Villiers Touch by Brian Garfield Page A

scared of him. Are you going to meet him?”
    â€œMind your own business.”
    Cynthia grinned happily. “You are? Why, that’s even better than Emiliano Upton. Hell, Mace Villiers is the world’s champion fornicator. If he can’t—”
    â€œWe’re going to discuss a business deal,” Diane said.
    â€œHorse shit. Admit it, why don’t you? You’re just as attracted to him as any other woman with all her faculties would be, but you’re afraid of him because he’s a man you can’t control. But don’t you see that’s why he’s just what you need? Mace Villiers is strong enough to—”
    â€œWill you please just shut up?” Diane demanded.
    â€œHoney, I only want to see you regain your self-assurance as a woman.” Cynthia gave an emphatic nod of her head and batted out of the room.
    Diane said aloud, to her disappearing back, “May the gods save us from meddling busybodies.” But she was smiling.

4. Russell Hastings
    After a dull lunch with two junior SEC attorneys Russ Hastings walked the steaming sidewalks to Chatham Square to find a taxi bound uptown through the Bowery. He waved down a vacant cab and got in.
    â€œWell?” the driver growled. “Where ya wanna go?”
    He had to look it up in his notebook. “Forty-fourth and Sixth.”
    â€œUnh.” The traffic light was green, but the driver was busy writing the address down on his clipboard. “You got the time, mister?”
    â€œOne-thirty.”
    â€œThanks. I got to put it down on my ride sheet here, see, and I busted my watch last night.” The dashboard of the taxi was festooned with plastic madonnas, American flags, religious medallions. The driver finished scribbling and looked up; the light had just turned red against him. He put the shift in neutral and revved the snarling engine, startling a passing pedestrian. When the light changed, they started off with a neck-snapping jerk and careened across the intersection. Hastings sat back and tried to ignore the taxi’s violent progress through the traffic; watching, from the perspective of the back seat, always made him tense with alarm.
    It was a big cab, a Checker, the high old body style with jump seats. A warped sliding plexiglass window separated the back from the front seat; it was open, against the heat.
    The driver was a compulsive talker: “You one of them broker guys? My daughter works for one of them guys—Howard Claiborne, maybe you heard of him. Now an’ then I get tips on the stock market, y’understand what I’m saying?”
    Hastings only grunted to indicate he was listening. The driver was a hulking big man with a thick brutal chin and a polished bald head; from the rear quarter he looked like a thug.
    An errant car crossed the taxi’s bows, and the driver roared in a voice like a bassoon, out the window: “Whassamatta with you, ya dumb asshole—tryin’ to getcha stupid fuckin’ balls creamed?” The driver shook his head and said in exasperation to Hastings, “Mutterfuckinsonsuhbitches think they own the road or somep’n. Y’understand what I’m saying?”
    Hastings glanced at the license sign on the glove-compartment door. He made out the driver’s name on the placard: Barney Goralski. The photo wasn’t much worse than his own passport photograph. It gave a vague indication of a big fleshy face, nothing more.
    â€œYeah,” Barney Goralski was musing, “that stock market sure a hell of a place. My daughter, Anne, now, she gets all kindsa inside dope, y’know, but she’s a good kid, she don’t go spreadin’ it around the wrong places. Y’understand? Yeah, I fool around some with them stocks myself—I’m an independent businessman, y’know, own this cab myself. Ain’t one of your hired minority-group thugs what don’t know how to drive a cab. It’s a