Close Protection (13 page)

Ramon would not be sleeping either. Even though Damien had no way of knowing who had beaten him tonight, the truth would be discovered by one means or another. Certainly not honestly, but that wasn’t really important to Ramon right now. The finger would point at him, and he would take the fall. He made the most convenient scapegoat. Normally, he would have been proud to take credit for the beating. Nobody in their right mind could have said that Damien didn’t deserve it. But the people here weren’t in their right minds, and deserve didn’t have anything to do with it.

Anyway, he didn’t have time to worry about that until Zeus was done with him. After they’d left Lena’s room, the old man had ordered Ramon to follow him back to his office. Ramon was beginning to wonder if the old man didn’t sleep in there.

“What’s going on in this house?” he demanded to know once he was seated behind his enormous desk, Ramon standing at attention on the other side.

“Lena and Damien don’t get along sir. Sorry about the other night. Didn’t know the boy was family.”

“I know all of that. Tell me something else.”

“Not sure what to tell you, sir. I heard screaming and found Lena’s bedroom door open, her sitting on the bed.”

“How’d anyone manage to get into her room.”

“Broke in, I imagine. I’ve got the only key, it’s still in my pocket.”

Ramon produced the tiny key. His excuse was a plausible one. The lock on Lena’s door only had two tumblers. Even a moron could have picked the lock. A big moron could just knock the door open.

“And you didn’t see or hear anything?”

“No sir. My thinking is that Lena let Damien in, and things got out of hand. She’s probably the one that beat him up is my guess, and he’s too embarrassed to say.”

Ramon was proud of that lie. He felt like shit pinning the blame on Lena, although he knew that she’d be happy to take it. But Zeus must have been familiar with the type of man who, when beaten in a fight, made his opponent into a giant invincible brute. Zeus gave the idea careful consideration and seemed to be happy with it. He must have hated the little twerp as much as anyone, but to Zeus, Damien’s marriage to Lena was a matter of business. He didn’t have to be happy with it, it just needed to happen.

“Very well. Back to your post.”

Ramon nearly sprinted upstairs. He needed to be ready to leave at the drop of a hat. The smart move was to leave now, but he couldn’t, not without Lena He knew he wouldn’t do her any good dead or locked up, but he needed to stay here until the last possible second. To look out for Lena and to continue looking for a way of getting her out of here.He prepared two bags. Each had the bare minimum supplies that he’d need to stay alive long enough to get to help. Food, water, and clothes. He’d figured it might be a long walk through a lot of swamp, so he put two extra pairs of socks in each bag. The socks he had were garbage, made for dress shoes. He only had two pair of lightweight but rugged wool socks. He put one in each pack, lamenting the fact that he would not be able to wear either until the bags were needed or no longer necessary.

He very much wanted to contact Gabe. There was no one in the world that Ramon trusted more right now, except for maybe Lena. And in a contest between which of the could do more to bail his ass out of trouble, Gabe won handedly. But he had no phone, and all of the lines on the compound were bugged according to Lena. In the Marines, they’d had distress codes. Ways of sending apparently innocuous messages that, to a knowledgeable receiver, indicated that the sender was in serious trouble. He wondered if Gabe had remembered any of them. The call would have to be made in the morning, during normal hours, preferably when Ramon had the excuse of dialing a few other numbers to make it look like business as usual.

If Gabe got the call, Ramon couldn’t be sure that he’d know what he was getting. Even if he did, would he know what to do? What could he do? And dragging Gabe into the middle of this clusterfuck was about the worst thing that he could ask him to do. After what had happened in Afghanistan, Ramon could hardly imagine asking him to get his ass out of trouble with the mob.

But Ramon’s other options were looking slim. He’d poke around the garage tomorrow and see if he could find some holes in the security there. Getting a pair of wheels would be a big step up in any escape plan.  Tomorrow was going to be a busy day for Ramon. He had gotten in the good habit of assuming the worst case scenario.

Unfortunately, his imagination wasn’t very good.

The next day, Lena went back to pretending that she didn’t even see Ramon. It was a hard act to put on. After everything that had happened yesterday, the good and the bad, she could hardly see anybody but him. Her step-father made her go through wedding arrangements. His logic, Lena supposed, was that if a woman couldn’t decide
who
she was going to marry, she at least ought to be able to pick out table cloths and napkins.

It was a good distraction though, and Lena had fun with it. She had seen a lot of reality TV about domineering brides, and she played the character well. The cake, she insisted, would be vegan and gluten free. There was only one bakery in Miami that she would accept. She sat in Zeus’s office beaming inside as he got chewed out by the head baker for daring to request a custom wedding cake with three days notice. Then Lena had her turn at harrying him.

The color of the wedding would be a sort of desaturated yellow-green. A small child might remark that it was “booger” color. Lena would have agreed. In jarring contrast to the booger green, she selected a number of items with hot pink accents, and decided that each chair would have brown slip covers. She thought it was funny that all of the colors had interesting names like “Seafoam” and “Starlight”. And then there was “Brown”. Lena never gave it a second thought.

Although she’d never been a terribly sentimental person, Lena had thought about what kind of a wedding she’d wanted. For one, it never would have taken place on a boat. Two, she’d have had more than a few days to plan it. As a sort of protest, every choice that she made - and insisted upon vehemently - was as antithetical to her actual wishes as possible. It briefly occurred to her that she might be able to get the wedding canceled if the decor was so awful that all of the guests began to spontaneously vomit.

After three hours of being as miserable as she could to her step-father, he lost his nerve and had Lena excused. She would speak with the planner directly regarding any remaining decisions.

While she was sitting in the living room trying to imagine how she could make the ceremony any more unbearable, she heard her father talking on the phone in his office. Her attention had been drawn by her name, but was kept by what followed.

              “Lena’s bodyguard, I think.”

Then a short pause.

“I understand.”

“Yes. Yes of course.”

Whoever Zeus was talking to then proceeded to give him very detailed instructions which Zeus then repeated back twice. Lena could not believe what she was hearing. She thought that trouble would come out of last night, knew it, really, but she didn’t imagine that it would be like this.

“I’ll take care of him tonight.”

Lena tried not to freak out. She calmly got up and went to the kitchen. She asked if Tia or Michaela knew where Ramon was, but neither of them knew. She looked outside but didn’t see anybody. It was the middle of the afternoon and the Florida sun made it too oppressively hot for anyone to work outside for very long.

He wasn’t at her room, or in his, or in the room he kept above hers. As she walked through the second story of the house, she heard the clank of metal on metal.

She opened the door to the small room that served as the gym for the house. Basil had insisted on it several years ago. He used it a few times and then forgot about it. Lena worked out in it from time to time, but she prefered to get her exercise running and swimming.

Ramon had his back turned to the door. He was on a machine doing pectoral flies. He was wearing a tank top that showed off a huge swath of his back and Lena stood watching for a long time, utterly transfixed. It wasn’t until the waits clattered back down onto the stack that she snapped to it.

She stepped into the room and called for Ramon.

He turned and smiled and met her at the door.

“How are you doing?”

“Ok. Still really shaky. I miss you.”

She stood up on her toes and kissed Ramon before wrapping her arms around him and holding him tight.

“Ramon,” she said. “I need to tell you something.” She could feel tears in her eyes and struggled to keep her voice from cracking and failing.

“What is it,” Ramon said, as cool and collected as always.

“My father is going to kill you.”

Ramon listened to what Lena had to say. When she was done, he kissed her goodbye. He promised that he would see her soon. He promised that she would not have to marry Damien in three days. Not then, and not ever. He promised that everything would be okay, but he wondered if it was true.

If he could believe what Lena had told him, Zeus would have one of his goons sneak into Ramon’s room while he slept and kill him. Tonight. There was one tiny advantage that Ramon had. As long as Zeus did not suspect that Ramon knew of his plot, he would be safe until at least then. That was good, because Ramon had big plans for the afternoon. They started in Zeus’s office. Ramon knew that Zeus would be leaving for a few hours to sure up some final arrangements for Lena’s marriage and the subsequent business deal. He always locked his office door when he was not in it, but Ramon did not understand why. The lock was the same as all the others in the house. Three decades old and meant for simple privacy, not security. He picked it with a paperclip and a screw driver. It would have been faster and easier to force it, but that came with the risk of leaving more detectable damage. He didn’t need Zeus to realize that something was up before he was gone.

In a dresser drawer in Zeus’s office, Ramon found what he was looking for. Nearly fifty thousand dollars in cash. The wad of bills was heavy in his hand. It was, by far, the most amount of money that Ramon had ever had at one time. That only mattered if he could keep it. He stuck it into his jacket pocket and went through the rest of the desk looking for anything that might help. It was full of papers for the most part. They might have been valuable under certain circumstances, but Ramon didn’t have time to find out. He went through the desk carefully, trying not to disturb it or leave signs of his activities. He found nothing of particular use until he opened the bottom drawer on the right side of the desk. Inside was a snub nosed revolver and a box of ammunition. The gun was loaded, and Ramon tucked it into his waistband and stuffed the box of spare rounds into his other jacket pocket.

Ramon hated guns. He had since he was sixteen when his sister died. But he wanted to live to see tomorrow, and given the circumstances, he decided he would have to stomach whatever means were necessary to see another sunrise. He locked Zeus’s office up and snuck outside, undetected. He then went to the kitchen where Michaela and Tia were working on lunch. He gave both women a hug and kissed them on the cheek. He explained to them that he would not be here tomorrow, and that it would be up to them to look after Lena. They did not ask questions. They understood all that there was to understand.

His next stop was to pick up his bags. He took both go bags and the luggage that he taken with him when he came to the Buldova estate for the first time. If everything went according to plan, he would leave no trace of his time here except for the fortifications to the compound and a lasting mark on Lena’s heart. He carried his things downstairs, constantly looking for anyone that might spot him in his getaway. To help, he put on a hat and a pair of sunglasses. The house was almost entirely empty,  all of the goons were with Zeus, away on business. He snuck out of one of the side entrances of the house and slipped across the narrow gap between the house and the garage.

Ramon loved the garage. He wished that he’d had more time to spend there. He couldn’t even begin to estimate the value of the cars that were stored there, but he knew exactly how much he’d wanted to take one out for a spin.

Sometimes, dreams come true. He dropped his bags in the middle of the floor and went to the lockbox. He picked it in ten seconds flat and opened the metal door. Inside were the keys to every car in the garage. Ramon hadn’t even thought about what care he would take. He looked back at the roster of high performance automobiles. Some were curvy classics that he’d known since he was a kid. Others were strange, aggressive, angular. They looked like metal monsters from some science fiction movie. As much as vanity egged him to take one of the several supercars, he figured that reliability and all around performance was more important than flash and straight line speed. He searched the contents of the box until he found the keys for the silver Nissan GT-R that was parked across from his own humble Honda. Most people upon looking at the car, would not think much of it. It didn’t have the slinky flash of European supercars, but that was what Ramon wanted. He could still keep a low profile. Or a lower one, at least. The car chirped and lit up as he unlocked it and placed his bags into the truck. He was momentarily distracted by a pile of small electronics on the garage attendent’s desk. They looked an awful lot like blastic caps and remote detonators that he’d seen in IEDs in Iraq. He wondered what they were doing here in the garage, but he hardly had the time to play detective.

He walked across the garage and got in and acquainted himself with the car. It felt like sitting in the cockpit of a fighter plane. He adjusted his seat and the mirrors, found the wipers and the lights, and felt out the pedals. Then, holding his breath in anticipation, he pushed the ignition and smiled with glee as the car roared to life. He pulled out of the garage and nursed the car forward to the gate. This was the riskiest part of the plan. He figured Zeus had it on orders that Ramon was not to leave. If anyone knew that, it was the person working the gate. But he’d also seen one of the goons at the gate getting chewed out for not letting Andris out of the complex fast enough, and so Ramon was going to take a gamble.

He pulled straight up to the gate and began to lay on the horn, flipping off the gate camera. He prayed that the hat and sunglasses made him look questionably like one of the step brothers.

The gate didn’t move.