Near Dark (Scot Harvath #20) - Brad Thor Page 0,51

matter how much he had tried to encourage her, she hadn’t been interested in taking care of herself. Her health and her appearance had taken an obvious turn for the worse. Now, she wanted to get rid of the implants.

Nekrasov supposed he loved his wife. She was the mother of his children after all, but in addition to her appearance going downhill, so had their sex life. They used to make incredible, passionate, swing-from-the-chandelier love. In the early days, they would make so much noise the neighbors would call the police. Those were good times. Those times, though, were gone. Long gone.

Her breasts, on the rare occasions that they made love, were the only part of their marriage that he still felt passionate about.

In fact, despite his well-crafted image, he had recently begun toying with the idea of getting a divorce. Then, Eva’s cancer diagnosis had arrived.

He couldn’t leave her in light of such news. That wasn’t the kind of man he wanted others to see him as. So, he had stayed.

And now here he was—late to his wife’s oncology appointment, double-parked in a shitty part of Nice, a part the tourists and wealthy residents rarely saw, waiting for a street fight to take place.

“Are you in?” he asked again. “One thousand euros on the Arab.”

Valery, the driver, counted the number of young Frenchmen arrayed against the skinny Arab. He couldn’t understand why his boss was backing such a hopeless cause. But he had been working for Nekrasov long enough to know he was never wrong in these matters. “I know better than to bet against you, boss.”

“For Christ’s sake, Valery. Come on. It’s five to one. Even you have to like those odds.”

Putting the pearl-white, bullet-proof Bentley Mulsanne in Park, the beefy driver turned to face his boss. “In my heart, I love those odds. Even in my gut, I know there’s no way he can win. But in my head—”

“In your head, what?” Nekrasov prodded.

“In my head, I know you’re like an old witch. You see things before they happen. Somehow, you know. You always know. So, I’m not betting. Not on this.”

Nikolai enjoyed the compliment, but at the same time he was disappointed that his driver had refused to bite. As much of a dumb beast as he understood Valery to be, perhaps, in the end, there was a little wisdom hiding inside the man.

Depressing the button for the refrigerator behind his armrest, he removed two chilled shot glasses and a small bottle of exquisite Polish vodka. Though it was considered a sacrilege to drink anything but Russian vodka, he and Valery had an understanding—what no one else knew wouldn’t hurt them. Pouring one for himself, he handed the other forward. The two men clinked glasses, then settled back in their seats to watch the fight. Things didn’t take long to kick off.

Normally in these situations, there was a lot of posturing—taunts, a bit of shoving, and a wait for an antagonist to identify himself as the chief aggressor against the victim, who in this case was the Arab.

Unlike the French, Nekrasov didn’t look down his nose at the country’s Arabs. Most of them were descendants of Arabs from the French colonies of North Africa who had come over in the 1960s and 70s looking for better lives for themselves and their families. They had worked in the most thankless, most menial jobs imaginable, hoping their kids would have it better. But even their children, who had been born and raised in France, were never accepted by the French as full French men and women.

Nekrasov loved France and loved all of its people. He didn’t give a damn what color or what religion they were. If you could hold your own, you were worth giving a shit about. It was why he wanted to watch this fight.

The Arab couldn’t have been more than fifteen. The other boys gathered around him were about the same age, but Nekrasov couldn’t be sure. A couple of them looked like they might have been a year or two older.

It didn’t make a difference. What mattered was that the Arab was outnumbered five to one. You never would have known it looking at him. He stood in front of the French teens, his birdlike chest puffed out, defiant.

He didn’t stare at the ground, eyes downcast, already beaten; hoping they’d take pity on him. He glared at all of them, his face a stony mask, giving nothing away. His confidence radiated all the