Second Shot

Fourteen

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment of my waking. It wasn’t like just flicking a switch between oblivion and reality. Instead, I made the transition slowly, merging the edges of one into the other, until it was all just a slurred emulsion of violent dreams and pain and darkness and hazy memories and odd moments of utter peace.

Then, finally, I opened my eyes and found that they were prepared to stay open without dragging me downwards again like a doomed submariner. Everything crowded in on me in a thunderous rush, too much information to take in, arriving much too fast.

I squinted in the harsh light and found I was lying on my back in what could only be a hospital bed. Hospitals look the same and feel the same and smell the same, the industrialized world over.

There was a foul taste on my tongue and an oxygen mask covering my nose and mouth. I had the strange feeling of being one stage disconnected from the rest of my body. But at least I had a body to feel disconnected from. So, I’d definitely imagined my own death.

But I hadn’t imagined Simones.

I squeezed my eyes shut, blocked it out, shied away from it. I wasn’t ready to face that. Not yet.

I tried a few small experimental wriggles of my extremities. Both feet checked in, although flexing my toes on the left side caused someone to start burning a hole through my thigh with a blowtorch.

The fingers of my left hand came online as normal, but my right hand seemed to be having some difficulty complying with the simplest of commands.

I stilled, trying not to panic, then tried again, telling myself there was a perfectly reasonable explanation. Maybe I’d been lying on my arm in my sleep. Hell, I could have been like that for days-weeks, for all I knew. No wonder the damn thing was numb.

Because that’s all it was, just asleep. I was not-was not-paralyzed. I shut my eyes and focused all my will on moving my right arm. How the hell do you do that consciously? I’d never had to think about it before. The idea of reaching out for something had always just formed in my mind and, before I knew it, my hand was already acting on that impulse, in every sense.

Only now it wasn’t.

Eventually, with a sluggish reluctance, my arm began to obey me. Movement, however small, sent a rippling ache up through my shoulder into my back. There was a blunted feel to the discomfort-the effects of the morphine, most likely.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, taking a perverse pleasure in the fiery stab in my ribs that it caused. Pain meant feeling, at least, and for that I welcomed it. It felt like someone had got me on the ground and kicked me around a good deal while I was there. The drugs hadn’t taken the pain away, just coated it with a sullen protective layer. It would account for the slight nausea as well. The thought of actually throwing up brought me out in a cold sweat.

From somewhere at the foot of the bed I heard the rustle of paper, then quiet steps, and a man walked round into my field of view Good dark blue suit, impeccably cut, tailored shirt, silk tie.

“Ah, Charlotte,” my father said, unsmiling. “You’re back with us, I see.”

I pulled the mask down away from my face, clumsily, with my left hand. There was a butterfly taped to the back of my hand, and an IV line disappeared off out of my field of view I was careful that I didn’t snag it.

“Shit, things must have been bad if you’re here,” I said, my voice clogged and my throat raw. “Where is here, by the way?”

My father frowned. He was holding what was probably my chart and he peered at me over the top of his thin gold-framed reading glasses, but whether his disapproval was at the profanity or the flippancy, it was hard to tell. I’d never been very good at reading him.

“You are at the Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston, Maine,” he told me. “How much do you remember?”

I swallowed, “I remember being hit,” I said. Andseeing my principaldie in front of me … but I wasn’t going to admit to that.

“And after that?”

I concentrated hard, but any recall slipped away, elusive as smoke. The harder I chased it, the faster it escaped me.

“No … nothing. How long have I been here?”

He hesitated, as if telling me might make a difference to something. “Four days,” he said.

“Four days?” Instinct made my limbs start to paddle, like someone suddenly told their alarm clock had failed to go off and they’d slept in late for work. My brain was filled with cotton wool.

I was treated to that look over the glasses again and it was that, as much as the hand he’d placed on my shoulder, which stilled me.

“Charlotte,” he said in that clipped, slightly acidic tone I knew so well. “Please bear in mind that you have been shot-twice. The first bullet missed the femoral artery in your leg by millimeters. If it hadn’t, you would have undoubtedly bled out at the scene. The second bullet hit your scapula and deflected through your right lung. The fact that you have survived at all is a testament both to the skill of the emergency medical technicians who attended you at the scene, and that of the surgical team once you arrived here.”

Of course, I should have realized that my continued presence on this earth would be due to members of his own profession and nothing to do with my own will.

He paused a moment, letting the import of that sink in before he hit me with the next volley. “Attempting to do anything without express medical approval could-and will-result in an increase in the severity of your injuries and delay your recovery. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes,” I muttered, battered and defenseless. I closed my eyes again so he wouldn’t see the tears forming in them. “Perfectly.”

I opened my eyes again after what seemed like no more than a slow blink, and found it was now dark outside, and my father’s shirt had changed color although his suit remained the same. The oxygen mask had gone, but the IV line had not. There was a bank of monitors to my left, turned away from me so I couldn’t see the readouts.

“Have they told you when I can think about moving around?” I said, continuing the train of thought where I’d left off.

I thought I caught the barest flicker of a smile cross his thin lips.

“Not long,” he said. “You’ll know when you’re ready, Charlotte. I wouldn’t be in any hurry, if I were you.”

He nodded towards my torso and I discovered, looking down, that I had a tube coming out of the side wall of my chest and disappearing over the edge of the bed. My God, how much morphine was I on not to have noticed that before?

“What the hell is that?” I said weakly.

“A thoracostomy tube,” he said. “It’s keeping your lung inflated and taking care of any residual bleeding. It will remain there until the lung’s healed,” he added, like a warning. Until then, you re tethered to your bed.

I took a shallow breath and channeled a lot of effort into keeping my voice casual enough to ask, “Is Mother here, also?”

I saw the uncharacteristic hesitation and didn’t need his answer. No, of course not. “She didn’t-”

“What’s happened to Ella?”

He frowned at my interruption. “The child? She’s with her grandparents.”

Her grandparents… Lucas and Rosalind.

A picture of Lucas’s face flashed into my head, holding Ella in front of his chest, using her for his own protection, and before I knew it my father had crossed to the bed in two short strides and was holding me down again.

“Calm yourself,” he snapped, “or I’ll have you sedated.”

I abandoned my feeble struggles. “You don’t have the authority,” I said, gasping for breath, aware of the childishness of the comment even as I said it.

The doorway was slightly behind me on my left, and my view of it was partially blocked by one of the monitors. I’d tuned out the background noise of telephones and footsteps and the squeak of gurney wheels on the polished floor to the point where I didn’t hear anyone come in until he spoke.

“Ah, the patient’s showing signs of fighting spirit, is she?”

“Yes,” my father said drily “A little too much of it for my taste.”

There came a rich chuckle and a man moved round the foot of the bed into my line of sight. He was tall and wide without being overweight, with a distinguished head of short gray hair that contrasted with the dark mahogany of his skin. I could just see a yellow bow tie above the collar of his coat. He had the unmistakable ultimate self-confidence of a surgeon.

“You must be Richard Foxcroft,” the man said, and I heard the respect in his voice as they shook hands, two equals weighing each other up. “Your work precedes you.”

My father inclined his head graciously “Tour work,” he said, with a nod in my direction, “speaks for itself.”

The man laughed out loud, a deep belly laugh. “Yes, I suppose she does. Well now, young lady,” he said to me, “and how are we feeling today?”

“Like we’ve been shot,” I said.

“Well, nothing wrong with your recall, at least,” he said, still smiling broadly “You’ll be pleased to hear that we successfully removed the bullet from your back.”

“Can I see it?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Well now, I do believe the police had first claim on it.”

I swallowed and said, “How far am I likely to be able to come back from this?” It wasn’t the clearest wording, but he seemed to get the gist.

“Your injuries were serious,” he said, letting the smile slide for the first time. “We nearly lost you on the flight over here. You were bleeding internally and we had to give you around four units of blood to get you stabilized. You suffered a hemopneumothorax-that is to say, you bled into your chest wall and your right lung collapsed. You’re probably aware that you still have the chest tube in there, but so far there doesn’t seem to be any infection. We should be able to remove the tube within the next few days.”

He moved around the bed and lifted the sheet to inspect my misshapen thigh, his fingers cool against my skin. After a moment he gave a grunt of satisfaction. “The injury to your leg was more straightforward. We simply cleaned out the clothing debris and irrigated the wound with antibiotic solution. You had a drain tube in there for the first few days — which you possibly wont remember-but it’s healing nicely now. All in all, you’ve been very lucky. That and the fact your treatment has been first-class, of course.” He smiled again, magnificently. The man ought to have been advertising dental work. “There’s no reason why, given time and hard work on your part, you shouldn’t make a full recovery.”

“I seem to be having some, ah, difficulty with my right arm,” I said.

He nodded. “That’s only to be expected,” he said. “The bullet entered your back at an angle and gouged a nice lump out of your scapula before it headed off toward your lung. Along the way it did plenty of damage to the muscles in your shoulder. They’re swollen and that’s putting pressure on the nerves into your arm. And you’ve been through some tough surgery. Once the swelling subsides you should find things will improve.”

“But, it will come back?” I tried to keep the pathetic note of hope out of my voice and failed miserably.

“Yes,” he said, his expression kindly now, “we have every reason to think so.”

I closed my eyes briefly. “Thank you.”

“You are entirely welcome,” he said. “So, are you going to take pity on that young man outside?”

I opened my eyes again, flicked them to my father’s face and caught the faintest sliver of guilt about him.

“What young man?” I said sharply. At least, in my head I said it sharply, but I think by the time it reached my lips it was little more than a mumble.

The surgeon raised his eyebrows, glancing quickly between the two of us as if aware that he might have said the wrong thing. It only took a moment for his natural arrogance to step in and reassure him that wasn’t a possibility. “Why, the young man from England,” he said. “He’s been sitting down the hall since the day after you were brought in here.”

“Sean,” I said and something broke inside me. I was suddenly filled with a relief so sharp it reduced me to tears. I felt them sliding sideways across my face, pooling between my cheek and the pillow. And now they’d hit the surface, I couldn’t seem to stem the flow On and on I wept, trying to hold myself rigid through the sobbing and not succeeding, so the pain made me cry harder, and the crying caused only more pain.

“I take it, then, that you do wish to see him?”

I could only nod, unable even to voice the words of bitter recrimination towards my father that, once again, he’d conspired to keep Sean away from me when I needed him the most.

The next time I opened my eyes, it was daylight. I raised my head a little way off the pillow and saw Sean sitting back in the easy chair by the bed. His head was resting on his fist, elbow propped on the arm of the chair, and he was fast asleep.

Even sleeping, he looked dangerous. If it hadn’t been for the expensive Breitling watch on his wrist-and someone with the obvious seniority of the surgeon granting him access — any member of the nursing staff who walked in and found him here would immediately call security.

For a moment I just lay there and watched him. He was wearing jeans and a plain white T-shirt and he hadn’t shaved that morning. The haze of stubble lined his face, making his skin look almost pale above it and the dark eyelashes ridiculously long against his cheeks.

There had been a time, a long time before, when I’d been injured and frightened and ashamed, and I’d prayed every day that I’d wake in my bed in the military hospital and see this man waiting for me. But he’d never come. He hadn’t even known what had happened to me, not until long afterwards, and by then it was much too late.

The involvement between us then had been clandestine, forbidden. He was one of my training instructors and any hint of a relationship between us would have been disastrous for both our careers. After the brutal assault on me but before the farce of the court-martial and my eventual disgrace-when I still thought, foolishly, that I had some kind of a future in the army-I hadn’t dared ask for him.

I sometimes wondered what difference it would have made if I had.

It was strange, now, to lie there in circumstances so similar yet so different, to wake and find Sean sitting alongside me. I was profoundly grateful that he was here, without doubt. As soon as the doctor had spoken I’d been aware only of a lifting of the total weight of responsibility that had been pressing on my chest far more heavily than a collapsed lung could ever have done.

But on top of that alleviation, guilt had come chasing hard. Guilt that I had been trusted to do a job and I’d failed in the most basic way possible. Guilt that I was alive, and Simone was not. And as for Ella …

No, best not to think about what Ella’s going through.

My thoughts must have provoked some small change in my breathing because at that moment Sean’s eyes twitched beneath his lids and then snapped open, instantly alert.

He saw me watching him and he smiled, without hesitation.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hello, Charlie,” he said softly. “How are you doing?”

“Oh, great,” I said weakly. “But you’ll forgive me if I don’t come out dancing tonight.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You dance?”

“Only when I’m very drunk.”

“In that case,” he said, igniting one of those slow-burn smiles, “remind me to ply you with cheap booze at the first available opportunity.”

We both paused, our repertoire of inconsequential small talk exhausted.

“So,” he said, shifting so he was leaning forwards in his chair with his forearms resting on his knees, “do you feel up to a debrief?”

“I suppose so,” I said, not bothering to hide my reluctance. “I daresay this has caused a real mess all round.”

“We’ve had worse,” he said with a tired smile. “The police have been clamoring to talk to you about what happened, by the way, but your father’s been as good at keeping them away as he was with me.”

“I didn’t know you were here until the surgeon told me,” I said, suddenly defensive.

“That’s OK. I didn’t think it was a good idea to punch out your dear papa in the corridor. At least this way they let me wait just down the hallway instead of in the car park.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “Don’t be,” he said. “You and I both know there’s no love lost there.”

I went through a brief summary of events between my last phone conversation with Sean and the moment I was shot, keeping it as impersonal and objective as I was able to.

Sean interrupted rarely, preferring that I work through the story in my own way, gently pushing me when I faltered. Forcing my mind to concentrate and hold on to the thread of the story required an almost physical effort. I was aware of gaps and pauses where seconds and maybe even whole minutes slipped by before I could bring myself back on track. By the time I was done I was sweating and shivering and I had a bitch of a headache thumping away behind my left eye. The pain in the bottom of my right lung was like a stone, pulling down on it.

When I was spent he sat there for a time, eyes fixed on a point on the bed frame, frowning.

“Tell me again what Simone said, when you walked in on her at the house,” he said.

“She said that he’d killed him and she’d seen him do it. That she’d loved him. Then she called him a fucking bastard and that’s when Lucas did a runner.”

“So, she-”

“What do you think you’re doing?” My father’s voice, from the doorway, was cold even for him. Damn, I really must get them to shift some of this bloody equipment so people cant creep up on me like this.

Sean got to his feet automatically. “We were talking,” he said, in that blankly respectful voice he’d always used to disguise his intense dislike.

My father moved round to the side of the bed where I could see him, eyes sweeping over my face. He clearly didn’t care for what he saw there.

“She needs rest and no emotional upset,” he said tightly.

“Shame you didn’t always feel that way,” Sean murmured.

My father’s face paled beneath his tan. They faced off, almost toe-to-toe. Sean was taller and wider and exuded the kind of menace that made people leave seats vacant next to him in crowded bars. But my father had been at the top of a tough profession for more than thirty years and along the way he’d acquired the ruthless superiority of a despot. Until someone threw the first punch, I would have said they were fairly evenly matched.

“Say, is this a private party, or can anybody join in?”

The new voice from behind me had what was by now a familiar New England twang to it, and the heavy cynicism that could only have belonged to a cop.

“The more the merrier,” I said wearily, closing my eyes. “Did you bring a bottle?”

There was a grunt of laughter. “Round here, ma’am, the bottles seem to be mostly full of the kind of liquids you wouldn’t want to drink.”

“Charlotte, you’re not up to this,” my father said. I opened my eyes and found him watching me intently.

“Probably not,” I said, mustering a shallow smile, “but I’ve got to talk to the police sometime.”

He hesitated. “Just see that they don’t overtire you.”

“If they do that, I’ll just fall asleep on them,” I said. ‘And I don’t think they’re allowed to beat up witnesses anymore.”

“They won’t bully her,” Sean said, and the cold certainty in his tone earned him a sharp glance.

After a moment my father nodded slowly, as if reluctant to find himself in any kind of agreement with Sean. “No,” he said with the wisp of a smile, “I daresay they won’t.” And with that he turned and left. He didn’t even make it seem like a retreat-just that he simply had somewhere more important to be.

The cop who’d been doing the talking came round where I could see him. He was middle-aged and heavyset like he spent time in the gym rather than like he’d gone to fat. At home I would have put him down as a rugby player, right down to the broken nose. Over here I assumed he played American football in some kind of offensive position. With him was a small, wiry, dark-haired woman with a face that didn’t look as though it laughed easily. Partners, I assumed. Detectives, too, if their lack of uniforms was anything to go by.

They both dragged up chairs to the bedside and went through the rigmarole of introducing themselves and showing me their badges. The man’s name was Bartholemew. The woman’s was Young.

“We’d really like to speak to you alone, Miss Fox,” Young said pointedly, taking the lead so we didn’t mistake her for Bartholemew’s junior.

My eyes slid over Sean. “If he leaves,” I said, “so do you.”

Sean showed them his teeth and they both took on a pained look, like they’d been told if they really didn’t want the Rottweiler sleeping on the furniture, they’d have to physically remove it themselves.

“Er, we understand that you were acting as Miss Kerse’s bodyguard, is that correct?” Young asked, and something about the unbridled skepticism in her voice made me regret the decision to talk to them right from the start.

“Yes,” I said.

She raised a single eyebrow, mocking, and let her eyes travel over me, lingering over the tubes and lines I was hooked up to.

“Been doing the job long?”

“Long enough.” It was Sean who answered for me, staring out the two detectives. They’d been doing their own jobs for a while and they must have interviewed their share of murderers and gangsters, but neither of them liked being the subject of Sean’s dead-eyed stare.

“We assume, from the fact that you got it in the back, that you didn’t see who shot you?” Bartholemew took up the baton.

“No, I didn’t,” I said.

“But you have an idea, right?”

I took a breath in, too deep, and had to wait a moment for the stabbing in my chest to subside. “I don’t know,” I said, stubborn. ‘As you so gallantly pointed out, I was shot in the back. I didn’t see who pulled the trigger.”

Bartholemew sighed, a noisy careless gush of breath that made me instantly jealous. “We have a preliminary ballistics match between the bullet removed from you and the gun found with Miss Simone Kerse,” he said flatly He let that one settle on me for a while. “I don’t suppose you’d like to hazard a guess as to why Miss Kerse would take it into her head to shoot her own bodyguard, now would you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I paused. “Is there any possible doubt that she actually fired the shots?”

“Well, her prints were on the weapon and she tested positive for gunshot residue. That’s normally good enough for the jury,” Bartholemew said, laconic. “We would sure like to have some idea of a motive, though.”

“You and me both,” I said. But in my head I saw a slow-motion replay of the moments before I was hit. I saw once again Lucas’s head square in my sights. Saw the way I’d let the gun rise, taken my finger off the trigger. Even in the moonlit darkness, it must have been clear that I wasn’t about to take the shot.

Was that why Simone had done it? I remembered the sheer fury in her voice down in the basement, when she’d called Lucas a bastard, when she’d said she’d loved and trusted him and sounded so desperately betrayed. I didn’t believe those first two shots she’d fired had been meant to hit me-or anyone else, for that matter. But out in the woods, well, that was a different story, despite Ella’s close proximity.

And who had Simone seen Lucas kill? Jakes? Was he the subject of her anger? Why-when she’d known Jakes for less than a day?

“We understand from Mrs. Rosalind Lucas that Simone arrived at the house with her daughter, Ella, and her other bodyguard, Mr. Jakes, in a state of some agitation. Can you shed any light on why that might be?”

“No,” I said. “I had a message on my mobile phone from Jakes. It should be about somewhere, if you want to check it. He said something along the lines that Simone had had a call from her father and wanted to go over to his place and that she was getting angry about having to wait. By the time I arrived there I found Jakes dead at the bottom of the stairs and Simone in the basement threatening Lucas and his wife with a gun.”

“But you don’t know why?”

“Not beyond what I’ve already told you, no,” I said dully My voice was starting to rasp in my throat now and I desperately wanted something to drink. Not just the ice cubes and minute sips of liquid the nurses seemed determined to tease me with, but a long endless glass of iced water. The urge for fluids I could actually swallow was fast becoming a fantasy.

Young frowned and studied the notebook that lay open on her lap. “We understand that Miss Kerse had spent some considerable time and money tracing her father. Can you suggest any reason why she might suddenly turn against him like this?”

“Maybe,” I said. I glanced at Sean, as if for reassurance. We hadn’t had time to discuss any theories and I was loath to voice them now, untried, but I didn’t see much of a choice. “The reason we moved out of the Lucases’ house was because there was a break-in the night before.”

Young leafed through the pages of the notebook and glanced at her partner, making a brief I-have-no-record-of-that kind of gesture with her right hand. He responded with a slight dismissive roll of his eyes that instantly put my back up.

“It wasn’t reported,” I said. “But you must have noticed that there was a brand-new window at the top of the stairs?”

Young checked her notebook again. “I don’t recall there being any damage to the property apart from a couple of fresh bullet holes in the basement,” she said carefully. “And Mr. and Mrs. Lucas didn’t mention anything about a break-in.”

“Simone didn’t want anything getting into the papers. She’d had a rough time with the tabloids before she left home.”

“Wait a minute,” Bartholemew said, sitting more upright in his chair. ‘Are you telling us you failed to report a serious crime because Miss Kerse didn’t want it getting into the newspapers?”

His voice had started to harden and Sean sliced across him instantly. “Simone had just come into money,” he said. “Charlie felt the break-in was possibly a kidnap attempt on the child. Any kind of publicity would have only increased the danger to Ella.”

“Money?” Bartholemew said. “What kind of money?”

“Several million,” Sean said shortly, severely playing it down and still provoking a jerked reaction from the cop. “According to her banker, Simone made a will just before she left England. If anything happened to her, then everything went to Ella,” he went on. His eyes flicked to me. “I spoke to Harrington yesterday about it. There are plenty of strings attached, but if they become her legal guardians, the money will probably end up under the control of Ella’s grandparents.”

I knew Lucas was aware of Simone’s money-had been practically from the start. But if his motive in contacting her had been financial gain, why did he come to the hotel that day and almost beg me to take her back to England? Why did he refuse Simone’s offer? Unless he knew things were about to turn nasty. …

I remembered Vaughan’s words in the restaurant, just before I left. He’d asked if Simone had found out the truth about Greg Lucas. What truth? What had he done?

“We caught one of the guys who broke in, but he got away from Lucas,” I said, trying to drag myself back on track. “Maybe if Simone found out- I’ve no idea how- that Lucas was in any way responsible, she would have flipped. What happened to Jakes, by the way?” I asked. My mind was starting to disconnect now, and coherent speech was becoming noticeably more difficult. I had to fight to stay with Bartholemew’s answer.

“His neck was broken.”

“Lucas is supposed to be ex-SAS,” I managed. My eyes had drifted shut without my realizing it and I forced them open. The effort made my vision quiver. “One of the first things they teach you is how to break someone’s neck. Practically the first lesson, huh, Sean?”

The two cops exchanged a look I didn’t catch the meaning of. “The pathologist seems of the opinion that his injuries were consistent with a fall,” Young said at last, carefully.

“O-K,” I said slowly, slurring badly now, “but what if Lucas wasn’t her father? His partner knows something-Felix Vaughan. Have you spoken to him? Only-”

Young cut me short. “Mr. Vaughan was polite but unhelpful,” she said, and I remembered Vaughan laughing when I’d asked him the same question about Lucas.

It wasn’t that simple, Vaughan had said. Why?

“If Lucas wasn’t her father, that would be a pretty good reason for a massive falling-out between them. Simone was already pretty convinced, but they were supposed to have had a DNA test to settle it,” I mumbled. “If she found out he wasn’t who he said he was, she might well have reacted badly. I’ve never been entirely happy that he — “

“The tests came back,” Bartholemew cut in. “They were positive- and our own lab has run their own independently, just to be sure.” He paused, looking almost disappointed that I’d come up with such feeble reasons for Simone to turn psycho. “As close as the science can call it, Greg Lucas was definitely Simone’s father.”