DIE EASY: Charlie Fox book ten (the Charlie Fox crime thriller series) (36 page)

I reached out with my free hand and pressed down on his levered elbow with one finger.

One finger, I knew, was all it would take to carry the lock to its final, bone-splintering conclusion. The torsional twist would fracture every major bone in Baptiste’s right arm and it would take months of surgery and rehab and more surgery before he got the use back. Before he got enough use back to feed himself.

As for ever playing professional baseball again . . .

“It’s a combination of flex in the hips and stride length and suppleness in the torso. But all that is nothing without the arm. And you’ve got one of the best arms in the business, haven’t you, Gabe? For now.” I paused again. His eyes were pleading with me, silently begging. I leaned in closer, said quietly, “Who will they get to take your place on the team next season?”

“All right, all right,” he said through lips clamped in pain. “I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you everything. Just get this crazy bitch off of me!”

I slackened my grip slightly but I didn’t let go.

Baptiste made to snatch his arm away. I locked his joints up again. “Hey—”

“
When
you’ve told us the truth,” I told him. “Until then . . .”

He threw me a last frustrated glance and after that wouldn’t meet my eyes. He stared at Sean instead, as if looking for signs of recognition for his story.

“He never went with me that night,” Baptiste said, his voice low and sullen. “Wouldn’t even consider it, but I
needed
to go, you know?”

Tom O’Day said, “You were a junkie,” with austere disgust in his tone.

“No! I just needed a little something,” Baptiste muttered. “To keep me sharp. To keep me calm. You don’t know what it’s like, old man, having that kind of pressure on you. Big decisions, big games. I was just a kid back then.”

Tom O’Day said nothing. I wondered how old he’d been back when he’d served in Korea. Back when there was more than the outcome of a big game at stake.

“Meyer wouldn’t take me where I needed to go, and he wouldn’t go for me,” Baptiste said. “So I told him I was turning in for the night, and went out the back way. I never thought he’d catch on so fast—never thought he’d follow me.”

“Addicts are rarely as subtle as they think,” Castille said dryly.

Baptiste flushed. “The dealer—um, your brother,” he said, stumbling over the distinction. “He musta recognised me. He threatened to go to the press, the National League, unless I paid him. He was talking big bucks. I didn’t have that kind of money.”

Castille’s face tightened more in sadness than in anger, as if he could entirely believe that his little brother’s greed had got the better of him that one last time. “So that is when your bodyguard stepped in, hmm?”

Baptiste threw me a look that was half fear, half loathing, for dragging this out of him. “No,” he said, and the bravado was back again. “I didn’t need him to.”

“I had a gun,” Baptiste said. “I saw my chance and I used it.”

“You shot my brother in the back,” Castille said. It was not a question. It was a judgement.

“It was him or me,” Baptiste mumbled. “He had a gun, too. He’d been threatening me. I promised to pay him. Told him I still needed the stuff. He thought he had me beaten. He thought—”

Castille cut him off. “He thought your word was good—that he could trust you.”

Baptiste said nothing.

Castille turned to Sean. “Is
that
how it happened,
cher
?”

Sean gave a slight “don’t know” twitch of his shoulder. The man stared at him for a moment longer.

I tightened my grip on Baptiste’s arm. He flinched, rose on his toes as if that might lessen the way his bones and tendons were being prised apart.

I said, “What then?”

“He was down but he wasn’t dead. I thought he’d die, but he didn’t—just lay there, looking at me. I ran. What else could I do? And then Meyer came in with his gun out. He’d heard the shot. He was gonna call the cops. I mean, Jesus! I shouted at him to kill the son of a—to kill the guy,” Baptiste amended. “To put him out of his fucking misery. But he wouldn’t do it.” His voice turned plaintive. “He was supposed to protect me.”

“He wasn’t supposed to cover up your foul-ups,” I said. “That’s not part of the job description.”

“Then he should have stopped me before I ever got there,” Baptiste complained.

How could you let me make this mistake?
I shook my head. We were guardians of their physical well-being but half the time a principal also expected us to be the keeper of their soul.

“So your bodyguard finished him off, is that what you are saying?” Castille demanded.

“He wanted it!” Baptiste said, almost a shout. It took me a moment to realise he was talking about the man’s brother, not Sean. “He was crying and shit, begging for it.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, incredulous. “The guy you shot
asked
to die?”

Baptiste nodded, his own throat filled with tears—for his own loss, I suspected, not anyone else’s. “He . . . he knew he was paralysed, couldn’t move his arms and legs, could barely breathe. He said he couldn’t live as a cripple. Said if I was a man I’d finish what I’d started. I–I couldn’t do it.”

“So your bodyguard did it for you,” Castille said, and his tone was quieter now, subdued. “In the back of the head?”

“He didn’t want to, but he did it. So’s your brother could have an open casket,” Baptiste muttered, shame flooding his face. “For his mother—”

Castille lifted an abrupt hand, silenced him. For a moment he said nothing, fighting for control. When he met Sean’s eyes his voice was calm again, almost light. “Will you accord me the same honour?”

Sean rolled his shoulder a little into the stock of the gun, looked for all the world as if he was going to comply. Then he straightened slowly, let the muzzle drop.

“No,” he said roughly. “I won’t be your bloody executioner.”

Castille looked downwards, pointedly, towards the man with the broken neck lying at Sean’s feet. He raised an eyebrow. “You have grown soft,
cher
.”

I let go of Baptiste, gave him a shove. He staggered away clutching his wounded arm to his chest. I stepped forwards alongside Sean, a united front.

“If you don’t get your thugs off this damn boat you’ll find out just how soft we are.”

The man’s gaze lingered for a while on Sean, then switched to me. “You—you I think would kill me if you could,” he said at last. “You have the eyes for it,
chérie
.”

“Try me.”

The man glanced at Tom O’Day, still standing with another of the M16s in his hands. “What about you, old man?” he asked. “If I try to leave are you going to shoot me in the back, also, like my brother?”

O’Day shook his head. “Like Charlie said, all we want is for these people to be safe and you to be off this damn boat.”

Castille inclined his head, gave a smile that I did not entirely trust. “Do not worry,” he said, “as soon as—”

Gunfire cut his words short. A short staccato burst from somewhere below and aft of us. We all reacted instinctively, according to temperament and training.

Baptiste dived under a table, his arm miraculously forgotten. Jimmy disappeared back behind the bar. Sean and I both moved for the nearest main bulkhead, knowing it was made from steel plate.

Even as we did so I saw Castille twist lightly on the balls of his feet, heading back for the stairwell. Saw the way his hand slid under his jacket.

I shouted, “Gun!” even before he’d cleared the weapon. Before I saw that I was wrong.

In his hand was not the gun I’d been expecting. Instead he gripped a short narrow-bladed knife.

My warning should have made Tom O’Day and Blake Dyer head for cover. It should have made them leave him alone, think of their own safety and let him go.

It didn’t.

Instead, buoyed by his earlier success, Tom O’Day moved to block the other man’s escape. He started to bring the M16 up. I could tell he was tracking too slow to fire and stand a chance of hitting his target.

But Blake Dyer suddenly seemed to come out of stasis. He stepped in close to Castille, the golf club unwinding into a low blow aimed straight for the man’s shins. Hard enough to put him on the ground and make sure the only way he was getting up again was to be lifted onto a stretcher.

It never landed.

Castille leapt to the side, lithe as a dancer. He elbowed Dyer aside with contemptuous ease and was through the doors and away before you could blink.

I glared at Sean. “What the hell—?”

“Charlie,” he said, already letting the muzzle of the weapon drop and moving forwards fast.

I turned, just in time to see Blake Dyer let go of the golf club. It rolled out of his open fingers and dropped to the deck. He folded both hands very slowly and carefully against his abdomen.

Through his fingers, the blood welled out in a vivid, violent rush.

“This is going to hurt.”

Blake Dyer gave a breathless little laugh. “What do you mean, ‘going to’?”

I’d eased the tails of his dress shirt out of his trousers. Underneath, just below the level of his belt, was a small slit in the wall of his abdomen. It was maybe two or three centimetres long, but the blood oozed from it as fast as I could wipe it away.

Not a good sign.

Neither was the colour of the blood—very dark, almost black. Nor the way his stomach had already begun to swell.

The blade of the knife had been long enough to reach deep into Dyer’s body. From those two indicators it was almost a certainty that he had internal bleeding.

He needed a paramedic and a hospital—fast.

I doubted we could provide him with either in time.

So I improvised as best I could with what remained of the duct tape we’d used to bind Sullivan and serviettes from the dispensers on the tables. I wished I still had my evening bag, long since jettisoned in the casino. The tampons I’d put in it would have made ideal dressings shoved into the wound to stop the external bleeding at least.

Not much I could do about the rest of it.

I remembered a time when I’d watched my father, a surgeon of considerable skill, save a man’s life by the side of the road using a pair of pliers from a vehicle tool kit to clamp off a severed artery.

What I wouldn’t have given to have him here now.

We’d dealt with the fallen men—the survivors, anyway. They were all going to need their legs splinting before they could move, so the threat they presented was static at best. We still searched them, and roughly taped their hands. I made the guy I’d dealt with improvised dressings for the wounds to his eye and throat. He didn’t thank me for it.

Dyer shivered as the shock set in. Jimmy found some spare tablecloths folded behind the bar, brought a couple over and draped them around his godfather’s shoulders. I gave him a brief nod. He looked as if he might speak but eventually just shook his head mutely and turned away.

He’d been about to ask a question he already knew the answer to.

“Bet you’re glad you . . . got that dismissal . . . in writing, huh?” Dyer said now, struggling for breath. His abdominal cavity was slowly but steadily filling with blood from some punctured organ. It was compressing his lungs, suffocating him.

“I’m counting on you to rescind that,” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral. “It will look bad on my record.”

He gripped my sleeve, fingers suddenly strong, leaving greasy stains on the material.

“Tell my wife . . . I love her. Tell her . . . I’m sorry . . . for being such a damn fool.”

I should have said, “You can tell her yourself,” but we both knew that wasn’t going to happen. I said nothing. After a moment Dyer nodded as if thanking me for not continuing the lie.

“Tom . . .” Dyer said. “My grandkid . . . was going to ask you . . . to be godfather.”

“Of course—if you stop talking like a damn fool,” O’Day said briskly, but his voice was filled with sorrow. He’d seen enough wounded to make his own judgement.

“Uncle Blake,” Jimmy said. “I—”

It was as far as he got before his voice gave out.

Dyer gave him a lopsided smile. “Walk tall, Jimmy,” he said. “Gotta come . . . out of the shadows.” He coughed, every breath a violent drag of air now. “Always thought I’d have . . . more time with you.”

Jimmy turned away, hands to his mouth as if to hold back the sobs.

I glanced at Sean still braced behind the M16. There was nothing in his face. Was that good or bad?

“Hey, people! We need to get off of this goddamn boat!” The words burst from Baptiste. I shot him a vicious glare. Baptiste swallowed but hardly missed a beat. “Um, ’cause we need to get Mr Dyer some help, yeah?”