“It was a speedy courtship by all accounts, and a secret marriage held in Edinburgh. This does seem the MacTavish way. Never fear, ladies, there’s still… six or seven or maybe twenty hot MacTavish men that are still single and fair game.”
“All right then,” Kenna says, all business. “The first thing we do before we tear Wallace’s reputation to shreds is that we all have to say something nice about him.”
She kicks off with a story about how Wallace torched her ex-boyfriend’s expensive sports car as a gesture of solidarity and I cannot stop laughing.
Wallace…
“Wait for it…”
Logan’s hovering over my shoulder, watching the countdown on my remote detonator. “Really,” hesays to the ten guards with us, “this shite is art. Wait till-”
The mansion goes up with a searing explosion of flame, right through the center of the house, then the fire jumps the roof like ballet dancers to the two wings of the building, setting them aflame. Every window is lit like the fires of hell and knowing the prick who owns this place, it’s probably seen its fair share of evil.
“I never got to do the countdown!” Logan says sadly. Three more explosions rock the mansion, and a flaming missile of debris lands right at his feet. “Ach, well…” he leans down, lighting a cigarette from the chunk of burning wood. “It was a fine job, all the same.”
He glances over at my raised brow. “What?” He blows a stream of smoke into the air. “Why aren’t ye lighting up? Ye know, like a post-sex smoke. Dinnae ye tell me ye dinnae come when that bastard blew sky high.”
“Nae. It’s not like that.” My gaze is still fixed on the conflagration, watching it dance and twirl in a roaring column of flame reaching toward the night sky. The first wall collapses and I sigh. “Time to go, lads.”
The mansion we just decimated required a helicopter to bring us in, since Marlon St. Jones built the fecking thing high in the mountains on the Isle of Skye. One heavily guarded roadin or out, making it impossible for the girls he kidnapped to escape. The radge is in London tonight, preening at a black-tie fundraiser.
“How many girls did we get out?” I ask.
Logan’s smile drops. “Sixteen. We had to call for another helicopter to extract us.”
I’m watching the team load heavy boxes into the cargo area. “What the hell - how big an arsenal did ye find here?”
It’s like Christmas morn’ for this one. I've never seen Logan so happy. “Military grade weaponry from the US,” he beams, “rifles, surface to air missile systems, the new ammunition drones… It’s a pure dead brilliant shipment.”
“The drugs?” We put on our headsets, as the chopper takes off, watching the first emergency vehicles wind their way around the mountain road.
“Twenty kilos of coke, sacrificed to your funeral pyre. Several cases of molly, too. He must keep ‘em for his shite parties. And lube,” he says, shuddering. “So much lube.”
We canna take on every crime family that dabbles in human trafficking, though I wish we would. But when it’s happening right under our noses… The pompously named St. Jones hosted parties for rich old feckers like him, with all the booze and drugs and underaged girls they could possibly want.
“How many guards did ye take out?”
Ewan, our head of security answers, “There were over forty. That’s cutting into the old prick’s team. I’m thinking he’s only got whoever’s guarding him now in London.”
“Excellent.” I crane my neck for the last glimpse of my creation. “That should make it easier for someone to send a bullet right through his head. There’s plenty of volunteers.”
“Aye, and we have all this braw weaponry,” Logan says happily. “A hell of an evening, aye, ye thunder nugget?”
“It is indeed, ye mangled turtle-faced hellbeast.” I slap his hand. “Now, back home to find out what horrifying shite my cousins have been telling my bride.”
“Couldn’t be worse than Arabella’s lunch,” he says. “They started by telling her how I blew up the boathouse at the family’s summer place on Lake Como and it went downhill from there.”
Hochmagandy - Scottish slang for sex.
Pure dead brilliant - Scottish slang for utterly fantastic.
Braw - all-purpose Scottish slang, in this case meaning excellent.
Radge - Scottish slang for a vicious or dangerous person.
Chapter Twenty-Five
In which some people really do not know when to give up.
