Bodyguard Read Online Free PDF Page A

the audience, watching.
    George took a seat at the bar in the back of the room, smiling a greeting as Carol, the bartender, gave him his usual—a vodka and tonic with a twist of lime.
    “Will you tell Kim I’m here?” he asked, and she moved to the phone.
    He took a sip of his drink and lit a cigarette as he looked around the room. He recognized quite a number of the faces in the audience. And of course, he knew all the girls by name. Monique had the stage. She was rolling and gyrating in ways that defied description, doing what George liked to think of as her floor routine. He smiled, imagining an entirely new adults-only category for the Olympic gymnastics competition filled with competitors named Trixie Devine and Bunny LeFleur.
    “Kim’s up next, Mr. Faulkner,” Carol came over to tell him. “She says she’ll be out to see you after.”
    “Thanks, Carol.” He took another pull on his cigarette, reaching for an ashtray as he watched Monique dance.
    The limousine pulled up outside a warehouse. They were in a part of Queens that Alessandra had never seen before, down near the river, by the docks.
    The man with the accent, the one who’d spoken to her on her car phone, opened the door, gesturing for her to get out. He was tall and broad, with sandy blond hair and a distinctly Eastern European face. Flat, Slaviccheekbones, slightly flattened nose, broad forehead, pale blue eyes.
    “Where are we?” Alessandra asked.
    He looked at her with complete dispassion in his eyes. There was absolutely nothing there. No registering of her beauty, no interest, no humanity. It was as if she were invisible.
    Or as if she were already dead.
    “It’s best if you don’t ask many questions,” he said in that voice that so reminded her of Arnold Schwarzenegger playing a high-class art dealer.
    Taking a deep breath, she gathered all her nerve. “I thought you said Michael Trotta wanted to talk to me. I don’t know why you dragged me all the way down here when he lives not too far from—”
    “You will follow me, please.”
    This was ridiculous. She had no real reason to feel so utterly afraid. She’d known Michael and his wife, Olivia, for seven years. And even if the rumors she’d heard for all those years were true, and some of the business Michael did was illegal, that still didn’t mean she had to be afraid of him. He liked her.
    Just last Christmas, she’d attended a holiday party at his house. He’d fixed her a drink himself, telling her a very corny joke about a rabbi, a priest, and an alligator.
    Yes, Michael Trotta liked her, but then again, Alessandra had always thought he’d liked Griffin a whole lot, too.
    The man with the accent opened the warehouse door, and she followed him inside. The space had been subdivided and partitioned. Instead of one vast area, she was in a long corridor that stretched all the way to the end of the building. Her heels echoed on the cheap tile floor.
    There were no doors off this part of the corridor and only one other dimly lit hallway that led to the right.It was spooky and silent and not at all where she wanted to be.
    God, what if she were wrong? What if Michael Trotta were behind the destruction to her home and that frightening phone call she’d received last night? Where’s the money? Find it. Fast. Or you’re next.
    What if he was responsible for Griffin’s death?
    The accented man paused outside a door—the only door in the entire expanse of the hallway. He knocked, and it opened a crack. A man peeked out, but no one spoke, and the door closed again.
    “What—” Alessandra started.
    “We wait. Quietly.”
    “I knew I’d find you here.”
    George closed his eyes. That wasn’t his ex-wife’s voice. He refused to let it be his ex-wife’s voice. But when he opened his eyes, Nicole was slipping onto the bar stool next to him. “I called you at home, and when you weren’t there, I figured you’d be here.” She fanned the air between them. “God, when did you