Марк Грини - One Minute Out

She takes a long swig of the beer and then she turns to face me again. “The shit you see. What it make you want to do?”

I think about the question. “It makes me want to kill people.”

“Yes. I want kill people, too.” She nods. “But that does not make everything better.”

Maybe she’s right. Maybe she’s wrong. I see the shittiest parts of humanity, and it is a soul-sucking experience, but at least I have an outlet. I am an assassin.

A killer of men.

Someone like Liliana . . . a baker forced into prostitution by economic hardship, then kidnapped into slavery. What can she do but sit there and take the world as it comes at her like a monster reaching out from under her bed?

Neither of us speaks for over a minute. Finally I break the uncomfortable silence. “When you get home to Moldova, I wouldn’t go back to Tiraspol.”

She nods. “I go back to bakery. It is safe. No one steal baker for sex traffic.”

She has the right idea, and I clink my beer bottle against hers. She starts to bring it back to her mouth while she keeps her eyes across the street, but she stops suddenly and points out the window. “There! That cop, getting out of the car.”

It’s a white SUV with the Mostar police logo in blue on the side. A driver climbs out and steps up to the sidewalk, opening the back door of the vehicle when he does so.

“You know him? From the farm?”

“Yes. He not in charge. But he always with man in charge.”

The passenger side opens now, and almost as soon as the man steps out, Liliana recoils. “ He man in charge.”

A cop in his forties wearing a smart uniform takes off his cap, rubs his hand over his short gray stubble, and then replaces it.

“That asshole right there?”

“Da. Da.”

“You know his name?”

“I hear them call him Niko. That is all.” She begins to cry suddenly, her hardened look evaporating in an instant.

Three men in total climb out of the vehicle, and another two emerge from a second, identical SUV. They all walk together up the steps to the front door of the police station. I take a few pictures, focusing on the one called Niko, then help Liliana out of her chair and lead her back over to the bed by her arm.

She is weeping still, and I sit her down. “You did great. You just made a difference. Get some rest. Tomorrow morning I’ll take you to the train station and tell you how to get home.”

“What about Niko?”

I smile a little in the dim light. “I’ll be back for Niko.”

She nods slowly; I start to stand to return to the window, but she holds me by the wrist.

“You are good man.”

I’m not, but I say, “Thanks.”

She pulls me closer, tries to lead me down onto the bed on top of her.

I attempt to break away without making a big deal out of it, but her grip is surprisingly strong. I say, “You aren’t thinking straight, Liliana. You need to sleep.”

There are fresh tears in her eyes now. “I know what you need. I give you what you need.”

She’s wrong. I don’t need that. Not like this.

“No, you aren’t thinking straight,” I repeat.

I stop her advances as gently as I can, but gentle isn’t exactly my strong suit. Within seconds I have her arms pinned over her head, and only then does she stop trying to pull me down.

She nods without emotion now. “This you like? You like rough?”

Shit. “No. No. I’m sorry,” I say. “But I can’t.” I let go of her arms, but she doesn’t move them.

She sniffs and looks at me quizzically. She doesn’t seem offended, just surprised. “Assassin who is gay, or assassin with girlfriend?”

I marvel at the absurdity of this moment. “There is a girl.”

Another dispassionate nod from the Romanian. “British girl?”

The comment confuses me, but then I remember that I’m Prince Harry. Surprising myself, I don’t lie when I answer her. “No. A Russian girl.”

I get yet another look from her like she thinks I’m an idiot. With all the certainty in the world she replies, “Russian girl? She take your money.”

“Not this one.”

Then, “Russian girl drink too much.”

To this I shrug. “You may be right about that.”

She looks at me, then again says, “You are good man.”

A good man? She’s got me all wrong. For the third time I say, “You aren’t thinking straight, Liliana. Get some rest.”

EIGHT

It was an especially beautiful summer morning in the Hollywood Hills. Three kids—a ten-year-old boy and girls of twelve and sixteen—lounged around the infinity pool behind an Italian Renaissance Revival mansion, a woman in her forties looked gorgeous while sipping her coffee at a table on the expansive back patio, and landscapers and gardeners toiled around the steeply graded two-acre property. The skyline of LA was striking in the distance; the smoggy haze that usually blanketed the city was less pronounced than usual.

And all this filled fifty-four-year-old Kenneth Cage with a sense of peace.

His palatial home had been built in the 1940s for a Hollywood mogul, and an impressive list of actors and musicians had resided there over the years. Cage himself was attached to the world of entertainment via one of his businesses, but he had more money than any five of the movie stars or rock stars who’d ever lived at this Hollywood address.

And this home was but one of six he kept here in the United States. There was Steamboat Springs and Boston and New York and Jackson Hole and Lake Tahoe, and he had his eyes on a four-hundred-acre winery in Sonoma County.

All this wealth and property came with a cost, of course. Even now as he sat at his kitchen island, looking out the open patio door and enjoying his family while they enjoyed the fruit of his labors, in the distance he also counted three men patrolling the well-manicured grounds. There were three more somewhere around here he couldn’t see, and the house was lined with cameras, all fed into a control center with yet another security officer monitoring them.

The leader of Ken Cage’s security detail was an ex–Navy SEAL and LAPD SWAT officer named Sean Hall, and while the other men rotated in three shifts throughout the day, Hall lived in a detached two-thousand-square-foot pool house just off the patio, and he went everywhere his boss went from the hours of nine a.m. until Cage was tucked into bed at night.

Right now Sean was still in his pool house, because Cage had a strict rule: no work before nine. That meant no bodyguards inside the mansion, no phone calls or e-mails, no spreadsheets or PowerPoints or business-related visitors.

Cage traveled on business regularly, but he was a family man and, when he was home, he carved out time for Heather and the kids.

Cage always told others that he regarded the security precautions as one of the ancillary and necessary costs of success, but the truth was, he liked the feeling of significance it conveyed when he walked as the nucleus of a group of beefy ex-cops and military men. Heather didn’t like the intrusion into her life brought on by the bodyguards, but Ken truly didn’t mind, because it fed his massive ego.

He finished his breakfast on the marble kitchen counter, chatted briefly with his son about the Dodgers’ win over the Twins the night before, and looked over some art made by his twelve-year-old daughter, pronouncing the watercolor to be magnificent.

Soon his three kids were swimming and splashing in the big infinity pool overlooking the city skyline. Heather would join them as soon as she changed into her bathing suit, but now she sat on the sofa with her husband in the living room, enjoying her coffee and his companionship before he retired into his home office for the workday.