Sleepless by Charlie Huston

Author:Charlie Huston [Huston, Charlie]
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Sci-Fi
ISBN: 978-0-345-51928-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

I HAD DISPENSED with burglar alarms and other home security measures long ago. That was shortly after I had become an independent contractor and found myself at odds with a long-established firm that provided services similar to mine. A boutique operation, they’d had business cards. No name, just the discreet number of an old-fashioned answering service, and a motto: Solutions for Extreme Circumstances.

As you can imagine, having such a card offered to you by a crew-cut gentleman with obviously scarred knuckles, wearing a well-tailored suit, was very impressive. This operation had a wonderful sense of theater. They were also, I must admit, quite good. Their solutions were effective more often than not, and most definitely extreme. The specific reason they had become displeased with me personally had to do with what they perceived as my poaching of a client they had serviced for some years. Poaching was the word they used when they called to advise me that I should desist and renege on the contract I had already accepted. All fairly polite but rendered with the unmistakable subtext that I had best get the fuck out of town on the next train. Or something equally Old West.

I declined.

There were a minimum of ways they could menace me. I was young. Capable of excellence in my field. Confident in my ability to succeed in the marketplace against any form of competition. And I lived within a highly secured property. The rule of law was strong, and my business was largely conducted in civilized countries; I had little to fear while engaged in my professional affairs. Having established what I believed to be my terminal exposures, I set to defending them, and went about my working days.

They came at me at night. Within the unbreachable security of my home. Dulled by the sense of safety that the locks, pressure-sensitive plates, armored doors, unbreakable glass, air density detectors, CCTV cameras, and obligatory infrared beams had imparted, I did not know I was at risk until I awoke with a blade at my throat. I was saved only by the fact that these were the kind of men who felt that an affront could be redressed only to the offender’s face. If they’d been of another sort, the kind who are genuinely happy to discover their victims asleep and to kill them in that state because of the many hazards and difficulties it eliminates, they would have survived. They were not of that sort.

I am.

So, finding myself alive when I should have been dead, I knew I had a slight momentary advantage. That advantage born of two facts: the first being that they clearly believed me to be helpless and at their mercy, the second being that I was clearly more ruthless than they.

No one expects that a naked man who was fast asleep only a moment ago will ignore the knife you have at his throat and attack you. What sane person would do such a thing? What sane person would do

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