Third Strike (6 page)

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Authors: Zoe Sharp

Tags: #Contemporary, #Fiction, #Bodyguards, #Thriller

BOOK: Third Strike
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The occupants were nearly all female and mostly alone. The majority of the workforce looked Asian—possibly Korean or Vietnamese. The girls seemed to live in the rooms where they worked, their few shabby possessions hidden behind a curtain or in a flimsy plywood wardrobe.
The place had a smell all of its own. Old cooking fat that had been overheated one time too many, mingled with stale sweat and other, more earthy odors, all not quite masked by the false cheer of cheap fabric freshener and the thin reek of even cheaper perfume.
And desperation. The only locks we encountered were on the outside, which probably accounted for the browbeaten lack of reaction to our arrival. If any of the girls spoke English, they weren’t making a big thing of it, but I suppose it was unlikely they were being paid—in any sense—for their sparkling conversational skills.
On the fourth floor up, we kicked the lock off the inside of a door this time and found a woman older than the others, a fact which was obvious even in the low light. Her larger living quarters spoke of middle management rather than labor.
We caught her bending over an old square sink in one corner of the room, and she straightened with an expletive that was pure homegrown Brooklyn. Statuesquely built, her most startling feature was a pair of massive breasts that, to my cynical eyes at least, were so clearly man-made they probably had a “Best Before” date stamped on them. Her dress was gaudy without even the excuse of being cheap.
Very recently, someone had caught her a belter across the left-hand side of her face and she’d been trying to negate the aftereffects with a cold wet cloth pressed against it. She went deathly pale at the sight of us, but stood her ground, putting the cloth down slowly.
“Who the fuck are you?” she demanded. Her eyes flicked to the doorway behind us a couple of times, waiting for Goliath’s intervention. When it didn’t come, she checked us out again and frowned. Her tone modified a little. “Whaddya want?”
“English guy,” I said shortly. “Came in here about half an hour ago. Where is he?”
She heard my accent and her face grew calculating, but she didn’t try to bluff us. By the look of the bruising, she’d tried that ploy once today already and it hadn’t gone well for her.
“Upstairs,” she said. The reluctant fear in her voice twisted in my belly, grabbed at my chest as I began to move. “Hey, I didn’t have nothing—”
“Stow it,” Sean said.
He was right behind me as I took the stairs to the final floor two at a time, was alongside me as we broke our way into each of the matted little rooms up there. He didn’t speak, and I’m not sure I would have heard him over the raucous clamor inside my head even if he had.
It was the last room. It always is. We hit the door hard enough for the flimsy hardboard to rip out of the frame and sway drunkenly from one hinge before toppling to the floor.
Inside, we found my father standing centered under the dusty bulb. He was minus his suit jacket, with the buttons of his shirt halfway open, revealing a vee of pale hairless chest beneath, and he was just in the process of sliding his tie out from under his collar.
Or rather, the girl in front of him was taking care of that part.
She was young—much younger than just about any of the girls we’d seen so far in that place. Well under the age of any kind of informed consent, with taut skin the color of latte and glossy long dark hair. Her back had been to the doorway, presenting us with a perfect view of a slender body not yet entirely spoiled. She spun, gasping at the violence of our arrival, to reveal classic almond-shaped eyes.
Apart from too much makeup, she was completely naked. Just for a moment, the side of my brain responsible for lucid thought and reasoned argument totally shut down. Instinct and training took me forwards, only peripherally aware of Sean moving to check and secure the room.
I closed in on my father, registered the absolute shock and the pure, undiluted shame that coated him like a layer of grime, moments before he covered it with a haughty mask. That was what did it. Another silent lie on top of all the others.
Blinded, I gave a howl of utter rage and backhanded him across the face with enough force to snap his head round. I was still wearing my bike gloves, which had tough carbon fiber protectors across the backs like lightweight knuckle dusters. My father staggered a pace from the blow, but made no attempt to block me or prevent another. That was enough to bring me up cold.
Raked with guilt and anger, I felt the blood drop out of my face so fast that my vision buckled and I nearly fell.
“You …
bastard,
” I said.
The certainty that he was dead, and all the emotions connected to that conviction, had set vicious barbed hooks deep into every part of me. The sudden discovery that he was very much alive ripped them out all at once, leaving behind a bloody mess of tattered thoughts and raw confusion.
He was alive, and I wanted to kill him for it.
“Charlie.” It was Sean who spoke, gently, firmly, putting his hand onto my forearm to press it downwards. It was only then I realized I had the gun up, had been watching my father’s reaction over the top of the sights and had seen nothing wrong with the picture that presented.
“Don’t do this,” he murmured. “I hate to resort to cliché, but he genuinely isn’t worth it.”
I let my arm drop away, found it was trembling as badly as the rest of me.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I wouldn’t waste the round.”
I lurched back as the adrenaline boost drained away, almost collapsed against the wall near the doorway to the corridor. My left thigh burned and I resisted the urge to grab at it. I was damned if I was going to show more weakness in front of him.
As soon as we’d burst in, the girl had scuttled onto the rumpled bed by the far wall and tucked her legs up close to her body, head buried against her knees and her arms wrapped tightly round them. If you look insignificant enough, and you can’t see the monsters, maybe they will leave you alone.
No, they won’t.
Her submissive posture angered as much as it disturbed me. There was a thin dark red robe on the floor that was trying to be silk but was as artificial as the madam’s breasts downstairs. I leaned down, snatched it up and threw it across to her. She stopped rocking just long enough to clutch it in front of her body.
“Well, well,
Dick,
” Sean said then, his voice softly mocking. “This opens up a whole new side to you.”
My father darted him a savage glance but didn’t reply. The area around his cheekbone had already begun to swell, puffy. I hadn’t broken the skin but he was going to have a hell of a bruise.
Still clinging to that brittle dignity, he retrieved his tie from where the girl had dropped it in her flight, fed it back through his collar, and began reknotting it. His movements were apparently calm and sedate, but it was little more than a thin veneer. I could see the shake of his hands, the pulse in his jaw.
“So, you still think you don’t owe me any kind of explanation?” I said.
He refastened his cuff links and reached for the jacket he’d laid across the back of a narrow chair. The suit had been tailor-made for him by Gieves & Hawkes of Savile Row and fitted to perfection, in devastating contrast to the decayed dilapidation of that tawdry little room.
“I owe you nothing, Charlotte,” he said then, and his arrogance was astounding. “I make my own choices. I won’t ask how you found me—invading people’s privacy seems to be second nature to you—but I most certainly do not need your approval for my actions.” He allowed his lip to curl just slightly. “Nor do I require you to accompany me.”
“Approval?”
I said, aware my voice had become almost a squawk. I flung a hand towards the huddled creature on the bed. “She’s young enough to be your
daughter,
for fuck’s sake! Christ, she’s practically young enough to be mine!”
He stilled. “Get out, Charlotte,” he said coldly. His eyes skated over Sean, who’d been standing watchful and silent during the exchange. “And take your nasty little bully boy with you.”
Sean shrugged off the insult and started for the door. As he passed, my father gestured to the gun Sean carried with an expressive flick of his fingers.
“Violence. Is that the only thing you people understand?”
We’d caught him in a run-down brothel with a naked teenage hooker and still he tried to take the high ground.
“Perhaps it is,” I said, not moving. “So how’s this for violence? If you don’t walk out of here with us, right now, I’ll knock you senseless and carry you out—and, believe me, it would be a pleasure. Either way, you’re leaving.”
His spine straightened. “You can’t.”
“Oh, don’t tempt me.”
“No, you
can’t!
”
I registered the edge of panic in the rising tone with something akin to wonder. Of all the emotions he’d shown since we’d entered that room and exposed him, this was the first hint of fear.
“I can’t leave you here,” I said, without pity. “If my mother—”
“That’s just it.” He grasped the reference like a talisman. “Your mother. If you feel anything for your mother, Charlotte, then just leave me here and go before it’s too late. Please.”
“Too late? What the hell are you—”
Then, from underneath us, we heard crashing and highpitched screaming and loud voices bellowing commands. Sean and I ran into the corridor. About halfway along was a narrow window with a view down into the alleyway. When we looked down, all we could see were the flashing lights on top of the squad cars.
“Oh. Shit,” Sean muttered. His eyes met mine. There weren’t any other exits or we would have found them on our way up. The management was clearly more anxious about customers trying to skip out without paying, than they were about the possibilities of escape from a fire.
Sean picked the illegal Kel-Tec out of my nerveless grasp. Without having to watch his hands, he stripped the gun down to its frame and dumped it out of the window, where it fell five stories, straight into the open Dumpster by the entrance. His own weapon quickly followed. Nobody on the ground heard or saw a thing. Even so, I knew we were headed for deep, deep trouble.
We went back. My father hadn’t moved, but someone had hit fast-forward and he’d aged maybe twenty years. His face was gray in the dull light. “It’s the police,” I said. “The place is being raided.”
My father nodded, mildly resigned, as though I’d told him it looked likely to rain, and the sudden realization hit me that somehow he’d known this was going to happen. The girl continued to rock gently on the bed.
And we waited, the four of us, for the thunder of boots on the stairs.
 
“Well, congratulations, guys. I do believe this will go down in history as a screwup of monumental proportions,” Parker Armstrong said. He raised a tired smile that lost heart long before it reached his eyes. “As I understand it,” he added with morose humor, “they can see it from space.”
We were in the conference room at the agency. High-tech and spotless, it had been furnished with an eye to luxury and none at all to cost. The suspended ceiling seemed to hang in a cloud of ice blue neon, perfectly highlighting the swirling grain of the maple wall panels. At one end was a projector screen for presentations. It was rarely used, but I knew for a fact the sound system that went with it had cost more than my last house.
Parker was in the power seat at the top end of half an acre of mirror-polished table. Sean and I were shoulder-to-shoulder about halfway along, with Bill Rendelson scowling ferociously at us from the other side.
We’d been offered a seat but preferred to stand. I had to fight the urge to do so at attention. Back straight up, arms straight down so my thumbs were precisely in line with the seams of my leather jeans, knees just slightly bent so I could hold the position for hours if I had to. Only the lack of dress uniforms prevented this from being an action replay of the travesty that was my court-martial.
I felt thoroughly dirty. We were both still wearing the same clothes we’d been arrested in, roughly twenty-eight hours earlier. If it hadn’t been for some fancy footwork on the part of Parker’s legal team, we would probably still be in jail.
The last glimpse I’d had of my father was of him being bundled, handcuffed, into the back of a police cruiser. I’d asked the lawyer who’d got me out what had happened to him, but the man seemed to be billing by the word as well as the minute and my credit was obviously running short.
“I’m sorry,” I said, aware that I was starting to sound like a scratch mix. “But don’t blame Sean for any of this. I’m the one who dragged him into it.”
“Aw, come on, Charlie.” Parker sat back, his voice almost gentle in its admonition, even if his body language betrayed his impatience. “You know as well as I do that Sean makes his own decisions.”
“Of course,” I agreed quickly, before Sean could jump in, “but nevertheless, this was—and should have remained—a family matter.”
“‘Family matter’—is that so?” Parker echoed sharply. “You make it sound like some kind of sick tradition. Does your father always take you along when he goes visiting cheap hookers?’Cause that’s just plain wrong.”
He waited to see if I had anything better to offer him. I did not. A few days ago I would have laughed at the idea of my father even looking at another woman, never mind paying her for sex. Now it was like dealing with a total stranger who’d somehow taken up residence behind his tight-lipped face.
“Or maybe he doesn’t have time.” Without taking his eyes off the pair of us, Parker reached out his hand and Bill hurried to smartly slap a folded newspaper into it, precise as a theater nurse handing over a pair of forceps. “Seeing as how he’s so busy with his alcoholism and his euthanasia.” With a contemptuous flick of his wrist, Parker sent the newspaper skidding across the tabletop towards us, adding grimly, “And there’re one or two things here about
you
that weren’t on your resume, that’s for sure.”
I reached out and stopped the paper sliding before it slipped over the edge onto the Italian tile, then unfolded it and scanned the story.
Somebody had been raking through the muck of my past history with a pretty fine mesh. They seemed to have caught just about all the most pungent bits of it, at any rate. My father’s current fall from grace was recapped with salacious glee, and my own alongside it. They built me up first—my army commendations, marksman certificates, trophies, Special Forces selection and high hopes—all the better to knock me down again. Laid out in the most lurid terms was the story of the vicious attack by four of my fellow trainees, the revelation of my affair with Sean, my ignominious expulsion.
Journalistically speaking, they picked over the carcass of my career and whooped as they waved the bones in the air. In their eyes, their words, I was damaged goods. They hinted in their snide way that either I had been brutalized out of my humanity, or that I was simply a product of my upbringing. And then they started in on my father again.
Sickened, I let the paper drop back down onto the surface of the table and glanced up. I could tell from the angle of his head that Sean had been reading it, too, and I knew Bill must have done so before he’d brought the paper through to Parker. I felt the heat steal up into my face.
Sean knew what had happened to me that freezing winter night, but only secondhand and at a distance. He’d been posted a few weeks before and it wasn’t until we’d met again, by chance, several years after the event that the truth had come out. And then he’d reacted both with anger and sorrow that had chilled me to the bone.
Now, he regarded Parker with a deadly gaze. “Do you think any less of Charlie because of what she went through?” he asked softly.
Parker shifted in his seat. “Hey, like I said, I’m not the issue here. But it looks like you and your dad are making headlines,” he said, focusing back on me. “This business he’s mixed up in with this dead doctor in New England is a hot story, and this just poured a truckload of gasoline right onto the flames. Nearly all the tabloids led with it.”
I winced. Sensing I was about to launch into another—longer and more profuse—apology, Sean cut in again.
“How bad’s the damage?”
“Bad enough,” Parker said flatly. He rubbed a hand across his eyes, slowly, pausing to squeeze the bridge of his nose before allowing the hand to drop away.
Bill’s face had darkened. “Besides all the questions about Fox’s colorful past,” he said, “we’ve been fielding accusations all day that we, as an agency, condone illegal activity by our clients and turn a blind eye to whatever they do while they’re under our protection.” He spoke without inflection, but the words were more than enough on their own.
Parker let out a breath, wry. “I think our legal bills this week will be enough to put both my lawyer’s kids through college.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, narrowly resisting the urge to hang my head. “Easy for me to say, Parker, I know, but I am. If I hadn’t believed my father was in genuine danger, I never would have gone in there in the first place.”
“Hell, I know that, Charlie,” he said. That weary smile again. His disappointment was harder to take than his anger would have been. “I knew when I hired you—both of you—that you were not the type to walk away from a situation, and I wouldn’t ask you to. I’m just having a real bad day.”
Something in his tone alerted me and I was aware of a plummeting sensation in the pit of my stomach, like an express lift or the first long drop of a roller-coaster ride. And I knew.
“The banking people pulled out,” Sean said suddenly, as though he’d been plugged straight into my central nervous system, too. It was not a question and I saw from both Parker’s and Bill’s faces that it didn’t need to be.
Parker opened his mouth, frowning, then shut it again and shook his head a little.
“I had a call this morning,” he admitted, “from the personal assistant to the personal assistant to the CEO—not the guy himself—informing me that they were reconsidering their options. Which is doublespeak for ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ I guess.”
“I’m—” I began.
“—sorry. Yeah, I know,” he finished for me. “Question is, what do we do about it?”
“Well, can’t you re-present to the bank?” I said. “Won’t they let you explain the circumstances behind what happened and—”
“Do you want us to go?” Sean cut in, chopping me off in mid-breath as well as mid-sentence. “If it would cause you the least embarrassment to be seen to take decisive action, I won’t hold you to the agreement we have.” He paused, impassive, as though this didn’t mean everything to him when I knew plainly that it did. I knew what it was costing to keep his voice so coolly polite, indifferent, and—from Parker’s sudden immobility—he did, too.
For a moment neither man spoke. Bill twitched, as though desperate to put it to a vote and I knew which way he’d go. The silence stretched, gossamer thin in the over-dry, purified and conditioned air.
“For God’s sake,” Parker said at last, “will you take that damned stick out of your ass long enough to sit down? Both of you,” he added. “No, I don’t want you to go, okay? If you hadn’t been on board, Sean, we wouldn’t have stood a chance with the bank in the first place. This dies down fast, maybe they’ll come around. And if not, fuck’em. There’ll be other clients.” He gave a rueful little smile. “But not if we don’t figure this out—pronto.”
Parker rarely used bad language and, when he did, he sounded uncomfortable, as though it was something he felt was required of him rather than coming from the gut. There was more than a hint of bravado there, too. I knew what he’d put into trying to secure this contract and losing it would cost more than money. It was a question of face. In this game, reputation was everything.
I thought of the months of hard work, of the investment that had just been laid to waste and I wondered, had the positions been reversed, if I would have been so gracious. Probably not, I realized with a certain sense of shame. After all, my father had screwed up big-time as well, and look how I’d reacted to him … .
Without speaking, both Sean and I reached for the nearest chairs, slumping into them. As soon as I relaxed, my leg started muttering about being overworked and underpaid. Below the level of the tabletop, I surreptitiously jammed my thumb and forefinger hard into the muscle along the front of my thigh in an effort to persuade the nerves to gate.
Parker glanced at the pair of us, almost defiant, the hint of a smile lurking at the edge of his mouth. “So, Charlie, question is, what do we do about the situation with your dad?”
Across from us, Bill made a sound, like he was clearing his throat, but it could have been a growl. It was pretty clear that his choice of immediate action would have been to have both of us flayed alive and thrown off the roof of the building.
“‘We’?” I queried.
“I need this situation contained, and I need it contained fast,” Parker said. “I thought your dad was a well-respected guy. When we hired you, our searches on your family”—and he smiled slightly in apology “—came up clean. What the hell happened over the last six months?”
“I’m as amazed by his behavior as anyone else,” I said. “I dread to think how my mother’s going to react when …”
My voice trailed off slowly before I could finish. I felt three pairs of eyes swivel in my direction but I didn’t see them. My sight had turned inwards, riffling through the disordered filing cabinet of memories and senses.
“If you feel anything for your mother, Charlotte,” my father had said, “then just leave me here and go before it’s too late.”
“Oh my God,” I murmured. “My mother …”
“Do you think your mom even knows what’s happening?” Parker asked, not quite catching it. “If she doesn’t, then I don’t envy you the task of telling her what her husband’s been up to.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “He’s trying to protect her.”
“Oh, yeah, of course,” Bill said, unable to maintain his silence any longer. He threw up his one remaining hand in frustration and I saw his other shoulder hunch as the ghost of his amputated arm tried to join the party. “Okay, so this guy got caught with his pants down, but, hey, that’s okay because he’s ‘trying to protect her.’” The sarcasm overflowed to the point where it dripped. “How the hell do you figure that?”
“No matter what I, personally, might think of my father,” I said, pinning him with a fierce gaze, “I happen to know he’s a brilliant surgeon. And you know what makes him so bloody good at his job? It’s because he’s put whatever classifies as his heart and his soul into what he does for more than thirty years. I find it very hard—no, make that impossible—to believe he’d just throw all that away for the chance of a cut-price lay.”
“People change,” Parker pointed out. “They have … breakdowns, crises, or they simply burn out. Ever considered that?”
It was Sean who shook his head. “To burn out professionally you have to have some kind of emotional overinvestment in your work, and Richard Foxcroft’s a very cold fish,” he said. “But I would say that he does care about his wife—very much so.” He glanced sideways at me. “And his daughter.”
I gave a bitter, incredulous bark of laughter. “Well, he’s got a bloody funny way of showing it.”
“You didn’t see how he was, Charlie,” he said softly. “Back in February, when you were shot. He might have a bloody funny way of showing it, but he cares all right. I never thought I’d hear myself standing up for the bloke, considering he hates my guts, but don’t kid yourself that he doesn’t care about you.”
“So much so that he tells me I’m a useless cripple,” I shot back, disregarding our current audience, feeling my lip begin to curl. “Yeah, right, how stupid of me! How could I possibly have mistaken that for anything except paternal affection? And then we find him about to screw an underage prostitute. What are you saying—that perhaps my mother bought it for him as a wedding anniversary present?”

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