by Zoe Sharp
“In the office,” he said, twitching the end of the barrel in the direction of the nearest doorway. “Now.”
The guard jumped to her feet, scared, dropping the magazine to the floor. Mason picked the walkie-talkie out of her nerveless fingers and hustled her through the office door. When he returned a few minutes later he was alone. None of us asked him what he’d done with the woman.
“So, Charlie,” Brown said when his boys had checked the surrounding area and found it devoid of other life. “Where d’you reckon Whitmarsh will put in an appearance?”
“If he shows up,” Gerri put in sharply. “He could well have just called the cops.”
Brown regarded her with one eyebrow raised. “Well, let’s see if you’re right,” was all he said.
Mason came up by his shoulder. “We’d best get ourselves outta sight, sir,” he said. “Don’t want to scare this guy off.” His eyes flicked to Gerri and something happened to his mouth that might almost have been a sign of amusement. “If he shows up.”
Brown nodded and flashed me a quick smile. “Now don’t you worry none, Charlie,” he said, patting my shoulder. “Me and the boys’ll be close by.”
Most of the office doors were locked but that didn’t seem to be much of a problem. Mason produced a set of picks from his inside jacket pocket and within moments the doors were open and they were inside.
I was left standing in the centre of the polished floor, alone. Beyond the doorways to my left I could hear the thunder of the show coming up from the lower floor. The bikini contest was under way now, by the sound of it, the commentator trying to whip the crowd into an ever-greater fever of excitement as each girl took the stage.
“You gotta cheer for the girl you wanna win,” he yelled. “The louder you cheer, the better she’ll do. Let’s hear it now for Chastity, from Orlando. Come on out Chastity!”
I don’t know how good looking Chastity was. Or, more to the point, how little of her chest was covered by her bikini top, but the crowd went wild.
The noise was suddenly amplified as one of the doors from the balcony looking out over the auditorium further along the corridor was pushed open. I tensed, automatically reaching for the gun in my bag.
There was a pause, then Keith Pelzner stepped out into view.
He was shuffling, looking back nervously over his shoulder. His gaudy Hawaiian shirt was stained and crumpled and his hair was matted down onto his head. Wherever Whitmarsh had been keeping him for the last few days, it wasn’t anywhere with a bath and full room service, that was for sure. Keith looked round vaguely, like he’d no idea where he was and didn’t remember me either.
I called to him and started forwards but I hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps before Jim Whitmarsh moved out from behind the open door Keith had just come through. It swung closed behind him.
Whitmarsh pulled his lips back to show me a set of white, even teeth. The gesture came across as friendly as the greeting from a scrapyard dog. He was holding the same Beretta he’d had at Henry’s house and looked like he couldn’t wait to use it.
“If that hand comes out anything but empty,” he said pleasantly, “I’ll shoot you.”
I carefully let go of the SIG but as I withdrew my hand from the bag I brushed my thumb against the voice activation button on Walt’s tape recorder.
Whitmarsh nodded at my compliance. “Lose the bag,” he said.
I lifted the strap, ducking out from underneath it, and held the bag out at arm’s length beside me. I let it drop gently to the ground so as not to damage or spill the contents. It landed close to the wall and lay on its side.
Whitmarsh was looking in better nick than Keith. He was wearing a striped shirt with buttons that strained slightly over the expanse of his stomach. His weight was causing him to feel the heat and two circles of sweat stained the shirt’s armpits. Maybe he was just nervous.
From somewhere below us I heard the commentator shouting to the rabid mob, “And now, from right here in Daytona Beach, it’s Tameka. Let’s hear it for the lovely Tameka!” The screams and cheers and whistles grew louder.
“OK Charlie,” Whitmarsh said. “Where’s the kid?”
“Close.”
He shook his head. Not good enough. “Call him.”
I shrugged. “I don’t have my phone,” I said.
Whitmarsh eyed me for a moment, thinking through the moves like a chess player, trying to see if I was setting him up for checkmate further down the line. When he’d worked out that I had nowhere to go he reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out his own mobile.
“Here.” He put the phone on the floor and sent it skidding towards me. I stopped it with my foot, then bent to pick it up without dropping my gaze.
Keith, meanwhile, hadn’t moved apart from a gentle rocking motion backwards and forwards. He kept his head tilted away from both of us, his gaze averted. I wondered what, if anything, they’d given him to keep him so docile.
I began to key in Trey’s number but stopped before I’d got much further than the start of the code. I looked up. “How do I know you won’t just kill me and take off with both Keith and Trey?”
Whitmarsh grinned again. “You don’t.”
“So why exactly should I trust you?” I asked but I knew I was just stalling. Come on, Mason, what the hell are you waiting for?
Whitmarsh wiped the sweat from his forehead and studied me seriously. “Well, I could threaten to shoot Keith here if you don’t make that call,” he said, “but I don’t really think you give a damn about that one way or the other.”
For a moment he regarded his captive with the contempt for weakness that often befalls despotic jailers, drunk on their own power and total control. Then he was back concentrating on me.
“I could threaten to shoot you. In fact I could make things pretty damn intolerable without actually killing you,” he said reflectively and I forced myself not to react other than to remain politely interested, as though in someone important who’s telling you a long and pointless anecdote.
In the main hall, the commentator had reached the final bikini contestant. “Last up, all the way from Iowa, it’s Jephanie. Whaddya think, huh? Way to go, Jephanie!” The crowd couldn’t have shown more savage approval if they’d been watching a public execution.
“But somehow,” Whitmarsh went on, oblivious, “something tells me you don’t give much of a damn about that either.”
Still keeping the gun aimed at the centre of my body mass, he stepped back and glanced sideways towards the door he’d just come through, which was standing a little ajar.
“So as a last resort,” he said, “I could threaten to shoot somebody I know you do give a damn about.” He raised his voice slightly and called, “OK. Bring him out.”
Just for a second I feared that Whitmarsh’s men had somehow got hold of Trey. If they had, I was abruptly surplus to requirements. But if that had been the case, I realised, Whitmarsh would never have showed for this meeting.
And then the door opened again as Lonnie and Chris pushed through it. Lonnie was closest to me and I saw at once that in his right hand he was holding the Remington pump-action shotgun he’d used to such devastating effect in Henry’s garden. The length of the gun meant he held it awkwardly, angled upwards so that the end of the barrel was resting under the jaw of the figure he and Chris held pinioned between them.
As they turned him towards me and my eyes zeroed in on his face the sound of the roaring crowd below us shrank and vanished like a pinprick of light in space. All I heard was the sharp astounded intake of my own breath.
It was Sean.
Twenty-two
Sean!
If I thought I’d reacted badly to news of his death, that was nothing compared to the emotional impact of finding him suddenly alive.
The trauma of it went up my body in a fast ripple. Up my shins and the sides of my ribcage, scuttered across my chest and then passed quivering over my scalp like a sine wave. A physical effect that left
me shaken and gasping. I was peripherally aware that I’d had to shift my feet to keep my balance.
Sean – and it was definitely Sean – looked like shit. There was no other way to put it. Like Keith, his clothes were filthy and soaked with sweat and from the knees down his trousers were coated in what could have been old mud.
They’d beaten him, too. They’d probably had to in order to begin to subdue a man like Sean. Blood had run and dried from a dozen cuts on his face and body. The bruises had spread like fear. My sense of dread at what had been done to him, at what he’d suffered, ran very cold and very deep.
And at first I thought they’d broken him. I looked and saw nothing in his face. No fright, no pain, not even rage or madness. It was like his emotions had been ripped out, eviscerated.
And then I looked again and, maybe because I knew him so well, I caught a glimpse of what lay past the shield he’d been using to protect himself from damage. Something glittered like ice in the depths of his eyes. A brooding intelligence that still lurked, intact and aware. Waiting . . .
And, recognising it, my legs spontaneously took me forwards.
Lonnie jerked the end of the shotgun up into where the carotid artery pulsed under Sean’s jaw, bringing both of us up short. The only difference was that it was me who flinched. Sean didn’t react at all. Lonnie had to physically lift his head back, arm muscles straining with the effort. It was only when I was still again that he allowed the gun to relax slightly away from Sean’s head.
“Hey, Charlie,” Sean said lightly, his voice soft when I’d been half expecting a tight weariness. “Love the hair.”
“Yeah,” I said, forcing my vocal cords to unclench. “It’s growing on me. I may even decide to keep it this way.”
He smiled at me then, recognising my response for what it was. The smile was slow and sexy and it made my heart ache and my throat constrict until it hurt to swallow.
“I see rumours of your death were greatly exaggerated,” I managed with surprising equanimity.
“Mm,” he said, calm and level but for the first time there was just a trace of the underlying anger. “I expect they hoped you might fold easier if you thought you were on your own.”
He let his gaze skim from my blenched features to Whitmarsh’s. The other man wouldn’t meet his eyes and I realised that even though he held the upper hand Whitmarsh knew only too well what might happen if ever there was a change in the status quo. He was a little afraid of Sean, a little afraid of the monster they’d created and now daren’t let go of. No wonder he’d got both his men clamped onto him, leaving Keith standing to one side, submissive and almost forgotten in this exchange.
“So, Charlie,” Whitmarsh said with a touch of sneer. “Unless you want to watch your boyfriend’s brains getting splattered all over the ceiling for real this time, call the kid in. Don’t make me ask a third time.”
Come on, Mason. For Christ’s sake man, get on with it!
But even as the thought formed I realised that if Brown’s men did ambush us now, Sean was likely to get his head blown off anyway. I told myself that Mason’s combat experience, either police or military, was standing him in good stead. He was waiting for his opportunity, biding his time. All I had to do was play along for just a little longer . . .
I lifted the phone again and completed punching in Trey’s number. My eyes met Sean’s as I hit the send key, looking for reassurance, but I might as well have been hoping for a reaction from a statue. I wondered if he knew what I was going to do, if he would have done the same himself.
I tried not to feel pain at the fact that he’d shut down again, shut me out, but it was real and physical. I just had to accept that he was doing what he had to do in order to survive this. Now it was up to me.
Somewhere below me the noise came rushing up again as the mob howled and stamped and cheered for the half-naked girls on the stage. The commentator’s voice was a frenetic squawk as he urged them to select a winner like they were choosing a sacrifice.
“Hello?” Trey’s voice sounded tinny and hollow but they were somewhere close. In both ears I could hear the same cheers and catcalls. One reported, one live.
“Hi Trey, it’s me,” I said and saw Whitmarsh’s fingers flex round the pistol grip of the Beretta, trying to relieve the tension. But his face had already twisted into a triumphant smile. He knew he’d won. Knew he’d beaten me. Beaten the pair of us.
Not quite yet, old son.
“I need you to come upstairs, the corner near the stage. Fast as you can,” I said, keeping my voice neutral. “Come on your own. Don’t bring the others with you.”
“All right,” he said, nonplussed and cautious. “Is everything OK?”
“Yeah,” I said, eyes fixed on Sean’s face. “Keith’s here. Everything’s fine.”
I ended the call and threw the phone back to Whitmarsh. He caught it easily, one-handed, and said with some satisfaction, “So now we just wait for him to come to momma.”
He never got the chance to be disappointed.
At that moment two of Brown’s men came smoothly out of one of the offices behind where Lonnie and Chris were holding Sean, guns out and ready. They must have been using the time they’d been hidden to quietly bypass the connecting doors between the rooms, gaining ground.
Whitmarsh’s face sagged in disbelief. Before he had time for response, Mason and the black guy moved out from a doorway to my right and I found out what had been in that gym bag. Both had Mossberg pump-action shotguns pulled up hard into their shoulders like they were doing house clearance, the barrels arcing to cover all the players.
My heart trampolined into my throat as I watched Lonnie’s grip tighten on the stock of his own shotgun but he hadn’t lived to turn grey in the security field by making rash decisions under fire. After only a fleeting hesitation he delicately removed the Remington from Sean’s neck and let it droop.
A spasm of anger passed across Whitmarsh’s features, as though recognising his best hope for negotiation had just slipped away from him. Then he, too, let his gun hand fall to his side.
“I gotta hand it to you, Charlie,” he said, his voice bitter. “I didn’t think you had the balls for an ambush.”
“She didn’t,” Brown said. He’d followed his men out of the office doorway and was careful now to stand behind them as he spoke. “But I sure did.”
Almost to my surprise he had a gun out, too. A little stubby Colt 38 Special revolver that sat firm and steady in his liver-spotted fist. There was more steel to Livingston Brown III than I’d ever suspected.
Lonnie and Chris had sized up the situation enough to step away from Sean, keeping their movements careful and their guns lowered. Sean swayed slightly when they disengaged, the only betrayal of weakness. Then he was steady again. His hands were secured behind his back but I saw him straighten and hunch his constricted shoulders, as though in preparation for release.
Something, I wasn’t sure what, stirred in his eyes. Something base and deadly. I could feel it vibrating in the air between us. When he got loose, there was going to be trouble and he could almost taste that freedom.
Whitmarsh just stood and gaped at Brown, gaped all the more as Gerri Raybourn emerged alongside him. His eyes grew wide and not a little wild. “What the—?”
“What, Jim?” Gerri demanded, stalking forwards. “You’ve got a whole heap of explaining to do, feller and, oh boy,” she added with low venom, “it better be good. Just what the fuck did you think you were doing here?”
“A little private enterprise, by the looks of it,” Brown put in coolly.
Whitmarsh froze, then made a conscious effort to relax, gave a wheezy laugh.
“Just trying to put together the whole package, I guess,” he said. His composure seemed to have resurfaced entirely now but it could just have been last gasp bravado making him sound so cocksure.
Gerri, on the other hand, was shrinking before my eyes. Lines of strain had appeared around her mouth. Her skin had taken on a
translucent quality so the matt powder of her subtle make-up now looked false over the top of it.
“You owe your loyalty to the company that employs you,” she said, but her voice was hollow.
“Why?” Whitmarsh laughed again. “Over this last year you’ve weaselled out of paying us overtime, cut our dental and medical, treated us like crap on the sidewalk. Told us the company was going through a rough patch and how we had to suck it in. But you sure didn’t have to give up your Mercedes-Benz, now did you? And you expect loyalty for that? Wake up, Gerri! Opportunities like this one don’t come along every day.”
“So those kids at the motel?” she said quietly. “That really was you?”
Whitmarsh grinned and gave an elaborate nod, almost like he was bowing.
I glanced at her. “Who did you honestly think it was, Gerri?”
She turned her head to stare back at me. “But you’d taken the boy hostage,” she said, blankly. Her eyes shifted to skate briefly over Sean and Keith. “We – I – thought you’d taken both of them. I was trying to negotiate with you, going by the book. But Jim insisted he wanted to be the one who went and brought you in. Said he felt responsible that the Pelzners had been taken on his watch . . .”
Her voice trailed off and I thought back to the phone conversation we’d had. Amazing how things altered when you put a different slant on them. The questions she’d asked, the responses she’d made.
It was like adjusting a door that’s always been awkward to close and suddenly finding it fits seamlessly. It’s not until you look back that you realise how wrong it was before.
“I thought you were trying to set me up,” I said.
She heard the doubt in my voice and latched onto it, shaking her head almost violently. “No, no, I wasn’t,” she said. “You gotta believe me, Charlie. I had no idea what Jim was up to—”