DIE EASY: Charlie Fox book ten (the Charlie Fox crime thriller series) (27 page)

The back of his skull had been smashed flat, either from a high fall or a fast-moving blunt instrument. Not being a pathologist, it was hard to tell which. Either way, he wouldn’t have stood much of a chance. Nor would he have lasted long afterwards.

I checked the back of his jacket, his rear trouser pockets. Nothing.

Cursing under my breath, I stood up, sluiced the blood off my hands and went out, closing the door behind me. Blake Dyer was still sitting on the bunk, Tom O’Day in a chair across the other side of the cabin. Both men looked shocked and thoughtful.

“Somebody caved his head in,” I said bluntly.

Blake Dyer closed his eyes briefly, looked away. “Poor guy,” he murmured.

“Still think he was their inside man?” Tom O’Day asked with a little edge to his voice.

I shrugged. “No reason why he couldn’t have been,” I said. “Maybe they decided to cut their costs and kill him once his role was over. It’s not like he could sue them for breach of contract.”

“Or maybe he saw them coming aboard and single-handedly put up a fight,” O’Day said stubbornly.

“Maybe,” I agreed. “Or he could have played his part and then been taken by surprise by someone he had reason to trust.”

He glanced at me sharply. “You have anyone in mind?”

I shook my head. There was no way I was going to get into that kind of argument—they’d already had enough to send them reeling.

Maybe one day we might even discover which of those scenarios was closest to the truth. Now was not that day.

“We need to move—we’ve been here too long already.” I hefted the Maglite, holding it just behind the bulb where I could use the tail end as a club and still be able to see what I’d hit afterwards. I handed the roll of duct tape to Dyer and gestured to the open golf bag. “Choose your weapons.”

They stuck with their original choices—a couple of medium irons. I couldn’t comment on that one way or another. But from the way they gripped the clubs determinedly I’d say the image of Hobson’s body was painted large and fresh in their minds. If it came to it, they wouldn’t hesitate to lash out like they meant it. I couldn’t ask for more than that.

We switched off the lights and I checked we had no company before we slipped out of the skipper’s cabin onto the deck. The fog made it impossible to tell what part of the river we were passing along now. I made a note, when we reached a place of safety, to ask Tom O’Day if he knew where we were. He seemed to know this area better than most. How would his fervour for the After Katrina Foundation survive this episode, I wondered. Would it survive at all?

Although O’Day was the one with expert knowledge of the
Miss Francis
I recalled enough of the layout to lead from the front. Every time we reached a corner, a doorway or a stairwell, I braced myself, ran through a rapid subliminal list of actions, moves, alternatives.

The bad guys were armed with automatic weapons. I had a flashlight. Not exactly a fair fight, but not a hopeless one either. I was expecting them and if they were expecting anybody, they were most likely not expecting me.

Not many blokes, whatever their training, can shoot a woman without a moment’s hesitation. I’d learned that statistic a long time ago. Now I was banking my life on it being true.

If Hobson was indeed the inside man on this job, he would have briefed our attackers about the personnel coming aboard. Whether they would have worked out I was missing or not was another matter. Clearly, they knew Tom O’Day and Blake Dyer had made it out of the casino in the confusion, but could well have assumed that Sean was Blake’s man and discounted me altogether. I could only hope so.

After all, everyone had assumed Sean was in charge and I was merely . . . what—window dressing?

We headed back towards the crewman’s cabin where I’d first hidden away. It still looked as undisturbed as it had been when we’d left it. I riffled through the clothing on the hanging rail, just to be sure nobody hid where I had hidden. Nobody.

“So, do we have a plan?” Blake Dyer asked, sitting down on the edge of the bunk. He sounded exhausted, as though the adrenaline that had been firing him had leached away, leaving him old and tired and just a little bit wishing he’d never got involved with this damn stupid stunt in the first place.

“We need to get to those people in the casino—get them out of there,” Tom O’Day said promptly. So much for him needing a rest—even a nap—before we could go any further.

“The casino deck is three down and slightly aft of here, isn’t it?” I asked.

O’Day stood, turning a little to get his bearings, then said, “You nailed it, Charlie.” He sounded confident but I made a mental note never to play poker against this man. And definitely never for money.

I flipped a slat of the blinds aside and peered into the darkness outside. “Where are we in relation to the land, any ideas?”

Tom O’Day joined me at the window, pursed his lips as he squinted out much as I had done.

“Damned if I know,” he admitted at last.

“I thought you knew this whole area?”

“Hey, it’s kinda dark out there, ma’am, in case it escaped your notice. And foggy. All I know is we’ve been heading up river.”

Considering upstream was the direction we’d taken when we set off, that wasn’t much help. I refrained from pointing that out and wondered instead where the
hell
we were going.
And—more importantly—why were we going there?

I shook my head, stepped back from the window. There was a reason it was called “intelligence gathering”. Right now, we needed to go out and gather some.

As we left the cabin, Tom O’Day indicated we should turn left, heading aft. I shook my head and jerked it in the opposite direction.

I put my lips close to his ear and whispered, “Roundabout route—safer.”

When I pulled back it was to find him frowning, but here was not the place to argue. That was why I’d picked it. If he realised that he gave no sign.

But both of us knew my choice had nothing to do with safety. I was setting myself up both as hunted and hunter.

Finding suitable prey took maybe a couple of minutes. So far, we’d been purposely avoiding any roving patrols, diving out of sight whenever we heard bootsteps or caught the suggestion of movement ahead.

Now I headed for the source of the noise, with O’Day and Dyer creeping along behind me. Their only job, I’d told them, was to watch my back. So far they seemed to be taking the task seriously.

But I was gambling and I knew it. I needed to find a man alone to stand a chance of taking him down, quick and clean. I’d seen what I was about to attempt done in training but never tried it for real—when the stakes were higher than a mere technical defeat.

If I got this wrong I would end up seriously injured or dead.

And who will mourn for you? Sean?

The way things stood, that wasn’t a certainty.

Parker?

In private, maybe. No, that was unfair – and demeaning to the depth of feeling I knew he had for me. But in public he would show only the same sadness as for any employee. My mother might weep with decorum, clutching a lace handkerchief. My father would not allow himself to weep at all.

I shook myself roughly.
Better concentrate on staying alive then, Fox.

And then, halfway down one of the side decks a man stepped into view around the corner of a bulkhead. His gaze was slanted towards the railing and the darkened river, bored and dulled by a route he’d tramped a dozen times already. Repetition with no variation.

Until now.

It took me a fraction of a second to register that he was alone. By that time I had already launched myself towards him. I put everything into an explosive burst of energy and movement, using my arms to drive up instant speed.

The man had been about five metres away. Even as his focus finally snapped onto me I’d closed that distance by half, arms still pumping furiously. Maximum speed, maximum aggression. The watchwords Sean had drummed into us back in the army filled my head like a roar.

I should have been yelling, a battle cry designed to disorientate and paralyse the enemy, but I couldn’t afford to make so much noise. I settled for opening my mouth and eyes wide as I charged and hoped that the man’s mind would fill in the rest.

It did.

For maybe another half a second he was locked motionless, then he grabbed for the H&K machine pistol hanging by its strap from his right shoulder. He fumbled it.

That was all it took and I was on him like a lioness taking down a wildebeest on the African savannah.

I didn’t aim
for
the man, I aimed
through
him. I hit him mid-stride, punching my knee upwards dangerously low into his belly, followed up fast with the Maglite straight to the throat.

He was bowled over by the attack, crashing backwards and skidding along the deck with me on top of him, adding knees and elbows as he hit. The breath was blasted out of him along with any warning cry he might have been about to make.

He dropped the MP5K. It went clattering away. I ignored it for now. As long as it wasn’t actively in his hands I didn’t care.

I hit him again, in the face this time, just to get his attention and give him something to think about other than fighting me. I used the end of the Maglite to break his nose with one sideways sweep. By the looks of him he’d never had it broken before. The shock and surprise would be all the greater.

It certainly took the wind out of him. He arched away from me, gasping and moaning, offered no resistance when I rolled off him and dragged him by the collar of his jacket towards the nearest cabin. As I did so I glanced up, found Blake Dyer and Tom O’Day staring down at the pair of us.

“Where’s the gun?” I demanded.

“It went over the side when you tackled him,” Tom O’Day said.

Shit.

“Erm, a little help here?”

Blake Dyer jerked out of it and grabbed for the door handle. Tom O’Day got a grip of the downed man’s arm. He slid much faster with two of us. We bundled him inside. I checked we’d left no trace behind, aroused no pursuit, then shut the door firmly behind us and flicked on the light.

I quickly checked the man over, hoping he was carrying a back-up piece, a handgun of some description. Sadly, he was not.

I ripped out his radio mic and the curly-cord that led to his earpiece. The transceiver for his comms system was hooked to his belt. I took that away, too, made sure it wasn’t set for voice-activation. I fitted the earpiece into my own ear, adjusting the volume. If they started calling for him, it was best to be forewarned.

I looked up. The men were still clutching their golf clubs ready to take a swing if our prisoner showed signs of resistance.

“I wish I’d managed to grab the gun before it went over.”

“Don’t beat yourself up about it,” Tom O’Day said. “It was a
damned
fine tackle, ma’am.”

“Yeah, well, I always wanted to play rugby at school but they wouldn’t let me.”

“You played too rough for the boys, huh?”

“Something like that, yeah,” I murmured.

Over the side . . . Double shit. All that risk for nothing.

I slumped back against the bunk. The cabin was another crew quarters, although I hadn’t seen enough crew to warrant the number of cabins the
Miss Francis
seemed to have prepared for them. Maybe the sternwheeler doubled as a floating brothel. I glanced at the narrow single mattress.
Hmm, maybe not.

I stared down at the man moving dazedly on the cabin floor between us. If he couldn’t provide us with a weapon, at least he could give us intel.

Or he’d follow his bloody gun into the river.

“Let’s start with an easy one,” I said. “What’s your name?”

The man with the broken nose glared at me resentfully but I couldn’t blame him for that. When he opened his mouth it was only to breathe, not to speak.

I said conversationally, “Just because I’ve broken your nose once doesn’t mean I can’t break it again. And trust me, it will hurt more the second time.”

I’d taken the roll of duct tape back from Dyer and had used a good measure of it to secure our prisoner to the upright chair in the cabin, hands behind him and ankles attached to the front legs. I knew enough about the technicalities of it to make his bonds uncomfortable as well as secure.

“OK, so maybe the nose doesn’t bother you,” I said. “What about your kneecaps?” I let my eyes slide to my companions, standing awkwardly near the door. There wasn’t much room for four of us in there. “Any room to put some decent power behind that club, Tom?”

He held my gaze, playing his part. “It’s a bit tight, but I’m sure I can get the job done,” he said easily.