Evil Grows & Other Thrilling Tales Read Online Free PDF Page B

to buy them the sandwich and skip the gutters. Mr. Wassermann never gave anyone anything for nothing—it was a saying on the street, Midge had heard him confirm it in person—and the big ex-fighter was proud to be able to say in return that he never took anything from anyone for nothing.
    He liked the way he looked in the suits. They complemented his height without calling attention to his bulk, did not make him look poured into his clothes the way so many of his overdeveloped colleagues appeared when they dressed for the street, and if it weren't for his Jagged nose and the balloons of scar tissue.. around his eyes, he thought he might have passed for a retired NFL running back with plenty in Wall Street. Of course, that's when he wasn't walking with Mr. Wassermann, when no one would mistake him for anything but personal security.
    Today, however, without giving the thing much thought, he'd decided to wear the electric-blue double-breasted he'd worn to Mr. Wassermann's office the day they'd met. He'd had on the same shade of trunks when he KO'd Lincoln Flagg at Temple Gate Arena and again when he took the decision from Sailor Burelli at Waterworks Park. He'd liked plenty of flash in those days, in and out of the ring: gold crowns, red velvet robes with Italian silk linings, crocodile luggage, yellow convertibles. Make 'em notice you, he'd thought, and you just naturally have to do your best.
    But then his run had finished. He lost two key fights, his business manager decamped to Ecuador with his portfolio, the IRS attached his beach house. The last of the convertibles went back to the finance company. In a final burst of humiliation, an Internet millionaire with dimples on his forehead bought Midge's robes at auction for his weekend guests to wear around the swimming pool When Midge had asked Mr. Wassermann for the bodyguard job, he'd been living for some time in a furnished room on Magellan Street and the electric-blue was the only suit he owned.
    It had brought him luck, just as the trunks had. He'd gotten the job, and right away his fortunes turned around. Because Mr. Wassermann preferred to keep his protection close, even when it was off duty, he had moved Midge into a comfortable three-room suite in the East Wing, paid for his security training and opened an expense account for him at Rinehart's, where well-dressed salesmen advised him on which accessories to wear with his new suits and supplied him with turtle-backed hairbrushes and aftershave. On the rare occasions when his reclusive employer visited a restaurant (too many of his colleagues had been photographed in such places with their faces in their plates and bullet holes In their heads), he always asked the chef to prepare a takeout meal for Midge to eat when they returned home. These little courtesies were offered as if they were part of the terms of employment.
    Because there were other bodyguards, Midge had Saturdays off, and with money in the pocket of a finely tailored suit, he rarely spent them alone. The women who were drawn to the aura of sinister power that surrounded Mr. Wassermann belonged to a class Midge could not have approached when he was a mere pug. While waiting for his employer, he would see a picture of a stunning model in Celebrity and remember how she looked naked in his bed at the Embassy.
    There had been a long dry spell In that department after his last fight. True, his face had been stitched and swollen and hard to look at, but that wasn't an impediment after the Burelli decision, when eighteen inches of four-oh thread and a patch of gauze were the only things holding his right ear to his head; he'd made the cover of Turnbuckle that week and signed a contract to endorse a national brand of athlete's-foot powder. He'd considered hiring his own bodyguard to fight off the bottle-blond waitresses. But that was when he was winning. The two big losses and particularly the stench that had clung to the twelve rounds he'd dropped to Sonny