Adrian McKinty - The Bloomsday Dead

“Which girls? The hookers?”

“The maid. She’s very young.”

He wanted me to come up with a solution before I’d even assessed what the problem was.

“Ok, I’ll send her away for a week and when she comes back you give her a raise and we’ll keep an eye on her to see if she keeps her mouth shut. Got it?”

Tinco nodded. I yawned and headed for the bank of elevators.

Usually I showered and went to bed now and slept until two or three in the afternoon, when the older, tradition-bound Peruvians were getting up from their siestas. And like I say, it had been a tedious, tiring night and I was looking forward to some shut-eye.

Hopefully, this wouldn’t take too long.

I pressed the P button and the lift sped me up to the penthouses on the fiftieth floor. It was a boast of the hotel that it was one of the tallest buildings in South America but even the express elevators seemed to take forever.

I took the time to adjust my appearance in the mirror.

My hair was in the crew cut of an Israeli commando, dirty blond, but recently I’d noticed a couple of gray strands around the ears. I hadn’t had a chance to shave, and I looked a little rougher than usual, though the Peruvian sun had done much to erase the obvious Paddy pallor in my features. I’d do.

The elevator doors clicked.

I checked guns one and two, hitched down the bottom of my trousers, drank the rest of my coffee. I turned left and strolled toward room LY.

The sound of fighting coming down the hall. No, not fighting, someone smashing things up.

So he hadn’t got himself exhausted just yet.

I hastened my pace.

Nice up here. Plush golden carpets, paintings of the Andes and Indian women in bowler hats. Fresh flowers, views up and down the foggy coast.

I turned the corner. There was a maid I didn’t know and Tony, one of my boys, standing patiently at the stateroom’s entrance. Tony smiled at me and jerked his thumb through the door.

“How bad is it?” I asked.

“Not bad, he’s trashed the room, but he hasn’t hurt himself yet,” Tony said.

“He alone?”

“He’s alone and lonely. He tried to grab Angelika here,” Tony said. “She doesn’t speak Spanish so good; she didn’t know what he wanted.”

Angelika nodded. She was a flat-faced Indian girl, probably just in from the highlands. I pulled out my wallet and removed ten twenty-dollar bills. I gave them to Angelika and said to Tony, “Tell her she didn’t see anything, nothing happened here.”

Tony nodded and told her the same thing in Quechua, the Indian language of the mountains.

Angelika took the money, seemed very pleased, and curtsied to me.

“She can take the rest of the week off,” I said. “Maybe have a little vacation.” I gave her five more Andrew Jacksons.

“Muchas gracias, Señor Forsignyo,” Angelika said.

“It’s nothing, I’m sorry this had to happen to you,” I said and Tony translated.

I gave her my empty coffee mug and said “Yusulipayki,” the only word I knew in Quechua. She thanked me in return and shuffled off down the corridor. She’d be ok. The crashing continued from inside the room.

“He keeps saying that he’s not happy,” Tony said.

“Nobody’s bloody happy.”

“No. Except my dog,” Tony said.

“Hey, it isn’t Peter Buck, the rock star, is it?” I asked.

“Peter Buck? Which group is he a member of?”

“R.E.M.”

“This one I am not very familiar with,” Tony admitted. “But the gentleman is fifty or perhaps sixty years old, bald and fat, he does not look like a rock star to me.”

“Maybe it’s Van Morrison,” I said, took a deep breath, and barged into the room.

I rode the elevator down to the seventh floor and walked along the corridor to my corner room. Here the carpets were less plush and the pictures on the wall were prints. But it was still nice.

The business hadn’t taken long.

I’d forced Mr. Buck to sit down on the bed and we’d talked. Apparently, the maid had refused to have sex with him even though he’d offered her good money. While I sympathized, Tony slipped a Mickey into a gin and tonic that knocked the bastard out. The cleaning service would fix his room while he dozed. Probably wouldn’t remember a thing about it until he got a five-thousand-dollar extra on his hotel bill.

Still, as incidents go, not one to write home about.

I found the key card and opened my door.

The room was dark. I yawned again. I wouldn’t even turn the light on. Straight ahead past the sofa and the boom box, a left turn into the bedroom. Go to sleep, wake up, and have some eggs with steak.

“Señor Michael Forsythe?” a voice asked from the sofa.

I said.

The lights came on.

“Do not move.”

There was a man behind me. I could see in the reflection of the mirrored dresser that he was pointing a 9mm at my head. Slightly redundant since the man sitting on the sofa held a pump-action shotgun. They were both dressed in shiny gangster-fabulous suits. They spoke Spanish with northern accents. Colombian, I would have guessed, but that just might be prejudice on my part.

“You are Michael Forsythe?” asked the one with the 9mm.

“No, amigo,” I said. “Don’t know who that is.”

“You are Michael Forsythe,” he said again, but this time it wasn’t a question.

The one with the shotgun motioned for me to put my hands up and the other one frisked my upper body, removing my obvious gun, my binoculars and wallet. They looked at the photo on my ID.

“It’s him,” Shotgun said.

The two men backed away from me. I stood with my hands over my head for a moment.

“Ok, what do we do now?” I wondered.

“We wait.”

One of the gunmen sat down on the sofa while the other motioned me into the center of the room.

“Kneel on the floor with your hands over your head,” Shotgun said, flashing a crooked smile in my direction.

“Are you going to kill me?” I asked.

“Quite possibly,” the one with the shotgun said, which, if nothing else, was an interesting answer. Not an imminent threat of death anyway.

“Well, I hate to spoil your little plans and I know you guys don’t like surprises, so you should know that if I don’t call the front desk and tell them I cleaned up that disturbance on the fiftieth floor they are going to send a couple of guys up here looking for me.”

The two men glanced at one other and conferred in low tones. Nine-millimeter brought me the phone.

“Call them. Let them know you are going to bed and do not wish to be disturbed,” he said.

I took the phone.

“Of course, if you say anything to warn them or anything we do not like we will kill you immediately. Those are our instructions,” Shotgun added.

“Shoot first, eh?” I said.

“Yes.”

I picked up the phone, dialed the front desk and got through to Tinco.

“Tinco. I took care of the problem on the fiftieth. Tell Hector that he can go home, I don’t want to go bird-watching this morning, I already saw an eagle. Got that? Ok, I’m going to go to bed.”

I hung up the phone and looked at the two men. They seemed satisfied. If Hector hadn’t left, he’d be up here in five minutes. Eagle was the call sign for major security alert.

I stood for a moment and the men motioned me to kneel again. All the tiredness had left me now and I was ready to raise holy hell if I got the chance. But the men were cautious. Keeping themselves well away from a sudden spin kick or a roll and punch. By the time I was halfway through either of those moves, I’d be dead. I scanned them. Skinny, young, but not that young. Experienced looking. This was not their first hit. Both in their late twenties or early thirties. The one with the shotgun was slightly older, slightly yellower, his hair greased back over a bald spot. Both had an odd burn mark above their knuckles. Some kind of gangster tattoo. I’d seen similar ones before. They were representing. Unlikely they were freelance. Unlikely they were amateurs.