In For the Kill (18 page)

“What's wrong with your hip?” he asked abruptly.

Sam braced himself. “You know me. Accident prone.”

His father made a disgusted sound. “Put on a shirt, for the love of God. You look like a car wreck. A fresh wound, to add to your collection. My compliments, Sam. Well done.”

“He got that wound saving my life,” Sveti said.

His father looked at her, startled. Sveti gazed right back, her big golden brown eyes bright and very direct. “And you are?” he asked.

“Dad, this is Svetlana Ardova, a friend of mine,” Sam said. “Sveti, this is my father, Richard Petrie.”

Sveti did not mouth pleasantries. His dad met her glare for glare.

“I was not speaking to you,” he informed her, icily.

Her chin went up. “I speak when it pleases me.”

This was going south at warp speed. He hastened to intervene. “So, uh, Dad. What brought you back so early?”

Sveti crossed her arms over her tits, zapping Richard Petrie with a death-ray look, as if she wasn't facing down a billionaire financier whose ass was kissed by everyone. Except for his wayward son.

“You're the reason I'm back early,” his father said. “I learned you'd been in another deadly shootout involving the Chinese mob and a half-drowned prostitute.”

Sveti's eyes narrowed. “What half-drowned prostitute is that?”

“The one from the escort service you called. My investigator took pictures.” He clicked on his phone and handed it to Sam.

It was a shot of Sveti in the evening gown, tottering up his steps. Lit up in the porch-light's glare, she looked so exotic and out of context, he could see why she'd be mistaken for a call girl. Sveti glanced at the picture and maintained a sphinxlike silence. Taking the high road.

“You've got it wrong,” Sam said. “An investigator? Seriously?”

His father grunted. “We booked a flight immediately when we heard. Your grandmother as well. Dinner will be served in half an hour. Your companion can stay up here. Your sister and your aging grandmother do not need to meet her. Dolores can bring up a tray.”

“Sveti's been a friend of mine for years, Dad,” he said. “Her life is in danger. I brought her here for the night because I trust your team. I thought we'd be no trouble, because you were out of town.”

“Protection from whom? Her pimp?”

“She's not a call girl, Dad,” Sam said through his teeth. “Don't say that again. I'll come down to dinner, but Sveti comes with me.”

His father looked like something had curdled in his mouth. “Bring her, if you must. Explain her to your grandmother, who turned eighty-seven last week, by the way. She could have used a phone call. You've been sulking for months, and she misses you. Don't be late, please.”

His father marched out, closing the door smartly.

Sam listened to footsteps recede, trying to breathe. Everything just got way more complicated than he'd bargained for. “Sorry,” he said.

“It's not your fault,” she said. “But is it true, about not having seen your eighty-seven-year-old grandmother in months?”

He gave her a narrow look. “Don't you dare judge me right now.”

“I'm not judging,” she said. “But I have a lot of bitter experience with this. Death comes without warning. And it's very final.”

“I lost my mother when I was fifteen,” he said. “I know about the finality of death.”

She was quiet for a few moments, eyes downcast. “I'm so sorry,” she murmured. “You go on down to dinner. I'll stay here. I'm not hungry anyway. Being taken for a sex worker killed my appetite.”

“No way. You're coming with me. He has to get used to this.”

“Used to what?”

“Us,” he said bluntly.

Sveti had that terrified look in her eyes again, the one that always came over her when he dared to invoke a possible future with her.

Too fucking bad. He was sick of backing down, pussyfooting around it. There was no way this woman was getting away from him. The sooner she understood that, the better for everyone concerned.

“Sam . . . I don't think you should . . . now is not the time to—”

“Now is the only time,” he said, grim and relentless. “Start learning to tolerate my family. You're going to need the practice.”

C
HAPTER
13

“H
ollandaise sauce, Svetlana?”

Sam's older sister Connie's voice was artificially bright and sweet as she held up the sauce boat. She was a pretty woman, tall and statuesque, with long, gleaming chestnut hair.

Svetlana murmured her thanks and held up her plate to have buttery sauce drizzled over her blanched asparagus. Sam and his father glared stonily at each other, over an abyss of silence. All attempts to break the silence sounded weak. Baby birds, cheeping in the void.

Connie gamely tried again. “So, Svetlana. Do you, ah, have a green card?”

Sveti smiled behind her napkin as she dabbed at her lips. “No,” she said. “I have a passport. I've been an American citizen for years. I went to high school in Washington, on the coast, where my adoptive family lives. After that, I went to the University of Washington.”

“An American success story!” Sam's grandmother, Moira, seized eagerly upon the new topic. “Like us! Augustus Petrie crossed the Atlantic in seventeen-ninety in search of opportunity. And he found it.”

“Have you found yours, Svetlana?” Sam's father asked. “Or are you still looking?”

The question felt like a trap, so she chose her words carefully. “Yes, certainly. I've been very fortunate in the friends I've made here.”

“It must have broken your parents' hearts to have you go so far away, though,” Moira said. “What does your father do, dear?”

“He was a police investigator,” she said. “He's been gone for many years now. He died in the line of duty.”

“Oh, I'm sorry,” Moira said, blinking rapidly. “And your mother?”

“I lost her, too, six years ago,” Sveti said.

“Tragedy at every turn.” Richard forked up a bite of salmon.

“Watch it, Dad,” Sam said.

“A tale of woe calculated to bring out your pathological hero complex,” his father said. “Orphaned by a bullet, eh? Classic.”

“He was disemboweled, actually,” Sveti said.

Connie's fork clattered on her plate. They stared at the fish, which had been opened, filleted, and sprinkled with herbs and almonds.

Constance's chair screeched as she shoved it back. She scurried out of the room with her hand on her mouth.

Sam's father swallowed his mouthful with an audible gulp, and coughed. “I beg your pardon?”

“He was undercover, investigating a mafiya boss,” Sveti explained. “He was betrayed. It ended badly.”

Sam's father wiped his mouth. “Dramatic.”

“Yes, it was.” Sveti was unfazed by his tone. He thought she was making this up. If only. What she wouldn't give to have it be untrue.

“I'm surprised after such trauma that you would want anything to do with someone in police work,” Richard Petrie said.

She glanced at Sam. “I'm surprised, too,” she admitted.

“Not that I'm in police work,” Sam said. “You've killed that.”

The senior Petrie did not deny it. “No one could blame a father from trying to keep his son from destroying himself!”

“I'm blaming you anyway,” Sam said.

“Calm down,” Moira soothed. “Sam, have some more potatoes.”

“Do you care to explain what you were doing on the six o'clock news? Putting fresh cadavers in the morgue?” Richard demanded.

“They were torturing her.” He indicated Sveti. “I objected. That was how they came to be cadavers.”

Connie came back and sat down carefully at the table, still very pale, and with a shiny forehead.

Richard turned to Sveti. “Why did these people attack you, if I may ask?”

Sveti took a sip of wine. “I'm not exactly sure.”

Petrie, Sr. looked down his nose at her. “Oh, really.”

It took talent, to load just three syllables with such a quantity of contempt and disbelief. Sveti reminded herself that this man's opinion meant nothing, changed nothing. “Really,” she affirmed. “My prime theory is that they want information my mother was gathering when she was murdered. I don't have it, but they think I do.”

“Dear God.” Moira put down her fork and pressed her napkin to her mouth. “Your mother, too? Spare us the details this time, dear.”

“They could also be a local gang who traffic people from China for slave labor,” Sveti said. “I inconvenienced some of them last year. They weren't pleased.” She shrugged. “Who knows.”

“Ah.” Richard turned to Sam. “I see that your choice in lady friends is as colorful and haphazard as your other life choices.”

“I try, Dad,” Sam said. “Always.”

“So, Sam, dear,” Moira interjected, with false cheerfulness. “Let's look to the future, shall we? Do you have any plans?”

“Yes, I'm going to the airport tomorrow,” he replied. “I'm starting my new career. In Italy. With Sveti.”

His father blinked. “Excuse me? Italy? What new career?”

“I'm going as her bodyguard.” Sam stuck a forkful of salmon in his mouth as that grenade bounced and rolled into the enemy camp.

“But . . . but that's insane!” his father said. “Bodyguarding?”

“Her life is in danger,” Sam said. “She needs protection. And my career prospects are ever narrowing, thanks to you. Bodyguarding is more interesting than private investigating. Following cheating spouses and wayward sons around. Big yawn. I'd be good at forensic accounting, but it would bore me into an early grave. I could join the military, I guess, if they'd have me. As beat-up and long in the tooth as I am.”

His father's mouth was white. There were dents beside his nostrils. “You'd truly go to such lengths just to spite me?”

Sam shook his head. “No, I'm going to Italy because I want to. But I would prefer it if you kept your tentacles out of my professional life.”

“What will you be doing in Italy, Svetlana?” Connie broke in.

Sveti briefly explained about the conference in San Anselmo, the award ceremony, and the London job.

“Martin,” the senior Petrie called. “Bring me my tablet, please.”

The uniformed server passed it to him. The older man poised the little pen over the keyboard. “The name of the organization? I'd love to see the announcement for this award. Congratulations, by the way.”

Sveti gazed at him. “Are you trying to catch me in a lie?”

Petrie blinked innocently behind his glasses. “If the shoe fits.”

“It doesn't,” she said. “Look up the Tran-Global Business Organization against Human Trafficking, and this year's Solkin Prize.”

“Better yet.” Sam plucked the tablet and pen out of his father's hands, tapped the flat-screen keyboard. “Watch the reason she's getting this prize. It's because she has a set of solid brass balls. She busted a sweatshop slavery ring single-handedly, right here in Portland.”

“Good Lord.” The elder Petrie scowled at the tablet with distaste.

“Oh, Sam,” Sveti murmured, alarmed. “Really? Now? At dinner?”

“He should know who he's dealing with,” Sam said stubbornly.

Connie and Moira leaned forward to watch the video clip, curious, but Sam's father pushed the tablet away, his lips very thin. “Later for this, if you don't mind. I would like to finish my dinner in peace.”

Sam shoved his chair back. “True to form,” he said, as he got up. “You always cut people off before they have a chance to get to the point. That way you never risk having to change your mind.”

He stalked out of the room, to Sveti's dismay. She got up to follow.

“No! Leave him,” Richard snapped. “There's no point, until he's had his sulk, and who knows how long that will take. Years, maybe.”

“Dad!” Constance shot Sveti an embarrassed glance. “Sorry,” she added. “My father and Sam tend to bring out the worst in each other.”

“It's so frustrating for Richard, you see,” Moira confided. “Sam is so gifted. And I don't just say that because I am his grandmother. His grasp of finance was . . . well, almost magical, his professors and mentors said. He shocked people with what he could do.”

“He was already at it back in high school.” Connie had a harder edge to her voice. “Sam the wunderkind. He interned with a hedge fund when he was sixteen one summer, and earned them twenty-two million dollars in a single weekend, just messing around. Taking risks he was not authorized to take. But he got lucky.” Her tone indicated that she considered this ability to be entirely wasted upon her brother.

“He sees patterns, you see,” Moira explained. “Other people just see a mass of data, but Sam sees connections, shapes, trends.”

“He could have gone anywhere,” Richard said bitterly. “Any bank or brokerage firm in the world would have paid him top dollar. He could have started his own company. Or had mine. The whole world flung itself at his feet, and what did he do?” His voice shook with old anger.

The woman Sam had called Dolores came in, bearing what appeared to be chocolate mousse cake, drizzled with raspberry sauce.

“I don't know, actually,” Sveti admitted, as the woman served her.

“He threw it away!” Richard thundered. “He switched his major from economics to criminal psychology, his last year in college! After graduation, he applied for a job at the Police Bureau! As a patrol officer!”

Dolores froze, tray in one hand, plate in the other. Eyes wide.

“And he made detective after only a few years, right?” Sveti pointed out. “I'm sure this ability to see patterns is what makes him such a gifted investigator. It's not like he joined a motorcycle gang.”

“You saw his scars!” Richard bellowed. “Do you know how close he's come to being killed? And all this just to spite me! To punish me!”

“Dad,” Connie said. “Don't yell, please. You're embarrassing us.”

“And now, he wants to chase some seductive little chippie across the world!” He raked her with a scathing gaze. “Bodyguarding? Unpaid, I expect? I hope for his sake that you intend to make it worth his while.”

“Mr. Petrie,” she said, her voice quiet. “That is enough.”

Richard Petrie got up and walked stiffly out of the room.

Dolores hastily finished putting down the plates of cake. “I'll get the espresso,” she mumbled, scurrying out.

In the silence, Connie and Moira's attention was drawn once more to the sound of the video clip Sam had set to play on the tablet. Sveti leaned over to see what was happening in it. Oh, dear. One of the young women was about to show the camera the festering welts on her back, from having been savagely beaten with electrical wire. Sveti pressed ‘pause' and met the two women's questioning gaze with a smile.

“Not before dessert,” she said gently.

 

Sam opened the bedroom door and stepped inside. Sveti sat cross-legged on the bed, tablet glowing in front of her. She wore gray jersey pajamas and a tank top. Bland, cheap stuff that turned Grecian goddess graceful when draped over that regally upright body.

He closed the door. “I'm sorry,” he said. “That was bad.”

“It's okay,” she said. “I'm tough.”

He looked down at the tablet. “What are you doing with that?”

“I just told Hazlett and his assistant about my arrival tomorrow.”

His heart rate kicked up violently. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

She looked up, big-eyed and startled. “What? Sam, the guy is my future employer! I don't consider him a security risk!”

“Maybe not him, but your own e-mail account might be!”

“But I have to communicate with them!” she protested. “I'll miss most of the conference! I was supposed to be on two panels tomorrow!”

“You're missing the panels because you almost got killed,” he said through his teeth. “Please. Keep your priorities in order.”

She tapped at the keyboard, hair swinging forward to hide her face. “I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking. I should have said something to you.”

“Damn right, you should have.” He was perversely irritated at her for having apologized too quickly, since he wasn't done being scared and pissed yet. “I hope you're not tweeting about your trip. It's a good bet your would-be killers are following your Twitter feed.”

“I'm not an idiot, Sam. I just sent the message to Nadine, and checked the account where Sasha and I message each other. That's all.”

“Sasha?” He was bewildered. “You mean Alex Aaro? He messages you?”

Sveti snorted at the mention of one of the McCloud Crowd's most prickly and reclusive companions in adventure. “God, no. I would never presume to call Aaro by a nickname. Only Nina can do that. And Tam, when she's being provocative.”

“Which is always,” he commented.

Sveti's lips twitched. “I'm talking about my friend Sasha. The one who was imprisoned with me and Rachel by the organ traffickers.”

Sam's lungs froze. “Oh, fuck me. Aleksandr Cherchenko? The son of Pavel Cherchenko, the head of the Ukrainian crime syndicate?”

She frowned. “Yes, the very one.”

“You're chatting, online, with the son of a mafiya vor?” His voice had risen to a hoarse bellow. “Do you have a death wish?”

“Calm down!” she snapped back. “Sasha is my closest friend! We went through hell together! We trust each other absolutely!”

“Is he smart enough to cover his tracks? Doesn't he shoot up heroin? Val said he's a junkie! You think he's completely on top of it?”

Sveti's lips tightened. “Val should not talk about that. Sasha's had problems with drugs, yes. Who could blame him, after what happened?”