DIE EASY: Charlie Fox book ten (the Charlie Fox crime thriller series) (40 page)

“I was told not to force memories on you,” I said. “To let whatever was going to come back do so in its own time.” And to leave whatever was never coming back well alone.

He turned into me, crowding me, close enough for him to hear the hitch in my breath, the lurch in my pulse.

“I remember a child,” he said suddenly, intense. “A little girl . . . Emily, or Emma . . .”

The blood was thundering in my ears. “Her name was Ella,” I said. “She was the daughter of a principal—someone I was protecting. Apart from that she was nothing to do with me.”

She wasn’t ours.

He stepped back. I was unsure whether to be relieved or disappointed—either at the action or the line of questioning. I felt my shoulders sag.

“But you
were
pregnant, weren’t you Charlie?” he asked, sudden as a blow to the chest.

“I—” My first instinct was denial, but I knew he’d seen the truth in my face, my eyes. “Yes,” I said finally, my tone flat.

He nodded as if I’d confirmed some vague idea rather than anything more certain. “What happened?”

I took a breath, used it to keep the emotion out of my voice. “I . . . lost the baby.” Such a little sentence to describe all the heartache and confusion.

He still flinched as if I’d slapped him. I put a hand on his arm, wanting to give comfort as much as I needed to take it myself. Perhaps, finally, here was something we could face together.

Sean pulled away from me, then stiffened. “What was that?”

I froze, listening intently, and heard a regular noise like slow uneven knocking.

We dropped lower, moving faster now, and found the galley area. In the rear half of the long narrow compartment dirty water had started to slosh up to ankle level. The surface was rainbowed with oil, sheening in the overhead lights.

The two meat lockers were positioned halfway along. The door to one swung open, clattering back against the bulkhead with every lurch of the ship.

We reached the aperture and I peered inside, a fast look. It was enough to tell me the locker was empty apart from two swinging sides of meat and racks filled with plastic containers. I gave it a longer inspection.

“Someone was here,” I said. On the floor was a large plastic zip-tie, cut through and discarded. Even so, it wasn’t hard to tell it had been big enough to be fastened around a pair of wrists.

Sean stepped sideways, grabbed hold of the handle to the other meat locker. I nodded and he yanked the door open.

A body lay crumpled in the far corner, face down. It was clearly a man, dressed in black like the hijackers, but it gave me a momentary jolt even so.

“Admiring my handiwork?” asked a voice from the galley doorway.

This time it was Sean who swung round fast, M16 at the ready. Morton just grinned at him. He had picked up a flashlight from somewhere and was wet to mid-thigh.

I glanced back at the dead man in the meat locker. The blood pooling around the body had congealed in the chill.

“Took him out when I got loose,” Morton said.

If he was looking for praise, I wasn’t about to give it to him. “No sign of Autumn?”

Morton shook his head. “I’ve been all over this tub,” he said. “I don’t know how they did it, but I reckon somehow they got her away.”

I remembered the Z-boats that had delivered Castille. I hadn’t seen them put anybody aboard before they pulled away, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened.

Damn.

“OK, let’s—”

The overhead lights flickered a couple of times and went out, plunging the galley into total darkness. It took Morton a couple of seconds to fumble the flashlight on. As he did so, we heard the ragged rumble of the engines finally die away as the water finally flooded the rear part of the hull.

“I don’t want to sound like a big girl’s blouse,” Morton said, “but if we’re going to the bottom of the Mississippi I’d rather be topside, if you don’t mind.”

For once I didn’t argue. We stumbled our way back up the stairwell, through the bar and out onto the sidedeck. The lights of the shoreline were suddenly bright and brash ahead of us.

“We’re coming in hard!” shouted Tom O’Day from the bow. “Brace yourselves, everyone!”

As I moved forward, Sean put his hand on my arm. I looked at him, surprised.

“I’m sorry, Charlie—about the baby,” he muttered stiffly, but they were the toneless words you’d offer to a stranger.

The
Miss Francis
came ashore like she meant it.

Even with the engines dead, the boat’s forward momentum was enough to drive the bulk of her up onto the steep rocky embankment that marked the edge of the Mississippi. The shallow-draught steel hull grated as it rode out of the water, buckling with a drawn-out screech of protest. As the current caught the stern the boat slewed sideways, threatening to topple us over into the river. Out on the decks, we clung to railings and stanchions and willed her not to capsize.

It seemed to take her a hell of a long time to make up her mind about that.

Finally, the
Miss Francis
came to rest at a steep angle, leaning away from the bank. I staggered to my feet. It still felt like she would roll over and slide beneath the water at any moment. I was only too aware that we needed to abandon ship and we needed to do it fast.

I managed to climb uphill to the landward railing and looked out. To my amazement, I recognised the three white spires of St Louis Cathedral almost dead ahead, lit stark against the night sky. We were smack bang in the middle of the French Quarter, maybe half a mile from our original start point.

If Tom O’Day had hoped to keep
this
under wraps, I reflected, he was out of luck.

Behind me, a voice shouted, “We need to get a line ashore!”

I turned. Jimmy O’Day was dragging one of the
Miss Francis
’s mooring ropes towards the side. He started tying one end to the railing.

“Hang on a minute—that won’t hold us,” I said, untying it again. I passed the rope under the railing and took it back to a more substantial-looking bollard further inboard, trying to remember a decent knot.

I looked over the side. The bow was over land but substantially further out of the water, making for a longer drop onto the rough ground. Further aft the drop was less, but chances were you’d land in the edge of the river and have to wade through the shallows. “You better let me do it.”

Jimmy flushed, almost snatching the rope out of my hands. “I can manage.”

I shrugged. “Just be careful how you get down there,” I said, nodding to the jumble of rocks beneath us. “If you jump from here you’ll break your legs.”

He looked about to argue, but realised I was probably right. He moved further back along the railing, peering down nervously every metre or so until the drop lessened. He seemed to feel that getting his feet wet was a less scary option. I would rather see what I was about to hit.

“We’ll lower you down,” Sean suggested, but Jimmy didn’t like that idea either. Really, he would have liked to vault over the side with the rope in his teeth, if he’d had the guts for it. The fact that he did not clearly irritated him.

“I can manage,” he snapped again.

Eventually he climbed cautiously over the railing and dangled himself down as far as he could.

“Don’t dither,” I muttered under my breath.

At that moment, the ship gave a judder and slipped backwards abruptly, her stern settling further into the river. The gap between hull and rocks widened as she rolled.

Jimmy let go.

He dropped straight down into the water, stumbled and fell. He slid under, thrashing. The boat started to recover, started to roll upright again.

“Get up!” I shouted, reaching for the railing myself. “Jimmy!”

But Sean was over the side in an instant. He half jumped, half abseiled, using the rope to slow his descent. He still ended up in the water to his waist, grabbing Jimmy and hauling him out from under the ship as she settled onto the rocks again.

He dragged Jimmy clear and left him gasping up throatfuls of dirty water while Sean dragged the rope up the embankment. There were now many hands reaching out to take it.

I hesitate to call the grounding of the
Miss Francis
a shipwreck—it was more of a waterborne car crash. The noise of our arrival had brought people running. Plenty of them. It was close to midnight on a Saturday—a time when the nearby bars and clubs were crammed with revellers. They appeared across a parking area, stepping carefully over the railway tracks that followed the line of the river. First a trickle, then a crowd began to form.

The first people who arrived treated is as some kind of joke, a careless mistake by some pleasure boat skipper that was providing some new form of outdoor entertainment. It only took a few minutes for them to realise it was a disaster in the making.

The mood changed. Almost out of nowhere they produced ladders to lean against the hull. As more of the shocked and frightened hostages staggered ashore, people arrived with chairs, blankets, hot drinks, and sympathy.

Every man and his dog, it seemed, was videoing the wreck of the
Miss Francis
on their cellphone. I wondered briefly how fast this was going to feed out to the late-night news networks and found I didn’t care.

We did what we could. Then the police and the paramedics arrived and things were taken out of our hands—firearms, mainly. At least they didn’t arrest us all in the process.

It was fortunate we had liaised with local law enforcement in one form or another during our pre-event prep. The prior contact meant they had already vetted us, had a record of who we were and what we were doing. Now, they checked our IDs and seemed prepared to listen to us long enough to keep the hijackers we’d captured contained—temporarily, at least.

At this stage it was the best we could hope for.

And there the good news ended.

Blake Dyer was strapped onto a stretcher and brought ashore as carefully as they could manage. It was still not a smooth journey but he made no sounds of protest. I would have been more encouraged if he had.

The paramedics took him only as far as the nearest piece of flat ground before they began working on him. They slipped a CPR mask over his face and began pumping air into his lungs. I recognised the haste in their smooth, practised movements, and something contracted hard inside my chest.

I sat down on the rocks, tired to the point of numbness, cold despite the muggy heat still retained in the air.

Somebody dropped a blanket around my shoulders. I looked up, found Sean standing over me. He was wrapped in a blanket of his own. His clothing was still dripping.

I nodded my thanks. “Nice save, by the way.”

“I would have preferred to manage it without going swimming,” Sean said. He reached into a back pocket, brought out a soggy wallet. “One thing to tell Parker about this state-of-the-art new comms system,” he added, sliding out the slim-line transceiver. “It’s not waterproof.”

“Ah, I’ll let you tell him.”

I peeled out the tiny earpiece. With Sean’s unit dead there was nobody to hear.

I realised suddenly that my pocket was vibrating against my side. I reached into it, picked out my cellphone. I was almost surprised to find it lit up and buzzing but I had no difficulty recognising the number.

“You might get that opportunity a bit sooner than you were expecting,” I murmured, taking the call.

“Charlie! What the hell is going on down there? I’ve been trying to get through to you for hours!” Parker’s voice was clipped enough to betray him. His anxiety came across clearly when my boss was usually one of the calmest men I knew. In a crisis he was so cool I swear his core temperature actually dropped.

Was this near-panic caused by uncertainty about Sean’s ability to perform? Or did it have more to do with far more personal concerns for me?

Either way, not good.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” I said, adding blandly, “but the hijackers were jamming us until the boat started to sink.” I heard his sharply indrawn breath and gave him the bare essentials, managing to keep it voice flat and neutral.

Right up until I glanced across and saw the paramedics tending Blake Dyer lose their sense of urgency. They sat back with a resigned air, defeated. One checked his watch and pulled the blanket up over Dyer’s face. I looked away, my throat burning.

I swallowed. “Parker, I . . . I lost Dyer,” I said into the phone, interrupting him.

There was momentary silence at the other end of the line. Then I heard him let out a long slow breath. “That’s . . . not good,” he said at last, unconsciously echoing my earlier sentiment. Parker always was the master of understatement.

I said nothing. There was nothing to say. The weight of my own shame kept me from launching into any explanations. Anything I might have said in my own defence sounded nothing more than a weak excuse in my own mind.