Third Strike

by Zoe Sharp

  The Crown Vic lurched, slithering, to a stop, jolting as it hit something that I could only pray wasn’t my father’s body. The sudden deceleration was enough to spit me straight off the front edge of the bonnet and send me thumping back down onto the ground, knocking the wind out of me. The last time I’d been hit by a moving vehicle while on foot, I recalled whimsically, at least I’d had the forethought to be wearing bike leathers.

  Rid of his inconvenient hood ornament, the cabdriver punched the accelerator before I’d even hit the deck. I flinched, trying to roll out of the way of the fat front tire that was now heading straight for my chest, and knowing I didn’t stand a hope in hell of doing so. All I could smell was hot oil and burned rubber and rust.

  Game over.

  Just when I knew he couldn’t possibly miss me, the cab jolted to a stop again, engine revving high enough to send all the hairs up on the back of my neck. I realized, to my amazement, that my mother’s heavy-duty suitcase was rammed between the opposite front wheel and a mammoth concrete tree planter at the edge of the curb. I started scrabbling backwards on my bruised backside, arms flailing. The cab’s rear wheels spun up more smoke as the driver forced it on. The planter trembled. The suitcase began to buckle and twist.

  The shell of the case gave up its last breath and collapsed completely. As it did so I felt a hand grab my shoulder and another hook under my armpit to wrench me up and out of the way. I was peripherally aware of a yellow blur flashing past as I flew through the air, before I slammed up against a solid male body, robbing me of what little air I’d managed to draw back into my lungs.

  Dazed, I looked up, met Sean’s near-black eyes only a few inches from my own. The sheer fury in them shocked me back into life. I wrenched myself out of his grasp and staggered back a pace.

  I turned. For a moment everything was imprinted on my brain in minute detail and total silence.

  The doorman was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, staring after the disappearing cab with an expression of outraged disbelief on his face. The driver of the cab he’d summoned had leapt out and was gesticulating wildly. I could see his mouth moving, but could hear no sound coming out. My mother was crouched in the shelter of the doorway where Sean must have practically thrown her to keep her out of harm’s way. She was clutching her handbag to her chest like it was her sole means of protection, knuckles white around the straps.

  But my father was the one who worried me. All I could see of him, sticking out from between the planter and the cab waiting by the curb, were his legs from the knee downwards, good dark gray socks and highly polished black lace-up shoes. For a moment, I felt a dreadful cold leap of fear, then his feet twitched and he sat up abruptly, brushing the dirt from his suit jacket. He looked annoyed rather than hurt, and pale as dust.

  The world kicked back into gear. I heard our cabdriver’s raucous shouts in what sounded like Ukrainian, the squeal of brakes and the blowing of horns all the way up the next two blocks as the cab that had tried to hit us swerved through traffic. I could only hope the crazed windscreen was making it harder for him.

  Sean brushed past me to bend over my father and his eyes were everywhere.

  “Can you move?” he demanded.

  My father glanced up at him with irritation. “Of course I can.”

  Sean yanked him to his feet without another word and hauled him back inside the building, covering his back all the way. I did the same with my mother, depositing her onto one of the low sofas on the other side of the entrance lobby, well back from the doors. She threw herself at my father and held on tight, sobbing.

  The reception staff were fluttering with shock, telling each other in loud voices what it was they thought they’d seen. A moment later the doorman dragged the sorry-looking remains of my mother’s suitcase into the lobby and jerked his head at the Ukrainian cabbie.

  “The driver says he thinks the other cab was stolen,” the doorman told Sean. “Says one of their guys got’jacked in Murray Hill’bout an hour ago. The word was out to the other drivers to keep an eye out for his ride.”

  “Looks like they found it,” Sean said.

  The doorman nodded, eyes flicking over my shocked parents and the ruined case. “You want I should call the cops, Mr. Meyer, or is this a … private matter?”

  “I think this was too public for that. You’d better call them.’

  “Got it.” He paused. “What about a medic?”

  I turned fast at that, scanning my father. He’d moved awkwardly when Sean had rushed him inside, but he’d seemed basically okay—no obvious injuries, no blood, and I didn’t think he’d hit his head or lost consciousness when he fell.

  “No, he seems fine,” I said, turning back to find the doorman staring at me like I’d totally lost it.

  “Er, I meant for you, ma’am.”

  I followed his gaze and looked down, realizing for the first time that I was the one with blood on my hands. I turned them over to find I’d scraped the palm of one and cut the other. I’d put a hole in the knee of my trousers as well. The blood didn’t show up much against the dark brown fabric, but I could see grit stuck to the wetness around the torn edges. I swore under my breath.

  My jacket was ripped, too, one sleeve almost hanging by a thread where Sean had grabbed at it. When I went to step forwards I realized my left leg was already stiffening up, and by the feel of it I was going to have a bruise the size of Wales from hip to ankle.

  I glanced at my father again. He was staring at me over the top of my mother’s weeping head with an expression on his face that I couldn’t quite decipher, and didn’t have the patience to try.

  “You may think it’s all over,” I said bitterly, jerking my head in the direction the cab had taken, “but nobody seems to have told the opposition.”

  Parker’s office had its own private bathroom and that’s where I stripped off. The designers had lined the place with mirrors, so I practically had a three-sixty view of my injuries, such as they were. One scraped knee and elbow, two scraped hands, and a sizable grazed bruise that started in a remarkably neat line halfway up my left calf and was spreading rapidly. Nothing that wouldn’t heal up or scab over in a few days.

  All in all, I reckoned I’d got away pretty lightly.

  I fumbled with the mixer tap to sluice the dirt out of my hands, and had just wadded up tissue paper to wipe the worst of the grit out of my knee when there was a knock at the door.

  I expected Sean, but it was my father who stood in the gap.

  For a moment we stared at each other. I saw him survey me with a professional gaze and I was suddenly very aware of standing there in just my underwear with all my scars, ancient and modern, on show for him to judge me by. I resisted the urge to reach for one of the large towels hanging by the shower, and faced him with as much pride as I could muster. Not much, under the circumstances.

  “Was there something you wanted?” I asked, icy.

  “I brought you this.” He lifted his right hand and I noticed for the first time there was a first-aid kit in it. His voice was cool for the intended victim of a hit-and-run. “And I thought you might appreciate my professional expertise, if nothing else.”

  I’d been through enough emergency medical training, military and civilian, to deal with such minor injuries myself, but I shrugged and turned back to the sink, wringing out another piece of paper towel and shaking the excess water out of it. “Feel free,” I said.

  In the mirror, I saw him approach and put the case down on the marble surface. I’d half-filled the sink with lukewarm water, which was now a grubby pink color and had disgusting mushy clumps of tissue floating in it. For a moment he stood there, watching my efforts, then he reached into his jacket to pull out his gold-framed glasses.

  “Sit down, Charlotte,” he said with quiet authority, and snapped open the first-aid kit.

  For once, I didn’t put up a fight. Pointless to cobble something together myself when there was an expert on tap. I sank onto the closed lid of the
toilet and let him empty the sink in order to wash his hands.

  “I’m assuming you didn’t hit your head?” he said when he was done, tipping my chin up to watch the way my pupils reacted to the strong overhead spots.

  “I’m not concussed and there’s nothing broken,” I said, twisting my face out of his grasp. “Trust me, I know what broken bones feel like.”

  “Yes,” he murmured. “So you do.”

  “Where’s Sean?” I asked, trying not to sound too hopeful.

  “He and Mr. Armstrong are giving statements,” my father said shortly. “The police want your side of it, naturally, but Meyer’s stalling them until you feel up to it.”

  I pulled a wry face. Sean was very good at keeping the unwanted at bay. “Are they really willing to wait that long?”

  He picked a handful of sterile wipes out of the kit, tore them open and began cleaning my left palm.

  “The man driving the cab,” he said, almost conversational as he worked. “I think I recognized him.”

  I looked up sharply from what he was doing to my hand but his face, bent close to mine, was a picture of closed concentration.

  “Who was he?”

  “I don’t know his name, of course,” my father said. “But I believe he may have been the one who drove me across the river to Brooklyn. I hadn’t seen him before that. It was always the other chap who called or visited—the one with the shortback-and-sides.”

  Buzz-cut.

  He straightened, ripped open another packet. This one contained a pair of tweezers, which he used to pinch a sliver of glass out of my flesh. Probably from the front screen—I’d certainly hit it hard enough.

  “I see,” I said. “So, they’ve tried to discredit you and blackmail you, and, now that’s failed, they’re just settling for a spot of good old-fashioned murder. Nice people you’re mixing with.”

  He dug the tweezers in again and I flinched, letting my breath out on a hiss. Just when I thought he’d done it simply for badness, he emerged with a second chunk of glass, which he dropped into the stainless-steel waste bin. It was big enough to bounce when it hit the bottom.

  “You do realize that he was there, don’t you?” he said suddenly. “In the hotel, the morning you came to see me and brought me that bottle of rather expensive whisky.” He smoothed his thumbs over my palm, searching for any residual splinters. There weren’t any.

  “Buzz-cut?” I said, and even as I asked I remembered the tightly closed door to the bedroom in my father’s shabby little suite. No wonder Buzz-cut had looked at me twice when I’d pulled up outside the hotel the next morning.

  My father glanced up at me for a moment, frowning before he got the reference. “Hm” was all he said.

  He put my left hand down and picked up the right. I’d sliced into the heel of my thumb, small but deep, and the cut was dirty but the damage was generally less widespread. In fact, my knee was shouting loudest. I ignored it.

  “Is that why you told me I was a cripple?” I asked without rancor.

  He cleansed the cut and applied the self-adhesive closure strips. His hands were cool, dry and confident.

  “I was under the strictest instructions—I’m quite sure you don’t need me to go into details. It was impressed upon me that I was not to counter any attempts made to discredit me. Nor,” he added grimly, “was I to elicit any help or assistance from anyone. Any offers were to be firmly … rebuffed, or the consequences would be severe. They were most definite about that.”

  Rebuffed. Well, I suppose you achieved that one … .

  “So you chose brutality to get your message across.”

  My father finished a fast cleanup of my elbow, which had come off best in the injury stakes, and put the tweezers down roughly, almost slamming them. He touched a finger to his discolored cheekbone. “It seemed a method you would best understand,” he said, almost haughty. But underneath that veneer of pride I caught just a glimpse of genuine sorrow. I recalled my own bitter, angry words, hurled without thought to the wounds they would inflict, only aware of the desire to cause him as much pain as he had caused me.

  And I had, I realized, by so readily believing the things I’d heard about him were true. Just as I’d been left stripped and wasted by his lack of belief in me, all that time ago.

  “Besides,” he went on, remorseless, “I knew if I wasn’t hard enough on you, you would be too stubborn to give up.” He allowed a glint of bleak humor to break through as he bent to examine my knee. “As it was, I think I was convincing, don’t you?”

  I forced my mind to concentrate on what he was saying, rather than on what he was doing. The grit seemed to have gone a long way into my knee, and the patella itself felt strangely disconnected. All that work to rid myself of my limp, and now I’d gone and got myself another. And in that distracted moment, I finally understood.

  “You weren’t simply rebuffing me,” I murmured as the thought coalesced.

  “You’re going to need to take some painkillers for a few days, Charlotte,” he said. “Please don’t be stubborn about it.”

  “I’ve got some … something in my bag I can take,” I said, dismissive, suddenly wary of telling him what. My left leg had settled into a sullen throb along most of its length, burning brightest around my knee. “You weren’t just rebuffing me, were you?” I repeated. “You were trying to make me seem too weak to be a threat to them. You were trying to protect me.”

  He paused, frowning slightly again. Then he was tearing open more wipes, leaving the packets scattered across the marble surface next to the sink. He was used, I recognized, to having a team to clear up after him.

  “Yes,” he said at last, cautiously. “Yes, I suppose I was.”

  “Why?”

  His eyes flicked to mine in silent censure. “In case it escaped your notice, Charlotte, I’m your father.” He sprayed me with a coat of sealant dressing and straightened, nodding to signify he was done. “It’s what fathers do.”

  And I realized then that, despite my earlier jealousy, whenever I’d called on him in the past, he’d come. He might not have agreed with my actions. In some cases he might not even have fully supported them, but he’d come nevertheless.

  I stood, trying not to stagger as I put weight through my left leg, testing the knee to make sure it wasn’t going to fold on me.

  “You know you can’t leave this here, don’t you?” I said. “Not now.”

  My father looked up from scrubbing his hands, met my eyes in the mirror for a moment. Then he was back to his brisk rubbing.

  “I was prepared to,” he said remotely, “but clearly they are not.” His face pinched and I wondered, briefly, what might happen if my father ever relaxed that ruthless self-control for long enough to well and truly lose his temper.

  “So, are you going to tell the police the whole story?”

  He had been drying his hands, and that halted him for a few long moments while he gave it due consideration. “What good will it do?” he said, sounding weary. “Do you honestly think they’ll give due credence to anything I have to say?”

  I opened my mouth to respond but got no further. There was another knock on the door and Sean put his head round without waiting for an invitation. His eyes slid darkly from me to my father, who turned away, throwing the last paper towel into the waste bin and straightening his shirt cuffs.

  “You okay?” Sean asked.

  “I’ll live,” I said.

  He advanced and folded my new clothing onto the counter next to the sink—a spare suit and shirt, still in their drycleaning bags. It was a rule of Parker’s that everyone kept a decent change of clothes at the office, just in case of emergencies. In his early days he had once had the misfortune, he’d told us, to have to face a widow when he was still spattered with her late husband’s blood. He’d taken considerable precautions not to be put in the same situation again.

  “Are you ready for the police? They want your side of it.”

  “Do they think I might have bee
n jaywalking?”

  He smiled and, just for a moment I saw the relief and the anguish swimming deep in his eyes, then it was gone.

  “Getting hit by a car hasn’t knocked any sense into you, I see,” he said dryly. “I’ll tell them you’ll be another fifteen, shall I?”

  I nodded, and he went out. I turned to find my father watching me with an expression that might have qualified as distaste. He removed his glasses and folded them into their slim case, which he tucked back into the inside pocket of his jacket.

  “What?”

  He shook his head and I shrugged, stripping away the plastic bag to remove the shirt from its hanger.

  “What do you intend to say to the police?”

  “What would you like me to tell them?”

  He made a gesture of frustration. “Don’t play games, Charlotte,” he said, clipped. “It doesn’t become you.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Who’s playing games?” I said mildly, buttoning the shirt. By the time I’d eased my way into the trousers, he still hadn’t answered.

  “Your reputation’s been blown, your home invaded, your family’s secrets smeared across the newspapers. And now somebody’s just tried to kill you,” I said then, keeping all the emotion out of my voice.

  I lifted my jacket. Underneath it was my SIG P228 in a Kramer inside-the-waistband sheepskin clip. Sean must have been into the office gun safe. My father watched me go through my habitual checks and slide the holstered weapon into position just behind my right hip. There was absolute disapproval in his every line.

  “If you’d trusted me and Sean enough to come to us when they first started threatening you, we could have dealt with it there and then and avoided it coming to this.” I pulled on my boots and straightened, stifling a groan the movement caused. I shrugged into my jacket, smoothing the cloth to make sure it covered the outline of the SIG. “Whether you like it or not, I’m bloody good at what I do. We could have taken out Buzz-cut and his friend before they got you anywhere near Bushwick.”

  “Oh, I’ve no doubt you could have ‘taken out’ my aggressors, as you so coyly put it,” my father echoed bitterly. “Perhaps that was what I was afraid of most.”