One Damn Thing After Another Read online

  ONE

  DAMN

  THING

  AFTER

  ANOTHER

  By the same author

  Never Look Back

  Risky Mission

  Out of the Night

  Run for Home

  A Death at South Gare

  Living Dangerously

  And Then You’re Dead

  ONE

  DAMN

  THING

  AFTER

  ANOTHER

  Dan Latus

  ROBERT HALE

  First published in 2017 by

  Robert Hale, an imprint of

  The Crowood Press Ltd,

  Ramsbury, Marlborough

  Wiltshire SN8 2HR

  www.crowood.com

  www.halebooks.com

  This e-book first published in 2017

  © Dan Latus 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 71982 252 0

  The right of Dan Latus to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Dedication

  For Sandra, with love.

  Chapter One

  IT WAS A QUIET, peaceful place. Or so I had been assured. A small boutique hotel in an unfashionable quarter of the city, a couple of miles from the usual Prague tourist spots. Perhaps it was quiet and peaceful normally. But when I stepped outside onto the pavement, and the ornate timber door closed automatically behind me, things looked very different.

  A Range Rover with darkened windows was parked immediately across the pavement, a rear door open, ready for someone to step inside. A Toyota Land Cruiser, also with darkened windows, was parked close behind, and there was another one in front.

  The man who probably should have been holding the door open lay prone on the pavement, bleeding heavily, his chauffeur’s cap by his side. The man who I assumed had been about to step inside the Range Rover was being badly beaten by three other men, who looked as if they didn’t know when to stop.

  There were no screams or cries for help. There was no shouting in either triumph or despair. Nothing like that. Just a lot of grim, determined grunts and thuds, as the three doing the attacking slammed into their victim savagely and relentlessly.

  The victim had his back to the vehicle. He was sagging, pretty well spent. But he wouldn’t go down, and he was still flailing wildly and hopelessly at his assailants.

  It was a good time to turn around and step back inside the elegant tranquillity of the boutique hotel. Instead, I did a stupid thing – not for the first time, some would say.

  Instinct shouldered reason aside. This couldn’t be allowed to go on. I yelled at the men in front of me to stop, grabbed one by the shoulder and pulled him back. Then I stepped forward into the middle of it and lunged sideways, knocking another of them out of the way with my shoulder.

  The third man turned and swung a fist that thudded heavily into my chest, knocking me back. I kicked out and hit his lower leg hard, as an arm wrapped round my throat from behind. I was hauled backwards but managed to stamp on somebody’s instep with my heel hard enough for the arm to drop from my throat.

  I spun round, my back to the Range Rover. The guy who had been about to collapse to the ground was straightening up now I’d relieved him of some of the weight and pressure. Together, side by side, we fought back. A fist crashed into the side of my head, and another into my chest, but my blood was up and I registered little pain. I kicked and punched my weight automatically, without any thought whatsoever.

  Suddenly there was blood everywhere. It was on my hands and in my eyes. The guy beside me let out a loud grunt and sagged. Then I saw the man in front of him was using a knife, and about to thrust with it again.

  I reached out, grabbed the knife arm with both hands and put my whole body weight into throwing it over and back. Bone snapped as the arm broke free of the elbow joint. Somebody screamed. The knife dropped loose and disappeared from sight.

  Then a bright overhead light came on, a security floodlight. It was followed by lots of yelling and shouting, and suddenly there was breathing space. People stopped hitting me, and the bodies in front of us thinned out until there was nobody left for me to hit back at.

  I doubled over, breathing hard, but ready for more of the same if it started up again. It didn’t. Nobody came back. The pavement between me and the door of the hotel had cleared.

  Engines roared into life. The Range Rover shook as something slammed into it heavily. Tyres squealed. Both Land Cruisers were departing in a hurry.

  It was over. I was heaving for breath and felt like vomiting, but somehow I straightened up. I glanced sideways. The man beside me gasped something I could barely hear, and couldn’t understand anyway. Then the effort of trying to speak became too much for him. He just pushed his head into my shoulder, a gesture of thanks, and slowly straightened up himself.

  While I stayed where I was, and continued struggling to get my breath back, he staggered forward a couple of paces and leant down to attend to the man on the ground. I could see he was in no state to manage alone. So I joined him and tried to help.

  The chauffeur was conscious, but a long way from having his wits about him. We sat him up, with his back against the door of the vehicle. He was still leaking blood from the head wound, but by then uniformed staff were streaming out of the hotel and I eased back to let them take over.

  Remarkably, the man who I had fought alongside was recovering fast. He shook my hand and thanked me in what sounded, surprisingly, like Russian. I nodded and gave him a brief appreciative smile. Then I did my best to melt away out of sight.

  I sought the sanctuary of my ornate baronial-style room inside the boutique hotel, where I laid down on the bed to recover, and to wonder why such things happened to me. Other people can go on holiday and nothing out of the ordinary ever happens. Not me, though. Oh, no! If not this, then something else. It’s inevitable. Just one damn thing after another!

  Chapter Two

  AFTER A WHILE, THE blood thundering in my ears quietened down and my pulse rate dropped to a survivable level. I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling, or what I could see of it in the early evening gloom.

  Dim light from the sodium street lights outside the hotel allowed me to pick out men on horseback hunting a stag through rocky country without trees or discernible cover. I found myself wishing the stag luck. A tram squealed to a halt not far from the window of my room and a procession of vehicles dutifully stopped behind it, their engines throbbing as they waited more or less patiently for the tram to move off again.

  Someone knocked on the door of my room. I waited, listening. Nothing was said. The knocking, a heavy, confident sound, was repeated. I grimaced. Clearly, I was wanted.

  ‘Yes?’ I called reluctantly, sitting up on the bed.

  ‘Mr Doy? May I speak with you, please?’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘The hotel management, Mr Doy.’

  I supposed I’d better answer the door. Once I did that, though, I might be invited to start looking for another hotel. The management wouldn’t be very keen on guests who partook in mayhem on their doorstep. Good thing I was leaving soon.

  On the other hand, I thought, hesitating, my visitor might be nothing at all to do with the hotel management. So I stood well to one side and flu
ng the door open wide suddenly with outstretched arm, hoping I didn’t have to fight whoever was on the other side.

  I didn’t. The man standing there was familiar to me. Tall, slim, fit looking, and stern-faced, he was often behind the reception desk. I had spoken to him once or twice in the short time I’d been here.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mr Doy, I am sorry to disturb you.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said with a polite smile.

  ‘Mr Podolsky sends his best regards, and says that he wishes to see you.’

  ‘Who does?’

  ‘Mr Podolsky, the owner of the hotel. He would like to see you.’

  ‘So it’s a summons, is it? What for? Fighting in the street?’

  He didn’t smile. Not even a hint of it.

  ‘Please,’ he said, politely but insistently.

  So it looked as if I really would be required to vacate the premises. They didn’t want my sort staying in their smart hotel.

  ‘Do you know what it’s about?’ I asked again.

  ‘I do not have that information. Please,’ he repeated, making it sound even more like an instruction than a request.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Now, please. If you will come this way, I will take you.’

  I gestured at myself, my clothes torn, dirty and bloody from the recent exercise. ‘Let me change first.’

  ‘That will not be necessary, Mr Doy.’

  So I gave in and followed him along the corridor and up a flight of stairs. Then we passed through a door that was heavily security locked – which I thought interesting – and along another corridor or two.

  By then, I realized, we must have passed beyond the apparent limit of the hotel and now were inside the building next door. Clearly, the owner’s hold on the terraced street was greater than appeared from outside. That wasn’t too surprising. All those ancient Prague streets were a mystery to me. What lay beyond the shadowed front doors was an unknown world so far as I was concerned.

  My guide stopped, tapped on a door and opened it. ‘Mr Doy to see you, sir,’ he announced, for all the world like an old-style butler announcing the arrival of an important guest. He ushered me into the room, and I came face to face with Leon Podolsky – again. He wasn’t particularly tall, and he wasn’t especially broad, but he was a big man in all sorts of ways, and a strong one. In the brief moments we had fought together side by side, I hadn’t really appreciated that, but I should have guessed it from the way he had stayed on his feet and kept on fighting when he was heavily outnumbered and being badly beaten.

  But when I looked at him now, naked from the waist up, massive bruising spreading fast across his torso, with dressings and sutures from knife wounds that luckily didn’t seem to have done serious damage, it was his welcoming smile that dominated the room. He was a tough guy. No doubt about it. And his powers of durability and recovery were truly remarkable.

  ‘Mr Doy! Welcome. I am Leon Podolsky,’ he said in good, if heavily accented, English. ‘So we have found you? Please let me thank you, for coming here now and for the help you gave me this afternoon.’

  He stepped away from the man in a white medical coat who was attending to his wounds and came towards me, one hand outstretched. I took it and he clasped mine firmly for a moment. No big performance. No iron grip to demonstrate his mental or physical strength. Just a straightforward handshake. He rose even higher in my estimation.

  ‘I stepped outside the hotel at the wrong moment,’ I said with a rueful smile, ‘and there you were. Then I interfered when you were doing fine on your own.’

  ‘No, no! Absolutely not. It was exactly the right time to arrive. I am forever in your debt. If you had come even earlier,’ he added, ‘it might have saved my chauffeur from a fractured skull.’

  I grimaced. ‘How is he?’

  Podolsky shrugged. ‘Maybe he will live. I hope so. But I don’t know yet.’

  He didn’t seem overly concerned. It was not uncaring indifference on his part. I had seen how his first thought when the fracas ended had been for the injured man. It was more as if he was accustomed to violence and serious injury, and had learned to take them in his stride. That thought should have led me to walk away right then.

  ‘What was it about?’ I asked. ‘Do you know?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  He stood still to allow the medical man to adjust some of his dressings and then added, ‘What was it about? That is a very good question, Mr Doy. We will find out sooner or later. And then I will let you know, too, my friend.’

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but already I quite liked the guy. He was intriguing, and full of life. He seemed pretty decent as well, although it was odd that a pretty decent hotel owner should have been attacked on his own front doorstep.

  By then, though, I was sure he was Russian, which explained a lot. Phrases like “organized crime” leapt to mind automatically.

  Not that I was yet ready to assume anything untoward about Podolsky himself. It was more the world in which he lived that was suspect.

  But I was curious, a trait that has always been hard to deny, even though it has got me into a lot of trouble over the years. I admit it. Really, I did want to know what had been going on out there. It hadn’t been a simple street mugging. It hadn’t been an attempted assassination, either. Assassins would simply have shot him, probably in a hail of bullets from a sub-machine gun. It looked more like an attempted abduction to me. I guessed someone had wanted him picked up, either as a hostage or for ransom money – perhaps both.

  ‘Before we go any further,’ he said, ‘I would like my personal doctor to deal with your injuries.’

  ‘I’m all right, thanks,’ I said, shaking my head.

  ‘Please,’ he added, gesturing to the man in the white coat who had been attending to him.

  ‘I’m fine. There’s no need for that.’

  ‘No, you are not fine,’ he said sternly. ‘I can see with my own eyes some of the damage. You are possibly even worse than me.’

  I doubted that. But I smiled, and his laughter filled the room.

  After that, I was shepherded into an adjacent room that seemed to serve as a clinic. Somehow my clothes disappeared off my back, and I found myself swaddled in a luxurious bathrobe and stretched out on a bed.

  ‘Hey!’ I protested weakly as I saw my apparel leaving the room.

  ‘Don’t worry, my friend,’ the doctor said with a chuckle. ‘They will be back, cleaned and repaired by housekeeping, before I have finished with you.’

  I must have been weary. Probably the street battle had taken more out of me than I had first thought, when the adrenaline was still flushing around my system. At any rate, I gave in and allowed myself to be inspected by the doctor, and then pampered with cooling lotions and a massage by a young woman I had not even seen enter the room. Happily, there was no significant damage. But there were plenty of bruises, cuts and grazes to be worked on.

  ‘So what do you think, Doc?’ I asked the man in the white coat when he returned to peer at me.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Me!’

  ‘You have mild concussion, but nothing life threatening. Just get some rest and you’ll be good as new.’

  ‘That’s nice to know.’

  Later, rested, refreshed and dressed again in clothes that really had been cleaned and repaired, I was shown into yet another room. There, I found Leon Podolsky waiting for me once more. Now he was fully dressed, too, and eager for me to join him for dinner.

  ‘It is not much,’ he said apologetically, ‘but at short notice the chef has done his best.’

  I was staggered by the amount of food on the table. For the two of us? It was ridiculous. MacDonald’s would have suited me.

  ‘Mr Podolsky, there is no need …’

  ‘Nonsense! You must allow me to begin to repay you – for your courage, and for your instinctive commitment to helping someone in need. And it’s Leon – please!’

  I shook my head, quit
e unable to respond to his flowery, but apparently sincere, tribute. Then I stayed for dinner. Of course I did. My curiosity had got the better of me once again. Besides, he had a way with him that attracted me.

  Chapter Three

  MY HOST HAD SOME difficulty cutting the meat on his plate. This was not because his knife was blunt. It was more, much more, because his fingers looked as if they had been stamped on by an African elephant – or because he had been punching something very hard, with all his weight behind the blows. Someone, somewhere, would have a face to match.

  Still, we ate. The food was terrific. Some sort of steak, cooked in red wine. Excellent. The wine wasn’t bad, either. He said it had come from a famous vineyard in Georgia, a place where many people lived to be well over a hundred years old. He said other interesting things, too, lots of them. Even in the state he was in, he was a convivial host.

  Something that puzzled me slightly was why so much time had elapsed before I had been sought and then offered such lavish hospitality. It’s human instinct to thank someone right there and then, if you are going to do it at all. Offer them a cup of tea or a drink. Show concern over any bodily damage done to them. Apologize, explain – or whatever. Podolsky had not done that. He had let an hour or two go by before giving me a summons. I was soon to learn why.

  ‘You are an interesting man, Mr Doy,’ he announced with a sly smile, waving his fork at me in a friendly way.

  ‘Not everybody thinks so, but thank you. It’s Frank, by the way.’

  ‘Frank? Good.’ He nodded and went on to say, ‘You do interesting things, Frank.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Your work, I mean – for example.’

  Ah! So he’d had me checked out. Hence the delay. What a cautious street victim he was! Or a capable chess player, perhaps. Competent businessman, even.

  ‘So you know what I do for a living?’

  He nodded. ‘You’re a security expert, right?’

  ‘And a private investigator. Jack-of-all-sorts, really.’