Dan Simmons - Hard Freeze

"Come here often?" asked Kurtz.

"Fuck you."

He and Angelina Farino Ferrara were pacing on parallel treadmills in the mirrored and teak-floored sixth-story main room of the Buffalo Athletic Club. Her bodyguards were in the adjoining weight room, clearly visible through the glass wall as they pressed heavy weights and admired each other's sweat-oiled muscles, but out of earshot. No one was exercising near Kurtz and Angelina.

"Did you bring my property?" she asked. Kurtz was wearing a bulky sweat suit, seriously out of fashion based on what the few other patrons were wearing, but Angelina's fashionable skintight leotard showed that she was not armed.

Kurtz shrugged and set the treadmill for a faster pace. Angelina set hers to match. "I want those two items back." She was breathing and speaking easily, but she had broken a sweat.

"Noted." Kurtz glanced over at the bodyguards. "Are they any good?"

"The Boys? Marco's all right. Leo's a waste of Stevie's money."

"Is Leo the one with the cupid lips and con torso?"

"Right."

"Are these your main men?"

"The Boys? They're the only ones with me full time, but Stevie's brought in eight other new guys. They're all competent at what they do, but they don't hang out at the marina. Shouldn't you be asking about Gonzaga's protection rather than mine?"

"All right. What about Gonzaga's people? How many? Any good? And who else is usually in his compound? And how often does he come out of that compound?"

"These day's, he almost never comes out. And it's never predictable when he does." Angelina cranked up the speed and angle of her machine. Kurtz matched it. They had to speak a bit more loudly to hear one another over the whir. "Emilio keeps twenty-eight people on his payroll at that fortress," she said. "Nineteen of them are muscle. Pretty good, although they must be getting rusty just sitting there guarding his fat ass. The rest are cooks, maids, butlers, sometimes his business manager, technicians…"

"How many with guns in the main house when you visit?"

"I usually see eight. Two baby-sit the Boys in the outer foyer. Emilio usually has four bodyguards playing servant during the lunch. A couple of others roam the house."

"And the rest of the guards?"

"Two in the guardhouse at the gate. About four in the outbuilding security center, where they keep the video monitors. Three more always roaming the grounds with guard dogs. And two with radios driving the perimeter in Jeeps."

"Other people there?"

"Just the servants I mentioned and occasional visits from his lawyer and other people. They've never been there when I go for lunch. No other family there. His wife died nine years ago. Emilio has a thirty-year-old son, Toma, who lives in Florida. The kid was supposed to take over the business, but got disinherited six years ago and knows that he'll be whacked if he ever shows up in New York State again. He's a fag. Emilio doesn't like fags."

"How do you know all this? I mean about the security setup."

"Emilio took me on a tour the first time I visited."

"Not very smart."

"I think he wanted to impress me with his impregnability." Angelina set the treadmill to its fastest pace. She began running in earnest.

Kurtz clicked in matching settings. For a few minutes they ran in silence.

"What's your plan?" she asked at last.

"Am I supposed to have a plan?"

She gave him a look that seemed Sicilian in its intensity. "Yes, you're supposed to have a fucking plan."

"I'm not an assassin," said Kurtz. "I hire out for other things."

"But you are planning to kill Gonzaga."

"Probably."

"But you're not seriously planning to try to get to him in his compound."

Kurtz concentrated on breathing and ran in silence.

"How could you get to him there?" Angelina flicked sweat out of her left eye.

"Hypothetically?" said Kurtz.

"Whatever."

"Have you noticed that roadwork being done about half a mile south of the compound?"

"Yeah."

"Those bulldozers and huge graders and haulers that are parked there half the time?"

"Yeah."

"If someone stole one of the biggest of those machines, he could drive over the guardhouse, smash his way into the main house, shoot all the guards there, and whack Gonzaga in the process."

Angelina hit the stop button and trotted to a halt as the treadmill slowed. "Are you really that stupid?"

Kurtz kept running.

She raised the towel from her shoulders and mopped her face. "Do you know how to drive one of those big Caterpillar things?"

"No."

"Do you know how to start one?"

"No."

"Do you know anyone who does?"

"Probably not."

"You got this from a fucking Jackie Chan movie," Angelina said, and stepped off her treadmill.

"I didn't know they had Jackie Chan movies in Sicily and Italy," said Kurtz, killing his machine.

"They have Jackie Chan movies everywhere." She was toweling the bare skin where the leotard cut across her cleavage. "You're not going to tell me your plan, are you?"

"No," said Kurtz. He looked over at the Boys, who had finished bench-pressing and were admiring each other as they curled dumbbells with each hand. "This has been real fun. And I can feel this attraction building to the point where you're going to invite me home soon. Shall we meet again tomorrow, same time, same place?"

"Fuck you."

On Sunday mornings, James B. Hansen attended early morning worship service with his wife Donna and stepson Jason, went out with them for a late breakfast at a favorite pancake house on Sheridan Drive, and stayed home in the afternoon while his wife took their son to her parents' place in Cheektowaga. It was his weekly time for private reflection and he rarely missed it.

No one was allowed in the basement except Hansen. He was the only one who had the key to his private gun room. Donna had never seen the inside of the room, not even when it was being renovated when they had first moved in almost a year earlier, and Jason knew that any attempt to trespass in his stepfather's private gun room would incur serious physical punishment. "Spare the rod and spoil the child" was a Biblical injunction that was taken seriously in the home of Homicide Captain Robert G. Millworth.

The gun room was guarded by a keypad working on a separate code from the rest of the house security system, a steel door, and a physical combination lock. The room itself was spartan, with a metal desk, a wall of bookshelves holding a law-enforcement officer's assortment of reference books, and a case behind locked, shatterproof Plexiglas doors in which Hansen's expensive gun collection hung under halogen lights. A large safe was built into the north wall.

Hansen disarmed the third security system, entered the proper combination, and took his titanium case out from where it was nestled with stocks, bonds, and his collection of silver Krugerrands. Returning to his desk, he opened the case and reviewed the contents in the soft glow of the gun-case lights.

The thirteen-year-old girl in Miami two weeks earlier—a Cuban whose name he'd never learned, picking her up at random in the neighborhood where little Elian Gonzalez had stayed a few years earlier—had been Number Twenty-eight. Hansen looked at the Polaroid photos he had taken of her while she was still alive—and later. He paused only briefly at the single photograph he had taken with himself in the frame with her—he always took only one such photo—and then went on to study the rest of his collection. In recent years, he noticed, the twelve- to fourteen-year-olds had developed earlier than the girls of his own childhood. Nutrition, the experts said, although James B. Hansen knew it to be the Devil's work, turning these children into sexual objects sooner than in previous decades and centuries in order to entice men.