DIE EASY: Charlie Fox book ten (the Charlie Fox crime thriller series) (23 page)

Shit—why did you have to go thinking in those terms, Fox?

The most straightforward route to the casino deck was down the main stairwell, but as I headed for that I heard voices, booted feet. It seemed that not everyone was bothered about damaging the
Miss Francis
’s plank decking.

I dived for the nearest doorway and grabbed at the handle. It turned. I shoved through, found myself in what looked like a crew cabin, a tiny space with a bunk and a one-place table, and hanging space between them. A spatter of photographs was tacked to the bulkhead above the table—a woman and a couple of small children, a long-legged shaggy dog who seemed keener than any of them to be in front of the camera.

I heard the boots approaching, moved back away from the windows as they slowed outside. Some people just had the hunter instinct, were able to sense prey on an almost subconscious level. I stepped back again, silently, and burrowed my way into the clothes hanging between table and bunk. If he took a cursory glance he would miss me. Anything more I’d deal with when I had to.

Inside my head I was still cursing the fact I didn’t have a weapon. It had become so second-nature to carry the SIG that I realised the lack of it was distracting me. My reliance had become a handicap instead of a freedom.

I shook it off, tried to concentrate instead on what I
did
have. On the table was a pen and pad with an almost unintelligible To Do list scrawled across it. I reached out, plucked the pen off the pad.

The cabin door opened—a crack that widened very slowly. I shifted my grip on the pen, readying it so that it both reinforced my fist and protruded from my clenched fingers as a kubotan. I found that although my body was revving, my mind was suddenly cold and calm.

Come on
, I found myself willing him.
Come on in. Come closer.

Close enough for me to strike.

Close enough to kill.

The man took a step forwards. I had one foot braced against the base of the wall behind me as a springboard now, poised, tense. I could feel his wariness, his caution. Could almost smell it. As if his own instincts were warning him of danger but he could not quite identify the source.

Through a gap between a pair of old jeans and a work shirt, I could see the man standing just inside the cabin door, one hand still on the open handle and the other wrapped around his MP5K. His head was tilted as if he tasted the air for trace of me. But like the man in the wheelhouse he wore a balaclava which prevented me gauging anything from his features.

For maybe ten seconds we stayed like that, frozen. Then the man took another step and reached to nudge aside the clothing on the rack in front of my face with the muzzle of the gun. He let go of the door handle and the door began to swing shut behind him.

As soon as it closes, you’re mine . . .

The door never closed.

A moment before it would have latched, a booted foot was stuck inside the frame.

“You looking to lie down on the job, huh, Sullivan?” demanded the newcomer. “Get on with it for Chrissakes, or we’ll be running behind schedule.”

“Hey, I was told to be thorough,” said the man named Sullivan, his voice leaning towards whiny. “He should make up his goddamn mind.”

“You want to tell him that yourself?” asked the second man.

There was a short pause while Sullivan tried to work out exactly how sorely tempted he might be, considering the undoubted payback. Then he turned, shoving his way out without a word.

The second man made a harrumph of sound as he started to close the cabin door. Then he stopped, as if he too had sensed me watching in the shadows.

Hell, he only had to look down to notice a disconnected pair of legs behind the hanging clothing.

But he didn’t notice. A moment later he’d yanked the cabin door shut behind him and I was left listening to the thump of their combined bootsteps fading along the deck outside.

I slumped back against the bulkhead, the adrenaline hangover hitting hard and fast. It scared me how close I’d come to killing him. How disappointed I was to be denied.

No! That isn’t true
.

I told myself I was disappointed only to be robbed of the chance to interrogate one of the other side and extract vital intel from him—numbers, aims, and their line of retreat once they’d done whatever it was they’d hijacked the
Miss Francis
to achieve.

Right now, I was back to guessing.

I straightened gradually, no sudden moves or I was likely to keel over. And that, I was sure, would bring Sullivan and his mate running.

Instead, I waited until my system had climbed down from screaming high alert to just your everyday normal hijacked-riverboat kind of levels.

I pushed through the unknown crew member’s clothing and reached for the door handle myself. I confess that I opened it with extreme caution, skylining my head as little as possible past the aperture.

But of Sullivan and his cheery friend, I saw no sign.

I don’t know what Sean told Blake Dyer about leaving before the impending threat. I could only guess he must have phrased it as an order rather than a request. By the time I arrived on the casino deck, identified my principal and hurried across, they were involved in a quiet but vehement argument.

Now, I considered, was not the bloody time for either man to get stubborn.

It didn’t help that he was only a few metres from Tom O’Day himself, who watched the exchange with undisguised curiosity, even if they were keeping their voices down. The body language spoke volumes.

“Sir,” I cut in as soon as I reached them. “We need to leave. Right now.”

“So Sean here has been informing me,” Dyer said with a certain coldness. He indicated the crowded room with a flick of his hand. “And what about everybody else?”

“They have their own protection,” I dismissed. I stepped in close. “Sir, if you don’t walk with us,
right now
, then if I have to I will punch your lights out and
carry
you out of here.”

His head reared back in shock, checking between our grim faces as if—after all that had happened so far—he still thought we might possibly be joking. I saw him waver as he realised there was a distinct chance we were not.

Then Sean made a guttural noise of impatience in the back of his throat and took hold of Blake Dyer’s arm.

Mistake.

Dyer twisted out from under his grasp, face closing down. He turned towards Tom O’Day, who was now staring with frank fascination at the unfolding scene.

“Tom,” he said, loudly enough to be awkward, “they’re telling me your guys have apparently lost control of this old tub to some kind of river pirates—is that so?”

Shit!

My turn to grab Dyer. I did so with both hands—one at the back of his wrist and the other pinching in hard to pressure points just behind his elbow. He went rigid but allowed me to turn him. Unless he wanted it to really hurt, he didn’t have much of a choice.

Tom O’Day moved forwards as if to intervene. Or maybe he couldn’t quite believe the question Blake Dyer had just asked. “Now, wait just one moment—”

I ignored him and began to hustle our principal towards the nearest exit. “We don’t have time for this.”

Tom O’Day came after us. Of his own bodyguard, Hobson, there was no sign—and that worried me. It worried me a lot.

I glanced around, took a mental snapshot of the casino as it stood at that second. I’d been half expecting Morton to be among the missing, too, but there he was near one of the blackjack tables, staring over at the commotion we were causing. There was something akin to amusement on his features.

Jimmy O’Day, on the other hand, was goggling at us in horror. I made a mental note to ask him some tough questions about the reason for it—when all this was over. It was as if he knew something bad was about to happen, if it wasn’t doing so already. The look he threw Morton contained total panic. He received no obvious reassurance by way of response.

Even Gabe Baptiste showed the beginnings of concern, but after a supposed mugging and a missile attack on the helicopter he was riding in, I guessed he had every right to a little paranoia. Interestingly, though, the person he edged nearer to was not his replacement bodyguard, but Ysabeau van Zant. As though she had got him into this mess and he was relying on her to get him out of it.

Sean and I almost had Blake Dyer as far as the service entrance when the double doors leading out of the casino were rammed open so hard they bounced back from the frame on both sides.

Armed men poured in through the gap, a mix of MP5Ks and M16s pulled up hard into their shoulders. I swung Dyer round behind me, almost onto my back, to keep my body in front of him. I half expected Sean to step up, step in, but realised in shock that he’d let go of the pair of us and was already moving away.

I could only watch as he shifted sideways. I took a look at his face and knew he was not in escape-and-evade mode—he was on the attack.

For a second my mind faltered as the prospect of Sean killing himself at the hands of our attackers burst into it, overwhelming any logical thought processes taking place there.

But as I watched—still shuffling backwards towards our exit and dragging Blake Dyer with me—I saw Sean casually reach out and pluck a couple of the heavy champagne bottles from the table where they’d been stacked up.

He threw the first of them overhand towards the nearest attacker. The bottle flashed outwards, tumbling in flight like a circus performer’s flying dagger, catching one black-dressed figure full in the face and dropping him like a stringless marionette.

Sean wielded the second like a club, smashing it down into another man just at the juncture between his neck and the front of his shoulder. There was too much noise to hear the crack, but I saw his arm suddenly droop, letting the stubby machine pistol dangle from its strap, and knew Sean’s blow had smashed his collarbone.

“Get Dyer out of here,” he yelled at me over his shoulder, then waded in with another bottle.

I didn’t hesitate—couldn’t allow myself to hesitate. I piled Blake Dyer back towards the doorway. We almost knocked Tom O’Day flying in the process. He stumbled. Dyer grabbed him and, as the casino deck erupted into panic and confusion, the three of us half crashed, half staggered out of the door into the stairwell beyond.

The last thing I saw before the doors punched shut behind us was Sean going down amid a flurry of black-clad figures with fists and boots swinging wildly.

I took them back to the crewman’s cabin on the upper deck where I’d so nearly had my run-in with the man called Sullivan.

The logic of that decision was simple. They’d already searched the cabin and found it empty. There were plenty of nooks and crannies aboard the
Miss Francis
left still unexamined. Why would our attackers go back over ground they’d already covered until there was nowhere else left to look?

The two of them followed my lead in compliant silence—for once. Blake Dyer must have been only too aware that his own stupid stubbornness had just cost Sean dearly. If he’d done as he was bloody well told at first time of asking, he and Sean would have slipped quietly away before the trouble even started. Now, they knew to look for us.

As for Tom O’Day, I suspected he might well be in shock. His face was bagged with disbelief, eyes dazed in denial. But more than that I sensed a bitter, overwhelming disillusionment. I thought back to his speech earlier. This was something he’d fought for with a passion, more than just a project or a hobby. This had been a crusade. And now his dream lay in tatters around him.

It was hard not to feel sorry for the man.

When we reached the tiny cabin I shoved them inside and took a moment with the door ajar, listening for signs of pursuit. None came. I closed the bolt as quietly as I could and twisted the Venetian blinds so they were almost closed, slanting upwards so I could see the legs of anyone passing but they could not easily see in.

All the time I was aware of the sweat sticking my shirt to my back but also of a terrible anger fizzing coldly at the base of my brain. I had come so close to losing Sean at the beginning of the year, in more ways than one. We’d had a breakdown in communication that had nearly damaged our relationship beyond repair. And just when I thought things were all over for us, that we’d never come back from that precipice, Sean had been shot. The whole edge of my world had collapsed underneath me. I’d been falling ever since.

I pushed it aside, locked it away, keening, into a dark recess of my mind. If Sean had sacrificed his life for our principal, at least he’d done it willingly this time—knowingly . . .

“Charlie, I am so sorry,” Blake Dyer said at last, his voice shaky. “You have to believe me—I had no idea there was any real danger—”