DIE EASY: Charlie Fox book ten (the Charlie Fox crime thriller series) (20 page)

On the way back to the hotel the four of them decided to detour into the heart of the French Quarter for afternoon coffee and
beignets
at the Café du Monde. I’d heard of the place but never been there. It turned out to be more laid-back than I was expecting, with the tables crowded together under a green and white striped awning, open to the street.

This made things awkward from a security point of view, particularly in light of yesterday’s attack on the Bell. I wondered if the choice was a kind of provocation. And if so, who was it aimed at?

The café was full, the nearby streets bustling with the city’s distinctive, slightly exotic energy. Tourists strolled and gawked, or rode in the elegant four-wheel horse-drawn carriages along Decatur Street, their white knees pinking in the sun.

I stood at the front of the café with Sean. Tom O’Day’s security guys took a table inside, near to our principals without overcrowding them.

Given a choice, I would have positioned Morton solo by the entrance to the kitchens, but I was not given that choice. Left to his own devices Morton chose to cluster with Tom O’Day’s bodyguards instead.

I was initially thankful. Then I saw the way he was talking to the two men, leaning forwards conspiratorially with his head bent—and the dubious looks they flicked in our direction—and I wished I’d kept him close enough to strangle whatever rumours he was spreading.

I pointedly kept my attention spread between our principal and the street. Across from the café were tall brick buildings adorned with verandas and balconies in the typical New Orleans style, delicate wrought-iron tumbled with greenery. It made for a lot of access points to cover. The only consolation was that the elevation made it harder to pinpoint a target under cover.

I remembered the RPG and was not reassured.

“Parker’s not happy,” I said to Sean, sipping the ice coffee I’d ordered.

He gave me a sharp glance. “Been running to the boss man again, Charlie?”

“Hey,
he
rang
me
,” I said, keeping it as neutral as I could. It seemed whenever Sean had been in close contact with Morton he was prickly with me afterwards, his mood changeable. Something else I’d have to damn well watch.

“And what did Parker say, exactly?”

“That he doesn’t like the incident rate so far on this job—not when we haven’t even got to the main event yet.”

“One car park ambush and one mid-air ambush,” Sean said lightly, still trying to shrug off his assumption and not quite managing it. “What’s not to like?”

“Where do I start?” I murmured. “If it had been up to me we’d have hauled Dyer back onto his executive jet, in a straitjacket if necessary, and he’d be safely tucked up in bed back home in Florida by now.”

“You offering to tuck him in, are you?” Sean said, and just when I began to think he’d turned into a total jerk, he added, “Besides, it’s nowhere close to bedtime in Miami.”

I half smiled, put a hand out to touch Sean’s arm, in solidarity, friendship, but I caught Vic Morton’s lascivious gaze out of the corner of my eye. I could see him almost willing me to touch Sean in some way that could be used against me in the eyes of his companions. I redirected my hand to my paper cup, turning it in my hands before I took another sip. An old saying fell into my head:

Fool me once; shame on you. Fool me twice; shame on me.

Fool me three times; shame on the both of us.

I’d once thought Morton was an OK kind of bloke. Not quite the kind I wanted to turn my back on, maybe, but not one who’d stab me in it either. Turned out that should have been the least of my worries about him.

He was not as silently malevolent as big Clay, or as easily egged-on as Donalson. He wasn’t as intrinsically nasty as Hackett, either—he’d been the one leading from the front there. Leading by example.

I tried and failed to stop my skin shimmying at the memory.

“You going to tell me the rest of it?” Sean asked.

For a second my mind rushed headlong down a completely different track, back to a cold dark night, a hint of mist, a hint of frost, danger lurking like a sleeved blade. I had not seen it coming.

I would have done so now.

Sean sighed, not altogether patiently. “What else did Parker say, Charlie?”

Reality nudged me back into step. The darkness receded, replaced by the bright busy street, the chatter of people, and a muggy heat only lazily dispelled by the overhead fans.

Along with their coffees our group had ordered the café’s famous
beignet
pastries. These appeared to be squared-off doughnuts covered with enough icing sugar to make my teeth itch at the sight of them. Even the floor inside the café was dusted with it. Blake Dyer was tucking into his
beignet
with evident enjoyment. I flicked my eyes back to Sean.

“Parker strongly suggests that we keep a very close eye on Ysabeau van Zant,” I said.

“So the rumours Dyer told us about are solid.”

“What worries Parker more, I think, are the rumours that she might have contracted out a hit on that dealer who got himself shot, Leon Castille. One way to show them she meant business—especially when he wasn’t exactly an upstanding pillar of society.”

“Did it smell like a pro hit?”

I shrugged. “One round in the back to put him down, then finished off with one to the head, according to the reports. First round was a through-and-through—never found the bullet. Second round stayed inside the skull but was too mangled to try for a match. The shooter policed his brass. And all this went down in a part of town where there were never going to be any witnesses prepared to come forward. Nothing to go on and nobody to care. Case closed.”

Sean nodded, took a sip of his coffee. I lifted my own drink just for something to do with my hands, and debated on how much of the rest to tell him.

Because, Parker had also been in touch with Madeleine Rimmington back in the UK. Madeleine had assumed control of Sean’s close-protection agency when he and I moved over to the States to take up Parker’s offer. She was an information expert who’d since specialised in data protection and counter-espionage for all things electronic. But to protect stuff like that, you had to first know how to steal it. If it was stored on a computer and made up of pixels or binary code, Madeleine seemed to be able to access it.

In this case, though, all she’d found were the dates of Sean’s last visit to New Orleans, back when he’d been assigned to a fledgling young baseball player called Gabe Baptiste. A babysitting job he’d been reluctant to take on in the first place, but had done so anyway because it was a chance to work in America, the land of opportunity. A chance to gain a reputation, to make a name.

A job he’d canned early and come home, with Baptiste’s name firmly removed from the list of possible future clients. It would seem he’d expunged any other record of the job.

But the dates of his trip just happened to coincide with the death of Ysabeau van Zant’s troublesome drug connection.

A killing with no apparent witnesses.

But what if there
had
been a witness? What if Gabe Baptiste had seen what happened and had chosen not to come forward, not to speak out? I already knew he’d got himself sorted afterwards, mentally and financially. Did Mrs van Zant pay him off and tell him to get out of New Orleans and stay out, no matter what?

Did she, in effect, pave the way for his glittering career?

If so, perhaps that was the marker he owed her—the one she’d now called in. Not to keep him away from New Orleans, but to force him back here. It would also explain his response to Sean when he saw him again.

Because the man Sean had been before he was shot would not have liked letting someone get away with murder. Not when it was straightforward assassination anyway. I still hoped he might not see it quite that way in my case—if it ever came to that.

I had a vision of the old Sean—the Sean who’d come before—disagreeing vigorously with Baptiste’s decision to allow himself to be bought off.

Sean had a strong sense of justice that did not always conform to legal niceties. In the right circumstances he would have done the job himself, but not to take the heat off some unknown politico—they were never his favourite breed at the best of times.

Besides, I reassured myself, if that had been the case then surely Ysabeau van Zant would have reacted to Sean in the same way that Baptiste had when they were first introduced. Instead there was not a flicker of recognition from her—even allowing for the fact that she was, by definition, a professional-grade liar.

But the only person who really knew the answers to these questions was Sean himself.

And the way things stood at the moment, he was the only person who would not—
could
not—provide them.

Sunset brought with it a hazy low cloud that crept in from the Gulf and threatened to solidify into fog. It also brought another surprise we hadn’t planned for and didn’t like much.

It was early evening—less than an hour before we were due to leave for the glitzy main event on the paddlewheel floating casino—when they sent Jimmy O’Day up to break the bad news.

He stood in the middle of Blake Dyer’s suite at the hotel, with Vic Morton slouching near the wall by the hallway, and faced us down with weary defiance.

“I’m real sorry,” he said for about the dozenth time since he’d entered the suite, “but the captain of the
Miss Francis
is adamant. He will not, under any circumstances, have firearms carried aboard his vessel. No exceptions.”

“If there was going to be a problem with this, we should have been told days ago when we did the recce,” Sean put in sharply. “What’s he so worried about?”

Jimmy gave him an exasperated look. “Well, we had to let him know about what happened with the helicopter getting shot down—couldn’t let him go into the situation blind,” he said. “I guess he just feels you guys may be a little . . . trigger-happy at the moment.”

“I prefer ‘alert’ if you don’t mind,” I said. “And it’s not like we’re a bunch of cowboys—most of us anyway.” I studiously ignored the way Morton scowled at me from across the room.

“If we hadn’t been armed aboard that helo, you’d have a much higher body-count on your hands right now,” Sean added. “It’s not like we’re using them to
start
a bloody fight—just to finish it.”

Jimmy held up his hands in a gesture that indicated both surrender and command, his face doleful. “I know, guys, trust me, but the whole evening hinges on getting everybody’s cooperation on this. I’ve spoken to most of the security teams so far and they’ve agreed to go along with the captain’s ruling, just so long as it’s the same for everyone. Level playing field.”

I caught Sean’s eye. My instinct was once again either to pull Dyer out of there and bundle him back onto his private jet bound for the sunshine state, or to pack ourselves onto the first flight back to New York without him.

But what would Tom O’Day’s reaction be if we did that, and what rumours would he instruct Autumn Sinclair’s PR minions to circulate about Armstrong-Meyer’s unreliable, flighty personnel?

Not something I wanted to find out.

It was perhaps fortunate that our principal was at that moment engaged in a long shower before his evening out. Arguing our case in front of him would have been that much harder. No doubt that was why Jimmy had chosen to come to each room in turn rather than call us together for any kind of group meeting. Maybe something of his parents’ shrewdness had filtered down through the genes after all.

Although it was a formal evening event, I’d decided not to wear a frock myself, despite the fact it all sounded very glamorous. Sean’s comments about the way Blake Dyer was behaving towards me had stung just enough that I was determined to be all business tonight. I’d chosen loose black silk trousers and a matching embroidered jacket that would have hidden the SIG very nicely—had I been allowed to carry it. And bearing in mind that we would be on a boat I’d chosen soft-soled low shoes rather than heels. If the skipper was throwing a fit about firearms on board he would no doubt be equally picky about stiletto marks all over his decking.

Eventually, Sean let his breath out short and fast down his nose. “Rock and a bloody hard place, this, isn’t it?” he demanded. “If we say ‘yes’, you tell the next lot we’re happy to agree—even when we’re not. And if we dig our heels in about it, we’re the villains of the piece.”

Jimmy allowed a small smile to brave its way past his lips. In that moment he looked very much his father’s son. “I guess so,” he admitted. “So . . . you prepared to give it a shot? Um, no pun intended there.”

“Do we have a choice?”

Jimmy gave a fractional shake of his head. “Not if you want to get onto the boat tonight, no,” he agreed. “Since nine-eleven they installed those metal detectors like they have before you get on an airplane, just to be sure. I guess they thought a riverboat casino might be some kind of target.”