Personal Protection (3 page)

“You said you’d do anything for me.” She threw my own words back at me.

I flinched. “Do you hate me that much?”

The question brought her up short. It wasn’t what she was expecting.

“Of course I don’t hate you! What..?” Then she looked at the gun. “Jesus.” She swallowed hard and nodded her understanding. “This… this is not America.
There are only so many guns in the country… Your licence is for this..?”

I nodded. “It would only be a matter of time before they found me. Then I’d spend the rest of my life in prison. I don’t think I could live like that, Tori.”

I really couldn’t. I’m not good with authority.

“What’s the euphemism? You’d eat your gun?”

“Yes.”

On my black days, I had more than once contemplated that particular form of suicide. It was quick, if you knew what to aim for. I do.

She saw the look in my eyes and caught her breath. “But if I asked you, really asked you and meant it, asked you to kill them?”

“Yes, I’d do it.”

She shivered and slid the gun into the holster at my back. “You’re scary.” She cuddled into my shoulder and this time laid the full length of herself against me. “Tell me
again why it is that I love you, scary lady.”

“Because I love you. Because we have good sex. Because I’d do anything for you. Any or all of the above.”

She sighed, almost contentedly. “It doesn’t make the pain go away, but it does make it easier to bear. Thank you. Thank you for dropping whatever you were doing and coming here. For
making me that offer. For being you.”

“I wish I could have been there to stop it. I wish it wasn’t just comfort and consolation I have to offer you.”

I felt her smile against my shirt. “You’d have kicked her ass but good.”

“Her?”

She looked up at me. “I thought it was. Now I’m not sure. You probably think I’m useless…

“No! No, it’s shock.” And not wanting to remember. I couldn’t blame her.

I let out an explosive breath. It was a reasonable assumption. Who else would use a fake prick? Smell of perfume? God, maybe it was one of her exes! I don’t know why I didn’t think
of it sooner. This is why I’m the brawn of our outfit.

“You thought it was one of the men from the club?”

I hated to disappoint her, but now was a time for honesty. “The thought had crossed my mind.”

“That’s what Mum and Dad thought too. I couldn’t talk to them. How could I explain that another woman might have done that to their daughter when I was coming here to talk to
them about you? You’ve probably met my dad. You can see what he’s like. If he knew who’d done this… She shivered.

I could sympathise. Coming out to your parents is always difficult. Many of us leave home to avoid the necessity. I did.

“I just wanted to get in a cab and go home, but I wasn’t in a fit state. Anyway, whoever it was stuffed me in a sack and dumped me on the doorstep so it wasn’t as if I had any
choice. They even rang the bell.” She began to giggle hysterically.

I held her again, until the laughter turned to tears then faded away.

“God I hurt,” she whispered wretchedly.

“There is something we can do about that. Get you in a bath.”

“I don’t want to do that here. I want to go home. Will you take me?”

“If that’s what you want. But I think you’ll find it uncomfortable to sit in a car so soon after…” I bit off what I was going to say.

“I have to deal with it.”

“But not so soon. Please, Tori, take a bath here. You can have another one when you get home, if that’s what you want. You need to feel better about yourself. You can’t do that
if every time you look in a mirror what happened to you looks back.”

“I don’t have any clothes here,” she protested. But her resistance was weakening.

“You can have some of mine; you know I always keep spares in my car.”

“In case of blood and bullets.” She swallowed back giggles that would have become as hysterical as the last.

“Yes,” I agreed simply. Why varnish the truth?

“All right,” she agreed.

Then another thought struck her. “I don’t know what I’ll say to Mum and Dad.”

“Leave that to me.”

I have an idea now what police officers have to go through when they make house calls to tell people that their loved ones are dead. Sitting in that pristine living room,
facing Tori’s homophobic father and partisan mother, I told them as much of the truth as I thought they could stomach. That their beloved daughter had been molested: abducted, bound, gagged.
I didn’t specify her attacker’s gender. I said they’d done it with implements other than what nature gave them.

Her mother cried and her father raged. When I left them to fetch Tori my spare clothes they were both crying, feeling as helpless as I had, confronted by the truth and the fact that they had not
been there to save her. Most parents never think of you as anything but their baby, no matter how old you grow. It is a mark of their love when they still want to protect you from the evils of the
world, no matter how you might have disappointed them. While I didn’t have that luxury, Tori was fortunate. Her parents thought the world of her, had always supported her, no matter how they
disagreed with her choices.

It might have been wrong to let them think that the attacker was a man. But the opportunity to give Tori their complete support for what she was, why she’d chosen as she had, was a chance
not to be missed. I had no desire to make her father feel that his gender was evil, that he was the same by default. I truly hope that was never what he thought. Having come so far along the road
towards acceptance, not to drive the bolt home just when she needed them most would have been a crime bigger than the one she’d just suffered.

I knocked at the bathroom door, thinking that she’d been in there too long. There was no bolt on this door. She was squatting in the water, crying and bleeding into the bath.

“Tori, you have to come out, let me get you dry.”

“N…n…no! I… There are
things
stuck in me!” she cried.

I scrubbed a hand across my face. Shit, shit, shit. “Then I’ll get them out,” I told her.

There followed one of the most harrowing episodes of my life. Tori, on her back on the bathroom floor, my jacket raising her lower back and beautiful behind in the air, legs spread as if for a
cervical smear, while I employed tweezers, water, a magnet and my fingers until we were sure there was nothing left inside her that could harm her.

Then I stripped myself and put her under the shower, washed her hair and scrubbed her until she was clean, until both of us were wrinkled like prunes and the water was going cold and there could
be no further reasons not to come out.

“I’ve ruined your jacket,” she said quietly as I towelled her dry.

“Doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me!”

I stopped what I was doing. “Then you can buy me a new one.”

She nodded vigorously. “Yes, yes, I will.”

“OK.” I went back to drying her.

Her mother was just coming down the loft steps when we came out of the bathroom. Bed linen lay in a heap at the foot of the stairs and the light was out above.

“I’ve remade your bed, love. If you need to come back, you know we’ll be here.”

She hugged her mother tightly and managed not to cry.

“Thanks, Mum, I will, I promise. How… How’s Dad taking this?”

“You know your father. He’ll get over it. It’ll take a while, but he will. Don’t fret about it.”

Then she saw my gun. Her eyes opened wide. “You really are a bodyguard.”

“I feel like a pretty useless excuse for one today.”

She gripped my hand. “You couldn’t have known. None of us could. You hear about this sort of thing on the news, but it doesn’t come home that it’s real until it happens
to you. Won’t the person you’re guarding be wondering where you are?”

“I was on call. He didn’t call.” Of course it was that moment that the bloody pager went off. I didn’t even look at the number. I quite deliberately plucked it off my
belt, turned it off and dropped it into a pocket of the ruined jacket. Tori’s mother’s hand gripped mine even tighter.

“Go and say goodbye to your father. Let him see that you’re all right.”

Tori swallowed hard, then, steeling herself, walked into the living room and closed the door behind her.

“Thank you for coming. For telling us everything.” I nodded. I couldn’t exactly say it had been a pleasure.

“You’ll take good care of her, won’t you?”

“Count on it. I only have one job right now, that’s protecting Tori.”

Now it was her turn to nod. She looked at a scuffed bit of wallpaper and smoothed it back against the wall. “You’re going to get them for her, aren’t you?”

“If I can.”

“Does she know who it was?”

“She’s still in shock. She might remember more later. It’s too early to say.”

“Will you come and tell me when it’s done?”

I nodded. Tori came out. She had been crying again, as had her father. I hadn’t expected anything else. I didn’t expect him to take my hand, though.

“You take care of my little girl.”

I realised I was being given the sacred trust. Father to son-in-law, acceptance, the passing on of responsibility. Tori heard it in his voice and caught her breath. I returned the pressure on
his hand with a little more than my accustomed force, showing him my strength, my worthiness of the faith he was placing in me.

“With my life, sir,” I told him and meant it.

“You are not what I wanted for my daughter, what I expected when I learned who…

“I understand. I’ll do my utmost to prove to you that she hasn’t accepted second best.” Even though I know you’d rather she was with a man, I thought.

His rheumy eyes took in every facet of my face. “You’d better, because even if I don’t know where to find the bastard that did this to her, I know where you live!”

“I wouldn’t expect anything less, sir.”

He nodded and went back into the living room with great dignity.

I looked at both women in wonder and found them smiling. My chivalry had found an echo in my lover’s father. If I let him down, I’d hand the gun to him myself. I’d deserve
it.

I got Tori into the car, cushioned on a duvet I keep in the boot for stake-outs, and pointed the bonnet towards my home. I wasn’t sanguine about the security at her house. I hadn’t
been there when she needed me. I wouldn’t let her down with ignorance now.

I’d discover who the perpetrator was. And when I did, I’d find out everything there was to know about them and a way to pay him or her back. Shooting would be too quick. What I had
in mind would be much slower and more thorough. They were going to pay.

The Illuminations twinkled as I drove along the promenade. Tori, swathed in my old sweatshirt and jumper two sizes too big, against the cool September night as well as her
internal chill, pressed her nose against the window. The bulk of the newly refurbished Miners’ Rest Home twinkled invitingly with lights enough to rival those set up for the tourists.

“Are you going to check your pager?”

“No.”

She turned away from the window. Though I kept my eyes on the road I was aware of her scrutiny. I jumped when her hand touched me, which was entirely the wrong thing to do. She recoiled into
herself, curling into the tiniest space possible, trying to disappear. I slapped on the indicators, took us into a side street, pulled over, then reached out to her.

“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to react like that. You just startled me.”

I managed to coax her into my arms. Somebody blew their horn at the car and I gave them the finger in the rear-view mirror. She looked into my face.

“It isn’t your fault that you weren’t there. I don’t blame you.”

“I know, Tori, it’s just that…

“It’s your life, it’s what you do, protecting people. Not to have been there when I needed you makes you feel helpless. For such a small woman, you have so much presence, so
much attitude.” She stroked a finger along my jaw. “I almost expect to wake up some mornings and find you’ve grown stubble overnight and that there’s more between your legs
than there was when we went to sleep.”

Don’t think I haven’t dreamt about it. I’m one of those lesbians who loves women because I felt I was destined to be a bloke. I got given the wrong body. I’m not a dyke
because some guy did me wrong. I like blokes – I just wouldn’t want to sleep with one. Maybe I think of them as brothers, or the competition? Tori seemed to be suggesting as much.

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to come over all macho, it’s just how I am.”

“I know. I wouldn’t have you any other way. You make me feel safe.”

There’s not much you can say to that. It’s one hell of a compliment. I hugged her.

“You can’t put your life on hold because I got hurt. You have a job to do.”

“I can’t just leave you and go haring off after some stranger!” I protested. “Let them call somebody else! You’re more important.”

“Dean will fire you.”

“He can’t. He’s not my boss, he’s my partner. I’m only responsible for myself.”

That was crap. If I let the business down and the client base abandoned us, he could sue me for negligence.

“Please,” was all she said.

I swore softly and got out the pager. I dare you to refuse anything to a woman who speaks to you in that tone of voice, with that look in her eyes. I turned the thing on and it updated. Four
more calls. Every ten minutes. All the same number. Dean.

I picked up the car phone and dialled.

“Finally! How is she?”

“As well as can be expected. Thanks for calling, Dean.” I meant it.

“What kind of a shit would I be if I didn’t? If there’s anything I can do…”

“Not just now, but if you’re up for getting who did this…”

“That sounds like quite a story,” he said, cautiously.

“We’ll talk later, OK? Can you call the client and tell him something came up, that I can’t take the job?”

“Of course. He still hasn’t been in touch?”

“Nope.”

“Maybe he doesn’t need your services. I’ll call and make sure.”

“Thanks. I appreciate it.”