FIRST DROP: Charlie Fox book four

by Zoe Sharp

  I washed my hands and took my time over drying them while I waited for them to totter out. Then I went along the line of cubicles, giving each door a gentle nudge. Aimee was lurking in the end one with her hands in her pockets.

  “Wassup girl?” she demanded. “You look, like, way too stressed.”

  I held my finger up to my lips and shushed her. There was no outer door and even with the general noise level I didn’t want to risk being overheard. I pushed her back into the cubicle and shut the door behind us.

  “Look, I need you to tell Trey I’m here with Gerri Raybourn and Livingston Brown and his security men,” I said, keeping my voice low. “We’ve arranged a meet with Whitmarsh and he’s supposed to be bringing out Trey’s dad. If he does, Brown’s guys will grab him.”

  “Cool,” she said. “What do we have to do?”

  “Just keep Trey out of sight,” I said. “I’ll call you and let you know when it’s over.”

  She nodded and started to go but as she reached for the door handle I had one last thought to add. “If it’s safe for him to come to me I’ll say something about his father, his dad,” I said. “But if anything goes wrong, when I call you I’ll mention Keith by name. In that case get him out of here as fast as you can and tell him to go to Walt’s place on the beach. You got that?”

  “What about you?”

  I brushed the question aside. “Have you got that?”

  She hesitated a moment, then nodded. “Father is good. Keith is bad,” she said, like she was revising for an exam. “Go to Walt’s place. I gotcha.”

  “OK,” I said. “Now give me a minute or so head start before you come out.” And I started to head for the exit.

  “Oh – and Charlie?”

  I turned.

  “Good luck, girl,” she said.

  I managed to raise a poor smile. “Thanks,” I said. “I’m going to need it.”

  ***

  When we’d been at the Ocean Center before I’d automatically noticed the security guards covering all the staircases leading to the upper floors. Now I wondered if Mason’s magic ID card was going to work to get us to the upper level as well but in the event he didn’t need to show it.

  The main stage was close to this entrance and it turned out that our arrival coincided with the buildup to the final of the weekend’s bikini contest. So that explained the two girls in the ladies’ room.

  The guard on this particular set of stairs was about twenty-two and he’d deserted his post to leer round the corner at the half-naked leggy beauties who were gathering in the backstage area. The eight of us were able to slip past him, under the tape barrier and up the first flight before he’d got his eyeballs back into their sockets again.

  The upper floor of the Ocean Center was painted neutral colours and buffed to an institutional shine. It consisted of a network of wide corridors with offices and meeting rooms round the outside of the building and doors leading to the terraces of seating on the inside.

  There was another guard sitting reading a magazine between one of the offices and the glass exit doors that led down to the street. She was a fat middle-aged woman with ornate glasses on a chain round her neck and aggressively-dyed orange hair. She got to her feet as we approached, reaching for the walkie-talkie on her belt. I expected Mason to go through his ID rigmarole again but maybe he was getting bored with that approach. Instead he took a gun out from under his jacket and pointed it at her.

  “In the office,” he said, twitching the end of the barrel in the direction of the nearest doorway. “Now.”

  The guard jumped to her feet, scared, dropping the magazine to the floor. Mason picked the walkie-talkie out of her nerveless fingers and hustled her through the office door. When he returned a few minutes later he was alone. None of us asked him what he’d done with the woman.

  “So, Charlie,” Brown said when his boys had checked the surrounding area and found it devoid of other life. “Where d’you reckon Whitmarsh will put in an appearance?”

  “If he shows up,” Gerri put in sharply. “He could well have just called the cops.”

  Brown regarded her with one eyebrow raised. “Well, let’s see if you’re right,” was all he said.

  Mason came up by his shoulder. “We’d best get ourselves outta sight, sir,” he said. “Don’t want to scare this guy off.” His eyes flicked to Gerri and something happened to his mouth that might almost have been a sign of amusement. “If he shows up.”

  Brown nodded and flashed me a quick smile. “Now don’t you worry none, Charlie,” he said, patting my shoulder. “Me and the boys’ll be close by.”

  Most of the office doors were locked but that didn’t seem to be much of a problem. Mason produced a set of picks from his inside jacket pocket and within moments the doors were open and they were inside.

  I was left standing in the centre of the polished floor, alone. Beyond the doorways to my left I could hear the thunder of the show coming up from the lower floor. The bikini contest was under way now, by the sound of it, the commentator trying to whip the crowd into an ever-greater fever of excitement as each girl took the stage.

  “You gotta cheer for the girl you wanna win,” he yelled. “The louder you cheer, the better she’ll do. Let’s hear it now for Chastity, from Orlando. Come on out Chastity!”

  I don’t know how good looking Chastity was. Or, more to the point, how little of her chest was covered by her bikini top, but the crowd went wild.

  The noise was suddenly amplified as one of the doors from the balcony looking out over the auditorium further along the corridor was pushed open. I tensed, automatically reaching for the gun in my bag.

  There was a pause, then Keith Pelzner stepped out into view.

  He was shuffling, looking back nervously over his shoulder. His gaudy Hawaiian shirt was stained and crumpled and his hair was matted down onto his head. Wherever Whitmarsh had been keeping him for the last few days, it wasn’t anywhere with a bath and full room service, that was for sure. Keith looked round vaguely, like he’d no idea where he was and didn’t remember me either.

  I called to him and started forwards but I hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps before Jim Whitmarsh moved out from behind the open door Keith had just come through. It swung closed behind him.

  Whitmarsh pulled his lips back to show me a set of white, even teeth. The gesture came across as friendly as the greeting from a scrapyard dog. He was holding the same Beretta he’d had at Henry’s house and looked like he couldn’t wait to use it.

  “If that hand comes out anything but empty,” he said pleasantly, “I’ll shoot you.”

  I carefully let go of the SIG but as I withdrew my hand from the bag I brushed my thumb against the voice activation button on Walt’s tape recorder.

  Whitmarsh nodded at my compliance. “Lose the bag,” he said.

  I lifted the strap, ducking out from underneath it, and held the bag out at arm’s length beside me. I let it drop gently to the ground so as not to damage or spill the contents. It landed close to the wall and lay on its side.

  Whitmarsh was looking in better nick than Keith. He was wearing a striped shirt with buttons that strained slightly over the expanse of his stomach. His weight was causing him to feel the heat and two circles of sweat stained the shirt’s armpits. Maybe he was just nervous.

  From somewhere below us I heard the commentator shouting to the rabid mob, “And now, from right here in Daytona Beach, it’s Tameka. Let’s hear it for the lovely Tameka!” The screams and cheers and whistles grew louder.

  “OK Charlie,” Whitmarsh said. “Where’s the kid?”

  “Close.”

  He shook his head. Not good enough. “Call him.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t have my phone,” I said.

  Whitmarsh eyed me for a moment, thinking through the moves like a chess player, trying to see if I was setting him up for checkmate further down the line. When he’d worked out that I had nowhere to go he reached into his trouser pocket and p
ulled out his own mobile.

  “Here.” He put the phone on the floor and sent it skidding towards me. I stopped it with my foot, then bent to pick it up without dropping my gaze.

  Keith, meanwhile, hadn’t moved apart from a gentle rocking motion backwards and forwards. He kept his head tilted away from both of us, his gaze averted. I wondered what, if anything, they’d given him to keep him so docile.

  I began to key in Trey’s number but stopped before I’d got much further than the start of the code. I looked up. “How do I know you won’t just kill me and take off with both Keith and Trey?”

  Whitmarsh grinned again. “You don’t.”

  “So why exactly should I trust you?” I asked but I knew I was just stalling. Come on, Mason, what the hell are you waiting for?

  Whitmarsh wiped the sweat from his forehead and studied me seriously. “Well, I could threaten to shoot Keith here if you don’t make that call,” he said, “but I don’t really think you give a damn about that one way or the other.”

  For a moment he regarded his captive with the contempt for weakness that often befalls despotic jailers, drunk on their own power and total control. Then he was back concentrating on me.

  “I could threaten to shoot you. In fact I could make things pretty damn intolerable without actually killing you,” he said reflectively and I forced myself not to react other than to remain politely interested, as though in someone important who’s telling you a long and pointless anecdote.

  In the main hall, the commentator had reached the final bikini contestant. “Last up, all the way from Iowa, it’s Jephanie. Whaddya think, huh? Way to go, Jephanie!” The crowd couldn’t have shown more savage approval if they’d been watching a public execution.

  “But somehow,” Whitmarsh went on, oblivious, “something tells me you don’t give much of a damn about that either.”

  Still keeping the gun aimed at the centre of my body mass, he stepped back and glanced sideways towards the door he’d just come through, which was standing a little ajar.

  “So as a last resort,” he said, “I could threaten to shoot somebody I know you do give a damn about.” He raised his voice slightly and called, “OK. Bring him out.”

  Just for a second I feared that Whitmarsh’s men had somehow got hold of Trey. If they had, I was abruptly surplus to requirements. But if that had been the case, I realised, Whitmarsh would never have showed for this meeting.

  And then the door opened again as Lonnie and Chris pushed through it. Lonnie was closest to me and I saw at once that in his right hand he was holding the Remington pump-action shotgun he’d used to such devastating effect in Henry’s garden. The length of the gun meant he held it awkwardly, angled upwards so that the end of the barrel was resting under the jaw of the figure he and Chris held pinioned between them.

  As they turned him towards me and my eyes zeroed in on his face the sound of the roaring crowd below us shrank and vanished like a pinprick of light in space. All I heard was the sharp astounded intake of my own breath.

  It was Sean.

  Twenty-two

  Sean!

  If I thought I’d reacted badly to news of his death, that was nothing compared to the emotional impact of finding him suddenly alive.

  The trauma of it went up my body in a fast ripple. Up my shins and the sides of my ribcage, scuttered across my chest and then passed quivering over my scalp like a sine wave. A physical effect that left me shaken and gasping. I was peripherally aware that I’d had to shift my feet to keep my balance.

  Sean – and it was definitely Sean – looked like shit. There was no other way to put it. Like Keith, his clothes were filthy and soaked with sweat and from the knees down his trousers were coated in what could have been old mud.

  They’d beaten him, too. They’d probably had to in order to begin to subdue a man like Sean. Blood had run and dried from a dozen cuts on his face and body. The bruises had spread like fear. My sense of dread at what had been done to him, at what he’d suffered, ran very cold and very deep.

  And at first I thought they’d broken him. I looked and saw nothing in his face. No fright, no pain, not even rage or madness. It was like his emotions had been ripped out, eviscerated.

  And then I looked again and, maybe because I knew him so well, I caught a glimpse of what lay past the shield he’d been using to protect himself from damage. Something glittered like ice in the depths of his eyes. A brooding intelligence that still lurked, intact and aware. Waiting . . .

  And, recognising it, my legs spontaneously took me forwards.

  Lonnie jerked the end of the shotgun up into where the carotid artery pulsed under Sean’s jaw, bringing both of us up short. The only difference was that it was me who flinched. Sean didn’t react at all. Lonnie had to physically lift his head back, arm muscles straining with the effort. It was only when I was still again that he allowed the gun to relax slightly away from Sean’s head.

  “Hey, Charlie,” Sean said lightly, his voice soft when I’d been half expecting a tight weariness. “Love the hair.”

  “Yeah,” I said, forcing my vocal cords to unclench. “It’s growing on me. I may even decide to keep it this way.”

  He smiled at me then, recognising my response for what it was. The smile was slow and sexy and it made my heart ache and my throat constrict until it hurt to swallow.

  “I see rumours of your death were greatly exaggerated,” I managed with surprising equanimity.

  “Mm,” he said, calm and level but for the first time there was just a trace of the underlying anger. “I expect they hoped you might fold easier if you thought you were on your own.”

  He let his gaze skim from my blenched features to Whitmarsh’s. The other man wouldn’t meet his eyes and I realised that even though he held the upper hand Whitmarsh knew only too well what might happen if ever there was a change in the status quo. He was a little afraid of Sean, a little afraid of the monster they’d created and now daren’t let go of. No wonder he’d got both his men clamped onto him, leaving Keith standing to one side, submissive and almost forgotten in this exchange.

  “So, Charlie,” Whitmarsh said with a touch of sneer. “Unless you want to watch your boyfriend’s brains getting splattered all over the ceiling for real this time, call the kid in. Don’t make me ask a third time.”

  Come on, Mason. For Christ’s sake man, get on with it!

  But even as the thought formed I realised that if Brown’s men did ambush us now, Sean was likely to get his head blown off anyway. I told myself that Mason’s combat experience, either police or military, was standing him in good stead. He was waiting for his opportunity, biding his time. All I had to do was play along for just a little longer . . .

  I lifted the phone again and completed punching in Trey’s number. My eyes met Sean’s as I hit the send key, looking for reassurance, but I might as well have been hoping for a reaction from a statue. I wondered if he knew what I was going to do, if he would have done the same himself.

  I tried not to feel pain at the fact that he’d shut down again, shut me out, but it was real and physical. I just had to accept that he was doing what he had to do in order to survive this. Now it was up to me.

  Somewhere below me the noise came rushing up again as the mob howled and stamped and cheered for the half-naked girls on the stage. The commentator’s voice was a frenetic squawk as he urged them to select a winner like they were choosing a sacrifice.

  “Hello?” Trey’s voice sounded tinny and hollow but they were somewhere close. In both ears I could hear the same cheers and catcalls. One reported, one live.

  “Hi Trey, it’s me,” I said and saw Whitmarsh’s fingers flex round the pistol grip of the Beretta, trying to relieve the tension. But his face had already twisted into a triumphant smile. He knew he’d won. Knew he’d beaten me. Beaten the pair of us.

  Not quite yet, old son.

  “I need you to come upstairs, the corner near the stage. Fast as you can,” I said, keeping my voice ne
utral. “Come on your own. Don’t bring the others with you.”

  “All right,” he said, nonplussed and cautious. “Is everything OK?”

  “Yeah,” I said, eyes fixed on Sean’s face. “Keith’s here. Everything’s fine.”

  I ended the call and threw the phone back to Whitmarsh. He caught it easily, one-handed, and said with some satisfaction, “So now we just wait for him to come to momma.”

  He never got the chance to be disappointed.

  At that moment two of Brown’s men came smoothly out of one of the offices behind where Lonnie and Chris were holding Sean, guns out and ready. They must have been using the time they’d been hidden to quietly bypass the connecting doors between the rooms, gaining ground.