by Sharp, Zoe
He smiled, flirty as always. “How could I ask for anyone else?” He turned to Sean. “Charlie saved my life,” he said. “A hell of a woman.”
Sean allowed himself a small smile as I introduced them, adding. “Sean is Parker Armstrong’s partner.”
Dyer’s eyebrows quirked. “Sending out the big guns, huh?” he said. “Well, I’m honoured to make your acquaintance, Sean.”
“Thank you, sir. We’ll do our best to keep you safe.”
Dyer’s smile broadened. “Ah, you don’t need to flatter my ego,” he said. “We both know this is something of a dick-waving contest—if you’ll pardon my language, Charlie.”
I hid a smile as I opened the rear door and ushered our principal inside, following him in. Sean got behind the wheel. The muted rush of the air-conditioning was louder than the engine.
We rolled across the airport land, a man-made peninsula stretching out into the lake, and pulled out past the restored art deco terminal into traffic. Despite the US Marine Corps T-45 Goshawks and the sleek modern aircraft, the airport itself still had the feel of the pre-war years to it. I half expected to see gleaming old DC-3 Dakotas and gangster cars with running boards.
Maybe it was just that New Orleans had a mixed-up vibe between the historic and the modern, as if it couldn’t quite decide what to let go of and what to hold onto.
“‘Dick-waving’?” I queried. “If there’s going to be much of that, I want hazard pay.”
Dyer laughed again, batted a hand. “You know what I mean—all posturing and posing,” he said. “These days, you’re not a big shot unless you have a half-dozen bodyguards shadowing you everywhere—even to the john.”
I nodded, muffling a mild exasperation. I’d lost count of the number of times I’d been hired as a status symbol or executive toy. It never failed to put my back up. While the idle rich were showing off, I could have been looking after someone who really needed it.
“If I’d known,” I said dryly, “I would have brought a bigger team.”
“I’m happy to go for quality rather than quantity,” Dyer said. “And my wife insisted I have some protection before she let me out on my own.”
We chatted on the drive in. Mrs Dyer, I discovered, had stayed in Miami to be on hand for the imminent arrival of their first grandchild. By the time Dyer had finished telling me all about it, we were swinging into the hotel entrance. Sean pulled up under the portico and we debussed without drama. Dyer’s luggage was handed off to a hovering bellboy—a college kid we’d screened well enough to know he was about to flunk history and had a dog named Blue.
The hotel, located in the historic French Quarter, was swanky by anyone’s standards. Dyer’s suite had a private balcony overlooking the Mississippi. We’d already cleared it and checked him in prior to his arrival. As we crossed the lobby I gave him his key. All he had to do was walk straight to the elevators and ride on up.
If only things were so simple.
“Hey, Blake, you son of a gun!” called a booming voice. “Damn, I’m glad to see you here.”
We turned as a single unit. A tall, almost gaunt man in a handmade cream suit was striding towards us, a linebacker bodyguard keeping pace at his shoulder. The tall man’s smile engaged his whole face and his hand was outstretched in greeting, but I still stepped in front of Dyer before either of them could intercept us.
“Relax, Charlie, he’s not going to bite,” Dyer murmured, moving out past me. And louder, clasping the man’s hand, “Tom. Good to see you.”
But I’d placed the newcomer even before Dyer spoke his name. Tom O’Day, electronics billionaire. Probably gazillionaire, if the fawning of the financial press was anything to go by. In a volatile economy, it seemed he could do no wrong. You certainly saw his company’s stylised dragon logo just about everywhere.
Maybe his wealth and power was the attraction to the model-thin blonde who followed him across the lobby. She was almost as tall as O’Day, most of it leg, although there was a generous dollop of chest thrown in for good measure. On a figure so slender it looked out of proportion, like her airbag had gone off.
The bodyguard’s name was Hobson, I recalled. He was an ex-Marine who’d been with O’Day for a decade. No doubt this familiarity explained why O’Day ignored his presence, but introduced the blonde to Dyer simply as “Autumn”.
I caught Sean’s eye out of habit, expecting to see a cynical glint. Instead, I saw just a glimmer of calculated interest.
I looked away, aware of a certain hollow feeling just below my ribs. Where once Sean and I had been in tune, now I found myself surprised and occasionally disappointed by his actions. Whoever he’d become, I didn’t really know him any more.
I let my eyes roam the lobby. O’Day talked like a man who thought a lot of what he had to say. But as he was the driving force behind this fundraiser I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt—for now.
Dyer’s face had taken on the look of polite concentration that people get when they’re being lectured by an evangelist. From the way O’Day poured himself into his subject, his self-made fortune was not hard to understand. He gave everything to it. The force of his will was almost tangible.
I mentally turned down the volume, listening for keywords without giving the rest of it chance to swamp me. I did another visual sweep.
Outside the main doors another limo had pulled up—a stretch Cadillac Escalade with gold trim just about everywhere it was possible to have it.
A young guy with the loose square frame of an athlete climbed out. He was early twenties, with stylised facial hair around his mouth, oversize designer shades, and trendy clothing about two sizes too big. His gold jewellery rivalled the Escalade for gaudiness. A white kid who desperately wanted to be black.
If Blake Dyer had inherited most of his wealth and O’Day had built his up over decades, I judged this young man had come into a lot of money very fast and was still experimenting wildly on the best way to spend it.
Photographers appeared out of nowhere, snapping furiously around him like a pack of starving dogs around a butcher’s cart. He ignored them with the blasé air of someone for whom this was such a regular occurrence he didn’t even see them any more.
His security guys were large and obvious. The leader elbowed a path to the door and ushered him inside. The youngster paused just inside the entrance, making the most of it.
The commotion finally penetrated O’Day’s focused spiel. He turned and caught sight of the newcomer and his whole body reacted like he’d just seen the Mona Lisa for the first time.
“Gabe, my boy!” he cried. “Glad you could make it. Come and meet one of our benefactors—a very dear friend of mine, Blake Dyer.”
Gabe came ambling over, an odd way of walking that moved his shoulders but not his head. He hooked one arm of his shades into the neck of his shirt and smiled at Dyer.
“Blake, I’m sure this young superstar needs no introduction. This is Gabe Baptiste.” He did not seem to get the irony of his words. “Finest baseball player of his generation—the next Tom Seaver.”
Dyer held out his hand, but Gabe Baptiste had suddenly frozen in mid-stretch. I was close enough to see his pupils dilate, the hairs riffle along his forearms. I recognised it as pure, instinctive flight-response.
I glanced at Dyer. He was staring in bemusement at the guy and clearly had absolutely no idea what should have caused this kind of reaction.
My eyes flicked back, but this time I tracked Baptiste’s sightline and realised he wasn’t looking at my principal. His gaze had slid past Dyer’s right shoulder and was locked, firm and terrified, on Sean.
Four
“Baptiste is a last-minute substitution,” Parker said. “Trust me, I had no prior knowledge of his involvement or I would have warned you.”
“Warned me about what, Parker?” I demanded. “All I know is, as soon as Baptiste clapped eyes on Sean he panicked like someone had stuck a cattle prod up his backside. I’m amazed his goons didn’t draw o
n us.”
I was in my room at the hotel, which adjoined Blake Dyer’s. Sean had the room directly across the hall. He was currently conferring with our client about his schedule for the next few days, in case there were any other surprises. I’d left Sean to go through the details—tried to make it seem that I had absolute confidence in him. It was not an easy façade to maintain.
“O’Day had the reigning NASCAR champion, Lyle Junior, all lined up as his star attraction,” Parker said. “Then Junior hit the wall on turn three in California doing about one-ninety-five last weekend and rolled a half-dozen times. Won’t be out of traction for a month. They had to find a big-name draw to take his place in a hurry. Just so happens that Gabe Baptiste was born right there in New Orleans—in St Bernard Parish—before he got out and made good. I can see why he was considered the ideal choice.”
“I realise this Baptiste guy is some kind of hot-shot ball player, but what’s his connection to Sean?”
Parker’s dry chuckle came clearly down the phone line from New York. “You’re never going to pass for American if you don’t understand our national obsession with baseball, Charlie.”
“Why? It’s exactly like the game they foisted on the girls at school who weren’t tough enough for hockey, only we called it rounders. This is just played by guys in old men’s underwear, with frequent ad breaks and more spitting.”
I thought back to my schooldays. Well, OK, maybe not more spitting . . .
He laughed out loud. “Don’t let anyone hear you say that or they’ll practically throw your ass in jail.”
“Well, it won’t be the first time,” I said dryly. “And I know I can rely on you to post bail, can’t I?”
“You can rely on me for anything, Charlie,” he said, and the sudden intensity in his voice made the blood drop out of my face. “There isn’t much I wouldn’t do for you—you must know that.”
“Parker . . .” My voice caught. I swallowed. “Please, this is hard enough without—”
“I know, I know.” I heard him sigh. “I’m sorry. I promise I’ll try to keep things strictly professional—most of the time, anyhow. Good enough?”
“Good enough,” I agreed. I cleared my throat. “So, what’s the story on Baptiste and Sean?”
A pause. “What’s Sean got to say about it?”
The strings of my patience stretched and frayed. “What do you think he’s got to say? He has no idea.”
No idea of the UK close-protection agency he’d founded more than five years before, or even the principals he’d guarded twelve months ago. Almost his entire career since leaving the army was one giant void. The occasional fractured flashes of recall confused more than they enlightened.
At the other end of the line, Parker gave another sigh. It was late afternoon in New Orleans, an hour ahead of New York. Standing by the long window I leaned my forehead against the glass. Outside, the sky over the Gulf of Mexico was washed with pinks and pale blues and flittered with seabirds. A poetic dying fall towards evening.
Parker would still be at work in his corner office with a stunning view of a different kind—out over Midtown Manhattan. His desk was positioned facing inwards with his back to the vee of the corner. When we first moved over to the States it took me a while to figure out why he ignored the view, until I realised Parker was a New Yorker born and bred. I still wasn’t quite that nonchalant about the cityscape that had become my adopted home.
But I wouldn’t have sat with my back to a window, either.
“OK, Charlie,” he said at last. “When Sean and I went into business together—when I offered him the partnership—we agreed on full disclosure. I read him in on the clients I’d never work with again. He did the same from his end. The name Gabe Baptiste was top of his list.”
“Why? What did he do?”
“I don’t know.”
“So when you say ‘full disclosure’ it was something of an oxymoron—like ‘military intelligence’?”
“At the time, I admired his discretion.” I heard the suggestion of a smile in his voice. “Just telling me the guy’s name was enough. I blacklisted him. Cost me, too. When Baptiste made the play offs earlier this year and had that crazy fan stalking him, we were asked by his manager to provide a protection detail. I turned him down.”
Earlier this year . . .
“That was when Sean was . . . in his coma,” I said slowly.
I almost heard Parker shrug. “What difference does that make?”
None at all, I realised. His sense of honour was one of the things I admired most about Parker. He was the dictionary definition of a straight arrow. And if we’d come close to nudging a personal line, the two of us, we had not actually crossed over it. Even if the temptation had been tantalisingly strong.
The Sean I’d known had not possessed the same kind of scruples, was not above bending the rules if it got the job done. Between them, he and Parker had been two halves of a whole, dark and light. Where Parker went around, Sean went straight through. Conscience and muscle. It made them a good team. I’d once thought the same about Sean and me.
Even if my conscience probably wasn’t quite as pristine as it once was.
“So you’ve no idea what Baptiste might have done that was bad enough to get himself on the shit-list?” I pressed.
“Soon as I heard his name today, I got Bill onto it,” Parker said. Bill Rendelson was Parker’s electronic surveillance and security expert and all-round major-domo, an embittered former operative who’d lost his right arm on a close-protection job some years previously. If his attitude was anything to go by, he missed both it and the action every single day.
“And?”
“We only know the rough date of when Sean was last in New Orleans—I checked with his old agency in London. They tell me he was the only one who had the full details, and he didn’t share.”
I murmured, “Now why doesn’t that surprise me?” But if Parker heard, he didn’t respond to the jibe.
“All we know is that Baptiste was a local kid, grew up in a rough neighbourhood. Had an attitude and the talent to back it up. The scouts were all over him from when he was a teen, but it was like he was playing with them, not taking it all seriously. Then not long after Katrina he suddenly leaves town, signs with the Boston Red Sox and starts working his ass off.”
“Something made him grow up fast,” I said. “Sean can have that effect on people.”
I recalled the first time I’d met him, back when he was a sergeant on the Special Forces training course I’d begun with such hopes. His grim warnings of what we could expect and how many of us would wash out before the finish had not shaken my determination. Maybe it should have done.
“Well, whatever it was, it worked,” Parker said now. “Last season Baptiste had a two-nine ERA. They’re saying he’s the next Tom Seaver.”
“So I hear—and I’m impressed,” I said. “Or I would be if I had any idea what you’re talking about.”
“I’m telling you, Charlie, you go on like this and the federal government will be knocking at your door asking for your green card back.”
“They’ll have to fight me for it,” I said.
“Well, that’s one bout I wouldn’t put money on,” Parker said. He paused again, as if feeling his way. “How do you want to play this—with Sean and Baptiste.”
“Well, at the moment Sean’s as puzzled by the guy’s reaction as the rest of us. I’d take a guess that as long as he stays that way, we should be OK.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
I smiled faintly into the gathering dusk. “Then Gabe Baptiste should have brought a lot more goons.”
Five
Blake Dyer stood in front of the full-length mirror in the bedroom of his suite, struggling with his tie.
The tie was a proper self-assembly silk bow. It went with the immaculate tuxedo and the crisp white dress shirt with pearl studs down the front. I reckoned, at a cynical guess, he was wearing more than the cost of my last motorcy
cle. And possibly the one before that.
I wondered briefly if he’d ever owned anything that wasn’t brand new or made-to-measure.
He fumbled for another few seconds, made a frustrated noise in the back of his throat. “My wife always takes care of these for me,” he complained, turning. “Never could quite get the hang of it myself.”
He’d been getting ready for more than half an hour. Back in my room it had taken me eight minutes to pull on my all-purpose black evening dress, add a quick gloss of lipstick and swap boots for lowish heels.
A quick check in the mirror showed I was done. My hair never seemed quite sure if it wanted to be blonde or red. Not long after I’d moved to New York I’d opted for having it cut into an all-purpose bob. At least it survived being under a bike helmet reasonably well and—like tonight—was presentable with little more than a quick brushing.
