DIE EASY: Charlie Fox book ten (the Charlie Fox crime thriller series) (2 page)

I didn’t speak, didn’t distract Sean, but by the way he tensed I knew he’d seen them, too.

His brows were drawn down flat in concentration, making his harsh face seem colder than usual. Cold enough to make me shiver.

He muscled me sideways effortlessly, snatching roughly at the cuffs so that it jarred my whole arm. I should have been protesting at this point, but I said nothing. It took willpower to remain passive.

Sean went down on one knee, pulled me into a crouch alongside him, using an old parked Chevy for cover. We stayed up by the front wheel where the engine block provided more of a shield.

More people sprinted by. A man tripped and went sprawling right behind us. Sean ignored him. He had the gun up in front of him, head tilted to best utilise his dominant eye.

A target broke cover, dodging through the remnants of the fleeing people. Sean fired on him without hesitation, four fast shots that somehow threaded through the crowd, tracked and hit. He went down.

Before the first man finished falling another had appeared, jinking between parked cars on the opposite side of the street. He had a machine pistol held at waist-level, and he strafed us as he ran. Sean held his nerve, his position and his aim, taking only two rounds to drop him.

The third and fourth assailants came in together from oblique angles, taking advantage of any tunnelling in Sean’s focus. Sean twisted, forgetting about my dead weight on the end of his right arm. He growled in frustration as his first shots went wide, taking an extra fraction of a second he barely had time for.

His breath hissed out as he swung his arm over the top of me and fired again, so close I felt the gases blast past my cheek, heard the brutal snap of the report clatter in my ears. The hot dead brass spun out and scattered around me. One casing hit the side of my neck, burning the skin. Instinct told me to stay on my feet. Instead I dropped flat, trying to get my hands over my head. Not easy with unwieldy objects attached to both arms.

Then I heard the Glock’s action lock back empty.

I hadn’t been counting the rounds, but I couldn’t believe Sean let the gun run dry in these circumstances.

I raised my head, my locked-together fingers hampering his reload. Sean hit the release to drop the magazine and shoved the Glock, butt upwards, into the vee at the back of his bent leg. He snatched the spare mag out of his belt and slapped it home with the palm of his hand, then pulled the gun free and flicked the slide release awkwardly to snap the first round up into the chamber.

The whole operation had taken maybe a couple of seconds, left-handed, smooth and without a slip, but he was staring at me as if I’d just tried to get him killed.

As if I
wanted
him dead . . .

“Come on—up!” he commanded, almost wrenching my arm out of its socket as he dragged me upright. The briefcase dangled painfully from the short cuff chain, gouging at my right wrist. I groped for the case’s handle, stumbling as we fell back into the mouth of an alley.

The expanding slap of a long gun rebounded between the brick buildings, and then they came at us thick and fast, half a dozen armed men, experienced pros, motivated, confident.

It was always going to be a no-win situation.

Sean went to the wall that allowed him to keep his left hand free, facing outwards, elbowing me round behind him. He fired at anything that showed itself past the edge of the scarred brickwork, dialled in now, emotions buttoned down tight.

And this time he dropped the magazine out before the last round was fired, keeping the Glock’s working parts in play. He shoved the gun into his belt to reach for a reload.

I stayed close up behind him—I had no other choice. But I had my face slightly turned towards the back of the alley, and for this reason I saw a door open halfway back, a man emerge with a gun in his right fist. He was tall, rangy, his arms already raised to firing position, and he was smiling.

I sucked in an audible breath. Sean heard it, head snapping round. For the merest fraction of a second he hesitated, then tried to hurry the magazine into the pistol grip and fumbled it.

The man’s smile became broader. He fired.

Not at Sean, but at me.

I felt the punch of the impact in my chest, high on the right, where he knew the round would drill diagonally through ribs, lungs and heart. Where he knew it would do the most harm.

Bastard.

I gasped but couldn’t get my breath, started to slide down the rough wall as my legs folded under me. Sean turned into my body as if to stop me falling. His face was an inch from mine. I stared into eyes dark as mourning and saw nothing reflected back at me.

That hurt worse than the shot.

His left hand was empty. It snaked under the tails of my shirt. I felt his fingers close around the SIG Sauer I wore just behind my right hip, pulling it free.

He knew I carried the gun ready, with a round jacked up into the chamber. There was no safety.

He fired as soon as the weapon cleared my torso, four rounds straight into the centre of the smiling man’s body mass.

As the guy went down I just had time to note that he wasn’t smiling any more.

“C’mon, Charlie, it was just an exercise,” Parker Armstrong said. “The whole point was for you to make things as difficult for Sean as possible, really test the guy out.”

I remembered my faked mini-hysteria, the deliberate inaction that had stuck in my craw to maintain. I looked down at the coffee cup clasped between my tense fingers. “Well, I did that all right.”

My boss’s smile was dust dry. “I’ll bet. But Sean passed the course—top ten per cent.”

I remembered the shots that had threaded through the crowd. That they’d been accurate was not the point. Collateral damage was not supposed to figure in our line of work.

“Yeah, but—before—we both know Sean would have been in the top
two
per cent, easy.”

Before.

It was how we’d taken to referring to Sean’s near-fatal shooting and the resultant coma that had locked him down for nearly four months. Before he’d nearly died and then come back to us changed not just physically and mentally but emotionally, too.

Before the part of him I knew—the part that really knew me—
had
died, in a way.

“It’s only been five months since he woke up and he still passed fit, Charlie. That’s impressive, by anyone’s standards.”

I hunched my shoulders. “You didn’t see him, Parker—the way he looked at me . . .”

And the way he didn’t.

Parker leaned forwards on my sofa, elbows resting on his knees, and pinned me with a level gaze. “There’s no point in taking a Stress Under Fire course unless it lives up to its name. Your job was to drive him hard, to look for the cracks.” His voice softened sympathetically. “Nobody escapes unscathed, Charlie—that’s the point of it. Sure, it was never going to be a cakewalk for either of you, but I knew no one else would push him harder. You’re the one who knows him best.”

“I
knew
him best,” I corrected. “But that’s not true any more.”

We sat there in the high-ceilinged living room of the New York City apartment. Parker looked at home there, but his family owned the building so I suppose he had every right.

He’d offered it to us at a ridiculously subsidised rent as part of the relocation package that had tempted Sean and me away from the UK in the first place. Otherwise there was no way we could afford to rent within sight of Central Park, even if you did practically have to stand on a chair to see the greenery.

I glanced up, found him still watching me. There was something both soothing and unnerving about Parker’s calm silence. “The old Sean would never have let them shoot me in the chest,” I said at last. It sounded almost plaintive.

Parker smiled more fully then. It transformed his rather sombre face, took half a decade off his age. “C’mon, Charlie, Tony’s been waiting to get his own back ever since you shot him in the balls last year.”

I felt a sheepish grin of my own rise up. “Hey, that was just his bad luck. I was aiming for low-centre-body mass, just like he advocates—the most static part of a moving target. He should just be thankful we weren’t using live rounds.”

“As should you,” he said. “How’re the ribs?”

“Black and blue, thanks.”

“Yeah, those sims sting like a bastard, don’t they?”

The Simunitions training rounds used on the SUF course were designed to give participants a nasty and painful reminder of the consequences faced in the field. Heavy or protective clothing was disallowed by the instructors, so there was nothing to lessen the impact. As with the real thing, nobody wanted to take a hit.

The sims had the advantage that they could be fired from a replacement barrel in the shooter’s own weapon. They were the most realistic training round I’d encountered short of live ammunition.

Getting shot in the chest had been an experience that left me bruised and aching, but it had only been a day or so ago. In a week the visible marks would have faded like they never were. Only the implanted reflex would remain.

I drained my coffee, rose stiffly and reached for Parker’s empty cup too. He’d come straight from the office and was wearing his usual formal dark suit. It was well-cut without being flashy. I could have used the same words to describe Parker himself—everything about him capable of blending into the background. Unless you looked closely at his eyes. Then you realised he’d seen and done more than you ever wanted to know about.

Sean had eyes like those.

I took the cups into the apartment’s kitchen area, dumped them in the sink. When I came back, I found my boss standing by the tall windows looking out across the Upper East Side. His hands were in his pockets, but I knew from the angle of his shoulders that he wasn’t anywhere near as relaxed as the pose suggested.

Parker wasn’t only my employer and, I suppose, my landlord—over the course of Sean’s incapacity he’d become a friend. He could have become much more than that, if we’d let it happen.

He turned around. “So, how are things between the two of you?”

I shoved my own hands into the back pockets of my jeans, wished I hadn’t when I saw Parker divine the defensiveness of the gesture. “OK-ish,” I said. “Intellectually, Sean accepts I’m not the girl he remembers from the army—the one he thinks betrayed him. He accepts that we moved on, found each other again, came over here together and are sharing this place, working for you.”

“But?”

“
Intellectually
, he accepts it, but emotionally?” I shrugged, shook my head. “That’s another thing altogether.”

Parker stepped in suddenly, reached out and took my upper arms. His grasp was light, but sufficient to stop me getting my hands free without a struggle. I didn’t try.

“Look, Charlie, if things have gotten too . . . difficult here, you can always move out. I know the two of you are not sleeping together—”

I did wrench free then. “Sean told you that?”

“He didn’t have to,” he said gently. “This is a two-bedroom apartment, and you’ve moved your gear into the second bedroom.”

For a second I thought about telling Parker that Sean had become a violently restless sleeper, racked by desperate nightmares as if back in the coma’s grip. Besides, he’d shown no inclination for intimacy—not with me anyway.

How can I share a bed with someone who not only doesn’t love me, but doesn’t really even
like
me any more?

I shrugged. “He snores.”

Parker placed his hands back on my shoulders, not calling me on the lie. “Hey, Charlie, I know it’s tough,” he said softly. “But if the both of you need some space, some time, I have room at my place. You’re welcome to stay as long as you need.”

My throat tightened. “Parker—”

Off to my left, the apartment front door slammed. I jerked back automatically, but was aware of the shocked guilt plastered across my face when Sean appeared in the living room doorway.

He was dressed in his running gear and dripping with sweat. No longer as wasted as when he’d woken, Sean had worked hard to rebuild his muscle bulk. But his right leg was dragging a little as it did when he pushed himself to the point of exhaustion. He’d done a lot of that.

The gunshot wound to his left temple had disrupted his brain’s control over his right side. Remastering simple coordination was just one of the battles still raging.

Sean saw the pair of us, standing together like that and his eyes flicked over us with unreadable intensity. I thought I caught just a flicker of contempt.

“Hi, Sean,” Parker said with remarkable composure. “Charlie and I were just discussing your Stress Under Fire course. Sounds like you aced it. Tony says it’s the first time he’s ever been taken down by someone using a New York reload.”