Third Strike

by Zoe Sharp

  I moved in, touched my mother’s arm and found she was vibrating through her coat.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  She finally tore her gaze away from the other side of the park and swept it over me. I was astonished to see, not fear, but anger lighting up her features.

  “Yes,” she said at last, calmly, and added through gritted teeth, “I utterly refuse to allow that woman to frighten me any longer.”

  “That’s … good,” I said slowly. “But she scares the hell out of me, so we’re leaving.” I caught my father’s eye. “Unless you feel we’re overreacting?”

  “No.” He shook his head, clearly more shaken than he was prepared to admit, and cast a jaundiced eye over the magician. I could see that whereas before his act had seemed fresh and funny, now it had taken on a rather tawdry air. The sun had gone in unexpectedly and left the day bathed in cloud and shadow that was reflected in my father’s face. “I think I’ve seen more than enough.”

  Parker managed to reach Collingwood at home, or wherever the crumpled little man went at the weekends. Collingwood called me direct on my mobile a short while later.

  “I’m very sorry,” he said, sounding genuinely mortified. “Agent Blaylock is temporarily suspended until the internal investigation is complete and, believe me, I made it, ah, totally clear to her that she’s in a world of trouble.”

  “Not clear enough, obviously.”

  I heard his sigh. “She’s hurting right now,” he said, aiming for reproach. “She’s gonna need surgery on that nose. You really messed her up.”

  “I did no more than she was undoubtedly prepared to do to me,” I said mildly. “Sort her out, Collingwood, or I’ll do it for you.”

  “Hey, let’s not let things get out of hand, huh?” he said, sounding worried now. “I think it might be a good idea if you took your folks away for a few days, though, get them out of harm’s way.”

  “They won’t be dictated to,” I said. “Fortunately, they’ve already decided to get out of New York for a while. Use that time to talk some sense into your agent, will you?” I didn’t tell him Parker was arranging tickets as we spoke.

  “I will,” he promised. “Meanwhile, you be sure to let me have your travel plans—so I can stay in touch.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, shaking my head even though I knew he couldn’t see it. “Parker can always get hold of us if he needs to.”

  “But—”

  “No,” I said. “That’s going to have to be enough. You told my parents to put themselves in my hands, Collingwood. If you trust me enough for that, leave me to do my job. So far you’ve done nothing. Not even pick up the tab for our services.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, apparently chastened. “I guess it looks that way, but bureaucracy moves slowly. You have my word that I’m working on it. And of course I don’t want to compromise the security of your parents in any way. Do what you think is best.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I intend to.”

  CHAPTER 17

  I hadn’t been to Boston since an assignment the previous winter when my principal had died and, technically, so had I. For a brief period at least. On the whole, I wasn’t sure if that made me feel any better about the way things had turned out.

  And I certainly wasn’t sure that it put the city on my list of top ten places to revisit. But, Boston was where Jeremy Lee had lived and worked and died, and that’s where my father was determined to go.

  “This chap Collingwood doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere, despite his earnest promises,” he said, dismissive. “And I can’t sit around doing nothing. One may as well just be covered in honey and pegged out for the ants.”

  “I agree,” I said. “So, what do you hope to find in Boston?”

  “I need to talk to Jeremy’s wife, Miranda, and go over his medical records again, in detail,” he said. “And I hardly think, under the circumstances, the hospital authorities will courier them down for my inspection.”

  He gave me a slightly tired smile, looking almost human for a change. “I still find it hard to believe that a company as large and well thought of as Storax Pharmaceutical would stoop to this kind of behavior because one patient out of a considerable number suffered side effects. Yes, Jeremy’s reaction was severe, but medicine is never an exact science and one must expect the occasional unexpected result.”

  It was hard, listening to him, to remember that he’d counted the dead man as his friend.

  “Nevertheless,” I said, “licensing the drug when they know this might happen makes no sense, surely?”

  “No, it doesn’t.” He frowned, removing his reading glasses to pinch at the bridge of his nose. “I’m missing something,” he admitted, almost to himself, “and I can’t work out for the life of me what it is.”

  “It’ll come to you,” I said. “But what makes you think the hospital will let you see the records, even if you go up there in person?”

  He cleared his throat. “Ah, well,” he said, looking as uncomfortable as I’d seen him, although there was the faintest glimmer of amusement in the back of those usually humorless eyes, “I wasn’t exactly planning on asking their permission … .”

  The four of us flew into Logan on a midmorning flight out of La Guardia, making the usual knuckle-whitening approach over the dark gray waters of Boston Harbor.

  Sean and I had declared and checked our guns, locked in their polymer cases, with ammo separate. All strictly aboveboard and legal. Until we reached Massachusetts, that is, which has no reciprocity regarding concealed-carry licenses with New York. Most of Parker’s operatives solved this problem by going through the rigmarole of getting additional licenses for nonreciprocal states, but Sean and I were still plowing our way through that particular forest of paperwork.

  If we were caught, we’d be in just as much trouble as we would have been getting ourselves arrested with a pair of unlicensed handguns in a police raid on a brothel in Brooklyn. But I’d thought of the threat I’d read in Vondie Blaylock’s stance that day in Washington Square Park, and made my decision without a qualm.

  We picked up a rental car at one of the off-airport lots. Sean had chosen another capacious Navigator SUV, despite the abysmal fuel economy, on the grounds that sometimes it was good to have the advantage of bulk over speed.

  We drove sedately through the Ted Williams Tunnel and into the city itself, glowing with autumn browns and golds. More sedate than New York, less brash, Boston nevertheless showed the petticoats of its history like a prim old lady secretly proud of a wild and somewhat rowdy past.

  Bypassing glitzier accommodation, we settled for a more low-key chain hotel in the Back Bay area. The rooms were dull and as much in need of refurbishment as the shabby New York place where I’d first confronted my father after that damning news report. It seemed half a lifetime ago. Since then, I’d been mildly kicked about by Vondie and much less mildly kicked about by the pointed end of a yellow cab. Thank God for Vicodin.

  I knew I was leaning heavily on the painkillers to see me through this rough patch, and I was rationing my intake as much as I could stand. But I’d learned a long time ago that there’s nothing heroic about being in pain. Nor does it allow you to function at anything like full speed, mentally or physically. When recovery time wasn’t an option, chemical respite would have to do.

  We used the bellboy service to haul our luggage up to the eighth floor, leaving our hands free. Sean and I had taken an adjoining room to my parents, with a dividing door that we unlocked but left closed while we freshened up after the flight.

  It hadn’t occurred to me, until my father knocked and entered, that this arrangement might cause a problem for his old-fashioned sensibilities. But as soon as he walked in I saw him pause, eyes skimming disapprovingly over the huge kingsize double bed that filled the floor space in the small room. There wasn’t even a pullout couch so we could make any pretense about it.

  At that moment Sean came out of the bathroom, drying his h
ands, looking very much at home. And the fact that we intended to share a bed together, in the room right next to theirs, was suddenly very loud and very obvious. I felt seventeen again. It was all I could do not to squirm.

  “Can I help you, Richard?” Sean asked pleasantly, moving past him close enough to make the older man step back.

  My father tore his eyes away from the bed and our partially unpacked bags, which were sitting cosily side by side on the counterpane. Without thinking, I reached out and grabbed the handles of mine and swung it onto the foldout luggage rack in the alcove next to the bathroom, then tunneled through the contents to find my toiletries.

  “We wondered about dinner,” my father said stiffly. “Elizabeth and I are quite happy to eat here in the hotel, if you do not wish to go out again.”

  Even with my back to him, I could feel that Sean had followed my movements. I knew damn well he read me like an open book and, by the way he flicked the towel sharply over the back of a chair, that I’d have to answer for my cowardice later.

  “I wouldn’t recommend staying in,” Sean said, nothing in his voice. “The rooms are okay, but the last time I ate here I went down with food poisoning and I’ve no desire to go through that again—even with such an eminent medicine man on hand.”

  “Very well,” my father said, inclining his head despite the danger of cracking his neck because he was holding it so rigid. “We’ll knock when we’re ready.” And with that he went out, closing the door oh so quietly behind him.

  I shut my eyes. Sean’s voice, when it came, was viciously soft and close enough to make me jump, though I hadn’t heard him move round from the other side of the bed.

  “You’re an adult. When are you going to stop apologizing to them, Charlie, for the way you live your life?”

  I opened my eyes again, turned and found him crowding in on me so I had to tilt my head back to meet his. Briefly—just briefly—I thought about lying, but there wasn’t any point.

  “Respect for the attitudes of an older generation hardly counts as an apology,” I tried instead.

  “No excuse,” he dismissed. “Times change. Attitudes change. They should be the ones to adapt, not you.”

  It took me a moment to find some spine and, when I did, it brought my chin up in defiance. “You’re the one who used to take Madeleine home with you and pretend intimacy, just to stop your mother matchmaking.”

  His head went back in surprise and his anger dissipated just a little under the force of wry amusement.

  “You’re right,” he allowed, his voice still cool, “but I did it to stop my mother worrying about me working too hard and not having a life. Not because I was ashamed of anything.”

  “I am not ashamed of you, Sean.”

  “Really?” He stepped back, and it was like he’d stepped back in time as well as space, to the arrogant, unsettling superior he’d been during my short and inglorious military career. Someone to whom my success or failure had appeared to be of minor interest because he had nothing invested in the outcome. “So, prove it.”

  I didn’t, of course.

  We went out and found a fabulous seafood place down near the water but I was so jittery that I couldn’t remember exactly what I had to eat or drink.

  I told myself it was because I was on duty. And not just any duty, but guarding principals I cared about too deeply for it ever to be purely professional. Sean, on the other hand, was the model of the perfect executive protection officer—polite, remote, focused.

  But, unusually for him, he made no attempt to blend with us on a social level. He’d disconnected himself from the family group, deliberately emphasizing his status as an outsider. Rather than a party of two related couples, it appeared more like we had inexplicably invited a servant along for the evening and were perhaps now regretting such a display of largesse. And I knew I was trying too hard to pour oil on troubled waters, otherwise I would have berated my parents for their supercilious demeanor. It was a long and uncomfortable evening.

  After we got back to the hotel and settled my parents in for the night, I expected Sean to bring things to a head, but he didn’t. He’d never been a sulker and this new attitude scared me.

  When he came out of the bathroom, he stripped with impersonal efficiency, and climbed into his side of the bed. It was big enough for the gap between us, when I slunk in silently on my side, to seem wider and more frozen than one person could hope to cross—even with dogsleds and an affinity for polar bears.

  CHAPTER 18

  The following morning we risked breakfast in the hotel restaurant and then headed for the suburb of Norwood, where we would find Jeremy Lee’s widow. Norwood was southwest of Boston, just outside the I-95 ring road that cupped the city to Massachusetts Bay, skirting round the growing sprawl on its landward, western side.

  The mammoth construction job that had been disrupting Boston the last time I’d been there didn’t seem to have changed or progressed overmuch. We sat in traffic, inevitably, which my parents bore with stoical patience and which Sean maneuvered his way through with expressionless skill. He’d hardly spoken to me all morning, a state of affairs that my father observed minutely, as if monitoring a patient for the manifestation of fatal symptoms.

  We hadn’t picked up any signs of surveillance since we’d landed in Boston, but went through a series of routine countermeasures even so. They all came up empty. By the time we hit the main freeway, we knew we were clear. Sean kept our speed up, making good time, but the journey still seemed to take forever.

  It was a little after ten when we pulled up outside a pretty two-story house in a quiet street of others, all painted beautifully contrasting pastel shades with white trim around the windows, like the residents had been to a color-coordination meeting before they all went out and bought paint in the spring.

  Miranda Lee was not what I was expecting. The name sounded tall, refined and elegant, but the person who opened the screen door onto the covered porch was short and rather chunky, dressed in black leggings and a baggy football sweater, with her long wiry dark hair tangled around her face. But there was no debating the delight with which she greeted my parents.

  “Richard! Elizabeth!” she cried, flinging herself onto each of them in bone-crushing hugs while Sean and I stood a little apart and watched the street, the neighboring houses, the wooded area behind. “Oh, I just can’t tell you how glad I am to see you both. I’m so sorry for all of this,” she added, sounding genuinely distraught. “But what am I thinking? Come in, come in … all of you.”

  As she said this last bit she cocked her head towards Sean and me, scanning us with shrewd dark eyes as we walked into the house.

  “This is my daughter, Charlotte,” my father said without any particular pride. “And … Sean Meyer, who is helping to ensure our safety.”

  As introductions went it was a cop-out, as he well knew, but Sean kept his expression bland as he shook hands with the widow. He refused a seat and instead stayed at one side of the room where the windows gave him two separate views of the street.

  The ground floor was spacious and open, with a large kitchen off the living room, and a dining room separated by fold-back double doors. It was decorated in a haphazard style with splashes of vibrant color that should have jarred but somehow didn’t. The house was rammed with cheerfully disjointed clutter, easygoing and largely unpretentious.

  I declined our hostess’s offer of herbal tea, which she went into the neighboring kitchen with my mother to make, and chose to stand alongside Sean, just far enough apart to keep the doorway to the kitchen in my field of view. It was not a gesture that went unnoticed by either man present.

  When I glanced over, I found Sean and my father had locked gazes like two rutting stags battling for supremacy. I shifted uncomfortably under the weight of knowledge that I was the dubious prize they were fighting over.

  It was juvenile and pointless and would not, I thought bitterly, help any of us to do what we had to.

  Miranda came ba
ck through, balancing a tray containing cups and a china teapot and set it down on the low table in the living room.

  “There now,” she said brightly, plonking herself down on the comfortably faded sofa and patting the cushion alongside her. “Come and sit, Elizabeth, and I’ll pour.”

  “Miranda, we need to talk,” my father said gravely. “About Jeremy.”

  For a moment it was as if she hadn’t heard. Then something of the light dimmed out of her, sending her shoulders drooping. I looked at the top of her bowed head and realized that the pale line of her part revealed gray roots. When she looked up and her face had lost its animation, the lines framing her eyes and mouth seemed deeper cut and much more apparent.

  “I know,” she said quietly, hands restless in her lap. “I’ve been following the news—I haven’t been able to avoid it.” She looked up suddenly, her gaze flitting nervously before finally coming to rest on my father. “So … did you give Jeremy morphine, Richard?”

  My father’s head tilted. “No,” he said, his voice utterly calm and laced with regret rather than anger. “Actually, I was going to ask you the same question.”

  “No. No, I didn’t,” she said. She sat up straighter, looked him firmly in the eye. “I wish I had, but I was selfish enough to treasure every moment I had with him, right to the end. And yes, when it was all over, I admit I was relieved, for both of us.” Her voice wavered, taking her lower lip with it. She took a moment to steady both. My mother put a comforting hand on her arm. “I wish I’d been brave enough to put an end to his suffering, but I wasn’t.”

  My father closed his eyes briefly in acknowledgment and I saw a fraction of the tension go out of him.