Third Strike

CHAPTER 26

We met up with Parker in a rest area on I-95, just south of Boston. It was six hours since my initial phone call to Nick. Five hours since Nick had managed to get a sneaky message through to Parker, and my boss had given his watchdogs the slip and hotfooted it down to the gym to be waiting by the phone when I called back. And four hours since I’d called again, by which time he’d arranged a substantial float and instructions for a rendezvous.

So, not only smart but bloody efficient, too.

We’d hung around at the mall for as long as we reckoned we could get away with it, then headed towards the meeting point, staying as far away from the populated areas as we could manage.

According to Parker, the story Vondie was putting out—via Collingwood, naturally—was that they’d attempted to flag us down on the road in order to escort us back to New York. At which point we’d opened fire on them in a vicious and unprovoked attack. I’m not sure quite how they explained the obvious signs of a Stinger hit and heavy side impact on the Navigator, but I’m sure the empty brass I’d left behind inside it didn’t help our cause any. Nor did leaving gunshot wounds in two of her team.

New York to Boston, if Parker kept it legal and didn’t get too badly snarled up in traffic, was a four-hour drive. We timed our own arrival at the rest area to be a couple of minutes after his ETA. The less time we had to hang around in the open in a bullet-ridden—and technically stolen—vehicle, the better.

I’d told Parker what we were driving and we’d parked up out of the way to wait. Eventually, we spotted him behind the wheel of a nondescript silver five-year-old Toyota Camry. He did a slow circuit of the car park, showing himself to us, before pulling up. Sean restarted the engine and maneuvered the pickup in alongside him.

Parker had dressed down in jeans and a Tommy Hilfiger stripe shirt, worn with the collar open so it looked natural to have the tails out. As he walked round the back of the car to join us, a Honda Integra on big chrome wheels pulled in about a hundred meters away. Part of me half-expected someone like the young Canadian, Joe McGregor, to be driving the second car. Instead, it was Nick who climbed out and gave us a sketchy, self-conscious wave.

Sean merely raised an eyebrow at Parker’s unusual choice of traveling companion. Parker gave him a look that said clearly, don’t ask.

My mother got out of the pickup with her arms out, ready to embrace her savior. Parker ignored her. He was wearing sunglasses, but I could tell that his eyes were everywhere.

“Get your gear into the trunk of the Camry,” he said. “Do it now.”

Chastened, my parents began transferring luggage. Despite the size of my mother’s suitcase, it didn’t take long. Sean’s and my squashy bags fitted in round the others, tight but snug.

When we were loaded, Parker installed my parents in the rear seat, got back into the Camry again and sedately drove it over to join the Integra. Sean and I gave the pickup a quick once-over, wiped down the obvious touch points, locked it up and walked away from it, towards the Camry. We walked away quickly, I noticed, without looking back—as though the Ford were going to start whining like an abandoned dog.

By the time we’d rejoined him, Parker was back out from behind the wheel and standing by the driver’s window. He stood, I noticed, casually relaxed with his hip turned side on to the car, not obviously using it for cover but using it just the same. He handed over the keys, jerked his head towards the interior.

“There’s five grand in cash in the glove compartment,” he said. “A couple of boxes of ammo, and two clean pay-as-you-go cell phones. But don’t use them unless you have to—that goes as much for the hollow-points as it does for the Motorolas.”

“Parker, we’re not exactly virgins at this,” I said mildly.

He smiled just a little, shrugged. “Better to tell you and risk offense, than not tell you and risk blowing the whole thing to hell and back.”

“Speaking of which—what’s he doing here?” Sean asked quietly, nodding in the direction of Nick, who was hurrying to join us.

“He got me the car,” Parker admitted. “Belongs to his sister. She’s out of town for another month—Europe. Besides, the Camry’s the most common car on the road. You couldn’t blend in better if you tried.”

“My sister’s a real motorhead,” Nick said, enthusiastic. “It’s got the V-six under the hood, in case you need to make a run for the border.” He suddenly realized what he’d said and his face fell comically. “Uh, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t.”

I didn’t like to point out that running from someone with Collingwood’s resources was one car chase destined to be over very quickly. Instead, I offered him my hand.

“Thanks, Nick,” I said with a warmth I didn’t have to fake. “Good job.”

He grinned at me. Still a big adventure for him, I saw. Wait till the first time you get blood on your hands—either literally or metaphorically. See how much of a game you think it is then.

Last thing, Parker handed over a scrap of paper. “I’ve set up temporary e-mail addresses for both of us,” he said. “This is yours, and the password. Might be easier sometimes to use that than to phone. Any intel I can dig out for you—on Storax or this O’Loughlin character you mentioned—I’ll send.”

“Parker, you’re a wonder,” I murmured, studying the random series of numbers and letters that made up the e-mail address. “At the moment, it’s a toss-up whether I want to adopt you or have your children.”

He lifted an eyebrow, smiled a little and gave me a firm handshake, the same for Sean. “I’d settle for you straightening this mess out and getting back to work,” he said.

“One more favor,” Sean said. “When Vondie’s crew jumped us, we were on our way back to see Jeremy Lee’s widow, Miranda. We haven’t been able to raise her since. Can you look into it for us? Check she’s okay?”

Parker nodded, climbed into the passenger seat of Nick’s Integra. “I find out anything, I’ll e-mail.” He slammed the door and dropped the window. “Make sure you get receipts for what you spend,” he warned. “The five grand’s for expenses—it’s not a bonus, okay?”

We watched them pull out of the parking area and get back onto the highway before we climbed into the Camry, my parents still in the rear seat and Sean behind the wheel. It was clean and remarkably free from clutter inside. Nick’s sister had a vanilla-scented air freshener hanging in front of one of the vents on the dashboard. I unhooked it and dropped it into the ashtray, which was part full of spare change.

When I checked the glove box, I found the money Parker had promised, in bundles of mixed-denomination used bills, held together with an elastic band. A brand-new-looking road map of America was tucked down the side of my seat. It was nice to work for a man who thought of everything.

Sean started the motor. The V-6 sounded polite rather than powerful. Parker must have filled up not long before he met us because the needle on the fuel gauge canted well to the right. Sean adjusted the driving position and glanced over his shoulder.

“So,” he said. “Now we have clean transport, the question is, where do we go—apart from anywhere the hell away from here?”

“Houston,” my father said, surprising me with the immediacy of his response. “It’s where Storax have their U.S. headquarters and, as they seem to be at the center of this, it’s where I should imagine we’ll find some answers.”

“Do you have any idea of how far it is to Texas?” Sean asked. “Or how long it will take us to get there?”

“No,” my father said, unashamed. “Do you?”

“Roughly two thousand miles,” Sean said without a blink. “That works out to the best part of two days’ solid driving—if we don’t want the luxury of stopping to sleep.”

My father gave him his most arrogant surgeon’s stare. “We’d best make a start, then, don’t you think?”

We drove southwest, out of Massachusetts, down through Connecticut and slipped across the corner of New York state bypassing the city itself. A few hours later we were passing Scranton, Pennsylvania. The Camry wasn’t exactly the rocket ship Nick had boasted, but it had cruise and air con and allowed us to make competent, inconspicuous progress.

We rolled on, mile after mile of undulating freeway, rocked by mammoth trucks that gained on us with relentless ease in the gathering dark, like supertankers crossing the English Channel.

Just after midnight, we hit Harrisburg and crossed the Susquehanna River. As oncoming headlights raked the interior, I glanced back and found my parents soundly asleep. My father had taken off his jacket and was using it as a blanket for my mother, who had curled up over the center armrest, her lips slightly parted as she slept, face pillowed on her hands like a praying child. My father had draped his arm across her shoulders, his head lolling sideways against the door glass. He was going to wake up with a hell of a stiff neck.

“They okay?” Sean asked, keeping his voice low.

“Out of it. How about you?”

In the dim glow from the instrument panel I saw him smile, little more than a twitch at the corner of his mouth.

“I’m okay,” he said. He’d discarded his jacket and rolled back the cuffs of his shirt, revealing the lines of muscle definition in his forearms.

He drove without apparent effort, shoulders relaxed. I’d once driven through the night with Sean from Stuttgart to Berlin and back, at hair-raising speeds of over a hundred and sixty miles an hour for most of the journey. Going a steady sixty-five on an arrow-straight freeway should have been child’s play by comparison, but there was so little stimulation that the hardest part was staying awake.

“Not getting tired?” I persisted. “Let me know as soon as you are and I’ll take over for a while, let you get some shuteye.”

“I’m fine,” he said. He glanced across at me. “You maybe ought to grab some sleep yourself, though, so you can spell me later.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said, lifting a wry shoulder. “Still too wired, I suppose.”

“Well, you could always talk to me, Charlie. Keep me awake that way.”

Something in the silky way he said it had my heart rate accelerating. “What about?”

He must have heard the way it slightly changed my voice, because he laughed softly. “Not that,” he said dryly. “Although, if you really want to talk dirty to me while your parents are dozing lightly in the backseat then feel free, by all means.”

“No, I don’t,” I said, aiming for stern but badly let down by the hitch in my breath. “And it was a reasonable question. It’s only your dirty mind that puts any other slant on it.”

“Guilty,” he said cheerfully. A pause. “Actually, I wanted to talk about us. About last night.”

My pulse had begun to slow, but at that it took off again like someone had fed in a squirt of nitrous oxide. I felt the liquid burn under my skin, firing a primitive flight response that translated into such a fierce blush I was glad of the surrounding darkness.

“Wow,” I said, surprisingly sedate. “I thought it was supposed to be the woman who always initiated conversations like that.”

“Don’t hedge, Charlie,” he said, and though his voice was mild, I heard the underlying serrated edge to it. “I promised I wouldn’t hurt you and … I did.”

“No,” I denied quickly. “It—”

“I hurt you,” he repeated, more harshly. “And I’m sorry for it. More than you’ll ever know.” The last part was muttered under his breath, hardly audible.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, and saw the frustrated twitch that crossed his features.

“Well, it damn well should,” he said quietly. “In one breath I tell you that I’m not the same as the bastards who raped you, and then, in the next, I’m practically doing the same thing myself. I let my temper get away from me.” His fingers flexed round the steering wheel and I had a flash recall of them braceleting my wrists with the same unforgiving grip. If his hollow tone was anything to go by, he remembered it, too. “It’s not something I’m proud of.”

“Do you honestly believe what you did—what we did—was rape?” I said, cracking the last word like a whip, even though I kept my voice down to a fierce whisper. “Nowhere near. It was wild, yes. A little rough, maybe. But if you think that qualifies, you’re a bloody fool!”

“I disagree,” he said icily.

I tried to let go of my anger. “Okay, have it your own way—yes, you raped me,” I snapped, still keeping the volume as low as I could manage, feeling the slightest tremble of the car as he controlled his reaction. “I didn’t enjoy it for a second and I faked my orgasms—all of them. Happy now? Hair shirt uncomfortable enough for you?”

For a second Sean’s face had frozen, then all the tension went out of him and he made a spluttering sound that might have been suppressed laughter, but could just as easily have been anguish.

“Oh my God, Charlie,” he said at last, almost a groan, shaking his head. “I’ve always tried so hard not to remind you—”

“You don’t,” I said, cutting him short. “And do you think I don’t know that, anyway? Do you honestly think I would stay with someone who deliberately set out to intimidate me? To hurt me?” I huffed out a breath. “You must have a pretty low opinion of my own sense of self-worth, Sean.” A wisp of an earlier conversation drifted through my mind. “And you’re not the only one,” I muttered.

It took Sean all of a second to latch on to that. “Your father?”

“He made his feelings clear over breakfast,” I said lightly. “Told me how pitiful he found me—that I must be a whack-job to have enjoyed any of it.”

“Your father actually used the expression ‘whack-job,’ did he?” Sean murmured. “Don’t you just hate it when he comes out with all that technical medical jargon?”

I shrugged, more an annoyed roll of my shoulders. “So I’m paraphrasing,” I allowed. “‘Pitiful’ is definitely one of his, though.” I debated silently for a moment about how much of the rest to tell him, then said, “When I told him I wasn’t likely to turn into a battered wife, he nearly had a heart attack.”

“At the ‘battered’ part or the ‘wife’ part?”

“Either—or both. Take your pick.”

A mile passed in silence. The periphery of the Camry’s headlights picked out some unidentified large bird of prey lying as crumpled roadkill on the shoulder of the highway, the feathers of one stiffened wing ruffling slightly in the wash from the passing cars like it was waving for help.

“Does the prospect have any appeal for you?” Sean asked then. “Marriage?” There was nothing in his voice, no clue to which way he hoped I’d answer.

“I’m assuming that wasn’t some kind of proposal,” I said, with the same care I’d use to approach a suspect device. “I think, at the moment, I like things the way they are. What’s that old saying? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Besides, I’m not sure I’m good wife material—battered or otherwise.” I only caught Sean’s shoulders shift by some infinitesimal amount because I was looking, and looking hard. “Why?”

Sean pulled out to overtake a truck that seemed to be going only a few miles an hour slower than we were, despite hauling a double trailer-load of tree trunks behind it. The driver was tired enough to wander slightly into our lane as we drew alongside. Sean accelerated out from under him, then let the cruise control pick up again.

“Because it’s not a question that’s occurred to me before,” he said. “And this is the kind of journey where no doubt we’ll get to say all kinds of things that haven’t occurred to us before.” He took a breath, cocked his head as if considering. “I don’t think I’m good husband material, either. And, if genetics are anything to go by, I’d make a lousy father,” he added, his voice hardening just a touch.

“Well, like I said—if it ain’t broke …”

“That’s not to say it will never need fixing, at some point in the future,” Sean said then, his voice calm, almost remote. “It’s just, right now, I think this is probably all I have to give you … to give anyone. But, if—or when, but more likely if—I ever get to the stage where I feel inclined to propose, it would be to you, Charlie.”

Inside my head I heard a soft hissing sound, like a lover’s gasp or spray on summer lawns, followed by a smooth vortex of tightly spiraling, conflicted thoughts.

Too much.

Not enough.

As good as you’re going to get.

“Thank you,” I said quietly, listening to the rhythm of the tires over a section of mended road surface. And I found myself smiling. “My parents would utterly freak out.”

“All the more reason for you to say yes, then—if or when it ever happens.” I saw the answering flash of his teeth. And, as if I’d asked the question out loud, he added, “And no, you’d never be battered if you were my wife. Not by me, at any rate.”

I reached across and brushed my fingers along his cheekbone, where the hollow dipped it into shadow. The skin was tightly stretched. He was concentrating on the road ahead and almost flinched under my touch.

“I’m not made of glass, Sean,” I said, keeping my voice deceptively gentle. “Four of them couldn’t break me. You won’t come close. And I meant what I said last night.”

“Which part?”

“The part where I told you if you dared hold anything back, I’d kill you where you stood.”

He let a laugh form, even if it was a shaky one. “Ah, that part,” he murmured, and his voice turned wry. “I think you almost did.”

I grinned at him, mostly in relief. A feeling that lasted right up until a disembodied voice spoke up from the backseat.

“I’d like to stop for a short break when it’s next convenient,” my father said, sounding cool and collected and not at all like a man who’s only just woken from an uncomfortable nap. “No rush,” he added. “Please—do finish your conversation first … .”