The Protector

He had grown up in Westchester and knew it well, so he took a series of back roads on his return from visiting his sister, Katherine, and his six-year-old son, David, a Down syndrome child who lived with her.

On an impulse, he stopped at a picturesque overhang that offered a view of the Long Island Sound. He had some time left before he had to take over from his pal California, who was with his employer for the day.

After a moment, he exited his employer’s Mercedes, leaned on it, and gazed across at the water. The night was mild with a light breeze and a few high, elegant clouds. He felt good, glad to be alive.

His reverie, though, was interrupted by the aggressively noisy sound of a motorcycle. The disturbance irked him, perhaps more than it should have, and he waited for it to pass, his positive mood leaking away. One motorcycle roared by and then another. Two Harleys. His ears reached for the return of silence, but the revving of the engines grew louder again as the bikers turned to join him in his secluded spot.

His heart sped up and he felt the sweat starting to run down his face and arms. He was flushed, and his breathing deepened. But damn! He wasn’t armed. How he wanted the satisfaction of his 9mm Astra solid against his shoulder. Happiness is a warm gun—to surprise your enemies with. The adrenaline was coursing through him, filling him with a familiar craziness that he tried to slow down. He waited for the moment to unfold.

The two cycles stopped about three feet in front of him. The first guy was a skinny white runt with a scraggly beard and a caustic smile. The runt’s eyes glittered as in ‘Happy days, we’ve found a little mousey we can tear apart.’ This one loved finding a victim, that was obvious. Eric knew the type—to the point of boredom. The trouble for the runt was, Eric could be a little that way himself—where the justification was plain. Eight years as an Army Ranger in a special unit had validated his tendency to run more than wild and had given him the skills to do so. But he was in no hurry tonight.

The second biker was heavyset, a little flabby really, with absolutely no humor in his face. For this second one, the thought in his mind was kill or be killed. Eric understood him also.

Eric’s blood was pounding in his head, and he wanted the signal to take the two of them apart. He didn’t need a gun now that he saw them. Even if they were armed themselves, his moment would come.

They were done for. He was flushed with their annihilation and a disregard for his own danger.

“Nice evening,” said the runt. “A pleasant sort of evening to be driving a nice rich boy’s car like that one.” Again, the evil smile.

Eric didn’t speak. What was the need? His voice would crack he was so hyped. Hyped to respond. ‘Hurry, hurry, let’s do it,’ his body demanded. He just looked at the two of them. If they tried to run him down, he would be on the first one in a flash.

“Don’t want to talk? Just throw me the keys to the car and walk down the road to the right. You’ll be safe there. I know someone in Venezuela who loves these pricey German autos,” the runt told Eric, suddenly all business.

Eric beckoned to the thin one, like a taunt. He was absolutely ready, just as deadly as he had ever been at his peak. He felt it, he knew it, he wanted to test himself in action again. And he could anticipate no consequences. That was the lovely part of the game. He was the guy in the expensive car. He was the victim.

He was breathing so hard, he felt slightly dizzy. “Come on,” he whispered to himself. “Come on.” He watched their eyes. The entire scene was crystal clear, pellucid. He felt as if he were coming out of a long sleep and suddenly being himself again.

The big one made the first move, kicking down the stand on his bike, pulling out a lead pipe and advancing, threatening. No gun! Eric nearly laughed, but moved forward and jumped instead, kicking the guy directly in the jaw without the slightest warning. Eric would have kicked him again in the gut, but the biker was already down on the ground, moaning in pain.

Eric had kept the runt in sight and leaped out of the way as soon as the guy drove for him on the Harley. Eric performed a somersault and rolled, jumping up as his attacker headed back. Leaping over the body of the runt’s big pal, he picked up the lead pipe. As the cycle approached, bearing down on him, he swung and struck the would-be car thief square in the head. The runt fell off the bike, unconscious.

The crunch of the pipe against the man’s skull jolted Eric and turned his stomach 360 degrees. Oh Christ, maybe he had killed the guy. Goddamn! He had meant to, maybe, but now that the worst might have happened, he felt sick. He never liked when things that were alive turned suddenly dead—especially when the cause was an up-close action of his own.

Out of the corner of his eye, Eric caught a movement. The big biker was crawling toward Eric, reaching for his legs.

Eric quickly side-stepped out of the way, then bounded heavily, with both feet, solidly onto the wounded man’s back. He leaped off before he could lose his balance. Something had cracked—a rib, maybe a vertebra. Eric threw the pipe well away from the area and moved quickly toward the car. He got in and started the engine.

Should he call the police, or simply drive away? Oh, damn, what if the small guy wasn’t dead, but was dying? And the fat one could die, depending on what organs had been damaged; he could even be in shock. And suppose Eric didn’t call, but someone saw the license as he left and they tracked him down?

Eric dialed 911 on the car phone and told them to send the police and two ambulances. Well, that shot the rest of the evening. He was going to be late getting back.

“You’re a one-man disaster area,” the trooper said, regarding him quizzically. Eric didn’t respond but gave the trooper his identification and the car registration. Right, now they had to call Watson to verify his possession of the car.

“Where’d you learn how to do that?” the trooper asked.

“I was in the Army for eight years,” he said in a neutral tone. “I’m currently employed as an executive protection specialist. I work for Frank Watson, the owner of the vehicle.” He inclined his head toward the car in question.

He excused himself for a moment and walked over to the ambulances. The bikers were still breathing. Both were in head blocks to stabilize their spinal columns. “Are they okay?” he asked the EMS team.

“Not really” was the response.

The time was one a.m. Eric parked the car in the garage and stood outside the house, listening. He couldn’t walk around the building because that would set off the motion detectors. He should have been armed tonight. He was stupid not to have been. Not for his own protection, but for when he returned to the house. What if an incident was going on inside, right now?

Eric disarmed the alarm system and let himself in quietly, then rearmed the unit. He listened to the house. He thought he could hear the occupants breathing, and he took a deep breath himself.

He removed his shoes, walked through the house downstairs, checking, then went up to his room. Someone was lying on his bed, but without turning on the light he could see that someone was California. Eric started to undress and get ready for bed, knowing he had already made enough noise to wake the other man up.

California sat upright and propped himself against the wall. “Hey, big buddy, I heard you had a dust-up on the highway tonight. Muy macho muchacho! Did some damage?”

“Yeah. I was just lying in wait for some carjackers, so I could bust their heads in. It was swell. Stimulating, you know. But they were white-bread, man. They were soft. I don’t know where they got the idea that they were intimidating. Not!” Eric put on a T-shirt to sleep in. “How’s our special guy?”

“Nothing doing,” reported California. He yawned. “Are we having a romantic moment here? Or do you just like the dark?”

“Yeah, I’m afraid of the light. It makes me feel like a big white target. If only I were black like you, I’d turn on all the lights. No one could see me.”

“You forget a little thing called night vision, buddy. You can run, but you cannot hide.”

“Ah, you’re a man of deep logic. Smart, too,” Eric said. He picked a bowl of fruit off of the dresser and put it on the night table next to the bed. Eric always kept food in his room. He preferred to stay out of the family’s way as much as possible. He took an apple and bit into it. “No little telltale signs of surveillance on our guy today?”

“No, nothing.” California shrugged.

Eric made a face that signaled a certain degree of disgust. “We’re helping our pal here lead a particularly uninteresting existence. Adding a little window dressing. Years could go by before anyone even thinks bad thoughts about him, much less tries anything.” He sighed. “I should be happy, right? We’re so much safer this way.”

“And how’s your kid?” California had met David once, a couple of years back.

“He’s great. He’s a great little kid. He loves me. It can’t get much better than that. No matter what. I mean, if he were like a normal, smart kid, that wouldn’t make us better together. I wouldn’t love him more. He wouldn’t love me more.” Eric stared at California, looking for some reaction, but spoke again before the other man gave one.

“Yeah, so maybe he won’t have all the wondrous opportunities in life afforded guys like you and me. Like the monumental chance to be shot at for a few bucks, protecting someone else’s ass. The outstanding privilege of being some rich neurotic’s live-in servant. The stupendous honor of being crabbed at by someone else’s wife for her husband’s workaholic business schedule that you also wish to hell he would cut back on. Our fabulous, glamorous lives! To think that my own son will never know such infinite pleasures, that’s where the heartbreak lies.” He sat in the chair next to the bed and again looked at his friend for a response.

After a second, he continued his earnest exposition. “You think I’m nuts, deluded, misperceiving the passing parade. Not sufficiently destroyed about David’s situation and not sufficiently grateful for my own. Tell me,” he demanded.

California looked at him somberly, saying nothing. The two were peas in a pod—both upper-middle-class boys who had underperformed, according to their parents: California, the son of a Los Angeles dentist and Eric, the son of a corporate accountant. Eric finished the piece of fruit and held the apple core in his hand, not wanting to put it in the wastebasket. “Sorry I’m late. I’m exhausted. Are you going to split?”

Eric was up at six, sore from his athleticism the night before. Although he did hard exercise daily, moving when the adrenaline was flowing took the body beyond its usual limitations. He worked out then for 40 minutes, doing stomach crunches and arm work with only 10-pound hand weights. He stretched. You can’t kick someone in the jaw if you don’t keep the hamstrings and inner thigh muscles long and loose.

He took a quick hot shower and dressed. The shoulder holster with the Astra-75 were included under his suit jacket. The gun was steel, a solid two-pound weight pulling his shoulder down.

Before Eric went downstairs, he phoned the hospital to ask about his pals from the night before. He needed several calls, but finally reached the floor nurse. The men were alive, had multiple injuries, and were still being evaluated, she said. The nurse was sympathetic, thinking him to be a concerned friend of the patients. Before he hung up, he told her, “Don’t turn your back on my buddies. They’re not good folks.”

He and his principal got in the Mercedes and headed for the city. Eric drove. It was nearly eight. They were late; the traffic would be horrendous. He took the long way around, anyway, to vary the route. Falling into a habit trap was so easy. That’s how you got taken. He watched for vehicles, faces that looked familiar.

“Is the car okay then?” asked Watson in a weighted tone, rich with the implication that Eric had done something particularly blameworthy.

“Yes, it’s fine,” Eric answered in a neutral, natural manner, as if he’d completely missed the question’s overtones.

“I hope no one was hurt,” Watson said piously.

Eric didn’t respond. That was enough conversation with his employer for one morning. He concentrated on being stuck bumper to bumper for twenty minutes on what they jokingly called the Expressway. Some kidders. Watson read The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Investor’s Business Daily as they sat.

Eric had a desk of his own in the secretary’s office outside Watson’s spacious suite. Although Edith had regarded him with great skepticism at first, she had gotten used to his presence. He didn’t simply sit all day, either. He worked. He did advance work, which he considered to be one of the most important aspects of his job—if not the most important. Today, he was writing letters on the computer and emailing them to some contacts in Tokyo—trying to hire a driver there who could be trusted; alerting the Tokyo police of their arrival next week; asking for information about the hotel where they were staying: who the security director was, what the security arrangements were, whether they had a suitable suite on a lower floor, if he could book the adjacent room.

Ideally, he would find an American counter-surveillance expert in Tokyo who could do an electronic sweep of the hotel rooms and any conference room they would use, to see if listening devices had been planted.

At noon, Watson’s luncheon appointment showed up. Watson had spoken of them dismissively, and indeed they seemed nervous as they waited—a man and woman, flawlessly groomed in the way that only corporate types might be. Watson introduced Eric to the visitors as “my associate, Mr. Ryder.” The chief financial officer of the company, Lloyd Henderson, joined them, and they prepared to set out for lunch at Colors on Park Avenue.

“We’ll take a cab,” Eric said decisively.

“No, no,” said the woman, Lenore. “It’s just a few blocks. We can walk.”

“We’ll take a cab,” Eric repeated quietly.

“Eric knows what he likes,” said Watson in simulated amusement. “But I think we can walk. There are five of us. That’ll be easier than finding a large cab at this hour.” He smiled at Eric, as if the matter were a joke.

That ended the debate, but what a pain in the butt for Eric, being on the streets of Manhattan, with the intensity of the crowds. He stayed next to Watson all the way, even forcing poor Lenore off the sidewalk at one point as she tried to converse with Watson, charming him over to her side—whatever that was.

Lenore seemed astonished at Eric’s rudeness, and no doubt would have told him off under ordinary circumstances. He didn’t have time to consider her reaction, however. All his attention was focused out there, on the crowds striding past. At one point, he nearly dropped it, thinking, Oh, forget it—if they want to shoot him so bad… He really believed any danger was minimal. But he had never let go like that in his life. And, he would be seriously humiliated if some crazy came up and punched Watson out or something. No way.

Colors was a weird little space, a glass box with gauzy curtains. Eric insisted on facing the windows and wound up on a too soft, sofa-like seat. He loathed it. He ordered an Evian water, marinated salmon as an appetizer, and lobster salad. He didn’t join the conversation but watched their surroundings. After some preliminary, conventional chatter, his companions talked business, numbers. Eric tuned it out, keeping his eyes open and enjoying the food. Money really did make a difference when it came to food, and this wasn’t even what someone like Watson would consider a first-class restaurant.

“What do you think of all this, Eric?” Lenore asked him in a very personal way, snapping him back. “Have you looked at the P&Ls?”

Now, what in the hell were P&Ls? They probably weren’t a new type of artillery. “That isn’t my forte,” he told her in a manner that indicated he actually knew some deep, dark secrets about the P&Ls, but was not at liberty to disclose them.

He looked at her as if she had made some gaffe, but she persisted. “The overall market position of the company has a definite appeal, don’t you think? The possibilities are strong.”

He raised his eyebrows. “We’re always hit by surprises,” he said. “Always. To think you know exactly what’s going on would be foolish.” He looked around at the restaurant, keeping everything in view.

Lenore appeared to take Eric seriously, mulled over his comments, and seemed to agree. “Yes, we see a limited risk, certainly, but the projections are sound. At the current interest rates, I don’t see anything significantly frightening about this level of debt.” She looked at him questioningly, enticing him on. Eric could see Watson’s little smile that said, ‘This fellow knows nothing. He’s practically illiterate. We hired him to pick up after me.’

“Mr. Ryder isn’t involved in the financial end,” said Henderson, the CFO, hurriedly, as if embarrassed that the woman might think Ryder represented the firm. Eric smiled blandly. These people took themselves a mite too seriouslike. How were they on jungle survival?

Watson got up to go to the john, and Eric stood, hoping nobody would come up with some cute little verbal byplay over this. In fact, no one did, until they returned. “We women always go to the ladies room together,” said Lenore cozily. “I didn’t know men usually did that.” She wasn’t being sly, he deduced. Her curiosity had been aroused—added to which, she was, frankly, socially inept.

“Eric is my bodyguard,” Watson announced with a small, satisfied grin on his face. He sounded as if he had a nice pet he was proud of. Eric divided 24 hours into the per-diem he was earning and decided that maybe cats and dogs had the better deal.

Lenore smiled as if she would like a bodyguard, too, if only she had the ready money. “Oh,” she enthused at Eric. “You’re a bodyguard.”

“Bodyguard is a vulgar word,” he answered, knowing that he could never unpeg himself.

He wasn’t ticked off at Watson for trying to make him feel like two cents. He never really felt like two cents because he was on his center, as an old friend, dead in Colombia, used to say. What bugged him though was that Watson compromised his own security and Eric’s by discussing his protection arrangements with outsiders. That sucked big time, in Eric’s view. He didn’t care what profession Watson was in, that was unprofessional. Three months with this guy. Eric had gone the whole road with Watson. The relationship wasn’t working. He couldn’t stick up for the guy, come what may—not that anything in particular seemed to be coming.

Watson had just wanted a warm body around because some other kidnapping and killing had put him on edge. The first EP—executive protector—who had been with Watson couldn’t hack it after a while. Nor could Eric.

Back in the office, he called a contact in his network. Where any jobs out there for someone like him? An hour later, his employment guy, Alan, gave him a call. “I have one for you. A CEO of some kind of technology company,” Alan told him. “He received threats, and the company has decided to go ahead with a two-man detail. They want some protection for the wife and daughter, too. I get it that the VIP is concerned and cooperative. That’s all I know. I have the number of the company security director, if you want to give him a call.”

They hung up. Eric called California and left a message. He didn’t think his friend would want to come on board fulltime with Watson in Eric’s place. Watson rubbed California the wrong way. California thought the problem was a race thing, but Eric assured him the trouble was really a Watson thing. If Eric got this other position, maybe California would want to join him there, even though he was hung up with some woman in Queens on a full-time basis.

Eric went over in his mind the little speech he would make to Watson—something about team work. Something about pulling the oars in the same direction. But that wasn’t totally the difficulty. A lot of executives didn’t understand how to work with their security detail, and he could forgive them their failure to master the concept. What disgusted Eric so much about Watson was that this guy had his ego flapping in the wind all the time. Like, be a little self-contained, fella, he thought.

Lenore and her colleague came out of Watson’s office. As the man addressed a few parting pleasantries to Watson, Lenore stood, briefcase in hand, regarding Eric with a devouring smile, as if she possibly knew who he might be. “I wish I had a bodyguard,” she said.

He nodded. “I do, too. I’d like to sleep soundly at night myself for a change. It’s a luxury few of us can afford.”