Close Protection (8 page)

The next morning, Ramon climbed into the huge SUV that the Buldovas kept for hauling large cargo. As far as the truck was concerned, carrying the necessary materials to reinforce the stronghold of a drug lord was one of the less insidious things that it had been party to over the years. Ramon was unaware of this, although he was suspicious of it. Presently, the cargo that concerned him most was the pair of borderline psychotic men in the back.

Andris and Basil were just about the worst kind of person that Ramon could imagine. They’d grown up every bit as spoiled as Lena had, but with buckets more privilege. Everywhere they went, scared peons worshipped the ground that they walked on simply because they were their father’s son. The same people who would not recognize Lena would lavish the boys with gifts and praise. All of this, naturally, disabused the boys of any sense of decency or good nature, and so they went around committing heinous acts with absolute impunity. Why wouldn’t they? Rules and morality were concepts that existed to rule the wills of lesser mortals. They did not apply to the only given sons of Zeus Buldova.

Of course, Ramon didn’t know all of this, but it was an educated guess on his part and one that was closer to the truth than he imagined.

Now, they chattered ceaselessly behind him as he drove the tired old truck up the road to the nearest hardware store.

It was hard to make out their words as the road rumbled beneath them. Every once in a while, one of them would shout an order to the front of the van. Turn up the radio. Change the station. Stop so we can get food. Both stepbrothers were older than Lena. Andris was 22 and Basil was 24. But they both seemed to Ramon like petulant children, hardly out of school.

Begrudgingly, Ramon honored each request.

More than ever, Ramon realized how important it was to keep on Zeus and his awful spawn’s good side. If he was going to figure out what was going on, he needed them to be convinced of his loyalty. It pained him to play along with them. He couldn’t stand their abusive and predatory nature. But it was a ruse he was willing to live in order to protect Lena.

After three stops, once to use the bathroom, once for cigarettes, and once to get fried chicken from a gas station, they finally arrived at the hardware store that Ramon had planned on going to to get the first bunch of things he’d need to make the house safer. Safer, that is, if the threat to Lena’s health was outside their walls, and not on the inside.

“This place is a dump,” Andris said, climbing out of the van.

“Yea, a real shithole,” Basil added.

Ramon ignored them. It was the only hardware store around. The next closest one was in Miami almost two hours away. It had the added benefit of being next to an old outlet upholstery store. Zeus wasn’t exactly going to love the decorations Ramon picked out for him, but he didn’t have time to wait for custom curtains from Venice to arrive, not when Lena’s safety was in question.

The old man could choose between eyesores in his living room or a happy, healthy step-daughter. Ramon was beginning to wonder if he knew how Zeus would pick, given the option.

They went into the upholstery store first and Ramon found the only matching curtains that would fit the windows. They were, even to his unrefined eye, fuck ugly. Maroon with shades of deep brown and faded gold. It was though they’d been made by two people. one who wanted an earthy floral pattern, and one who liked the sweeping geometric designs of the late 1980s. The result was a mutt of poor taste and visual offensiveness. But at least they matched.

After purchasing the curtains with Zeus’s money, they went to the hardware store to get the equipment that they needed to hang the curtains, plus a hodgepodge of other items that Ramon could use to make various improvements. The brothers disappeared immediately upon entering the store, and Ramon shook his head, silently apologizing to the poor employees of the store who would no doubt be bothered by their antics any second now.

It took Ramon nearly an hour to fill his cart. He only needed to go through each aisle once. Last night he’d called the store with his list and ensured that he would find everything that he needed. About fifteen minutes in, there was a loud crash and the sound of hundreds of tiny metal things skittering across the concrete floors. A flustered employee walked past Ramon with a broom and a large dustpan. Ten minutes later, he heard the clatter of falling lumber, and then a sound that Ramon was unable to identify. It was, in fact, the sound of a sledgehammer being taken to a porcelain toilet.

He finished his shopping before the brothers were able to destroy anything else, at least as far as he was aware. The cashier up front rang him up to the tune of just over twelve hundred dollars. Ramon turned around and looked at the devastation that his tagalongs had caused, and pushed the entire remainder of the two-thousand dollars, minus the cost of gas and curtains, to the cashier. When he started to remark at Ramon’s massive overpayment, Ramon raised his finger to his lips and winked. The extra money would pay for the things that the brothers had damaged, but not the added misery of the workers’ days. Still though, it was everything Ramon could do short of locking them in the truck and pushing it into the swamp.

“That was fun,” Andris said as they walked back to the truck.

“Yea, did you see the look on that woman’s face when she saw all those screws?”

They both started laughing hysterically. Ramon loaded his haul into the van and climbed back into the driver’s seat. He noticed that neither of the brothers was wearing a seatbelt as he pulled out of the parking lot, and he entertained the idea of swerving off the road and into a sturdy looking tree on more than one occasion on the drive home.

When they returned, Ramon wanted to get right to work, but Zeus called him in to talk. Ramon gave him a brief overview of the timeline that he had made for the improvements, explaining to Zeus how many hands he would need to help and when each task would be completed. Zeus was relieved to hear that the curtains would be installed first, and that use of his living and dining rooms would be restored. He wasn’t going to be happy when he saw what they looked like, Ramon thought.
Or when he realizes that the TV is in Lena’s room.

Ramon was eager to get back to work, but Zeus seemed dismissive.

“Do you see this tattoo?” he said, rolling up his sleeve and brandishing the macabre cephalopod on his wrist.

Ramon had seen it for the first time many years ago. Back then, it did not have as many enemies dead in the water. Nor did it have so many wounds.

“Every spear, ever jagged tooth, every slash. They all represent people who have tried to best me and failed,” Zeus explained. “Whenever somebody tries to kill me, I add a wound to this magnificent creature. On most occasions, I also add a body.”

Ramon wondered how many of the bodies on Zeus’s arms he knew. At least one.

It used to be, Zeus said, that he worried about people making threats on his life. If people wanted him dead, then surely they would find a way to make it happen. But people are predictable. They take a long time to make up their minds. Zeus learned to force their hands. Wait until someone gets to the breaking point, then give them a push over the edge. They respond with passion and emotion. They don’t think. Zeus laughed. He pointed to one body. The father of a man who had died in Zeus’s service and who had tried to kill him with a butter knife. Andris shot him dead before he even raised his arm. Another, a man who had hired a hitman to kill Zeus. At the end of a gun, Zeus talked the man down and tripled the assassin’s pay to kill the man that hired him.

There were dozens of bodies on Zeus’s arm. Surely there was more blood on his hands than was tattooed there.

“Anyway Ramon, you see why I’m not terribly worried. I can handle myself. Nobody.
Nobody
fucks with me.”

Ramon was going to ask the old man why he needed someone to watch over his step-daughter then, but he was interrupted by a ringing phone.

Zeus pointed to the door, and Ramon stepped outside. For the first ten minutes, the only sounds that Ramon could hear from inside the officer were jubilant laughter. Then it went quiet for a few minutes. When he heard Zeus again, he was screaming. Ramon strained to hear the words. The boss sounded hurt and defensive.

“I know, I know, I know,” he said.

Ramon waited, holding his breath.

“Well he shouldn’t be such a giant pussy. Would you have
ever
let that happen to yourself?”

“I didn’t think she’d break a glass over his fcking head!”

He had to have been talking about Lena. And by extension, Damien. Ramon wondered if Zeus was talking to the man he’d seen in the car at the gate the day before.

“Listen to me. I promise you…”

“I know that she’s a difficult little bitch, trust me, I know better than anyone.”

“You have my word. My little bitch
will
marry your big pussy.”

Lena was sitting up watching a cooking show that was indistinguishable from all the other cooking shows, starting a celebrity chef that was indistinguishable from all the other celebrity chefs. She’d seen this episode before, she thought, but it was still a welcome distraction from her feather down prison.

She was relieved when there was a knock at the door and Ramon came inside. She reached to her nightstand and grabbed a voice-changer toy that she’d found while digging through the drawers looking for something to keep her from going craz.

“Good morning handsome,” she said in an artificial chipmunk.

             
Lena had taken to embarrassing Ramon with little pet names like this. Yesterday, when she old him how much Tia and Michaela liked him, how they thought he was cute, Lena realized that he was completely oblivious to the effect that he had on them. How typical, she thought. The entire idea that he might be desirable to someone seemed to make him uncomfortable, and Lena was happy to abuse that.

              In the grand scheme of things, he had been the cause of a great deal of discomfort for her, so it only seemed fair that she could repay the favor. Ramon sat down on the bed now and asked how she was doing.

              “I’m good,” Lena lied, sounding like a robot.

              The truth was that she was feeling even more empty than she had the day before. She hadn’t been out of bed except to hobble to the bathroom since the night that Damien had showed up. She was starting to go crazy in her room, and wanted more than anything to get out. But her feet were still bloody and swollen and hurt like a motherfucker to stand on.

              “I could carry you down to the pool,” Ramon suggested. The idea made Lena throw back her head and laugh.

              “I’m serious,” he said, taking the voice changer and answering her with the “slo-mo” setting.

              And he was.

              Lena considered it for a moment, and couldn’t think of any reason why he shouldn’t.

              “Get my swim suit, it’s in the top drawer there.”

              Ramon opened her dresser and found the top and bottom to a matching teal bikini. He did his best to ignore the other lacy contents of the drawer, and not to think about what they’d look like on (or off) of Lena. He turned around to leave and give her some privacy, but Lena stopped him.

              “What,” she said. “It’s not like you haven’t seen it before.”

              She shamelessly pulled her shirt over her head and tossed it aside. Ramon averted his eyes, but before he did, he caught a fleeting glimpse of her bare chest. He felt a twinge between his legs as the image of her naked body burned into his eyes.

              “Ok, it’s all safe now big guy,” he said, giggling at his modesty.

She wrapped her arms around his neck as he scooped her up and carried her through the bedroom door, down the stairs, and out back. He started towards the lounge chairs on the far side, but as he walked past the deep end, he unceremoniously tossed Lena into the pool, catching her completely off guard.

The initial surprise wore off as she hit the surface and sank into the warm water. Completely submerged, she felt like a new woman. The pain of the last few days had washed away in a moment, and she burst up through the surface and took a revitalizing breath of fresh air for the first time in days.

“You bastard!” she shouted, but she was not angry. Ramon stood at the side of the pool, laughing hysterically.

“If I could walk I swear to God I’d come up there and show you what’s what!”

The image made Ramon laugh even harder. She knew she couldn’t push Ramon around, but that didn’t mean that she didn’t have other ways of getting him in the pool. Lena had grown up in the water, she was about as at home there as she was on dry ground. But Ramon didn’t know that. So while she treaded water, talking to him, she began to feign shortness of breath. As they continued talking, she’d wince now and again, not too much, but enough that Ramon noticed.

Then, in the middle of a story about a time that a bird had flown into the house and Tia and Michaela spent all afternoon chasing it around with a broom, she started to gasp, cry out, and sank beneath the water. Lena could hold her breath for over a minute. It only took fifteen seconds for Ramon to dive into the pool and pull her up to ‘safety’.

As soon as they were back above water, Lena started laughing. Ramon               knew that he’d been tricked right away, and his cheeks turned bright red. Lena kept laughing as he pulled himself up onto the side of the pool, his suit soaking wet and clinging to his body, his hair dripping down in front of his face.

“I suppose I deserved that,” he said, wiping water out of his eyes and wringing it out of his sleeves. He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, looked at it, and frowned.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…”

Ramon didn’t mind. It was cheap and the only thing on it of any value were three phone numbers which he had committed to memory. Still, he’d need to get a new one. A cell phone is perhaps the most important tool a bodyguard can have. A fact that most bodyguards overlooked. Some men are just too macho to know when they’re in over their heads and need help.

Lena swam for nearly an hour while Ramon sat in a chair drying himself out. It was a beautiful afternoon.

“Aren’t you supposed to be working?” Lena said as she swam past him with his arms behind his head and his legs propped up on the lounge chair.

“I am working,” Ramon said. “And your stepfather took all his goons out on urgent business, so I can’t take care of any of the improvements.”

“So we have the house to ourselves?” Lena said with a look that started Ramon. Her bodyguard did not know how to respond. Lena swam over to the shallow end of the pool and pushed herself gently onto the steps. All the time in the water had opened her wounds and made them significantly more tender than they’d been that morning.

“I need help getting out,” she said.

Suspicious of another ploy, Ramon was slow to approach. But Lena allowed him to pick her up and he carried her back to her room. She kept her arms wrapped tight around his neck and she watched his face as he carried her through the house. His eyes were so sad and so serious, and his thin lips always seemed flat against his face. She yearned to see the corners curl up in a smile.

Ramon laid her down in bed, but she did not release her grip on his neck.

“Wait,” she said. “I want to give you something.”

“Okay,” Ramon said. “What is it?”

Lena pulled herself up and gave him a kiss.