his head, that question, but to Saul, combined with the money, it had been every bit as convincing. I’d seen it in the tightening of his jaw and the ice behind his glare . . . a brittle ice running with cracks in all directions, ready to break. If you were a bodyguard, reading people was a crucial skill. I didn’t know exactly what had changed Saul’s mind, but he had changed it and that was all that mattered. I wasn’t going to waste time feeling guilty about it, I thought obstinately, doing my best to promptly squelch the supposedly nonexistent emotion. After all, with the chunk of change I was giving him, he could stock up on plenty of long spoons for the next time he supped with the devil.
    “Yeah, yeah. I’ll cry for you later.” I needed Saul for this. If that meant manipulating him, I