Not a direct lie, Nikolai noted. For men who had been raised like he and his cousins, calls like these were a matter of business. But not the exact truth either.
Nikolai listened to the sounds of rustling on the other side of the phone. He imagined Alexei getting out of the bed he shared with his wife, and going to another part of the house to finish the call out of earshot.
“I do still work with that service,” Alexei answered. “But it’s based in Chicago now.”
So Alexei’s hit man had moved to Chicago, it seemed.
“It is fine. Chicago is closer to my party,” Nikolai answered.
“Also, the service no longer caters. Family obligations.”
That gave Nikolai some pause. He’d only met Tetsuro Nakamura once, when he’d handed him the audio recording of Sergei’s death. But the emotionless Asian man hadn’t struck him as the type of guy who would ever had “family obligations.”
But then, Nikolai had never planned to have children himself and look at him now. Making arrangements to clean up this mess before he went home to his nephew… and his nephew’s current guardian, the girlfriend of a police officer.
In this case, though, whether Nakamura was still willing to kill was neither here nor there.
“That is not problem. The party was already thrown,” Nikolai answered. “But it was very messy. I need your maid service.”
“How long did this party last?”
Nikolai surveyed the basement room, a less than classy affair, with carpet on both the floors and the walls. Not like his own home, which he had designed as one big fuck you to Sergei, who’d been from one of the richest crime families in Russia but had forced his girlfriend and child to live in a small, grey two-bedroom apartment.
That small apartment was luxury accommodations compared to this room, located below a strip club called Jiggles. Every piece of furniture looked to have been either hauled from a sidewalk or bought at a discount store’s clearance sale. So cheap, it was no wonder it had only taken Nikolai fifteen minutes of “questioning” the guy who’d been sent to take out Pavel before he’d sung like a bird and gave him an address.
The drug outfit that had killed his brother was fairly new with a boss who’d come to Indiana with just a few East Coast connections and a family of thick-necked brothers and cousins. According to the hit man Nikolai had interrogated, they only had the one strip club and apparently not enough money or taste to redecorate.
Either way, it wasn’t something they’d have to worry about now. The man who’d attempted to kill a defenseless woman and child earlier that evening was dead on the carpeted floor, along with his boss and other family members, after having been used as a human shield when Nikolai had kicked in the door and come into the room shooting. The only thing the hideout had to recommend it was that, thanks to all the tacky carpeting and music blasting from the club above, the short gunfight went completely unnoticed.
But there was still the not-so-small matter of clean up. Nikolai counted eight bodies in all, and in this case, he had admittedly been a little sloppy. All of the men had been killed quietly and efficiently, but there was a strip club full of people upstairs and no way for him to sneak out fully undetected.
“Eight hours,” he answered his cousin.
“The party went on for eight hours,” Alexei repeated. “You are not serious.”
“Eight hours,” Nikolai repeated, “And there are many people here who weren’t invited. This is not my house, so I need the maid service as a courtesy to the owner.”
Nikolai could almost hear his cousin frowning as he said, “I will now ask you why you did not invite me to help you with set up. I would have flown back if I had known you were planning a party.”
“There wasn’t time,” Nikolai answered. “Someone tried to invite my nephew to this party on the same night, so I had to throw the party myself. Quickly.”
They’d only texted briefly about Fedya’s newly discovered son after Nikolai left the police station, but Alexei cursed upon hearing the coded news of the attempt on Pavel’s life.
“I understand. Hold on…”
Some shuffling and then Nikolai could hear Alexei having a muffled conversation with someone else—probably on another phone reserved for the messier aspects of his business dealings. The conversation was conducted with rapid efficiency on Alexei’s part, until he broke off to ask Nikolai for an address.
Nikolai coded his answer as best he could given he lived in a city Alexei had only visited occasionally, most recently just a few days ago to assist Nikolai with some business dealings. But Nikolai’s vague description clearly got the job done because after a few more rapid exchanges, Alexei came back with, “The maid service says they can clean up your party. Lock the door behind you when you leave. The service will take care of the rest.”
“Thank you,” Nikolai said, meaning it. There were few people he trusted in this world and his cousin was among that very small number.
“Do not thank me. We are family. Of course I will do this for you,” Alexei answered. “And I would have thrown the same party if it had been either of my children.”
Of course he would have.
To everyone’s surprise, Alexei, who’d garnered a reputation as a ruthless businessman prior to his marriage to a spitfire from Texas, had turned out to be a dedicated and loving father. He truly seemed to enjoy his role as a parent, even more so than his role as an international oligarch. The few times Nikolai had observed him with his family, he’d been doting with just enough firmness to command his son’s respect. As of late, though, he seemed be going even further into softy territory now that his wife had given birth to a little girl they’d named Layla. Nikolai had yet to meet the newest member of Alexei’s family in person, but he’d been forced to listen to Alexei refer to her by the most syrupy Russian pet names, and it was obvious the baby already had Alexei completely wrapped around her finger.
His love for his family didn’t make him any less commanding, though. Nikolai did as his cousin said, locking the basement door and piling the cheap furniture in front of it in order to barricade the room from the inside, so no employees with keys could stumble in on the grisly scene. Luckily there was a basement window, one he could crawl out of with the aid of a plywood chair.
He thought of his own nephew being forced to crawl at out of a small window earlier that night and felt no remorse for what he’d done to his would be killers. But he also felt no sense of relief after he made it back to his car. Because now it was time to go home and face what he could already tell would be a much bigger challenge than killing eight men.