by Zoe Sharp
Gardner picked up her fork again, winding the tines into her lettuce. ‘OK,’ she said then, reflective, ‘I’ll buy that for a dollar. Question is, why you? You said you spoke with Witney the morning after you grabbed him. Did he say anything? Give you a hint what Bane’s up to that’s suddenly gotten Homeland Security’s panties in a twist?’
I shrugged. ‘Witney knew his life was in more danger on the outside than it had been when he was still with Fourth Day, but he wouldn’t be drawn on why,’ I said, frowning. ‘Was it coincidence, I wonder, that Witney was the one injured in the attack last year that Bane mentioned?’
‘Alleged attack,’ Sean put in. His eyes flicked to Gardner. ‘I assume you checked up on his claims?’
She nodded. ‘Witney was pulled out of a wreck on one of the back roads leading from Fourth Day’s place. Claimed he’d been run off the road, but we never proved it one way or the other.’
‘Witney seemed to think it was significant that it’d been left until now to get him out. He said Bane would double what we were getting to deliver him back. And he assumed we’d drugged and interrogated him while we had the chance.’
I looked up and found Gardner’s eyebrow raised inquiringly.
‘Which we didn’t,’ Sean said blandly.
‘Whatever he knew, he told me nothing that would have been worth trying a grab raid to find out,’ I finished, almost lamely.
‘They tortured him,’ Gardner pointed out quietly. ‘He would have told them anything he thought they wanted to hear, just to make it stop.’
‘You don’t have to remind me,’ I muttered.
I had a stark flash of Witney’s body, left broken in the bath of a cheap motel, remembered his earnestness, his grief over his son, and his dignity. Something bubbled up in my chest and I reached for my drink to help force it back down again. Sorrow was never far from the surface these days. I looked away sharply, out over the gently rolling breakers, coming in slow and steady along the shoreline, tried to regulate my breathing in step.
‘There was nothing you could have done, Charlie,’ Sean said, tension pushing roughness into his voice. A warning. ‘Don’t try shouldering the blame for this.’
‘Maybe that’s not what she’s feeling guilty about, huh?’ Gardner said into the silence that followed.
‘Meaning?’ I snapped. But I already knew.
Sean turned to look at the detective, slowly, coldly, and something about the way he did it reminded me of Epps. In spite of herself, Gardner shifted slightly on her seat.
‘Meaning?’ Sean repeated softly.
She pushed her plate away, wiped her mouth again and rested her elbows on the tabletop, linking her fingers together. ‘Exactly when did you realise those three guys were only carrying TASERs, Charlie?’ she asked. She paused meaningfully, the way I could imagine her pausing with the gang-bangers and the rapists and the murderers she’d spoken of. ‘Was it before or after you realised they were all wearing vests?’
I’d been expecting this, but I still hadn’t found an answer. Not a convincing one, anyway.
‘Probably both at the same time,’ I said, then shook my head. ‘No, I knew the driver was wearing something – or was on something – when he came at me. Four to the chest will normally stop just about anyone.’
‘Stop them?’ Gardner asked. ‘Or kill them?’
‘In close-protection work, your only concern is to protect the life of your principal,’ Sean said, stepping in smoothly. ‘We’re trained to react to a threat, Detective, just as you are. To keep firing until the target goes down.’
It was interesting, I thought, that he made no mention of our shared military background, where the priorities had been slightly different – identify your enemy and get the first shot in before they do.
What are you trying to hide, Sean?
What do you think I need to?
Gardner took all this in with those quick bright eyes, storing away our every tic and reaction for future reference. She was intuitive and tenacious, neither qualities I wanted in someone who had me under a microscope.
‘You know that if they hadn’t been wearing those vests, and all we’d found on them were non-lethal weapons, you’d be cooling your ass in a jail cell right now – spooks or no spooks.’
In my experience of Conrad Epps, I felt she was vastly underestimating the range and scope of the man’s authority but, I reasoned, now was not a good time to point that out.
‘I know,’ I said calmly. And don’t you think I haven’t gone over it, a hundred times, since it happened?
‘You ever had a TASER hit, Detective?’ Sean asked.
‘Oh yeah,’ she said, wry. ‘In training. Hurts like a son of a bitch.’
‘So, if you were faced with an assailant – three assailants – armed with them,’ he went on, ‘wouldn’t you do whatever it took to avoid taking that hit?’
‘Yeah,’ she allowed, but her eyes were back on me. ‘So, you knew they were TASERs?’
‘Honestly?’ I let out a long breath. ‘No. You see a gun – or what looks bloody like a gun – pointed at you with clear intent, and that’s enough. You react. You don’t fixate on the weapon itself. It’s just an inanimate object. You look at the person behind it. Their eyes, their hands, the way they hold their shoulders. That’s what tells you they’re going to shoot.’
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.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
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?
CHAPTER TWENTY
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.