First Drop (40 page)

I called to him and started forwards but I hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps before Jim Whitmarsh moved out from behind the open door Keith had just come through. It swung closed behind him.

Whitmarsh pulled his lips back to show me a set of white, even teeth. The gesture came across as friendly as the greeting from a scrapyard dog. He was holding the same Beretta he’d had at Henry’s house and looked like he couldn’t wait to use it.

“If that hand comes out anything but empty,” he said pleasantly, “I’ll shoot you.”

I carefully let go of the SIG but as I withdrew my hand from the bag I brushed my thumb against the voice activation button on Walt’s tape recorder.

Whitmarsh nodded at my compliance. “Lose the bag,” he said.

I lifted the strap, ducking out from underneath it, and held the bag out at arm’s length beside me. I let it drop gently to the ground so as not to damage or spill the contents. It landed close to the wall and lay on its side.

Whitmarsh was looking in better nick than Keith. He was wearing a striped shirt with buttons that strained slightly over the expanse of his stomach. His weight was causing him to feel the heat and two circles of sweat stained the shirt’s armpits. Maybe he was just nervous.

From somewhere below us I heard the commentator shouting to the rabid mob, “And now, from right here in Daytona Beach, it’s Tameka. Let’s hear it for the lovely Tameka!” The screams and cheers and whistles grew louder.

“OK Charlie,” Whitmarsh said. “Where’s the kid?”

“Close.”

He shook his head. Not good enough. “Call him.”

I shrugged. “I don’t have my phone,” I said.

Whitmarsh eyed me for a moment, thinking through the moves like a chess player, trying to see if I was setting him up for checkmate further down the line. When he’d worked out that I had nowhere to go he reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out his own mobile.

“Here.” He put the phone on the floor and sent it skidding towards me. I stopped it with my foot, then bent to pick it up without dropping my gaze.

Keith, meanwhile, hadn’t moved apart from a gentle rocking motion backwards and forwards. He kept his head tilted away from both of us, his gaze averted. I wondered what, if anything, they’d given him to keep him so docile.

I began to key in Trey’s number but stopped before I’d got much further than the start of the code. I looked up. “How do I know you won’t just kill me and take off with both Keith and Trey?”

Whitmarsh grinned again. “You don’t.”

“So why exactly should I trust you?” I asked but I knew I was just stalling.
Come on, Mason, what the hell are you waiting for?

Whitmarsh wiped the sweat from his forehead and studied me seriously. “Well, I could threaten to shoot Keith here if you don’t make that call,” he said, “but I don’t really think you give a damn about that one way or the other.”

For a moment he regarded his captive with the contempt for weakness that often befalls despotic jailers, drunk on their own power and total control. Then he was back concentrating on me.

“I could threaten to shoot you. In fact I could make things pretty damn intolerable without actually killing you,” he said reflectively and I forced myself not to react other than to remain politely interested, as though in someone important who’s telling you a long and pointless anecdote.

In the main hall, the commentator had reached the final bikini contestant. “Last up, all the way from Iowa, it’s Jephanie. Whaddya think, huh? Way to go, Jephanie!” The crowd couldn’t have shown more savage approval if they’d been watching a public execution.

“But somehow,” Whitmarsh went on, oblivious, “something tells me you don’t give much of a damn about that either.”

Still keeping the gun aimed at the centre of my body mass, he stepped back and glanced sideways towards the door he’d just come through, which was standing a little ajar.

“So as a last resort,” he said, “I could threaten to shoot somebody I know you
do
give a damn about.” He raised his voice slightly and called, “OK. Bring him out.”

Just for a second I feared that Whitmarsh’s men had somehow got hold of Trey. If they had, I was abruptly surplus to requirements. But if that had been the case, I realised, Whitmarsh would never have showed for this meeting.

And then the door opened again as Lonnie and Chris pushed through it. Lonnie was closest to me and I saw at once that in his right hand he was holding the Remington pump-action shotgun he’d used to such devastating effect in Henry’s garden. The length of the gun meant he held it awkwardly, angled upwards so that the end of the barrel was resting under the jaw of the figure he and Chris held pinioned between them.

As they turned him towards me and my eyes zeroed in on his face the sound of the roaring crowd below us shrank and vanished like a pinprick of light in space. All I heard was the sharp astounded intake of my own breath.

It was Sean.

Sean!

If I thought I’d reacted badly to news of his death, that was nothing compared to the emotional impact of finding him suddenly alive.

The trauma of it went up my body in a fast ripple. Up my shins and the sides of my ribcage, scuttered across my chest and then passed quivering over my scalp like a sine wave. A physical effect that left me shaken and gasping. I was peripherally aware that I’d had to shift my feet to keep my balance.

Sean – and it was definitely Sean – looked like shit. There was no other way to put it. Like Keith, his clothes were filthy and soaked with sweat and from the knees down his trousers were coated in what could have been old mud.

They’d beaten him, too. They’d probably had to in order to begin to subdue a man like Sean. Blood had run and dried from a dozen cuts on his face and body. The bruises had spread like fear. My sense of dread at what had been done to him, at what he’d suffered, ran very cold and very deep.

And at first I thought they’d broken him. I looked and saw nothing in his face. No fright, no pain, not even rage or madness. It was like his emotions had been ripped out, eviscerated.

And then I looked again and, maybe because I knew him so well, I caught a glimpse of what lay past the shield he’d been using to protect himself from damage. Something glittered like ice in the depths of his eyes. A brooding intelligence that still lurked, intact and aware. Waiting . . .

And, recognising it, my legs spontaneously took me forwards.

Lonnie jerked the end of the shotgun up into where the carotid artery pulsed under Sean’s jaw, bringing both of us up short. The only difference was that it was me who flinched. Sean didn’t react at all. Lonnie had to physically lift his head back, arm muscles straining with the effort. It was only when I was still again that he allowed the gun to relax slightly away from Sean’s head.

“Hey, Charlie,” Sean said lightly, his voice soft when I’d been half expecting a tight weariness. “Love the hair.”

“Yeah,” I said, forcing my vocal cords to unclench. “It’s growing on me. I may even decide to keep it this way.”

He smiled at me then, recognising my response for what it was. The smile was slow and sexy and it made my heart ache and my throat constrict until it hurt to swallow.

“I see rumours of your death were greatly exaggerated,” I managed with surprising equanimity.

“Mm,” he said, calm and level but for the first time there was just a trace of the underlying anger. “I expect they hoped you might fold easier if you thought you were on your own.”

He let his gaze skim from my blenched features to Whitmarsh’s. The other man wouldn’t meet his eyes and I realised that even though he held the upper hand Whitmarsh knew only too well what might happen if ever there was a change in the status quo. He was a little afraid of Sean, a little afraid of the monster they’d created and now daren’t let go of. No wonder he’d got both his men clamped onto him, leaving Keith standing to one side, submissive and almost forgotten in this exchange.

“So, Charlie,” Whitmarsh said with a touch of sneer. “Unless you want to watch your boyfriend’s brains getting splattered all over the ceiling for real this time, call the kid in. Don’t make me ask a third time.”

Come on, Mason. For Christ’s sake man, get on with it!

But even as the thought formed I realised that if Brown’s men did ambush us now, Sean was likely to get his head blown off anyway. I told myself that Mason’s combat experience, either police or military, was standing him in good stead. He was waiting for his opportunity, biding his time. All I had to do was play along for just a little longer . . .

I lifted the phone again and completed punching in Trey’s number. My eyes met Sean’s as I hit the send key, looking for reassurance, but I might as well have been hoping for a reaction from a statue. I wondered if he knew what I was going to do, if he would have done the same himself.

I tried not to feel pain at the fact that he’d shut down again, shut me out, but it was real and physical. I just had to accept that he was doing what he had to do in order to survive this. Now it was up to me.

Somewhere below me the noise came rushing up again as the mob howled and stamped and cheered for the half-naked girls on the stage. The commentator’s voice was a frenetic squawk as he urged them to select a winner like they were choosing a sacrifice.

“Hello?” Trey’s voice sounded tinny and hollow but they were somewhere close. In both ears I could hear the same cheers and catcalls. One reported, one live.

“Hi Trey, it’s me,” I said and saw Whitmarsh’s fingers flex round the pistol grip of the Beretta, trying to relieve the tension. But his face had already twisted into a triumphant smile. He knew he’d won. Knew he’d beaten me. Beaten the pair of us.

Not quite yet, old son.

“I need you to come upstairs, the corner near the stage. Fast as you can,” I said, keeping my voice neutral. “Come on your own. Don’t bring the others with you.”

“All right,” he said, nonplussed and cautious. “Is everything OK?”

“Yeah,” I said, eyes fixed on Sean’s face. “Keith’s here. Everything’s fine.”

I ended the call and threw the phone back to Whitmarsh. He caught it easily, one-handed, and said with some satisfaction, “So now we just wait for him to come to momma.”

He never got the chance to be disappointed.

At that moment two of Brown’s men came smoothly out of one of the offices behind where Lonnie and Chris were holding Sean, guns out and ready. They must have been using the time they’d been hidden to quietly bypass the connecting doors between the rooms, gaining ground.

Whitmarsh’s face sagged in disbelief. Before he had time for response, Mason and the black guy moved out from a doorway to my right and I found out what had been in that gym bag. Both had Mossberg pump-action shotguns pulled up hard into their shoulders like they were doing house clearance, the barrels arcing to cover all the players.

My heart trampolined into my throat as I watched Lonnie’s grip tighten on the stock of his own shotgun but he hadn’t lived to turn grey in the security field by making rash decisions under fire. After only a fleeting hesitation he delicately removed the Remington from Sean’s neck and let it droop.

A spasm of anger passed across Whitmarsh’s features, as though recognising his best hope for negotiation had just slipped away from him. Then he, too, let his gun hand fall to his side.

“I gotta hand it to you, Charlie,” he said, his voice bitter. “I didn’t think you had the balls for an ambush.”

“She didn’t,” Brown said. He’d followed his men out of the office doorway and was careful now to stand behind them as he spoke. “But I sure did.”

Almost to my surprise he had a gun out, too. A little stubby Colt 38 Special revolver that sat firm and steady in his liver-spotted fist. There was more steel to Livingston Brown III than I’d ever suspected.

Lonnie and Chris had sized up the situation enough to step away from Sean, keeping their movements careful and their guns lowered. Sean swayed slightly when they disengaged, the only betrayal of weakness. Then he was steady again. His hands were secured behind his back but I saw him straighten and hunch his constricted shoulders, as though in preparation for release.

Something, I wasn’t sure what, stirred in his eyes. Something base and deadly. I could feel it vibrating in the air between us. When he got loose, there was going to be trouble and he could almost taste that freedom.

Whitmarsh just stood and gaped at Brown, gaped all the more as Gerri Raybourn emerged alongside him. His eyes grew wide and not a little wild. “What the—?”

“What, Jim?” Gerri demanded, stalking forwards. “You’ve got a whole heap of explaining to do, feller and, oh boy,” she added with low venom, “it better be good. Just what the fuck did you think you were doing here?”

“A little private enterprise, by the looks of it,” Brown put in coolly.

Whitmarsh froze, then made a conscious effort to relax, gave a wheezy laugh.