Third Strike: A Charlie Fox Mystery

by Zoe Sharp

  I rose, nodding curtly to Sean, and we walked out. I noted that he made sure to grate the spade on the ground with each stride, just to drive the point home.

  We halted just outside the garage door, leaving it open slightly so we could keep a surreptitious eye on them.

  “What exactly did you do to Don?” I asked quietly.

  Do you really want to know?

  I shook my head as though he’d spoken out loud. “No, on second thoughts, don’t answer that. Will they cooperate?”

  He shrugged. “I would, given that kind of a choice—and so chillingly delivered.” He tilted his head and regarded me with studious eyes, an almost mocking smile on his lips. “You play the psycho very well, Charlie.”

  “Thank you—I think,” I said. “I learned from a master.”

  At that moment, my mother came out of the front door and hurried across the gravel towards us. She saw the spade in Sean’s hands and her face blenched white.

  “Oh, you haven’t … ?”

  “No, we haven’t,” I said, moving forwards to meet her and registering the way Sean casually shifted to block her view into the garage. “We’ve given them some options, that’s all, and they’re talking them over.”

  “Oh,” she repeated, more blankly this time. “Well, er, I’m just packing some things, but I’m not sure what to take. How cold is it in New York at the moment? And how long am I likely to be away? I have a lot of responsibilities that can’t just be dropped at the last minute, you know,” she added in a peevish tone that lasted until she asked, suddenly more forlorn, “And … what do I tell people?”

  “Tell them your husband’s been taken ill,” I said, starting to run out of patience. “He’s a doctor, for heaven’s sake. Hospitals are full of sick people. Tell them he caught something. Or tell them he got knocked down by a bus crossing the road and broke his ankle.”

  “But that’s simply not true.”

  Give me strength! “Okay. How about you tell them he broke it falling down the stairs during a police raid on a Brooklyn brothel? That closer to the truth for you?”

  She gave me a hurt look and scurried back into the house without reply. I turned and found Sean watching me, expressionless.

  “What?” I said, but he only shook his head and pushed the garage door open again.

  As they heard our footsteps approaching, both Blondie and Don squirmed round to try and see us coming, as though that would somehow make a difference.

  “Okay,” Sean said to them, his voice even and pleasant, but that of a stone-cold killer nevertheless. “Decision time. What’s it to be?”

  They chose internment over interment. Of course they did. We folded the Shogun’s rear seats flat and slid them in like coffins into a hearse, on a sheet of folded heavy-duty plastic from the greenhouse. They lay flat on their backs, side by side. We secured their hands and feet with more duct tape so they posed no risk to us, and covered them with a picnic blanket my mother insisted on providing. She thought comfort—we thought concealment.

  I made a phone call and got the promise of help I needed. Then Sean and I drove them north. About an hour and a half up the M6 motorway, over the high-level bridge at Thelwall, and into Lancashire. Back to my old stamping ground.

  Aware of our audience, we didn’t talk much on the drive up. At one point Blondie’s muffled voice demanded we stop so she could use the rest room. Classic hostage technique—get your captors to do you small favors. I wasn’t buying.

  “It’s not much further,” I told her. “You’ll have to wait.”

  “And what if I can’t wait?”

  “That’s up to you—only you might want to bear in mind that this isn’t our vehicle, so we don’t really care what happens to it,” I said blandly. “Whereas you might not have a change of underwear for a while.”

  She fell silent for the remainder of the journey.

  Sean left the motorway at the north Lancaster exit, drove up the Lune Valley and then struck out along the winding back roads towards Wray. Eventually, at my direction, he turned off the main road and the Shogun clambered easily up a potholed farm track. At the top was a scruffy yard with an old stone barn at one side and a couple of dead pickup trucks fighting a losing battle with the weeds in front.

  We passed through a set of stone gateposts, one of which was cracked clean in half, and drew to a halt. A moment later, the barn door opened and a big man with shaggy hair and a scarred face stepped out and glared at us, even though he’d known full well we were coming. At his heels was a mammoth rottweiler bitch. The dog appeared to be glaring, too.

  I opened the door and climbed out. As soon as he recognized us for certain, the man broke into a grin that revealed several gold teeth.

  “Charlie!” he said. “How are ya, girl?”

  “Good, thanks, Gleet,” I said, shaking the oil-ingrained hand he offered. “You remember Sean?”

  “Course I do, mate,” Gleet said, a certain amount of respect in his voice. He clicked his fingers dismissively to the dog who, with one last, longing look in our direction, turned and disappeared back into the barn. Gleet jerked his head towards the Shogun. “You got these two bodies you want storing, then?”

  “Yeah,” Sean said, opening up the rear door. “Don’t take any chances with either of them.”

  “No worries. Got a space cleared out at the back of one of the old pig sheds. They’ll be safe as houses back there and they’ll not get out across the field past that lot with their fingers intact, I can tell you.” He gave an almost delicate shudder. “Vicious little buggers, pigs.”

  Gleet might live on a farm, but the day-to-day running was handled by his morose sister. He spent his time building beautiful custom motorcycles out in the barn, which was how I’d first come into contact with him.

  His sister appeared now, a stocky masculine woman, silent and scowling, in a baggy flower-print dress over Wellington boots, and a knitted hat with a frayed hole in the crown.

  Between us, we hauled our cargo out of the Shogun and untied their feet so they could walk. Don thought about making some kind of a play at that point, but his restricted circulation wasn’t up to it. Gleet’s sister manhandled him across the yard and through a galvanized metal field gate with all the careless skill of a woman who’s spent the last forty years dealing with bolshy cattle.

  The free-range pigs were a new addition since my last visit to Gleet’s place, and they hadn’t done much for the landscape. Pigs like to dig, and the ground we staggered across was ankle-deep in muddy ruts, like the Somme after particularly heavy bombardment.

  The pigs looked happy, though—and big, too. And intelligent in a sly, cunning kind of way, as if they knew full well they had the upper hand out here and they couldn’t wait for you to miss a step so they could prove it. They stopped wallowing and tunneling long enough to watch our halting progress across the field, past their corrugated iron arks to a dilapidated wooden shed.

  Close up, the shed was a lot more solid than it had first appeared, with a shiny new padlock on the door. Inside, it stank of its last occupants, to the extent it made your eyes water. Blondie’s face showed her disgust.

  “This isn’t over,” she said, her voice flat and buzzing slightly from the busted nose. “This isn’t anywhere close to being over.”

  “Any time you feel up to a rematch,” I said, meeting her gaze, “you let me know.”

  Her lips twisted into a grimace that might have doubled as a smile. “You have no idea, do you,” she said, “who you’re dealing with?”

  “Perhaps you’d care to enlighten us?” Sean said. He gestured to the pigs, who’d edged nearer like they were hoping to pick up gossip. “Might make all the difference to the company you keep.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” Blondie said, closing down. “I think they’re probably better than yours.”

  Gleet’s sister gave her a shove backwards and bolted the door to their temporary cell behind the pair of them. It was only then I let the bravado fade fro
m my face.

  “Don’t worry, they’ll be fine,” Gleet said. “May and me’ll look after them.”

  I realized with some surprise that I’d never known his sister’s name before. I turned to her and, aware of the listening ears, asked casually, “Are you still handy with that crossbow of yours?”

  “Don’t need to be no more,” May said darkly, with the faintest glimmer of a twinkle in her dull gray eyes. “Them daft buggers at t’local council gave me my shotgun license back.”

  CHAPTER 11

  We spent the night down in Cheshire. A phone call on the way back had Madeleine arranging seats for the three of us on the first available return flight to New York, but it didn’t leave until the following morning so there was nothing we could do except sit tight overnight. I called ahead to warn my mother of the schedule. The conversation was brief and when I rang off she was fretting about canceling the milk and the newspaper delivery at such short notice.

  For the rest of the journey, we speculated about Blondie’s and Don’s purpose, employer, and identity—mostly fruitlessly.

  The only thing that was obvious was that they were both Americans. Accents aside, their clothing was all U.S. chainstore brands. No need to cut out the labels, because hundreds of thousands of each item were sold every year.

  Sean and I had been through their belongings meticulously, but they were real pros and they’d carried nothing incriminating. No passports, no ID, no personal mementos or convenient books of matches, no credit cards. Just a stack of cash in a plastic envelope from an airport exchange bureau, and a pay-as-you-go mobile phone with the call register purged.

  They’d arrived by taxi, my mother had told us, but in Blondie’s handbag we’d found a ticket for parking at Manchester airport, dated the day of their arrival, and a set of car keys. The keys were for a Citroën, so they obviously didn’t belong to Blondie’s own vehicle in the States, where Citroëns weren’t imported. That meant they were from a rental, which they’d picked up and almost immediately abandoned in one of the sprawling car parks. They’d carefully removed the key fob identifying which company it was hired from.

  “I suppose that’s where they’ll have stashed their personal stuff,” I said. “Hire a car as soon as you land, leave everything you don’t want found on you inside, then dump it in long-term parking and pick it all up again when you leave.”

  “It’s good operating procedure,” Sean said. “These days, the authorities are too nervous to let you leave luggage at the airport.”

  They’d stuck to protocol over communication, too. My mother had never heard them make any outgoing calls, and they had always been very careful to take incoming ones well outside her earshot. Apart from Don’s increasingly creepy behavior, they hadn’t given any sign that things weren’t going according to whatever plan they’d devised.

  “Interesting that they had no weapons on them,” I said, “but I suppose if they flew in they couldn’t exactly bring anything with them.”

  “Mm, still, they’re not difficult to pick up over here—particularly so close to Manchester. Perhaps it’s fortunate they didn’t think of that,” he said with a wry smile. “But they must have known they didn’t need them. There were two of them against an untrained woman in her fifties, and they had the additional threat of doing something nasty to her husband if she didn’t play ball. They knew she wasn’t going to try anything.”

  “But … she did,” I said, a little blankly as the realization hit. “She warned us.”

  “Yes, she did,” Sean agreed. He threw me a little sideways look. “There’s more to your mother than meets the eye.”

  “Well, let’s face it,” I said, unwilling to be impressed, “there could hardly be less.”

  He smiled openly at that, reaching into his jacket pocket without taking his eyes off the road and pulling out his mobile phone.

  “Here,” he said, handing it over. “Before I started asking those two any difficult questions, I took a couple of mug shots of each of them. They’re not very good—I’m no David Bailey, and they weren’t exactly willing subjects—but if you e-mail them across to Parker, he might be able to ID them.”

  “You’re right,” I said critically when I’d scrolled through the menus and found the shots. I peered closer at the small view screen. “This one of Blondie’s so bad she ought to be using it on her passport.”

  He glanced across. “I don’t think she trusted me to capture her best side, so she would keep shutting her eyes.”

  After some fiddling, I managed to send the photos on, then called Parker to check they’d come through. I heard the rattle of computer keys in the background.

  “No … nothing yet,” he said. “How’s your mom—she okay?”

  “She is now,” I said.

  “Ah. Trouble?”

  “No more than we were expecting.”

  “That bad?” Parker said grimly. “Ah, hang on … yes, the pictures have just landed. Let me just check that they open okay … . Jesus! Is this woman actually dead?’

  “No, she’s faking it.”

  “I guess she’s faking the blood all over her face, too, huh?”

  “Ah, no, that was me,” I said, and he laughed at the cheeriness of my tone.

  “Okay, leave it with me. I’ll e-mail these to a guy I know who works with the Feds. He should be able to run them through a database or two and at least tell us if they’ve got any history.”

  “The guy—Blondie called him Don—seemed to have some fairly distinctive behavior quirks,” I said, and summarized my mother’s halting admission. “That might help nail him down.”

  Parker’s voice hardened. “Damn right he oughta be nailed down,” he said. “She must have been terrified.”

  She’d certainly had a taste of the grim realities of life, I reflected, where previously her only brush with the dark side had been somewhat vicarious.

  “Yeah, well, she bounces back pretty quickly.”

  “Oh,” Parker said, sounding a little nonplussed but, at the same time, cynical. “So that’s where you get it from.”

  It was dark by the time we got back to the house. My mother had cooked us an evening meal that was as elaborate as it was exquisite. She served it, accompanied by best china, starched linen and hallmarked silver cutlery, with all due pomp and ceremony in the formal dark red dining room. I imagined she’d done the same thing every night for her captors, a pointlessly stiff-upper-lip example of not letting standards slip, no matter what the circumstances. If she’d been any good at carpentry she’d have built them a river bridge in the jungle, too.

  I was starkly reminded of the last time Sean had eaten a meal in that stuffy room, during the one and only time I’d brought him home to meet my parents on an illicit weekend pass from camp. I’d been filled with the vain hope that they’d be impressed by his quiet self-containment. Instead, they’d been horrified by his obvious working-class origins and gone out of their way to expose him, in their opinion, as little more than a vulgar, uncouth yob. Although he’d hidden it rather better, he’d been just as intimidated by their uppermiddle-class snobbery.

  In truth, I never should have been involved with him in the first place. Not then. Not only was he a sergeant when I was a lowly private, but he was one of my instructors as well. As far as the army was concerned, the relationship was taboo on every level, and undoubtedly doomed from the start.

  Now, I watched him in the flickering light from the twin candelabra, as he lifted a long-stem glass to sip the excellent wine he’d chosen from my father’s cellar to go with the main course. There was still an unmistakable lethality to him that anyone with half a brain couldn’t fail to recognize, but it was sleeker, slicker, more heavily disguised.

  He could have been a corporate raider, a ruthless entrepreneur, even a prowling tiger on the Stock Exchange floor, rather than the obvious enforcer he’d always seemed in the past. My mother certainly responded better to his present gloss, but I wasn’t sure how much of that was due to s
ome kind of residual gratitude. And, if it wasn’t, a part of me bitterly resented her belated approval now, when neither she nor my father had bothered to look beyond Sean’s rough-diamond exterior before.

  After we’d locked down for the night, we quizzed her again about my father’s recent behavior, but it was heavy going.

  “I simply can’t believe he could possibly be involved in anything illegal or immoral,” she declared resolutely, and wouldn’t budge from that standpoint, despite firsthand reports to the contrary. “I’m sure when I’ve spoken to him, everything will be all right.”

  Eventually, I gave up and announced my intention of turning in, and that provoked more prudish maneuvering on my mother’s part. Anyone would have thought I was in my early teens rather than my late twenties.

  She made a big song and dance out of showing Sean to the room she’d made up for him specially, as though that was going to persuade him to stay put for the duration of the night.

  He just favored her with a bland smile and assured her he would sleep very soundly there. And, as she was fussing over pointing out clean towels in the neighboring bathroom, he passed by me close enough to murmur in my ear, “Won’t we?”

  “If you were a gentleman you’d be the one doing all the creeping from bed to bed,” I whispered back, scalp prickling at the thought of trying to get away with that kind of thing under my parents’ somewhat puritanical roof.

  “Yeah, but I’m assuming your childhood bedroom doesn’t have the luxury of a double bed.” He smiled, wolfish. “Besides, I’m not sure I could stand the thought of being stared at by a shelf full of raggedy old stuffed animals and dolls.”

  “Good point, although I was never a big fan of dolls.” I waited a beat. “Had an Action Man and a Meccano set, though.”