guessed that this was the case. "Well, when you get outside with these things, I want you to pump a round out of each of them and you were the one who took these things off the corpses, not Brian."
"Got it," Cole agreed.
CHAPTER SIX
Jim set the bag forward to the edge of the desk in front of Cole and then turned thoughtful again as his focus came over to Nicole. His gaze felt like it had weight and she tried to sit a little straighter. "Let's return to the email I got offering the overly-done reward."
"I've already notified the men in my club, the ones who do a bit of bounty hunting in underworld affairs, that you are an internal matter for now and that you are under the protection of Cole.
"Cole is a good man, but you already know that part. He carries an impressive amount of respect around, handed to him by most of the members of our club and myself. So, for now, no one from this club is going to be looking to cash you in, but the note also mentioned that you took something from Gabriel when you left.
"He was very vague about what the missing something might be, but from the looks of you, I would guess it was his heart."
Nicole studied him and then said, "He doesn't have a heart. It's a birth defect."
"Rendering him all the more unpredictable in situations like this. Why are you so important to him?"
"I don't know," she sighed. "I mean, I was a call girl for him and good at what I did. I might have been better than some of the other girls, but we were never given information along those lines. I figured that he didn't want us figuring out that we were more valuable to him than we suspected."
"How, um, valuable were you?" Jim asked. Then he glanced at Cole, who calmly gave him a nod of permission to carry on.
So, Nicole told him, and told him about the tips, and what she learned about the bidding wars for her, which were common on particular days during the year. "When I overheard that conversation, the ravings were about how they raked in twelve times my fee that year."
Jim lifted both eyebrows to this and then gave her a long appraising look. "Forgive me. I agree you are very nice on the eyes, but that's a lot of money for a night of sex."
Nicole quirked the edge of a grin before she was able to control her lips and replied, "No, Jim, that's an insane amount of money for a night of sex even with twelve women." She shook her head, "No, it wasn't about the sex. A prostitute gives you a climax. What I did was give you a night of freedom and then the sex."
"Interesting, but freedom from what?" Jim pressed.
She glanced over at Cole and said, "We were going to talk about this later, but now seems like a more appropriate time, if you agree."
Cole was silent for a moment, "It's important that Jim knows as much as he can right now about what is going on and why. So, yes, I agree."
She nodded, focused her thoughts, and let the words pour out. The men who were on her calendar regularly were very rich -- the multiple millions kind of rich in cash value with many times that locked up in investments and deals all the time. They were also extremely powerful and you could tell that by the way they came into a room and how they perceived things.
"For example," she explained, "a bomb threat at the Chicago airport would not be seen as terribly important. It would not delay them. They would simply make some calls -- one, or two at the most -- and then they would not only make their flight, but it would leave on time. Their problems aren't the problems other people have. They're the problems other governments have."
She paused for a moment and then continued, "If men like these just want sex, they don't come to me. They bend their willing secretary over the desk, fuck her, and get on with their day. Or, maybe it was their girlfriend, or perhaps their wife, or sometimes the young nanny, or perhaps three of those women in the same day.
"Men of