Page 3 of Safe Enough

“My bodyguard.”

“In his room,” the guy said. “But not for long. Pretty soon he’ll be downstairs and we’ll be having some fun with him.”

“What kind of fun?”

“I’m not sure. But I’m sure it’ll be something pretty imaginative.”

“A game?”

“Not exactly. We’re going to kill him.”

“Why?”

“Because we don’t need him.”

Anna said nothing.

The boy said, “What’s wrong with the table?”

“One of the legs is loose.”

“Which one?”

“This one,” Anna said, and whipped the leg out. She swung it like a baseball bat and caught the guy square in the face with it. The edge of the corner hit him on the bridge of the nose and punched a shard of bone backward into his brain pan. He was dead before he hit the floor. Anna took the gun off his hip and stepped over his body and walked to the door.

The gun said Glock on the side. There was no safety mechanism on it. Anna hooked her finger around the trigger and stepped out to the corridor. Downstairs, the boy had said. She found a staircase and went down and kept on going.

By that point they had dragged me to a large ground floor room. A conference hall, maybe, once upon a time. There were thirty-nine people in it. There was a small raised stage with two chairs on it. The boss man was in one of them. They put me in the other. Then they all started discussing something in Portuguese. How to kill me, I presumed. How to maximize their entertainment. Halfway through a door opened in the back of the room. Anna stepped in, swinging a large handgun from side to side in front of her. Reaction was immediate. Thirty-eight men pulled out weapons of their own and pointed them at her.

But the boss man didn’t. Instead he yelled an urgent warning. I didn’t speak his language, but I knew what he was saying. He was saying, Don’t shoot her! We need her alive! She’s valuable to us! The thirty-eight guys lowered their guns and watched as Anna moved through them. She reached the stage. The boss man smiled.

“You’ve got seventeen shells in that gun,” he said. “There are thirty-nine of us here. You can’t shoot us all.”

Anna nodded.

“I know,” she said. Then she turned the gun on herself and pressed it into her chest. “But I can shoot myself.”

After that, it was easy. She made them unlock my cuffs and my chains. I took a gun from the nearest guy and we backed out of the room. And we got away with it. Not by threatening to shoot our pursuers, but by Anna threatening to shoot herself, with me backing her up. Five minutes later we were in a taxi. Thirty minutes later we were home.

A day later I quit the bodyguarding business. Because I took it as a sign. A guy who needs to be rescued by his client has no future, except as a phony.

THE GREATEST TRICK OF ALL

I could have shot you in one ear and out the other from a thousand yards. I could have brushed past you in a crowd and you wouldn’t have known your throat was cut until you went to nod your head and it rolled away down the street without you. I was the guy you were worrying about when you locked your doors and posted your guards and walked upstairs to bed, only to find me already up there before you, leaning on the dresser, just waiting in the dark.

I was the guy who always found a way.

I was the guy that couldn’t be stopped.

But that’s over now, I guess.

None of my stuff was original. I studied the best of the best, long ago. I learned from all of them. A move here, a move there, all stitched together. All the tricks. Including the greatest trick of all, which I learned from a man called Ryland. Back in the day Ryland worked all over, but mainly where there was oil, or white powder, or money, or girls, or high-stakes card games. Then he got old, and he slowly withdrew. Eventually he found the matrimonial market. Maybe he invented it, although I doubt that. But certainly he refined it. He turned it into a business. He was in the right place at the right time. Getting old and slowing down, just when all those California lawyers made divorce into a lottery win. Just when guys all over the hemisphere started to get nervous about it.

The theory was simple: A live wife goes to a lawyer, but a dead wife goes nowhere. Except the cemetery. Problem solved. A dead wife attracts a certain level of attention from the police, of course, but Ryland moved in a world where a guy would be a thousand times happier to get a call from a cop than a divorce lawyer. Cops would have to pussyfoot around the grief issue, and there was a general assumption that when it came to IQ, cops were not the sharpest chisels in the box. Whereas lawyers were like razors. And, of course, part of the appeal of a guy like Ryland was that evidence was going to be very thin on the ground. No question, a wife dead at Ryland’s hands was generally considered to be a lottery win in reverse.

He worked hard. Hit the microfilm and check it out. Check newspapers all over the States and Central and South America. Look at Europe, Germany, Italy, anyplace where there were substantial fortunes at stake. Look at how many women went missing. Look at how old they were, and how long they had been married. Then check the follow-up stories, the inside pages, the later paragraphs, and see how many hints there were about incipient marital strife. Check it out, and you’ll see a pattern.

The cops saw it too, of course. But Ryland was a ghost. He had survived oil and dope and moneylending and hookers and gambling. No way was he going to get brought down by greedy husbands and bored wives. He flourished, and I bet his name was never written down in any cop’s file. Not anywhere, not once. He was that good.

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