by Sharp, Zoe
Forty-seven
“What goddamn divorce?”
Tom O’Day’s voice was harsh but with an underlying thread of bewilderment that had to be real. If there really was a divorce in the offing, then it was clear he was not the instigator.
But I remembered Marie O’Day’s words, back when she’d visited Blake Dyer in his suite, the morning after the helo crash. She had made some reference to wanting to catch her husband in the act.
In the act of doing what?
O’Day loomed over Sullivan. He had big hands and they gripped tight round the shaft of the golf club. Sullivan tried not to cringe away.
“Hey, don’t blame me. That’s what I heard,” he gabbled. “That’s what they told me.”
I stepped in front of Tom O’Day just in case. “Why?”
Sullivan tore his eyes away from the other man with difficulty. “W-what?”
I spelled it out. “Why would Marie O’Day want to have her husband murdered before the divorce?”
“Now just wait one minute,” O’Day blustered. “There is no goddamn divorce—”
“Say there is,” I interrupted gently. “Just hypothetically speaking. You’re a rich man. Surely there’s enough to go around if you and your wife split up?”
From the other side of the cabin Blake Dyer cleared his throat, said, “They made him sign a pre-nup.”
My turn for confusion. “Who?”
“Marie’s family,” Blake Dyer said. “They mistook Tom’s natural ambition for gold-digging. They had no idea how successful he’d become so they made him sign a pre-nup—to protect her inheritance.” He gave a dry smile. “Of course, they also had no idea how cruel a hand fate and time would deal them. If Marie were to divorce Tom now all she’d end up with would be her family’s debts.”
Tom O’Day shrugged. “She always refused to have the damn thing annulled,” he said with a fond little smile of his own. “Sticking it to her daddy right to his last breath and beyond.”
“And there’s no chance she’s decided to cancel that pre-nup now—permanently?”
Tom O’Day shook his head, but I caught the fractional hesitation even he couldn’t entirely prevent. He gave an open shrug. “Why the heck would she?”
I suppressed a sigh. “Well, maybe she’s taken exception to the amount of time you spend with your very attractive young PR consultant.”
He looked genuinely surprised. “Autumn? My goodness, you got that wrong, ma’am. I can assure you there is nothing like that going on between us.” A little colour bled across his cheekbones. “If she were a six-XL with a face like a prospector’s mule nobody would question the fact it’s her brains I most admire,” he added with a little more spirit. “But a woman’s beauty can be a curse as much as a blessing. People automatically assume she must be my mistress, not my protégée.”
I said nothing, vaguely ashamed that I too had fallen into the same trap.
“Besides,” Tom O’Day said with dignity, “I’m old enough to be her father.”
I privately considered that he was actually old enough to be her grandfather. But that’s when I really got it—from the words, the tone.
Regret.
Autumn Sinclair was everything, I realised, that Jimmy O’Day was not. She was bright, ambitious, ruthless and driven. Qualities that Tom O’Day appreciated fully because he possessed them himself in spades.
Qualities his only child quite simply did not have.
Jimmy O’Day might have been a nice kid once, probably right up to the point when he recognised he was never going to grow into the man his father desired to succeed him.
I wondered if that was when the bitterness had kicked in. A part of Jimmy O’Day must have known that to gain his father’s respect he needed to get out from under and make his own way. And another part knew he couldn’t hack it in the big wide world. So he kept his sinecure and was thus reminded on a regular basis of his own inadequacies and cowardice.
From such daily belittlings resentment could grow into a monster.
Maybe it already had . . .
I thought back to what I’d overheard down in the casino over Sean’s open comms link. Besides the murder of the bodyguard, Rick Hobson, there were those taken away from the others—Autumn Sinclair and Jimmy O’Day.
Of all the guests, the hostages, those were the people connected most closely with Tom O’Day. They were the ones most intertwined with his life and that of his wife.
“We need to find Jimmy and Autumn,” I said. I glanced up at Sullivan. “Where were they taken?”
“I don’t know,” he said, sullen now. Then—as Tom O’Day took a step towards him—with more fervour, “I don’t!”
“Well use your imagination,” I said coolly. “If not to think where your colleagues might have stashed them, then to imagine what we’re going to do to you if you don’t come up with something convincing.”
“I don’t—” he began again, almost a squawk.
“The meat locker,” Tom O’Day said calmly, cutting Sullivan off in mid-protest. “Well-insulated, big lock on the outside of the door—it’s secure as any brig.”
I couldn’t tell from the crushed look on the other man’s disfigured face if the guess disappointed him for being correct, or because he didn’t come up with it himself.
“They cater enough dinner parties on the Miss Francis to have a well-equipped galley aboard,” O’Day said. “Climate like this, you need a full-size meat locker or half your clientele would go down with food poisoning.”
“Do you know where it is?”
He hesitated a moment, then nodded. “I took a tour of the ship when we selected her for this . . .” His voice tailed off as if he wasn’t quite sure how to describe what had been designed as a celebration of renewal and had turned into an orgy of destruction instead.
“Good—you can lead the way,” I said. I picked up the Maglite, weighed it in my hand, paused. “What do we do with him?”
Sullivan’s eyes bulged. “Now, wait, please—”
“Well, we damn well gag him, for sure,” Tom O’Day said. His eyes drifted around the narrow cabin. “No telling how much noise he might still make, though.”
To my surprise, it was Blake Dyer who stepped forwards. “I think I can help with that,” he said. He drew out a pen from his inside jacket pocket, found a sheet of dusty paper and wrote across it in neat capitals:
MR SULLIVAN TOLD US EVERYTHING
Tom O’Day looked at the paper uncomprehendingly, a frown pulling those bushy eyebrows together into a single furry line.
I taped the paper to Sullivan’s chest with enough duct tape that he wouldn’t easily dislodge it, then used another strip to clamp his lips shut. Above the makeshift gag his eyes were wild.
“You do get it, don’t you?” I murmured. “If your mates come in here and see that note, do you think they’ll bother to untie you to get your side of it? Or do you think they’ll just chuck you, chair and all, straight into the river?”
Forty-eight
The galley aboard the Miss Francis was down in the bilges, adjacent to the casino where the majority of the hostages were being held.
Of course. It would be.
Tom O’Day led us along the upper deck away from the cabin where we’d left Sullivan still tied to his chair. I hoped having that note on his chest would dissuade him from trying to attract anyone’s attention. It was a fiendishly neat and simple device. I wished I’d thought of it myself.
I waited until we were out of Sullivan’s earshot, then gave Sean a brief rundown on events via the comms. Sullivan’s team might yet find and release him. No point in him being able to tell them we had a man on the inside. Sean responded with a brief double-click but no other comment.
I would have felt a lot better about the expedition if I’d managed to secure Sullivan’s weapon, but once his H&K had gone over the side the only thing he’d been carrying were spare magazines. Heavy enough to throw at someone but not otherwise useful—unless I got
lucky with the next hijacker we encountered.
I didn’t want to count on that.
We found a stairwell, dropped a deck to the main restaurant area and crept inside. The restaurant was largely arranged in booths around the outer walls with a few loose tables dotted across the centre space. No doubt the fixed seating came in useful in rough weather—not that I could imagine the Miss Francis casting off in anything other than calm conditions. The skipper was probably on a cut of all the tips handed out. Violent seasickness would not make for a generous gratuity—or lagniappe I’d heard it called here.
There was a small bar in one corner near the door to the service entrance. We crossed to that and ducked behind it just in case of a cursory sweep.
“From here the galley is straight beneath us, another deck down,” Tom O’Day reported quietly. He nodded to the service doors. “Through there are the dumb waiters they use to bring the food up, and stairs in case the staff need to go fetch anything.”
I made a “wait here” gesture and inched across to nudge one door open, shifting around to peer carefully through the gap. Beyond were two large dumb waiter lifts, as he’d described. There was also a small prep area with a sink and a line of stainless steel tables where the food could be loaded onto serving trays and carried out to the waiting guests. It was bare and utilitarian, no frills, no fuss. I checked for cutlery, knowing I could make a useful weapon out of a table knife or a fork, but the drawers were empty.
To one side were more double doors with small windows in them. The doors had finger plates that were scratched and discoloured from the careless shove of numerous wait-staff hands. Always in a hurry, always against the clock. I guessed that those doors led to the service stairwell that went down directly to the galley itself.
I moved across to them, careful how I put down my feet on the hard decking. The doors both had clear panels at head height—wire mesh embedded in safety glass. I peered through. At an angle I could see straight down into the stairwell. As I watched, a shadow moved slowly and steadily across the area below.
I eased back, rejoined the two men behind the bar.
“Is it clear?” Blake Dyer asked, strain in his voice.
I shook my head. “Looks like there’s a sentry at the bottom.”
“Just one man?”
I looked at him. “That’s all they need.”
Especially with no weapon of my own.
I looked at the bottles of spirits hanging from their optics above me. Any number of highly flammable liquids here—the makings of any number of improvised explosive devices that would clear a stairwell faster than just about anything. I thought of the hostages in the bowels of the boat. Fire was my last—and worst—option.
We crossed to the opposite side of the boat and moved out of the restaurant. Tom O’Day guided us to another stairwell. Alert for more guards, we slipped down it onto the next deck level and tried to keep out of sight.
Eventually, O’Day came alongside me and murmured, “If we go out and round we should be able to come at the galley from the dock loading entrance. Keeps us away from the bow area.”
The casino was in the bow. The galley was further back, where the only view to be enjoyed was the murky river rushing past at close proximity. The galley staff must have been able to hear little beyond the thud of the engines right behind them.
I nodded and we slipped out onto the side deck. We were low enough to hear the water slopping against the hull as we cleaved through it. The air was thick, damp, heavy.
I gazed out across the slide of the river, expecting to see nothing but distant lights glinting against the surface through the fog. Hoping that’s all I’d see, anyhow.
It was not.
I nudged Blake Dyer’s arm, waited until he’d nudged his friend’s. “We’ve got company coming up on our starboard side.”
Tom O’Day craned his neck. We could just make out the darkened shapes of inflatables closing rapidly on the Miss Francis. “Who in hell’s name is that? They called in reinforcements you think?”
“There you got me,” I said. “But I don’t think it would be wise to be caught out in the open when they get here, do you?”
We scuttled back the way we’d come, careful not to silhouette ourselves against the boat’s own lights. Fortunately, coming out of the misty blackness and reaching such a bright-lit beacon must have played havoc with the new arrivals’ night vision. There were no sudden shouts of alarm or recognition as we retreated.
Of course, that could simply mean they didn’t want to alert the existing crew to their presence. Just because we had one hostile party on board didn’t mean the newcomers were in cahoots with them.
One thing was for certain, though. Whichever scenario I plumped for I somehow doubted our lives were about to become any easier.
Forty-nine
“What are you doing here, Castille?”
The voice belonged to the man with the New Jersey accent I’d heard on the casino deck. In person his voice was fuller and more rounded, all the upper and lower frequencies intact. It was still instantly recognisable.
It took me a moment to place the name he spoke, though. The drug dealer who’d been killed when Sean had been last in New Orleans—his name had been Leon Castille.
“Keep a hand through my belt,” I whispered to Dyer and Tom O’Day, handing over the Maglite. “If you hear anyone coming, haul me up and out of there, OK?”
They nodded. I crept across the side deck and lowered myself over the edge so I could hang down and see onto the deck below. I was almost instantly blinded by the deck lighting strung there. I shaded my eyes with my hand. At least nobody was likely to stare up straight into the bare bulbs and spot me. All I had to do was keep still, no matter what.
Below me, further along the lower deck, I could see a group of men. From the way they stood it was difficult to work out who was part of the original raiding party and who were the new arrivals. But something, I realised, was just about to come unstuck.
Not good—for anybody.
“This wasn’t part of the plan,” New Jersey said. He was a tall, spare-framed man, wide across the shoulder the way mercenaries tended to be—the good ones, anyway. Their lives depended on their level of fitness and they worked hard at it if they wanted to survive for long.
He had ripped off his balaclava leaving slightly long pale hair sticking up at sweated angles from his head. It did not add to his air of command.
By contrast, Castille—the man at the centre of the newcomers—was altogether too sleek, too smooth. His complexion was olive, almost Latin, his hair slicked back with enough gel to gleam in the lights like the coat of a wet seal. Despite climbing off an inflatable in the middle of a foggy river he was wearing a black suit complete with a waistcoat. It might have been expensive but there was some kind of glittery thread woven into the fabric that made it look cheap. Despite tooled boots with a heel, he was still shorter than the man from New Jersey, a little softer around the middle, but no less dangerous for all that.
“On the contrary, cher,” he said. “This was always part of my plan.”
As soon as I heard his voice, the whole of my body tingled in reaction producing instant goosebumps.
It was the man from the scrapyard near the Lower Ninth Ward. The one who’d brought down the Bell. He’d wanted one of us then and hadn’t succeeded.
I put it together—the name, the determination. Only one name popped: Baptiste. He’d tried for the ball player once already—maybe twice. I was pretty sure now it must have been Castille’s men in the parking structure next to the hotel, as well as downing the helicopter.
Baptiste. And there was nothing I could do about it.
“C’mon, Castille,” New Jersey said now, sounding tired. “We had a deal—”
“And I intend to keep my side of it, but with certain . . . alterations.”
New Jersey let out a snort of breath. “And if I say no?”
From where I lay, looking down, I saw Casti
lle smile and spread his hands. He had small hands, the fingers slim and delicate.
“Come now, cher, let us not fall out over this. After all, I have allowed you use of my men for this enterprise, no?”
New Jersey glanced around him as if realising for the first time that he was surrounded by more unfamiliar faces than trusted ones. Just for a second his hands strayed towards the MP5K. It dangled from its shoulder-strap like Sullivan’s had done. The men around him tensed in automatic response. His hand stilled.
