by Sharp, Zoe
“So tell us about your girlfriend?”
It was the man with the New Jersey accent who asked the question, loud enough that he must have been standing close to Sean.
“My girlfriend?”
“Yeah”—there was a rustle of pages, as if he was consulting a manifest—“Charlie Fox. Remember her?”
“She’s a capable girl,” Sean said easily.
“Yeah, so it seems. Capable of cutting a man’s throat in cold blood?”
There was a pause. The old Sean would have denied it. The old Sean would not have believed me capable of murder. But the new Sean, it seemed, had no such doubts. “I reckon so—if she had to.”
I would have told him I had nothing to do with it, but with his mic open I couldn’t communicate from my end. The comms only allowed one mic to be keyed at once to avoid confusion on the net.
A muttered, “Shit.” And an aside to someone probably behind him, from the way the volume dropped a little: “Find them. Now. And if you get the chance, kill the—”
I never got to hear exactly which of us the man from New Jersey wanted to see dead or by what means, because his voice cut off so abruptly that for a moment I thought Sean had let go of the mic key.
Tom O’Day demanded, “What’s happened?”
“They think I killed their man.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Blake Dyer said. “You haven’t been out of our sight for a moment.”
I raised a tired eyebrow. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, but I don’t think—”
Noises came through my earpiece again, faint like scuffling, bootsteps on wooden planking, moving fast. I jerked my head up as if expecting to see men approaching our position but it was all coming down the wire.
“What?” Tom O’Day asked again.
I silenced him with a finger.
At the other end of the open channel, down in the casino, I heard a single set of footsteps, moving slow and precise and arrogant. There was a definite swagger. I recognised them.
Castille.
“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for being so . . . patient in such difficult circumstances,” Castille’s voice said, further away from Sean’s hidden mic but still clearly audible. “As you may have guessed, there has been a change of plan for this evening’s entertainment. Another one. I will be your host for what remains of your . . . celebration.”
Why did I get the distinct feeling that wasn’t either what he meant or had been going to say. The remains of your what? Lives?
More footsteps, still slow and deliberate. Still swaggering. He was the star of the show and seemed determined to savour every moment. The footsteps halted.
“So, you are the famous Gabe Baptiste,” Castille said. “I have wanted to meet you for a long time.”
Fifty-seven
I repeated the gist of the conversation to the two men.
“Gabe Baptiste,” Tom O’Day repeated slowly. He shook his head, mystified and more than a little angry. “Why go to all this damn trouble to grab a ball player?”
“A ball player who hasn’t been back to New Orleans for years,” I reminded him. I caught something through my earpiece, tilted my head as if that would help. “Shush.”
“You some kind of deranged fan or something?” Baptiste said now. There was fear in his voice but bravado, too. He was too young or too foolish to realise how serious this man was.
If he’d appreciated that, he would have taken the first flight out after the helicopter crash—OK, maybe the first bus. Either way, he would not have hung around waiting for them to try again. Like I said—too young or too foolish.
Unless he was very lucky, he was going to die before he had a chance to outgrow either.
Castille laughed. It was a soft almost gentle laugh that contained no trace of humour.
“‘Deranged?’ Who knows,” he said. “But a fan? Of course. I have been following your career very carefully, cher. I know everything about you . . . Everything.”
Baptiste said nothing.
“You should have given yourself up,” Castille said. “Instead, you have caused all this”—I could imagine a negligent wave of a hand—“unpleasantness.”
“Given myself up for what? What have I done?” Baptiste asked, sticking it out. I couldn’t decide if that was purely stubbornness or the fact he had a captive audience, as it were. He sounded nervous, but that was nothing to go by. The guns were there even if I couldn’t see them. In that kind of stressed-out situation Mother Teresa would have sounded guilty of something.
“What have you done?” Castille repeated. His voice betrayed a hint of underlying steel, under tension like a suspension bridge wire beginning to vibrate in a high wind. “Murder, cher. You murdered my little brother, Leon. And I have waited a very long time to make things . . . right between us.”
“Wait a minute. ‘Make things right’? How?”
Which was the wrong question, I thought. Dead wrong.
Unless he was guilty.
I remembered Parker’s brief report on the murder of the dead drug dealer, Leon Castille. The guy everybody assumed Ysabeau van Zant had contracted a hit on. One in the back to put him down, then finished off with a second round to the base of the skull at close range.
It certainly sounded cold, calculating, professional.
It didn’t sound like the work of an immature kid, which was all Gabe Baptiste had been at the time. It sounded more like . . .
“It wasn’t me!” Baptiste’s voice was close to a yelp, distorted through guilt or fear or a combination of both. “I didn’t kill him. Shit, you got to believe me. You think I done that? No way—”
“You were there,” Castille said, cutting across his protests, icy. “You were seen, just before. Your face was known, even then.”
“Yeah, I was there, so what? Doesn’t mean I did it. Doesn’t mean I killed him.”
“So who did?”
“I–I—”
The man’s voice grew almost soft, harder to hear. “I would advise you to think very carefully before you lie to me, cher. After all, what good is a ball player without the use of his legs, hmm?”
“It was the fucking bodyguard—him!” Baptiste shouted. “Meyer. Sean Meyer. Your fucking brother tried to roll me—pulled a gun. And that’s when my bodyguard arrived, all right? That’s when Sean Meyer shot your brother.”
Fifty-eight
“You don’t deny it,” Castille said, his voice louder again. He had closed on Sean, was asking him the question. “So, is it true, what he says?”
I held my breath. The O’Days and Blake Dyer were staring at me. I ignored them, willing Sean to give the right answer.
Not necessarily the true answer—just the one that wouldn’t get him killed.
Because the truth was that Sean would have been more than capable of pulling the trigger if the circumstances had been as Baptiste had described. I thought back over his words. “And that’s when my bodyguard arrived . . .”
If that part was correct—if any of it was—then Sean had not been there from the outset. It sounded plausible. No way would Sean have gone with a principal to buy drugs. Nor would he have let him out on his own to do so.
But if Baptiste had lied to him about the destination, or the purpose, that would only have kept Sean out of the way for so long. Long enough for him to work it out and go charging in there.
Long enough for him to take down a possible threat.
“It might be,” Sean said now. “Might not be. I don’t know.”
Not the answer I’d been hoping for.
“You don’t know,” Castille repeated flatly. “Is that your best answer? Because, it is not only your life at stake here, cher, but the manner of your death.”
Sean’s tone matched him. “Dead is dead.”
“This is true, but not all roads that lead to death are the same. I could make yours long and . . . torturous.”
“You just said you didn’t want lies,” Sean said, brusque with tension. “
Now you’re asking me to do just that.”
“How can you not know if you killed a man? Was this so easy for you to forget—shooting him in the back, severing his spine with your bullet, so all he could do was lie there, helpless, and watch you walk towards him with your gun?” I didn’t need to see the man’s face to feel his fire. “Did his eyes call you for the coward that you were? Is that why you couldn’t meet them when you finished him, hmm?”
“How do you know that’s how it happened?” Sean asked.
I knew he was hedging, but what else could he do?
Then I heard the sound of a blow landing. Not a fist, but something heavier, harder—the butt of a pistol maybe—smacking hard into flesh and muscle and bone. A grunt of pain.
“What do you hope to gain by lies except more pain?” Castille said now, something close to curiosity in his voice. “Do you still think you have to protect him? Look at him—he is not worthy of your protection.”
I could guess that by “him” he meant Baptiste.
“He can’t tell you what happened,” Baptiste blurted out. “He was in a coma. He can’t remember anything. So, you’re just gonna have to take my word on it.” He sounded almost triumphant.
There was a long pause, then Castille said, “Is this true?”
“Yes, it’s true,” Sean said tightly.
He sounded as if he’d rather keep taking hits than admit to such weakness in front of the assembled crowd. More to the point, in front of their close-protection people. There were bodyguards here from major agencies all over the country. And right now they had nothing else on which to focus their attention except the scene being played out in front of them.
Sean added grudgingly, “I was shot in the head—doing my job.”
That much, at least, was common knowledge.
“Ah, like my brother. But unlike my brother you did not die,” the man said. “And now you are returned to full health, yes?”
“Yes.”
I heard just a touch of defiance.
“And yet you claim you do not know what happened to my brother.” It was halfway between a statement and a question. “Unless you are somehow . . . brain damaged, cher, how can it be that you do not remember? Perhaps this is a convenient lapse of memory. A little too convenient, yes?”
Sean said nothing. There was nothing he could say without damning himself before one audience or another.
If he admitted that his whole memory of guarding Baptiste years ago was missing, he might save his own skin right now, but he’d be hanging himself later. Not only that, but he’d be hanging Parker out to dry, too. The news that one of the partners in the prestigious Armstrong-Meyer had gone back out into the field with such huge gaps in his recall would go round the business like wildfire. It would cause a sensation.
And not in a good way.
But, if he hoped to come out of this alive how could Sean admit to being involved without contradicting Gabe Baptiste’s own story?
Baptiste might be a coward—he might even be a murderer—but he had still been a client.
And close-protection operatives do not sacrifice clients—even former clients—to save themselves.
That would cause another sensation.
Again, not in a good way.
I closed my eyes, might even have let out a low groan.
“What the hell is going on down there?” Jimmy O’Day demanded.
I said nothing.
I felt his hand on my arm, a rough little shake.
I said, “Move it or lose it,” without opening my eyes.
The hand went.
“Charlie—”
“Shush.”
In my ear, Sean had started speaking again. “You want to know what really happened?” he asked. “Then I’ll tell you. But you’re not going to like it.”
Fifty-nine
“Yes, I was with Baptiste that night,” Sean said calmly. “I didn’t like it much, but it was my job to be there, right?”
“Sean, what the hell are you doing?” I murmured uselessly. He couldn’t hear me any more than he could remember anything about that night—could he?
Or could he?
He paused a moment and I cursed the fact I couldn’t see Gabe Baptiste’s face.
When Baptiste had first arrived and seen Sean in the lobby of the hotel, the ball player had been shit-scared. Here was someone who knew all his shameful little secrets.
And then he’d discovered that by some remarkable quirk of fate Sean could remember nothing at all about him. I remembered Baptiste’s palpable relief, on the roof of the parking garage the morning of the helicopter crash, when the truth of it finally hit home.
Clearly Baptiste hadn’t been able to believe his luck. At first he’d treated it as some kind of joke at his expense, and later as one that he could join in with impunity. He’d invited himself onto the same flight as Sean purely, I realised now, to do some private gloating at close range.
After all, here was someone who could probably sink Baptiste’s precious career. A man he believed had kept silent only out of some old-fashioned sense of duty and honour that Baptiste could not understand. He must have wondered constantly if he could rely on it.
Was that why his manager had approached Armstrong-Meyer earlier in the year to deal with the stalking fan—just to see if his past crimes were going to be resurrected and held against him?
How heartened he must have been by Parker’s polite but noncommittal response.
Now here was Sean about to spill the beans in front of everybody who was anybody in New Orleans. His home town.
And there was nothing he could do about it without making things ten times worse.
“No, I didn’t know why Baptiste had gone there—he spun me a line about meeting with someone,” Sean said easily. “Some girl he’d met.”
From the way Baptiste had been all over Autumn Sinclair, that wasn’t a stretch of imagination on Sean’s part. Or anyone else’s.
Baptiste, I noted, did not interrupt him.
“He told me to wait outside, so I stayed with the car. That kind of area, I wanted to make sure it still had all its wheels when he came out.”
“You expect me to believe that you, his bodyguard, did not stay close to him?”
Sean gave a half-snort of mirthless laughter. “Like I said, he told me he was meeting a girl and there are some things I really don’t need to watch.”
There was a moment’s silence. I held my breath. Jimmy O’Day shuffled from one foot to the other. I glared at him. He stopped shuffling.
“What changed your mind?”
“Now that I don’t know,” Sean said. “Instinct? Experience? Mainly, though, I think it was the smell.”
“What smell?”
“Something about the whole set-up stank.” I almost heard Sean shrug. “I decided to go in—quietly. If I was wrong and the kid was just getting his leg over, I’d back out and he’d never know I was there.”
“But he was not ‘getting his leg over’ as you put it.”
“No,” Sean agreed. “He wasn’t. Instead I found him facing off with another guy. The other guy had a gun on him. Baptiste was wailing and whining and saying how he was sorry. Whatever had gone on, he was offering the guy money to ‘make things right’, or something like that.”
I had no idea where this was coming from. I only had the information from Parker’s report. In theory, the same information Sean had. So was he genuinely working from memory, or spinning a desperately well-played line?
Either way, he had Castille hooked hard enough not to call him a liar outright. Not yet anyway.
Even Baptiste wasn’t voicing denials, so either Sean had it nailed or he had pretty good insight into Baptiste’s character. Good enough to guess how he might have behaved.
“And how did you react to this . . . situation?” Castille asked now, his voice almost a hiss.
“As I’m trained to,” Sean said, matter-of-fact. “I gave him a warning, then took him down.”
There was another pause, longer this time. “You, cher, are a liar,” Castille said. “A good liar—but a liar, nevertheless.”
“That’s how it happened,” Sean said, and I heard the stubborn tilt of his chin. Now he was playing this hand, he was playing it to the end. What other choice did he have? “Were you there? No. So how am I lying?”
