One Minute Out

I don’t ponder this for long. Instead I answer the girl as truthfully as I can. “I’m just here to make things better.”

That’s true, isn’t it?

“Please,” she implores. “Don’t hurt him.”

I smile a little, but I guess it must look sinister to her, seeing who I am and what I’m smack-dab in the middle of. My smile fades as this occurs to me, and then I say, “I need you to run out that front door. There is no one out there who will hurt you, I promise.”

Into my earpiece I say, “I got one, green, coming out the front.”

A green is a noncombatant. Not a friendly, a blue, or an enemy, a red.

I wait for the reply from Rodney. “Understood, one green out the front door of the pool house. Do we detain?”

“Negative. Just make sure she gets clear.”

“Roger that.”

Rodney will probably think this little girl is another sex slave, like the hundreds he’s rescued in his life. This realization only serves to make me want to kill her daddy so much more.

But I can’t. Can I?

“Go ahead,” I say to her. “Out the door.”

Fresh tears fill her eyes, and I know she’ll never be the same. It’s a shame, but her tears aren’t going to stop me from doing what I came here to do to her father.

“Why?” she asks, now watching blood drip from my left fingertips, onto the floor.

She thinks I’m a monster. I see that in her eyes. She doesn’t know that her own father is the monster. Maybe she will soon, or maybe this will all be swept under the rug somehow. But I don’t have time to walk her through Kenneth Cage’s crimes, so I don’t answer.

I swing my gun towards her now, shifting it towards the front door, and soon she leaves, sobbing all the way.

When the door closes behind her, I turn my attention to the staircase.

Cage is up there, I can feel it; he’s with Roxana, and it all ends here.

With my Walther aimed up the stairs, I begin ascending. There is a mirror on the landing that gives me a narrow view to the second floor, and my eyes are on it, but I can’t see anyone above.

I only make it halfway to the landing when I hear a man up there speak. “Gentry?”

I stop, take a few steps backwards till I’m on the ground floor again.

I don’t recognize the voice. “Who’s that?”

“I’m Cage’s bodyguard.”

I sniff out a little laugh. “I hope you’ve updated your résumé.” I resume my climb, slowly and carefully, my weapon high in front of me.

“Look, man,” he says from above, and I stop again. “There’s three of us up here, all armed and well trained.”

“Thanks for the heads-up. I’m liking my odds, though.”

“And we’re all ready for you. You can turn around now, get out of here, and we won’t come looking.”

“If you were ready for me, you wouldn’t be giving me that option, would you?”

I hear the man sigh all the way down here. Then he says, “Look, bro. I’ve had enough. I don’t want to die for this shit. Let’s just call a truce. We stay up here, you leave. I can send the girl down to you. Unharmed.”

Roxana isn’t unharmed, of this I’m certain. Before I respond I hear a man shout out from another room upstairs. “What the fuck are you doing, Sean?”

I don’t recognize this voice, either, but I know exactly who it is. “Hi, Ken. Just met your daughter. She’s going to miss you.”

There is no response.

“I met your man Jaco, too. By the way, you might want to get that pool out there professionally cleaned.”

The bodyguard shouts down again. “If you won’t knock it off, Gentry, we will kill you.”

I back off the stairs, my right hand holding the Walther because of the knife still sticking out of my left shoulder. Through a grimace of pain I say, “I love your optimism, Sean.”

“It’s desperation, dude,” and that’s exactly what I hear in his voice now. Then he screams out, plaintive and terrified. “What are you? A hero? A fucking saint? We aren’t all like that, you know? Some of us out here are just trying to make a living.”

I kneel down, searching for a target in the mirror’s reflection. While doing this, I say, “I had a mentor, and he had a thing he used to tell me. ‘Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.’”

For several seconds I hear nothing, nor do I see anything through the reflection.

Softly, Sean says, “I like that.”

I think he’s right above me, so I can fire into the ceiling and, with a little luck, get some .22 rounds on this guy, but I don’t know where Roxana is, so I decide that I’ll have to ascend the stairs to verify my targets.

But just as I begin to move, he says, “Look. What do you say I tell my guys to toss their weapons, I do the same, and you let us all walk out of here?”

I’d like to shoot this guy. I imagine that the remorse he seems to be feeling now only comes after getting busted protecting an evil man, and I don’t have any respect for that type of self-development.

But three armed men on the second floor are slowing down my approach to my target.

“Anybody else up there? Other than Cage and Maja?”

“No, sir. I swear to God.”

“Is Cage armed?”

“A little folding knife. That’s it.”

“All right. You boys come down, slowly, and nobody will fire on you.”

After a pause the man says, “I’m trusting you to do the right thing here, Gentry.”

“Ditto. You step onto that landing empty-handed, or I drop you where you stand, got it?”

I hear the other man again, the one I take for Cage. “Sean! I’ll double your salary! I’ll double it! And no hard feelings, swear to God. Just hold out till the cops come, do your job protecting me, and I’ll double . . . fuck it, I’ll triple your salary! Permanently.”

Hall speaks to me, not to Cage. He just says, “This fuckin’ guy. Right?”

But I respond, “That’s a lot of dough, Sean. It’s gotta be tempting. It’s your call.”

The squadron of LAPD helicopters flying overhead nearly drowns out his soft response. “I’m just a surfer, bro. I don’t need much. But I need my life.”

Cage shouts, “Sean! Sean!”