Читать книгу Klick's Shorts - Milam Smith - Страница 18

Klick and the Black Bitch Part Two

TRICKS OF THE TRADE STRESS RELIEF CHA YU THE TRICK THESE LYING EYES DAY ONE DAY TWO DAY THREE

STRESS RELIEF

Inside the Army trunk in my private room was a black duffel bag of gear that my friend Charlie Chan had bought me over my birthdays and the Christmasses of the years he’d known me. The latest was a special low-light video camera with laser-aimed microphone. The thing weighed twenty pounds. Heavy for a standard video recorder, but there was nothing standard about this puppy. I’d played with it but never used it on an assignment before. When I’d first gotten it I’d pointed downstairs into the bookstore beneath my offices, only to confirm what I’d suspected for years. The owner spent a lot of time complaining to her customers about the proprietor above her. Which was me, of course.

Then I aimed it across the street and caught various conversations of people coming in and out of the Tarrant County Convention Center. Mundane, for the most part. But there was an occasional couple still caught in the mad clutches of love who were discovering each other and sharing all the stuff of their lives which most certainly would come back and haunt them over the years when the fights began.

In a matching bag - both were waterproof, Chan having been thoughtful enough to buy the companion knowing I wouldn’t have enough sense to - I stuffed a couple changes of clothes with plenty of extra socks and a pair of black Army boots. Toothpaste, a razor and a hair brush.

I put a new tape in the answering machine since it would be several days before I returned.

I double-checked myself as I locked the doors behind me. Normal behavior for someone going away on a long trip or vacation…let’s see, did we turn off the gas and all the water faucets? A stray memory flitted around inside my head of our vacation to New Mexico when I was about seven years old and my Mother constantly wondering if she’d turned off the water and Dad finally turning around the other side of Weatherford and coming back to the house and walking through the house with her to make sure she’d turned everything off.

His only sign of anger or discomfort was shown in his usual manner; a brusque snort that could have just been a clearing of his throat. Unless you knew him as well as we did.

Downstairs I tossed the bags into the van my brother had loaned me. I felt eyes stabbing my back. I turned and waved ‘bye-bye’ at the old woman squinting at me from the bookstore. She returned the gesture with her usual one-finger salute.

I cranked up the van and then just sat there. I was still as tense as a lawyer working in the White House. I knew that I couldn’t handle spending five-or-so days in the woods starting out like this.

Closing my eyes, thoughts of the warm summer nights of my youth filled my mind. No matter the chaos in my house when I was a kid, if I could just lie outside in the tangle of the thick St. Augustine grass in our front yard and peer up at the glistening stars before going to to bed, I could handle having to wake up in the same house the next morning.

When I opened my eyes, I was still tense. I turned and looked down at the duffel bags. Ah! I knew just the thing for a little stress relief.

* * *

Some time back Chan had moved his protection agency into the North Bass Tower. Chan had always been one to go along with progress - hence all the junk in the black bag in the van - but he’d hesitated moving from the Tandy Center for years. But having one of the most famous Protective Service agencies in the State, if not the Country, it was only fitting to have offices in one of the Two Bass Towers.

The one noticeable difference was in the speed of the elevators. It took only seconds to glide up to the twenty-first floor, which the elevator announced for you just in case one can’t read the numerals.

A nice young Asian-American named Vicki was working the desk. She said hello and smiled as if she meant it. My heart fluttered for a moment but I knew that smile was supposed to cause that reaction in everyone with an appointment at the MAN O’ WAR PROTECTION AGENCY.

“Clyde, isn’t it?” she asked.

I nodded. “Wondered if I could use Chan’s gym?”

She giggled. “Well, he’s sort of using it now. Just a sec’.”

Vicki had the look and air of a properly trained courtesan, but the voice and energy of a recent college grad from sunny California. She hit a key on her keyboard - the computer and its components on the top of her black, glass desk were black as well and looked as if they’d been lacquered, which matched the doors leading into Chan’s office behind the desk.

She said something in German. She listened and I could see her face flush red, which matched her red tongue wetting her red lips. She looked back up at me.

“German?”

“Yes,” she said. “Charlie’s gotten into this thing of languages lately. I know four, and he demands I use a different one every day.”

I nodded.

“He said ‘enter at your own peril’!” And then giggled some more.

I went around the desk and had my hand on one of the twin Jade Dragon tails that served for door handles when Vicki said,” Clyde?”

I paused. “Yes?”

“You’re like, an old friend of Charlie’s, yeah?”

“Yes.” I looked into her midnight eyes and porcelain face and imagined a man could could get sent direct to Hell for the lustful thoughts they caused.

“Well, like why don’t you call him ‘Charlie’ like everyone else?” I tried to focus on her face and not look down inside the low cut or her black velvet dress, or at the carved ivory legs exposed by its shortness, which I’d already noted looking through the glass desk.

“Old Army habit.”

She started to say something else, and I gave her the time to, but she never said what she was thinking and I didn’t help her along. There was Beth still in my thoughts although I wondered how meaningful that was, or how monogamous, under the circumstances.

“Later,” I said, with a nod of my head, my eyes avoiding hers. I opened the door and stepped into Chan’s office. Just like the layout in the old office the view behind his empty desk was of the West side of town, but because he was now in a corner office one could look out and see the North Side of Fort Worth. To the right was a door that led to the gym.

I opened it and was greeted by the warm humid air caused by the hot tub, which was not only full of steaming hot, roiling water, but with Chan and two ladies that might have been sisters of Vicki’s.

Chan smiled and waved towards the other end of the room, a long narrow space with weights lined along the walls and a hardwood floor for a more ‘martial’ kind of workout.

At the far end of the room was another gentleman of Asian descent. He was dressed in nothing but kickboxing shorts and a fine film of sweat. He stopped kicking and punching a heavy bag and looked over at me, waving with his hand like you do when you teach a baby to say ‘bye-bye’.

“Knock yourself out, Clyde,” Chan said. He smiled, and the girls in the tub tittered.

Yeah, I thought. This really out to relieve that old stress, huh?