Page 93 of Barristers & Bones

“Where is that fucking bastard?” Sylvie growled.

“About five blocks away from Euphoria. What do you want to do?” he asked me again.

My mind raced as hatred and relief flooded through me. I didn’t know if I could voice what I really wanted to do. “How’d you find him?”

“His father owns a nail salon and a ‘massage’ parlor between Flamingo and Spring Mountain Road–one of those ‘happy endings’ parlors with apartments on the second floor. They use it to launder money, and Kilian has one of their regular customers on his payroll. The guy saw one of Lionel’s men there.”

I wasn’t surprised Kilian found him first. Information was his currency, and he’d told me once that certain information could be more valuable than any tangible good.

Ivan and Kilian were both geniuses at gathering secrets, but Ivan seemed to have one flaw. He relied heavily on technology, whereas Kilian didn’t have a favored method. He was an equal-opportunity collector, and he had people all over Sin City on his payroll.

Fenn glanced at us. “I’ll drop you two off at my house, then we’ll pick him up.”

I leaned forward. “Should we tell Roman and Drakos?”

He shrugged. “It’s up to you. Maybe tell them after we have him.”

Sylvie’s eyes narrowed. “We might even want to wait until after we eliminate the fucker. And you’re not dropping us off at your house.”

We talked Fenn into taking us to the mortuary and bringing Lionel to us when they picked him up.

I called Samuel to check up on Misty while we waited. “She just got out of surgery.” He sounded like he’d been crying.

“Tell me honestly, how bad is it?”

“She’s still alive, and they say she’ll recover, but it was close. Between her collapsed lung, perforated bowel, and blood loss, it was touch and go. She’s going to be recovering for a while, and Strack kicked her in the fucking face.”

“I want to kill him slowly, Samuel.”

He exhaled and pulled himself together. “Me too. One good thing–her cheekbone isn’t broken, but she’ll need more surgeries and a lot of time off.”

Angry tears filled my eyes. I hated Lionel Strack almost as much as I hated my father. “Tell her we’ll come see her as soon as she’s up for visitors.”

“I will. Luna, thank you for telling the girls to demand health insurance. The doctor just came in–I need to go.”

I hung up and stared at my phone for a few seconds, adrenaline and hatred boiling through me. When Fenn dropped us off at the mortuary, I turned to Sylvie. “Do you remember theTales from the Cryptepisode where that dead man’s wife wished he were still alive, and he came back thrashing and screaming from the embalming fluid burning in his veins?”

“I remember. That was a good one.”

“Lionel needs to suffer, and I want toreallyhurt him.”

Sylvie nodded slowly. “I have a few ideas.”

“Like what?”

She rubbed her hands together. “Like playing show-and-tell before we torture him. There’s that wicked-looking aneurysm hook, and the artery forceps.”

“Your big suction needle would work too.”

She gave me a creepy, happy smile. “My trocar. We’ll start there and see how it goes.”

An hour later, Kilian honked twice at the mortuary garage door with an unconscious and slightly dented Lionel Strack in the back of his vehicle. Sylvie opened the garage, and Kilian pulled inside. Fenn and Kilian pulled Lionel out of the back cargo area by his duct-taped hands. He groaned a little and started coming around.

“How’d you get him?” Sylvie asked.

Kilian grunted under Lionel’s weight. “I sent a man in pretending to be with Door Dash. He tasered Lionel, and then we drugged him. Where do you want the ugly asshole?”

Sylvie studied the man. He was rotund and probably weighed three hundred pounds. “Let me get a gurney and we can load him onto it and take him to the embalming room.”

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