DIE EASY: Charlie Fox book ten (the Charlie Fox crime thriller series) (16 page)

A part of me wanted to agree with him and reach for the phone, but another part knew what that would do to him—to any chance of us. Instead I found myself saying, “It’s a skill like any other, Sean. You acquired it once. You can do it again.”

“How do
you
do it?”

I stared at him blankly. “Do what?”

“All . . . this.” He gestured with both hands, glass still in one but almost empty now. “The job. The life. I mean, Christ Jesus—getting shot at while you’re walking down the street—or parking your car, or taking a sightseeing flight. All of it.”

I went very still inside.
My God, it . . . scared you
, I realised.
Today actually bone-deep-and-shaken scared you.

But the very fact that I’d finally found something—anything—that put the wind up Sean Meyer did not give me any satisfaction. In fact, it put the wind up me to a far greater degree.

Sean had always been my rock, my anchor point and my centre. When I feared I might have crossed the lines of violence into a no-man’s land from which there was no safe return, he’d been the one whose calm voice of reason had talked me back in. The one who convinced me I might still be a viable member of the human race after all.

Without him I’d already come dangerously close to losing that grip on my humanity. I’d killed a man—not for self-defence or to defend another—but to extract a form of justice that was as primitive as it was extreme.

An eye for an eye.

And my most fervent hope, when I learned Sean had woken from his coma, was that one day I’d be able to tell him what I’d done. That one day I’d maybe even get his blessing, or at least his forgiveness.

The old Sean would have approved. Hell, he would have fought me for the privilege. But the new Sean . . . that was a different matter.

Now, I shrugged, hunted for words I didn’t have and suspected probably did not exist.

“I do it because . . . it’s who I am,” I said at last, and saw a frustrated gesture forming at what he assumed was a throwaway answer. “No, let me finish, Sean. You told me once that I was perfect for Special Forces—that Colonel Parris was a fool to let me go. But he
did
let me go—with a boot up my backside to help me on my way.” I still remembered that conversation with Sean, every word of it. OK, so I’d had to pull a gun to get him to sit still long enough to listen. But listen he did—in the end.

Looking at his face now I knew he had absolutely no recall of it.

I sighed. “Close protection is about the nearest I can get to that life and still live with myself.” I tried a smile. “The nearest I can get without ending up in prison, that is.”

I remembered, too, a lecture from my father some time ago. After Sean and I had reunited, after I’d headed down the road which led me here. Up to that point, the deaths on my hands had all been judged justified. But what would happen, he wanted to know, when it all became so easy—so second nature—that I took a life I
couldn’t
justify?

“If you stay involved with Sean Meyer you
will
end up killing again
,” my father said.
“And next time, Charlotte, you might not get away with it.”

“Out there today, pinned down in that crashed helo with the fuel pouring out of it and taking fire”—Sean shook his head as if to clear it—“I was fucking terrified, if I’m honest.”

“And you think I wasn’t?”

“If you were, you hid it bloody well.”

“Just because you couldn’t see it, doesn’t mean it wasn’t there,” I said. “Fear helps keep you alive—if you use it rather than let it use you. It’s what tempers recklessness, makes you think through an action, however briefly, before you do it.”

“I was close to losing control,” he admitted abruptly, unconvinced.

I reached out then, tentative, put a hand on his bare forearm and tried to ignore the fizz of contact through every nerve. Hairs riffled along my own arms, but the touch also set off a more basic chain-reaction that pooled in my belly. I tried to ignore it.

“Everybody with half a brain is scared under fire,” I told him. “What matters is how you deal with it.”

His gaze was locked on my fingers where they rested on his arm. “Simple as that?” he murmured dryly. “And who dispensed that little pearl of wisdom?”

I knew his reaction was an instinctive denial of something he must have known, deep down, was true. Even so, the edge of derision to his voice stung enough for me to remove my hand. I washed down the last of my whisky and held the empty glass out towards him.

“You did,” I said.

“Excuse me,” Sean said, “but that’s bullshit—and you know it.”

Tom O’Day looked vaguely shocked by the blunt declaration. He glanced at me but I kept my face professionally blank. The old Sean—the polished version who’d run his own highly successful close-protection agency for five years after the army—would not have been so forthright in tone, even if he might have echoed the sentiment.

It was the morning after the helo crash. We were in Blake Dyer’s suite with the remnants of his belated breakfast still on the table. In view of the events of yesterday, though, the table was no longer quite so close to the window as it had been.

Tom O’Day had arrived while our principal was still eating, and studiously ignored the packed suitcases standing in the suite’s hallway. We’d already persuaded Dyer to recall his pilot. A flight plan was filed for later that morning to take him straight back to Florida as soon as a slot opened up. I confess that he hadn’t taken much persuading. If anything he seemed relieved to have the decision forced on him.

The memory of the missile striking the tail rotor, the brief but terrifying plummet, the shock of impact. It was all still very fresh in Blake Dyer’s mind and was likely to remain so.

As well as the ubiquitous and silent Hobson, O’Day had Autumn in tow. He and the cool blonde chatted with Dyer inconsequentially over coffee and croissants for maybe half an hour. After he’d expressed admiration for my principal’s courage and iron constitution, O’Day got down to business.

“Need you to do something for me, Blake,” he’d said, looking his old friend straight in the eye. “Need you to put yesterday’s excitement down to some random act of violence and stay on. Can you do that for me?”

It was at that point Sean made his interjection. It ran so close to the immediate thoughts passing through my head that for a second I wasn’t sure which of us had actually spoken.

Tom O’Day might have looked shocked, but Blake Dyer put his coffee cup down slowly. His eyes met those of Autumn, sitting opposite. She was wearing a designer trouser-suit today with a long-sleeved jacket, probably to hide the bruises from the crash. But from her bored expression she may as well have spent yesterday morning at some mid-town gallery, gazing at mildly inferior works of art.

“There was nothing random about it, Tom—as I’m sure the young lady here will tell you,” Dyer said at last, nodding towards Autumn. “They were after somebody most particularly—no doubt about that. And the death toll could easily have been seven instead of one if it wasn’t for this fine pair of professionals from Armstrong-Meyer.” He indicated Sean and me, keeping station on opposite sides of the room. “And the casualties could well have included two people sitting at this very table right now.”

Tom O’Day cleared his throat. “Aw hell, Blake, you think I don’t know that?” he demanded. The animation went out of him for a few moments and he suddenly looked a decade older. “But I’ve spent best part of two years putting together this whole dog-and-pony show. If one of my oldest friends turns tail at the first sign of a little trouble, how’s that gonna look?”

“If you call firing some kind of ground-to-air missile at us ‘a little trouble’ then I’d hate to know what you think of as a major disaster,” Blake Dyer said.

O’Day leaned forwards in his chair. “Hurricane Katrina was a major disaster, Blake,” he said quietly. “And the tragedy is still ongoing—folk down here have been abandoned and ignored by their own government. Kicked to the kerb like so much garbage. We have a chance to make a real difference to these people. You really going to let a small minority ruin all the good work we’re trying to do here?”

Blake Dyer dabbed his lips with his linen serviette, put it down very deliberately. “Hard to play the poverty card when they’re toting military hardware.”

Tom O’Day gave a dismissive shrug. “We’re shipping so much out to the Gulf and Afghanistan that stuff like that goes missing all the time,” he said. “RPGs are a dime a dozen at just about any surplus store.”

Blake Dyer raised an eyebrow but didn’t contradict his assertion. “You’ll still get my cheque, Tom,” he said, “but it will be in the mail—
after
I get home to the sunshine state.”

O’Day sighed, as if he really hadn’t wanted to bring out the big guns, but had been given no option. “You’re godfather to my son,” he said flatly. “Apart from me and his mother, the boy has no other family. He’s taken on a big role in all this—finally shouldering some responsibility. How’s it gonna look to Jimmy if you don’t stick around to see it?”

“That’s a low blow, Tom,” Dyer said, but his mouth quirked just a little. “Even from you.”

“Yes, it surely is,” O’Day agreed cheerfully. “You feeling guilty yet?”

There was a pause and then both men were smiling. And Sean and I were not.

I stepped forward. “Sir—”

“No, Charlie. I’m afraid Tom’s right,” Blake Dyer said without taking his eyes away from his old friend. “Cancel the plane, would you? I think I’m going to stay ’til the fat lady sings.”

It was casually phrased, but there was no doubt in my mind that if we tried to change his mind again we’d run headlong into a steel plate wall.

Tom O’Day sat back in his chair looking thoroughly satisfied. Well, I hadn’t thought he’d got a sale-or-return deal on all that champagne.

That didn’t mean I had to like or approve the situation, though.

O’Day allowed himself a deep chuckle. “I knew you’d come around, Blake,” he said. And just when that made me bristle he added candidly, “Leastways, I hoped to hell you would. ’Sides anything else, if I come right out and announce that some of the very folk we’re trying to help most just tried to kill a bunch of us with a damned bazooka, what effect d’you think that’s gonna have on potential benefactors?”

He had a point. If the locals had cash for that kind of ordnance, they had money for reconstruction without any outside help.

Blake Dyer sat back in his chair, unconsciously mirroring his friend. “Are you asking me to lie for you, Tom?”

“If that’s what it takes to keep this show on the road? Damn right I am.”

Dyer paused, considering, then took a breath. But to my complete surprise, it was to Tom O’Day’s companion that his attention switched. “What about you, Autumn?” he asked. “You think that will work?”

The blonde pursed her lips. “The news networks were slow to get wind of the crash, by which time SWAT had cleared the scene and only local law enforcement personnel were visible on the ground,” she said calmly. “The damage to the helicopter was disguised by the crash and the fire, and was not obviously caused by an attack, so putting it out that it was some kind of mechanical failure might just hold up.” She gave O’Day a faint smile. “It’s an oil company helicopter, after all. They’re notoriously hard-ridden. After Capt Neal’s valiant efforts, I’m afraid I’d be reluctant to go along with any kind of ‘pilot error’ claim.”

I felt a guilty astonishment wash down over me. My eyes flicked to Sean, leaning with folded arms against the far wall. His raised eyebrow mirrored my own.

What was that about never judging a book by its cover . . .?

Tom O’Day beamed. “Bright as well as beautiful, huh?” He was proud as a parent showing off a precocious child.

Autumn favoured him with a faint answering smile of her own, then her gaze veered and met mine. I saw a certain conspiratorial glimmer there.

You get underestimated based solely on the way you look, too, don’t you?

I hoped she’d never guess that I’d made the same false assumptions about her as everybody else, but I had a feeling she already knew.

Shit.

Blake Dyer spread his hands in capitulation. “Who am I to argue with the experts,” he said, reaching across the table. “OK, Tom, you have my word. It was a terrible accident and nothing more.” They shook on it with knuckle-cracking gusto. “I assume you’ve also had a chat with young Gabe Baptiste. This whole thing really had him shook up.”

“Oh, I don’t think you need to worry about him. Whatever negatives darlin’ Ysabeau is holding on the kid, they’re keeping him pretty much in line,” Tom O’Day said, uncoiling his lean frame from the chair. “By the time I got there this morning, she’d already put the squeeze on him to stay.”

Autumn rose gracefully, turning to me.