Close Protection (7 page)

             
After Zeus’s conversation at the gates of the house, but before he informed Ramon of his impending termination, the old man went to his daughter’s room to speak to her. He was pleased to tell her that two weeks from now, he would be taking Lena and her step-brothers on vacation to Cuba.

              The family had taken many vacations before. They were always high points in her life. It was standard policy that the children could bring friends as guests. Lena was shocked and disappointed to learn that she would not be allowed to bring anyone on this trip. Her father gave a vague excuse pertaining to customs and border patrol, and made his leave.

              Lena was not sure what to make of the change, but she was not terribly alarmed and saw no reason to be suspicious of her father. While she lay in bed recovering from her injuries, Ramon kept her constant company. He taught her card games that he had learned as a child and as a soldier. In turn, she taught him the songs that she learned as a girl from her mother and from Tia and Michaela. Ramon was surprised at how colorful the songs were, and frequently found himself blushing at the words.

              The sight of the big strong man turning beet red at children's’ songs was almost too much for Lena to take. She laughed until she hurt, which only made Ramon blush harder.

              Lena’s trips out of bed were few and far between. It was not out of any sort of obedience that she remained in bed, but because it was too painful for her to walk on her own, even heavily medicated, even a week after she had broken the glass over Damien’s face.

              Ramon offered to carry her wherever she wanted to go, and twice, Lena took up his offer and had her carry him to the pool. Other times, finding herself bored while she was laid up in bed, she lamented the lack of a television in her room. Ramon took a ladder from the landscaping shed and hauled the flat screen TV that hung over the fireplace up to Lena’s room. This did not make him more popular with Lena’s stepbrothers.

              She was smitten with his continued care. He went on to oversee a number of improvements to the security of the house, and when he wasn’t seeing to his responsibilities, he was with her.

              Lena continued to hide her feelings for Ramon, not wanting to be beholden to him, and not wanting to cause any trouble.

              One afternoon, three days after her injuries, she noticed Ramon acting strangely. She asked him what was wrong, and he snapped upright and his demeanor changed in an instant.

              “What do you mean?” he asked. “Everything’s fine.”

              And as far as Lena could tell, outside of that one incident, he
was
fine. He sat with her watching bad TV, joining her when she made fun of the D list celebrities or Hollywood hopefuls humiliating themselves for ten minutes more in the spotlight. They talked about played cards and sang songs. Ramon had a light and agile voice that to Lena seemed like a strange match for his big, strong body.

              They carried on like this for the seven days that Lena was bedridden. With only that one exception, everything seemed perfectly wonderful.

              She never once sensed how much trouble was looming on the horizon.

             
Two days after Lena’s injury, Ramon started to wonder about some things. His incipient termination still didn’t make sense, nor did how it fit with the timeline of the Buldova’s upcoming vacation. Ramon hardly saw the point in having a bodyguard if all you were going to do was sit at home. It was when you were out and about, especially in a strange country that you really wanted some muscle at your side.

              He tried not to let it bother him too much, but the questions just kept gnawing at him. He kept himself busy by tending to Lena. He enjoyed the time that he spent with her, and he made every excuse that he could to sit with her in her room. His feelings were completely out of line, completely unprofessional, and he kept them to himself for fear that his job might come to an end even sooner than planned.

              What was hardest was watching Lena stuck in bed. She did her best to keep high spirits, but Ramon couldn’t help but notice the stack change in her personality between the first days he’d been at the house and the days now that she was bedridden. When she spoke about her family, her face slumped into an expression that was either empty or sad.

              He had seen flashes of vivacity from her, he knew how much life she was capable of. He wanted to see it again. She was dying in this house. But she’d never had a chance to be happy so she didn’t know how bad it was. Ramon laughed at himself. He was sitting here feeling sorry for a spoiled girl who grew up in the lap of luxury. It seemed stupid to him. But he’d been here for less than a week and he already knew how hard Lena’s life must have been.

              Zeus called him down to his office to review the first security report. Ramon was starting to dread these visits. They never seemed to end too terribly well. At first, it seemed like this might be a pleasant exception. Zeus had a lot of questions about the report. It occurred to Ramon that in all the time that he’d lived in this house, there were a lot of aspects of his safety that he’d taken for granted. It didn’t say much about his career as a crime lord. Anyone worth killing would have been long dead or learned to take care of themselves.

              That wasn’t entirely true, Ramon thought. There was a perfect example right here.

              While Zeus was thumbing through the spiral notebook, Ramon couldn’t help but to glance around his desk. Fanned out on the corner to his right were seven tickets for a chartered flight from Miami to Havana. Ramon counted three times. There were two tickets for Zeus, two tickets for Basil, and two tickets for Andris. There was only one ticket for Lena.

              “I swear to God Ramon, you do good work.”

              “Thank you, sir.”

              “Twenty years I live here, none of my people have ever been so thorough.”

              Right about now, Ramon was beginning to wish that he hadn’t been.

              “I have a concern, though.” Zeus said. “These improvements you suggest they’re a little, uh…”

              “Extensive? I thought so too. If you flip to page 23, I’ve made a list of suggestions. Some of the changes will be rather expensive without yielding a huge increase in safety. Some of them you could put in today and would make a tremendous difference.”

              “Like the curtains?” Zeus said with one cocked eyebrow.

              “Exactly.”

              Zeus considered the report in his hand and looked up at Ramon. He opened up a desk drawer and pulled out the fattest wad of cash that Ramon had ever seen in his life. A conservative guess would have been twenty-five grand, although it could have easily been more depending on how many of the bills bore Benjamin Franklin’s ugly mug.

              The big man pulled a few thousand dollars off of the top and handed it to Ramon in a neat fold. Ramon did his best not to look surprised by the amount of cash that he was now holding.

              “Take my sons first thing tomorrow and buy whatever you can get at the store. I’ll have some help here tomorrow afternoon to help you make things happen.”

              “Yes sir. Anything else?”

              “You’ve been spending a lot of time in Lena’s room. I trust you haven’t forgotten our conversation.”

              He hadn’t. He remembered it in excruciating detail every time he thought about leaning in to kiss Lena, or inching his hand over towards hers.

              “No sir. She’s getting a little, uh, restless being cooped up. I figure keeping her company is the best way to keep her from jumping out the window or walking around too much.”

              “How are her feet?”

              “Honestly?”

              “Of course.”

              “Pretty fucking gross.”

              Zeus nodded and looked down at the paperwork on his desk. Ramon supposed that he was dismissed, and excused himself from the office. As soon as the door closed behind him, he collapsed against the wall and took a deep breath. His chest felt like it was going to collapse, it was hard to breath, his head was spinning.

              Something was very fucking wrong in this house, and he wasn’t going to stop until he figured out what it was.

             
Lena was sad to see how bad Ramon looked when he stepped into her bedroom. He’d just finished with another meeting with her step-father.

              “How’d it go?” she asked.

              “Better than the rest of them.”

              “Why are you so shaken up, then?”

              “I don’t know,” Ramon lied. “These improvements, they’re going to be a lot of work. I’m just stressed about them I guess.”

              The half truth was enough to satisfy Lena.

              “Guess where we’re going for vacation.” she said.

              “Kansas City.”

              “Very funny, funny guy. No, it’s worse than that. We’re going to Cuba.”

              Ramon pretended to be surprised.

              “What’s wrong with Cuba, I’ve always wanted to go.”

              “I’ve been before, and it was
awful.
”

              She wasn’t exaggerating. Ramon asked her to tell him the story of her last trip to Cuba, just five years before. After some measure of pestering, she agreed.

              They had gone as a family, Zeus, the boys and two of their friends, along with Lena and one of hers. She wasn’t
really
Lena’s friend, she explained. Lena hadn’t wanted to bring anybody on the trip, but the stepbrothers insisted. She ended up inviting a girl from her class who she was friendly with, which wasn’t the same as a friend.

              The trip had started off well enough. They flew into Havana and had lunch in an amazing little cafe. The city was alive in a way that put even Miami to shame, with handsome men in old American cars and beautiful women in flowing dresses. There was color everywhere and the smell of slow cooked food and pungent tobacco gave everything a magical scent that she remembers to this day.

They had a house right on the water with beautiful views of rolling green hills and the Havana skyline in the distance. The house was beautiful, even to Lena’s high tastes, and the beach was, in her words, completely spectacular. As soon as they had put their things away, Lena ran out to the beach and into the water. The children played in the water for hours, until Lena had an unfortunate tangle with a jellyfish.

              She spent the rest of the afternoon in agonizing pain in a hospital waiting room. Zeus was furious the whole time, not because his step-daughter wasn’t receiving care, but because he was spending his vacation surrounded by the sick and lame. The other children stayed at the house and played, and when Lena returned late that night, her guest had become fast friends with the stepbrothers, and she hardly saw her for the rest of the weeklong trip.

              To make matters worse, Lena had contracted quite the sunburn in her one day on the water, so she sat in the house, alone, sick and shivering and in an excruciating amount of pain. And while the house was nice, it lacked anything that might pass as entertaining to a teenager. The closest thing to it was an old transistor radio that picked up three local stations. None of them were in English and only one played music with any regularity. So Lena listened to people she didn’t know talk infinitely in a language that she didn’t understand, just so that she’d feel like she wasn’t completely alone.

              “It was a lot like right now, with the glass,” she said. “Except that I didn’t have you to keep me company.”

              “That sounds awful,” Ramon said. “I’m sure you’ll have a better trip this time.”

              “Don’t you mean ‘we’ll’ have a better trip?”

              It was too late. Ramon could not lie to her, not in a way that Lena would believe.

              “You aren’t coming?” Lena shouted. “Why not.”

              “I don’t know,” Ramon said. He did not even begin to suggest that he would not be seeing Lena after she returned. If she returned. “And please, don’t tell your father about it, you weren’t supposed to know.”

              “What, was it supposed to be a surprise? I get on the fucking plane and you jump out of the security at the last minute shouting ‘bon fucking voyage’?”

              Ramon sighed. Lena was outraged.

              She calmed down a little when Ramon promised to talk to Zeus about it. He would make the case that it was in the best interest of her security. It would do no good to have Lena beseech her step-father. She could not remember the last time he’d yielded to her wishes on any matter of any importance.

              And so she said goodnight to Ramon and they parted in sour moods. After he left, she stayed up thinking about why her Zeus would not be bringing him along, why none of them would have guests.

It was certainly strange, but Lena figured that her step-father must have his reasons.