The Bodyguard

Flash Fiction by Roy Dorman

Jeremy Fulton is enjoying his morning coffee in a little deli off 45^th Street in New York City’s  Hell’s Kitchen area.  Surveying the other customers, he sees he’s the only one with an actual paper newspaper.  Everyone else has their heads buried in their laptops or are intently studying their phones.

Jeremy is a bodyguard by profession.  As he doesn’t have a current assignment, no bodies to guard, he’s on a short hiatus.  But that doesn’t mean he isn’t still aware of his surroundings.  He has a window table, and looking out he sees….

***

Dr. Allan Toussaint calls himself a scientist.  If he had colleagues, which he doesn’t, they’d call him a charlatan.  His field of interest is voodoo.  Haitian voodoo.  He experiments on human beings to try to capture their spirits.  At the time of their death.

Today Dr. Toussaint is out trying to collect a pure specimen for his research.  He’s just a block from his basement apartment laboratory and is looking to gather up an untainted life.  The young boy walking with his mother would be perfect for his purposes.

He steps in front of the pair and allows the mother to see the small pistol he holds.  He probably says something like, “Don’t do anything stupid or I’ll shoot the boy….”

***

Lauren Adler and her ten-year-old son, Michael, are enjoying the morning walk to the park for his Summer Little League practice.  Michael’s chattering on about the pair of turtles the class had last semester, and how the teacher had let the kids play with them during free time.

Lauren’s first thought is about what she’s heard about Salmonella.  She hopes Michael’s teacher is careful about the animals she brings into the classroom.  There seems to be danger everywhere these days.

Their brownstone apartment is eight blocks from the practice field in the park.  Michael is willing to let her walk with him the first seven blocks, but insists he walk the last block by himself.  After all, he is ten, he tells her.

A man in a black trench coat steps in front of them.  Lauren has to stop to avoid running into him.  He shows her a gun and tells her to come with him or he’ll shoot Michael….

***

The scene occurred right in front of Jeremy’s window.  With an exaggerated sigh, he folds his newspaper, finishes his coffee, and puts a ten-dollar bill under his cup.

He spots the trio a half-block from the deli.  They walk at an unhurried pace and turn into an alley.  Jeremy has caught up to them, but now holds back to see what will happen next.

The man in the trench coat unlocks a door in the alley and ushers Lauren and Michael in.  As soon as the door is shut, Jeremy closes in.

It’s an old door on a rotten frame and it crashes open with just one kick from Jeremy.  Dr. Toussaint reacts with surprise and anger and turns his pistol toward Jeremy.  Jeremy shoots just once with his silenced Glock and hits Toussaint in the forehead, killing him instantly.

Not acknowledging the terrified Lauren or Michael, Jeremy walks over to Toussaint and kicks his silenced Sig Sauer out of his hand across the floor.

He pushes the broken door as closed as it will go.  The basement apartment is small.  A hot plate, a refrigerator, a desk and chair, a bed, and a bunch of books and Haitian artifacts pretty much fill it.

“Thank you, whoever you are,” said Lauren, regaining some composure.  “I don’t know what he was going to —”

“I’m Jeremy.”

“Well, again, thank you.”  Lauren looked at Jeremy’s large physique and also his large Glock.  “Are you a police officer?”

“Nope.  I’m a private bodyguard.  I keep people who can afford it from gettin’ hurt.  Or killed.  And before ya ask, yeah, it pays well.”

Still a little dazed, Lauren just stared.  Maybe too much information?

Jeremy stared back. 

“Take off yer clothes,” he then said, now pointing the huge Glock at Lauren.

“What?” Lauren stammered, thinking she couldn’t have heard what she thought she heard.

“I said, take off yer clothes.  Or I shoot the boy.”

Michael is scared to death, but now he’s also pissed.  That is the second time in less than a half-hour that some stranger has threatened to kill him.

“No, please don’t do this,” Lauren pleaded.  “Not in front of my son.”

Michael fell to the floor in a dead faint.

“Michael!” Lauren screamed.

“Leave ‘em.  He’ll be okay.  It’ll be better for ‘em bein’ out.”

Michael has fallen onto Toussaint’s Sig Sauer.  He keeps his eyes closed as he slowly maneuvers it from under his stomach into his right hand. 

Jeremy is intently watching Lauren undress.  Michael methodically brings the gun around until it’s pointed at Jeremy.  Though it’s smaller than Jeremy’s Glock, the Sig Sauer is still big for Michael’s ten-year-old hand.

He squeezes off four shots like he’s seen in the movies, each shot hitting Jeremy in the chest.  Jeremy gets off one shot, but it’s wild and goes into the wall behind Michael.

“Michael!  Michael!  My god, Michael!”  Half naked, Lauren runs over to Michael and hugs him.

“Geez, Mom, I’m okay!  I’m okay!  And for Pete’s sake get some clothes on, would ya?”

Lauren is both surprised and a little in awe of Michael right then and steps back from him.  For a few seconds, she stares at her recently grown-up ten-year-old son.  Her unexpectedly violent grown-up ten-year-old son. 

She quickly gets dressed and watches while Michael wipes any prints from the Sig Sauer and positions it in Dr. Toussaint’s right hand.  Like a pro.

Trying to recover some of the parental control she knows she should have, she says, “Come on, Michael, grab your glove.  We have to get out of here. You’ve got baseball practice.”

She grabs the brass doorknob to pull open the shattered door, goes up the five stair steps, and goes out to check the alley.  Michael rolls his eyes, shrugs, and wipes the doorknob clean with his shirt before joining her.

Leaving the alley still in a state of confusion, Lauren wonders how less than an hour ago she could possibly have been concerned about turtles and Salmonella.

Taking her hand and walking next to her, Michael is thinking of all the times she’d caught him watching “The Sopranos” on TV and made him shut it off.  If he’d just watched cartoons like she wanted him to, they’d probably both be dead now.

In the months to come, Michael awakens to nightmares where the outcome of that morning is different.  Eventually, the nightmares stop, but the memories of that day stay with him.

Back at school in the Fall, while some kids in his class talk about maybe growing up to be astronauts, firefighters, or professional baseball players, Michael already knows at age ten what he wants to be.  He wants to protect people from getting hurt or killed.

He wants to be a bodyguard.

---

Bio: Roy Dorman is retired from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Benefits Office and has been a voracious reader for over 70 years. At the prompting of an old high school friend, himself a retired English teacher, Roy is now a voracious writer. He has had flash fiction and poetry published in Black Petals, Bewildering Stories, One Sentence Poems, Yellow Mama, Drunk Monkeys, Literally Stories, Dark Dossier, The Rye Whiskey Review, Near To The Knuckle, Theme of Absence, Shotgun Honey, Punk Noir, The Yard, and a number of other online and print journals. Unweaving a Tangled Web, published by Hekate Publishing, is his first novel.

Cover photo by pexels/Joy Marino, Edited by The Yard.

Read more Flash Fiction on The Yard: Crime Blog

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