Stephen Leather - Tango One

Donovan went into the kitchen and took a bottle of San Miguel out of the fridge. He opened it and drank from the bottle.

"Home sweet home," he muttered to himself. It had never felt like home, not really. During the past three years he doubted if he'd spent more than eight weeks in the house. Vicky had bought all the furniture and furnishings, with the exception of the artwork, assisted by some gay designer she'd found in her health club. Donovan couldn't remember his name, but he could remember a close-cropped head, a gold earring and figure-hugging jeans with zips up either leg. He might have been a freak, but Donovan had to admit he'd done a terrific job with the house. Turns out he'd studied art at some redbrick university and he'd been impressed with Donovan's collection some of the rooms he'd designed around the paintings, much to Vicky's annoyance.

Donovan went into the study and checked the safe, even though Laura had already told him that it was empty. He stared at the bare metal shelves and cursed. He wondered if Sharkey had been with her when she'd emptied it. Vicky would have thought about the passport, and probably regarded the cash as hers, but would she have realised the significance of the Spar-buch passbooks in the manila envelope? Donovan doubted it, but Sharkey certainly would have known what the passbooks were, and what they were worth. Donovan slammed the safe door shut and put the painting back in place. He ran his fingers along the gilded frame and smiled to himself. Luckily Sharkey was as ignorant of art as Vicky. The oil painting of two yachts was more than a hundred years old, and together with its partner on the opposite wall was worth close to half a million dollars. They were by James Edward Buttersworth, an American painter who loved yachts and sunsets, and both were used to good effect in the two pictures.

Donovan walked around the ground floor and satisfied himself that none of the works of art had been taken. They were all where they should be. Pride of his collection were three Van Dyck pen and brown ink drawings, preparatory sketches the Dutch master had made for a huge canvas that was now hanging in the Louvre. They featured a mother and daughter, and Donovan had bought them shortly after Robbie was born.

Donovan walked slowly upstairs, his hand on the banister. He imagined Robbie doing the same. Hurrying back from school, then rushing upstairs to see his mother. Catching her in the act. Donovan couldn't imagine how Robbie must have felt. Donovan had never seen his mother kiss his father, much less seen them in any sexual situation. Sex wasn't something that parents did. To find his mother in bed with someone else must have ripped the heart out of Robbie's world.

Donovan's lips tightened and his free hand clenched into a fist. He'd make sure Vicky paid for what she'd done. Sharkey, too.

He pushed open the door to the master bedroom. The door to Vicky's wardrobe was open. There were lots of empty hangers inside and one of her suitcases was missing. Donovan went over to the bed. He stared at the sheet, picturing the two of them, Sharkey and his wife, screwing their brains out in his bed. Vicky had been a virgin when she'd met Donovan, and clung to her virginity for a full three months before surrendering it to him on her seventeenth birthday. They'd married a year later, and so far as Donovan knew, she'd been faithful to him throughout their marriage. He'd been her first and only lover, that's what she'd said. Usually affectionately, though occasionally, when she suspected that he'd been playing around, she'd thrown it in his face like an accusation. However, he'd never doubted that she'd been true to him, that he was the only man who'd ever taken her. Until Sharkey.

Donovan picked up the quilt and threw it on to the bed. Maybe Sharkey hadn't been her first affair. Maybe there'd been others. Maybe she'd been screwing around behind his back for years. He felt his heart start to pound and he kicked the bed, hard, cursing her for her betrayal. He walked around the upper floor of the house, checking the bedrooms but not really sure what he was looking for. It was more territorial; it was his house and he wanted to pace out every inch of it. He'd sell it, of course. Soon as he could. He wanted nothing more to do with it. It was tainted. He hated the place, he didn't want to spend a minute longer there.

He went back downstairs, reset the alarm and let himself out through the back door. The security light came on, blasting the patio with stark halogen whiteness. Donovan pulled on his baseball cap and hurried off across the grass.

He unlocked the gate leading out of the garden, checked that there was no one around, then slipped through the relocked it. He put his head down and his hands in his pockets and walked briskly along the pavement.

As he walked past a dark saloon he heard a car door open. Donovan tensed. He'd been so deep in his own thoughts that he hadn't noticed anyone sitting in any of the parked cars. He took a quick look over his shoulder. A large man in a heavy overcoat was walking around to the boot of his car, jingling his keys.

Donovan turned away and walked faster. Two men were walking along the pavement purposefully towards him. They were big men, too, as big as the man who was opening the car boot behind him. Donovan stepped off the pavement but they were too quick for him. One grabbed him by the arm with shovel-like hands and the other pulled out something from his coat pocket, raised his arm and brought it crashing down on the side of Donovan's head. Everything went red, then black, and Donovan was unconscious before he hit the ground.

Donovan had bitten the inside of his mouth when he was hit and he could taste blood as he slowly regained consciousness. The left-hand side of his head throbbed and he was having trouble breathing. The room was spinning around him and Donovan blinked several times, trying to clear his vision. It didn't do any good, everything was still revolving.

Then he realised it wasn't the room that was spinning. It was him.

He'd been suspended by his feet from a metal girder with rope, and his hands had been tied behind him. His jacket was bunched around his shoulders and he could see his socks and the bare skin of his shins.

His nose felt blocked and his eyes were hurting and he had a piercing headache. He'd obviously been hanging upside down for a long time. He coughed and spat out bloody phlegm.

Two pairs of legs span into view. Dark brown shoes. Grey trousers.

Black coats. Then they were gone. Machinery. A dark saloon car.

Welding cylinders. A jack. A calendar with a naked blonde with impossibly large breasts. A workbench. Then the legs again. Donovan craned his neck but he couldn't see their faces.

One of the men said something in Spanish but Donovan didn't catch what it was. He knew who they were, though. Colombians. He coughed and spat out more blood.

He heard footsteps and a third pair of legs walked up.

"Hola, hombre," said a voice.

"Que pa saT Donovan twisted around, trying to get a look at the man who'd spoken. It took his confused brain several seconds to process the visual information.

A short, thickset man in his mid twenties. Powerful arms from years of lifting weights. A neat goatee beard. It was Jesus Rodriguez, Carlos Rodriguez's nephew and a borderline psychopath. Donovan had seen him several times in Carlos Rodriguez's entourage but had never spoken to the man. He'd heard the rumours, though. Ears cut off. Prostitutes scarred for life. Bodies dumped at sea, still alive and attached to anchors.

"Oh, just hanging around," said Donovan, trying to sound confident even though he knew that if the Colombian had just wanted a chat he wouldn't have had him picked up and suspended from the ceiling. And the fact that Doyle hadn't called him to warn him about the Colombians meant that he probably wasn't able to.