Authors: Zoe Sharp
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a packet of gum, regarding me with those cool, flat eyes as she unwrapped a stick and folded it into her mouth.
‘Shoot? Yeah, sure,’ she said then. ‘But kill? The only one playing for keeps here was you.’
‘If I’d been shooting to kill, I’d have gone for head shots,’ I said grimly. ‘Besides, how long do you think I would have lasted, if I’d let them put me on the ground?’
‘Well, just be kinda thankful to your pal Epps that you won’t have to argue that one in front of a judge.’ She rose, automatically hitching her jacket free of the Glock on her hip as she did so, and swung her legs over the bench to
get up without bothering Sean. By the end of the table she paused and gave me a half smile that came and went like a light.
‘I saw what they did to him, Charlie,’ she said. ‘If it’s any consolation, if it had been me, I woulda shot the bastards, too.’
In the Suburban, heading for the airport, Sean said, ‘Talk to me, Charlie,’ as if he wasn’t going to like what I had to say.
I turned away from glumly watching traffic through the side glass with my chin resting on my fist.
‘What is there to say?’ I asked. ‘I overreacted. You and I both know it. And Detective Gardner certainly knows it, too.’
It took him a moment to reply. ‘And what would you have me tell your father, your mother, if you’d hesitated and they’d got you?’ he said, harsh. ‘If they’d tortured and executed you in some shitty little motel, just like they did with Witney?’
My parents’ long-standing, intense dislike for my profession had undergone something of a revision after the events of the previous autumn, when they’d been reluctantly forced to rely on me and Sean to act as their temporary bodyguards. Oh, they didn’t like it any better now, but at least they had some understanding of what we did.
I tried to remember how my parents had gone about imparting their moral standards into their only child, but that part of my infancy remained obstinately blank. It could have been by osmosis. I glanced at Sean. Were we as capable of setting an example to the next generation?
‘How about, “Well, at least she wasn’t a murderer”? Not in the eyes of the law, at any rate.’ Was that really my voice with its irritating, petulant note?
‘Christ Jesus,’ he muttered between his teeth, then let out a long breath. ‘You know my first thoughts, back on that road in the canyon this morning, when I heard you run through your statement for the cops?’
He pulled out to overtake a slow-moving truck in the right-hand lane, accelerating hard into a gap that didn’t really exist. You can get away with driving a little more aggressively in an up-armoured SUV.
‘No. What?’
‘
Textbook
. That’s what I thought. It was textbook, the way you handled things. Fast, clean, accurate. An armed attack on a principal, three on one, and you wiped the floor with them.’ He smiled a little. ‘I was bloody proud of you, if you must know.’
My skin rippled. ‘For trying to kill three people?’
‘No – for doing your job! How many times have I told you, you can’t afford to let emotion cloud your judgement in this business, Charlie? It almost killed you once, for Christ’s sake.’
‘That was different. You know it was,’ I reminded him, quietly reproachful. ‘The life of a child was at stake.’
Ella. The four-year-old daughter of a principal I had failed to save.
‘Yeah, and you held your fire, not because it would have endangered the kid, but because it would have traumatised her to witness the result,’ he said, flaying me with the truth of his words. His eyes, hidden behind the lenses of his sunglasses, were on the mirrors, the traffic. Anywhere but on me, and I was glad of it.
‘She was four years old and I was doing my best to protect her,’ I said at last, stiffly. Only then did he flick a glance in my direction.
‘Yeah, well, sometimes you’ve just got to concentrate on saving them first and worry about the after-effects later,’ he said. ‘Like you did today.’
It wouldn’t matter, I realised, what decision I’d made about leaving the business, about becoming a full-time parent, because Sean would still be involved. And who was to say that wouldn’t still make me – and any child we might share – a target? A target who would grow up with a mother who habitually checked underneath her vehicle for explosive devices before making the school run, performed countersurveillance routines on the way to the supermarket, who had a gun-safe in her bedroom.
What kind of moral code would that imprint?
We rode on in silence, turning inland at the Santa Monica Pier and heading through Venice Beach and Marina del Rey, the traffic starting to build now as we began picking up signs for LAX.
Then I said, stark, ‘I didn’t know.’
‘Didn’t know you hadn’t killed them?’ Sean asked immediately. ‘Or that they weren’t carrying firearms?’
‘Either,’ I said with a mirthless little laugh. ‘Both.’ I paused, eyes fixed on the brake lights of the car in front as
we slowed. ‘And you know the worst thing? At the time…I didn’t care. I saw the threat and just reacted.’
Just because it was textbook, doesn’t mean it was right
.
‘You care, Charlie,’ he said, not sounding quite so exasperated with me anymore. ‘It’s always been your Achilles’ heel for this job – you care too much. And feeling nothing when you’re in the middle of a firefight is just a skill you pick up. Don’t knock it. Being calm under pressure is a good attribute.’ He looked across, eyes hidden, face without expression.
‘Feeling nothing when you have to make the decision to kill isn’t the problem – trust me on that,’ he said. ‘The real problem comes if you start to enjoy it.’
The flight back to New York was five and a half hours, squeezed in next to two fat businessmen, who talked loudly in impressive management jargon that was nothing but empty words and hot air.
Sean sat two rows back, across the aisle to my right. The flight was full and we hadn’t been able to rearrange our seats, but there are times when I’d swear Bill Rendelson booked us tickets like these on purpose.
We lifted out of LAX in the dark, banking hard over the city to reveal a million dots of light stretching out in a giant matrix to the far horizon. Still full of tacos, I declined the dubious evening meal, reclined my seat, pulled my blanket up to my chin, and willed myself to sleep.
It was a long time coming.
Every time I closed my eyes, I had a jumbled-up vision of the ambush, sometimes in slow motion, sometimes so fast the figures were little more than a blur. But, every time, I
saw the rounds hit, and I heard again the noises my targets made as they fell.
Sean had lost his adverse reaction to death a long time before we first met. Since then, I’d watched him kill without hesitation or regret and, yes, there were times when I might even have said there was a certain grim satisfaction about him, too.
And while at one time he’d had disturbed dreams, close to nightmares, that saw him sweat and tremble in his sleep, I’d never seen uncertainty in him during his waking hours.
I thought again of Parker’s warnings, to tell Sean about my condition, and to do so as soon as this job was over. Well, we were on the plane home. It was over now.
But I was filled with an overwhelming sense of dread that we’d have a similar conversation. A conversation that owed everything to a cold-blooded, pragmatic assessment of the facts, and very little to emotional gut reaction, which Sean seemed to hold in such low regard.
And I wanted emotion from him, like nothing else.
I’d lost the child I carried halfway through the eighth week, just two-thirds through the first trimester. Old enough to have a heartbeat, but not yet a gender. An entity but not yet a person.
It had happened suddenly and without warning, just as the weather turned colder and the month into December. About five days after my visit to the downtown clinic where the Chinese doctor had offered me the leaflets about terminating my pregnancy. My own body, it seemed, had ideas of its own on that score.
All I knew was that I’d collapsed in the street, bleeding, while I’d been looking at the Christmas displays in a
department store window. After that, things were a slur of pain and indignities. By the time I came round in hospital to find Parker at my bedside, it was all over.
I’d had what the doctors referred to as a spontaneous abortion, a phrase which preyed continuously on my mind, as though I’d somehow willed it. It happened in about twenty per cent of first-time pregnancies, so they told me. There was no apparent cause. Just my body’s way of rejecting a foetus that was, for whatever reason, unviable. There was nothing I could have done to prevent the loss of my unborn child, the doctors assured me, trying to comfort, nor to halt my miscarriage once it had begun.
The logical half of my brain completely understood and accepted their gentle explanations. But the emotional half, that was another story.
Sean had been away working and I’d begged Parker not to recall him. Not to tell him.
After all, how
could
I tell Sean I’d just lost his baby, on the run-up to Christmas, when I hadn’t quite got round to telling him I was expecting it in the first place?
We were greeted by a thin daylight at JFK and a thirty-five degree drop in temperature. We collected our checked bags and walked out into blustery rain that had the smell of sleet about it.
Erik Landers was waiting to pick us up, looking lean and efficient in an immaculate grey suit and stark white shirt. He and Sean fell into easy conversation about the upcoming baseball season, still a couple of months away. We rode back into the city with the heater on full and the windscreen wipers hustling water off the glass. It seemed a world away from Los Angeles.
Landers dropped us off at our apartment, a stone’s throw from Central Park on the Upper East Side. The building was owned by some rich relative of Parker’s, which didn’t narrow it down much. When we’d first moved to New York, he’d done considerable arm-twisting on our behalf to get us a lease on the place at a price we could afford.
As we took the lift up to our floor, all I wanted was a
hard shower and a soft bed, but knew only the former was on offer.
I stood under the needle spray of hot water for a long time, sloughing off the grime of recirculated plane air, and some of my weariness went with it. Not all, but some.
When I stepped out of the cubicle, it was to find Sean leaning in the bathroom doorway, watching me as he unbuttoned his shirt. Almost lazily, he hooked a towel off the rail and passed it across. I wrapped it hastily around my body, suddenly self-conscious to be naked in front of him in case he spotted the minute physical changes. He always did see too much.
‘You OK?’ he asked.
‘Yeah,’ I said with a quick smile, indicating the billowing steam. ‘Better for that, that’s for sure.’
‘Mm, I thought you were trying to boil yourself, you were in there so long.’ He came forwards to lightly grasp my upper arms, eyes on my face. ‘You look a lot happier than you did when we left LA,’ he said quietly. ‘Seriously, Charlie. I’m glad. Sometimes life throws shit at you, and you’ve just got to put it behind you and move on.’
He stepped back, a look of wonder on his face. ‘I mean, look at what we have here, hmm? When I was back in school, the best my teachers predicted for me was that I’d end up in the army, in prison, or dead.’ He shook his head. ‘But every day I wake up in this apartment, this city – with you – and I have to bloody pinch myself to check it’s all real.’
‘Yeah,’ I said softly, smiling on the outside and weeping within. ‘Maybe it’s just good to be home.’
* * *
By the time we reached the midtown offices of
Armstrong
-Meyer
, wrapped up against the slushy cold in overcoats and gloves and scarves, the laid-back warmth of the west coast seemed a distant memory.
Bill Rendelson, manning the desk in the plush reception area on the twenty-third floor, greeted us with his customary scowl when the lift doors opened.
Almost as if we’d planned it, Sean and I strode unhesitatingly across the expanse of tile towards Parker’s office. As we swept past the desk, Rendelson was already half out of his seat in protest. Sean sent him back into it with a single daggered look.
‘He’s in, I take it?’ It was barely a question. When we reached the door, Sean rapped his knuckles once, briefly, on the wood. Then he was turning the handle and we both walked in.
The office straddled the north-west corner of the building, and had been furnished by an interior designer with a clean modern eye and very few budgetary restrictions. It smelt, as always, of furniture polish overlaid with good coffee.
Parker was on his feet next to one of the large windows, talking on the phone when we barged in. He glanced across sharply and I saw him go still, but he smoothly continued his conversation, using the time to inspect the pair of us as though for imperfections. I resisted the urge to come to attention and saw Parker register that fact in the way his right eye narrowed.
Eventually, he ended the call and moved across without hurry to slot the cordless handset back into its base station on the desk.
‘Sean, Charlie,’ he greeted us calmly. ‘You got back OK?’
Sean’s head gave a tiny jerk of impatience, but when he spoke there was nothing in his voice.
‘After everything you said to Epps about keeping secrets,’ he said, ‘it was a bit of a shock to find out you’ve been hiding the biggest one of all.’
Parker’s eyes flickered to me, a gesture Sean didn’t miss, I was sure of it. Then he said, ‘We’ll get to that. Tell me about this ambush.’
I let Sean recount the story while I helped us to coffee from the pot of Jamaican Blue Mountain on the credenza. We sat in the comfortable client armchairs, facing each other across a low glass table. Parker leant back, slightly angled towards both of us, giving his utter attention to Sean’s verbal report. He didn’t fidget or interrupt, hardly blinked until it was done. I was suddenly reminded of Randall Bane.
‘I think we’ve smoothed things over a little with the LAPD, but I wouldn’t run any red lights in that town for a while, if I were you,’ Sean finished. ‘We still don’t know who those guys were and I’d guess we’re not going to find out, if Epps has anything to do with it.’
‘Epps already called this morning,’ Parker said dryly, surprising both of us. ‘The guys who tried to jump you are local talent, he says. Pros, but not high on the food chain. They reckon they were only recruited for the job two days ago and told they had to move fast.’
Sean said, ‘Have they confirmed it was a snatch, not a hit?’
Parker nodded. ‘They were given a reasonably accurate description of Chris Sagar and told just to grab whoever was with him. Their instructions were quite specific.’
‘But they weren’t told who this “whoever” might be?’ I asked.
‘No. Apparently, the guy driving, name of Delmondo, did the deal – and before you ask, a voice on a cellphone and a dead-letter drop for half of the money upfront. He said when they saw it was a woman, they thought they’d have it easy.’ Parker glanced across at me and smiled. ‘You kinda disabused them of that notion pretty quick.’
‘If they weren’t expecting resistance,’ Sean said, ‘why the body armour?’
‘Standard operating procedure these days, according to Delmondo. These guys wear Kevlar like the rich wear Prada and Armani.’
‘Good to know,’ Sean said, and the casual tone of his voice sent the hairs prickling along my arms, because I knew exactly what piece of information he was tucking away for future reference.
Next time, head shots
.
‘How did they know where to find us?’ I queried, and noted Parker’s frown.
‘They got a call to say you were leaving the house,’ he said carefully. ‘Picked you up from there.’
My eyes flicked to Sean’s in dismay. I would have sworn the house was not under surveillance. We’d been automatically attentive. And, besides, the very fact that the whole estate in Calabasas was gated off, and had its own security, was what made it so ideal for us in the first place.
‘There was nobody watching the house,’ Sean said, before I could make the same statement. ‘Not unless they had half a dozen teams on it and they were bloody well trained.’ He shook his head. ‘And if they were using so many people that we didn’t make them, why not send more on the snatch itself, just to be sure?’
‘Hey, I didn’t say I agreed with Epps’s take on it,’ Parker said mildly. ‘I’m just telling you what he said.’
‘What were their orders, once they’d grabbed me?’
‘To call for instructions on where to deliver you,’ Parker said. ‘They were pretty insistent that they weren’t out to kill you.’
‘Yeah right,’ I said, mildly sarcastic, ‘which is why they took
such
trouble to hide their faces.’
Parker raised an eyebrow at Sean, who shook his head. ‘They knew there wasn’t going to be any danger of Charlie identifying any of them afterwards,’ he said. ‘Even if they
allegedly
weren’t going to finish the job personally.’
‘I think it’s safe to assume Epps’s people will have questioned them kinda…closely on that,’ Parker said gravely.
‘What about the cellphone number of this mystery employer?’ I said.
‘Dead end. Pay-as-you-go number, probably stripped and dumped in a storm drain, soon as the job went south.’
‘Does Epps think they’re the ones who grabbed Witney, too?’ I asked.
‘They claim that was nothing to do with them, but maybe they’re holding out because they know killing two federal agents will put all of them on Death Row for sure.’
‘And has Epps put his own house in order and found out who put the tracker on the van Witney was in?’
‘No,’ Parker said. His lips twisted briefly. ‘Or, if he has, he wasn’t willing to share
that
information with me,’ he amended.
We sat for a moment in silence, then Sean put down his
coffee cup and said flatly, ‘OK, Parker, what’s the real story with you and Thomas Witney?’
Parker sighed and sat forwards with his forearms resting on his knees, shoulders hunched. I opened my mouth to hurry him along but Sean, catching my eye, shook his head slightly.
Give him time
.
For what? To remember, or invent?
Sean’s glance was reproachful. He waited without impatience, but his eyes never left Parker’s face. The coffee machine gurgled unexpectedly, like sudden indigestion. The siren of a fire engine ran the length of the street below us, echoing between the buildings.
At last, Parker looked up, loosing a breath. ‘The Witneys came to me about Liam five years ago.’
‘After he was killed?’ I asked.
‘No, it was after he dropped out of college,’ Parker said, rubbing an absent forefinger along his temple. ‘They were worried he might have gotten involved in drugs, something like that, and they asked me to find out.’
‘Why you?’ Sean said. ‘Armstrong’s has never been a private investigation firm.’ He paused, head tilted. ‘You had a prior connection.’
A faint trace of a smile appeared on Parker’s face. ‘Lorna Witney runs an oil exploration business,’ he said. ‘Family firm, I think, but she’s a smart lady. Lotta grit. Degree from Columbus. We provided security personnel for their ongoing overseas projects.’
Sean said, ‘The name doesn’t ring any bells.’
‘It won’t. After she and Witney parted, she shifted her base of operations to Europe and I assume she now
uses someone local.’ He shrugged aside that dent to his professional pride.
‘So, what
did
you find out about Liam?’
‘That he’d come into contact with Randall Bane and had joined Fourth Day,’ Parker said simply.
‘Just like that,’ I murmured. ‘Wow, Bane must be even more persuasive than I thought.’
‘Liam had been off the grid for six months,’ Parker said. ‘By the time we located him, Bane had him pretty much where he wanted.’
I remembered Thomas Witney’s edge of regret over his son, asked, ‘Why did they wait so long before they went looking?’
‘Not the first time he’d pulled a stunt like that,’ Parker said. ‘The impression I got from his parents was they were not entirely surprised when he dropped out of college. They thought maybe it was some girl, but figured he’d be back when he needed money. It was only after they got his
cutup
bank and ATM cards in the mail, they realised he was serious this time.’
‘So they tried to get him out,’ Sean said. ‘Did they ask you to do an extraction?’
‘Only after they’d tried just about every other way to get to their son,’ Parker said tiredly. ‘Which gave Bane plenty of time to move the kid elsewhere. By the time we went in, he was long gone. Next thing we heard, he’d turned up dead during some sabotage attack against an oil exploration project in Alaska. Real blow for his mother, considering her line of work.’
‘Debacle, wasn’t it – the name of the group he joined?’ I said, remembering Detective Gardner’s interview with Bane.
‘Yeah,’ Parker said. ‘They claimed responsibility. Claimed Liam had been executed in cold blood and was a “martyr to the cause”, as I recall, but I saw the reports. The boy was caught planting explosives and apparently tried to shoot his way out. Even I would have judged it a good kill.’ There was bitterness in his tone. ‘Witney blamed Bane’s influence. He haunted the authorities, trying to get some action, became obsessed with bringing Fourth Day down, by whatever means. Eventually, he decided to go in himself.’ He looked up. ‘The rest you know, pretty much.’
‘Oh, I think there are still a few important blanks,’ Sean said softly. ‘Like, why did you leave him there, Parker? Weren’t you supposed to be his safety net?’
Parker didn’t reply right away, just got to his feet and strolled over to the window, leaning against the deep reveal and staring sightlessly at the distant lanes of traffic. Another fire engine passed, then a couple of police cars. Must be quite a blaze.
‘Sounds kinda bad, doesn’t it?’ he said eventually, his tone wry. ‘What you gotta understand is how Witney was when he went into that cult. He was a man on the edge of reason. Lorna – Mrs Witney – was scared for his sanity. The doctors were talking about placing him in an asylum.’
‘Bane told Gardner you went to see Witney, before the first six months were up, and Witney convinced you not to retrieve him,’ I said baldly. ‘Why?’
Parker turned away from the view, met my eyes. ‘Because he was almost back to normal. Rational, calm, reasoned. He told me he was at peace and, looking at him, I…believed it.’
I let out a long breath. ‘How do you know it wasn’t some drug-induced torpor?’
‘Credit me with some intelligence, Charlie.’ Parker gave me a slightly old-fashioned look. ‘I can spot a junkie, and Witney even let us draw blood from him. We had a private forensics lab in LA run just about every test they could think of. It was clean.’
‘There are plenty of other ways to exert control over someone,’ Sean said. ‘You should know that.’
Parker sighed. ‘Yeah, and maybe we should have ignored his wishes, got him out by force and put him through some kinda twelve-step programme, but ultimately, it was out of my hands.’
‘Oh?’
‘Mrs Witney made the choice to respect his wishes and leave him be.’