Personal Protection Page 5

  Straight women and femmes have my undying admiration. Periods, pregnancy and beauty treatments: you are the stronger sex. Never let anyone tell you otherwise! I don’t even have pierced ears!

  Tori was grinning ear to ear when she came out. I tried to hate her, but visions of what I’d just seen kept coming back to haunt me and I couldn’t.

  I don’t know whether she deliberately arranged it that way, or if it was for my benefit, but the rest of the afternoon was filled with restful visits to a hairdresser and manicurist.

  No stylist would touch my short barbered locks. My idea of hairdressing is to wait until the stuff is falling into my eyes, march in off the street and demand a dry cut, now, and if they can’t do it, leave.

  I’ve also been known to take scissors to it myself. So I just sat quietly said yes and no at appropriate times during the conversation and waited while my lover had the full monty on her long auburn tresses.

  Later Tori tried to get me into the spirit of things by ordering me a manicure. I accepted without too much of a fight. Considering the uses I’m usually required to put them to in my sexual practices, short, carefully rounded fingernails are a must. The manicurist tutted at the length, but dutifully washed, filed, buffed and hand-creamed my mitts. I drew the line at polish, much to her dismay. She was sensible enough not to talk about nail extensions or gold and silver little fingernails. I don’t have to do anything; people can just tell I’m a lesbian and leave me alone. Tori isn’t like that. She doesn’t look the part. I’d have been afraid I’d blown her cover that afternoon, if she had been the least bit troubled about being out. She’s not. Watching them sculpt her talons made me alternately flush with desire and wince in pain, thinking of the uses she puts them to on me. In her current mood I could imagine they’d be getting a workout sooner than I’d like.

  I’ll digress at this point to fill in some salient details. By now I’m sure my tantalising hints have you wondering just what my darling really looks like. And the ape she’s allowing to bask in her presence.

  Victoria Kingston is twenty-five years old, a coffee-skinned, brown-eyed minx. Her waist-length curly hair is natural auburn as a result of her mixed parentage. She’s a statuesque five foot nine in heels, weighs about a hundred and fourteen pounds, has clear skin, a 36-24-32 figure and a winning personality. Everybody loves her. Nobody can understand what the hell she’s doing with me. Most of the time that includes me.

  And yours truly? I weigh in at about a hundred and thirty pounds, most of it muscle, and top out at five foot four which gives my clients pause. (Remember that scene in The Bodyguard?. Kevin Costner amply demonstrates size and weight are not what make us good at the job.) I’m sure my vital statistics don’t interest you. I’ll only say I’m thirty-something, tan-free, white, have short dark brown wavy hair and such broad shoulders I look like an American football player in full kit. So no shoulder pads in my suits! Unlike the sun in my sky, I don’t have a winning personality. I’ve been accused of taking life and myself too seriously. That’s probably true. I have frown lines rather than crows’ feet and way too much silver in my hair. Probably because of the job. Not because of my girlfriend.

  “Please can we go back to my flat?”

  She was stroking my thigh while I drove as a way of persuading me. If she didn’t stop, the point would be moot, because we’d never arrive.

  “Randall, I need more clothes than this if I’m going to stay on at yours.”

  “And if we find out nobody has tried to get in, you won’t want to come back.” I put her hand firmly on her own knee when we reached a convenient set of traffic lights.

  “You could always stay at mine.”

  “We’ve been through this.”

  “I’m not made of glass!”

  Shit! What could I say to that?

  “All right.”

  I indicated, spun the wheel and pointed the bonnet toward her home.

  I didn’t really want her flat to have been touched, but it would have made things easier if we could have arrived to find the lock plate gouged. I wanted to protect her, but I couldn’t do it if she wouldn’t let me. She was my lover, not my client.

  In the event, I needn’t have worried – or perhaps I should have worried more. While the door seemed shut firmly enough, the rest of the flat showed a more violent face.

  Tori stood in the doorway and trembled. All the work she had put in on getting her life back under control was ruined by the sight that met us when she opened the living room door.

  The soft furnishings had been slashed. Everything that could be ripped had been ripped. Anything that could be broken was broken. How her neighbours hadn’t complained was beyond me.

  Maybe they had? And the police had found nobody here when they arrived. Or perhaps the perpetrator had brazened it out when the law turned up on the doorstep? These were questions for another day.

  I bundled Tori back into the car and drove her to my place, then called Dean and Craig. It was my good fortune that Craig was working the late shift and Dean had closed the office for the day. They both agreed to come over.

  It took a while to calm her down. The boys arrived conveniently as I’d got her settled. I left Craig to keep her company. He is a nurse after all; he should know about hysteria. Then Dean and I drove back to her flat in his Range Rover.

  “Bloody hell! There’s not much we can salvage here.”

  “I know. Let’s just do what we can to clean the place up before she sets foot in it again. Empty is better than trashed.”

  He was in perfect agreement. The two of us put our backs into it and had everything liveable in about three hours. I was reluctant to leave Tori longer than that. There wasn’t really anything else we could do. His car had piles of bin bags with the things we couldn’t save in the back and the few clothes still wearable in a hold-all in the front. The bastards had cut the wires on her electrical appliances. Her tropical fish were dead, her freezer had defrosted, the food was starting to go off and the floor was flooded. Nothing from telephones to CDs had escaped the rampage.

  “You know, whoever it was did this before she was raped.”

  “That had occurred to me, but I wanted your opinion.”

  He sat down at the scratched but otherwise whole table on the remaining hard-backed chair.

  “Is that why you left Craig looking after Tori instead of me?”

  Time for some brutal honesty. “Not entirely. I meant what I said, about your helping me to catch the person that did this. But I still wasn’t sure how you felt about Tori after the dinner party fiasco. I didn’t think she needed to wonder about whether you blamed her, at a time like this.”

  “Fuck! You don’t believe in pulling your punches, do you?”

  “No.” I looked at him.

  Dean ground his teeth then grimaced back.

  “I’m sorry. I overreacted.”

  “OK.”

  “OK? That’s it?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, yes. You’re my friend. I can see you’re sincere. I’m not a queen. I won’t make you pay for the next twenty years. Life’s too short.”

  This business had brought that home to us all. I could see him wondering how he would feel if something like this had happened to Craig.

  “You’re right. We should get together on this. Find out who’s responsible.”

  “Tori doesn’t know who it was. She thought at first it might be someone she knew. Maybe an ex.”

  “It was a personal attack I grant you, but… I don’t know. It feels wrong, Randall. It really might be something to do with the club.”

  I was about to lay into him for his prejudices when he held up a conciliatory hand. “It needs looking into. If I’m right this won’t be an isolated incident. We should find out if any of the other girls have been victims of similar attacks, anything from this –” he waved a hand around us “– to what happened to Tori. Violence always accompanies the sex industry. It could be our starting point.”

  �
�And the ex-girlfriends?”

  “I’ll look into that. You haven’t got enough perspective. You’ll want to go wading in full of righteous indignation and beat the crap out of them. Getting bound over or imprisoned for assault won’t do Tori any good, no matter how noble a gesture it might be.”

  I turned my back on him full of frustration.

  “You know I’m right. Let’s do this properly and get the bastard in a way they can’t get out of. Once we know we’ve got the right one, I’ll happily stand back and let you kick skittles of shit out of them and swear you were with me at the time. But let’s make sure we get the right one first, OK?” He laid a kind hand on my shoulder.

  I really wanted to hit something, but Dean’s voice of sweet reason routine had short-circuited me. He was right. But that didn’t make it any easier when all I wanted was a target. Which is when I decided what I was going to do tomorrow.

  I’d followed Tori to her appointments. She was going to have to do the same for me. Tomorrow we’d go to my gym. Apart from shooting, there is no finer way to get the urge to kill somebody out of your system.

  I rolled my neck and settled the Kevlar vest more comfortably into place as the instructor squared up to me on the mat. It hadn’t been easy to persuade Tori to come. But what she had seen in her flat convinced her that the violence wasn’t over. I’d shamelessly used that to my advantage. The prospect of sitting on her hands alone, or risking the streets without me, convinced her a trip to my world wasn’t the worst thing that could happen.

  Unlike your usual gym, this one has no exercise equipment, no weights to lift, no aerobics classes, step or otherwise. What it did have was a bunch of very determined people wearing their workday clothes – which in our case meant Kevlar vests and suits – and the occasional padded mat.

  It is important that a bodyguard be able to take a certain amount of punishment as well as dish it out. So along with martial arts classes, this place employs a selection of pugilists to beat the shit out of us. I know what you’re going to say: she lets herself get hit but she can’t watch somebody have her legs waxed? It’s different somehow. Believe me.

  “Ready?” my opponent inquired.

  “Ready.”

  For the next hour I endured a gruelling regimen that made Tori wince, grimace, gasp and swear, before she finally clapped her hand over her mouth and endured in silence.

  I felt better about running out of her waxing session at the end of it.

  “Was that really necessary?” she asked afterwards in the changing rooms.

  “Yes. I’ll be less likely to fold if someone takes a punch at somebody I’m guarding. If someone does floor me I can get back up. It takes the fear out of falling, means you can do it properly.” I peeled out of my body armour and sodden T-shirt.

  “It all looked very painful,” she said doubtfully, relieving me of my towel to rub my back dry before I got into a fresh T-shirt.

  “Not as much as you’d think. It hurts the guy smacking the Kevlar more than me.”

  “What’s next?”

  “Now I get to fight back.”

  “I like the sound of that much better.”

  I grinned. “Don’t be so sure. He won’t just stand still and let me hit him.”

  “I knew there had to be a catch.”

  “Always.” I kissed her and strapped the Kevlar back on.

  “Isn’t that an unfair advantage?” she asked as we walked through to the next room.

  “Only if the other guy isn’t wearing any.”

  They all were and they were all men. About a dozen or so had already collected in the room; a few other stragglers drifted in behind me, falling into conversation about techniques, shadow-boxing with themselves, half-heartedly sparring or checking out one another’s moves.

  “Brought some fresh flesh this week?”

  I gave the speaker what Dean calls The Look.

  “She’s my Principal.” Tori, to her credit, did no more than blink.

  “You know the rules, no one but fighters,” someone else complained.

  “I have nowhere else to stash her. Where could be safer than a room full of bouncers and bodyguards? She’ll keep clear.”

  I settled her against a wall, on one of those plastic and stainless steel stacker chairs you see everywhere from village hall meetings to doctors’ waiting rooms, amid a chorus of complaints and cat calls. And one moan that he’d planned to use the chair to hit his opponent with. I ignored them all.

  “Does that mean I’m your client?”

  “Yes, unless you want to fight one of these idiots.”

  “No! I sort of like the idea of being your client.” She touched my face. I swallowed hard and firmly put her hand back into her lap. “What? There’s a no touching rule?”

  “In a way. It is considered very unprofessional to get involved with your Principal.”

  “What if you were already involved before they became your client?”

  “Doesn’t happen. You’d be advised to get someone uninvolved to guard you.”

  “Why?”

  “Too close to the situation. An involved bodyguard might overreact.” As I had last night.

  Someone yelled my name. “Be right there!” I called back. “Can we talk about this later?”

  “Of course. I thought I knew what you did, but I’m beginning to see that I knew very little. Be careful, please?”

  “For you.”

  I went to join the others.

  “McGonnigal, you’ve drawn Spink.”

  Leon Spink is a huge black guy. He was beginning to build a gut, which meant he was less in demand for clients that require running around, but more for those that require standing around looking impressive as part of the job description.

  There isn’t any particular enmity between us; let’s just say that he’s not a big believer in women as bodyguards. He gave me this tombstone grin, pearly white perfect teeth in the ebony of his face, cracked his knuckles and said, “I’m going to enjoy this.”

  I knew I wouldn’t. But Tori’s presence meant I was going to make a damn good showing. Nobody was going to wipe the floor with me in front of my girlfriend, I promised myself that.

  Everyone paired off and began the circling and talking to psyche out their opponents.

  “I’m going to show you why women shouldn’t be in Personal Protection, little girl.”

  The mammoth body began a lumbering run towards me. His arms spread wide to gather me into a bear hug that would bruise ribs even through the Kevlar and break any limbs that got in his way. There was nowhere I could run without looking like a coward, and precious few spots on his body that were not protected by something. He had no neck to speak of; his arms and legs were rolls of fat and muscle; he wore a box to protect his cock and balls; and the Kevlar vest sandwiched his torso.

  As the inexorable juggernaut barrelled towards me, I did the only thing I could think of. At the last moment I dropped into a squat, then lashed out with a foot to his right kneecap.

  A sickening snapping noise stilled all movement in the gym. Leon Spink shrieked, lurched, then fell backwards, crashing to the floor. I stood. As quickly as that it was all over.

  All bodyguards know elementary medicine. Nobody needed to examine Spink to know I’d broken his patella. He’d be out of action, and work, for some time. With the weight he was carrying, he might never be free of pain, even if I hadn’t permanently weakened him. I didn’t like what I’d been forced to do, but what choice had there been? He wouldn’t have stopped till he’d proved his point and I couldn’t afford to be hospitalised, now of all times. I’d acted out of instinct and self-preservation. It was what I was trained for.

  The real medic we had on hand immobilised his leg and called for an ambulance. Since I’d been responsible I got changed, then sat with him till it arrived. Tori stayed in the background on her chair. Spink did his fair share of cursing and moaning about his fate to the air, then addressed me directly.

  “You’re good.�
�

  “Thanks.”

  “Been lookin’ for an excuse to get out. My old lady thought it was time to move on. Looks like you’ve given me what she wanted.”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer that. It was sort of a backhanded compliment.

  “Someone will need to take my place till they can find a replacement in my current job. I’ll phone and recommend you.”

  “Leon, I can’t…”

  His laughter interrupted me. “Sure you can. It won’t interfere with your client. Might even be helpful to you. I’m bouncin’. At your lady friend’s club.”

  I was so carried away with this gift from the gods which had fallen so conveniently into my lap that I didn’t notice how quiet Tori was until we reached my apartment.

  “So that’s what you do,” she said quietly as I turned off the engine. “You hurt people.”

  “I protect people.”

  “That wasn’t how it looked to me.”

  “Would you have preferred I just let him wipe the floor with me? He would have.”

  “Of course not, but…”

  “There are no buts, Tori. I do what I have to, we all do. It’s my job.”

  She turned her face away, looked out of the window.

  “I’d never hurt you, you know that, don’t you?”

  She was quiet for much too long.

  “Tori?”

  She let herself out of the car. I scrambled to follow.

  “Tori, you don’t think..?”

  She turned at the door to confront me. “I don’t know what to think. It’s not what I expected. You’re not what I expected. I know you sometimes carry a gun, that you’ve promised to get whoever was responsible for what happened to me. But you didn’t think. You just did it. You didn’t know that man beyond casual acquaintance, but you’re not even sorry. I’m not sure I want anything to do with that level of violence!”