FIRST DROP: Charlie Fox book four Read online

  I glanced up at him, tried to force a smile that took more effort to produce than the end result was worth. “I’ve just called Gerri Raybourn,” I told him. “She’s coming to pick us up.”

  His face spasmed momentarily, like a kid let out with the grown-ups who’s just been told it’s bedtime. “When?” he demanded.

  I shrugged. “Soon, I expect,” I said.

  It occurred to me then that Gerri might have been just the person to ask what had really happened to Trey’s mother. If the company carried out any kind of background checks before they took people on, a suspicious disappearance of a spouse was just the kind of thing that should have jumped out at them. They must have looked into it further. Still, I suppose there would be time enough to find that out later, once the kid was off my hands.

  Trey was fidgeting, but he stilled when he caught my inquiring glance. “I kinda don’t trust her,” he mumbled.

  This time I didn’t have to push the smile out. “Neither do I – not entirely, which is why I’ve told her we’re in the room across the way,” I admitted. “We’ll watch from here what she does when she arrives before we go out there.”

  That got me a quick, unexpected grin. I blinked, and it came to me that Trey must have been a pretty-faced child. Once he’d got over the gawkiness and the tantrums, the acne and the braces, he would no doubt turn into an attractive adult. His mother must have been a looker, I concluded, because he certainly didn’t get that side of his genetic make-up from Keith.

  “So we wait here, yeah?” he said. And just when I thought he’d been doing some rapid growing up, he added with a hint of his old whingey tone, “I’m hungry.”

  There was no way I was going to go out to the diner, and I vetoed Trey’s idea that we should order in pizza, even though there was a menu from a local takeaway next to the TV. In the end we compromised on raiding the vending machine I’d spotted at the top of the stairs when we came up. There had been a bank of them offering everything from cans of soft drink to snacks, as well as an ice maker.

  I used some of the stash of money Keith had given to me that morning. There was still a heap of it left and I was glad I hadn’t given in to Trey’s whim on the leather jacket. Even with Gerri Raybourn on her way to get us out of here, it was always good to have a contingency fund.

  We went to the vending machines together and I let Trey have a free hand with the food. He seemed intent on grabbing one of just about everything in the glass-fronted machine, stabbing at the selection buttons so fast I couldn’t follow him. By the time we’d gathered an armload each I was anxious to get back to the safety of the room.

  It was past six now, but the temperature was still as balmy as an English summer day. The light was starting to drop fast, though, the sky a vast wash of turquoise and shell pink. Already the cars on the road outside had their headlamps on. I wondered what was keeping Gerri, how long it would take her to get to us from Miramar. I hadn’t been to the company itself, had only a vague idea of the distance involved from a glance at the map.

  As Trey fiddled with the key to get us in I scanned the car park, but there was nothing untoward. The room opposite our own was still in darkness.

  We sat on one of the beds and inspected our haul. I had no clue what most of it was, and it seemed he’d dropped in one or two surprises.

  “My God,” I said, suddenly finding myself trying to bite through a piece of spiced conveyor belt webbing. “What the hell is this?”

  “Teriyaki beef jerky,” he said, tearing a chunk off with his teeth and chewing with his mouth open. “You like it?”

  “I’m sure it would come in very useful if I was training a dog, but otherwise? No.”

  Trey laughed and started to come back with a smart remark, but then I heard the sound of a car engine pulling in slowly off the road and I held my hand up for quiet. For once he shut up straight away.

  I hopped off the bed and clicked the light out before easing the curtain aside. A dark-coloured Chevy saloon was idling in the middle of the car park. As I watched, the front doors opened and two men climbed out, giving the whole area a thorough but apparently casual scrutiny as they did so.

  One was thickset, running downhill from muscular towards just plain fat but he moved lightly, like he didn’t know it yet. He was going bald from the front in a big way, leaving a two-inch band of short-cropped hair around the back of his head from ear to ear. The other guy was younger, black, and in great shape by comparison. I recognised both of them the moment they stepped out of the car.

  “Hey, it’s Mr Whitmarsh and Chris.” Trey was by my shoulder now, looking down. “Let’s go.”

  Still wary, I grabbed his arm. If Keith and Sean were out of the picture, how had these two escaped unscathed? “Not yet,” I said. “Let’s see what they do first, hmm?”

  The two men strolled towards the block opposite, still checking around them, but to my surprise they ignored the stairs. “Now why aren’t they going to the right room?” I wondered out loud, more to myself than to Trey. “I know I told Gerri the far left-hand room on the first floor.”

  “That’s where they’re heading,” Trey said, sounding confused. “We’re on the second floor.”

  I stared at him. It hadn’t occurred to me that the Americans would refer to the ground floor as the first, and the first floor as the second. I shifted my eyes back to the room below the one I thought I’d indicated. There was a light on and I could see somebody moving around behind the curtains.

  “Oh shit,” I muttered.

  Whitmarsh and Chris were at the door now. I expected to see them knock and wait, but Chris pulled a silenced semiautomatic out from under his jacket and calmly put two rounds through the door around the lock. He did it smoothly, without hesitation. This had been the plan from the start, not some last-minute impulse decision.

  Jim Whitmarsh reared back and kicked the door, using his arms for balance. Whoever was inside the room can’t have put the safety hook across, or maybe it was just weakly mounted. Jim was a big guy and he looked like he’d done this kind of thing before. The door broke open with a crack, bouncing back against the inside wall. By the time the two men dived through the doorway, they both had a gun out.

  I froze, drenched in shock. Whatever I’d been expecting, that wasn’t it.

  “Jesus,” I muttered, “What the hell are they—?”

  Because of the silencers we didn’t hear the sound of the shots, and the muzzle flashes were reduced to little spurts of light, spilling out from the open doorway. I desperately tried to remember who’d been in there, but I hadn’t seen anybody, hadn’t known the room was occupied.

  And even if I had it wouldn’t have made any difference, I realised with a sick taste at the back of my throat. I simply hadn’t known that I’d given Gerri Raybourn directions to the wrong room.

  “What’s that?” Trey asked in a small voice. “What are they doing in there?”

  For a moment I couldn’t answer. Then Whitmarsh and Chris reappeared, stalking out, moving fast. The set of their shoulders betrayed their anger. Whitmarsh tucked the gun away under his arm, bringing out a mobile phone and hitting speed-dial. Whoever he was ringing must have been waiting for the call.

  “They’re not here,” I heard him say tightly into the phone, his voice loud with anger and tension. “How the hell should I know?” There was a pause while the person at the other end of the line had their say. “OK,” he added, glancing back at the room briefly. “You’d better send a clean-up crew out to the motel.”

  He snapped the phone shut again and they both climbed back into the Chevy before swinging out of the car park. The whole thing took less than three minutes.

  The door to the room they’d burst into was still standing open and I eyed it with major apprehension. Everything in me was screaming to get out of there, to run and keep running but I knew I couldn’t do it without knowing what devastation I’d caused, however unwittingly.

  “Stay here,” I said to Trey. “I’m goin
g to have a look.”

  I could hardly see his face in the gloom, but I took his silence for compliance. I let myself out of the room, shutting the door quickly behind me. Despite the onset of evening it was still pleasantly warm outside, with the cicadas clicking constantly in the background.

  I moved to the stairwell and hurried down it. The motel’s outside lights had come on and there weren’t any shadows to offer a comforting hiding place to linger. I was just going to have to get this over with as quickly as I could.

  Nevertheless, once I’d reached the far block I paused at the doorway to the room, feeling Trey watching me from the other side of the car park but unable to walk straight in. Come on, Fox, where’s your courage?

  When I stepped over the threshold, I needed all of it.

  A girl lay sprawled over the bed, limbs flung wide. She had clearly just got out of the shower when they’d killed her. There was a bath towel knotted loosely around her body, and another around her head like a turban.

  She’d been shot twice in the body, the blood a livid stain against the white cotton of the towel, splashing up the wall behind and across the same floral bedspread as in our own room.

  I stood for a moment and stared down at her, this girl whose death I was ultimately responsible for. She was young, maybe in her early twenties, but she could even have been still in her teens.

  From the bathroom came the sound of running water. I moved through there and found her boyfriend had never made it out of the shower before they’d shot him, too.

  He must have grabbed at the plastic curtain as he’d fallen, snapping it off the rail and pulling it on top of him as he’d gone down. He sat slumped in a corner of the bath with the water still beating down on his head and bubbling across his open staring eyes. It hit the wall behind him, washing the last traces of his blood away down the drain. An expression of horror was forever frozen on his youthful features.

  Without the curtain to hold it back, the bathroom floor was already flooded. I didn’t venture in. I didn’t need to in order to know there was nothing I could do for either of them. I turned and walked out, using the tail of my shirt to pull the splintered door as far closed as I could behind me.

  As I walked back across the car park I felt nothing inside me but a cold, brightly burning rage against Whitmarsh, and Chris, and Gerri Raybourn. They would pay for this. At that precise point I had no idea how but, in the end, they would pay.

  I would make sure of it.

  Six

  I took the steps back up to the room two at a time and knocked on the door twice in the time it took Trey to get his skinny backside off the bed and let me in. He took one look at my face and backed away from me.

  “What was it?” he demanded, but he looked like that was a question he didn’t really want an answer to.

  I didn’t give him one. Instead I grabbed the thin plastic bag out of the unused rubbish bin and swept the remaining snacks off the bed into it.

  “Come on,” I said, twisting the top of the bag shut. “We’re leaving.”

  Trey didn’t say anything further as we walked out of the room. I slipped the key into my pocket on the way out, even though I had no intention of using it again.

  As we reached the bottom of the stairs a crowd of people had gathered round the doorway to the ground-floor room on the other side of the car park. A fat woman in the kind of loud check trousers you normally only see on a golf course pushed to the front to have a better look, then started screaming when she got what she was after. Trey faltered. I hooked my hand under his elbow and kept him moving all the way to the Mercury, which was still sitting behind the diner next door.

  It was only as we pulled out into traffic that he finally spoke.

  “There were people in there, weren’t there?” he said, curiously neutral. “Are they, like, dead?”

  I took my eyes off the road briefly to glance at his set face in the flashes of reflected light from the shop fronts and restaurants along the sides of the road.

  “Yes.”

  He nodded and swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Then he said, “Why would Chris and Mr Whitmarsh do that?” and his voice was nearly plaintive, as though it wasn’t fair.

  There wasn’t an easy way to say it. So, better to say it fast and get it over with. “Because they thought it was us.”

  I’d come to that conclusion almost as soon as I’d walked in on the scene. In the split-second it would have taken Whitmarsh to take a bead and fire, he wouldn’t have had time to recognise that the girl who’d just got out of the shower wasn’t the me he’d been told to expect. Not with a towel covering her hair and shock distorting her face.

  And after that? Well, maybe they were just being tidy. It still didn’t tell me if they were trying to take Trey alive, or if they’d wanted him dead from the outset.

  “If they’re the ones trying to kill us, why did you call them and tell them where to find us?” he asked now, and the sudden anger in his tone made me wary.

  “Trey, I didn’t know they were going to do that and anyway, I thought I’d directed them to the room above,” I said, not liking the defensiveness that was creeping in when it should have been cool command. “I thought I’d sent them to a room that was empty.”

  “Yeah, you thought,” he threw back, half twisting in his seat to face me. “Jesus!” He shook his head. “Just how long have you been a bodyguard, Charlie? How many VIPs have you saved, huh?”

  I waited a beat before I answered. The temptation to lie was great, but I knew in the long run it wouldn’t get me anywhere. “Well, if you count,” I said, “then you’re the first.”

  He slumped back, letting his arms lift then flop back to his sides as though weighted down with despair.

  “Oh man,” he muttered, “we are so screwed.”

  ***

  For no particular reason other than the fact I recognised the road number, I headed north on A1A. We were travelling parallel with the Atlantic and somewhere over to my right endless rollers crashed and broke in the darkness.

  For a time we drove in silence. I kept strictly to the speed limit, indicating religiously whenever I changed lanes and stopping for amber lights as well as reds. I was being so legal it was downright suspicious but I suddenly couldn’t remember how to drive any more casually.

  I don’t know what thoughts were tumbling around inside Trey’s head. I was too occupied with my own to care.

  The first couple of times I’d seen dead bodies I’d been physically sick. At least that hadn’t happened this time. Perhaps my stomach was hardening with experience, or perhaps it was simply because the murdered couple in the motel room were complete strangers.

  Then I thought of Sean, who was so much more than a stranger to me, and felt the familiar twist in my gut, the hollowness up under my ribcage and the slight buzzing in my ears. I dropped the window a couple of inches and gulped at the blast of warm air it allowed into the car.

  Trey recognised my moment of weakness mostly for what it was. “You gonna hurl?” he demanded.

  “No,” I said firmly. I took a final breath and wound the window back up again. The Mercury’s air conditioning immediately returned the interior to its former temperate state. The moment passed.

  We were moving further out of the built-up area now. The buildings had thinned out and were punctuated by longer and longer clumps of scrubby trees and palms. I found my fingers had locked into tense claws round the steering wheel and I flexed them a few times, trying to relax a little more with every mile we were putting between us and the motel. I’d almost begun to think we might have made it clear.

  And then, just at that moment, I saw the flashing lights come on in the rear-view mirror.

  The cop didn’t switch his sirens on straight away, as though he didn’t want to spook us into running. He started out just with the lights. It was only after I’d ignored the first three or four convenient places to pull over that he hit the loud button.

  Trey jerked upright as the
screeching wail started up and squirmed round in his seat to stare out through the back screen.

  “Aw shit,” he said. “You gonna stop, or what?”

  “What, probably,” I murmured. I reached behind me, awkwardly, with my right hand and pulled the SIG out from under my shirt. I wedged the wheel with my knee just long enough to yank back the slide with my left hand, snapping the first round into the breech. Then I stuck the gun just far enough under my thigh so that it was out of sight of anyone leaning in through the window, but within easy reach.

  I glanced over at Trey. He was staring transfixed at the little bit of the pistol grip that he could see peeping out from between the seat cushion and my leg. When he lifted widened eyes to mine they were suddenly a whole lot more guarded than they had been.