Cold as Ice - Anne Stuart [102]
He looked at the unpleasant children. Not that he tended to like children in general, except the very pretty ones who didn’t cry too much when he touched them. They never seemed to respond to his famous Van Dorn charm. It was almost as if they could see through him, past the smiles and the jokes.
Dogs didn’t like him either. Maybe dogs and kids were smarter than the rest. Or maybe he just didn’t care enough to try to fool them. Either way, the handful of scrawny, ugly kids were looking at him with deep distrust.
“I’m a man of many charities,” he continued. “This here is an important one to me—looking after dying kids, trying to make their last few months on earth a little brighter.”
The camera moved, panning the children’s faces. He didn’t know children well enough to guess how old they were—probably all under twelve—which made them even more pathetic. Heart-wrenching, to the right people.
“Now, we’d hate to have anything happen to these kids, but the roads up in the mountains can be very treacherous, and there aren’t even guardrails in some places. The van they’re driving in could go over the edge if someone isn’t careful, and I like to think of myself as a very careful man.”
He half expected the kids to start weeping and wail- ing at that veiled threat, but none of them even blinked, the stoic little bastards.
“I have to admit my pride is wounded. And it really burns my hide to think I have to let go of everything I’ve worked for. But I will, no fuss, no ugly publicity, I’ll just slink back and keep giving my money away to hopeless causes and you won’t need to worry. But I need one thing, and if I don’t get it, these children aren’t going to be happy. Accidents are bad enough. Burning to death’s a sight worse—real painful, I’ve heard. And if a van goes over a cliff somewhere up in the mountains there’s a good chance it’ll catch fire just in case there are survivors. I always carry extra fuel in my vans, just in case I need it.” He smiled at the camera, feeling very benevolent.
“So I’m taking these children up to my place in Lake Arrowhead, and don’t make the mistake of thinking you can get there first. It’s an armed fortress, and anyone who tries to get in will blow themselves to kingdom come. Oh, and you may not know which place I’m talking about—I own a number of properties around Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear, most of them so tied up in dummy corporations that it’ll take you too long to guess which one.
“So here are the details you’ve been waiting for, Ms. Lambert. We’ll have a little trade. You bring Ms. Genevieve Spenser, Esquire, back to me and I’ll hand off the children, clean and neat. Now, why would I want Ms. Spenser, you ask yourself? Because I’ve already killed every motherfucker who tried to mess with me on this, and she’s the only one still walking around. And I don’t like that. It’s kinda salt in the wound, you know what I mean?
“I will kill her—don’t try to fool yourself into thinking otherwise. The Rule of Seven is just going to have to be the pissant Rule of One, and I don’t like it, I can tell you that. So you have your choice. Half a dozen little brats who are going to die anyway, or one less lawyer in the world. You know that old joke—‘What do you call a hundred lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?’— ‘a good start’? I know what your choice is going to be, because you really don’t have any choice at all. I’ll let you know where the trade-off is going to be.”
His cameraman was well trained—he knew a closing line when he heard it and he shut off the camera, the bright klieg lights going out.
“You’ll get that where it needs to go? Find out where the she-wolf that runs them has gotten to, and get an answer. You understand?” he said. It was a foolish question—they all knew what would happen if they failed him, and Takashi’s unfortunate death had been a recent reminder.
There was an absolute jumble of hurried reassurances, and Harry flashed them all his brilliant smile before turning to the ugly little children.