Second Shot

Fifteen

I dreamed of Ella. It was Simone who’d died, but it was her daughter who haunted my sleep. Constantly. A jumbled-up barrage of splintered reflections, always anchored in that frozen forest. So cold it woke me shivering, my fingers numb with the psychosomatic effect.

Sometimes it was Simone who was holding the child. Or Matt, dressed as I remembered him from that first day at the restaurant, with that damned stuffed rabbit he’d been clutching sitting on his shoulder, egging him on. Or Rosalind, her face and clothing dusted with flour. Or sometimes it was Lucas again, and the dream was more vivid for the ghosted image of reality overlaid on top of it.

It never made a difference to the outcome. Sometimes I took the shot and watched in slow motion as the mist beaded outwards from the exit wound in the skull, Ella’s screams reverberating inside my own head.

And sometimes I stayed my hand but the mist splayed out anyway. I saw the body tumble, but I could never reach them before they both fell. Didn’t know for certain who’d been hit. I kept trying to turn and look behind me, to see who had fired the shot when I knew it wasn’t me, but the shooter always moved too fast for me to focus on them, slipping away like a shadow into the trees.

This time, it was Felix Vaughan who held Ella in my dream. He smiled as he slid his thumb under the skin of her soft belly and peeled it up and away from her body as easy as a boiled shrimp.

I woke with a gasp to find Frances Neagley sitting in the chair Sean had occupied beside my bed. It was two days since the visit from the two cops. Two long frustrating days and nights, punctuated by periods of fearful sleep. I’d got to know the patterns in the ceiling pretty well by then.

The private investigator had clearly been flicking through the pages of Sports Illustrated magazine when my gasp had alerted her. There was a can of Tab in her right hand. I vaguely remembered seeing Tab in the UK, years ago, but the clear stuff, whereas this looked more like regular cola. I locked onto it with envious eyes.

“Sorry,” she said, catching the line of my stare and putting the can down by her chair, out of sight. “Last time I was in the hospital, having my appendix out, it drove me crazy that they wouldn’t let me drink anything for a couple of days.”

“I think I’m starting to obsess about it,” I admitted. “Still, they gave me some real food for breakfast-if you count jelly.”

“Jelly?” Neagley said blankly. “What-on toast?”

I dimly recalled that “jelly” had a different meaning in America. “Ah, I meant Jell-O.”

Her careful gaze told me she probably knew I hadn’t been dreaming about kittens tied up with string or whatever the hell else Julie Andrews had been singing about in that old film but, by some tacit agreement, she didn’t bring it up. And neither did I.

Instead, she smiled ruefully. “So … would it be stupid to ask how you’re doing?”

“Better than I was yesterday. Not as good as last week,” I said, easing my position slightly. “At least they took the chest drain out yesterday, which means my lung’s on the mend. If sheer boredom doesn’t get me first, it looks like I’ll survive.”

Her smile grew serious. “You were lucky,” she said, and her face clouded. “I was sorry to hear about Jakes. He was a nice guy Friendly, but didn’t try anything, you know?”

I didn’t answer, mainly because I realized that I didn’t know. I’d hardly had time for much of a conversation with Jakes before he died. I’d no idea if he was married or single, even-couldn’t remember if he’d worn a ring. I remembered him the last time I’d seen him alive, reading that stupid story to Ella, and before I knew it the tears had rushed up out of nowhere, prickling behind my eyes, leaking across my face.

‘Aw, I’m sorry, Charlie,” Neagley said, sounding mortified. “I didn’t mean-”

“Don’t worry about it,” I managed, shaky. “I think while the surgeons were messing around in there they must have wired me up wrong. I can’t seem to stop damn well crying at every available opportunity.”

She handed me a couple of tissues from the box next to the bed. The nursing staff were obviously well prepared for the outpourings — emotional and otherwise — of their patients.

I mopped my face and after a minute or so I had myself more or less back under control. I tried a smile that seemed to alarm Neagley more than reassure her. She sat uncomfortably on the edge of her seat, like she expected to have to leave in a hurry at any moment.

“I suppose,” I said, trying to be brisk and businesslike, “with Simone gone you’re off the case.”

“Not exactly,” she said and paused, as though uncertain how much to tell me, brushing at some imaginary lint on her black trousers. “Mr. Meyer’s asked me to stay on it,” she said at last. “There are a lot of things about this case he’s not happy with-not least you getting shot. And besides, if Lucas is somehow mixed up in this, well, he might just have had something to do with my partner’s accident after all.” She looked up, her mouth thinning. “I want answers and so does your boss. Determined kind of a guy” There was respect in her voice.

“Yes, he is that.” I closed my eyes for a moment, surprised but grateful. After the two cops had gone I’d thought Sean was going to tell me that was an end to it, to let it go. Simone was dead. Her prints were on the gun that had shot me. Lucas was proven as Ella’s grandfather and had claimed his right to the child. My job was over.

Dismally, deficiently, definitely over.

Or-as it now seemed-not quite.

I opened my eyes again to find Neagley watching me, speculative, and I had the feeling that she was drawing her own conclusions about my relationship with Sean. I wondered if I should let that bother me and decided I had other things to worry about.

“So, have you made any progress?”

“I’ve been doing some digging on the guy you saw at the Aquarium,” she said, reaching down by her chair and hauling a large brown leather shoulder bag onto her lap, pulling out a slim gray file. She opened it but hardly needed to refer to the pages of notes inside. “From the description you gave me, and a couple of other things, I think we might have one or two promising candidates. The guy you mentioned didn’t seem like an amateur.”

“He wasn’t,” I said.

She caught something in my voice, glanced up, frowning. “Well, I’ve got some photos, if you’re up to looking through them?” she said, slipping some glossy prints out of the file.

I reached out my left hand for them. The IV line had twisted in among the bedsheets and I had to untangle myself first. It was awkward to straighten it, one-handed, but my right arm still did little more than flop, and forcing any more than that out of it caused sufficient pain and frustration to curtail further attempts. Not to mention the fear.

I saw Neagley eyeing me, unsure whether to let me struggle or risk offending me with an offer of help. She settled for pretending a sudden interest in the pictures in front of her, sorting them as though into order, and I was glad that was the path she’d chosen.

Once she’d handed them over, I leafed through the prints. Some were formal police mug shots, but others were more candid, taken in a hurry with a long lens and very fast film if the grain was anything to go by. I didn’t ask where they’d come from.

Near the bottom of the pile was one of a couple of men talking to each other. They were on a street and the photographer had been on higher ground. One man had his back to the camera and was wearing a hat. The other was caught in midsentence, or possibly laughter. His mouth was open, slightly amused, and his hands were spread as though he was shrugging. Difficult to identify anyone from that. The hair looked similar, but he was taller than I was and I’d only seen him standing, so the view of his crown was unfamiliar. I looked again, and something about the pure self-confidence of him struck a cord. That and the coat. He was wearing what looked very like the same tweed coat that Aquarium man had on when he’d approached us on Boston Common. I hesitated a moment longer, then set the shot aside, separate from the others. None of the remainder were even vague possibilities, and I came back to that one shot again.

“This one might be him,” I said. “ ‘Might’ being the operative word.”

She sighed. “I always hated relying on eyewitnesses when I was a cop,” she said, pulling a face. “Give me good solid forensic evidence any day.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Who is this guy, by the way?”

She took the shot back and studied it, though I was sure she knew the details without needing the memory jog.

“A fine upstanding individual called Oliver Reynolds,” she said. “Ex-military. Fancies himself as a bit of a ladies’ man. Works freelance as a debt collector, hired muscle. According to my sources, his specialty is putting the squeeze on women-particularly if they’ve got kids. He’s very good at worming his way in, then turning nasty, but he’s never been arrested for it. Mostly people are too frightened to stand against him.”

“Nice,” I said.

“Yeah, well, by all accounts he’s a man who enjoys his work.”

Vividly, I remembered tackling the masked intruder on the landing of the Lucases’ house, of having my forearms clamped around the man’s neck and tightening my grip. That infinitesimal moment in time when we were balanced rocking on the blade edge of fate. If I was right and Aquarium man was this Reynolds character, and if I’d known his history then, would I have done it? Would I have finished him? Something shuddered down my spine.

Probably better that I hadn’t known.

“Are you OK?” Neagley asked, and I realized that she’d stopped talking and was watching me again.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry, my concentration is all shot to hell-if you’ll excuse the pun.”

She pulled a face again. “Anyway, if you think this might be our guy, I can dig a little deeper, see what I can find out about who he might be working for.”

“That would be useful,” I said. “He picked us up in Boston, before Lucas made contact, and I don’t think it was chance. He knew who Simone was and that must mean he also knew about-” I broke off abruptly

“It’s OK, Charlie,” she said, her voice wry “Mr. Meyer filled me in on the details. I know about Simone’s fortune. To be honest, the amount of money she was spending on the search, we kind of had an idea she must have been pretty rich.”

“Yes, but there’s rich and then there’s rich” I said. “Whenhe and his oppo broke into the house the other night, I think he was after Ella.”

She paused in the middle of sliding the gray file back into her bag. “A kidnap, you mean?”

I nodded. “And if that’s the case, he’s not going to let a little thing like Simone being dead stop him, is he?”

“You think he might make another try for the kid?”

“I don’t know. I’d certainly be happier if she was somewhere safer than with Lucas, that’s for sure. I don’t trust him an inch-or the kind of people he chooses to do business with. And we still don’t know what made Simone go after him the night-” I broke off again, couldn’t even say it, improvised instead. “The night Jakes was killed.”

Restless, I shifted my position again, rolling a little towards her. Mistake. When I kept still, the pain had been little more than a background ache and I’d grown hardened enough to it to forget the damage that lurked under the surface.

The pain the careless movement caused was a vicious spike in my chest, which was nasty in itself, but followed by a terrible feeling of something tearing inside. I pictured that bloody bullet again, rending its way through my internal organs with a dreadful inevitability about it. I thought of the careful repair work to the damaged tissue that the surgeon with the beautiful teeth had put into saving me. For a moment I could only lie there, motionless, breathing fast and shallow, horribly afraid that in one thoughtless moment I’d just undone everything he’d tried to achieve.

The pain washed up over me and then, at last, began to recede. I re-focused out into the room again and found Neagley was out of her chair and bending over me, frowning with concern. “Charlie, are you OK?” she demanded. “My God, I’ve never seen anybody lose color like that. You want I should go fetch a doctor?”

I gave the slightest shake of my head, as small a gesture as I could get away with. “No,” I said when I could speak again. I could feel the sweat in my hair between the back of my head and the pillow, the fire in my chest. “I’m fine. Sorry-catches up with me occasionally.”

“No shit,” she muttered, shaking her head slowly as she sat down. “You shouldn’t be talking about this,” she said with a flash of anger. “You shouldn’t even be thinking about this. You should be sleeping and watching mindless TV and recovering.”

“Yes, but try telling her that,” said Sean’s voice from the doorway.

Neagley’s head snapped up and I saw her expression close in as she regarded him with a cool flat gaze. Maybe she was always wary when she was first introduced to people, or maybe the part of her-the instinct- that was still a cop recognized the inherently lawless element in Sean’s makeup.

“You must be Mr. Meyer,” she said at last, and waited for Sean to cross the room before she offered a handshake. “Frances Neagley-we’ve spoken on the phone.”

“Ms. Neagley,” Sean said, matching his tone to hers. After a moment she gave a flicker of a smile, as though acknowledging she’d been subjected to the same careful scrutiny.

He came round and sat in one of the chairs by the bed and I saw his eyes narrow as they swept over me.

“Any news?” I asked quickly, heading off any queries about my state of health.

“We’ve been digging around some more on Greg Lucas,” he said. “Lucas had a nasty reputation in the army, as we already know. He had a temper on him-used to go out and pick fights with the locals wherever he was posted. He was also one hell of a jealous husband. Made his wife’s life hell and after Simone was born he got a whole lot worse.”

“Worse?” I said, frowning. “No wonder Simone’s mother didn’t want her to contact him.”

“That’s not the whole story,” Sean said. “It seems that not only did he not trust his wife to behave herself while he was overseas, more often than not he took his anger out on the child.”

“On Simone?” It was Neagley who broke in this time.

Sean nodded. “It seems that she made a lot of trips to the hospital as a baby-bumps, bruises, a broken wrist,” he said. I thought of his own childhood, what I knew of it, and could understand the faint trace of bitterness in his voice.

“And nobody noticed?” Neagley said. “Nobody picked up on any of this?”

“Overworked staff and a convincingly concerned mother.” Sean shrugged. “It happens.”

“But if he beat her as a kid, why was Simone so desperate to track him down again?” Neagley asked. She glanced at me. “Did she have some kind of score to settle?”

I shook my head slowly. “No, I don’t think so,” I said. “Before we left London she said she couldn’t really remember anything about him and I believed her. Could have blocked it out, I suppose.”

I was starting to slur my words a little, I noted. It was catching up with me again. Every breath scraped my lungs, my mouth was arid, and my thigh was throbbing so hard it was making the whole of my lower leg ache. I wondered what time I was due some extra pain medication and hoped fervently that it was soon.

I heard the murmur of Sean’s voice and Neagley saying something in reply, but they seemed to be coming from a long way away, hazy and indistinct. Stay with it, Fox. Come on….

I don’t remember closing my eyes, but I must have fallen into a doze. Next thing I knew, I woke to hear my father’s voice, quietly furious, at the end of the bed. I opened my eyes a fraction and found that Neagley’s chair was empty, but I had no idea how long she’d been gone.

“I thought you were supposed to be concerned for my daughter’s welfare,” my father bit out. His voice was uncharacteristically harsh, as though there might be some danger of cracks appearing in that famously unemotional facade. “She nearly died, for God’s sake! It’s bad enough that she’s chosen to throw in her lot with you, Meyer, but I will not have you jeopardizing her recovery by exhausting her like this — do you understand me?”

“Yes sir,” Sean said. I could hear the tension in his voice, the holding himself in check, and I wondered if my father really comprehended what was likely to happen if that control broke.

“I still can hardly believe she would willingly come back to America again-not after what happened the last time.”

“It was supposed to be a low-risk job, or I wouldn’t have sent her,” Sean said with an attempt at patience. “We thought-”

“Did you?” my father snapped. “Did you really think about what you were doing? She went through months of therapy to try and get over what she went through in Florida. Wasn’t that supposed to be a low-risk job, too, hm? Months of therapy,” he repeated, “to try and salvage my daughter out of the psychopath you helped create! And now what?”

For a moment Sean was silent. I felt sure the pair of them must be able to hear the sudden acceleration of my heartbeat and I was glad I wasn’t still wired up to the heart-rate monitors, or my pulse would have been setting sprint records. I wasn’t sure what was worse-listening to them bickering over me, or the prospect of being caught eavesdropping on the conversation.

“Maybe that’s the cause of the trouble,” Sean said. “Charlie was a damned good soldier. And it wasn’t just that she had enormous natural talent-it had to do with mind-set. She had the right mind-set for the job. Her ability to kill-which scares the shit out of you so much-was always there. You may have hated it, but she was perfect for Special Forces.”

“So perfect that the army allowed four of her colleagues to rape her and halfway beat her to death before she’d even finished her training, and then conspired against her to ruin her reputation,” my father said, his voice so contorted with anger that I hardly recognized it. “But she came back from that. It took years, but she came back from it. And yes, I know we were wrong, her mother and I, to keep you away from her afterwards, but we felt she needed a clean break from the past. You were still in the army, part of the machine that had let her down so badly. Besides, what future did she have as some kind of camp follower?”

“Is that how you think of her?” Sean said with a deadly softness drawling through his tone. “How very flattering.”

I heard rather than saw my father make a gesture of impatience. “We were making progress with her,” he said. “And then you arrive back in her life and suddenly all that careful work is destroyed.”

“Have you ever thought,” Sean said, still ominously quiet, “that your interference might have brought her to this?”

“Oh no, don’t try to lay the blame for this on me, Meyer! We both know who’s responsible.”

“Do we?” Sean said. He paused, as if picking his next words with great care. “She hesitated. She had the guy … and she hesitated.”

“You’re talking about taking a life, for heaven’s sake. Any normal person would hesitate.”

“But Charlie’s not a normal person. She’s a bodyguard. And in this job, you can’t afford to let your emotions take over. Losing a principal is bad enough under any circumstances. Trust me, I know But as soon as you begin to doubt yourself-or others begin to doubt you-you’re finished.”

‘And you doubt her because of this?” My father’s voice was suddenly very serious, very intent and almost hopeful.

“I think Charlie doubts herself,” Sean said at last, “and the worst thing is that I think she started doing so long before she was shot.”