by Zoe Sharp
Fox Five Reloaded: Charlie Fox Short Story Collection
‘Charlie Fox. In small bites. With sharp teeth.’
This is a revamped and extended edition of the Fox Five collection of short stories by the highly acclaimed crime thriller writer, Zoë Sharp. It includes the original five stories, plus another four, available in one volume for the first time. All these tales feature ex-Special Forces soldier turned self-defence expert and bodyguard, Charlotte ‘Charlie’ Fox.
A Bridge Too Far
Postcards From Another Country
Served Cold*
Off Duty
Truth And Lies
Across The Broken Line
Kill Me Again Slowly
Risk Assessment
Hounded
*Nominated for the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) UK Short Story Dagger Award
Zoë Sharp’s short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Strand Magazine, as well as award-winning anthologies in the UK and USA. They have been used in school textbooks, turned into short films, included in many Best Of collections, and nominated twice for the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Short Story Dagger.
FOX FIVE RELOADED
Charlie Fox short story collection
Zoë Sharp
Contents
Also by Zoë Sharp
Author’s Note
Introduction
1. A Bridge Too Far
2. Postcards From Another Country
3. Served Cold
4. Off Duty
5. Truth And Lies
6. Across The Broken Line
7. Kill Me Again Slowly
8. Risk Assessment
9. Hounded
Afterword
About Zoë Sharp
The stories so far…
Also by Zoë Sharp
the Charlie Fox series
KILLER INSTINCT: #1
RIOT ACT: #2
HARD KNOCKS: #3
CHARLIE FOX: THE EARLY YEARS (eBooks 1,2,3)
FIRST DROP: #4
ROAD KILL: #5
SECOND SHOT: #6
CHARLIE FOX: BODYGUARD (eBooks 4,5,6)
THIRD STRIKE: #7
FOURTH DAY: #8
FIFTH VICTIM: #9
DIE EASY: #10
ABSENCE OF LIGHT: #11
FOX HUNTER: #12
BAD TURN: #13
TRIAL UNDER FIRE: prequel
FOX FIVE RELOADED: short story collection
the CSI Grace McColl & Detective Nick Weston
Lakes crime thriller trilogy
DANCING ON THE GRAVE: #1
BONES IN THE RIVER: #2
standalone crime thrillers
THE BLOOD WHISPERER
AN ITALIAN JOB (with John Lawton)
NEW: the Blake & Byron thrillers
THE LAST TIME SHE DIED (Oct 2021)
www.ZoeSharp.com/vip-mailing-list
“If you don't like Zoë Sharp there's something wrong with you. Go and live in a cave and get the hell out of my gene pool! There are few writers who go right to the top of my TBR pile—Zoë Sharp is one of them.”—bestselling author, Stuart MacBride
“Male and female crime fiction readers alike will find Sharp’s writing style addictively readable.”—Paul Goat Allen, Chicago Tribune
“Scarily good.”—bestselling author, Lee Child
“Whenever I turn the first page on a Charlie Fox novel, I know that her creator is going to serve up a complex, fast-paced military-grade action romp than can hold its head high in the male-dominated thriller world.”—Linda Wilson, Crime Review UK
“Zoë Sharp is one of the sharpest, coolest, and most intriguing writers I know. She delivers dramatic, action-packed novels with characters we really care about.”—bestselling author, Harlan Coben
“This is hard-edged fiction at its best.”—Michele Leber, Booklist starred review for Fifth Victim
“Superb.”—bestselling author, Ken Bruen
“Every book in this suspenseful series opens with a scene that grabs the reader by the throat and doesn’t let go until the final page… Sharp creates some of the best action sequences in fiction… Don’t miss out on one of the best thriller writers around.”—Ted Hertel Jr, Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine
“The bloody bar fights are bloody brilliant, and Charlie’s skills are formidable and for real.”—Marilyn Stasio, New York Times, on Killer Instinct
“I highly recommend this series!”—bestselling author, Ian Rankin
“What I love about this series is the fact that Zoë Sharp pulls the reader into every scenario—creates a world where you are part of the action and then leaves you gasping for breath as the final conclusion comes around. It’s a total experience and one I look forward to each and every time!”—Noelle Holten, Crime Book Junkie
“Zoë Sharp and Charlie Fox both kick ass.” bestselling author, Mark Billingham
Author’s Note
As an author, I hugely appreciate all the feedback, reviews, and ratings my books receive from my readers. It helps others make an informed decision before they buy. If you enjoy this book, please consider leaving a brief review or a rating on goodreads or on the retailer site where you made your purchase.
Links can be found at www.ZoeSharp.com.
THANK YOU!
Introduction
Meet Charlotte ‘Charlie’ Fox—ex-Special Forces soldier turned self-defence expert and bodyguard—protagonist of Zoë Sharp’s award-winning, highly acclaimed crime thriller series.
“Ill-tempered, aggressive and borderline psychotic, Fox is also compassionate, introspective and highly principled: arguably one of the most enigmatic—and coolest—heroines in contemporary genre fiction.” Paul Goat Allen, Chicago Tribune
In A Bridge Too Far, we meet Charlie Fox before she’s become a professional in the world of close protection. When she agrees to hang out with the local Dangerous Sports Club, she has no idea how soon it will live up to its name.
Postcards From Another Country has Charlie Fox guarding the ultra-rich Dempsey family against attempted assassination—no matter where the danger lies.
A finalist for the CWA Short Story Dagger, Served Cold puts another tough woman centre stage—the mysterious Layla, with betrayal in her past and murder in her heart.
Off Duty finds Charlie Fox taking time away from close protection after injury. She still finds trouble, even in an out-of-season health spa in the Catskill Mountains.
A longer story than the others, Truth And Lies puts all Charlie Fox’s skills and ingenuity to the test as she has to single-handedly extract a news team from a rapidly escalating war zone.
And now, for Fox Five Reloaded, there are another FOUR Charlie Fox stories included.
In Across The Broken Line, we follow Charlie Fox through a fragmented timescale of cross and double-cross as she fights to keep her principal alive—whoever that might turn out to be.
Taking on the bad guys is hard enough for Charlie Fox in the real world, never mind in the alternate reality of Kill Me Again Slowly, where literally anything could happen. (Originally included in the Anthony Award-winning anthology, Murder Under The Oaks.)
In Risk Assessment, a serial killer’s method of selecting his victims is immaculately conceived and carried out with ruthless precision and seemingly nothing left to chance. But sometimes even the most carefully thought-out plans can go awry.
And finally, Hounded is my take on the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle classic, Hound Of The Baskervilles. This was originally written for the anthology For The Sake Of The Game, short stories inspired by the Sherlock Holmes’ canon. My version brings Holmes into modern day and into contact with Charlie Fox. But Charlie isn’t staying on the moors hunting the infamous hound. She h
as altogether different prey in mind…
1
A Bridge Too Far
This was the very first short story I ever wrote featuring Charlie Fox.
The story is set at roughly the same point in her life as the opening book in the series, Killer Instinct, when Charlie is living in Lancashire in the UK and making a living teaching self-defence to local women.
She has been out of the Army for several years by this time, but has not yet plunged into a new career in close protection. Such a possibility is a long way from her mind, even though she already demonstrates the cool-headedness in a crisis that makes her so well suited for the job.
A Bridge Too Far came about because I was invited to submit a story for the UK Crime Writers’ Association short story anthology, Green For Danger: Crimes In The Country, by the editor, Martin Edwards. (I did not tell him that I had never attempted a short story before until after he had accepted it for publication.) But as soon as Martin mentioned the requirement of a rural setting, a true story sprang to mind.
Some years ago a friend told me about being a member of a local Dangerous Sports Club. Bicycle abseiling was one of their pursuits, if I remember right—and yes, that is just as crazy as it sounds.
Bridge swinging was another speciality, which did indeed take place from an old disused railway viaduct that stretched across a farmer’s field. And the farmer did indeed object to their activities for exactly the reason stated in this story.
But after that, all bets were off and I let my imagination take hold.
As well as the original CWA anthology, A Bridge Too Far also appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.
I watched with a kind of horrified fascination as the boy climbed onto the narrow parapet. Below his feet, the elongated brick arches of the old viaduct stretched, so I’d been told, exactly one hundred and twenty-three feet to the ground. He balanced on the crumbling brickwork at the edge, casual and unconcerned.
My God, I thought, He’s going to do it. He’s actually going to jump.
“Don’t prat around, Adam,” one of the others said. I was still sorting out their names. Paul, that was it. He was a medical student, tall and bony with a long almost roman nose. “If you’re going to do it, do it, or let someone else have their turn.”
“Now now,” Adam said, wagging a finger. “Don’t be bitchy.”
Paul glared at him, took a step forwards, but the cool blonde-haired girl, Diana, put a hand on his arm.
“Leave him alone, Paul,” Diana said, and there was a faint snap to her voice. She’d been introduced as Adam’s girlfriend, so I suppose she had the right to be protective. “He’ll jump when he’s ready. You’ll have your chance to impress the newbies.”
She flicked unfriendly eyes in my direction as she spoke but I didn’t rise to it. Heights didn’t draw or repel me the way I knew they did with most people but that didn’t mean I was inclined to throw myself off a bridge to prove my courage. I’d already done that at enough other times, in enough other places.
Beside me, my friend Sam muttered under his breath, “OK, I’m impressed. No way are you getting me up there.”
I grinned at him. It was Sam who’d told me about the local Dangerous Sports Club who trekked out to this disused viaduct in the middle of nowhere. There they tied one end of a rope to the far parapet and brought the other end up underneath between the supports before tying it round their ankles.
And then they jumped.
The idea, as Sam explained it, was to propel yourself outwards as though diving off a cliff and trying to avoid the rocks below. I suspected this wasn’t an analogy with resonance for either of us, but the technique ensured that when you reached the end of your tether, so to speak, the slack was taken up progressively and you swung backwards and forwards under the bridge in a graceful arc.
Jump straight down, however, and you would be jerked to a stop hard enough to break your spine. They used modern climbing rope with a fair amount of give in it but it was far from the elastic gear required by the bungee jumper. That was for wimps.
Sam knew the group’s leader, Adam Lane, from the nearby university, where Sam was something incomprehensible to do with computers and Adam was the star of the track and field teams. He was one of these magnetic golden boys who breezed effortlessly through life, always looking for a greater challenge, something to set their heartbeat racing. And for Adam the unlikely pastime of bridge swinging, it seemed, was it.
I hadn’t believed Sam’s description of the activity and had made the mistake of expressing my scepticism out loud. So, here I was on a bright but surprisingly nippy Sunday morning in May, waiting for the first of these lunatics to launch himself into the abyss.
Now, though, Adam put his hands on his hips and breathed in deep, looking around with a certain intensity at the landscape. His stance, up there on the edge of the precipice, was almost a pose.
We were halfway across the valley floor, in splendid isolation. The tracks to this Brunel masterpiece had been long since ripped up and carted away. The only clue to their existence was the footpath that led across the fields from the lay-by on the road where Sam and I had left our motorbikes. The other cars there, I guessed, belonged to Adam and his friends.
The view from the viaduct was stunning, the sides of the valley curving away at either side as though seen through a fish-eye lens. It was still early, so that the last of the dawn mist clung to the dips and hollows, and it was quiet enough to hear the world turning.
“Hello there! Not starting without us, are you?” called a girl’s cheery voice, putting a scatter of crows to flight, breaking the spell. A flash of annoyance passed across Adam’s handsome features.
A young couple was approaching. Like the other three DSC members, they were wearing high-tech outdoor clothing—lightweight trousers you can wash and dry in thirty seconds, and lairy-coloured fleeces.
The boy was short and muscular, a look emphasised by the fact he’d turned his coat collar up against the chill, giving him no neck to speak of. He tramped onto the bridge and almost threw his rucksack down with the others.
“What’s the matter, Michael?” Adam said, his voice a lazy taunt. “Get out of bed on the wrong side?”
The newcomer gave him a single, vicious look and said nothing.
The girl was shorter and plumper than Diana. Her gaze flicked nervously from one to the other, latching onto the rope already secured round Adam’s legs as if glad of the distraction. “Oh Adam, you’re never jumping today are you?” she cried. “I didn’t think you were supposed to—”
“I’m perfectly OK, Izzy darling,” Adam drawled. His eyes shifted meaningfully towards Sam and me, then back again.
Izzy opened her mouth to speak, closing it again with a snap as she caught on. Her pale complexion bloomed into sudden pink across her cheekbones and she bent to fuss with her own rucksack. She drew out a stainless steel flask and held it up like an offering. “I brought coffee.”
“How very thoughtful of you, Izzy dear,” Diana said, speaking down her well-bred nose at the other girl. “You always were so very accommodating.”
Izzy’s colour deepened. “I’m not sure there’s enough for everybody,” she went on, dogged. She nodded apologetically to us. “No-one told me there’d be new people coming. I’m Izzy, by the way.”
“Sam Pickering,” Sam put in, “and this is Charlie Fox.”
Izzy smiled a little shyly, then a sudden thought struck her. “You’re not thinking of joining are you?” she said in an anxious tone. “Only, it’s not certain we’re going to carry on with the club for much longer.”
“’Course we are,” Michael said brusquely, raising his dark stubbled chin out of his collar for the first time. “Just because Adam has to give up, no reason for the rest of us to pack it in. We’ll manage without him.”
The others seemed to hold their breath while they checked Adam’s response to this dismissive declaration, but he seemed to have lost interest in the squabbles of lesser
mortals. He continued to stand on the parapet, untroubled by the yawning drop below him, staring into the middle distance like an ocean sailor.
“That’s not the only reason we might have to stop,” the tall bony boy, Paul said. “In fact, here comes another right now.”
He nodded across the far side of the field. We all turned and I noticed for the first time that a man on a red Honda quad bike was making a beeline for us across the dewy grass.
“Oh shit,” Michael muttered. “Wacko Jacko. That’s all we need.”
“Who is he?” Sam asked, watching the purposeful way the quad was bearing down on us.
“He’s the local farmer,” Paul explained. “He owns all the land round here and he’s dead against us using the viaduct, but it’s a public right of way and legally he can’t stop us. That doesn’t stop the old bugger coming and giving us a hard time every Sunday.”
“Mr Jackson’s a strict Methodist you see,” Izzy said quietly as the quad drew nearer. “It’s not trespassing that’s the problem—it’s the fact that when the boys jump, well, they do tend to swear a bit. I think he objects to the blasphemy.”