Free Full Circle by Collin Wilcox Page B

Dodge.”
    “No. Willis Dodge was tossing a Molotov cocktail through the window of that cottage in the desert. I had a shotgun, and I fired instinctively as the bottle came through the window. It was a lucky shot. Dodge wasn’t so lucky.”
    Eyes once more downcast, submissively, Powers nodded agreement, but made no reply. Bernhardt finished his cup of coffee and checked the time: almost four o’clock on a smoggy April afternoon in Los Angeles.
    “Where’s the car?” Bernhardt asked.
    “I’ll show you. It’s in the short-term parking garage.”
    As if he were exasperated at some petty inconvenience, Bernhardt sighed impatiently. “If I’m ever alone with you in a parking garage, asshole, I’ll punch out your lights. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”
    Helplessly shaking his head again, the other man made no reply.
    “You’re disgusting. You’re unbelievably disgusting. There are no words to describe how disgusting you are.”
    Still no reply.

NINE
    B RACED IN THE CUSTOM-CONTOURED seat that held him erect in the car, Du Bois allowed his eyes to close, allowed his head to lean slowly back against the leather headrest. Recently the gardener’s eight-year-old daughter had watched while DuBois was being lifted into the seat, then strapped in. “Hey, look,” she’d said, calling to her father. “Look, it’s like a baby seat.”
    Raphael’s mortification had been monumental. Therefore it had been a particular pleasure to instruct a secretary that a comic card be sent to the child, with a ten-dollar bill inside.
    DuBois opened his eyes as the driver and the bodyguard began talking in low voices. Now James, the principal bodyguard and chief of security, was studying the side-view mirror on his side while Ferdinand, the Chicano driver, slowed the Mercedes. Probable significance: the two bodyguards following in a second Mercedes had fallen behind, either caught by a red light or clogged in traffic. DuBois touched a button on the console built into his chair’s arm, an identical console to the one in his wheelchair. In response, the window between the front and the rear began to close. Whenever he was in the decision-making mode any distraction, especially conversation, was unacceptable.
    Time: ten o’clock. The Friday morning traffic was light. They would arrive at the Huntington in twenty minutes, allowing James and Ferdinand to get him out of the car and into the wheelchair with a comfortable time margin. As he’d done before, Ferdinand would park so that, remaining in the car, monitoring two radios, he could see the marble bench where DuBois and Bernhardt had first met, almost six months ago. Ferdinand would take a small submachine gun from the compartment beneath the Mercedes’s dash. James and the other two guards would assume their positions, two on the pathway that connected the marble bench to the main building of the Huntington. Holding a tiny surveillance radio concealed in his hand, James, the leader, would take up a position beside the car. An intelligent, impassive, quick-thinking South American in his middle thirties, almost improbably handsome, James was built like a linebacker and moved like a quarterback. Of all his domestic employees, James was the only one in whom DuBois reposed any real trust, the only one who’d demonstrated mettle. The test had come only three months after James began work. In downtown Los Angeles, at noon, three black men in ski masks had tried to kidnap DuBois as his limousine stopped for a red light. With incredible coolness under fire, James had taken careful aim at each of the three kidnappers, dropping them with three shots from the Browning nine-millimeter he carried in an elaborately tooled leather shoulder holster. That evening DuBois had written out a bonus check for ten thousand dollars. A month later, James was given his own rent-free bungalow on the DuBois estate. Earning thirty thousand a year, James prospered.
    Sometimes DuBois estimated the expense,