Second Shot: A Charlie Fox Thriller

by Zoe Sharp

  I saw him tense instantly, start to come out of his seat. Then I was twisting to the side, keeping my knees soft as I started to turn. I had no idea at that point what I was going to see.

  A young, bearded man with a gaunt, intense face, wearing jeans and a baggy military-style jacket, had entered the restaurant and stepped into view only a couple of meters behind us. With surprising agility he’d shrugged away the hand of the maître d’ who had tried to detain him, and his whole being was now focused on Simone and the child. His jacket was open and he had his right hand inside it, holding something concealed tight against his body.

  Behind me, I sensed Sean was already going for the principals. There was no further need for communication between us. I knew instinctively that he’d selected his role based purely on cold logistics, leaving the threat for me because I was nearer, because it made more sense.

  I saw the man’s arm flex as he began to withdraw his hand and I took a fast stride sideways, moving to intercept. I grabbed his right forearm just below his elbow and dug my left thumb hard into one of the main pressure points located there.

  With my right hand I reached for his throat, using my own forward momentum to force him over backwards with that hold, hooking my leg around his calf to unbalance him and take him down. At the last moment I jerked my hand up slightly, enough to protect his head but not enough to stop him winding himself.

  He landed with a sharp explosive whump of sound, the air gushing out of his lungs. His breath in my face smelt of peppermint. His right hand had drooped where I’d dead-armed him, letting whatever it was he’d been hiding slip to the floor.

  I took a fraction of a second to scan it, just in case. It was a pink soft toy, a rabbit with long silky ears. I found myself kneeling partly on the toy animal’s body as the man who’d been carrying it struggled against my restraint.

  A pink rabbit?

  Suddenly, Ella’s voice was a piercing wail in my ear, accompanied by the stab of two tiny fists beating at my upper arm. Damn, she had a healthy punch for a four-year-old.

  “Don’t you hurt my daddy!”

  Daddy?

  My grip on the man’s throat slackened just a fraction and he didn’t need a second invitation. In a flash he had levered his body half off the floor, shoving me backwards. I fought for balance and lunged for him again, seizing his jacket at the shoulder. He gave a kind of jerking twitch, as though to jettison the coat. I yanked the back of his collar down and twisted a great handful to form makeshift handcuffs around his lower arms. Then I piled onto his back, forcing him face-first into the carpet.

  When I looked up I found the entire restaurant had frozen and were staring down at us. Harrington was on his feet, gaping at the tableau we presented in openmouthed horror.

  Sean had his body between where I had the man pinned and Simone, his eyes scouring the rest of the crowd in case this was a diversion rather than the main event.

  Simone had swept a loudly weeping Ella up into her arms. She was cradling the little girl on her hip and glaring ferociously at the man on the floor. His head was turned towards her, his nose mashed into the carpet by the pressure of my knee on the back of his neck. That might have been what had brought the tears to his eyes, or it might not.

  “Simone, baby, please listen to me,” he managed in a muffled voice, scratchy with stress. “Don’t go to America. Don’t take Ella away from me. Please-”

  “For God’s sake, Matt!” Simone snapped, and any trace of affection she’d shown for her ex when she’d spoken of him in the ladies’ room only a few minutes before had vanished, flattened out by anger and embarrassment. She leaned down towards him. “Who the hell are you to tell me what I can and can’t do?”

  “Baby, please, don’t go. You don’t need him. I love you. I’ll do anything to make it up to you. Please.” He was almost gabbling, his voice wavering between a whine and a plea. “I’m begging here.”

  “Well save your goddamn breath,” Simone told him in a savage whisper, and this time Ella didn’t bother to admonish her mother for swearing. “It’s nothing to do with you what I choose to do, or where I choose to go, or who I choose to see anymore. Get used to it!”

  She straightened, juggling a tear-streaked Ella to the other hip, and swept her eyes over Harrington’s shocked and immobile figure. He was still standing by the table, with his napkin still clutched in his hand. Si-mone’s defiant gaze met mine over the top of Matt’s tethered body.

  “I think I just changed my mind about needing a bodyguard, Charlie,” she said, her voice tired and bitter to the bone. “You’re hired.”

  Three

  By the time we got back to where Sean had parked one of his company Mitsubishi Shoguns, I knew I was in trouble. Even for Sean, he was much too quiet.

  Sean Meyer was quiet on many different planes. His hands and body were always quiet unless there was something to engage them. It made his actions all the more intense.

  Even back when he’d been one of the most feared sergeants on the Special Forces training course I’d abortively attempted in the army, he’d never had to shout and bawl in order to instill a dread respect in his trainees. The quieter he was, the more scared of him we’d all become. The clever ones, at least.

  And now, most people wouldn’t have spotted there was anything wrong. He’d been nothing but coolly professional while we’d ejected a still-protesting Matt from the restaurant and evacuated Simone and Ella to the safety of Harrington’s office at the bank, where security was tight as a matter of course. For speed we’d used Harrington’s waiting car and driver rather than retrieving our own vehicle, and I’d half-expected Sean to order me to stay with them while he went to fetch it. Instead, he ordered me along, and that was my first inkling that something was seriously awry.

  He strode along the icy pavements from the bank to the car park with an easy poise, plaiting his way smoothly between the other pedestrians, who were making their hurried assaults on the last remnants of the January sales. He moved without ever missing a step, but under the surface I could sense something simmering. It was there in the slight angle of his head, the way his arms swung fractionally tense from his shoulders.

  I held out, waiting for him to make the first move, until we’d actually reached the multistory parking structure and were on the right level, almost at the car. Then I sighed and stopped walking.

  “OK, Sean,” I said, short. “Spit it out. Don’t give me this silent treatment.”

  He deliberately kept moving so there were half a dozen paces between us before he stopped and turned. For a few moments he just stood there, staring at me, hands loose by his sides, his face that of a stranger.

  A sullen, sneaky wind whipped into the open concrete building, causing his long overcoat to flap lazily round his legs like that of a western gunslinger. It was only three in the afternoon but already the sky was darkening and the sodium lights strung across the concrete ceiling lit us both with an unearthly orange glow. The whole place smelt of diesel and burnt clutches.

  Just when I thought he wasn’t going to speak at all, when an unnamed fear had reached into my chest and squeezed my heart tight shut with it, he said:

  “You hesitated.”

  It was said flat, without inflection, but I heard the accusation as an underlying harmonic, even so.

  “I took him down,” I said, defensive. ‘And kept him there. What more do you want?”

  “It was messy. He nearly got away from you, and he wasn’t even a professional.”

  I felt my exasperation rise, partly at the harsh criticism and partly annoyance that I knew he was right. “Don’t you think you’re being overly critical? OK, so you feel I made a mistake. But I contained it—nobody else noticed. And come on, Sean—he was the kid’s father, for heaven’s sake!”

  Sean cocked his head from one side to the other, slowly, like he was shifting the weight of his thoughts. “So?” he said coolly. “What difference does that make?”

  What I’d heard of his
own father, I recalled belatedly, sketched the man as a drunken bully, both to his wife and to his children. When Sean spoke, rarely, of his father’s premature death in a largely self-induced car accident, it was with a kind of quiet resentment. It had taken me quite a while to realize that was probably because Sean had harbored a secret ambition to kill the man himself.

  I sighed. “In this case, it makes all the difference. Simone had just got through telling me how she still loves the guy. If she could be sure he was after her for herself and not just her money, she’d probably take him back in a heartbeat.”

  “That’s only a small part of the story, seen from her perspective.” Sean threw me a skeptical glance. “Quite apart from the fact that you gleaned all this from what—a two-minute conversation in the ladies’ room?” he said mildly. “Did she have time to show you a photograph while she was about it?”

  I knew where this was going but it was like playing chess with a grand master. Defeat was coming, but I didn’t begin to have the skill to fend off the inevitable.

  “No,” I said, and felt my pawns scatter as my knights fell and my queen faltered.

  He nodded briefly and went in for the kill. “So how did you know that the guy who came into the restaurant was Matt?” he said. Check. “He could have been any psycho stalker you care to name. Just because you’ve only been told about one threat doesn’t mean there won’t be others. You should know that, Charlie. You of all people.”

  His voice was gentle and he hadn’t moved, but that very stillness seethed.

  “Ella called him Daddy,” I said between my teeth, in a last-ditch castling to regroup. “He was carrying a pink rabbit.”

  “You didn’t know that until after he’d made his move —and you’d made yours,” Sean countered. He took a step towards me, then another. It took conscious effort not to retreat. “You had him under control and you let yourself be distracted. The fact that he was Ella’s father shouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference. Children are murdered by their fathers and women are murdered by their spouses every day.”

  Checkmate.

  Exasperation curled into anger like smoke into fire.

  “So I made a judgment call,” I bit out.

  “Really? Is that what you think it was?” He paused. “It was an emotional call, certainly.”

  I felt my chin come up, almost bobbing to the surface. There may as well have been a red flag attached to it for the signals it sent to him. I snapped, “Of course, and that’s a failing.”

  “In this job, yes,” he said, closing his eyes in a slow blink, like he was gathering strength. “Carry on making decisions like that in the field, and I can’t use you.”

  My mouth dried. I swallowed in reflex and tried not to make it obvious that’s what it was. But I saw him note my body’s automatic reaction with cold hard eyes, and something flickered in his face. Disappointment?

  “I can do the job,” I said, keeping my voice even only with willpower. “Haven’t I proved that to you already?”

  He paused again, just fractionally, then inclined his head in slight acquiescence. Just when I thought he’d given ground, he said, in a voice I wasn’t sure I recognized, “Prove it to me again.”

  My eyebrows arched in surprise. “What? Now?”

  He nodded, more fully this time. “Here and now.”

  I glanced around me, took in the dirty, oil-blotched concrete floor, the rows of parked cars. Both of us had shifted our stance, I realized. Sean into offense, me into defense. My elbows were bent and my hands had come up slightly, but I didn’t remember raising them.

  We both tensed as a salt-splashed BMW blipped up the ramp from the lower parking floor, then slowed as it drew level. The driver was a middle-aged woman with aggressively coiffured hair who stared at the pair of us as she crawled past. Not because she had hostile intent or was concerned for my safety, but more likely because she thought there might be a chance we were about to vacate a valuable parking space.

  When she was just past us, she braked, the rear lights flaring, and I saw her head angle towards the interior mirror. She must have realized, from our lack of movement, that we were having a standoff of some kind, that the situation was far from normal. But, would she intervene on my be-half?

  After only a moment, the car’s brake lights snapped off again and the car began to edge forwards, then quickened. No, she wouldn’t.

  My eyes went back to Sean. His body was giving off threat cues in waves, like heat. I could see them rippling outwards from his center.

  “Sean, come on—”

  “What?” he threw at me. “Do you want me to make things easy for you, is that it?”

  And that’s when I saw the knife in his left hand.

  In truth, I only saw it because he let me. Because he meant for me to do so. He was holding it concealed, with the blade slanted upwards so it was hidden by the sleeve of his coat. The hilt pointed downwards and as he spoke he’d flexed his fingers slightly to allow it to drop just into view between his forefinger and thumb. He must have palmed it just as he’d turned towards me.

  Christ.

  I stared at him and the hurt and the surprise must have been clearly visible on my face. How long have you been planning this?

  I didn’t get an answer, vocal or otherwise. As we stood facing each other I was aware of the adrenaline now punching through my system, constricting my breathing and locking my muscles as it tried to override sense and training in a stampede of panic.

  A knife. Oh, it would have to be a knife, wouldn’t it, Sean?

  I swallowed again, shrugged out of the constriction of my jacket and let it drop to the ground, using the time to make my decision.

  “OK,” I said softly, abandoning all pretense that I might still be able to dissuade him from this course. “If that’s the way you want to play it …”

  I just had time to see the gleam form in his eyes.

  “Hey, you!” yelled a voice from over to our right. “What’s going on? Back off or I’ll call the police!”

  I jumped and half-turned to cover both threats, guilty. Sean barely seemed to move, but he pocketed the knife as slickly as he’d brought it out in the first place. One moment it was there. The next, his hands were simply empty.

  A uniformed security guard was standing at the top of the far ramp, body tense. His unease was such that it was causing him to bend slightly forward at the waist, like the possibility of engagement had brought on an actual pain in his stomach. His gaze was on Sean, not me.

  “There’s nothing for them here,” Sean said calmly, raising his voice enough to be heard. Just the fact that he’d turned his focus onto the guard visibly increased the man’s anxiety.

  The guard stayed thirty meters away, unwilling to advance any farther. He had one hand clenched round the large flashlight he carried at his belt—his only weapon—and walkie-talkie in the other. Despite the distance, I could see his Adam’s apple bobbing convulsively above the button-down collar of his khaki shirt.

  He was wearing dark green trousers with a gold stripe sewn into the side of them and had the polished peak of his cap pulled well down over his forehead, military police style. Even in civilian dress, Sean had him outranked and outclassed in every way possible, and it was clear that both men knew it.

  Still, he stood his ground—I’ll give him that. ‘Are you all right, miss?” he called to me. “Is this bloke bothering you?”

  I glanced at Sean. There was nothing in his face. No heat, no light, no anger. I wondered if it counted as successfully dealing with the threat he presented if I said yes and had him arrested. I waited a beat but, if I’d been hoping to make him sweat, it didn’t work.

  “No, everything’s fine,” I said, consciously injecting some warmth into my voice to drive out any notion that I was under duress. I leaned down and picked up my jacket from where it had fallen, shaking the worst of the dirt off it. “But thank you for checking on me. Actually, we were just leaving.”

  The guard
nodded and remained by the ramp, shifting his feet uncomfortably, until Sean had crossed to the Shogun, unlocked it, and we’d both climbed inside. He finally moved away only as the engine turned over and fired. I followed my would-be protector’s progress in my door mirror. He looked back twice before he finally disappeared from my field of view.

  When I glanced over I found that Sean had sat back in his seat and was regarding me with those bottomless black eyes.

  I had a raw fluttering in my chest as reaction set in, a kind of adrenaline hangover. I knew if I reached out now he’d see that my hands were shaking, and I would not give him that satisfaction. I kept my hands together in my lap and refused to meet his eyes.

  He sighed. “I was wrong about you, Charlie,” he said evenly. His eyes flicked to the windscreen. “You’ll never know how sorry I am that I had to threaten you to find out for certain.”

  I wanted to ask, What were you trying to find out? But what I asked instead was: “So why did you?”

  The question came out stark and I knew he’d picked up on what was there between the lines, but he was silent for long enough for me to regret asking. Did I really want to know the answer?

  “Because I care about you,” he said at last, turning his head and looking straight into my eyes with such sincerity that my body lit up in reflexive response, the way a pupil reacts to light.

  So, yes, I did want to know, after all.

  He had exactly the same concentrated look on his face that he’d had when he’d pulled the knife on me. It was that, more than anything, that shut down my unexpected spike of pleasure.

  “Oh, of course,” I said with a kind of breathless little laugh that didn’t entirely obscure the bitterness in my voice. “In some cultures, coming at me with a blade could be considered almost akin to a proposal of marriage.”