Life Is Short and Then You Die

by Kelley Armstrong

  What did I want to do?

  Okay, so it’s not like I had that completely mapped out. There are a lot of moving parts in my head. I like to draw, and I’m pretty good at it. I like to sing, and if I had the time, maybe I’d audition for a school show. I know admiring girls isn’t a profession, but I bet I’d be good at it if it was. There are a lot of girls in drama club. Including Emily Ito. Actually, Emily Ito is why I started thinking about doing stage stuff in the first place. She has that triple threat combination of brains, a voice like Rihanna, and a face like … well, like Emily Ito.

  My point is that being a bodyguard isn’t—and never has been—at the top of my list. Not even top five. Barely top ten, and even then it’s on the list because I kind of feel I’m supposed to want to be a bodyguard.

  And look, here I was pretending to be a bodyguard for a kid that didn’t need to be guarded. Well, probably not.

  His parents on the other hand? Yeah, they needed the whole Quinn family on the clock. Which they were.

  The job we’d been working all summer was down in the islands. St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Maarten. I know, tough life, right? This gig has its perks, no doubt. Except that a lot of it is about as much fun as a root canal without the funny gas.

  We were here protecting the Palmieri family. Yeah, those Palmieris. The ones with all those juicy millions. Nine hundred million, according to Forbes.

  I had to spend some time just saying that to myself.

  Nine. Hundred. Million. I like saying it slowly. Tasting it, because … that’s yummy.

  The father, Antonio, a tech mogul. His company isn’t sexy like Apple or Samsung. They don’t make things you’d go out and buy. No, PalmTech makes parts for things. Without him, your smartphone would be kinda dumb. His wife, Sofia, had her own money from her mother’s design business. Absurd clothes for people who are so rich no one will tell them they look ridiculous. My ’rents and my aunt and uncle take turns watch-dogging them. Mr. Palmieri and his wife are the targets. Not of death threats, but for professional kidnapping.

  That is a big, big business. Snatching rich folks, posting ransom demands, providing proof of life, and then handling everything like a business transaction. The kidnappers run it straight, and most of the time people like us are the ones delivering the money and returning with the hostage. Unless we can prevent the actual kidnapping, we generally don’t do heroic rescues with guns blazing and a lot of kung fu. That’s the movies.

  In the real world, we have to—as Dad likes to say—be practical about the safety of our clients. Meaning gunfights and brawls aren’t the go-to choice. Besides, guys like Palmieri have kidnap insurance. Yes, that’s a thing.

  Targeting the kids—Valeria, who was eighteen, a year older than me—and Carlo, was not a big factor for this job. Ayleen seemed to be spending most of her time shopping with Valeria. Ayleen loves to shop, but Valeria is apparently Olympic level. There were no actual threats—death or kidnapping or anything—aimed at Valeria. From what my sister says, it’s probably because no one, not even kidnappers, would want to subject themselves to her company, even for money.

  “Valeria is the world’s single most annoying person,” Ayleen confided to me after the first night. “She’s either shopping, talking about shopping, shopping online, planning the shopping she’s going to do tomorrow, or complaining. Actually, maybe she complains more than she shops, but it’s close.”

  “Complains about what?” I asked.

  “Pick a topic. Any topic. She’ll have something negative to say about it. She could drive the Dalai Lama to start kicking puppies. Seriously, I’ve never seen a more spoiled, self-centered, narcississistic—”

  “Narcissistic,” I corrected, but she ignored me.

  “—poor little rich girl in my life,” concluded Ayleen. “If I didn’t think Mom and Dad would ground me for life, I’d feed her to the piranhas.”

  “First,” I said, “you’re eighteen. They can’t ground you anymore.”

  “Yeah? Try telling them that.”

  “Second … there are no piranhas in St. Thomas.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do, actually. Piranhas are freshwater fish from South America.”

  “Well, then what kind of man-eating—or snotty-rich-girl-eating—fish do they have around here?”

  “Barracudas?” I suggested. “Moray eels? They’re cranky. Some sharks…”

  “Maybe one of them will eat Valeria and get her off my hands,” said Ayleen, “because about the only thing she’s good for is harassing retail employees or fish food.”

  I’d met Valeria, and barracuda snacks or not, Ayleen had a point.

  As for Carlo…? He’s just a kid.

  The threatening letter the Palmieris received was the kind nobody took seriously. I mean, it was actually composed with words cut from magazines and catalogs. Like in old mystery movies. Like … who does that? I’m not even sure anyone ever actually did that. When Uncle Bear showed me the note, he was laughing. We all were. It read:

  WE WANT TEN MILLION DOLLARS OR WE KILL THE BOY

  SMALL UNMARKED BILLS

  NO TRICKS NO COPS

  No punctuation, either.

  “Tell me what’s wrong with this?” asked Uncle Bear. His real name is Barry, but he looks like a shaved grizzly bear with a beer gut and a lot of Marine Corps tattoos. He’s also six five, and weighs way north of three hundred pounds. Trust me, a lot of it isn’t fat, though it looks like it is.

  He held the note out in a plastic evidence sleeve. I read it, shrugged, handed it back.

  “They don’t know what they’re doing?” I said.

  Uncle Bear had a plastic drink stirrer between his teeth, and it bobbed as he chewed on it. “Tell me why.”

  “Well, first, the whole cut-and-paste-from-actual-magazines thing,” I said. “All they needed to do was compose it on a laptop and print it out. If they were afraid that the cops could somehow identify the printer—”

  “Which they mostly can’t do.”

  “—which they mostly can’t do,” I agreed, “they could have gone to any Staples, or even a business center at any hotel, and printed it out. No one would ever be able to trace it.”

  “Uh-huh. What else?”

  “They didn’t give any instructions. They didn’t even say how they’d be in touch with instructions.”

  “Uh-huh. And…?”

  I shrugged. “Pros don’t make these mistakes. They call from burner phones, and they never use the same burner twice.”

  Burners are disposable cell phones that come with prepaid minutes. Mom says that the biggest market share for them are people in organized crime, from small gangs to multinational crime families.

  I nodded at the note. “But what if it’s real, though? What if someone tries to grab him? Not a pro, but some jerk?”

  Uncle Bear laughed and punched me playfully on the arm. Which hurt. And left a bruise. “That’s where you come in, Dylan. They want him, they got to go through you. But don’t go all googly-eyed over it. No one’s going to try it. This is some whacko fan being cute. Heck, if he was a couple of years older and as much of a Goody Two-shoes, I’d think the kid sent it himself. Cry for attention and all that crap.”

  “Carlo wouldn’t do that,” I said.

  “Didn’t I just say he wouldn’t?” asked Uncle Bear, and took another swipe at me, which I evaded.

  3.

  All of that was three days ago. Now it was day four, and I was discovering just how exactly mind-numbingly dull bodyguard work was. I mean, seriously, I bet if I sat down with a bucket of popcorn and watched paint dry, I’d have loads more fun.

  It was also stupid.

  Carlo was on the island of St. Thomas for a photo shoot at Blackbeard’s Castle. Now … St. Thomas is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. Like—total CGI beautiful. It’s in the Virgin Islands, in the Caribbean, and if you haven’t seen videos of it, go search YouTube. “OMG” doesn’t begin to describe it. Pe
rfect temperature, perfect beaches, perfect everything. Even though Hurricane Irma kicked its butt pretty hard back in 2017, it bounced back, and is any sane person’s definition of amazing.

  But … were we on the beach? No. Carlo burns easily, despite the forty pounds of sunscreen his mom makes him put on. Were we snorkeling? Nope. His dad was afraid of Carlo drowning.

  Side note—Mr. Palmieri is afraid of pretty much everything when it comes to Carlo. Even though he’s seven years younger than Valeria, he’s the heir. It’s this ugly thing that everyone who reads about them on the Net knows, but nobody talks about. Valeria was born to Antonio Palmieri’s first wife, and that marriage ended in World War III. Valeria’s mom got some sleazy private investigator to take the wrong kind of pictures, and Mr. Palmieri had to fork over some serious bank during the divorce.

  Weirdly, though, Valeria’s mom didn’t want to take her daughter with her. She pretty much dumped her and went off to spend her money. Which sucks, and more so because Mr. Palmieri seemed to take it out on Valeria. As if it was her fault that he slept around and got caught and then had to hand over all that money.

  When Mr. Palmieri got married again—to a woman who wasn’t a whole lot older than his daughter is now—and they had a son, everything became about Carlo. He was the one Mr. Palmieri was always photographed with. Carlo was the one who’d inherit all those hundreds of millions.

  I don’t know, maybe that’s why Valeria loved to shop so much. Spending money while she had it in case Carlo wasn’t generous when he got it all. Spending it now in case Carlo grew up to be a jerk like his dad. Spending it because it probably felt like buying love. Kind of sad, really.

  News flash: Families suck.

  So, the photo shoot at Blackbeard’s Castle was part of a big feature spread for a feature on Carlo’s dad. It was for—big surprise—Money magazine. The photographer wanted to put Carlo in a costume and take shots of him in a real pirate captain’s castle. Sounds fun, right? Not really. They made him look like the son of Captain Jack Sparrow. That’s wrong from the jump. Eyeliner, a bad wig, a fake mustache that looked like someone took some linguini, dyed it the color of dog poop, and pasted it to the kid’s upper lip. One of those three-corner hats and a plastic sword.

  I was standing behind the cameraman, and the kid gives me a look that said this is where his therapy bill was starting. I tried to give him a reassuring smile, but I don’t think he was reassured at all.

  So, there he is, standing by the big statue of Blackbeard, posed on a pile of decorative rocks they brought in for no reason I can imagine, holding a plastic sword, flanked by two girls who looked like they stepped out of a reality show about plastic implants. I mean, nothing that I could see on them had its origins in human DNA. Besides, Carlo’s eleven. Have a little perspective.

  Blackbeard’s Castle is in the city of Charlotte Amalie. It’s right out in the open. If, say, a sniper wanted to punch Carlo’s ticket, he could have done it from anywhere. On the slopes around the castle, from behind any of the other statues on the island, even from a boat in the water.

  A sniper, everyone told me, wasn’t likely. A snatch-and-grab team wasn’t likely, either. Aunt Dix ran all these computer projections on the statistical probabilities of anyone trying an abduction in public, on a small island like St. Thomas, in broad daylight. The odds were—and I’m being as precise as possible here—a bazillion to one. If there was even a whiff of a chance of that note being serious, they’d have canceled the photo shoot and Antonio Palmieri would probably have locked his heir in a bank vault.

  Which is why I was working Carlo alone. The rest of the Dylan family were one radio call away. I was wired. All I had to do was say the right words and they’d come running. But … this was supposed to be what Uncle Bear called a “vacation gig.” Meaning keep my eyes open, but otherwise work on my tan.

  Things don’t always work out the way people think.

  4.

  I was walking in a slow pattern of wide half circles, watching the area around the photo shoot when I saw a white SUV pull up in the visitors’ parking lot. Two guys got out, and I could see a third guy, smaller than the first two, seated behind the wheel. One of the two guys was white, the other black, but I didn’t like the looks of either. The white guy was tall and gangly, with basketball player muscles and a shaved head. The black guy was short and almost as wide as he was tall, with biceps like soccer balls and no trace of a smile. They both wore Oakleys and Hawaiian shirts over shorts. At a quick glance, they were a couple of blue-collar guys on vacation in the islands. Maybe some pro ballers chilling during the off-season.

  I wasn’t taught to take quick glances, though.

  My dad drilled me on making what he called the “twice-over.” A first glance to kind of capture a photo image of the person in my head so I could remember height, weight, race, hair and eye color, clothes, and age. Then a second look to do a Sherlock Holmes on the picture. What looks normal? What doesn’t? What’s supposed to be there and what’s out of place? Do it enough times, especially with Dad giving me looks of icy disapproval every time I screwed up, and you get good at it. Later, it becomes like a game. Other kids at parties think it’s a magic trick. So do girls, and I’m seriously okay with anything that makes me interesting to girls. Juggling, I’ve found, doesn’t get me very far.

  So, I’m scoping these two guys, and suddenly the details aren’t really jibing with the clothes.

  First, both of their shirts were a size too big. They also wore the shirts unbuttoned over tank tops, and with the breeze, they used their right hands to press the shirt flaps against their stomachs. Who bothers to do that on a tropical island? It’s ninety-three degrees. A little breeze feels good.

  But it wasn’t really that. It was the fact that they used their right hands.

  Here’s the logic. Most people are right-handed. When we’re in public, there’s always a chance we’re going to open a door, shake hands, whatever. You do that with your right hand, which means you do maintenance stuff like carrying a briefcase with your left. The dominant hand is almost always free. So why were both of these guys holding their shirt flaps closed with their rights? How come neither of them bothered to button their shirt? How come they were both wearing oversized shirts?

  Say it with me.

  Guns.

  That was half of it.

  The other half was the way they approached. The photo shoot had already gathered a crowd of tourists. Sure, that happens; you expect it. But rubberneckers kind of wander in. They don’t get out of a car and head straight for the shoot. Why would they? How would they know about it? Carlo’s not Jennifer Lawrence in a bikini. He’s an eleven-year-old boy.

  Whose parents are sick rich.

  The last thing was where these guys were looking while they approached. They looked at the crowd, they looked at the paths to and from the statue, they looked at me, they looked at the pool. They looked everywhere but at Carlo.

  I understood that. It’s what scared me.

  Once you zero a target for a grab, you don’t need to look at him. If you’re moving toward him, you have the target in your peripheral. You look at witnesses, access, escape routes, obstacles. You look for security cameras and security personnel.

  And you look for the bodyguard.

  They saw me, and I saw their mouths tighten. I didn’t look like a tourist; I was dressed in a sport coat and khakis and had wire behind my ear. And I’m over six feet and built like a defensive tackle. I looked like what I was supposed to look like—hired muscle.

  Most celebs don’t have a teenager for a bodyguard. It depends on the image the family wants to send, and it depends on whether they want their kid to have someone protecting them that they can relate to.

  But that’s not to say I was flying without a wingman. Or without adult supervision.

  Carlo had a regular bodyguard, too. One that worked for the family. He took a weekend course to be a “protection professional.”

  Or, as those
of us in the game call it: a mouth-breathing brain-dead dumbass.

  His name was Ray. Did I not mention Ray? Now you know why.

  Ray was a slouchy guy who was Mrs. Palmieri’s third or fourth cousin, or a nephew twice removed. Something like that. He got the job through nepotism, because that’s the only way a doofus like him was ever going to get this kind of work.

  The two thugs spotted him, too. They separated. The tall guy peeled off and headed to where Ray stood, leaning against the wall of the castle, probably texting his girlfriend back in Milan. Something he’d been told about. The short guy veered my way.

  Short Guy saw me watching him.

  He smiled.

  Smiling is not always a good sign.

  “Carlo,” I called in a terse whisper, “jackrabbit. Now!”

  Jackrabbit. That was today’s danger code. We’d gone over what he was supposed to do, what Ray was supposed to do, and what I was supposed to do when that word was used.

  It’s a simple, smart, safe, easy-to-follow plan.

  Carlo looked at me with wide brown eyes and then blinked twice with a total lack of comprehension.

  He’s a good kid, like I said. Really nice. But he is dumb as a box of hammers. Parents are geniuses. This kid can’t color inside the lines.

  Tall Guy rattled off something in Italian that was way too fast for me to understand. I know exactly enough Italian to decipher the menu at Olive Garden. These guys weren’t ordering endless breadsticks.

  Short Guy grunted acknowledgment and ran straight at me.

  Ran.

  He was still pressing his shirt closed. This wasn’t a hit.

  It was a grab.

  That was how the whole day changed.

  If they had pulled guns right there, it would have been over. Short Guy was twenty feet from me, Tall Guy was twenty feet from Ray, and Carlo was between us. With a gun at that distance, there are only two things I could do: jack and squat.

  Instead, Short Guy rushed me.