FIRST DROP: Charlie Fox book four Read online

  I swear I saw a tear start to well up in Joyce’s eye and I felt a stir of guilt at playing on the woman’s emotions like this.

  “No problem, honey, you leave the kid right here and I’ll take real good care of him for you.”

  I dug in my pocket for some of the cash Keith Pelzner had given to me that morning and pulled out a fifty. “Would you get him whatever he wants to eat until I get back?” I asked. “I’ll try to be as quick as I can.”

  She nodded and smiled, relaxed now as she followed me back to the table. I put my hand on Trey’s shoulder.

  “OK,” I said carefully, “I’m going to go and take care of Rex now, so I want you to stay here with Joyce for a while.”

  Trey opened his mouth to ask what the hell I was talking about. I surreptitiously dug my thumb into the front of his protruding collarbone hard enough to shut him up. He squirmed out from under my hand and glared at me with resentment.

  Joyce watched this display of belligerence indulgently. “Don’t you worry,” she said to me. “He’ll be just fine.” Some waitressing sixth sense made her aware then that one of the other diners was approaching the counter, clutching his bill. “I’ll be right with you,” she said and hurried away.

  “No arguments!” I warned Trey quietly when she was out of earshot. “Now, for God’s sake try to look upset about this mythical dog who’s just been run over, and stay put until I get back.”

  I straightened up, was about to turn away when he stopped me.

  “So what happens,” he said in an uncharacteristically small voice, “if you don’t come back?”

  “Trey,” I said, passing him a grim smile, “I don’t think you could be that lucky, do you?”

  It was only when I was safely in the Mercury and had pulled out onto the road that I allowed the real worry to surface. It welled up and washed over me like a blocked drain, only smelling twice as bad.

  I reached for the mobile and re-dialled the numbers for the house, Whitmarsh, and Sean, but with no joy on any of them. I stuffed the phone back into my pocket, frustrated. Instinct told me that going to the house wasn’t a good idea, that my actions were being dictated to me, but what else could I do?

  I knew this wasn’t a straightforward kidnap attempt on the boy, otherwise I would have been able to contact them by now. All the worst possibilities I could come up with flooded in, but whatever had happened, I told myself, it was better to know now.

  I considered calling the cops and letting them check it out, but then I remembered Oakley man. I couldn’t identify him by name and I hadn’t been close enough to him when he’d come to the house to read his badge number. Supposing he was the one they sent to investigate? I could try explaining the whole scenario but I knew just who the police were likely to believe first. And it wasn’t me.

  OK Fox, on your own again.

  It took less than ten minutes before I was turning into the end of the Pelzners’ road and crawling down towards the house. The dead-end layout made it impossible to do a drive-by. I was going to have to go straight in and get it over with.

  I drove slowly right to the end and swung the car in a circle, as though I was simply turning round. The house looked quiet, but then, all the houses along this road looked quiet. It was too upmarket an area to stand for untidy rowdiness on the front lawn.

  The opener for the electric gate was attached to the Mercury’s sun visor, but I didn’t want to take it right into the driveway. Instead I pulled up by the kerb next door, leaving the car facing the main road. No other vehicles had followed me into the street and none were already parked there. Nevertheless, I’d already started to sweat before I even got out of the car and it had little to do with the heat.

  I took the opener with me, walking quickly across the road and through the gap as soon as it was wide enough, then closing the gates behind me. I did a rapid circuit of the exterior of the house, checking for obvious signs of forced entry. There weren’t any.

  I even peered in through a couple of the ground-floor windows. The furniture was all in its usual carefully co-ordinated positions. Juanita and the other maids kept the place immaculate, as though in readiness for a magazine photo shoot. If Keith Pelzner had been taken from here, he – and his bodyguards – had gone without a fight.

  I went in via the door to the kitchen, which was the only one I had a key for. There was a keypad for the alarm next to it. A glance at the panel on my way in told me the system hadn’t been set.

  I did a fast sweep of the ground floor rather than a thorough search but even so there was nothing to find. No disturbance. No breakages. No sign of hurry. It was like they’d all simply got up and walked out of the front door. And then someone had sent the cleaners in.

  I carefully used the bottom of my shirt to touch the door handles. If the place had been wiped down I didn’t want mine to be the only prints they found.

  Upstairs I ran through the bedrooms in the main part of the house but they were all empty. Nothing in the drawers or the wardrobes, no personal effects at all. Even Keith’s study had been stripped of its usual mess of paper printouts and notes. His computer was gone, too.

  With my heart in my mouth, I walked along the corridor to the rooms they’d given to me and to Sean. I looked in my own first. My bag and all my clothes had been taken.

  I’d put my passport in the top drawer of the dressing table. I almost didn’t have to check to know it wouldn’t be there but I couldn’t suppress the squirt of panic when I proved myself right, even so. The feeling of being trapped with no back door out of there was suffocating me.

  I took a couple of deep breaths, acutely aware of the amount of time I’d been in the house already. The longer I was there, the greater the risk. Still I couldn’t put it off any longer. I moved from my room to Sean’s. They were next door to each other, back to back. His was a mirror image of mine.

  I knew the layout pretty well, because I’d spent the previous night there.

  ***

  I’d gone simply to talk to him. At least, that’s what I’d told myself to begin with. Not so much talk as argue, really. I was pissed off with the way the job was unfolding and he was the only one I could shout at about it.

  Ten minutes after I’d heard him go in I was outside, banging on the door. At first I thought he was avoiding me. He’d seen at dinner how annoyed I was at Whitmarsh’s automatic assumption that my sole purpose in life was to look after the kid. It was only Sean’s warning glance and his murmured, “later,” that had stopped me shooting my mouth off there and then.

  I knocked again, louder this time. I was about to give it a third go when the door opened and there was Sean, wearing nothing but a towel round his hips, water glistening across his naked upper body.

  “Sorry,” he said, rubbing at the back of his dark hair with another towel. “I was in the shower.” He stepped back, opening the door wider. “Come on in.”

  I swallowed, the action ungluing my tongue from the roof of my mouth. “Look,” I said, my anger fleeing, “you’re busy. I can come back la—”

  “Charlie,” he said, cutting me off in mid-waffle, pinning me with that deadly gaze. “Shut up and come in.”

  I did as I was told almost meekly. He shut the door and turned to face me, a smile playing round his lips. I was trying not to look at the expanse of skin on view, but I couldn’t help it.

  Even though he’d been out of the army for the best part of four years by that time, Sean was still fighting fit in the true sense of the word. Every lean inch of him was packed with the muscle of an athlete rather than a weight-lifter. He’d always been wide across the shoulders but he’d never used that as an excuse to bulk up.

  My eyes strayed to the small scar just below the point of his left shoulder. The memory of how close I’d come to losing him hit me like a blow.

  I realised Sean hadn’t moved but was just standing there without conceit watching me, watching him. I tore my eyes away, face heating, and sat down on the bed rather abruptly.
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br />   “So,” he said, “what’s on your mind?”

  The flush, which had been starting to subside, flared painfully.

  He laughed softly, then reached over to a chair and picked up a bundle of clothing. “Tell you what,” he said, “I’ll take myself out of your sight into the bathroom. You can yell at me from here.”

  It was only when he was safely in the other room that my brain seemed inclined to resume normal service. “What the hell is going on, Sean?” I demanded, trying to pick up the thread of my earlier indignation. “Did you know I was going to be here as some kind of glorified nanny?”

  “No.” His voice floated back to me. He’d left the door open just a slit and I could see him moving about behind it in a series of tantalising snatches. “I can’t start kicking up too much of a fuss about the way Whitmarsh is handling you, because as soon as he asks for a list of your previous jobs, we’re a bit snookered. It’s one of those difficult situations where nobody wants you without experience, but to get the experience . . .” I heard rather than saw him shrug. “You’ve no idea how much bullshitting you have to do to get started in this business.”

  “So I just have to bite my tongue, is that it?” I said, aware of a weary kind of resentment.

  “No,” he said again, emerging from the bathroom. This time when he appeared the towel had been replaced by a pair of dark tan chinos. But he had yet to put on a shirt, or buckle the belt. It seemed a wanton invitation.

  My eyes suddenly became fixed on the chevron of dark hair that disappeared beneath the waistband of his trousers. I could feel my body reacting, however much my mind told it not to.

  “Keep looking at me like that, Charlie,” Sean said, his voice husky, “and talking is the last thing we’re going to be doing.”

  He moved in closer, pulling me to my feet, running his fingers lightly down my arms. My skin came up in goose bumps instantly.

  “I though you’d lost interest,” I managed, suddenly breathless.

  He shook his head. “Oh no,” he said, rueful. “I’ve been going cross-eyed trying to let you move at your own pace, but I really think you ought to leave now, because otherwise I’m going to be so tempted to push you faster than you want to go.”

  I had every opportunity to move away from him then, but I didn’t. It was time. I was ready. I stepped in closer and lifted my face to his, my voice little more than a whisper. “Who says I don’t want that, too?”

  ***

  It was only later – much later – that we had resumed our conversation.

  “To go back to an earlier subject, something’s clearly wrong out here, and I think both of us are being kept in the dark about it,” Sean said, settling so I could lie with my head resting on his shoulder and listen to his heartbeat recover its steady rhythm. Above us, I could hear the quiet rustle of the ceiling fan as it gently cooled the sweat on our bodies.

  “I know,” I said. “While you were out today a taxi arrived to take Keith and Trey to the airport.”

  “The airport?” Sean queried. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, I spoke to the driver myself, until Keith came out and made out like he hadn’t ordered a taxi, it was all some big mistake. He was getting quite irate, though it was hard to tell if that was because the taxi had turned up at all, or because I’d intercepted it.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, in the end Keith paid the guy off and he went away swearing merrily in that cheery way of disappointed taxi drivers the world over.”

  I felt rather than saw Sean smile into the darkness. “So,” he said, “is Keith planning a great escape, or is somebody just trying to wind him up?”

  “You think there might be something serious going on here after all?”

  He shrugged slightly. “Could be.”

  I started to shift round to face him. As I did so my hand brushed against something cold and hard under the pillow. I hardly needed more than that to identify the object for what it was.

  “Sean,” I said, my voice calm, “why have you got a gun under your pillow?”

  “It could just be that I’m pleased to see you,” he said. He eased away from me, leaning across to flick on the bedside light.

  I blinked for a moment, propping myself up on one elbow while he retrieved the gun. It was a SIG Sauer 9mm pistol, a P225 – similar to the one I’d used in Germany but without the double-stacked magazine, giving it a slimmer profile.

  “How the hell did you manage to get that onto a plane?”

  He grinned at my consternation. “I didn’t,” he said. “I was working out here a couple of years ago and I left this behind. All I did this time was detour on my way from the airport and pick it up.”

  “Does Gerri Raybourn know you’re carrying?”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said, “and that’s how I aim to keep it. I learned the hard way never to play all your aces at once.”

  “So,” I said, “what happens now?”

  “Well give me a minute, Charlie,” he said, mocking. “I’m only human.”

  I shot him what I hoped was a stern glance. “That wasn’t what I meant.”

  “OK, OK,” he said, laughing. “I’ve arranged a meeting with Ms Raybourn tomorrow while you’re baby-sitting Trey at the theme park. By the time you get back I should have some answers, otherwise we’re on the next plane out of here.”

  “Just do me one favour.”

  “What?”

  I nodded to the SIG. “Take that with you,” I said. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

  “Don’t worry,” Sean said. “I wasn’t planning on going anywhere without it.”

  ***

  Now, I walked into the room that had been Sean’s and looked around me. It was as empty and as lifeless as my own, as though he’d never been there at all. On impulse I picked up one of the pillows, just to see if it still smelt of him. I sat down on the bed and pressed my face into the cotton cover. The faintest trace of his aftershave still lingered somewhere in the fabric.

  But as I went to put the pillow down again I noticed something just sticking out from under the sheet. When I pulled the covers back there it was.

  Sean’s SIG.

  I picked the gun up slowly, slipped the magazine out and saw that it was fully loaded. And suddenly a rush of emotion came rocketing up out of the depths of nowhere and hit me in the face. Tears exploded. I sat there, on my own in a deserted house, clutching a gun and sobbing my guts out.

  Sean had said he wouldn’t leave the house unarmed, and that could mean one of two things. Either he’d been taken prisoner, against his will.

  Or he was already dead.

  Four

  I left the house the same way I got into it, locking the kitchen door behind me and wiping the handle once I was done. My search had told me everything and nothing. But had it been worth the risk?

  At least I’d managed to find a fresh shirt. None of my own clothes were where I’d left them, but I remembered seeing something crumpled up behind the small bar by the pool. I made a small detour through the lanai and found it, a rather tatty man’s striped shirt with a white collar and cuffs. Still, it didn’t look so bad once I’d put it on and rolled the sleeves back three or four times. It had the added advantage that at least it didn’t have blood on it.

  The tails were long, almost down to the bottoms of my shorts, but I left them untucked nevertheless. At least that way it covered the fact I’d shoved Sean’s SIG into the back of my waistband. The gun was momentarily chill against my skin but it took on body heat fast. I couldn’t deny that the weight of it was reassuring.

  I’d splashed cold water on my face in the bathroom before I’d ventured out. It had taken down some of the puffiness around my eyes and the redness out of my nose. Still, it didn’t take a genius to spot I’d been crying like a spoilt kid. I had eleven years on Trey, but right now I felt little better than his baby sister.

  I slipped through the smallest gap in the gates, closing them behind me. Outside,
beneath the dappled shade of the rows of palm trees, the street looked as quiet and deserted as it had done when I’d arrived. I tried to use its very normality to calm my shattered nerves.

  I’d almost made it back to the Mercury when a man’s voice froze me in my tracks.

  “Hey there!”

  After the briefest hesitation, I kept walking, picking up the pace. The man called again and this time I heard his footsteps approaching behind me.

  Just for a second, I considered the wisdom of drawing the gun but dismissed it just as quickly. The SIG was my safety net. My last resort. I wasn’t quite that far gone yet.

  I halted, turned, trying to contrive a faintly irritated expression. Behind me a trim upright guy in his early sixties was hurrying down the paved driveway of the house next door.