Third Strike

CHAPTER 27

We drove through the night, Sean and I, heading steadily southwest, one town blurring into the next on the endless road. We passed signs for familiar English place names in unfamiliar locations, all jumbled together until it was like something out of a long bizarre dream.

Dawn broke as we crossed the border from Virginia into Tennessee, the sun rising ragged over the Appalachians. It sparkled on the dew in roadside pastures, stretching the outlines of the trees and the dozing horses. We chased our own shadow for a hundred miles before it fell away and was trampled beneath the Camry’s wheels. The daylight, which started out so softly tentative, sharpened to a vicious edge by noon.

By 3:30 P.M., allowing for the hour we’d gained going from Eastern to Central time, we were approaching Memphis, Tennessee. We stopped at a roadside diner that had been cryogenically frozen sometime in the mid-fifties. An antique jukebox played a series of old maudlin country numbers, to which the wait staff sang along with more enthusiasm than technical accuracy. Raucous, but welcoming.

Our waitress must have been sixty-five, with skin the color of bourbon and the legs of a woman half her age, which she showed off beneath a skirt that was barely longer than her apron. She also had an accent thick enough to slice as she called my father “sugar” and bumped him with her hip as she declared how much she just loved the way he done talk.

I half-expected my father to tighten up like a clam’s armpit at her impertinence. To my surprise he seemed happy to chat to the woman, whose name was Glory, even going so far as to compliment her on the caterwauling she’d been subjecting us to.

“I knew you folk must be believers,” she said, beaming at us. “You on this road, headin’ west, and you gotta be goin’ to Graceland.” She finished scribbling on her pad, already heading for the kitchen, which we could see into behind the long counter, calling back over her shoulder, “You see the King, sugar, you be sure to done tell him Glory never lost the faith, now. We know he ain’t dead. It’s all some gov’ment conspiracy. Yes sir.”

“Of course,” my father said gravely. “I’d be delighted to pass on your message.”

“‘Delighted,’ huh?” She laughed and shook her head as she slapped in our order. “You sure talk pretty, sugar.”

My father waited until she was out of earshot, then looked at the rest of us, totally puzzled. “The king of where?” he said.

Once we’d stopped, it was hard to get going again. We drove for another couple of hours before Sean finally caved and agreed that we needed to rest up until morning. By that time, we were just approaching Little Rock and night had fallen hard on Arkansas. The city looked very bright as it loomed on the horizon, initially beautiful against the utter black. It was only when we got nearer that the glitter seemed to take on a slightly tarnished quality.

We picked out a small nondescript chain hotel near the airport. It was close to the interstate and promised Jacuzzi rooms, free HBO movies, and a business center.

We left the Camry under the impressive portico at the front entrance while we gave the woman on the desk a sob story about having our passports and wallets stolen. We assuaged her immediate suspicions by producing a large enough cash deposit to counterbalance any qualms that we were about to trash the place and skip out. I think our air of bone-deep weariness mixed with English respectability won her over.

She gave us adjoining rooms, told us what time the complimentary breakfast would be laid out in the lobby, and had already wished us a pleasant stay before it occurred to her that might be difficult.

As we trudged back out to fetch our luggage I was aware of being so tired my vision was vibrating with the effort of keeping my eyes focused. I noted the movements of the people in the lobby almost on autopilot. If someone had pulled an Uzi out from under his coat I would have seen it, but I was probably too far gone to comprehend what it meant.

More than twenty-four hours sitting in a car without sports seats made me feel like someone had been kicking me repeatedly in the base of my spine. I was praying that, sometime sooner rather than later, the nerves into my left thigh would overload and shut down.

Walking out of the hotel, I could feel the gathered heat releasing from the ground up into the darkness. The night air was hot, and humid enough to drink, sticking my shirt to my back almost instantly. Sean popped the boot and he and my father grabbed the bags while my mother wheeled out a luggage trolley from the lobby.

It was only as Sean swung my bag up with the others that I remembered I hadn’t re-zipped it fully after our last stop. I stretched out a hand, but I was too tired and too slow. The little brown plastic bottle of Vicodin I’d stuffed just inside the top of the bag went spinning onto the ground and rolled to a stop by my father’s foot.

He picked it up before I could stop him, recognized the type of the bottle and scanned the label automatically. He was halfway through handing it back when he stopped, frowning, and looked up at me.

“These are yours, I assume, Charlotte?” he said. He held the pill bottle top and bottom with a disdainful finger and thumb and shook it gently, gauging the level of the contents by the resultant rattle.

“Yes,” I said, reaching for the bottle, but he whisked it out of reach. Fatigue is not a good sedative for temper. Mine lurched into life, leaving blotches of vivid color splashed behind my eyes. I held my hand out. “Do you mind?”

“That my daughter’s on Vicodin? Certainly,” he said. He shook the bottle again and peered at the date on the label. “And, it would seem, consuming them at a rate of knots. How long have you been taking these?”

I glanced to Sean for support, but he had that closed-up look to his face. He didn’t need to speak for me to see his mind working it out.

“On and off,” I said bluntly, “since I was shot.”

“I see. Naturally, you are aware that Vicodin is addictive if taken long term.”

“Of course I am,” I said, aiming for haughtiness but not making it much past defensive instead. “I don’t use them regularly—just when I need to. When my leg’s bad.” Like now. Give me the damn bottle!

“Were you taking them the day you passed your physical?” Sean asked suddenly, and the unexpected coolness of the question took me by surprise. Our closeness in the car, our solidarity, suddenly evaporated in the face of his veiled accusation.

“I—”

“Oh for heaven’s sake, both of you, leave the poor girl alone!” my mother said. “Don’t you think she’s got enough on her plate without you both jumping on her over this?”

“I’m sorry if you feel that the danger of our daughter turning into a drug addict is something we should just ignore, Elizabeth,” my father said.

My mother laughed. It was a bone-tired laugh, with a touch of hysteria skimming just under the surface. “Of course we shouldn’t ignore it, but I hardly think this is the time or the place to make it into an issue, either,” she said stoutly. “How many times have you told me people make bad decisions when they’re in pain? Surely you agree that’s the last thing any of us want at the moment—least of all Charlotte?”

“Vicodin is a mix of acetaminophen and hydrocodone,” my father bit out. “Hydrocodone is a narcotic pain reliever and acetaminophen increases its efficiency. Among the many possible side effects are impaired reactions and reduced mental alertness. In other words, it can severely affect the decisionmaking process. One has to be careful about letting a patient drive, or operate machinery. But you’re quite happy for Charlotte to be running around with that,” he said, gesturing dismissively in the direction of my hidden SIG, “and very little compunction about using it, when she’s on this type of medication?”

My father must have been tired, too. It was the first time I think I’ve ever heard him sound so testy with her, but my mother was undaunted. She drew herself up straight as a duchess and treated him to a lofty stare.

“And have Charlotte’s actions so far shown her to be anything but entirely rational?” she asked with brittle dignity. She allowed herself a shaky smile. “Terrifyingly so,” she added, and her voice softened. “Whether we like it or not, Richard, our lives are in Sean’s and Charlotte’s hands and I, for one, am prepared to trust her judgment implicitly.”

My father gave a single muffled tut, the only outward sign of his annoyance. He glanced at Sean, as if for support. I didn’t expect for a moment that he’d get it.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were still taking painkillers, Charlie?” Sean said quietly.

My brain was working too sluggishly to do more than gape at him for a moment. “Don’t start, Sean,” I snapped. “Nothing I’m taking has stopped me from doing my job. You said so yourself.”

“Yes, but are you doing it in spite of the Vicodin?” he said. “Or because of it?”

My mother stepped between us and put an arm around my shoulders. “Be sensible and leave it for now, Sean,” she said gently. “We’re all tired enough to say things we’ll regret in the morning. Come along, Charlotte,” she murmured steering me towards the hotel entrance. “I think for once we can forget equality of the sexes and leave the men to bring in the luggage, hm?”

I shrugged her arm away. “I can still do my job,” I said, dogged, stepping away from her and struggling not to stagger.

“Of course you can, darling,” she said, “but at what cost?”

As we walked through the automatic doors into the lobby, I glanced back and saw Sean and my father, still by the open boot of the car, watching us. They were standing shoulder-to-shoulder, I noticed, unconsciously presenting a united front. Ironic that the first time they were in any kind of accord, it was to team up against me.

We slept like the dead, all of us. Ten straight hours. When I woke, I reached out a hand and found Sean’s side of the bed already empty but still warm from his body heat. When I lifted my head I heard the sound of running water in the shower, and I rolled over slightly to check the time on the digital clock by the bed. It was 6:08 A.M.

And as I moved, I noticed something else on the bedside table that hadn’t been there when I’d crawled into bed the night before—my bottle of Vicodin. For a moment the fear ran through me that perhaps Sean had junked the contents, to prove some kind of a point. I reached out and picked it up. The plastic bottle had some weight and I couldn’t help the sense of relief that went with that discovery.

“If you need them, take them,” Sean said from the bathroom doorway. I hadn’t noticed the water shutting off. The light was a little behind him, so his face was in shadow. He had one bath towel wrapped loosely round his hips and was wiping his neck with another.

I felt something hard and frozen tighten at the center of me. “For the moment,” I said baldly, “yes, I think I do.”

“I know,” he said, moving so he was in the light. His eyes were very dark and very cold. “But when we get back to New York, you are going to come off them. And if you need help to do that, we’ll get it for you.”

My chin came up and I met his gaze steadily. “I’m not hooked, Sean,” I said. “I won’t need any help.”

He regarded me for an elongated moment, then nodded just once.

“Okay” was all he said.

The business center was deserted when we went down to the lobby, so Sean was able to log on to the e-mail account Parker had given us without fear of anyone looking over our shoulder. There were two e-mails in the Inbox from the nondescript address Parker had set up for himself. Not worried about downloading viruses, Sean opened the first one.

Parker had clearly spent some time digging into Storax—background and financials. The number of zeros on the end of their annual profit figures had my eyes crossing.

“French parent company,” Sean muttered, scanning the highlights. “Subsidiaries in Germany, Switzerland and the Far East, as well as the U.S. government contracts for bird flu and anthrax vaccines. Fingers in lots of pies.”

“Well, Collingwood told us they had clout,” I said, “and he had no reason to lie about that.”

“Habit?” Sean suggested. He kept scrolling down. “Ah, here we are—Terry O’Loughlin. Bit sketchy, but I don’t suppose Parker wanted to raise any flags.”

The information Parker had uncovered simply said that Terry O’Loughlin had been listed as an employee of Storax Pharmaceutical for the past five years, and was registered as living alone at an address in an affluent suburb of Houston.

“Looks like they pay their legal people pretty well,” Sean murmured. O’Loughlin drives a two-year-old Porsche 911 GT3” To make identifying our subject easier, Parker had included the registration number of the car and the color—Guards red.

“If we’re going to try approaching this guy, we might be better confronting him at home,” I said. “We stand a better chance than trying to force our way into Storax’s headquarters, at any rate. My breaking and entering skills are somewhat limited.”

“Yeah,” Sean said with the ghost of a smile. “One day, when we’ve got time, I’ll show you how to do the job properly.”

“It’s a date.” I gave a wry smile of my own. “And they say romance is dead.”

He grinned at me then, if briefly, and I felt some of the tension go out of my shoulders, but when he opened the second e-mail from Parker, suddenly neither of us was smiling anymore.

Miranda Lee’s body had been discovered by local lawenforcement officers the previous evening. They’d called at her home in response to an anxious request from the friend in Vermont, who’d been expecting her that afternoon and had grown concerned when she didn’t show.

According to the reports Parker had accessed, Miranda had swallowed a large quantity of sleeping pills, washed down with an even larger quantity of vodka. She’d left a terse little note blaming loneliness and the involvement of one of Jeremy’s oldest friends in the events surrounding her husband’s death for her decision.

“Bastards,” I said slowly, clenched with an impotent rage. “They suicided her.”

“Looks that way.”

“Bloody hell.” I stood for a moment, then let my breath out. “What do we tell my parents?”

Sean erased the e-mails, dumped the cache and logged off. “The truth,” he said. “As much as they can stand of it.”

“It makes me keener than ever to talk to O’Loughlin,” I said bitterly. “Did he know what they were planning—is that why the cryptic warning? And, if so, why not tell her straight?”

“I’ll make a point of asking that when we meet him,” he said, getting to his feet. “But we must still be nearly six hundred miles from Houston. I suggest we make a start as soon as your parents are awake. We can grab breakfast on the way.”

“So, how do we approach this guy?” I wondered aloud as we walked to the elevators and punched the call button. “Phone? E-mail?”

“I think we might be better just turning up unannounced. Less chance of him setting us up if he doesn’t know we’re coming. We’ll get a more honest reaction face-to-face.”

“Okay, as long as you’re not planning that we go sneaking in there in the middle of the night,” I said.

Sean raised his eyebrows. “We’ve done plenty of sneaking, in our time,” he pointed out mildly.

“Yeah, but this is Texas, Sean,” I pointed out. The elevator doors opened and we stepped in. “This is the state where you practically have to explain to the licensing authority if your vehicle doesn’t have a gun rack. No way do I want to go sneaking into somebody’s house in the middle of the night when they’re likely to be armed and trigger-happy.”

“Come on, Charlie. He’s a lawyer.”

“So?” I muttered. “That just means he knows how to shoot you and get away with it.”

By 7:30 A.M. we’d raided the hotel breakfast buffet and hit the road. We left Little Rock and drove to Texarkana, which straddles the border between Arkansas and Texas. It was purely my imagination, but I could have sworn the sky seemed bigger here.

We dropped off I-30 at Texarkana and took the smaller roads, a mix of dual and single carriageways that meant progress was slower than before. The alternative was a long detour to stick to the interstate, going via Dallas.

We’d broken the news about Miranda to my parents as soon as we were on the road.

“Oh, Richard,” my mother had murmured with a chokedoff sob.

My father’s face had taken longer to react. “We should never have left her on her own,” he said, remote.

I braced myself for condemnation for not providing her with protection, even though she’d rejected our offer of help, but he lapsed into silent brooding after that, refusing to be drawn into conversation.

East Texas was more thickly wooded than I’d been expecting. We drove past lakes and forests, through small towns with curiously old-fashioned signs outside the local businesses, like they hadn’t been updated for the past forty years. Getting into the urban sprawl of Houston was a shock after the seemingly slower pace. The journey had taken forever and now, suddenly, we were here.

Traffic was starting to build, but we were all anxious to take a look at our enemy. Storax had their base of operations on a twenty-three-acre site in an area called Pearland, just outside Beltway 8. The site was on a high-tech industrial park, and surrounded by a good deal of chain-link fencing.

Even on a cursory drive-by, we saw patrols with dogs and CCTV that had been positioned by someone who knew what they were doing, backed up by more sophisticated and much less obvious security.

The grounds were not as attractively landscaped as those surrounding the hospital in Boston, but they were much more carefully thought out from a defensive point of view. The building itself was mirror glass and pale gray concrete, giving nothing away. Apart from the name in letters a meter high along the front wall, it could have housed anything. It wasn’t even easy to identify the main entrance.

“We’d need an army to break into this place,” Sean muttered, eyes still on the image of the pharmaceutical giant in the rearview mirror as we drove away.

“Well, Sergeant, considering we are all the troops you have,” I said, glancing across at him, “let’s just hope we don’t need to break in.”

The light was starting to drop and when it went, it went fast, the blue end of the spectrum fading to leave a soft lingering red and orange cast. In under half an hour it seemed to go from squint-inducing sunlight to dark enough for the Camry’s headlights to make a difference. Night didn’t so much fall in Texas, it plummeted.

We headed back towards Houston Hobby airport, where there were any number of hotels and motels to choose from, and picked one almost at random. My parents weren’t keen on being left there, but the lure of a real bed quickly overpowered their protests. Sean and I grabbed a couple of hours’ rest ourselves to let the rush hour die. Then we had a hot shower and a change of clothes, used the business center to print out route maps, and headed out again.

“You do realize,” Sean said quietly, as we pulled back out onto the freeway, “that they should have caught us by now, don’t you?”

“Yes, I’ve been wondering about that,” I said. “If Collingwood sounded the alarm after Vondie’s ambush failed to net us, we never should have made it out of Massachusetts.”

“Mm, so does that make us good?” he asked. “Or just lucky?”

I flashed him a tired smile. “Can’t we be both?”