The Protectors

by Dowell, Trey

  Lyla pouted. “Disappointing.”

  “It started with a woman in a diner. A sad woman I noticed in another booth. She was complaining about insomnia to her husband. Made me think about the nature of what I do . . . are some people’s consciousness buttons harder to press? Can they get stuck?”

  “Interesting. I’ve never considered it.”

  “After months of rabid insomnia, I’d imagine that’s all you could think about. Anyway, I reached out to her mental button . . . not to press it, just to look. To examine up close. The longer I looked, the closer I got. Eventually, I just popped through to the other side.”

  “And you could see what she was thinking?”

  “More like hear. Almost impossible to detect at first, but I got better over time. Practice, perfect, you know the drill.”

  The waitress brought me a refill and we paused. When the woman walked away, Lyla leaned over the table and spoke in a hush. “Read her mind. What is she thinking?”

  “What am I, a Vegas act? I don’t ask you to embrace her and make our meal free, do I? Besides, it’s not like dropping someone. Entering a person’s mind causes pain.”

  “To you?”

  I nodded. “A lot. Enough that I don’t do it unless I have no alternative.”

  “I’m sorry. I did not realize. That must be frustrating.”

  The pain wasn’t frustrating. Hell, I was thankful for it. The fact that mind reading required total concentration and personal sacrifice meant the power wasn’t casual. I could choose when to use it, and it wouldn’t overwhelm me. Think about it—how much do you really want to know what people think of you? And an even bigger question—would anyone else want to be around you once they knew what you could do?

  Lyla’s eyes were full of wonder at the novelty of my ability. But that’s the trick about novelty: it wears off. If she didn’t know about the eye-splitting pain, eventually she’d be worried I was scanning her brain all the time. Within days, she’d want to be anywhere in the world but next to me. And while I looked at her across the booth—the smile, the eyes focused on mine—I was very interested in keeping Lyla next to me.

  When the waitress collected my plate and left the bill, I got a small jolt of panic.

  Lyla noticed. “What’s wrong?”

  “I might actually need you to embrace her for the meal.”

  “Are you serious?”

  I leafed through the last of my emergency cash. “Not really, but we are dangerously short. I’ve got enough for the bill and maybe a change of clothes for you.”

  “This is one of my favorites. You don’t approve?”

  “Oh yes, I approve. Not exactly practical, though. I don’t suppose you’ve hidden cash anywhere on your person?”

  “I rarely pay for things.”

  “Nice,” I said, although my tone wasn’t. “You realize you’ve probably gotten hundreds of people fired by doing that? No, we pay our own way from now on.”

  “Since you mentioned ‘from now on,’ what exactly is the plan?”

  “We talk to the CIA and get them to call off the dogs.”

  “And if they choose not to?”

  “We need to be prepared to run. For that, we need real money. Cash. Credit cards are like sending up emergency flares every time we use them.” I scooped up the bill. “Let’s get you some non-goddess clothing, then work on finding a more substantial source of money.”

  “Pray tell, where will we find such a thing?”

  I winked. “Oh, I know just the place.”

  CHAPTER 16

  I don’t have a gambling problem.

  Fear of commitment, problems with authority, trust issues, chronic pessimism—those I have tons of. But gambling? No way. The tough part is it took me seven trips to Vegas and about fifty thousand dollars to figure out I didn’t have a problem with gambling. My issue is that you can’t call what goes on in most casinos “gambling.”

  Gamble implies a certain amount of, well, uncertainty—but also fairness. You don’t know what’s going to happen, so you bet against another guy who also doesn’t know what’s going to happen. Wagering on the Super Bowl, playing poker, filling out an NCAA basketball bracket: all examples of the noble practice of gambling.

  But when you walk in the door of an establishment with bright lights, no clocks, and an army of slot machines, my friend, you are no longer operating in the realm of uncertainty. The pit boss with the alligator grin knows exactly what I mean. He smiles because every game in the place is rigged. He smiles because he understands human nature. Most of all, he smiles because of the powerful ace he’s got tucked up his sleeve—a little thing called “math”—and math is one mean motherfucker. You might land one or two decent punches, but going toe-to-toe with the odds is a fifteen-round fight, and math never gets tired. Bottom line: the longer you play, the more money you lose.

  Which is really what they should call it: “losing.” I have a hunch the marketing people might object: Hey, honey, let’s grab dinner at the casino and go losing! But what it lacks in pizzazz, it makes up for in accuracy.

  I don’t have a problem with gambling. Legalized losing, however? Pisses me off.

  And even though Lyla might look at me like I’m a petulant child when I suggest it, I don’t suffer a big moral dilemma about stealing from a casino.

  We barely made it out of the cab before the eye rolling began. “I should have expected this,” Lyla said.

  “Don’t start. We need money, and casinos have it. It’s not my fault this is the easiest way to get a few thousand dollars without ending anyone’s career.”

  We stared across Rutland Street at a beautiful seventeenth-century stone church, steeple piercing blue sky above intricate restored stained-glass windows. A former place of worship, now occupying a spot several rungs lower on the moral ladder.

  “Besides, anybody who converts a church into a casino is begging for a karmic enema,” I told her.

  I reached down and took her hand in mine, a simple gesture made complex by our history. A sideways glance and raised eyebrow were her only responses.

  “What?” I said. “We need to look like tourists, not like we’re doing surveillance on the place.”

  Might have been my imagination, but I could have sworn she squeezed a little tighter. For my part, weird as it sounds, just the act of holding her hand made my pulse race and sent a tingle up my vertebrae. Standing on a street corner, praying she enjoyed holding hands as much as I did, hoping she wouldn’t be the first to break the bond—God, I was an overthinking eighth-grader again.

  Not to be outdone, my inner cynical bastard ran right over to beat the crap out of the junior-high romantic fantasy—whispering “Kill them all” in Lyla’s voice with every mental punch.

  “Not too big, can’t have very much in the way of security personnel,” I said, staring at the Livingston Carmel Casino. “Not like in the States.”

  “How do we want to do this? Embrace a dealer, get them to give me some chips?”

  I shook my head. “I think it’s probably better you sit this one out.”

  “Why, pray tell?”

  “How long have you been in the United Kingdom now?”

  “I’m not sure, more than a week, perhaps two.”

  “If MI5’s been stalking you that long, I’m sure they’ve circulated your file around the country. Most casinos have facial pattern recognition software—analyzes every single person who walks in the door, then runs the file against a red-flag database. Known felons, cheaters, card counters—if any patron comes back as a match, the software forwards an alert to security.”

  She scoffed. “The United States government is scared to death of me. I think I can handle a casino security force.”

  “I have no doubt. But in this case, your file gets a little more priority than a guy cheating at blackjack. The alert would prob
ably bypass the casino staff entirely—MI5 gets a direct feed and in ten minutes, guys with those goddamn sonic things will be all over the place.”

  I felt her hand quake as she shuddered at the memory.

  “But I doubt they’ve had time to spread the word on me. They’d have to contact the CIA first, ask for my file. With me on the hunt for you, I doubt Tucker and his boys would have any desire to respond quickly.”

  “Tucker?”

  “Yeah. New guy. Met him in Colorado. Douchebag.”

  “I hate that word.”

  “Colorado?”

  She squeezed my hand for real. “Very funny.”

  I winced. “Yeah, well, withhold judgment until you meet him.”

  The side doors of the church now served as the casino’s main entrance, and they banged open while we were talking. A young couple staggered out onto the sidewalk—three sheets to the wind before two in the afternoon. His pale, bald head shone in the rare Scottish sunshine. Even from across the street I could see the large gap between his two front teeth in the center of a drunken smile. With his soccer jersey and ripped jeans, he looked like a stereotypical soccer hooligan, ready to start a drunken brawl at the tiniest offense. The only potential problem with brawling would be his size—he was five foot six on his tiptoes, and scrappy only gets you so far when you weigh a buck-fifty. His companion was a pretty brunette, with a too-tight shirt and too-short skirt, both garments competing to see which could reveal more skin. The inebriated couple stumbled to the cab stand in front of the casino.

  “Then I suppose it is up to you,” Lyla said. “Drop the entire place once you’re through the doors?”

  “Nah. Only thing I’d be able to do is grab chips from the tables. Actual cash is locked behind cashier windows. Can’t shut everybody down unless I have keys to the back room or know the passcodes, if they’ve got digital locks on everything. And I really don’t want to be frisking unconscious security guards for twenty minutes, waiting for the police or MI5 to show up. No, we have to be more subtle than that . . .”

  A black cab with fat fenders and suicide doors pulled up to the taxi stand, looking like it was driven right out of the 1940s. The couple commenced drunken negotiations with the driver, but only managed to send the cab speeding away without them, the hooligan yelling “Fuck you, ponce!” in its wake.

  “Such a gentleman,” Lyla noted.

  “You’re jealous of her. I understand.”

  The brunette yanked on her companion’s arm, pulling him back onto the curb. “It’s your fault, Nathan! You’re pissed . . . ,” she started, and before she could finish, the hooligan backhanded her straight across the face, hard enough for me to hear the smack from the other side of the street.

  “Fuck off, Charlotte! Don’t talk back!” He screamed the words as she recoiled from the blow, cradling her face in her hands. He cocked his other arm to hit her again, and even as my own anger overwhelmed the shock of casual violence, Lyla dropped my hand and launched off the curb.

  She stalked directly toward the couple, intent on ending the assault her way. I knew that Nathan had a very real chance of finishing the day in a hospital bed, with self-inflicted wounds. And that’s if he was lucky, because Lyla could do worse.

  I caught up to her only a few feet before she reached them. The hooligan hadn’t followed through on the second punch, but he looked angry enough to launch another strike at any moment. For the second time in as many days, I grabbed Lyla by the crook of her elbow and spun her away.

  “Waitwaitwait . . . just a second. Don’t do anything yet,” I begged her. An idea ricocheted around in my brain, formed halfway along my panicked street crossing.

  Her eyes were on fire and she spat the words. “That man is going to pay!”

  “I know, I know! I couldn’t agree more . . . but we can use him. I’ve got an idea.”

  Her body faced me, but her head twisted back toward the couple—burning death rays at the hooligan. He shoved the brunette and returned to the cab stand, fuming.

  “Do you remember the UN party at Ellis Island? When we wanted privacy?”

  If she heard my words, she gave no indication. She was much more intent on the brawling couple, and probably imagining what manner of horrors she could inflict upon Nathan.

  “Lyla!” I shook her by the shoulders. “Do you remember Ellis Island? When we needed a distraction?”

  She turned back and her face lost the scowl. The memory came to her, and it took only seconds for the smile to start, but it was her scary smile—the one Godzilla gives right before he descends on Tokyo like a fat guy at a dinner buffet.

  “Rocky Balboa?” she said.

  “Abso-fucking-lutely,” I replied.

  CHAPTER 17

  Five minutes later, a subdued Nathan and I walked through the doors of the Livingston Carmel Casino.

  As instructed by Aphrodite, he went in first and paused by the coat check window. Walking toward him, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the evolution of Lyla’s power, which used to make people seem more like high-functioning vegetables when she turned on the juice. Nathan looked a lot less surly than before we approached him on the street, but for the most part he seemed, well, completely normal. For an abusive scumbag, anyway. I made sure to keep my body turned away while I fiddled with my wallet; no need for any of the folks watching the security cameras to think we were together.

  “Hello, Assface,” I said when I got within whisper range. “You ready?”

  “Aye, guv-nah!” He was way too happy.

  “Shhh, idiot! We’re not supposed to be together.”

  His bald head and beady eyes dropped toward the smoke-colored carpet. “Sorry, sir.”

  “You remember your instructions?”

  “Miss Aphrodite says I’m to follow your lead. I do whatever you say, no exceptions.”

  “Good boy. Now stay here and sit tight . . . I need to have a look around first.”

  I left him and descended five steps into the sunken gaming floor of the casino. Standard layout: the farther you got from the door, the less profitable the game was for the house. The slot machines near the entrance, video poker next, and in back, my target—the blackjack tables. Each table had row upon row of colored chips, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth. Lyla and I didn’t need a ton of cash—a couple of thousand would be plenty—which meant I had to somehow find an opening and palm three or four of the five-hundred-British-pound orange chips. Provided I could grab them, get to the cashier window, and exchange them, that’d be the equivalent of almost three thousand U.S. dollars.

  Easier said than done, of course. Couldn’t just sit down at a table, drop the dealer and other gamblers, then help myself—all the tables were close together, and the other dealers and gamblers around me would certainly notice in a hurry. Not to mention every camera in the place would instantly zoom in on my table, and security would be very interested in the one guy not unconscious in the middle of all the chips.

  No, I needed to be invisible for this job, and since I lacked that particular power, I’d have to settle for the real-world version of invisibility: make certain all eyes (both real and electronic) were looking at someone else. As far as security went, it took only a brief extension of my consciousness to “see” where they were; behind the dark wooden door near the restrooms marked MAINTENANCE, I could detect eight different mental buttons in a tight area. Another room close to the cashier windows contained a group of four people, but this room had no door leading to the casino floor. Didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize this was the counting area. You want the room with all the cash to be as secure as possible, with no way for a thief to access it directly from the casino. If you’re designing a security/surveillance room, on the other hand, you need to be damn sure your people can rush to the gaming floor in a hurry if needed. The maintenance door was therefore my focus. I just needed t
o make sure the distraction cleaned out the entire room, so no eyes were on the cameras.

  And that’s where Nathan came into the plan.

  I circled back to the front and saw him still standing quietly, eyes darting around the room seemingly at random. I ambled up near the coat check, whispering without looking directly at him.

  “You see that door across the way, labeled ‘Maintenance’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “See the security guy with the walkie-talkie standing just off to the side of the door?”

  “Course.”

  “I’m going to the blackjack table near the back with the blond dealer. When you see me sit down, I want you to walk over there and ask the security guard for the time.”

  “That’s it?”

  “No. As soon as he looks down at his wristwatch, I want you to punch him right in the face.”

  He nodded a little too enthusiastically. “What then?”

  “Nothing. Don’t hurt any gamblers, and don’t run. Just stand there and defend yourself.”

  Nathan turned and finally showed the eyes of a lovesick minion. “Then Miss Aphrodite will be happy with me, yeah?”

  “Oh yes, Nathan. Aphrodite will be very happy,” I said, and wow did I mean it.

  His gap-toothed smile made me sick to the stomach, but knowing his smile would have a few more gaps in it come morning made the asshole’s enthusiasm easier to take.

  “Wait until I sit down, then do as I asked. And remember everything Aphrodite told you.”

  He popped a fist into his open palm and shifted his weight from foot to foot in the throes of nervous energy. “Roight. Ass-kickin’, comin’ up!”

  Nathan was as good as his word—no sooner did my butt hit the seat than he fired away from the coat check area, loping bowlegged toward the security guard, arms swinging in exaggerated half circles as he closed the distance. When the guard noticed his approach, I could see the guy tense up as a wild-eyed hooligan came at him. The man outweighed Nathan by at least sixty pounds, but was unprepared to have a nutjob in a Manchester United jersey stalk right up to his face. He seemed relieved and surprised when Nathan asked for the time, but that was nothing compared to his utter shock when the little man reared back and delivered a haymaker to the guy’s jaw.