DIE EASY: Charlie Fox book ten (the Charlie Fox crime thriller series) (33 page)

I made a mental note—if I survived this I’d get back into practice.

Feet scrabbling, I got a toehold and used that to lever myself up further, pulled my body over the railing and almost slumped onto the upper deck, gasping for breath.

Come on, Fox, get up!

Now without any kind of a weapon, I sprinted lightly along the deck, heading forward. There were shouts below me now, raised voices, alarm. I passed the exterior stairwell, expecting pursuit at any moment. From the banging of doors on the lower deck, it seemed they’d assumed I’d taken the option to hide. Good thing I had not.

I dodged into the bar, through the service doors and forced myself to slow down so I could make it down the stairs there without too much noise. The loudest sound was my own breathing.

On the deck below, I paused by the service doors leading into the restaurant area, peering out of the glass panels. It all looked quiet.

Cautiously, I pushed the door open and crept out.

“Charlie!” came a loud whisper off to my right. I spun, caught a glimpse of Blake Dyer’s face just peeping out from behind the small bar in the corner. Behind it, all three of them were crouched down.

It was cosy behind there with the four of us, but for the moment it was the best concealment we could find.

“You OK?” Dyer asked.

“I’ll let you know that in about ten minutes—if they don’t find us,” I said.

Tom O’Day was eyeing me with concern. “You find out what was in the bag?”

In low tones, with one ear listening for intruders, I told them. Tom O’Day and Blake Dyer took the news in solemn silence. It was Jimmy, characteristically, who half rose in shock and had to be pulled back into cover by his father.

“We gotta find Autumn.” Jimmy’s voice was strained to cracking. “They took her away someplace the same time as me. I don’t know where they took her, but if they’re going to sink the ship—please . . .”

For the first time he seemed genuinely scared.

“We don’t know for sure that’s what they’re aiming to do, son,” Tom O’Day said, casting dubious eyes in my direction. “Just because they brought explosives on board doesn’t mean they’re planning to scuttle us.”

But I saw from his face that he couldn’t think of many alternatives, even if he didn’t want to say so.

I sat with my head rested back against the bar. My gaze went naturally upwards to the rows of bottles hanging above us.

“If it’s a drink you’re after, best make it a cola,” Tom O’Day said casually, following my line of sight. “We need all our wits about us.”

I’d already dismissed the idea of using the spirits as Molotov cocktails, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t still make a good distraction.

“On the contrary, I think a bottle of strong drink would be a really good idea.”

I rose, reached up and began to disconnect the nearest bottle from its optic.

“What the heck are you doing?” Tom O’Day demanded.

“You were a navy man,” I told him. “I’m making depth charges.”

His bushy eyebrows rose for a couple of seconds, then he got to his feet and began to dismantle the optic nearest to him.

Blake Dyer took a moment longer to catch on, but he was still looking shaky from tackling the man who’d gone into the water. I realised it was probably better that he had not been forced to look at the body afterwards. This way, he could kid himself that his victim might have survived.

If I could manage it I would not, I decided, put him in a position where he had to do the same again.

Then he pushed to his feet and began to help.

Still listening carefully I moved round to the front of the bar, lining up the spirit bottles as they were taken down—whiskey, brandy, vodka, gin, rum. There were eight in total. Not many but it would have to be enough. All I was looking for was enough of a diversion for me to get hold of a gun.

“What the hell are you planning to do with—?” Jimmy began.

A sudden noise just outside the double doors to the restaurant had me waving him to silence. A coverall gesture that I hoped he would realise meant for him to get out of sight, too. Jimmy froze like a startled deer. His godfather grabbed his collar and yanked him down into cover behind the bar.

There wasn’t time for me to join them. I grabbed one of the bottles, which happened to be vodka, dived under the nearest table and willed myself into total stillness. The average human eye divines movement better than features or change in colour. Out on the deck before—when I’d watched Castille murder Ysabeau van Zant—this theory worked for me. I hoped the newcomers weren’t the exceptions to prove the rule.

The bar doors open slowly and a shaft of light from outside blazed directly onto me. I almost shut my eyes, as if that was going to help.

The man whose bag I had flung overboard advanced carefully into the restaurant area, putting his feet down with almost no sound, sweeping left to right with the gun in his hands. His face was hidden under a balaclava but I didn’t need to see his expression to read the anger in him.

From my hiding place I saw his head moving, saw him start to approach the bar itself. I gripped the neck of the vodka bottle tighter. If he reached the bar and looked over it, Blake Dyer and the O’Days would be trapped in a tiny kill zone. It would be impossible for the gunman to miss.

I knew if I tried to launch an attack, armed only with a bottle, I stood almost no chance of success. I’d been lucky to overpower Sullivan, but this man was too tense, too alert. Nevertheless, I couldn’t just let him slaughter the others without moving a muscle to help. However useless that attempt might be.

He was only a couple of steps away when the outside door shoved open. He whirled, only to find the other hijacker standing in the doorway. The other bag was still in his hand, I noted.

“Hey, bro, you need to come see this,” the newcomer said, his voice betraying a trace of shock and anxiety.

“Can’t it wait?”

“No.”

The single word was urgent enough for his companion not to question it further. With a final glance at the bar he crossed quickly to the doorway and they both went out.

I let my breath out very slowly. The adrenaline was making my hands vibrate with unreleased tension. I crawled out from under the table and went over to the bar. As my head appeared over it, three pairs of eyes swivelled in my direction.

“It’s OK,” I said. “They’ve gone.”

“Didn’t you try to grab one of them?” Jimmy demanded. “We need to know what they’re planning to do with the boat.”

I didn’t bother to argue with him. Another prisoner might have been useful but I didn’t want to become one myself, never mind dead.

A clicking in my earpiece made me pause. It was the one I’d taken from Sullivan—on the hijackers’ own network. I covered my ear to cut out background noise at my end. At the other end was a burst of accelerated static, then a cool male voice:

“We are one man down and one man missing. Repeat, one man down, one man MIA. Stay alert for intruders and switch to the alternate frequency.”

There was a final click. I picked the earpiece out and dropped it into my pocket. They had clearly made a plan in case a comms unit fell into unfriendly hands. Without the back-up frequency there was no point in listening any longer.

“I think they just found Sullivan,” I said. “And now they’re going to be looking for us, so—”

This time it was my other earpiece that burst to life.

To preserve the battery life, Sean was not keeping the mic open when there was nothing happening I needed to hear. But he thought I needed to hear this.

“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.”

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?”