In the Night of the Heat by Blair Underwood Page A

skills in the close-protection industry. And hand to hand? You just don’t know. I work out with a skinny little guy who’ll be sixty-five next birthday, one of the best real-world bodyguards there is. He won’t play dojo games: You’ll just wake up hurting, if you’re lucky.
    So about the only thing about me they could evaluate was my fitness. Not even that: They weren’t going to ask me to run a hundred, bench my max, or hit the sled for them. And they weren’t going to ask me what my ring record was, or number of red stripes on the black belt. They would take the instant, male-male snapshot appreciation, an automatic question most guys don’t talk about much: Can I kick his ass?
    Of course, there’s a balancing question: Can he kick my ass?
    You could divide men into categories based upon the instinctivechoice of one of these questions. Whole families of life decisions and actions separate the worlds of the men who think of themselves as Thumpers and Thumpees. Neither is a better or worse human being. But trust me: They’re two different guys.
    T.D., these men, and I were all Thumpers. We all knew we’d bruise each other up. One level of reflexive male challenge done, and bonding begun. I wasn’t afraid of them. I wasn’t a monster, but my solid muscle was balanced, loose, bouncy. Watchful. They couldn’t know how well trained it was, but they had to wonder why I wasn’t intimidated. But if I was a leopard, they were lions. They figured they could kill me, even if they’d get scratched up doing it. All right, you’re okay buddy, you can watch my flank, and I’ll watch yours. We had sized each other up almost instantly, and the mutual answer was “yes.”
    I enjoyed being welcomed into the heart of that invincible tribe. I admit it. The rest of the banquet hall vanished.
    All his career, the media had criticized T.D. for his arrogance and cockiness. But I watched the grin fade from his face, revealing what he kept from hidden from everyone except his closest friends and family: He was tired and scared. The smooth skin he’d had in college looked weathered, and his eyes were slightly red, even crazed. No telltale white residue on his nostrils, but his eyes looked like fried marbles.
    Six men were talking to me at once.
    â€œSince the verdict, it’s crazy, man…”
    â€œâ€¦people done lost their damn minds…”
    â€œâ€¦can’t even open his mail…”
    Melanie raised her hand, and the men fell silent. She was the smallest of any of us, but Melanie Wilde was in charge. She surreptitiously showed me a grainy five-by-seven color photograph, and I nearly recoiled. That photo had run in the Enquirer after a police source leaked it to the tabloids: Chantelle Jackson bound to a chair, her lifeless headdangling to one side, taken inside the garage where she’d been killed. I was grateful the photo had been taken from behind, her face hidden from view. I’d already seen one dead woman too many.
    â€œWhere’d this come from?” I said.
    Melanie leaned close to me. “Some coward slipped it on the table and walked away.”
    â€œWish I’d seen the motherfucker,” Basso growled, scanning the crowd. I scanned too: Nothing but well-dressed Taus patiently awaiting their turn to touch greatness. All smiles.
    â€œT.D.’s getting threats,” Melanie said, voice low. “Not just this. Ignorant people unfamiliar with our system of jurisprudence don’t understand the words Not Guilty. Anyway, Dorothea Biggs teaches Sunday school with me at my church, and she talks about you all the time. Her son told her he’s never seen a…what? Close-Protection Specialist? Quite like you. You pulled him out of a fire, during the Afrodite thing?”
    She said it like she was trying to jog my memory. As if I could forget.
    Serena “Afrodite” Johnson’s death still infuriated