DIE EASY: Charlie Fox book ten (the Charlie Fox crime thriller series) (28 page)

Blake Dyer made a kind of muted gagging noise and looked away.

“OK, OK, it’s Lu-Lukas,” the man with the broken nose said quickly. “My name’s Lukas.”

“No it’s not.” I shook my head, regretful. “Your name’s Sullivan—isn’t it?

The fear leapt in his eyes then. He swallowed, coughing as the blood trickled down the back of his throat. Then he let his head hang, gave a brief nod.

Unseen over the top of him, Tom O’Day and Blake Dyer passed me astonished looks. I shook my head. Now was not the time to explain that as soon as he’d spoken I recognised the man. He was the same one who’d searched the cabin where I’d been hiding when the hijackers first came aboard. I wondered if he would have treated me any better, had our positions been reversed. Then I thought of Hobson lying dead in the bathtub.

No, probably not.

I sighed. “Look, Sullivan, you’re going to talk to me eventually. Why drag this out and make it more painful for yourself?”

“You’re not going to torture me,” he said, half bravado, half hope.

I shook my head. “No, I’m not,” I said patiently. I pointed to Tom O’Day and hoped he’d play along. “But you killed this guy’s personal bodyguard—his friend. And, trust me on this, he’s the wrong man to upset.”

“What?” Sullivan managed. “Hey, I didn’t kill nobody—”

“Guilty by association, my friend. That’s how the courts see it, that’s how I see it.” I gestured to Tom O’Day again. “And that’s certainly how he sees it.”

Sullivan squinted at O’Day as if trying to remember where he’d seen the face before. It didn’t take him long to work it out. “But that’s—”

“Tom O’Day, yes,” I agreed. “The millionaire—”

O’Day cleared his throat.

“—Make that
multi
millionaire,” I corrected. “But what most people don’t know about him is that during his time in Korea he was considered something of an expert at . . . extracting information—usually from people who did not want to reveal it. They never thought he could break them, but he did.”

O’Day’s eyebrows shot up again but he played along and didn’t contradict me. After all, I’d spoken the exact truth . . . in a way. What else did a cryptologist do but interrogate codes and ciphers until they spilled their guilty secrets?

“I guess I’m a little rusty,” O’Day said easily, linking his fingers together and cracking his knuckles out straight, “but they’re the kinda skills you don’t forget in a hurry.” He favoured Sullivan with his best hostile-takeover boardroom stare. “Especially for the man who had a hand in murdering Rick Hobson.”

“For God’s sake, man, I didn’t have nothing to do with that. We just needed to know what he’d done with you. He should never have—”

Sullivan broke off, gulping down his words as he realised he’d said too much. But once he’d started it was hard to stop.

“He should never have done what?” I prompted. “Run? Fought back? Told you he didn’t know anything?”

Sullivan didn’t have an answer to that one, wouldn’t meet my gaze.

“If you were hoping he’d tell you where his boss was hiding, he couldn’t,” I said roughly. “I got O’Day out when it all kicked off in the casino. Hobson didn’t have anything to do with it.” I paused, let that one sink in. “So you killed him for nothing.”

Well, that answers another question. Hobson was not the inside man.

Sullivan’s eyes fluttered closed for a moment, as if he were praying.

“Talk to me,” I said softly. “Before it’s too late. Before anyone else dies.” I didn’t need to be psychic to know Sullivan had automatically included himself in that group.

I’d intended that he should.

“Look, I hired on to do a straightforward job,” he said then, speaking low and fast, like he might not get another chance. “Come aboard, round up the rich folks, take whatever they had. That was all.”

But there was something evasive in the way he spoke that told me he was holding back.

“Hired by who?”

“You think they told me that?” he threw back. “Lady, I’m not far enough up the food chain to know that kinda thing.”

“OK, who else was hired—guys you knew? Guys you’d worked with before?”

He gave a shrug, as if trying to sideslip the question. “Some,” he admitted. “Guys I’d seen around—contractors, y’know?”

“Mercenaries.”

“Like you’re any different.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Who else—local talent?”

“Local guys, sure,” he said. “Fucking gangbangers. Can’t turn your back on ’em.”

“Yeah, ’cause the rest of you are
so
trustworthy,” I murmured. “What else? And don’t tell me there wasn’t anything, Sullivan. That will only piss me off. Why did you need to know where O’Day was?”

He threw me a quick glance that was almost fearful. “Because we were supposed to grab him, hand him over.”

“Hand him over to who?”

“I don’t know, I swear! All I know is, we were promised a big bonus if it all went off as planned.”

“The robbery?” I queried. “Or the snatch?”

“Both, I guess,” Sullivan said dully. The fear was receding, I saw. Before too long he was going to start feeling ashamed of his cowardice, and then he was going to either start lying to us, or clam up completely.

I kicked the front edge of the chair between his knees, rocking it back dangerously and giving him another jolt. “Why O’Day? Why here? Why now?”

Sullivan stared at us. “Smokescreen,” he said, like it was obvious and by asking we were just trying some kind of trick. He ducked his head towards O’Day. “So his wife could have him killed before the divorce.”

“What goddamn divorce?”

Tom O’Day’s voice was harsh but with an underlying thread of bewilderment that had to be real. If there really was a divorce in the offing, then it was clear he was not the instigator.

But I remembered Marie O’Day’s words, back when she’d visited Blake Dyer in his suite, the morning after the helo crash. She had made some reference to wanting to catch her husband in the act.

In the act of doing what?

O’Day loomed over Sullivan. He had big hands and they gripped tight round the shaft of the golf club. Sullivan tried not to cringe away.

“Hey, don’t blame me. That’s what I heard,” he gabbled. “That’s what they told me.”

I stepped in front of Tom O’Day just in case. “Why?”

Sullivan tore his eyes away from the other man with difficulty. “W-what?”

I spelled it out. “Why would Marie O’Day want to have her husband murdered before the divorce?”

“Now just wait one minute,” O’Day blustered. “There
is
no goddamn divorce—”

“Say there is,” I interrupted gently. “Just hypothetically speaking. You’re a rich man. Surely there’s enough to go around if you and your wife split up?”

From the other side of the cabin Blake Dyer cleared his throat, said, “They made him sign a pre-nup.”

My turn for confusion. “Who?”

“Marie’s family,” Blake Dyer said. “They mistook Tom’s natural ambition for gold-digging. They had no idea how successful he’d become so they made him sign a pre-nup—to protect her inheritance.” He gave a dry smile. “Of course, they also had no idea how cruel a hand fate and time would deal them. If Marie were to divorce Tom now all she’d end up with would be her family’s debts.”

Tom O’Day shrugged. “She always refused to have the damn thing annulled,” he said with a fond little smile of his own. “Sticking it to her daddy right to his last breath and beyond.”

“And there’s no chance she’s decided to cancel that pre-nup now—permanently?”

Tom O’Day shook his head, but I caught the fractional hesitation even he couldn’t entirely prevent. He gave an open shrug. “Why the heck would she?”

I suppressed a sigh. “Well, maybe she’s taken exception to the amount of time you spend with your very attractive young PR consultant.”

He looked genuinely surprised. “
Autumn?
My goodness, you got that wrong, ma’am. I can assure you there is
nothing
like that going on between us.” A little colour bled across his cheekbones. “If she were a six-XL with a face like a prospector’s mule nobody would question the fact it’s her brains I most admire,” he added with a little more spirit. “But a woman’s beauty can be a curse as much as a blessing. People automatically assume she must be my mistress, not my protégée.”

I said nothing, vaguely ashamed that I too had fallen into the same trap.

“Besides,” Tom O’Day said with dignity, “I’m old enough to be her father.”

I privately considered that he was actually old enough to be her grandfather. But that’s when I really got it—from the words, the tone.

Regret.

Autumn Sinclair was everything, I realised, that Jimmy O’Day was not. She was bright, ambitious, ruthless and driven. Qualities that Tom O’Day appreciated fully because he possessed them himself in spades.

Qualities his only child quite simply did not have.

Jimmy O’Day might have been a nice kid once, probably right up to the point when he recognised he was never going to grow into the man his father desired to succeed him.

I wondered if that was when the bitterness had kicked in. A part of Jimmy O’Day must have known that to gain his father’s respect he needed to get out from under and make his own way. And another part knew he couldn’t hack it in the big wide world. So he kept his sinecure and was thus reminded on a regular basis of his own inadequacies and cowardice.

From such daily belittlings resentment could grow into a monster.

Maybe it already had . . .

I thought back to what I’d overheard down in the casino over Sean’s open comms link. Besides the murder of the bodyguard, Rick Hobson, there were those taken away from the others—Autumn Sinclair and Jimmy O’Day.

Of all the guests, the hostages, those were the people connected most closely with Tom O’Day. They were the ones most intertwined with his life and that of his wife.

“We need to find Jimmy and Autumn,” I said. I glanced up at Sullivan. “Where were they taken?”

“I don’t know,” he said, sullen now. Then—as Tom O’Day took a step towards him—with more fervour, “I don’t!”

“Well use your imagination,” I said coolly. “If not to think where your colleagues might have stashed them, then to imagine what we’re going to do to you if you don’t come up with something convincing.”

“I don’t—” he began again, almost a squawk.

“The meat locker,” Tom O’Day said calmly, cutting Sullivan off in mid-protest. “Well-insulated, big lock on the outside of the door—it’s secure as any brig.”

I couldn’t tell from the crushed look on the other man’s disfigured face if the guess disappointed him for being correct, or because he didn’t come up with it himself.

“They cater enough dinner parties on the
Miss Francis
to have a well-equipped galley aboard,” O’Day said. “Climate like this, you need a full-size meat locker or half your clientele would go down with food poisoning.”

“Do you know where it is?”

He hesitated a moment, then nodded. “I took a tour of the ship when we selected her for this . . .” His voice tailed off as if he wasn’t quite sure how to describe what had been designed as a celebration of renewal and had turned into an orgy of destruction instead.

“Good—you can lead the way,” I said. I picked up the Maglite, weighed it in my hand, paused. “What do we do with him?”

Sullivan’s eyes bulged. “Now, wait, please—”

“Well, we damn well gag him, for sure,” Tom O’Day said. His eyes drifted around the narrow cabin. “No telling how much noise he might still make, though.”

To my surprise, it was Blake Dyer who stepped forwards. “I think I can help with that,” he said. He drew out a pen from his inside jacket pocket, found a sheet of dusty paper and wrote across it in neat capitals:

Tom O’Day looked at the paper uncomprehendingly, a frown pulling those bushy eyebrows together into a single furry line.

I taped the paper to Sullivan’s chest with enough duct tape that he wouldn’t easily dislodge it, then used another strip to clamp his lips shut. Above the makeshift gag his eyes were wild.

“You do get it, don’t you?” I murmured. “If your mates come in here and see that note, do you think they’ll bother to untie you to get your side of it? Or do you think they’ll just chuck you, chair and all, straight into the river?”

The galley aboard the
Miss Francis
was down in the bilges, adjacent to the casino where the majority of the hostages were being held.