DIE EASY: Charlie Fox book ten (the Charlie Fox crime thriller series)

by Sharp, Zoe

  “Yes, I’m sure,” I said grimly. “A man called Castille—he strangled her.”

  Tom O’Day looked saddened rather than shocked. “Why?”

  “It goes back to some guy who was killed a few years ago—Castille’s brother. I think Mrs van Zant was part of the cover-up.”

  Tom O’Day shrugged helplessly. “But why wait until now to—?”

  I grabbed his arm, cutting him off. I still had Sullivan’s earpiece in one ear and through it I’d just heard the sudden muted stutter of radio traffic, but there seemed to be an echo. I yanked the earpiece out. The noise came again, ahead of us and just around the next corner.

  I turned, piled into Blake Dyer and heaved him through the doorway back into the cabin, hoping Tom O’Day would get the message. He did.

  The three of us disappeared through the open doorway just as a black-clad figure appeared around the edge of the superstructure further along the deck.

  He plodded past, gun held slack. There was a cigarette dangling from the mouth-hole of his ski-mask. Stupid. Stupid and amateur.

  The burning end of the cigarette would not only negate what little night vision he had, but also give a sniper the perfect aiming point in the uncertain light.

  Shame I didn’t manage to grab that damned M16 when I had the chance.

  Tom O’Day put his lips close to my ear. “What do we do now?” he demanded in a loud whisper.

  I restrained myself from snapping back at him that we kept our mouths shut. At least until our armed opponents were far enough away not to turn around and come back if they heard that kind of a stage whisper.

  Fortunately, the sentry’s cigarette seemed to be blocking his ears as well as his arteries. He didn’t show any signs of disturbance as he walked on. I let out a long quiet breath of relief, felt rather than saw or heard Tom O’Day and Blake Dyer do the same.

  And then, in the quietness that followed, I heard another soft exhalation. I widened my eyes, as if doing so would help them see better in the gloom.

  Nothing.

  As my vision reached out I could tell we were in another small cabin. It was not much more than a storage locker, cluttered with deck chairs and old lifebelts. I made a mental note of the latter. We might need them.

  But right now I was more concerned by the fact that there were supposed to be three of us hiding in that narrow space.

  And there seemed to be four.

  Fifty-two

  It’s very difficult to convey to two comparative strangers that there’s someone else in the room, without causing panic. Especially hard when you’re restricted to sign-language in the dark.

  I closed my mind to the fact that Parker or Sean—Sean before—would have cottoned on in a heartbeat. Instead, I tried all the inventive puppetry I could think of. All that did was confuse them more.

  Eventually I gave a suppressed sigh, rose and launched myself into a stack of deck chairs behind me. It made more noise than I was happy with but there wasn’t much I could do about that.

  It was also effective.

  When I emerged I had a man with my arm around his throat and his arm locked up his back at the wrist. He was trying not to squeal.

  “Where’s that damn Maglite?” I demanded.

  I heard fumbling, then the flashlight clicked on.

  “My God,” said Tom O’Day. “What the—?Jimmy?”

  Aw, shit—not again.

  I downgraded the wrist lock from damaging to merely painful, unclamped my forearm slightly from across the kid’s throat. He began to cough and wheeze. Genuine lack of air, not an act. I let go of him completely. He went to his hands and knees and stayed like that for a minute or so while he got his breath back. In my opinion, he was playing up that part of it.

  But it was a mark of his distress—real or exaggerated—that his father and godfather did not ply him with questions until they thought he could speak again.

  I crouched on my haunches and flicked on the Maglite so it lit his face. He flinched away from the bulb.

  “Jimmy,” I said. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “What the fu—heck does it look like?” he rasped, mindful of the company. “Hiding.”

  “O–K,” I said slowly, “but last we knew you were being dragged out of the casino kicking and screaming. How did you get from there to here?”

  “How did you . . .?” He took a moment, swallowed. “They were looking for my father,” he said. “Thought I either knew where he’d be, or they could use me to tempt him out somehow.” His gaze flicked to Tom O’Day with a hint of reproach. “I told them nothing doing—told them he wouldn’t fall for that. So they tied me up and just . . . left me.”

  “They left you,” I repeated flatly. “Where?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Somewhere below decks, I guess,” he said vaguely. “By the time I got loose I didn’t much care. I just wanted out of there.” He tried a smile that faltered when it didn’t get a response.

  I remembered the sounds of struggle we’d heard before Jimmy had been removed from the casino. I tried to add nothing to my voice when I asked, “What about Morton?”

  “What about him?” Jimmy O’Day said dully. “Guy did his best to stop them taking me away—got beat up for his trouble, too.”

  I remembered that brief image of Sean going down under a barrage of black, of fists and feet. The fact he’d been able to communicate proved only that they’d left him one hand undamaged.

  And his head—don’t forget that.

  I set the flashlight down. The pool of light from the bulb spilled across the floor, illuminating his hands. They were smeared with blood. I began running my hands over Jimmy’s body. He tried to bat me away but wasn’t up to it yet. “Hey.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” I told him. “I’m just checking for injury.”

  “Well, you don’t need to,” Jimmy said, sounding offended. “I’m good.”

  I gripped his collar and forced him to meet my eyes—not an easy task.

  “So, whose is the blood?”

  He glanced down at his hands as if only noticing it for the first time. “They gave Vic a pretty nasty beating,” he said at last. “Even handcuffed the guy—and still he tried to stand up for me.”

  “But none of it’s yours?”

  “No.”

  “OK, let me get this straight,” I said mildly. “They drag you out of the casino—thrashing your bodyguard in order to do so—because they think they can force you to tell them the whereabouts of your father, which you can’t. But they don’t lay a finger on you.”

  He flushed, Adam’s apple bouncing in time with his unease, gave a nervous laugh. “When you put it like that it does sound a little . . . unlikely, I guess.”

  I thought back to Ysabeau van Zant’s final conversation with the man called Castille. He had been disappointed because she had not told him about the switch in helicopter flights—so who had? Who was in a position to communicate that change as soon as it happened? I couldn’t ignore Jimmy as a possibility. Just as I couldn’t ignore the possibility that they’d safeguarded his role by taking him out to make it look good, then told him to lie low and wait until it was all over.

  “Not as unlikely as them simply letting you go wandering the decks.”

  “But that’s not what happened. They tied me to a chair. See.” He indicated an almost invisible mark at his wrist. He could have got it from wearing his watch too tight. I was not exactly convinced.

  It was interesting to note that Jimmy’s father did not leap to his defence. It was left to his godfather to be the voice of reason.

  “Come on, now—who knows how these damn people think,” Blake Dyer said. “And why wouldn’t they turn him loose? It’s not like there was anywhere he could go.”

  But it wasn’t where he could go that bothered me. It was where he might already have been.

  Fifty-three

  I stared at Jimmy O’Day and thought back. To that bitterness I’d sensed in him. To hi
s discontent at the way his father thrust Autumn into the limelight in his stead.

  I thought back to the stricken expression on his face when the raiders had burst into the casino, right before I’d piled his father and Blake Dyer out of the room.

  And to the night of the reception at Ysabeau van Zant’s place, when he’d been so angry I’d taken him for a genuine threat.

  What might that long-term, festering resentment make him do?

  “We need to get back to the upper deck,” I said abruptly, getting to my feet. Tom O’Day and Blake Dyer followed suit more slowly. I could see they’d been hoping for a break, a rest, but they voiced no complaint.

  Plenty of time to rest when you were dead.

  I realised something else, too. That I’d become, by dint of battlefield promotion, their commander. By dint of being the most willing to commit acts of violence on the enemy. Leading from the front was always dangerous. It tended to get you killed.

  “You can’t be serious about going out there?” Jimmy O’Day demanded. “These people are armed, for God’s sake.” He gestured dismissively to the Maglite. “What are you going to do—frighten them away with shadow puppets?”

  Before I could speak, Blake Dyer put a gentle hand on his arm. “Trust me, Jimmy,” he said. “You don’t want to see the kind of damage this woman can do to a man with just a flashlight.”

  Jimmy shot me a dubious glance but stopped protesting, so at least I didn’t have to prove it. Probably for the best.

  “We’re not going out,” I said. “We’re going back in.”

  He frowned in silence. They all did. That was probably for the best, too.

  I led my increasing band of misfits out of our place of comparative safety and into relative danger again. We had two golf clubs and a flashlight between us. Jimmy O’Day had no weapon. If he had I would have taken it away from him.

  I may be foolish but I wasn’t stupid.

  There was one more thing I had to do before we ventured out again. I keyed the mic for Sean’s earpiece and told him what had happened between Castille and Ysabeau van Zant. I warned him, clear and concise, that he should keep his head down. I received a brief U.2. by way of reply.

  I had no intention of obeying that order.

  The people who’d taken over the Miss Francis were professionals. I didn’t believe that Jimmy O’Day had simply managed to free himself so easily and been left to his own devices. That didn’t leave many choices, none of which I could voice in front of his father.

  Castille’s words kept coming back to me. The fact he’d been disappointed that Ysabeau van Zant had not tipped him off about the helicopter trip—that he’d been forced to get his information from another source. They couldn’t have got aboard the boat without inside help, and Jimmy was at the top of my list. There was a chance, of course, that the hijackers had no idea who’d been helping them, but in that case why had they let him go with such apparent ease?

  And now Sullivan was going to act as a human lie detector for me.

  I didn’t need him to speak. All I needed to do was see his face when presented with Jimmy O’Day, and see Jimmy’s face when presented with Sullivan—especially with the message taped across Sullivan’s chest. It had been intended for the hijackers. It would work just as well on Jimmy.

  People have a tendency to believe things they see written down. It seems to carry more weight than a chance remark, as if nobody lies on paper.

  As we tiptoed along the intervening decks I weighed the possible outcomes. They boiled down to Jimmy reacting to Sullivan as a known or an unknown. And Sullivan reacting to Jimmy as a known or an unknown. Any combination of those reactions would give me more info than I had already. Probably. I was reminded of some US politician who’d gone on about known-knowns and known-unknowns until nobody had any idea what he was talking about.

  As we reached the cabin door I paused, waiting for them to bunch up behind me. I had only one chance to catch that first unguarded impression and I needed to be in a position where I could easily see both Jimmy’s face and that of the man we’d caught.

  Jimmy’s had to be the one I watched as I opened the door. He thought he was among friends and his face was exposed. Whatever emotions crossed Sullivan’s features would be masked by the tape he still had across his mouth and the fear of not knowing who was coming in. His eyes might tell me something, but it would be momentary at best.

  I opened the door, stepped sideways and put a hand on the small of Jimmy’s back to usher him inside.

  He stopped dead despite my urging. I saw his eyes widen, horrified.

  That, I thought, told me all I needed to know.

  Then I flicked my eyes to Sullivan and discovered that Jimmy’s reaction told me nothing at all.

  Fifty-four

  Sullivan was dead.

  Definitely, irrefutably, absolutely, dead. I didn’t have to press two fingers into the empty pulse point at his throat to confirm it, which was a good thing.

  His throat had been sliced wide open. Ear to ear. Plenty wide enough for his head to flop back rather than forwards, despite the overhang of chin and nose. The pose made the wound gape. It left all the muscle and tendons that normally held his head upright exposed and on show. In a brief glance I saw blood and froth and bisected trachea and ruin.

  Whoever had killed him had taken full advantage of his immobility, like a staked goat. That one, I knew, was on me.

  There might have been a touch of grandstanding going on. They might have grasped his hair and yanked his head up and back to tighten all the vessels and sinews. To make for an easier cut. Either way, he couldn’t help but see it coming, poor bastard.

  Or they might simply have propped him like that afterwards, on full gory display to put the fear of God into whoever found him.

  From the way Jimmy O’Day lurched sideways, gurgling in this throat as the vomit rose, I’d say the tactic worked pretty well.

  “Not over the side,” I said sharply when he would have groped for the railing at the edge of the deck.

  I hauled him back into the cabin instead. Maybe the few gulps of fresh air he’d managed to force down had fortified his stomach because he fought back the rising tide. But his whole body convulsed, one hand braced against the corner wall to support rubbery knees. Below him, seeping across the floor, Sullivan’s blood swilled with the gentle lapping movement of the ship.

  I remembered back to the first dead body I’d ever encountered. That had been cut up too—almost disembowelled—but unlike this one it had not been a fresh kill.

  Jimmy O’Day’s reaction, judged by my own experience, was entirely normal.

  I glanced at Blake Dyer and Tom O’Day. Blake’s complexion had taken on a greenish tinge but he was holding it together. Jimmy’s father was coping better. He’d been shocked by the sight of Hobson’s body but the man had been, if not a friend then at least a trusted employee. And Tom O’Day had seen service in the navy, under fire. I guessed when it came to mutilated corpses this was not his first time out.

  After a few seconds O’Day said with quiet intensity, “Who did this?”

  I shrugged. “We have a ship full of suspects. These are not exactly nice people we’re dealing with.”

  “And we are?” Blake Dyer’s face screwed up a little and his voice was hollow. “If they saw the note they might have thought he’d betrayed them.”

  I looked at him for a moment, reminded myself that strictly speaking I was no longer in his employ, with all the social niceties that entailed. “It’s possible,” I agreed.

  His mouth tightened but he nodded as if thanking me for not soft-soaping him.

  “What now?”

  I didn’t answer right away. Now we were in the light I could take a good look at Jimmy O’Day—what I could see of him with his back towards me. His hand where it leaned on the wall up by his shoulder was bloodied around the fingers but no more than that. He was wearing a dark dinner suit, so any dried spatter elsewhere might not show.
/>   So far, so inconclusive.

  But then I looked at Sullivan again. The hole in his throat was horrific. At first glance it looked as though the killing stroke had been delivered with brutal efficiency as well as effectiveness. It was hard to look closer. I edged in, as if the wound might really turn into the ragged mouth it resembled and snap at me.

  I looked beyond the obvious and saw the less obvious.

  I sidestepped Sullivan’s body and reached for Jimmy O’Day’s shoulder, spinning him away from the wall. There was spittle hanging from his lips, but despite the contortions he had not actually thrown up. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth slowly. His eyes flicked from me to his father, his godfather, and back again. Anywhere but at the corpse.