DIE EASY: Charlie Fox book ten (the Charlie Fox crime thriller series)

by Sharp, Zoe

  I leaned in close, lowered my voice so it reached his ears only. “And you’re going to find out all about gang rape in prison, Vic. But somehow I don’t think you’ll enjoy it quite so much when you’re on the receiving end . . .”

  I was rewarded with a flare of genuine emotion in his eyes. Fear. I straightened up, retrieved the Glock from across the room where it had come to rest when I’d kicked it from his hand.

  “Stay or go—we need to make a decision,” I said, terse. “I’m amazed the police aren’t here already.”

  Sean nodded. “If there’s anything you need to take with you,” he told Autumn, “you’d best get it now.”

  “There’s just one thing,” she said. She moved past him into the bedroom, rapped loudly on the door to the bathroom. “Marie,” she called. “It’s OK. You can come out now. It’s safe, I promise.”

  After only a moment’s hesitation we heard the door unlock and Marie O’Day ventured out into the room. She was in her nightclothes. There were remnants of duct tape still attached to her wrists and she looked frightened but lucid.

  She came out cautiously into the living area of the suite, stopped when she saw Vic Morton lying bleeding on the floor. For a moment her expression was stricken, then it hardened.

  “Oh, Vic,” she said softly. “Why?”

  Morton gave her a derisory stare. There was blood in his mouth now, on his lips and staining his teeth. He spat out a gob of it before he could speak. “You were going to . . . get rid of me,” he said. “Heard you talking about the . . . new Mrs O’Day.” His eyes shifted to Autumn. “Her.”

  “Of course,” Marie said sedately. “She’s going to marry Jimmy.”

  Autumn gaped at her. “How did you—?”

  Marie smiled. “A mother always knows,” she said.

  Autumn smiled. “I do love him,” she said sincerely.

  “I know you do, my dear, however well hidden the both of you thought you had it.”

  “What about the money?” I asked. “The half a million you moved to the Caymans.”

  She looked at Morton again. “Why do you think I came down here?” she murmured. “I trusted him too much.”

  “You lent him the money?”

  “No,” she said, looking embarrassed. “I can never remember passwords or account numbers at the best of times. While I was ill, the medications made me more confused. Vic became as much a personal secretary as bodyguard. I–I trusted him a little too much,” she admitted candidly. “I never thought to question how helpful he’d become—until I got a phone call from my bankers.”

  “Theft on a grand scale as well—this just keeps getting better and better,” I said. “OK, let’s get him a doctor.”

  “No.”

  I turned, looked back at Morton. “No?” I repeated.

  His gaze was fixed on Sean. “No medic,” he said. “Just . . . finish it. Please, mate . . .” He lifted his hands away from the wound. A fresh welter of blood bubbled out and slid across his shirt. He was down to a breathy whisper now. “I’m halfway there . . . Get it done.”

  Sean got to his feet slowly. He glanced almost numbly at the revolver in his right hand as if he’d forgotten it was there, forgotten what it was for.

  I remembered Castille’s brother, Leon, and the confession I’d forced out of Gabe Baptiste back on the Miss Francis. I wondered if Leon had used the same words, the same plea, when he’d demanded that Sean save him from a lifetime of paralysis, dependency, and frustration. A coward’s way out, making a mockery of all those who endured and overcame.

  Autumn looked at each of us. “Surely you’re not going to—?”

  “You wanted to leave him to die,” I pointed out. “What’s the difference?”

  Before she could answer, Sean shook his head. “If he wants to die, he can damn well do it himself.”

  He thumbed out the cylinder and emptied all the rounds into his hand, then reinserted one only, pocketing the rest. He closed the cylinder, rotating it so the live round was uppermost. “Gather your stuff,” he said to me.

  “Charlie,” Autumn protested. “You can’t let him do this.”

  “Why?” I said. “Yes, Morton should stand trial and go to Death Row for what he’s done, but you know as well as I do that could take years. This is justice, of a sort.”

  It’s closure. And I’ve already waited a long time for it.

  Autumn turned to Marie, as if expecting her to plead for reason. “Marie?”

  “He’s a thief and a liar and a cheat,” she said, her voice calm. “But he was also a soldier, and I can understand him wanting to die like one.”

  And without revealing your foolishness in public, I considered, but didn’t say so out loud.

  I shoved the comms gear and key cards back into my pocket, leaving the knife on the table. Sean put down the Smith & Wesson revolver, with its single loaded round, about a metre from where Morton lay. For a moment Sean looked at him without speaking, then turned away.

  I paused. “Any last words, Vic?”

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  “No thanks,” I said, cold and clear. “Been there, done that. Didn’t think much of it.”

  We stepped around Thad’s body, unlocked the door of the suite and went out into the corridor. The door clicked shut behind us.

  We were halfway to the stairwell when we heard the gunshot.

  Epilogue

  The hijacking of the Miss Francis and all that entailed was still a hot story when Sean and I returned to Manhattan.

  I don’t think New Orleans had been in the headlines as much since Katrina itself.

  The news channels constantly played the shaky hand-held footage, shot in the dark, showing the stricken paddlewheel boat sitting at an awkward angle, bows-up on the shoreline like she’d hit the French Quarter at ramming speed. People poured over the side like refugees, clambering to solid ground and being gathered up to safety by the waiting crowd. The reports were cleverly intercut to show the wealthy in their bedraggled finery, with their shocked and frightened faces, being comforted by the local population.

  It was powerfully emotive stuff.

  The donations had been flooding in to the After Katrina Foundation ever since the story broke. Tom O’Day’s delight was only tempered by the loss of his long-term bodyguard, and of his friend.

  Blake Dyer’s widow had threatened to sue us, and I couldn’t say I blamed her for that. Tom O’Day flew down to Miami to speak to her personally. I don’t know what he said but after that all mention of a lawsuit was dropped.

  It wasn’t much of a consolation—for anyone involved.

  Sean and I had spent the next week still in Louisiana, kept apart while we underwent countless interviews—bordering on interrogation—by local and federal law enforcement agencies. By the end of it they’d pretty much accepted our assertion that Vic Morton had planned the hijack and recruited the man from New Jersey and his crew. It would seem he’d intended not only to pocket the haul from robbing the guests, but also to lay in enough of a trail leading back to Marie O’Day over the death of her husband that she’d be wide open to blackmail afterwards. He’d made the unauthorised transfer of money from her account to the Caymans with that in mind.

  But whatever his ultimate plan, he wasn’t around to ask.

  The feds were not happy about that, but we told them blandly the Smith & Wesson must have been dropped and forgotten in the confusion, that our first priority had been to get the two civilians, Marie O’Day and Autumn Sinclair, out of the way and to safety. They didn’t like it, but there was no question Morton pulled the trigger of his own volition, so no charges were brought against us.

  Gabe Baptiste claimed his very public “confession” had been made under duress and was pure fabrication, told in an attempt to save his own skin. It did not do his sporting hero status any good, but it probably saved him facing a murder rap. He didn’t mention the fact I’d threatened to finish his career by splintering his throwing arm, though, so I assumed wha
t he’d told us then was the truth. I asked Parker to keep him blacklisted.

  The flight back to New York was crowded, affording no privacy and little time for Sean and me to talk. We both slept for most of it anyway. I felt like I could sleep for a month.

  It was only the following morning, over early coffee in the apartment, that we had sat down and finally talked to each other. Really talked, probably for the first time since he’d come out of his coma. We were on opposite sides of the breakfast bar in the kitchenette off the living room. We’d sat like that many times in the past, preferring it to the more formal dining area. Now the positioning felt both claustrophobic and adversarial.

  “I’m sorry—for not trusting you,” Sean said out of nowhere as I handed him a cup of fresh Jamaican Blue Mountain. I’d acquired an expensive coffee habit from Parker.

  “You don’t really know me,” I said. “How could you trust me?”

  He put the coffee down on the countertop in front of him and linked his fingers together. “I’m . . . confused. No—I find a lot of things confusing—not quite the same thing.” He stopped, took a breath. “It’s like I can’t trust myself to know what’s right any more.”

  “You could have killed Morton and you didn’t,” I pointed out. I didn’t express an opinion on whether that was right or wrong. I still couldn’t work out if I was glad the man was dead or disappointed that I hadn’t been the one to finish him.

  “I found I . . . couldn’t do it—take a life in cold blood.” Sean stilled, looked straight into my eyes. “However much I felt I should.”

  Both of us knew he wasn’t only talking about Morton and a tiny shiver rippled along my spine. “In that case, perhaps I should be thankful for small mercies.”

  “He was convincing,” Sean admitted. “And it didn’t help that all I remembered about you was an overwhelming sense of betrayal. It still . . . lingers.”

  I sipped my coffee and said nothing. We sat in silence for a time. Outside the windows of the apartment, down in the streets below, came the usual sounds of traffic threaded with the occasional wailing siren like an urban lullaby.

  “It scares me, Charlie,” he said at last. “This job, this life, it needs a ruthlessness that I don’t seem to have any more. Did I ever really have it?”

  “Yes, you did.”

  He nodded, his lips twisting. “It must have made me a right bastard to live with.”

  “You had your moments,” I agreed sedately. “But it was a part of who you were, Sean. I knew that and accepted it.”

  He nodded again, more uncertainly this time. He was frowning. “But . . . I loved you?” It was a question not a statement. The past tense made my heart contract into a hard, brittle knot inside my chest. “I was capable of that?”

  “You were.”

  Silence overtook us again. There was so much I wanted to say but the words wouldn’t come, wouldn’t form. I leaned on my elbows and sipped more of my coffee, both hands clasped around the mug as if trying to pull strength from it.

  “I need time, Charlie,” Sean said. “Ever since I came back I’ve felt under pressure to fulfil a role that feels completely alien to me. I see the constant anxiety in your eyes, in Parker’s. Like you’re willing me to somehow just . . . snap out of it.”

  “Sean, I—”

  “I’m not saying you’re doing it deliberately. But I still don’t know how much is left of the person I was before—there might be nothing at all. But the snatches I get . . . to be honest with you, I’m not sure how much I want there to be.”

  The irony of that was not lost on me.

  Just when finally I become more like you, you become less like yourself.

  “There was nothing wrong with the way you were,” I said, gently.

  “If Baptiste is to be half believed, I killed a wounded man without a second thought.”

  I took a breath. “Where does that leave . . .?”

  “Us?”

  “Everything.” The single word seemed stark against the high ceiling of the apartment. I gave a helpless shrug in an attempt to soften the effect. “Life, work, us. All of it.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, his gaze level. “I think that’s more up to you.”

  I didn’t understand but I nodded anyway, trying not to let the bewilderment show. “In what way?”

  “You rang Parker from New Orleans and asked him to recall me,” he said. “Told him I wasn’t right—wasn’t ready.”

  “I had . . . concerns,” I admitted. “Parker told me to sort them out on the ground.”

  “Yeah.” His voice was dry. “And look how well that worked out.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Sean. If you want to blame anyone, blame that tosser Vic Morton. He set the whole bloody mess in motion.”

  “We’re paid to anticipate trouble and to prevent it,” Sean said. “Aren’t we? But in that case I failed on both counts.”

  There was a stubborn set to his jaw I recognised of old. It troubled and infuriated me in equal measure, made my voice snappier than it should have been.

  “What are you saying—that you want me to tell Parker you’re not up to the job and save you having to make your own decision?”

  “That’s something only you can decide, Charlie. But I don’t want another dead principal on my hands—or my conscience.” He paused. “Do you?”

  Inside my head I saw again the paramedics pulling a sheet over Blake Dyer’s body, the weary defeat in their eyes. Another battle lost.

  I pushed up from the breakfast bar and put my empty coffee cup in the dishwasher, using the excuse of tidying away to give myself time to think. No useful thoughts came.

  When I straightened I found Sean watching me. “Losing someone always hurts—it’s supposed to,” I said. “As for what I’m going to tell Parker, well, until he asks the question . . . I don’t know what my answer will be.”

  I found out later the same morning. We weren’t due into the office for our official debrief until the afternoon. Sean had gone out for a run, leaving me alone with my troubled thoughts.

  When the buzzer at the apartment door sounded, I knew before I glanced through the Judas glass that it was going to be Parker. Only he had a key to get past the ground-floor security.

  I tried to suppress my dismay, took a deep breath and opened the door.

  Parker’s face broke into a genuine smile at the sight of me. “Charlie,” he said. “You’re looking good.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I stepped back before he could close in on me, aware from the flicker in his face that he’d registered it. There was very little Parker missed. I kept my voice pleasant, light. “Come on in. I’m afraid Sean’s not here at the moment.”

  He moved past me into the living area, looking around. “I had a feeling he might not be,” he said candidly, turning to face me. “I confess I was hoping I’d catch you alone.”

  “What’s on your mind?”

  He studied me for a moment, eyes shrewd as he took in my businesslike tone. I watched him mentally readjust, and somewhere inside my head I heard a door closing very softly.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you at home,” he said, more formally, “but we need to discuss Sean—his performance. I wanted to do that outside the office.”

  “Of course,” I said. “How have things been affected there?”

  He shrugged. “Purely from the agency’s point of view things are not as bad as they might be,” he said, matter-of-fact. “O’Day’s PR people seem to be giving us an easy ride.” He allowed himself an austere smile. “Maybe the fact you saved Ms Sinclair’s life has something to do with that.”

  “I should have let you put the word out about Morton earlier,” I said. “We might have managed to cut him off at the knees before he could do so much damage.”

  “I think this game was already in play well before anybody got to New Orleans,” Parker said. “And Sean seemed to think he was OK.”

  I realised for the first time that Parker had been in contact with Se
an while we’d been away as much as he’d been in contact with me.

  Should have expected that.

  “It was a difficult situation for Sean,” I said. “His memory of Morton is far different now to what it was before. He only remembered him as an OK kind of guy. And don’t forget that Morton was going out of his way to reingratiate himself.”

  “Nevertheless—”

  “In the end, Sean came down on the right side.”

  Parker frowned. “But just how much of a close call was it?” he asked softly.