Second Shot: A Charlie Fox Thriller

by Zoe Sharp

  He pointed and, like a fool, I let my gaze drift in the direction he indicated. When I looked back, he’d taken his hand out of his right pocket and, this time, there was a gun in it. A black semiautomatic, maybe a Colt, but in this light it was hard to tell. The Beretta was in my own pocket, but I knew I didn’t stand a chance of getting to it in time. I let my breath out slowly and forced myself to relax.

  “Nicely done,” I murmured.

  The mustachioed man gave a tight little smile in acknowledgment of the praise and jerked his head to the side.

  “Keep walking,” he said.

  “What’s the point?” I said, eyes tracking his every movement for sign of a way in. The barrel of the gun was disappointingly steady in that regard. “If you’re going to drop me, then drop me here. Why do I need to die tired?”

  “I ain’t gonna drop you unless I have to,” the man said. “Someone wants to talk to you, is all. But you give me any trouble, ma’am, and you better believe I’ll do what I got to.”

  “And if I don’t feel like talking?”

  The man smiled again, almost. “All you really got to do is listen,” he said. “And trust me, you’ll do it a whole lot better if you ain’t in pain. So, we gonna do this the hard way, or the easy way?”

  I paused, considering for a moment. As I did so I heard the long scrape of the side door of a van opening, away to our left. Any hopes I had of the noise causing a distraction were instantly dashed, however. Mustache never even flinched. I glanced sideways myself and found out why.

  Another man had emerged from a dark-colored van. He was medium height, neither small nor bulky, and his close-cropped hair gleamed slightly red in the lights from the hotel. He was also carrying a semiautomatic. My chances of escape had just halved.

  “Quit messing with her and get her in the van,” he said easily to Mustache.

  Mustache still hadn’t taken his eyes off me. Both of them had the look of pros, relaxed, confident and unlikely to make any slips I could take immediate advantage of. I cursed under my breath for walking so lamblike to the slaughter and shrugged my compliance, allowing the red-haired man to pat me down with rough efficiency. He took my mobile phone, then quickly found and confiscated the Beretta.

  “Tsk, Charlie,” Mustache said, and I couldn’t suppress a twinge of unease at his use of my first name. “Now I’m betting you ain’t got a license for that.”

  “Why?” I said. “Do you?”

  He didn’t answer, just giving me a shove in the small of my back towards the still-open sliding door. I climbed in, aware of a sense of deep foreboding. After I’d left the army I’d made a living for a while teaching self-defense classes to women. One of the most important points I’d stressed was not to allow yours elf to be taken to a place of your assailant’s choosing. Yet, as I waited for an opportunity to grab for the gun that never quite arose, here I was, breaking all my own rules.

  Mustache climbed in after me, threw his clipboard into the back, and slammed the door shut. The red-haired man got into the driver’s seat, reversed out of the parking space and stuck the gearshift into drive. The whole thing had taken no more than a couple of minutes from us walking out of the hotel lobby. There had been no witnesses.

  As we began to move forwards I caught a glimpse of the hotel’s lights glittering through the darkened back windows of the van, and wondered what the hell I’d just got myself into.

  The two men drove me down into North Conway and almost all the way through the town until we finally pulled off next to a little seafood restaurant called Jonathon’s. They stopped the van and the red-haired man twisted to face me, laying his arm along the back of the seat. He was wearing an ornate ring on the little finger of his right hand. The light was behind his head and I couldn’t see his face clearly

  “Now, you been a good girl so far,” he said. “Are you going to behave, or do we need to go through the whole threat business again?”

  “That depends,” I said, keeping my voice steady, “on what happens next.”

  The redhead smiled enough for me to see his teeth in the gloom. “Someone inside wants to speak to you,” he said. “We go in, you talk, you come out, we give you a ride back to the hotel.”

  “O-K,” I said slowly “And the threat business?”

  “Oh, we don’t need to go into that, but just let me say that sure is a cute kid you’re looking after.”

  I felt my face freeze over. “I think I’ve been pretty patient so far in allowing you two to drag me down here, but that, my friend,” I said softly, “was a big mistake.”

  “Hey, now who needs to quit fooling around with her?” Mustache said. “She’s said she’ll do it, so she’ll do it. Don’t make trouble for yourself.”

  As my two escorts walked me towards the restaurant, one on either side, I asked, “As a matter of interest, how did you engineer that grab raid back there?”

  The redhead merely looked smug, but Mustache was prepared to be more talkative. “I was hanging around in the lobby, keeping an eye out for you, and I heard them at the desk calling up the rental company. Soon as she mentioned your name, I went out and got myself a clipboard and some official-looking papers.” He shrugged. “Reckoned it was a whole lot easier than trying to deliver you pizza you ain’t ordered.”

  Tou reckoned right.

  They’d put their guns away but had a tight grip on my upper arms instead, just above the elbow. The redhead did the talking to the waitress who offered to seat us, nodding to an occupied corner table. It was too early for it to be busy. In fact, when I glanced around I saw that the man I’d been brought to meet was the only diner. It came as little surprise to recognize Felix Vaughan.

  I did a fast visual sweep of the place as I was walked across towards him. Formica-topped tables, plain wooden chairs, rough plaster and simple clapboard walls, painted white like a beach house. The look was completed by mooring buoys and other nautical items strung along the walls, including an old harpoon gun.

  Vaughan was sitting, eating a large portion of what I would have called king prawns, but I’d learned were classified as shrimp over here, from a paper plate. They’d obviously arrived still fully dressed and he had sticky fingers and a stack of empty shells to one side of him. He looked up as we approached and carefully wiped his hands.

  “Miss Fox,” he said, nodding to the chair opposite. “Please, won’t you join me?”

  His voice was polite, but the men on either side of me forced my obedience, dragging me into a seat and then making sure I stayed there with a heavy hand on my shoulder.

  “Mr. Vaughan,” I said, pleasantly. “Would you mind informing your minions that the next one who touches me will be feeding through a tube for the foreseeable future?”

  It was gratifying that the hand lifted sharply, without any need for the scowl that Vaughan leveled in their direction.

  “Thank you,” Vaughan said, his voice dismissive and chillingly polite. “You can wait outside.”

  He waited until they’d gone before he spoke again, sliding his thumb up the exoskeleton of another shrimp and twisting its head from its body.

  “Would you like some?” he said. He gestured to the paper plates. “Don’t be fooled by the modest decor. This place does the best seafood for miles.”

  I sighed, looked away a moment as if to catch my breath, or my temper, but in reality just so I didn’t have to watch him eat. Then I looked back. “You never quite got the hang of dating, did you, Felix?”

  For a moment he frowned before a sly smile overtook it. “You’re a cool one. I’ll give you that,” he said, shaking his head. He wiped his hands again, picking up a bundle of extra paper napkins. I leaned forwards, folding my arms onto the Formica surface and carefully palming a table knife in my right hand as I did so, just in case.

  “Don’t be foolish, Miss Fox,” Vaughan said without looking at me directly. “I’ve been a fighting man since before you were born. I’d kill you before you got that blunt blade anywhere near me.” />
  I sat back again, leaving the knife on the tabletop and he nodded as he reached for another shrimp.

  “That’s better. If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead by now, believe me. I hear you had a lucky escape last night.”

  How did you hear? Because you were involved, or because Lucas told you?

  His patronizing tone goaded me into bravado. “Luck didn’t come into it.”

  He grunted. “You say you were a soldier?” he said. I gave the faintest nod. “Well then, you should know that luck always comes into it, one way or another.”

  “Would you like to get to the point?”

  “Of course,” he said. “The point’s simple. I’ve tried to get it across to you as painlessly as possible, but it hasn’t sunk in, so now I’m going to tell it to you straight. Go home. Take the girl and the kid and go home.”

  I sat and looked at him. As painlessly as possible. Had he had a hand in last night’s failed kidnapping attempt, or did he have some other motive?

  “Why?” I said.

  He shook his head. “Not your problem,” he said. “Your problem is that I want you to go. That’s the start and finish of your problem. You do the right thing and your problem ends.”

  “My problem is my client,” I said. “If she wants to stay, she stays, but,” I added, raising a hand when he would have cut in, “fortunately— for all of us —she’s already decided she’s leaving.”

  “When?”

  I paused, but reason told me that it wouldn’t gain me anything not to tell Vaughan the truth. And it could even save a lot of hassle, so I said, “We’ll be heading down to Boston first thing tomorrow.”

  “That’s very wise,” he said, nodding, giving me a tight smile. He ripped open a couple of packets of moist towelettes and wiped his hands more thoroughly, fastidious about his nails. The scent of lemon cut across the fishy smell of the table, sharp and acidic. “So, your task is nearly over.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll stay with Simone as long as she needs me,” I said. “As long as there’s a threat.”

  “And then?”

  I shrugged. “Move on to the next job.”

  He reached for his glass, took a drink and stared at me. “I could use someone with your particular skills,” he said. “I think I could work something out that would make it very worth your while for you to consider relocating.”

  “I’m flattered,” I said blandly. “But it would have to be a very cold day in hell.”

  “Well, that’s the beauty of New England—the weather’s always just about to change,” he said. “You don’t like it, you wait five minutes.”

  “The answer’s no.”

  It was his turn to shrug. “A shame,” he said.

  I pushed back my chair and stood. He let me take one step away from him before he spoke again.

  “So tell me—has she found out the truth about him?”

  “The truth?” I turned back, a flash image of that old ID photo of Lucas in front of me. “You mean he’s not her father?”

  Vaughan laughed, little more than a chuckle under his breath. “That would be much too easy, wouldn’t it?”

  For a moment I just stared, so tempted to ask but afraid he was just teasing to get me to beg. “And how would you know anything about that?”

  “I make a point of finding out all about the people I do business with,” he said. He sat back and smiled again, more smugly this time. “So, she doesn’t know.”

  “The jury’s still out,” I said shortly, losing patience. “We leave tomorrow. By the time we come back, she’ll know one way or the other.”

  Thirteen

  Vaughan’s boys dropped me off at the bottom of the steep driveway leading up to the White Mountain, tossing my mobile phone out into the snow after me. They did not return the Beretta, more’s the pity.

  I waited until they’d turned round, avoiding the spray of slush from their wheels, and their dirty rear lights were bumping away before I stooped to retrieve the phone, drying it on my shirttail. They’d switched the phone off and I turned it back on again as I trudged back towards the hotel entrance. It rang almost immediately with a voicemail message.

  “Charlie? It’s Jakes. Where are you?” said a man’s voice, anxiety threading clearly through it. “Erm, look, Miss Kerse wants to go to her father’s place. She got a call, about ten minutes ago, and she says she wants to go over there right away. I kinda told her we ought to wait for you to get back first, but she’s getting kinda angry and she won’t wait any longer. So, I’m gonna go over there with her and, when you get this, that’s where we are, OK?” There was a pause, as though he expected me to speak, or offer some kind of advice or approval. “Call me when you get this, OK?” Then the bleep of the call being ended.

  I tried to get the phone to show me what time the message had been recorded but fumbled with the technology As I redialed, I was cursing under my breath.

  The driveway curved round behind the hotel, but the shortest route was up a steep, snow-covered bank to the front entrance. I took it without hesitation, plunging into soft powder.

  The cold scoured my throat as I struggled up the incline past the huge veranda that housed the heated outdoor swimming pool, listening to Jakes’s phone ringing out without reply Inside the lobby the blast of warmth from the central heating and the blazing log fire hit me like a wall. I staggered, coughing. The woman on the reception desk stared at me like I’d just beamed down from the Star ship Enterprise.

  “Miss Fox! Are you OK? Did you have trouble with your car?”

  I stared at her, uncomprehending, then realized that my jeans were wet past the knees and I was shaking.

  “I need a phone,” I managed. She flicked her eyes at the mobile I clearly had clutched in my hand but thrust the desk phone at me, the way you shove a toy into a dog’s mouth to try to stop it jumping up at your clothing. I punched in the number of Simone’s room and waited, impatient and in vain, for it to be answered.

  When I knew for sure that it wasn’t going to be, I swore under my breath again—or not so under my breath, if the sudden paling of the woman on the other side of the desk was anything to go by.

  “Listen, I need some transport.”

  “Well, I can call you a cab—”

  “I don’t have time to wait for a cab,” I said, aware of the panic scrabbling at the inside of my chest, causing my heart to pound. I was sweating with the heat and the fear.

  So tell me, Vaughan had said with that patronizing smile of his, has she found out the truth about him?

  Oh God. Simone … Ella…

  “Don’t you have a rental car out there on the lot?” the woman asked.

  “That guy … it wasn’t them,” I said.

  “Well, wait a minute now.” She frowned, dug around under the desk and came back up with a set of car keys. “There you go. The boy came and dropped it off not more than a half hour ago. Said if you could swing by the office first thing tomorrow, they’d deal with the paperwork and such then.”

  A half hour ago…. We must have almost passed each other on the driveway. I grabbed the keys with hardly a word of thanks and sprinted for the door again. She called something after me, but I didn’t hear it.

  The cold bit me as soon as I was out of the door, like it had always been waiting just below the surface, like I’d never really been warm. I didn’t care.

  As I jogged through the parking area, I fumbled for the button onthe key fob, stopping short as the hazard lights flashed on a white Buick SUV to my right.

  I jumped in, fumbling with the unfamiliar controls, and cranked the engine. I knew I headed down the driveway faster than it was wise to do, but the way the Buick slipped and slithered despite its four-wheel drive only served to make me angry, like it was trying to slow me down.

  I don’t remember getting between the hotel and the main road. The only reason the junction registered was because the traffic light was on red, but I suppose I would have hesitated there anyway. Miss Kerse want
s to go to herfather’s place, Jakes had said. Did that mean the surplus store, or the house? Left for Intervale, or right for the center of North Conway? I stabbed my thumb on the button to redial and listened to the empty ringing until the lights dropped onto green overhead and the driver behind me blew his horn.

  Her father’s place.

  The house. I turned right, not knowing why I’d made that decision, or if it was the right choice. I gunned the Buick down the main street, not seeing the prettiness of the lights wrapped round the trees outside the Eastern Slope Inn, until I reached the turnoff on the left for Mechanic Street, towards Mount Cranmore. The family houses I’d noticed the first time Lucas had taken us to his home looked very different in the dark, all lit up along the eaves like storefronts. The lights were deceiving and I almost missed the turn for Snowmobile, jamming the brakes on at the last moment.

  I drove past the Fitness Center and plunged into darkness on the other side of the lights. Maybe it was the illuminated ski runs farther up the mountain that made things look so shadowy at ground level, but people apparently didn’t go for excessive outside lighting here. Maybe they liked to be able to see the stars, which were scattered starkly across the inky blue-black sky above the trees.

  I stopped the Buick just short of the driveway and shut off the engine. I was close enough to be able to see that Jakes’s nondescript Ford Taurus was parked in front of the steps leading up to the front door. The two lamps on either side of the doorway were lit, but otherwise the place was in darkness. I wished wholeheartedly that Vaughan’s men had given me back the Beretta.

  I slid out onto the road, staying low behind the front end of the Buick while I waited for my eyes to adjust and tried to take stock. There was nothing for it—I was going to have to get closer.

  I left the cover of the Buick and ran across, doubled over, to duck behind the Ford. There was no response from the house. I waited a moment longer, took a couple of deep breaths, then pelted for the door.