DIE EASY: Charlie Fox book ten (the Charlie Fox crime thriller series) (34 page)

Which was the wrong question, I thought. Dead wrong.

Unless he was guilty.

I remembered Parker’s brief report on the murder of the dead drug dealer, Leon Castille. The guy everybody assumed Ysabeau van Zant had contracted a hit on. One in the back to put him down, then finished off with a second round to the base of the skull at close range.

It certainly sounded cold, calculating, professional.

It didn’t sound like the work of an immature kid, which was all Gabe Baptiste had been at the time. It sounded more like . . .

“It wasn’t me!”
Baptiste’s voice was close to a yelp, distorted through guilt or fear or a combination of both.
“I didn’t kill him. Shit, you got to believe me. You think I done that? No way—”

“You were there,”
Castille said, cutting across his protests, icy.
“You were seen, just before. Your face was known, even then.”

“Yeah, I was there, so what? Doesn’t mean I did it. Doesn’t mean I killed him.”

“So who did?”

“I–I—”

The man’s voice grew almost soft, harder to hear.
“I would advise you to think very carefully before you lie to me,
cher.
After all, what good is a ball player without the use of his legs, hmm?”

“It was the fucking bodyguard—him!”
Baptiste shouted.
“Meyer. Sean Meyer. Your fucking brother tried to roll me—pulled a gun. And that’s when my bodyguard arrived, all right? That’s when Sean Meyer shot your brother.”

“You don’t deny it,”
Castille said, his voice louder again. He had closed on Sean, was asking him the question.
“So, is it true, what he says?”

I held my breath. The O’Days and Blake Dyer were staring at me. I ignored them, willing Sean to give the right answer.

Not necessarily the true answer—just the one that wouldn’t get him killed.

Because the truth was that Sean would have been more than capable of pulling the trigger if the circumstances had been as Baptiste had described. I thought back over his words.
“And that’s when my bodyguard arrived . . .”

If that part was correct—if any of it was—then Sean had not been there from the outset. It sounded plausible. No way would Sean have gone with a principal to buy drugs. Nor would he have let him out on his own to do so.

But if Baptiste had lied to him about the destination, or the purpose, that would only have kept Sean out of the way for so long. Long enough for him to work it out and go charging in there.

Long enough for him to take down a possible threat.

“It might be,”
Sean said now.
“Might not be. I don’t know.”

Not the answer I’d been hoping for.

“You don’t know,”
Castille repeated flatly.
“Is that your best answer? Because, it is not only your life at stake here,
cher
, but the manner of your death.”

Sean’s tone matched him.
“Dead is dead.”

“This is true, but not all roads that lead to death are the same. I could make yours long and . . . torturous.”

“You just said you didn’t want lies,”
Sean said, brusque with tension.
“Now you’re asking me to do just that.”

“How can you not know if you killed a man? Was this so easy for you to forget—shooting him in the back, severing his spine with your bullet, so all he could do was lie there, helpless, and watch you walk towards him with your gun?”
I didn’t need to see the man’s face to feel his fire.
“Did his eyes call you for the coward that you were? Is that why you couldn’t meet them when you finished him, hmm?”

“How do you know that’s how it happened?”
Sean asked.

I knew he was hedging, but what else could he do?

Then I heard the sound of a blow landing. Not a fist, but something heavier, harder—the butt of a pistol maybe—smacking hard into flesh and muscle and bone. A grunt of pain.

“What do you hope to gain by lies except more pain?”
Castille said now, something close to curiosity in his voice.
“Do you still think you have to protect him? Look at him—he is not worthy of your protection.”

I could guess that by
“him”
he meant Baptiste.

“He can’t tell you what happened,”
Baptiste blurted out.
“He was in a coma. He can’t remember anything. So, you’re just gonna have to take
my
word on it.”
He sounded almost triumphant.

There was a long pause, then Castille said,
“Is this true?”

“Yes, it’s true,”
Sean said tightly.

He sounded as if he’d rather keep taking hits than admit to such weakness in front of the assembled crowd. More to the point, in front of their close-protection people. There were bodyguards here from major agencies all over the country. And right now they had nothing else on which to focus their attention except the scene being played out in front of them.

Sean added grudgingly,
“I was shot in the head—doing my job.”

That much, at least, was common knowledge.

“Ah, like my brother. But unlike my brother you did not die,”
the man said.
“And now you are returned to full health, yes?”

“Yes.”

I heard just a touch of defiance.

“And yet you claim you do not know what happened to my brother.”
It was halfway between a statement and a question.
“Unless you are somehow . . . brain damaged,
cher
, how can it be that you do not remember? Perhaps this is a convenient lapse of memory. A little too convenient, yes?”

Sean said nothing. There was nothing he could say without damning himself before one audience or another.

If he admitted that his whole memory of guarding Baptiste years ago was missing, he might save his own skin right now, but he’d be hanging himself later. Not only that, but he’d be hanging Parker out to dry, too. The news that one of the partners in the prestigious Armstrong-Meyer had gone back out into the field with such huge gaps in his recall would go round the business like wildfire. It would cause a sensation.

And not in a good way.

But, if he hoped to come out of this alive how could Sean admit to being involved without contradicting Gabe Baptiste’s own story?

Baptiste might be a coward—he might even be a murderer—but he had still been a client.

And close-protection operatives do not sacrifice clients—even former clients—to save themselves.

That would cause another sensation.

Again, not in a good way.

I closed my eyes, might even have let out a low groan.

“What the hell is going on down there?” Jimmy O’Day demanded.

I said nothing.

I felt his hand on my arm, a rough little shake.

I said, “Move it or lose it,” without opening my eyes.

The hand went.

“Charlie—”

“Shush.”

In my ear, Sean had started speaking again.
“You want to know what really happened?”
he asked.
“Then I’ll tell you. But you’re not going to like it.”

“Yes, I was with Baptiste that night,”
Sean said calmly.
“I didn’t like it much, but it was my job to be there, right?”

“Sean, what the hell are you doing?” I murmured uselessly. He couldn’t hear me any more than he could remember anything about that night—could he?

Or could he?

He paused a moment and I cursed the fact I couldn’t see Gabe Baptiste’s face.

When Baptiste had first arrived and seen Sean in the lobby of the hotel, the ball player had been shit-scared. Here was someone who knew all his shameful little secrets.

And then he’d discovered that by some remarkable quirk of fate Sean could remember nothing at all about him. I remembered Baptiste’s palpable relief, on the roof of the parking garage the morning of the helicopter crash, when the truth of it finally hit home.

Clearly Baptiste hadn’t been able to believe his luck. At first he’d treated it as some kind of joke at his expense, and later as one that he could join in with impunity. He’d invited himself onto the same flight as Sean purely, I realised now, to do some private gloating at close range.

After all, here was someone who could probably sink Baptiste’s precious career. A man he believed had kept silent only out of some old-fashioned sense of duty and honour that Baptiste could not understand. He must have wondered constantly if he could rely on it.

Was that why his manager had approached Armstrong-Meyer earlier in the year to deal with the stalking fan—just to see if his past crimes were going to be resurrected and held against him?

How heartened he must have been by Parker’s polite but noncommittal response.

Now here was Sean about to spill the beans in front of everybody who was anybody in New Orleans. His home town.

And there was nothing he could do about it without making things ten times worse.

“No, I didn’t know why Baptiste had gone there—he spun me a line about meeting with someone,”
Sean said easily.
“Some girl he’d met.”

From the way Baptiste had been all over Autumn Sinclair, that wasn’t a stretch of imagination on Sean’s part. Or anyone else’s.

Baptiste, I noted, did not interrupt him.

“He told me to wait outside, so I stayed with the car. That kind of area, I wanted to make sure it still had all its wheels when he came out.”

“You expect me to believe that you, his bodyguard, did not stay close to him?”

Sean gave a half-snort of mirthless laughter.
“Like I said, he told me he was meeting a girl and there are some things I really don’t need to watch.”

There was a moment’s silence. I held my breath. Jimmy O’Day shuffled from one foot to the other. I glared at him. He stopped shuffling.

“What changed your mind?”

“Now that I don’t know,”
Sean said.
“Instinct? Experience? Mainly, though, I think it was the smell.”

“What smell?”

“Something about the whole set-up stank.”
I almost heard Sean shrug.
“I decided to go in—quietly. If I was wrong and the kid was just getting his leg over, I’d back out and he’d never know I was there.”

“But he was not ‘getting his leg over’ as you put it.”

“No,” Sean agreed.
“He wasn’t. Instead I found him facing off with another guy. The other guy had a gun on him. Baptiste was wailing and whining and saying how he was sorry. Whatever had gone on, he was offering the guy money to ‘make things right’, or something like that.”

I had no idea where this was coming from. I only had the information from Parker’s report. In theory, the same information Sean had. So was he genuinely working from memory, or spinning a desperately well-played line?

Either way, he had Castille hooked hard enough not to call him a liar outright. Not yet anyway.

Even Baptiste wasn’t voicing denials, so either Sean had it nailed or he had pretty good insight into Baptiste’s character. Good enough to guess how he might have behaved.

“And how did you react to this . . . situation?”
Castille asked now, his voice almost a hiss.

“As I’m trained to,”
Sean said, matter-of-fact.
“I gave him a warning, then took him down.”

There was another pause, longer this time.
“You,
cher,
are a liar,”
Castille said.
“A good liar—but a liar, nevertheless.”

“That’s how it happened,”
Sean said, and I heard the stubborn tilt of his chin. Now he was playing this hand, he was playing it to the end. What other choice did he have?
“Were you there? No. So how am I lying?”

“It may have happened mostly as you say. An argument over money. A gun drawn. But there was no warning. You crept in like a coward and you shot my baby brother in the back without giving him a chance to . . . consider his options.
That
is what happened. Hmm?”

Sean said nothing for maybe half a minute. An eternity. I could picture him standing there, face cold and blank while his mind whirled. At the other end of an open comms link, my own mind whirled in tandem. How the hell could he get out of that?