by John Barnes
I was running down the stairs screaming like a madman, which I suppose I was at the time. One of the nice strong woman guards from Steel Curtain—their specialist in mental patients—grabbed me and pinned me down just after the bomb went off. Other people were charging upstairs to get Carrie and Dad, and they quickly swept us into the “secure room”—the old laundry room that they’d fortified as a kind of bomb shelter in the middle of the house.
By the time they let us out, the Steel Curtain guys had put out three minor fires on the roof and one blazing curtain inside the house, a repair crew was on its way to board up and reglaze the broken windows, and the house and yard were crawling with cops, FBI, and various guys who never exactly said who they worked for but looked like they were more used to wearing uniforms than the new suits they were in.
It was Christmas morning. I got up, wandered through the house that smelled strangely of smoke, and went to my untouched bedroom. I shrugged off the robe, got out the razor, changed the blade, and carefully shaved, then took a shower. I needed a haircut but I had no idea where I’d find a barber today.
My clothes fit really loose, and I realized that several months of not eating or exercising much had taken a lot off me. Well, the old weight set was down in the basement, and maybe the Steel Curtain people had an idea where I could get a little roadwork in on a track. And certainly I ought to be safe enough at my old dojo—being surrounded by friendly martial artists, with armed guards outside …
I went down and asked the cook Dad had hired (the book was rapidly making him rich, which was a good thing considering how much Carrie needed) to fix me a huge breakfast. Carrie stared at me for a long moment, then pulled her wheelchair around next to me to eat her own bagel and coffee.
“What are you going to do today?” she asked.
“I’ll start by apologizing,” I said. “I’m afraid I haven’t gotten a thing for either you or Dad.”
Dad came in then, and he said, “Seeing you like this is a pretty good gift as is. We didn’t exactly know what you’d like, Mark, so we took some guesses. Want to come and see how we did?”
“Sure.” I pushed the now-empty plate away, grabbing a last piece of toast to tuck into my jaws—I needed my strength back quickly—and went out with them to discover that I had gained a few sweaters, a pair of running shoes, and several large collections of prints. I was careful to praise all of them thoroughly.
I spent most of the rest of that day talking to the Steel Curtain people, and then on the phone to the extremely annoying shrink Dad had hired to pester me. Something about giving guns to mental patients bothered the guy, even when the mental patient could explain perfectly coherently that a gun was exactly what he needed.
It was simple. When that bomb went off—even before, when I knew something was happening—I wanted a gun in my hand and a chance to shoot back. I’d never fired a shot at anything but a paper target, nor hit anybody since I was a kid other than in the dojo, but that didn’t matter. I’d found a purpose in life—hitting back.
It wasn’t exactly the kind of thing a shrink approves of, but Dad and Carrie backed me up, and eventually Doctor Svetlana went for it as well. I think they figured it was just a phase, but a better one than watching me slowly fade away to a ghost. Anyway, it took about three days, and then all of a sudden everyone caved in, and I had the clearance to start getting myself qualified as a bodyguard.
If the shrink wasn’t crazy about it, Hal Payton, the head of Steel Curtain, was about as unenthusiastic as you can get. Having the client decide to join the bodyguards was not at all in his recipe for how things ought to work. Once again, though, I wore him down; the fact was that if I’d been an applicant off the street, with my skills, he’d have hired me in an instant. Moreover, he had the testimony of half a dozen people, plus his own eyesight, to tell him that I had found something that I could really take an interest in, and that, irregular as it was, it was making me better.
I passed his qualifiers on pistol and martial arts with no hassle at all, even showing one of his guys a thing or two about the pugil stick. It didn’t take long for me to get through the bonding process—there was practically nothing to investigate and it was all out in the open. And the exam for a Pennsylvania PI’s license could be passed by a young chimp. By the new year I was a licensed bodyguard, working as a freelance contractor, nominally hired by Dad (for the minimum wage—I could hardly ask him to pay me a “real” salary for something as crazy as this) to work with Steel Curtain.
The other bodyguards seemed a little bemused by it all, but when they found they could rib me about it and that I’d tease back in a friendly way, they accepted me pretty quickly. I realized early on that I would have done better to have a little military experience—you live closer to weapons for a longer time that way—and that maybe I should think about studying for the police exams; a surprising number of rent-a-cops are guys who found the test too tough, but I figured the police exam couldn’t be any tougher than the Ph.D. comprehensive exam I had been preparing for.
I especially liked sitting up at night; maybe that was because I figured that was when it would happen. Maybe because the bomb had gone off in bright daylight. I didn’t care—one perk that my strange position carried was that I could pick my own hours, and I was certainly going to exercise that.
The family had always gone to church on Epiphany, January 6, the celebration of the coming of the Wise Men, and although Reverend Hamlin took a little persuading—he thought armed men sitting around in Ninth Presbyterian might disturb the parishioners a bit—he came around after Dad made a big donation to the building fund.
This was partly Dad’s idea and partly Doctor Svetlana’s—“reestablishing family rituals” was what he called it, meaning it was better to get used to doing things without Jerry, Marie, and Mom than to have the empty time there to prey on our minds.
Epiphany evening service is not one of the biggies among even the most devoted churchgoers, but Reverend Hamlin gave a pretty good sermon, told the old familiar story pretty well, and had just gotten to the point of announcing that we would be taking communion next when the doors at the side of the sanctuary flew open.
The Steel Curtain guy on the other side of Dad pounced on him and brought him down to the floor; the one next to Carrie would have rolled her from her wheelchair to the floor except that she’d already gotten down there herself. Most of the congregation just gaped and gasped, but Reverend Hamlin did a very creditable job of taking cover under the communion table, knocking grape juice and little chunks of Wonder Bread everywhere.
Payton should have tackled me, but he was busy reaching for his sidearm, so I lunged, cleared the pew in front of me, dropped between pews, and had my Colt up and leveled before I was even aware that the top of the pew to my left had suddenly splintered. I saw the men bursting through the door to the right and fired twice, not really aiming so much as just getting shots off to make them keep their heads down, slow them up, and spoil their aim. From around the church, wherever a Steel Curtain guard could get a clear line of fire, pistol shots were cracking out, and the first two Blades to make it through the door made it only a step or two before they were cut down.
If they’d come with a bomb or a grenade, they might have pulled it off, but even then it would have been close. There was a clatter of gunfire outside, and the terrorists bursting into the sanctuary whirled to run back out. Steel Curtain men shot them in the back—I was shooting myself, but later it turned out that the bodies had only .38 slugs and one .357 Magnum in them, and all my shots were found in places like the doorframe or the side of the choir loft. Payton later told me it was buck fever.
Thirty seconds after the attack began, the Blades were all dead or dying on the floor. The firing outside turned out to be the city cops, who had been closing in and had caught the getaway vehicle.
But it took us a while to find that out. First everyone had to get up from behind pews and look around nervously, and the Steel Curtain people
made Dad and Carrie stay down and quiet for a long time. There were a few holes in the stained-glass windows—I noted that the Lamb of God seemed to have taken one right between the eyes—and a lot of the older parishioners weren’t going to be exactly the same for a while, but the only innocent bystander hit was the Sunday School director, a kind-of cute young thing who had all sorts of “very serious and important raps” with kids; some plaster chips had gotten blown into her thigh, and the blood ruined a good blue wool dress.
Aside from the dress, Dad ended up paying for new carpets by the sanctuary doors (bloodstains don’t come out easily), new paneling and woodwork in various places where rounds had hit, plastering to cover pockmarks in the walls, and a new surplice and stole for Reverend Hamlin, his having been ruined in a rain of grape juice. (He looked pretty grim getting up from under the communion table, but I could see where his sense of humor might have gone to hell about that point.)
And though I hadn’t hit a thing, I was confirmed in my choice of profession. Three months later the FBI said they were pretty sure Blade of the Most Merciful was out of business, and Dad and Carrie started traveling with just a guard or two each. I opened Mark Strang Bodyguards.
Since then I’d been hit several times, and hit people back, and I found that it was what I lived for. Five years had gone by, and Carrie was Dr. Strang now and doing all sorts of hush-hush stuff for Uncle Sam, Dad had two more books out and was on the talk shows a lot to explain the Mideast—and I was still living over my storefront office.
But hey, with the exception of getting thumped on by nuts like Brunreich, it wasn’t such a bad life, and it wasn’t like I’d be doing anything else. And I still had two years left on my leave of absence before I would actually have to tell them I was never coming back to settle into the quiet life of art history.
My whole life wasn’t exactly flashing by me as I rode in the back of Robbie and Paula’s van, but that was the gist of it. The dreams kept returning to two things … the last glimpses I had had of Marie, alive, and the moment when I found out how good it felt to hit people.
Not necessarily to hit them back, either. They didn’t have to have done anything to me. What it was, I think, was simply that a part of me had figured out that the whole world was just too damned violent, and people hurt each other much too often. And one way to get people out of the habit of hurting other people was to hit the aggressor with whatever force was to hand.
It was simplistic and dumb. And I believed in it down to the very core of my being.
My face was a little damp from my own slobber when Robbie gently shook me awake; Robbie’s a small woman, and it was some effort for her and Paula to get me inside my apartment and dump me on my bed. They knew where the spare key was—they’d done house-sitting for me a time or two—so they just locked the place up behind them. (I was dimly aware of this as I considered whether or not I wanted to get undressed and get under the covers rather than just stay where I was.)
After a while, I slept, and when I woke up, the world looked very slightly better. It was late in the afternoon, and the answering machine downstairs showed that the phone had not rung at all during the day, which made it a typical day. The mail was the phone bill and Ed McMahon; I considered referring them to each other. I was loaded, between Marie’s life insurance and the allowance Dad had settled on me, and it was a good thing too, because the business needed infusions of cash pretty regularly.
My right hand was aching where the tip of Brunreich’s bat had grazed me, and though I could flex all the fingers, I suspected I was bruised pretty deeply. This was going to cut into my ability to do anything effective for a while; I’m not much good on the left side in karate, judo, or hapkido, and I don’t shoot left at all. Probably I should practice all of that, but I never seem to get around to it.
I wandered back upstairs, fixed myself macaroni and cheese, took off my clothes, and got into a hot tub, with the plate of food on the toilet lid beside me. The warm water and the cold beer seemed to do my hand some good, and the meal helped, too; pretty soon I was quietly drifting, thinking of any old thing. That poor kid Porter had a tough row to hoe … she was just about the first client I’d ever cared about much, other than as a source of income and the “prisoner’s base” I was supposed to guard in this elaborate game that gave a grown-up man an excuse for violence, or for threatening violence, on public streets.
The other agencies in town didn’t like me much. They liked to work by intimidation. I liked to work by preemptive strike. I wondered what Porter might eventually hear about me, and I wondered even more why I cared.
Maybe it was getting time to date somebody again, though that seemed a waste of time and effort, too. I had a couple of alternatives, as it were—I could always get Robbie and Paula, who were always broke, to go to dinner and the movies, with no risk that either of them was going to want a good-night kiss, let alone to get into bed with me. And there was a former client, Melissa, whose ex-pimp I’d roughed up, who didn’t mind occasionally giving me some in-kind payment on the bill she still owed me, if I just wanted physical contact.
She was a nice enough girl in her way … what if I actually took her out? She said she wasn’t a working girl anymore, except for what she was doing for me (she didn’t seem to keep books, so I never told her whether she was anywhere near paying off the debt. The truth was, I didn’t see any reason to let her stop, and I didn’t care enough if she just decided to).
That was kind of an odd thought. Dinner with Melissa. Not a great idea—might lead to conversation. She knew my story well enough, and I knew all about hers, but that didn’t mean conversation was safe. I wasn’t quite ready to have opinions about anything.
So what did I want next year to be like? Maybe I just wanted to have an opinion about something, living versus dying, say, or liking some client or other.
Well, I had liked Porter. There. Smart quiet ten-year-olds were nicer than their crazy parents. I had an opinion about something. And heck, by the time I was thinking about dating anybody again, Porter would probably be looking for her second husband, the way things work these days.
Having an opinion didn’t seem to require any action, which was fine with me. I finished off the mac and cheese, looked at my hand—it was still swelling a little further, but I was sure now it was just bruised—and opened another beer for dessert.
I had just about finished beer number two and once again reached the conclusion that I wasn’t going to change anything about my life right away when the buzzer from downstairs went off. I jumped out of the tub, spilling the last of the beer into the gray suds, wrapped a towel around myself, went into the single large room that’s the rest of my apartment, and flipped on the video camera for the peephole.
He was a big, square-built guy, standing there patiently in the late-afternoon spring sunshine, and at first glance I would have figured he had a job lifting boxes somewhere, but the way he moved, sort of leading with his head as he looked around the street, suggested that he did some kind of brain work, might even be a scholar, and just happened to keep himself in shape. His hair was salt-and-pepper gray, thick, and overdue for a haircut; his nose spread across his face like someone had used a chisel to reshape it into a triangle. If he had students, they probably thought he looked like Fred Flintstone.
I pushed down the talk button on the intercom. “Can I help you?”
“I need to engage your services—or someone’s—as soon as possible.” His voice had that “educated American” accent that my dad’s does, the one that professors cultivate.
“Are you being followed right now?” I asked.
“It’s entirely possible.”
“Then come inside. I’ll be down to let you into the office part in a couple of minutes.” I pushed the door release button, and the buzzer went off; he turned the doorknob and came into the front room of my office, quickly closing the door behind himself. I flipped the video camera control over so that I could keep an eye on him there, though
there wasn’t much to worry about—the desk, file cabinets, and safe were all behind a dead-bolted solid-core door in the inner office. I suppose he could have torn up the old copies of Architecture Today, Reader’s Digest, and Art Collector that I keep there, or stolen one of the plastic chairs.
This made it a little more intriguing. He had two cases with him, one about big enough for a few changes of clothes and maybe some books and papers, the other about the size for an outsized briefcase. Usually if someone is being followed when they come to my office, it’s a woman with a crazy husband or boyfriend, or a couple of times it’s been a woman who was being stalked by one of those strange characters who decide they’re in love with a pretty face on the street.
Well, maybe he was in a love triangle or something.
I threw clothes on and hurried downstairs. When I opened the door from the inner office, he had set his cases down but he was keeping his hands close to the handles, not making a big thing of it but obviously ready to grab and run if he had to.
I said, “Come on in and have a seat.” He did, and I dead-bolted the door again behind us, then took my own seat behind my desk.
The first thing he did was lift the smaller case up, thump it down on the desk on its side, and open it. He took out a small bound stack of bills, the kind you get from the bank, and handed it to me; it was a set of fifty one-hundred-dollar bills.
I looked at it and said, “I don’t work for the mob, religious cults, or governments-in-exile.”
“Neither do I,” he said. “You may find this hard to believe, but I’m just a plain old professor of sociology at Pitt; the cash is from my savings. My name is Harry Skena. I’m only hiring a bodyguard because I can’t get the police or FBI to believe me.”
