Second Shot (42 page)

‘And it was never enough,” Lucas went on bitterly, staring out through the dirty windscreen at his wife’s body “She took everything I had to give and wanted more. I tried so hard to be what she wanted. But it was never enough….”

It had started to snow again, big fat flakes that floated down and laid themselves almost graciously on whatever they Youched. They had already covered Rosalind’s head and shoulders like a white lace shroud.

“Lucas —,” Sean began, but the other man shook his head vigorously.

“No,” he said. “Don’t call me that anymore. I spent God knows how many years trying to
be
Greg Lucas, trying to be the kind of husband Rosalind wanted. And then she took away the last thing that meant anything to me and tonight I realized, she never really wanted me at all, did she?”

He pulled back his focus and looked at me directly. “I found her out here and took that tape off her mouth and do you know what her first words to me were?”

I didn’t answer and his gaze swept me up and down. “She said that you were half-dead and a woman and you were still twice the man I’d ever be.” His face crumpled, consumed by bitterness and anger and regret. “So I finally decided to become exactly the kind of cold, hard, ruthless bastard she wanted me to be,” he said, “and I shot her.”

T
hree months after I was shot, Sean and I walked through an unfurnished apartment on the Upper East Side in New York City, listening to the echo of our own footsteps on the polished plank floors.

I no longer had to use a crutch, but I still favored my left leg a little, especially
if
I was tired. Intensive physiotherapy and spending just about every morning in the gym meant I was approaching something like my former level of fitness, but it was—as the physio at CMMC had predicted—a long road back.

“What do you think?” Sean asked as I moved over to one of the tall windows. If you stood on a chair and squinted sideways, you could just about see Central Park from the spacious living room. That fact alone should have added at least another thousand dollars a month onto the rent.

“It’s fabulous,” I said. “But are you sure about this?”

He shrugged. He had on the same dark suit he’d worn when we’d met Harrington the banker and Simone, that day in London. It was June and the temperature outside was in the nineties, but Sean still managed to look crisp and unflustered. He put his hands on my upper arms and turned me to face him.

“Are
you
sure about it?” he asked softly. “This partnership offer from Parker Armstrong is too good to turn down, but I will turn it down without a second thought if you can’t face the thought of coming with me. Of living over here. I couldn’t do it without you, Charlie. I wouldn’t want to.”

I didn’t answer immediately, but pulled away from him and turned back to the window. I still hadn’t gained enough distance from the Lucas job to find true perspective. As far as the law was concerned, I was in the clear. Parker Armstrong’s formidable legal team had seen to that.

After all, they’d argued, I was still barely recovered from my wounds. The doctor with the perfect smile had expressed his disbelief that I’d been capable of walking through a building and shooting two men dead at that stage of my recovery. It must have been an act of extreme determination, he said, for someone who had suffered such injuries to do what I had done. But there was something sad in his eyes as he said it, something disappointed. As though he hadn’t expended so much of his energy and skill carefully repairing me, only for me to go out and kill people by way of a thank-you.

Sean and I had flown back into a rainy Heathrow and I’d tried to pick up the pieces of my former life. I worked hard on my rehabilitation, as though if people couldn’t see the physical aftereffects, they wouldn’t see the freak I’d become. The stuff of children’s nightmares, who sent a little girl I would cheerfully have died to protect into a fit of pure hysterics at the sight of me.

I hadn’t seen Ella since that day at the surplus store when I’d killed the man who was threatening her as he’d held her in his arms. It was for the best, the child psychiatrists told me, if she never saw me again. My image was forever tainted with the kind of horrors no one of Ella’s age was ever supposed to witness. Just the mention of my name, they told me, caused her enormous distress. The very fact that it did so caused me enormous distress also, but I didn’t tell them that.

Matt had taken her home to the house he and Simone had shared in north London, where the people who claim to be experts in this kind of trauma felt Ella might achieve some kind of stability. Harrington’s bank had arranged a trust fund that, properly managed, would ensure she never wanted for anything in her life.

Apart, possibly, from a mother.

And I hope, when she’s old enough to understand, that Matt will tell her the truth about what happened to Simone. Better for Ella to have the cold hard facts than to half-remember, and to wonder. And maybe to have history repeating itself in twenty years’ time when she goes looking for her grandfather and finds him in a New Hampshire prison serving life for the murder of his wife.

After all, if Simone had been told the truth about the real Greg Lucas, would she have wanted so badly to track him down? Would six people now be dead?

“You did what you had to,” Sean said now, as though he could read my thoughts. “Reynolds would have killed her.”

“Would he?” I turned back to face him. “He knew what Ella was worth—and she wasn’t worth anything dead. Maybe—”

Sean shook his head. “You couldn’t let him take her,” he said. “And you said as soon as he saw you—the state you were in—he went for a shot. You did what you had to,” he repeated. “Let it go.”

From the hallway we heard the apartment door open and a voice call an echoing hello.

“In here,” Sean said, not taking his eyes away from my face.

Parker Armstrong ducked his head into the living room, smiling. A tall, slim man in his early forties, with artistically graying hair that seemed older than his face but not as old as his eyes. Sean’s new partner. My new boss.

“Well?” he said, advancing when he saw us. “What d’you think?”

Sean raised his eyebrow at me. I hesitated just for a second, then plunged into a decision and felt a weight lift as I did so. I turned to Parker and smiled.

“It’s perfect,” I said, and thought I saw his shoulders ease a fraction.

He grinned. “So’s the rent,” he said, wry. “What use is it having family who own property in Manhattan if you don’t abuse your connections, right?”

“Right.”

Parker held his hand out to Sean. “I guess this means we’re in business,” he said.

A slow smile spread across Sean’s face as he took it. “I guess it does.”

“Charlie,” Parker said, offering me the same. “Good to have you with us.” His grip was firm and dry without being overly macho. One of the things I’d liked about him from the outset. “Losing Jakes was a bad time for everyone. He was a good guy. I hope this will be a breath of fresh air for all of us.”

“So do I,” I said, and meant it.

“We’ll get the lease signed for this place when we get back to the office. You guys hungry? You want to go get something to eat?”

We rode south on Sixth towards TriBeCa and the Financial District, in one of the ubiquitous yellow Crown Victoria taxicabs that had the suspension of a water bed. I sat behind the driver, next to the window, watching the vibrant sun-drenched New York streets as they flashed past. Manhattan Island was small enough that it seemed so much more concentrated than London, more intense, and I wondered if I craved that noise and bustle as a means to drown out other voices.

I thought about Ella and wondered how long it would be before the memory of her faded. Her smile, and her healing kiss, and her screams.

And ultimately I thought about Reynolds and I replayed, as I’d done so many times since that night, the way he’d made his decision to try to kill me. Sean was right, to a point, because the moment Reynolds had taken the gun away from Ella’s head and started to turn it in my direction, there was only going to be one possible outcome. One of us was going to die.

But that didn’t take into account the fact I’d gone into that room with the image of Reynolds attacking me at the apartment burning fiercely in my mind. I hadn’t wanted his meek surrender. I’d wanted his blood.

So I’d gone in there ready to take him out, not face him down. I’d known he was a natural predator and he’d taken one look at me and he’d decided I was easy prey, as I’d suspected he might. But at the end of the day, it was purely luck that he’d reacted in such a way that justified my actions, fractionally after the event.

Matt had asked me why I’d removed the suppressor from the gun before we went into the stockroom and I’d told him it was purely to save those extra seven ounces, but that wasn’t the whole story. It was entirely plausible and nobody had questioned it since, but I knew if I’d gone in there and shot Reynolds with the suppressor still attached, I would have had a much harder time convincing anyone it was self-defense, rather than assassination.

So, still I ask myself the question: Did I kill him because I had no choice? Or because I made one?