Gagliano,Anthony - Straits of Fortune.wps Read Online Free PDF

for way too long, and he was retaining so little subcutaneous water that the muscles of his massive forearms had that telltale snakeskin tautness I'd noticed a lot of down on South Beach. "I see you've been at the movies," he said, glancing over at the television screen, now filled with jittery horizontal lines of static. I reached over, shut off the set, and popped out the cassette. 26
    We stared at one another. I am six feet one and weigh two hundred pounds, but Williams had me by three inches and enough muscle to make a difference, plus he'd been trained to fight by the best. Even with the age difference--I was thirty- four--common sense told me I should have been afraid of him, but I wasn't. At that moment, staring into his grinning face, all I wanted to do was hit him, hit him hard. He knew it, too. He smiled, turned sideways, tugged at the legs of his trou- sers, bent his knees, and assumed a fighting stance. He cocked his head to one side and then the other. There was a cracking sound you don't hear much outside a chiropractor's office. "You in the mood for a wee bit of a workout, Jack?" he asked in a fake Scottish accent. "When I am," I said, "you won't have to ask." I wondered if, like me, Williams realized how stupid we were being. Then he threw a punch that stopped an inch from my nose. He smiled when I didn't flinch. He looked offended, disap- pointed, as though I had refused a gift. I shook my head and walked past him out the door. I had nothing to prove to him. Williams tensed when I passed by him. He followed me as I went down the stairs, but not too closely. The bad vibes followed us both. The Colonel was swimming laps in the pool when I walked out onto the patio. Williams trailed me, a few feet back, still not getting too close, as though he sensed my mood. I wasn't the same man who had arrived here a short while ago. I had switched tracks halfway through the film, and I wasn't so sure I wanted to switch back. Still, despite my frame of mind, something didn't jibe about the black- mail angle, at least not as it pertained to the video I'd just watched. My gut feeling was that it was just a ploy to distract me. Unfortunately, it had worked. The Colonel saw me out of the corner of his eye, swam past me to the shallow end, and walked briskly out of the 27
    blue chemistry of the water. I waited off to the side for him. Williams handed his boss a black silk robe, which the old man promptly wrapped himself in, tying off the sash at the middle. He said a few words to Williams, who glanced over at me with a grin, then turned and headed off toward the garden. The old man went and sat down again at the table, and I went and sat across from him. A bottle of Johnnie Walker Black had appeared on the table, and he poured a bit of it into a glass and drank it straight down in one shot. "Williams doesn't like you very much, does he?" the Col- onel asked, looking at his empty glass. "No," I said. "I don't suppose he does." "I wonder why." "You should ask him," I said. "What did you think of the film?" "That's a stupid question." He thought that over for a moment. "It's been a very long time since anyone referred to me as stupid." "You'll need to get used to it if you think I believe that your daughter killed someone over a film, even one like that. I suppose you've seen it." He shook his head. "I've seen enough ugliness in my life, Jack. I took her word for what was on it, hers and Williams's. I told you. She did it to protect me." "If she really did shoot Matson," I said, "then protecting you was probably only part of it. I'm betting she just lost her temper and popped a cap into him. I'm not buying this loving-daughter crap." "He was going to send copies of his little masterpiece to everyone I know, people in Washington, people who matter. She didn't want that to happen, and she took the matter into her own hands before I could stop her." He looked across at me. "Do you want her to go to prison for killing that scumbag?"