John Birmingham - Without warning

Zood held her glare for a few seconds before breaking into an oily grin. ‘Money schmoney,’ he mugged. ‘I still got plenty to blow. I didn’t even have my dough stashed in the US – legally I don’t exist there. For tax purposes, you know. Legally I got disappeared years ago.’

He was drinking heavily and very much amused by his own wit, but Jules could detect a slightly anxious edge to his demeanour.

‘If you don’t mind, Jules,’ said Fifi, ‘I’ve got crew to interview back at the marina. I’ll see you back there. Better company if you ask me.’

‘Sure, baby, you go. Thapa can escort you to town. Sergeant Shah and I will catch a ride with Miguel.’

Fifi left the table without a backward glance. An uncomfortable silence ensued for a moment as Julianne regarded Zood with cold contempt.

Not that her other candidates were much less odious. A property developer and his wife-no kids. Some guy whose family owned a health fund; he had his third wife and one small child with him. A merchant banker, with his very own bank, based in Basel, Switzerland; plus his mistress. An oil broker. And a couple of trust-fund delinquents, a brother and sister, who seemed not at all put out that their entire family back in Boston were gone. The siblings, like everyone else at the table, had distinguished themselves by striking like rattlers as soon as they knew the score. Cashing up and converting to exactly the sort of high-end trade goods Jules had known would hold or even increase their value, at least in the short term.

She had trouble keeping their names straight, and was seriously thinking of a cull. Maybe dumping the porn king and his posse of bitches, and possibly Cesky, who struck her as trouble. They were all very demanding people. The trust-fund duo, Phoebe and Jason, had an especially noxious sense of entitlement, one she recalled from the useless rich kids of her own childhood.

‘Will there be staff?’ Phoebe had asked, before nodding towards the two Gurkhas. ‘Other than them.’

‘We could bring our own, I suppose,’ her brother had mused, not even bothering to run it by Jules. ‘Hire them here, perhaps, from the resort?’

But Cesky, he was the real quandary. Although she knew nothing about the construction industry, she figured it had to be a tough game. Wasn’t it rotten with mafia money and crooked unions? To make a fortune in it, you’d have to be as hard as tungsten, which wouldn’t necessarily count him out as a prospective passenger. But she just had a feeling with this bastard that if he got off the leash, you’d suddenly have something like a 300-pound bull mastiff with amphetamine psychosis tearing at your throat.

Then again, she supposed, she could always have Shah just throw him over the side.

‘Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has warned other regional powers that they will have to disarm immediately, if they do not wish to be attacked in a second round of strikes. The Saudi government has already agreed to immediate talks with Tel Aviv and has stood down its military, which had been on high alert since the outbreak of hostilities with Iraq and Iran.’

‘Man’s a fucking genius,’ said Cesky. ‘A fucking devil, but a genius.’

‘You think he’s a genius?’ Zood arced up without warning. ‘A fucking Hitler is more like it. He’s a fucking war criminal, Cesky. A mass murderer. He should be fucking stoned to death for the rest of his life.’

Cesky laughed in the pornographer’s face. ‘With a name like Zood, you would think that, wouldn’t you? Where’d your family come from again? No, lemme guess – they were ass-fucking goats in the Bekaa Valley for the last three thousand years, right?’

‘You fucking Jewish pig!’

Jules caught Pieraro’s eye for half a second, just long enough for an unspoken question. Where the hell did you find these idiots?

And then the two men were on each other, punching and clawing. Their chairs tipped over and drinks crashed to the floor. The banker’s mistress screamed, knocked down in the sudden eruption. The trust-fund brats simply pushed themselves back to a safe distance and smiled, enjoying the entertainment. Shah moved like a pouncing tiger but Miguel beat him into the fray. A flurry of blows from the Mexican cowboy, a blur of short, vicious punches, laid both of the tourists out flat.

Without consulting anyone, he stood over the prone figures and announced, ‘You will not be travelling on Ms Julianne’s boat. You will need to make your own arrangements. Do not attempt to answer me back or get to your feet.’

Zood opened his mouth to speak and Pieraro suddenly pistoned out one booted foot and kicked him in the face. The man’s head flew back with a nasty click and he flipped over, landing on his back. The vaquero turned a stone face on Cesky, who was glaring at him murderously, reminding Jules of an enraged bull. Pieraro absorbed the full force of the man’s enmity, never breaking eye contact. Eventually Cesky folded, crabbing away from the table on all fours until he felt he was at a safe enough distance to stand up.

A couple of security guards appeared, pushing their way through the throng, which had momentarily turned away from the television. The two Fairmont employees stopped in their tracks, however, at a single glance from the Mexican.

‘Man,’ said Phoebe, a little breathlessly. ‘That was so fucking hot.’

‘Do you wish to come on the boat, seсorita, to escape?’ Pieraro asked her.

She flushed noticeably at his attention. Jules recognised it as a purely sexual response. ‘Yes,’ she replied.

‘Then you will shut the fuck up!’ he barked. ‘And do what you are told when you are told. All of you! Comprende?’

The girl flinched, but nodded. The others all muttered and mumbled their assent. Back at the bar, with the prospect of personal violence abated, the crowd reluctantly turned back to the TV.

Jules saw Shah acknowledge the vaquero’ s handling of the situation with the slightest dip of his head. She had to admit, it was pretty fucking cool. None of these rich bastards would give them another moment’s trouble, she was sure of it.

But she was wrong.

Fifi was never comfortable around mucky-mucks, as she referred to anyone wealthier than a gas-station attendant. Except for Jules, of course – her fall from societal grace and favour meant that she very much met with Fifi’s approval. ‘You’re like Paris or Britney,’ she often told the English exile. ‘Rich but cool.’

The Oregonian was pleased to be away from that crowd up at Acapulco Diamante and back at the marina.

And she liked Mr Lee. He reminded her of old Lenny Wah, the man who rescued her after she’d fled her stepfather’s dream of a family threesome and cable TV fame via the agency of Jerry Springer. Lenny ran a super-cheap Chinese take-out in San Francisco’s East Bay, where she’d fetched up looking for a cheap meal after running out of money. The meal she got, a confronting fried rice/chow mein combo with a rock-hard spring roll, for $3.50. She also got a job offer, washing dishes in a huge clawfoot tub that stood out of view of the customers, in a weed-choked yard behind the cafe. The last dish-monkey had quit two days earlier and Lenny had let the pile of washing-up grow under a layer of cold, grey, fat-caked water.

‘But Lenny was kinda nice,’ she told Lee. ‘He had real soft skin and he smelled of jasmine rice.’

‘Lenny sounds like a bum, Miss Fifi. He try to make jiggy-jig for dishwashing?’

She snickered. ‘Only every fucking day. But he was real nice about it. He didn’t get upset when I said no.’

‘You always said no?’ he asked protectively.