Second Shot: A Charlie Fox Thriller

by Zoe Sharp

  “Simone must have remembered something,” Matt said, almost to himself. He lifted his head, focused intently on me. “You told us she said that he’d killed him—but killed who? Her mum’s boyfriend?”

  I shut my eyes briefly and brought back Simone’s bitter flood of words like they were permanently written to the hard drive in my head. “She said, ‘He killed him. I saw him do it. I loved you. I trusted you. You bastard. You utter fucking bastard.’“ I repeated the words devoid of emotion and opened my eyes again. “That was it. At the time I thought that when she said, ‘He killed him,’ she was talking about Jakes.”

  “But how come she said that she loved and trusted Lucas when we know he was such a bastard to her when she was a child?” Matt said. He had his hands in his lap, fingers locked together until his skin had turned white.

  “If we now assume that she was furious because she remembered her father killing her mother’s boyfriend, why did she shoot you and not Lucas?” Neagley asked.

  “Look, as far as we know, Simone had never picked up a gun before that night,” Sean said, moving over to the open-plan kitchen area and pouring himself another cup of coffee from the pot. “Maybe she knew she wasn’t good enough to hit him and not Ella at that distance and she couldn’t risk getting it wrong.”

  “But that doesn’t explain why she shot Charlie instead,” Neagley persisted.

  Sean looked at me over the rim of his cup. “Charlie had the chance for a shot at Lucas and didn’t take it,” he said. “We’ve already established that Simone was beside herself with rage. Perhaps she saw him getting away—literally with murder—and she just… snapped.”

  We lunched on takeaway pizza. I managed half a segment before the rich greasiness of the food dawned on my stomach and I had to leave the rest. While we ate we kicked around some theories on what might be going on, although without seeming to advance very far in the process.

  Felix Vaughan’s role bothered me. I’d already told Sean about the enforced meeting I’d had with him at the restaurant the night Simone was killed. I kept going over his parting shot about Simone finding out the truth about Lucas. What did that mean?

  ‘After the way Lucas was acting—like a bloody coward—and the fact that the photo message you sent me just didn’t seem to compare all that well, I would have bet almost anything that the DNA test was going to come back a total mismatch,” I said, watching the three of them fighting over the last piece of pizza.

  Sean shrugged. “Well, it didn’t,” he said. “And from what Young and Bartholemew told us at the hospital, they’ve had it verified by their own lab, so there’s no doubt.”

  “But all the stuff about his behavior in the army,” I said, still frowning, “and what Simone’s mother told you, Matt, doesn’t seem to fit the

  guy.”

  “People change I suppose,” Matt said dubiously. “But he was an SAS thug, wasn’t he? No changing a warped personality like that.” He missed the slight eyebrow quirk that Sean fired in my direction. “But he’s been out a long time, and maybe Rosalind had a settling influence on him, though she seemed a bit of a dragon to me.”

  “She can’t have been that good an influence on him—not if he was behind my partner’s car crash,” Neagley said, wiping her hands on one of the paper napkins and taking a swig of Tab. She’d laid in a private supply in the fridge.

  I shrugged, carefully. “It just doesn’t fit somehow. I wish I knew what Vaughan was hinting at that night. And why he was so anxious to get us out of the way.”

  “Well, I’ve put out some queries about him with my contacts,” Neagley said. “We know he’s ex-military which gave me a good place to start looking. Soon as they get back to me, we might have a better idea of what we’re dealing with.”

  I sat back against the sofa. What were the Lucases mixed up in with him that made them so scared of him? Why had he been so against Simone staying in North Conway in the first place, and so keen on me taking her away? It couldn’t have been a coincidence that he’d had me picked up on the very night Simone had gone rushing to confront her father. So did that mean Vaughan was involved in some way in the shooting? I couldn’t see how.

  Jakes had been a good man, but I wished I’d been the one who’d gone with her. If I had … yeah, right, said the sarcastic voice in my head, because you managed things so well after you did finally get there.

  I mentally shook myself out of that downward spiral. The police were convinced it was an open-and-shut case as far as the “who” was concerned. What was driving me mad was trying to work out the “why.”

  “Have you got any further with tracking down this guy Oliver Reynolds?” I asked.

  Neagley shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. “Maybe you scared him off when you grabbed him. Or maybe he injured himself getting away. He did have to jump through a window, after all.” She glanced at her watch, then at Sean. “We ought to get going,” she said.

  Sean nodded and rose, gathering the empty pizza box and folding it in half. “Neagley and I are going to go and do some digging around,” he said.

  Matt jumped to his feet. “What do you want me to do?” he said, eager.

  Sean’s eyes drifted over me. “You two just stay put here,” he said, like I’d been contemplating going out jogging. When Matt opened his mouth to object, Sean added, “Why don’t you make some calls —see if you can find yourself a decent legal man. Won’t Harrington help out?”

  Matt looked crestfallen. “I asked. He said he couldn’t be seen to be taking sides and if it came out—,” he began.

  Sean took a business card out of his pocket and handed it over. “Call Parker Armstrong,” he said. “He was Jakes’s boss. He and I know each other—we’ve worked together in the past. He’s a good guy and he’s offered to help us get to the bottom of this.”

  Matt stood there for a moment, fingering the card in his hands. “I don’t know what to say,” he ventured at last. “I don’t know how to thank you for—”

  “There’s no need,” Sean cut in, lifting his jacket from the back of a chair and shrugging his way into it while Neagley grabbed her own coat and picked the car keys out of her pocket. They’d almost reached the door before he stopped and glanced back. “Besides, we’re not doing it for you.”

  After Sean and Neagley had gone out, Matt got straight on the phone to Armstrong in New York, who in turn put him onto a firm of lawyers specializing in child custody cases who worked out of Manchester, New Hampshire.

  There wasn’t much I could do to help other than sit and listen to one side of the conversation. Besides, I soon realized that without the others to act as a buffer Matt was still uneasy around me. Eventually, I clambered to my feet, picked up my crutch, and mouthed, I’ll be in my room, to him. He clamped his hand over the phone mouthpiece and nodded distractedly at me.

  I hobbled back into the bedroom and shut the door behind me. I’d only been out of bed for a couple of hours but it was looking decidedly welcoming. I switched the TV on low, picked a news channel, and lay down on top of the covers to watch. I think I’d nodded off before the end of the first item.

  I woke up with a start that sent my breath out in a hiss. The news anchor still seemed to be rattling on about the same story, but the clock in the corner of the screen showed I’d been out of it for about three-quarters of an hour.

  My mouth felt terrible after the coffee and pizza, but the glass of water Sean had put out for me earlier was empty and I was damned if I was going to shout Matt and ask him to bring me another. I struggled up off the bed and limped slowly across the room, realizing that I was finding it a little easier to use the crutch now, if nothing else.

  Out in the living area, I looked around but didn’t immediately see Matt or call out to him. Hell, he was probably jet-lagged to all hell and back and sleeping himself. It was only when I was almost in the kitchen area that I glanced across and spotted him sprawled on the floor between the sofa and the coffee table. Not where anyone would have chosen for
a nap.

  “Matt?” I said, alarmed. I hurried—as much as I could hurry—across and eased myself down onto the floor alongside him, ungainly. “Matt! Are you OK?”

  He had a trickle of blood running down behind his left ear from a small wound at the back of his head. I pressed two fingers into the hollow beneath his ear and felt what seemed to be a strong pulse. I hadn’t heard anything, but I remembered the silenced Berettas that the men had used when they’d broken into the Lucases’ house. When I parted Matt’s bloodied hair and realized there was no bullet hole hiding underneath it, the relief was great.

  But not that great. Assuming Matt hadn’t fainted and hit his head on the coffee table on the way down, that still meant…

  I caught a soft noise from behind me and started to twist instinctively The pain brought me up short before I’d turned halfway

  “Not so good at looking after people, are you, Charlie?” said a voice, soft and familiar. I turned just my head, although I hardly needed to in order to recognize him. The guy I’d dubbed Aquarium man was standing behind the sofa with his arms folded. He was smiling.

  “I can’t tell you,” he said, “how much I’ve been looking forward to meeting you again.”

  Eighteen

  Mr. Reynolds,” I said flatly. “The pleasure is all yours, I assure you.” As snappy comebacks went, I didn’t think it was too bad. Not exactly James Bond, but the best I could manage under the circumstances.

  “Oh-ho,” he murmured at my use of his name. “We have been doing our homework, haven’t we?” He came round the sofa, moving easily, in no hurry. I considered rising but knew I couldn’t do it in time, never mind in style.

  Reynolds stopped, too close to me. I had to tilt my head back to look at him. He was dressed in jeans and tan boots and a high-tech designer fleece jacket over a T-shirt. “I’ve been doing my homework, too. You’ve got quite a reputation, Charlie.” He smiled. “From what I saw of you in action the other night, you might even have lived up to it—once.”

  He was on my left, which I tried to tell myself was good. My left arm had maintained more or less its full strength. His groin was well within striking distance. I was just going to have to be smooth in the delivery-otherwise the resultant shock of the blow was going to do me as much damage as it would him….

  And, just as I was contemplating making the first move, Reynolds lifted his foot and, almost casual, nudged my left leg with his boot.

  At least, to him it must have seemed no more than a nudge. To me he’d just inserted a molten bayonet into my thigh and twisted it. Blind, I grabbed my leg with both hands, gripping hard as though pressure alone would cut off the nerve impulses that were currently screaming a rampant distress call along my neural pathways. I bit back a cry, knowing that was what he wanted above all, and sat there, panting until the worst of the crisis was over.

  Reynolds had moved back a little way, more than an arm’s length, and squatted down on his haunches so he could better study my reaction.

  “Through-and-throughs are a doozy, aren’t they?” he said, conversational.

  “Remind me to make sure you can speak from personal experience some time soon,” I said, keeping my teeth clenched.

  “Well, you see, Charlie, for that you’d need a gun, which I happen to know you don’t have,” Reynolds said, still cheerful. ‘And, unfortunately for you,/do.”

  He reached under his jacket and pulled out a semiautomatic from a shoulder rig. Another Beretta M9, minus the suppressor this time. A replacement for the one I’d taken away from him at the Lucases’ house — and which Vaughan’s men had then taken away from me. Or the same gun?

  He was carrying the Beretta cocked and locked, first round out of the magazine and in the chamber, hammer back, safety on. Now, he thumbed the safety off and smiled at me.

  The action crinkled the skin around his eyes, which were very cold and very blue. A handsome face. One that lent itself easily to charm. Si-mone had certainly been taken in by it, had not seen past the attractive collection of features to what lay beneath.

  “So tell me, were you planning on snatching Simone before we left Boston?” I asked. Anything to distract him.

  “That would have been the easiest solution,” Reynolds agreed. “I would have gotten her at the Aquarium if you’d been thirty seconds slower.”

  “What?” I said. “You think she would have walked out of there with you and left her daughter behind willingly?”

  “Willing or not, she would have walked out of there with me,” he said, supremely confident. “Make no mistake about that.”

  ‘And that would have achieved what, exactly?” I said.

  He laughed and shook his head. “No, no, Charlie,” he said, wagging a disapproving finger. “This is not one of those corny old movies where I tell you my whole evil plan and then let you escape moments from death. Let’s face facts —if I wanted you dead, lady, you’d be dead already”

  I glanced at Matt, still lying still as a corpse on the floor next to me. I took reassurance from the fact that I’d verified his pulse myself, and that the wound to his head was still bleeding. Just a trickle, but at least that meant his heart was still pumping blood round his system.

  “So why are you here?”

  “To pass on a message,” he said. “A warning, if you like.”

  “Which is?”

  “Go home,” Reynolds said. “Simple enough, isn’t it? You and the rest of your crew just pack up and go home. No harm, no foul.”

  The same message Vaughan had tried to deliver, right before Simone was killed. But I’d told him we were going. Wasn’t that enough?

  “Or … what?”

  He laughed. “Quite apart from the obvious threat, here and now, you mean?” he said. “Well, just remember that Ella’s a sweet kid. How old is she now—four? You leave, today, and maybe she’ll get to be five.”

  The fear was a sudden starburst rising from my belly, bunched up tight under my ribs, a bright, leaking coldness that froze my heart to the inside of my chest. A cold flame ignited at the base of my right lung.

  “That’s it?” I said.

  He considered for a moment. “Yup, that’s it,” he said. “That’s the message, from my boss to yours, in full.”

  “So you’re nothing more than the messenger boy, is that it?”

  He smiled again, almost a grin this time. “Well, it was left to my own judgment how best to deliver the message—how to give it maximum impact, you might say”

  He stretched out the Beretta and touched the barrel of the gun to my left leg. It was barely a brush against the fabric of my sweatpants, but I couldn’t control a flinch that had nothing to do with the physical contact.

  Almost lazily, like a caress, Reynolds used the gun to trace the indentation where the bullet had exited at the front of my thigh. I compelled myself to sit motionless, to show no response.

  “I wonder what will happen,” he said softly, “if I put another round through your leg in just the same place as the last. Will it hurt more or less than the first time?”

  “Your message wouldn’t get delivered,” I said with a calm that came from somewhere else, somewhere outside of me.

  “No?” He raised an eyebrow.

  “No,” I said, firm but matter-of-fact. “Last time, I was lucky. A millimeter or two either way and you’ll hit an artery and I’ll bleed out before the others get back.” The tightness in my chest was making it difficult to get a whole sentence out in one breath. “And if that happens, Sean Meyer will find you and kill you, if he has to go to the ends of the earth to do it.” The utter conviction in my voice didn’t have to be forced.

  Reynolds sat back a moment, as if considering. “Your death would be an inconvenience we could do without,” he allowed. “But I still have to persuade you and your boss —and anyone else who’s hanging around— that letting this drop would be in all your best interests. And if I can’t shoot you—” He shrugged, regretful, slid the safety back on and put the Beret
ta back into its holster, “I guess I’ll just have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

  I tried to brace myself, brought my arms up to cover as much of my torso as I could, but it didn’t do much good. He hit me a low relatively lightweight punch, almost experimental, somewhere around my kidney on the left side. An incendiary burst of pain exploded inwards and upwards, the shock wave buffeting through my body, robbing me of sight and breath and sanity I screamed.

  And then I fainted.

  A moment later, or so it seemed, I opened my eyes and found I was sprawled facedown on the sofa with a pulsating white-hot burn going on in my back that lanced straight through to my chest and pinned me there.

  For a moment I thought that maybe it was all over, that Reynolds had delivered his message and gone. I should have known I wasn’t that lucky.

  “You’re obviously not a party girl, Charlie,” he said, shattering that fragile hope. “Here was I hoping we’d be up all night dancing, and you pass out on me at the first sign of a little trouble.”

  I lifted my head—very, very carefully—and turned it so I could see across the room. Reynolds was sitting in one of the chairs on the other side of the coffee table.

  “I was shot, Reynolds. What did you expect?” I said, my voice thick. I had the hollow bitter taste of bile in the back of my throat and I had to swallow it before I could speak. “I thought your orders weren’t to kill me.”

  A mistake to use the word “orders,” I realized, but not until I’d already used it and it was too late to pull it back. Something even colder flashed through his eyes.

  “Kill you, no,” he said, getting to his feet with that deadly smile back in place. “Nobody said anything about what else I could do to you, though.” And he reached for the fly of his jeans.

  I panicked instantly, flapping like a landed fish. I tried to push myself up off the sofa, but my right arm wouldn’t support my body weight and folded under me, so I nearly rolled over the edge and fell. Reynolds grabbed hold of my shoulders and hoisted me back onto the sofa, shoving my face down hard into the cushion so now I was suffocating as well. The spike of pain was such that I barely felt him tug at the waistband of my sweatpants.