Second Shot: A Charlie Fox Thriller

by Zoe Sharp

  I had the front passenger seat purely because I needed the legroom. Sean was behind the wheel, leaving the backseat to the others. Neagley was sitting behind Sean.

  As soon as we’d climbed in, Sean had reached over and taken the Beretta we’d won from Reynolds out of the glove box. Neagley had studiously looked in the other direction as he checked it over and slid the gun into the side pocket of his jacket. I noticed she pulled her handbag with the .357 Smith & Wesson a little closer towards her, bringing the gun out just far enough to confirm it was loaded and ready to go. Habit, more than necessity.

  Sean twisted in his seat.

  “Have you ever had cause to use that for real?” he asked, nodding to the revolver.

  Neagley hesitated, then shook her head. “Not really,” she admitted. “I don’t even take it to the range much.”

  “So why have it?”

  “Because it’s great for concealed carry and because I thought that if I ever did have to use it, something this size would stop a truck.”

  Sean smiled at her. “If Vaughan’s in that damned Humvee of his, we might be glad of it.”

  “Just who is this Vaughan bastard?” Matt demanded. He was sitting hunched up, arms wrapped round his body like he was about to be physically sick.

  “He’s another ex-Special Ops man,” Neagley supplied. “Spent the best part of four decades with the U.S. military, but he left in an all-fired hurry a couple of years back. Something to do with army supplies for the Gulf disappearing and turning up on the civilian market. They couldn’t prove anything, but there was enough suspicion to get him kicked out.”

  I moved carefully round in my seat so I could see her face. “These stolen supplies wouldn’t have been turning up at surplus outlets not unlike the Lucases’ place, would they?” I asked, and she nodded. “Well, that explains their connection, I suppose.”

  “Fuck that,” Matt said sourly. “What the hell’s he doing kidnapping Ella?”

  “It all boils down to money,” Neagley said. “Vaughan wants it. Ella’s the key”

  Matt rubbed his hands slowly over his face. “How I wish Simone had never bought that bloody ticket,” he said. “You think it’s going to be the answer to all your prayers, don’t you? But it’s been a nightmare from start to finish.”

  ‘And it’s going to get worse before it gets better—one way or another,” Neagley said grimly.

  “Heads-up,” Sean murmured. “Those look like Range Rover headlights.”

  He was right. The Lucases drove the length of the car park towards us very slowly, like they were looking for indications that we were going to cause them trouble along the way. I suppose I couldn’t blame either of them for being nervous, under the circumstances.

  The Range Rover came to a halt about ten meters away and I saw vague movement beyond the lights as both front doors opened.

  Sean put his hand on the door handle and glanced sideways at me.

  “Don’t bother saying it,” I warned. “I’m coming, too.”

  He shrugged and climbed out without a word, leaving me to make my own way

  Both sides met on the middle ground, like some kind of Cold War exchange. It was starting to snow again, I saw, tiny butterfly flakes that swirled in the combined beams of the lights from both vehicles, and it was colder than the grave. I thought the period in the car had warmed me through, but I quickly discovered it was all superficial. As soon as I was outside again, I froze down to my bones almost instantly.

  It’s just like Christmas, Mummy, Ella had said in Boston.

  Not like Christmas now, Ella….

  Lucas and Sean approached until they were only a meter or so apart and stopped to stare at each other in the sparkling glow from the light-wrapped trees. Lucas waited until I’d haltingly closed up to them before he asked, “So who’s this?” without taking his eyes off Sean.

  “Sean Meyer,” I said, short. “My boss.”

  “Ah.” Lucas nodded slightly, barely a twitch, as though he knew if he made any sudden moves he was likely to get bitten.

  Sean watched him, shoulders apparently relaxed, completely expressionless. Lucas’s eyes kept flicking nervously to Sean’s hands, which were buried in his coat pockets, as though he could sense the Beretta hidden beneath the material.

  “We’re wasting time,” Rosalind said, the sharpness in her voice not quite masking something I took to be fear that vibrated along under the surface. “We know Felix has got Ella, for God’s sake! What are we waiting for?”

  Lucas, galvanized by the urgency in his wife’s voice, started to move, clearly expecting us to follow.

  “Hold it,” Sean said quietly. “We’re not going anywhere until we’ve got a few things settled.”

  Lucas threw him a look of pure distaste. “You want to haggle over a price for my granddaughter’s life, is that it?” he jeered.

  Matt pushed his way forwards. “She’s my daughter,” he said. “D’you really think we don’t care what happens to her?”

  Lucas stared at him, then let his eyes skim across the rest of us. I don’t know what he expected to see there, because he made a brief gesture of impatience. “I don’t need your help anyway,” he muttered, turning his back and taking a step towards the Range Rover.

  “You do need us, or you wouldn’t be here,” Sean said. “Maybe the Greg Lucas who served at Goose Green and Port Stanley might not need our help, but a salesman like John Ashworth certainly does.”

  Lucas arched and froze like he’d been speared between the shoulder blades. I saw his head move slightly, making eye contact with Rosalind. Her mouth thinned and she dropped her gaze, almost an admission of defeat.

  Slowly, he turned back, and the man who faced us now was not the one who’d turned away only moments ago. His shoulders weren’t so square—much less like the old soldier whose skin he’d been animating for the last twenty-odd years. Like he could finally stop pretending and it was something of a relief to him. He tried to raise a smile, but it never quite developed.

  “So … my secret’s out,” he said, and even his voice didn’t seem quite the same, rusty and wry. ‘At last.”

  “Where’s the real Lucas?”

  “Dead, of course,” he said, matter-of-fact.

  “You killed him,” Sean said, and it wasn’t a question.

  Lucas — somehow I couldn’t think of him yet as anyone else—nodded. “But it was self-defense,” he added quickly.

  “Of course,” Sean said blandly. “That’s why you hid the body, stole his identity and skipped the country leaving your baby daughter behind.”

  Something skittered across Lucas’s face that might have been irritation, or guilt. “What does it matter now?” he asked, sounding suddenly tired. “What matters is Ella. If you’re not going to help us then, as Rosalind pointed out, we’re wasting time we don’t have.”

  “We didn’t say we weren’t going to help,” Sean said. He glanced over his shoulder at Neagley She nodded, her face serious, and I waited for him to look to me, too, but I wasn’t altogether surprised when he didn’t. “Where is he likely to have taken her?”

  “Felix has a place out on the 302 toward Bretton Woods,” Rosalind said, stepping forwards. “It’s isolated—no close neighbors. I’d guess that’s where they’ll be.”

  ‘And even if she isn’t,” Lucas said, grim, “that’s certainly where Vaughan will be. I’m sure we can find a way to persuade him to tell us where his guys have taken her.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” I said, and felt their focus on me. I shrugged. “From what I’ve seen of him, Vaughan isn’t the kind of bloke who gives in easily, however much you try to bully him.”

  Lucas gave a short, mirthless laugh. “If I threaten to turn state’s evidence against him, he’ll cave, believe me,” he said, ignoring the shocked glance from his wife, like she didn’t think he had it in him.

  “Is that what’s made him take her now?” Sean asked. “Why’s he waited this long to make his move?”r />
  Lucas hesitated and it was Rosalind who took a deep breath and said, “Because he realized—as we do—that we’re not going to be able to keep hold of Ella for much longer.”

  “What?” It was Matt who uttered the surprised question.

  Rosalind gave him an old-fashioned look. “Surely your legal people have told you by now that your claim is much stronger than ours is—or was?” she added sadly. “Even before you started digging up the dirt on Greg.”

  “And, just as surely, you must have known there was a chance the truth would surface sooner or later, regardless?” Sean said.

  She shrugged. “It hadn’t so far,” she threw back with a hint of defiance. “What would change?”

  “You found out about Simone’s money, and you got greedy,” Matt said, disgust in his voice.

  Rosalind didn’t reply to that one, just flicked a glance at her husband that I couldn’t fully discern the meaning of.

  “Whatever you may think of my motives,” Lucas said tightly, “Ella’s in danger. If you’re going to help, then let’s go. We can settle anything else later.”

  “We’ll take our vehicle,” Sean said. “It’s less distinctive and Vaughan won’t recognize it.” And he spoke to me directly for the first time since the Lucases had shown up. “You’re not coming with us on this, Charlie,” he murmured, putting his hands on my upper arms. Despite the softness of his voice, it was an order, not a suggestion. And when I would have argued anyway he said, brutal, “You’re no use to me like this. We can’t afford to carry anyone.”

  I swallowed, knowing he had a point and bitterly resenting that fact. “Yes, sir,” I said, jerking myself out of his grasp. He let me go, or I never would have achieved it.

  “Matt,” Sean said. “I want you to take Charlie back to the apartment.”

  “But-”

  “I need you to stay with her, OK?” he said, cutting across the other man very deliberately. “Wait for us there. If anything goes wrong, we’ll need someone on the outside to call in the cavalry.”

  Matt shut up abruptly and nodded. He looked both disappointed and relieved to be ordered out of the action, and guilty over both emotions.

  Sean’s gaze swung back to me and I saw an understanding in the dark depths of his eyes.

  He knows, I thought, panicked. He knows what Reynolds tried to do to me and he doesn’t want to risk him trying it again, if we should fail.

  “Take the Range Rover,” Lucas said to him, curt in his generosity to the man who would, ultimately, rob him of his granddaughter. He threw the keys over, aiming high, and Matt caught them with a flinch before they would have struck him in the face.

  He turned them over in his hands. “I’ve never driven left-hand-drive,” he admitted, subdued. “Or an automatic transmission.”

  Lucas sighed and turned to his wife. “Rosalind, honey,” he said gently, “you better take them.”

  “Greg, let me come with you,” she said, urgent. “I can help. I can be useful. We can still come out of this —”

  “I know,” Greg said, his voice soothing. He reached out a hesitant hand and stroked her pale cheek. “But it’s too late for all that now. All that matters is Ella.”

  Rosalind’s face hardened and she stepped back out from under his touch in much the same way, I thought, that I must have done from Sean’s.

  “Very well,” she said, almost snatching the keys out of Matt’s hands.

  We stood, the three of us, and watched as Sean got behind the wheel of the Explorer. Neagley and Lucas climbed aboard, and they drove quickly away into the darkness and the softly falling snow. We none of us moved until the big Ford’s taillights had reached the end of the hotel car park and disappeared completely from view

  Then Rosalind eyed the pair of us with much the same disfavor she’d shown towards me and Neagley earlier that day.

  “Get in,” she said, jerking her head towards the Range Rover, still standing in the middle of the car park with its lights on and its doors open and nobody at home. If the plain resentment in her voice was anything to go by, I wasn’t the only one who was completely and utterly pissed off to be left behind.

  Twenty-one

  So, I don’t suppose you’d care to tell us the whole story now, would you?” I asked as we drove down the sloping driveway away from the White Mountain Hotel.

  Rosalind paused as she reached a junction, pretending a preoccupation with checking for other cars when the darkness would have made it easy to spot them. She was a slow and cautious driver, and I didn’t think that was just down to the conditions.

  “What ‘whole story’ is that?” she said, noncommittal.

  “You’ve been married to the guy for fifteen years,” I said, “and you were an army brat. You’ve spent most of your life around soldiers. There’s no way Lucas could have kept up the pretense of being ex-SAS for long, Rosalind. Not in front of you.”

  In the glow from the car’s instrument lighting I saw her suppress a small smile. A compliment’s a compliment, after all. I was sitting alongside her in the front, with Matt relegated to the rear seat.

  “You’re right,” she said. “But I knew he wasn’t who he said he was, long before I married him.”

  “So why did you?” It was Matt who asked the question, sounding baffled. “You loved him, right?”

  “Love?” Rosalind almost scoffed. Then her voice turned bitter. “Do you have any idea how hard it is for a woman to be in the kind of business I’m in?” she demanded as she pulled away. “After my daddy died I couldn’t get anyone to deal with me on any account. We were going under and there were plenty of my daddy’s so-called friends who were just waiting for that to happen so they could step in and buy up the business for a rock-bottom price.”

  We were driving past individually designed houses set close to the shoulder of the road, home lights spilling out brightly across the crystallized snow.

  “So he was a figurehead,” I said, almost to myself. “Weren’t you worried someone else might spot him for a fake?”

  She shrugged. “The British SAS has a certain reputation and I coached him some,” she said with just a hint of a sneer in her voice. ‘As long as he talked quiet, stared hard, and didn’t blink, people believed he was what he said he was.”

  “And he was,” I agreed. “Or the real Lucas was, at any rate, if anyone cared enough to check the records. Speaking of which, did Greg ever tell you what happened to the real Lucas?”

  We stopped at a junction and turned left, the road twisting through the trees looming over us, over a small flat bridge with steel barriers at either side.

  “He was in the house alone, just Greg and Simone,” she said at last, her voice dull, almost monotone. It took me a moment to realize when she said “Greg” she wasn’t talking about the original.

  “Simone was in her room. It was a tiny cottage somewhere in Scotland, he told me, a cheap rental, but they moved around a lot and they couldn’t afford to be fussy. Lucas was searching for them, threatening them, but they’d been there six months and heard nothing. They thought they might be safe. They weren’t.”

  “He found them.”

  She nodded, slowing again as we reached another junction, each one connecting to a larger road. This one had houses set back farther into the woods, with mailboxes lining the edges of the road.

  “Greg said there was a phone call that afternoon, but when he answered there was nobody there, and he knew that they were going to have to run again, and the child was just starting nursery and she was old enough to be making friends and Pam had a job that she enjoyed. And he knew they couldn’t keep doing this forever.”

  “So he killed him.”

  Rosalind shook her head. “It wasn’t like that,” she said, softly bitter. “He started to gather up a few essentials, waiting for Pam to get home. He heard something upstairs and, when he went up to see, he found Lucas coming out of Simone’s bedroom, carrying the child. She was terrified.”

  Rosalind paused agai
n as we made another turn, each junction bringing us onto a larger road, heading towards the middle of North Conway. It was snowing harder now, big flakes that rushed towards the beams of the headlights like distant stars. The luxury of the Range Rover closed out the elements, separating us. We crossed a series of bridges over frozen water, the ice showing a dull gray between the pale snow of the banks.

  “So he killed him,” I said again. “How?”

  She flicked me a fast glance and the tail of it cracked like a whip. “Lucas attacked him,” she said, dogged, her speech becoming jerky, staccato. “Greg just defended himself, as best he could. Lucas was a trained killer, for God’s sake, and Greg didn’t want Simone to get hurt. They struggled. It was a tiny cottage and there was hardly any room. Lucas tripped, fell down the stairs, and Simone fell with him. She was screaming, but she didn’t have a mark on her. His neck was broken. It was an accident, but what could Greg do?”

  “He could have called the police and taken the consequences —if indeed there were consequences,” I said. Self-defense was a plea that was sometimes accepted by the courts, as I had cause to know only too well.

  If it was genuine.

  “He panicked,” Rosalind said, as though she had a bad taste in her mouth. “He and Lucas were similar enough in looks to pass for each other. He told me he sometimes wondered if that was what Pam saw in him—almost the same face but without the brutality”

  “What about the body?” I said. “What happened to that?”

  “Apparently, the cottage was pretty isolated,” Rosalind said. “Greg knew there were plenty of places in the Scotch countryside to hide a body where it wouldn’t be found easily”

  “So he buried the real Lucas, took the dead man’s identity and scarpered over here,” I said flatly. “That takes some forethought and planning. That’s not just something you can do on the spur of the moment.”