Ли Чайлд - Persuader

“Better than those bozos you sent to pick him up.”

“He speaks well of you.”

“So he should,” I said. “I saved his ass. At considerable cost to myself.”

“You going to be missed anywhere?”

“No.”

“Family?”

“Haven’t got any.”

“Job?”

“I can’t go back to it now,” I said. “Can I?”

He played with the bullet for a moment, rolling it under the pad of his index finger. Then he scooped it up into his palm.

“Who can I call?” he said.

“For what?”

He jiggled the bullet in his palm, like shaking dice.

“An employment recommendation,” he said. “You had a boss, right?”

Mistakes, coming back to haunt me.

“Self-employed,” I said.

He put the bullet back on the table.

“Licensed and insured?” he said.

I paused a beat.

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Reasons,” I said.

“Got a registration for your truck?”

“I might have mislaid it.”

He rolled the bullet under his fingers. Gazed at me. I could see him thinking. He was running things through his head. Processing information. Trying to make it fit with his own preconceptions. I willed him onward. An armed tough guy with an old panel van that doesn’t belong to him. A car thief. A cop-killer. He smiled.

“Used records,” he said. “I’ve seen that store.”

I said nothing. Just looked him in the eye.

“Let me take a guess,” he said. “You were fencing stolen CDs.”

His type of guy. I shook my head.

“Bootlegs,” I said. “I’m not a thief. I’m ex-military, trying to scrape a living. And I believe in free expression.”

“Like hell,” he said. “You believe in making a buck.”

His type of guy.

“That too,” I said.

“Were you doing well?”

“Well enough.”

He scooped the bullet into his palm again and tossed it to Duke. Duke caught it one-handed and dropped it into his jacket pocket.

“Duke is my head of security,” Beck said. “You’ll work for him, effective immediately.”

I glanced at Duke, than back at Beck.

“Suppose I don’t want to work for him?” I said.

“You have no choice. There’s a dead cop down in Massachusetts, and we have your name and your prints. You’ll be on probation, until we get a feel for exactly what kind of a person you are. But look on the bright side. Think about five thousand dollars. That’s a lot of bootleg CDs.”

The difference between being an honored guest and a probationary employee was that I ate dinner in the kitchen with the other help. The giant from the gatehouse lodge didn’t show, but there was Duke and one other guy I took to be some kind of an all-purpose mechanic or handyman. There was a maid and a cook. The five of us sat around a plain deal table and had a meal just as good as the family was getting in the dining room. Maybe better, because maybe the cook had spat in theirs, and I doubted if she would spit in ours. I had spent enough time around grunts and NCOs to know how they do things.

There wasn’t much conversation. The cook was a sour woman of maybe sixty. The maid was timid. I got the impression she was fairly new. She was unsure about how to conduct herself. She was young and plain. She was wearing a cotton shift and a wool cardigan. She had clunky flat shoes on. The mechanic was a middle-aged guy, thin, gray, quiet. Duke was quiet too, because he was thinking. Beck had handed him a problem and he wasn’t sure how he should deal with it. Could he use me? Could he trust me? He wasn’t stupid. That was clear. He saw all the angles and he was prepared to spend a little time examining them. He was around my age. Maybe a little younger, maybe a little older. He had one of those hard ugly corn-fed faces that hides age well. He was about my size. I probably had heavier bones, he was probably a little bulkier. We probably weighed within a pound or two of each other. I sat next to him and ate my food and tried to time it right with the kind of questions a normal person would be expected to ask.

“So tell me about the rug business,” I said, with enough tone in my voice that he knew I was saying I assumed Beck was into something else entirely.

“Not now,” he said, like he meant not in front of the help. And then he looked at me in a way that had to mean anyway I’m not sure I want to be talking to a guy crazy enough to chance shooting himself in the head six straight times.

“The bullet was a fake, right?” I said.

“What?”

“No powder in it,” I said. “Probably just cotton wadding.”

“Why would it be a fake?”

“I could have shot him with it.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“I wouldn’t, but he’s a cautious guy. He wouldn’t take the risk.”

“I was covering you.”

“I could have gotten you first. Used your gun on him.”

He stiffened a little, but he didn’t say anything. Competitive. I didn’t like him very much. Which was OK with me, because I guessed he was going to wind up as a casualty before too long.

“Hold this,” he said.

He took the bullet out of his pocket and handed it to me.

“Wait there,” he said.

He got up off his chair and walked out of the kitchen. I stood the bullet upright in front of me, just like Beck had. I finished up my meal. There was no dessert. No coffee. Duke came back with one of my Anacondas swinging from his trigger finger. He walked past me to the back door and nodded me over to join him. I picked the bullet up and clamped it in my palm. Followed him. The back door beeped as we passed through it. Another metal detector. It was neatly integrated into the frame. But there was no burglar alarm. Their security depended on the sea and the wall and the razor wire.

Beyond the back door was a cold damp porch, and then a rickety storm door into the yard, which was nothing more than the tip of the rocky finger. It was a hundred yards wide and semicircular in front of us. It was dark and the lights from the house picked up the grayness of the granite. The wind was blowing and I could see luminescence from the whitecaps out in the ocean. The surf crashed and eddied. There was a moon and low torn clouds moving fast. The horizon was immense and black. The air was cold. I twisted up and back and picked out my room’s window way above me.

“Bullet,” Duke said.

I turned back and passed it to him.

“Watch,” he said.

He loaded it into the Colt. Jerked his hand to snap the cylinder shut. Squinted in the moonlit grayness and clicked the cylinder around until the loaded chamber was at the ten o’clock position.

“Watch,” he said again.

He pointed the gun with his arm straight, aiming just below horizontal at the flat granite tables where they met the sea. He pulled the trigger. The cylinder turned and the hammer dropped and the gun kicked and flashed and roared. There was a simultaneous spark on the rocks and an unmistakable metallic whang of a ricochet. It feathered away to silence. The bullet probably skipped a hundred yards out into the Atlantic. Maybe it killed a fish.

“It wasn’t a fake,” he said. “I’m fast enough.”

“OK,” I said.

He opened the cylinder and shook the empty shell case out. It clinked on the rocks by his feet.

“You’re an asshole,” he said. “An asshole cop-killer.”

“Were you a cop?”

He nodded. “Once upon a time.”

“Is Duke your first name or your last?”

“Last.”

“Why does a rug importer need armed security?”

“Like he told you, it’s a rough business. There’s a lot of money in it.”

“You really want me here?”