DIE EASY: Charlie Fox book ten (the Charlie Fox crime thriller series) (21 page)

“For some disgruntled gambler, maybe,” I said. I caught Sean’s eye. He gave me a shrug. I sighed, too. “I already know what our client is going to say, so I suppose we have no choice but to agree. Make a note that we’re sodding unhappy about it though, will you?”

“You and everybody else,” Jimmy muttered, scribbling hastily on the clipboard that seemed to be permanently attached to the end of his arm. “Thanks anyhow, I appreciate it. And apparently there will be a couple of Zodiac inflatable boats acting as outriders while the
Miss Francis
is taking us on our river cruise, just in case of trouble. I’m told the guys in them will have some pretty heavy artillery. Um, not that we’re expecting any more trouble, of course,” he added hastily.

But I remembered the vehemence and determination in the voice of the man who’d shot down the Bell and pursued us into the giant scrapyard near the Lower Ninth Ward, and I wasn’t so convinced.

It was only after he and the for-once silent Morton had departed that the bathroom door opened and Blake Dyer stepped out, still flushed from his shower. He was wearing one of the thick bathrobes the hotel provided, and towelling dry his hair.

“Did I hear visitors?” he asked with apparent innocence.

“Just your godson,” I said, “letting us know about some last-minute . . . adjustments to security on the boat trip tonight.”

“Ah,” Dyer said. He heard the tightness in my jaw, eyes flicking between Sean and me questioningly. “What ‘adjustments’?”

Why do I get the feeling you already know . . .?

“We’re being asked to all go in our birthday suits,” Sean said heavily. “As far as weapons are concerned, anyway. They want us unarmed.”

Dyer was silent for a moment, still rubbing at his damp hair. “Well,” he said slowly at last. “From what I’ve seen of young Charlie here, she doesn’t need to carry a weapon.” He smiled. “Hell, Sean, she
is
a weapon . . .”

Of course, what we didn’t reckon on was the first hostage being taken before we even stepped on board.

As it turned out, getting on board the
Miss Francis
took more than simply leaving our guns behind in the hotel’s main vault. It seemed that Jimmy had not quite given us the full story about the eccentricities of the paddleboat’s skipper.

Not only was the old fruit bat in charge determined to prevent anybody stepping aboard his floating bit of Vegas with a piece on their hip, he didn’t want anybody talking about him behind his back, either. As we found out as soon as we reached the waterfront and were ushered into a striped marquee off to one side.

“No comms gear,” Hobson announced. “Sorry, people—it causes too much electrical interference with the ship’s nav systems.” The apology was perfunctory. He had a surprisingly high-pitched voice for someone so wide across the shoulder.

“I didn’t think we were going far enough for navigation to be any kind of an issue,” I said. “Don’t these old riverboat guys do it all by landmarks and whose dog’s barking on shore?”

Hobson didn’t even glower, just did his best to stare me down. I stood my ground with a look of polite enquiry.

“OK,” he said at last. “The skipper’s on a cut of the casino take, and there’s no way he’s going to allow anybody onto the casino deck who might stand a chance of beating the house through . . . unfair advantage, shall we say.”

“That’s more like it,” I muttered, but I could see his point—even if I didn’t like it much.

Hobson nodded. “Bags will be provided and you can collect all your gear again when you disembark. Oh, and you will be swept so don’t even think about trying to hang onto anything. The old guy in charge of the
Francis
is a law unto himself—still thinks he can make you walk the plank if you cross him.”

He can try.

There was a long pause while everyone waited, I’m sure, for Hobson to admit with a laugh that he was joking. He did not do so, just stood and waited with the patience of a crocodile, muscular arms loose by his sides.

Then, with much muttering, the line broke. Close-protection personnel—more worried about facing their irate principals than a threat—began unbuttoning their jackets. I watched them stripping out wires that disappeared inside shirt collars and sleeves to transceivers in inside pockets or clipped onto belts.

As they did so, it was interesting to note how many had chosen to wear covert body armour under their clothing, even though there were supposed to be no firearms on board.

I put a hand on Sean’s arm when he would have started to pick out the ultra-slim wireless earpiece that sat deep inside his ear canal. “Leave it,” I murmured. “I have.”

Sean frowned at the hand. “If they throw us out now,” he said after a moment, keeping his voice an undertone, “do you really think—at this point—our principal is going to let us take him with us?”

“Probably not,” I agreed, hardly moving my lips just in case. “But don’t forget the comms gear Parker provided for this job is the latest top-grade military spec. It’s so new it’s not even on the market yet. The manufacturers claim in standby mode it’s impossible to detect and in use it’s impervious to any kind of scanning. Might be a nice opportunity to find out if it lives up to the hype, don’t you think?”

For a moment Sean frowned, considering. “If you’d had as much supposedly top-spec gear as I have go down in the field, maybe you wouldn’t be so keen,” he said. But he let his hand drop away, gave me a brief nod. “All right then. Let’s hope this stuff’s up to the job, eh?”

I risked a smile. “If it’s not, I’ll tell them it was all your idea.”

If I’d hoped for a smile in return I was disappointed there, too.

Sure enough, Hobson ran a scanner over each of us in turn, which came up empty.
So far, so good.
He glanced at the sullen faces in front of him.

“Now, I don’t believe for a second that you’ve all been good little boys—and girls,” he said, giving me and the one other female bodyguard a mocking little bow. “So now we get you to prove it.”

He lifted a small transceiver off the table behind him and flicked it on, then hovered his thumb over a button. “If I hit this, anybody who’s trying to pull a fast one and keep hold of their comms gear is going to get a burst of static that will probably burst an eardrum,” he said with grim satisfaction. “Not to mention the fact it will get them kicked off this old tub with my boot so far up their ass they’ll have to swallow boot polish just to get a shine.” He surveyed us slowly with small pale eyes. “So, any of you got anything they ‘forgot’ to take out?”

A couple of the other guys shuffled their feet and sheepishly removed their earpieces. From the little snatch I saw, it was high-quality hardware that blended so well with their natural skin-tone I hadn’t spotted it—even though I’d been looking.

Hobson took a last long look around us, then raised his eyebrows. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he said cheerfully.

I tried not to meet Sean’s eyes, not to look guilty. Most of all I tried not to tense in expectation.

Hobson hit the button.

The burst of static was as loud and as painful as Hobson had predicted.

But it wasn’t in my ears—or Sean’s, come to that. I had time for a brief prayer of thanks that, for once, a piece of untried kit had lived up to the hype.

Instead, the static hit the guy next to us, who I knew was assigned to an oil millionaire from Texas. The errant bodyguard jumped back with a yell as one ear exploded into white noise I could hear from where I stood.

Hobson kept his thumb on the transmit button, face impassive, until the pain of it had driven the bodyguard almost to his knees.

I would have had more sympathy, but I happened to know the guy’s principal had a rep as a fanatical poker player, so I could guess that his motives for wanting comms up and running were not entirely motivated by concern for the Texan’s safety.

I was aware I was holding my breath as the bodyguard scrabbled at his own head, trying to escape from the noise. Eventually, it was Sean who stepped forwards, his gazed locked on Hobson, looking very much like the old Sean.

“OK, he’s had enough,” he said coldly. “You’ve made your point. Shut it off.”

Hobson stared for a moment, clearly tempted to face him down. But Sean still had a rep himself, as a man who would go straight through you and not notice the bump if you gave him cause. Despite a gunshot wound which should have killed him, and all that followed—the coma, the memory loss, the long road back to some kind of physical and mental fitness—Sean still carried weight in this industry. It was nice to see that he had regained enough confidence to throw a little of it around.

Hobson released his thumb with a casually exaggerated motion. Like he was trying to pretend he’d been about to let the guy off the hook anyway. I’m not sure who was convinced about that, but the others threw Sean respectful glances as he stepped back.

I recognised that if it had been me who’d spoken out, the action would have been seen as typical feminine weakness, but in Sean it was a sign of strength. I’d long since given up trying to work out the logic—never mind the fairness—of that kind of attitude. Still, mounting a crusade would be a waste of time and energy. Some things were never going to change.

Now, we were finally allowed to readjust our clothing and join our waiting clients in yet another marquee. This one had been set up on the wooden jetty area that extended out into the Mississippi itself and formed the paddle steamer’s berth. I saw Hobson cross to have a quiet word with the Texas millionaire. He did not look happy.

I assumed the sudden loss of his electronic advantage meant he was probably going to end up making a somewhat more substantial contribution to Tom O’Day’s worthy cause than he’d planned.

He wasn’t the only one to be disappointed at the outset. The
Miss Francis
might have had the appearance of a classic old stern-wheel paddle steamer from the turn of the twentieth century but it turned out she was a totally modern fabrication. Her two hundred and fifty foot hull was steel plate, and her ornate superstructure was steel and glass fibre dressed with enough wood trim to look the part until you got a nose-length away from it. By then the realisation that you’d been somehow fooled, however briefly, made the disenchantment all the more profound.

We had been given the precise specs on the
Miss Francis
as soon as the job came through, so I already knew the rough layout. The paddlewheel steamer had three separate deck levels with the wheelhouse perched on top. Below that were cabins, bars and the main restaurant, leading down to the casino in the main part of the shallow-draught hull. Where, presumably, nobody needed—or was interested in—the view.

Tom O’Day was almost hopping in his excitement to get all his guests up the red-carpeted gangway and on board. There were probably a hundred and fifty people by the time you’d counted all the security personnel. I’d been to charity events in New York and LA where the invites went out in their thousands, but looking at the display of wealth around the necks and wrists of the people here, I reckoned O’Day would not have any problem raising a substantial amount of money for the After Katrina Foundation.

He was also clearly a devotee of stern-wheeler paddleboats. I gathered that his naval background might have had something to do with his interest and knowledge. Certainly, he spouted history and statistics of their association with the Mississippi to anyone who’d listen. I gathered from the slightly weary expression on Hobson’s face that he’d heard it all before—probably more than once.

Ysabeau van Zant managed to maintain an apparently fascinated face while he was speaking. I suspected that as a long-term resident she knew more about the area than O’Day ever would learn as an occasional visitor. She was wearing dignified silver, a long-line jacket over a matching floor-length dress.

The mist that had been gently rolling in from the river solidified into fog by the time darkness thickened out. The
Miss Francis
’s running lights would have made Las Vegas seem refined, and cut down night vision out over the water until it was almost non-existent. I hoped our eccentric skipper knew how to read the river even in these conditions or we would all end up wedged on a sandbank by the time this escapade was over.

As for the armed chase boats Jimmy O’Day had promised us, I couldn’t hear or see anything out there on the grainy black waters. I would have hoped for a glimpse of them in the reflected lights from New Orleans glowing through the fog, or the buzz of a high-power outboard motor. Over the throb of the paddle steamer’s own engines I could hear nothing.

“I don’t like it,” I murmured to Sean. He’d just done another circuit of the bar area where the partygoers were being served an array of complimentary cocktails to get them into a generous frame of mind. I reckoned that was probably going to be their last freebie of the evening.

“Hmm, that’s weird,” Sean said, “because I don’t like it much either.”

I glanced across at him. He was looking tight and wired, something tense about the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head.