by Sharp, Zoe
The dress was stylish enough to be presentable anywhere but fell mercifully short of actual trendiness. Mostly, however, I favoured it because I’d discovered the fine-knit fabric had enough natural elasticity not to restrict movement and it hid blood-spatter remarkably well.
Now, I stepped away from the bedroom door frame where I’d leaned my shoulder while I’d been waiting for my principal to finish primping. “May I?”
Dyer gave me a relieved smile. “See? I knew I was right to hire you again, Charlie. I’ve been in town less than a day and already you’re coming to my rescue.”
I patted the back of an upright chair just behind him. “Sit.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
As he took his seat he automatically hitched the legs of his trousers so they wouldn’t bag at the knee. A man brought up to respect the finer things. To expect them, too.
I leaned in close behind him, reached around his neck and threaded the ends of the tie over and through, smoothing the folds so they lay neatly. He watched my hands, then smiled at me in the mirror. The smile went all the way up to his eyes.
“Perfect,” he said. “Ah, if I wasn’t a happily married man . . .”
“. . . you’d be a miserable divorced one,” I finished for him.
Dyer laughed, but as I straightened something riffled at the hairs on the back of my neck. I half-stepped in front of my principal, body starting to twist, before I realised it was Sean. He’d taken my place in the bedroom doorway and was watching us with narrowed eyes.
“Ready to go down whenever you are, sir,” he said with a studied blandness.
I scanned his face and saw only a taut disapproval there. He had not, it seemed, lost his knack of creeping up on people like a bloody ghost.
Dyer frowned at the pair of us, took a breath as if to speak but didn’t quite know what to say. He got awkwardly to his feet.
“Shall we?”
I threw Sean a daggered look that he parried without concern, and let him lead us out of the suite.
He went ahead, a couple of paces in front. I stayed at my principal’s shoulder covering side and rear. I don’t like admitting that only half my brain was on the job in hand, even though experience had taught me to remain alert to possible threat on an almost subliminal level, like a muscle memory.
The other half of my mind was thinking about Sean. About who he’d been when we first met and who, apparently, he’d now become.
Back then we were both in the army. Sean was my sergeant and my instructor. He’d known from the outset that allowing himself to get involved with me—one of his trainees—on any kind of personal, intimate level was to risk career suicide.
He’d been tough and cynical where I’d been idealistically determined. When we eventually came together we tore down the barriers between us—even ones that should perhaps have stayed firmly raised. It had made us both targets in different but equally disastrous ways.
The vast majority of my fellow trainees were almost entirely male and viewed the few women who’d made it through Selection as freaks—or potential prey. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when a group of them asserted their machismo in an age-old act of group brutality that cost me everything I had—my sense of self, of self-worth, my confidence and my pride. It had very nearly cost my life.
Donalson, Hackett, Morton and Clay.
Lately I’d found myself thinking a good deal about the four men who had raped me. Years might have passed, but sometimes it felt very present.
Back then—with a scandal already raging about the brutal hazing of trainees at another military training camp—the High-Ups were never going to allow transparency in their enquiries. And when the details of my affair with Sean surfaced it presented the perfect opportunity to shift responsibility squarely onto my shoulders. I’d spent several years after my dishonourable discharge blaming Sean for his unwitting part in my downfall. Without realising he’d been told I was to blame for his own.
And that time in between—those wilderness years—was the only thing Sean now remembered about our relationship. It didn’t matter what anyone said. It was what he felt that coloured his thoughts, his actions, his view of me.
We didn’t speak as we travelled down in the lift to the lobby. We’d already called ahead to the parking valet. The rented GMC Yukon was waiting outside with the engine running and the air-con cranked up high. Sean tipped the valet handsomely and took the driver’s seat. As we followed him out Dyer glanced at me again. This time he wasn’t smiling.
“Is everything OK with you, Charlie?” he murmured.
No, of course not.
“Thanks, but it’s nothing I can’t handle.”
“Oh, that I do not doubt,” he said. “But at what cost?”
Six
The opening night reception was held at the home of a local politician called Ysabeau van Zant. She was New Orleans old money, who’d married an off-comer with even more in the bank than she had. With a name like that I half-expected crinoline gowns and long white gloves for the ladies, white linen suits and big cigars for the men. I wasn’t far off the mark.
The van Zant family home was in Old Metarie in Jefferson Parish. It was an area of country clubs and exclusive golf courses. No two houses were alike, each with total privacy from its neighbours and at least one tennis court or pool in the grounds.
The van Zant place had the look of an old Deep South plantation house. A sprawling mansion with French doors opening out onto wide verandas right the way around both upper and lower floors.
In fact, when Sean and I had done our security inventory prior to Blake Dyer’s arrival, we’d learned that it had been wiped to the foundations when Katrina came through. What little remained had been knocked flat and rebuilt less than five years ago. A modern contrivance aping the glory of times past.
I wondered what it was, exactly, that the van Zants were trying to achieve.
Gridlock, it seemed. Sean weaved our rented GMC Yukon through the jam of vehicles already half blocking the driveway. He managed to squeeze through a gap that brought us within about six or seven metres of the steps leading to the main entrance.
“You take Mr Dyer in, Charlie, I’ll find us a parking space.”
I hesitated just a fraction before nodding. It was a sensible suggestion but that didn’t alter the fact it should have been my call.
I hopped down, made a visual scan as I rounded the tailgate to open the other rear door. Dyer emerged buttoning his tux jacket, and stuck one hand in his trouser pocket like he was striking a pose.
Just before I shut the Yukon’s door behind him, he leaned back inside and said to Sean, “If all else fails, leave it on the front lawn with one wheel in the fountain.”
It was hard to tell from his voice if he was being entirely flippant or not.
House security had already checked us off the guest list at the main gate, but even so I was surprised to be allowed to walk straight in unrestricted through open front doors.
Inside, the oval hallway was two storeys high and straight out of Gone With The Wind. Marble tiled floor, sweeping staircase wide enough for a chorus line, and a crystal chandelier suspended above half an acre of exotic hothouse flora. The flowers were arranged in a huge vase on a table hewn from yet more marble.
Blake Dyer paused inside the doorway, eyes tracking up the chain from which the chandelier dangled ominously, like a Poe pendulum. A slight smile played across his lips, as if he’d made some kind of private bet with himself about the decor, and had just won.
From further inside the house came the full-bodied timbre of a string quartet—live, I reckoned, rather than a recording. Above the music I caught the tap of approaching heels early enough to be watching the far doors before the woman wearing them actually came through.
I recognised the owner of the house, Ysabeau van Zant, from the briefing pictures rather than our previous visit. The lady herself had not been At Home to anyone as lowly as other people’s staff.
; Mrs van Zant was a tall angular woman who dressed to intimidate and impress rather than to enhance her physique.
She was wearing a narrow sleeveless sheath of blue silk with a modest split to the knee so she could actually walk in the thing. I would have ripped the side seam wide open the first time I tried to get out of a car. Some attempt had been made to soften the outfit with a gauzy scarf that floated around her shoulders. It wasn’t altogether successful. I wouldn’t have wanted to arm-wrestle her.
If I hadn’t been watching her entrance, I might not have spotted the momentary hesitation when she saw Dyer, then she put on a professional big smile and moved forwards, hands outstretched.
“My dear Blake, how good of you to come.” She had the whole double-handed shake, the air-kiss and the fake sincerity down pat. And if she noticed Dyer’s stiff response, she gave no indication of it. A real pro. “How wonderful that you could make it. We’re all so grateful.”
“Ysabeau,” Dyer murmured, as good manners forced the greeting out almost against his will. “The After Katrina Foundation is a worthy cause. Important enough to override any . . . personal considerations.”
Oh-oh . . .
“Of course,” Mrs van Zant agreed equably, but her face registered the hit in the sudden tightening around her eyes. Quite a feat, if the amount of cosmetic work she’d had done was anything to go by. Just for a second I thought she might lash out, verbally or physically, then the moment passed like it had never been. She flicked her eyes sideways, weighing up my possible importance as a witness to this exchange. Not much, if her instant dismissal was anything to go by.
She linked her arm through Dyer’s and steered him towards the interior of the house, back the way she’d come, with her head bent towards his. They were of a similar height. I fell into step close enough behind to eavesdrop shamelessly.
“As you say, this is an important event,” Mrs van Zant muttered through clenched teeth. “And if I can damn well put aside our . . . differences for a couple days in the name of such a good cause, my dear Blake, then so can you. Suck it up.”
“The fact I’m here at all should tell you that I have ‘sucked it up’ as you so charmingly put it,” he said. “That doesn’t mean I haven’t taken certain . . . precautions.” His gaze slid pointedly to me.
Mrs van Zant shot me another quick glance, just as narrowed but slightly more venomous this time. I threw her a guileless smile in return—it always confuses them.
Footsteps on the tiles had all of us turning, just as Sean Meyer circled the colossal flower arrangement and moved to join us. Presumably so they wouldn’t be mistaken for anybody important, all security personnel had been instructed to wear dark lounge suits rather than full evening dress.
Even without that distinction, nobody could mistake Sean for a member of the idle rich. It was something in the way he moved, the way he carried himself. The veneer of polish he’d cultivated had worn thin enough to see through. Not necessarily a good thing in our line of work.
And even if Mrs van Zant did not recognise the underlying grit, the way he stopped a respectful distance from the client and stood easy should have told her all she needed to know.
She ignored him after the briefest stare, but the interruption gave Blake Dyer the opportunity to extricate himself from her taloned grasp. He stepped neatly away to prevent her re-engaging, heading towards the gathering inside. It was clearly not the first time he’d had to diplomatically escape a woman’s clutches.
“Blake—” she began in a low voice, more urgently, but that was as far as she got before they reached the doorway to the next room, where the strings were louder, battling for supremacy over the hum of conversation.
“Blake! ’Bout time you showed,” came the buoyant tones of Tom O’Day. Here was someone who had no difficulty making himself heard.
He came striding through the crowd trailing little eddies of excess energy in his wake. O’Day was wearing a black suit that looked almost funereal on his tall frame. As he moved, the light picked out a pair of dragons woven into the fabric of the lapels in silky thread. Maybe not so traditional, then. The bodyguard, Hobson, was his constant shadow.
He clapped a solid arm around Blake Dyer’s shoulder, making him wince. For maybe half a second I wondered if breaking the event organiser’s fingers would count against me.
My eyes flicked to Hobson’s face. He was watching me as if he could read my thoughts. Hmm, probably.
“Ysabeau, you’ll forgive me for stealing a few words with an old friend, I hope?” Tom O’Day said. And without waiting for an answer he whisked Dyer away.
Sean and I were swept along with him, me taking the lead this time. I’d already argued that it made more sense for me to stay close to our principal, leaving Sean to stay further out as an early warning system. Dyer had requested discreet protection and I looked a lot less like a bodyguard, for one thing. As he was not with his wife for this trip I could hover around him under the guise of companion—read into that what you will. It seemed that Sean had already read plenty.
Tom O’Day towed us across to a space beside an oil-black grand piano, halting beneath a gloomy life-size portrait of some bloke in Civil War-era garb. If the subject’s scowl was anything to go by he had not enjoyed the experience of being immortalised on canvas. Perhaps that was why the artist had gone heavy on ugly sludge tones by way of retribution.
A member of the wait-staff appeared almost immediately, bearing a tray of champagne flutes. Dyer courteously offered me a glass before taking his own. I had no intention of drinking on the job, but I accepted as camouflage, holding the stem in my left hand to leave my right free. The SIG was within easy reach in a small-of-the-back rig hidden beneath the weighted hem of my evening jacket.
“Tom—” he began.
Tom O’Day held up a silencing hand. “You don’t need to say it, Blake. I know what’s on your mind.”
Dyer took a minute sip of his champagne, was obviously pleasantly surprised by quality he hadn’t expected. “I doubt that, old friend.”
Tom O’Day sighed, let his gaze roam the assembled guests. We were in a ballroom, with high ceilings and a proper suspended wooden dance floor. The paintings of more ancestors, real or imaginary, glowered their disapproval from all around the walls.
“You’ve been away a while,” he said. “Things change—”
“And the more they do, the more they seem to stay the same,” Blake Dyer finished for him.
Tom O’Day smiled a touch ruefully. “Well, you may not like the look of the horse with the best form, but if it’s a sure thing to win a man would be a fool not to back it. Makes no sense to do otherwise.”
Blake Dyer, taking another sip, snorted into his glass. “And Ysabeau van Zant was that fast mare, was she?”
The rueful smile broadened momentarily before being manfully smothered. “You know as well as I do that nothing gets done around here without greasing the right palms. Way of the world.”
“This part of the world, certainly.”
Tom O’Day’s eyes skimmed over me in much the same way Ysabeau van Zant’s had done, but this time I put on my best part-of-the-furniture face. He nodded acknowledgement and I let my eyes drift around the room as if slightly bored, lifted the champagne glass to my lips without actually taking a swallow.
“We needed her,” Tom O’Day told my principal quietly. He waited an artful beat. “Didn’t have to like it overmuch, though.”
I glanced back. Blake Dyer finally allowed his face to relax for the first time since he’d entered the house. He rolled his shoulders a little inside that fitted jacket, opened his mouth.
A commotion by the doors from the hallway distracted him. Everybody twisted to look, necks craning. Even the ladies of the string quartet petered into silence, but since they were playing the live equivalent of lift muzak they might simply have reached the end of a piece.
Through the crowd I caught a glimpse of a tall young man with a lanky build and a distinctive gait.
I heard someone nearby say, “It’s Gabe Baptiste!” with something approaching awe in their voice.
Tom O’Day heard it, too. He nudged Blake Dyer’s arm, leaned in close. “Ysabeau was the one who sweet-talked the prodigal son into returning home. When young Lyle put himself in the hospital, she was the one who came up with a suitable replacement. Gabe Baptiste—hell, he would have been my first choice if I’da thought we stood a cat in hell’s chance of getting him to agree.” He shook his head. “Boy didn’t even come home for his papa’s burial. But Ysabeau makes the call and here he is. Don’t have the faintest idea how she did it.”
“Oh, I think you have more of an idea than that.” Blake Dyer flashed him a cynical look. “You just don’t want to know for sure.”
