Third Strike: A Charlie Fox Mystery

by Zoe Sharp

  As soon as we’d come to a stop I’d punched my seat belt release and piled out backwards, keeping the SIG up to cover Sean as I checked our escape route.

  Sean wrenched open the rear door and bodily dragged my father out. He landed heavily on his knees on the grass, dazed, shaking his head as if to clear the ringing from the cumulative concussion of explosive air-bag charges and gunshots. The shock of close-proximity live firing in a confined space took some getting used to, and he hadn’t had anything like the practice.

  “Take him!” I reholstered the SIG and went back in for my mother.

  Sean left me without hesitation, scooping up my father and thrusting him towards the tree line with one hand wrapped in the collar of the older man’s jacket. The Glock was out in Sean’s right hand and he kept the muzzle up all the way, moving at a sideways crab so he could cover my father’s back and still be ready for the occupants of the pickup to make their move.

  I jumped into the backseat and found my mother in fullflight panic. Her seat belt had jammed and she was clawing at it uselessly, eyes wild with fear as I slid across the seat towards her. I flipped out the largest blade on my Swiss Army knife and hacked through the webbing of the belt itself, ignoring the locked buckle.

  As soon as she was free, my mother nearly trampled me in her desperation to escape. If I hadn’t grabbed her, she would have scrambled right over the top of me and hit the ground running.

  A man had jumped out of the driver’s door of the pickup—unscathed, I noted with irritation—and was heading round the front of the Navigator to cut us off. I almost slung my mother back into her seat and drew the SIG, bringing it up so my target’s head would appear in my gun sights as soon as he came into view.

  He did so, moving in a fast professional crouch, holding a semiautomatic handgun in a double-handed grip, up and level in front of him. As soon as he had sight of us, he pulled the trigger. He was hasty and the shot went wide, hitting the headrest of the rear seat just to my right and kicking out a flurry of foam and stuffing.

  “No!” my mother screamed and I realized in the fraction before I returned fire that her cry was as much to me as it was to our attacker. Ignoring her, I snapped off two rounds at the blur of moving target.

  One shot went wide but I put the second through his upper thigh. He gave a yelp of pain and scuttled for cover, dragging his injured leg. Well, I had a certain amount of sympathy there.

  I glanced towards the tree line but couldn’t immediately see my father and Sean, which meant they were safe in concealment. And if they’ve any sense, I thought fiercely, that’s where they’ll stay.

  Then, behind us, another vehicle hove into view, a dark blue nondescript Chevy. It arrived at speed, the driver showing no astonished twitch at finding an apparent pileup half-blocking the road in front of him, which meant he was expecting this—or something like it.

  The odds of successful evasion had just got longer.

  “Out—now!” I said roughly to my mother before the approaching car had come to a full sliding stop. “We need to move! And keep your bloody head down.”

  She looked confused, as though the new arrival might have brought assistance rather than further danger, but at least she didn’t argue.

  As we jumped out of the backseat of the Navigator, I fired off another shot in the direction of the pickup driver just to keep his head down, and dragged my mother into a run for the trees.

  As I did so, I heard shouts from the occupants of the Chevy. I spun, fisting my left hand into my mother’s coat and ducking my shoulder to haul her halfway onto my back, covering her body with my own as I brought the SIG up in my right hand.

  I fired before my arm was at full stretch, aiming intuitively. Two figures had emerged from the Chevy, and some part of my brain registered a man and a woman. Their body language told me instantly that they were armed for immediate use rather than merely for threat. I chose the man as my primary target based purely on experience, knowing that he would likely pose the greater risk to our safety.

  I sighted directly at the center of his body mass and squeezed the trigger twice in quick succession.

  Running, weighted, my aim wouldn’t have won me any marksman badges, but it got the job done. Both rounds took him high in the shoulder, jerking him back and to the right. I just had time to see the mist of blood spray out, then he was falling.

  Still lurching sideways, protecting my principal, I swung my arm towards the woman. She had moved into a shooter’s stance, legs spread, arms locked in front. If she’d any training at all she was in the far better position for a decent shot.

  And, with shock, at that moment I recognized her—if not the face then certainly the white tape across her fattened nose.

  Vondie.

  So, not only training but also a damn good motive for wanting me dead. Looked like Collingwood still hadn’t managed to put a muzzle on his rogue agent—not enough to stop her from trying to take a big bite out of me, at any rate.

  Suddenly, the car window alongside Vondie shattered as two fast shots from the trees put it through. She spun but clearly couldn’t spot Sean’s position. Outflanked, she jumped for the safety of her vehicle, abandoning the kill. The Chevy’s engine was still running, and she had the gearlever rammed into drive before the door was even shut, leaving her fallen colleague writhing alone on the ground in her wake.

  Vondie swerved round the wreckage and, just when I thought she was completely faithless, the brake lights blazed as she anchored on and leaned over to throw the passenger door wide open. The man I’d lamed came hopping out from behind the Navigator and dived inside. Vondie stamped on the accelerator and the Chevy took off with enough anger to leave two long black streaks of burned rubber scarring the asphalt, and the bitter smell of gun smoke, blood and gasoline behind her.

  CHAPTER 23

  Sean came out of the trees with soft-footed caution, staring after the disappearing Chevy, eyes narrowed and the Glock still clasped loosely in his hands. He glanced at me and nodded, just once. I nodded back. That was enough.

  My father ducked round him and began hurrying to the man who was jerking and twitching in the middle of the road, the blood pool widening around him by the moment.

  “Wait,” Sean snapped.

  We shouldered past my father and approached the fallen man, staying wide to present two difficult oblique targets. I knew he’d been carrying and I hadn’t seen him drop a weapon. Sean edged in, not letting the Glock’s point of aim waver, and kicked away a big Colt semiautomatic. He leaned down then and checked the man roughly for a backup piece, not mindful of his injuries while he was doing it.

  “Look who it is.”

  I moved closer, saw beyond the blood and the contortion of the pain, and realized my victim was Vondie’s partner in crime, Don Kaminski. Hardly a surprise to find them hand in hand, when I thought about it. I wondered how he felt about Vondie abandoning him when he went down.

  My father brushed Sean aside then, almost with contempt, and crouched next to the injured man, who was panting with the effort it took not to cry out. Blood pulsed from one of the wounds in his shoulder in oxygen-rich scarlet spurts. Artery. He had a few minutes, maybe less.

  My father ripped at the clothing around the wound. “Press there—hard,” he said to me. “We have to slow the bleeding.”

  Reluctantly, I holstered the SIG, put the heel of my hand over the hole in Kaminski’s shoulder and leaned my weight into it, hearing the squelch. The acute pain that action caused sent his muscles into spasm, arching his back off the ground as his body went rigid. I had a pretty good idea that it would, because I’d once had something very similar done to me.

  Kaminski’s pain threshold must have been considerably higher than mine, though. His only verbal reaction was a grunt when he should have been screaming. But I saw the almost feral panic in his eyes and knew it was fear as much as anything that kept him silent as he twisted beneath my hands.

  “We don’t have time for this,” Se
an said, eyes scanning the road in both directions. “We need to get out of here.”

  My father threw him a vicious glance.

  “We can’t simply leave him. He’ll die.”

  “We didn’t start this and we don’t have time to finish it,” Sean said, equally brutal. “He knew the risks.”

  Under his breath, my father muttered something that sounded very much like an instruction for Sean to go to hell.

  My mother gave a short laugh that was way too highpitched to signify amusement.

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, you’re as stubborn as each other!” she said crossly. “Let him do what he can, Sean. If anyone comes it will look like what it is—a doctor treating someone at the scene of an accident.”

  “I’m more worried about his friends coming back with reinforcements, rather than keeping up appearances,” Sean said. He stared down at the injured man with entirely dispassionate eyes. “All right,” he said, letting out a fast breath. “Charlie, stay with him.” He turned to my mother and added, almost politely, “Elizabeth, if you wouldn’t mind helping me get our gear, let’s see if their truck will still drive, shall we?”

  “Do what you have to,” my father said, dismissive, unfolding his glasses from his inside pocket and sliding them on.

  I leaned harder into Kaminski’s shoulder but seemed to be having very little effect on the rush of blood. My hands were awash with it. I glanced up at my father and saw by his face that he knew my efforts were futile. If Kaminski’s frantic struggles were anything to go by, he must have known it, too.

  “You must calm down if you want me to help you,” my father told him, quietening the man by the sheer authority in his voice. Or perhaps the lessening of Kaminski’s movements was simply due to the fact that he was bleeding out as fast as his accelerated heartbeat could accomplish the task.

  Nevertheless, knowing that death is stalking your shoulder doesn’t make you entirely see sense. Kaminski clearly didn’t like the option of letting a man he’d just been sent to kill get close to him. His rib cage heaved, shuddering with the sheer effort he was expending to drag in each sodden breath.

  “You know this man’s a top-flight surgeon, and you also know that without his help you’ll be dead in minutes,” I told him. “Now, just let him save your miserable little life.”

  “You know him?” my father said.

  “Yes,” I said coldly, meeting Kaminski’s eyes, seeing the pain and the dread in them and feeling nothing. “He’s the one who—if you’d refused to cooperate in New York—was planning to take such delight in raping your wife.”

  For a moment my father’s hands stilled and I thought perhaps he might simply abandon his efforts and walk away. Maybe I wanted him to.

  Then he glanced at me and seemed to shake himself. “I need a sharp knife and some form of clamp,” he said. “Anything will do, but quickly!”

  One-handed, I dug my Swiss Army knife out of my pocket again and flicked out the smaller, cleaner, of the two blades, thrusting the knife towards him handle first. He took it like a typical surgeon, without either eye contact or thanks, and began to slice away the clothing around the wound site.

  “Here.” Sean was back just long enough to dump one of the vehicle’s first-aid kits, a roll of duct tape and a tool roll down next to us. My father barely acknowledged him, just ripped the kit open and dug out sterile wipes, dressings and bandages. He searched through the rest of the contents quickly, but there was nothing intended to deal with anything this severe.

  Kaminski, I recalled, had once been in the military. I bet he wished he still had his standard-issue ampoules of morphine with him now.

  My father ignored the ties holding the tool roll together, cutting it open instead, his fingers slick with blood. With a grunt of satisfaction, he slipped a pair of pliers out of the roll, ready, and turned back to his patient.

  “Hold him,” he warned. “This is going to hurt.”

  Kaminski must have outweighed me by nearly two to one, but he’d been shot twice and bled for long enough to weaken him sufficiently that I had the upper hand. I knelt on his chest, letting go of the wound, which surged afresh like floodwater.

  Swiftly, surely, my father stabbed the knife into the dense pectoral muscle at the top of Kaminski’s chest and sliced up towards his collarbone, his face ticking with irritation as the man screamed and bucked under us.

  My father used one of the unpacked dressings to clear the welter of blood enough to see what he was doing, then stuffed what seemed to be his entire hand into the incision he’d just made.

  I don’t count myself as squeamish, but that made me look away. I had to remind myself that this was, after all, what my father did for a living. The inner workings of the human body held no mysteries for him. It was just a machine that went wrong, and he was a highly trained and highly paid mechanic. I glanced at his face and found him calm, frowning slightly in utter concentration as he worked by feel alone.

  “Ah,” he said at last. “Got it. Hand me the pliers.”

  I grabbed the pliers. They’d been sitting in the tool roll for some time, by the look of them, and were covered in a film of oil and dirt.

  “Shouldn’t we clean them first?” I asked as I slapped them into his outstretched palm, reaching for a sterile wipe from the first-aid kit.

  “The man’s bleeding to death,” my father snapped. “I think infection is the last of his worries at the moment, Charlotte, don’t you?”

  Slowly, carefully, he withdrew his hand from the gaping hole in Kaminski’s shoulder, a thin piece of rubbery tubing gripped tight between his forefinger and thumb.

  My God, I thought. That’s an artery.

  Delicately, he wrapped the tube in a piece of dressing and clamped the pliers onto it before looking round. I grabbed an elastic band that had been holding one of the bandages together and handed it over. “Use this.”

  He took it with a nod this time, stretching the band around the handles of the pliers to hold them shut. Then he sat back on his heels, head tilted slightly, his lips pursed slightly in disapproval.

  “Not exactly the neatest bit of surgery I’ve ever carried out,” he said, wiping his forehead with the sleeve of his jacket, “but under the circumstances it will do the job.”

  He leaned over Kaminski, eyes skimming the blanched features until he was sure the man had him in focus.

  “If you dislodge or attempt to remove the temporary clamp I’ve placed on your artery, you will undoubtedly bleed to death,” he told him, voice cold and entirely matter-of-fact. “Do you understand me?”

  Fear was not the only thing holding Kaminski immobile. Eventually, he gave a slow blink, which we took to signify assent.

  “Good.” My father glanced at me. “Dressing, if you please.” I ripped off the cellophane wrappings and slapped the wadded gauze and cotton wool into his outstretched palm, too. He packed them over the wound, but ignored the bandage I offered in favor of duct tape, which he applied liberally across Kaminski’s chest, holding the pliers as well as the dressings firmly in place.

  He was just adding the last strip when Sean approached.

  “The truck’s drivable, no problem,” he said as he drew near. “Hitting us hardly even put a dent in the chrome. If you’ve quite finished playing Dr. Kildare, now we need to leave, okay?”

  “We should take him with us—get him to a hospital at the very least,” my father argued.

  Sean hid his exasperation behind a formally blank face, but it edged out around his words, even so. “He’ll slow us down, decrease our chances of evasion,” he said. “And I should hardly need to remind you that he and his lady friend have just tried to kill the lot of us.”

  For a moment my father didn’t speak, but his face turned grave. Then he nodded, brusque. “Very well,” he said. He rose, dusting off his knees. “If you get medical assistance soon, your chances of survival are fair. You may even retain the use of your arm,” he told Kaminski in a disinterested tone, turned on his heel and
walked away.

  I bent to retrieve my Swiss Army knife, carefully wiping the blood from the blade onto Kaminski’s jacket. Between us, Sean and I managed to drag him to the side of the road, where at least he wasn’t going to get run down by passing traffic. Not that there’d been any since the Chevy’s exit. Vondie and crew had chosen their ambush site well.

  Kaminski was very weak now, passing in and out of consciousness, too far gone even to cry out when he was moved. I couldn’t find it in me to pity him.

  Sean crouched and looked into the man’s eyes and made sure he was just aware enough of us to register.

  “This is the second time we haven’t killed you when we had the chance,” Sean murmured, almost regretful as he got to his feet. “Make it the last.”

  The Ford turned out to be an F-350 on a Pennsylvania plate. It was a double cab, which meant there was more than enough room inside for the four of us and our luggage. And, apart from the trio of bullet holes in the front windscreen, it was relatively undamaged.

  Sean drove us away from the scene, making as much speed as he could without attracting too much attention, pushing the big pickup hard. I’d retrieved boxes of ammo from our bags before we set off and now I occupied my hands topping off both magazines while I had the chance. Sean’s Glock had only two rounds gone. My SIG was light by eight.

  At one point Sean reached over and gave my hand a quick hard squeeze. I squeezed back and that was it. For several miles, nobody spoke.

  When I glanced over my shoulder to check on my parents, I found them holding each other close in the backseat. But, to my surprise, it seemed to be my mother who had her arms wrapped around my father, when I would have expected him to be the one to be offering the most comfort. She met my eyes over the top of his bent head and gave me a faint smile. After a second, I smiled back.

  “So, where now?” I asked Sean. “Miranda Lee’s?”

  Sean shook his head. “They must have been there, or they’re intercepting her calls,” he said. “We didn’t decide we were going back there until this morning, and she’s the only person we told. Either way, she’s compromised.”