For someone so slight she packed quite a punch. The force of the blow sent me staggering sideways into the man who’d originally knocked me down. He shoved me upright again with as much care as if I was an unstable piece of cheap furniture. I noticed he was smiling.
“Cut that out!” Brown barked, half rising to lean on the desk. “Goddamn it, Gerri, I won’t have that kinda behaviour in my office. Get a grip on yourself, y’hear me?”
Gerri had been watching the effect of her strike with narrowed, glittering eyes. Now she turned away and sat down again, tucking her feet underneath her chair almost daintily. She even checked to see that she hadn’t broken a nail.
I shook my head to clear it. I had been right in my first assessment of Gerri’s rings, I realised. The stones in them had gouged a lump out of the flesh across my cheekbone that felt an inch wide. I could feel a small trickle of blood already running down the line of my jaw.
“Thank you,” Brown said, more quietly. He waved a hand towards the plasticuffs. “Now get those damned things off of her and leave her be. She’s not much more than a kid herself. Let’s try and be civilized about this, huh?”
The moustached man did as he was ordered while the one with the Colt kept me covered, then they both stepped back. I rubbed reflectively at my wrists and looked at Brown.
“Where was your panic button, by the way?” I asked idly. “I was watching your hands and never saw them move. Or did good old Randy raise the alarm?”
Brown scowled a little at the mention of his employee’s name. “No, looks like he don’t even have the wit for that,” he said readily enough, regaining his own seat. His eyes were bright and filled with a deep intelligence that the rest of his easygoing, slightly crumpled features had a tendency to disguise. “I have a switch down here on the floor. All I had to do was put my foot on it.”
“Nice touch,” I said.
Gerri let out a gusty sigh. “If you’ve quite finished exchanging pleasantries,” she said, voice dripping with sarcasm, “I’d like some answers out of her before we hand her over to the cops.”
Brown nodded and looked over my shoulder to where his security men were skulking. “Mason, get the lady a chair and then go see if you can rustle up some coffee,” he said.
The one who’d knocked me down brought forwards another chair like the one we’d broken in the struggle. His feet crackled over the shards of broken glass and pottery as he moved across the carpet. He plonked the chair down facing Gerri’s, keeping his attitude just a sliver this side of resentful at being asked to play the waiter. Then he went out, disengaging the handle of the door from the wall panel with a stiff jerk and closing it behind him.
The other man stayed in the background but he kept the Colt out and his attention firmly fixed on me. As I sat down I could almost feel his eyes boring into the back of my skull.
“So, Charlie, you wanna tell us what’s going on?” Brown asked then. His tone was calm and reasonable and almost kindly, and maybe because of that I felt much more inclined to answer him than Gerri.
“Keith Pelzner’s been kidnapped by Gerri and her boys because they want to get their hands on the finance program he was working on,” I said. “They tried to get Trey, too, but—”
“What?” Gerri cut in, strident now. “You and Meyer must be mad if you think anyone’s going to go for that fucking crap!”
Brown held up a placatory hand, old-fashioned enough to look faintly embarrassed at the profanity. “Now, now, Gerri, let’s hear her out,” he said.
“Sean’s dead,” I said coldly. And I wish you were, too. I turned back to Brown. “You remember you told me you’d seen Keith Pelzner packing up and leaving of his own accord on Thursday morning?” I said. “Well I now know he’s been kidnapped.”
Gerri’s brows came together. She, too, turned to the old man. “You saw Keith the morning he vanished?” she said to him, the rising inflection making it a question. She sounded annoyed and puzzled at the same time. “You sure never mentioned that to me.”
“Didn’t I?” the old man said, his smiling fading. “I coulda swore I told you all about it. Maybe it was that Whitmarsh feller.” He thought a moment longer, then brightened. “Yes, I do believe it was.”
Before Gerri could respond to that the door opened again and the security man, Mason, returned with three cups of coffee, and a little bowl containing three straws and packets of powdered creamer and sugar, on a brown plastic canteen-type tray. He put the tray down on the desk to one side of his boss.
He’d put my SIG into his right-hand trouser pocket in order to carry the tray. I could see the end of the pistol grip sticking out by his hip as he unloaded the contents and just for a second I considered making a grab for it.
Then I flicked my eyes up to Mason’s face and found he was watching me out of the corner of his eye with a sneaky little half smile lifting the edge of his mouth, making the moustache wrinkle upwards. I didn’t want to make his day any more than I had done already so I sat still and kept my hands in my lap. As he moved back to join his mate I contented myself instead with the rudeness of not saying thank you.
Gerri was still apparently frowning over Brown’s last remark, making a big performance out of it. The action produced two deep grooves between her carefully plucked eyebrows.
“She and Meyer took them both,” she said now, talking firmly to Brown, as though I wasn’t there. “I admit I kinda got the feeling Meyer was the ringleader and she was having second thoughts, or she wouldn’t have called me from the motel. But maybe he found out what she’d done. By the time my people got down there, they’d already killed a couple who’d gotten in their way and lit out.”
I flashed her a dirty look but followed suit, speaking to Brown like he was judge and jury. “I told her we were in a different room,” I said. “Partly deliberately, partly by accident. But when Whitmarsh and Chris turned up, they burst straight in there and shot the people inside without giving them a chance.” I glanced at Gerri but she was keeping her face devoid of emotion, a smooth, cosmetic facade. “That’s when Trey and I did a runner.”
She turned to me. “You really are delusional, aren’t you?” she said with something approaching a sneer. “Why the hell would Jim Whitmarsh kill those people?”
“You tell me,” I said softly. “Why would he and Haines be all fired-up for killing the pair of us – until they found out how vital Trey was to your precious program?”
“Now, now, ladies,” Brown interrupted, pushing a cup of coffee towards each of us, as though a hit of caffeine might calm us down. He rummaged through the little bowl, picking out four packets of Sweet ‘n’ Low which he emptied into his cup along with two packets of creamer. Then he stirred the resultant muddy-coloured gloop with one of the straws. Maybe it was a ploy to induce unity. Both Gerri and I eyed the concoction with measures of distaste.
I took my coffee black. It was out of a machine and it hit my stomach thin and sharp and greasy. It was also hotter than hell. I pushed it away.
“So, Charlie, what’s all this about them trying to kill the boy?” Brown asked then.
“Between them they’ve made three attempts so far,” I said, ignoring Gerri’s impatient gesture which I just caught out of the corner of my eye. “Four, if you count the initial attack by Haines in the amusement park.”
“Who’s this Haines character?”
“He’s a cop down in Fort Lauderdale but he freelances as a security consultant. Last year he did some work for Ms Raybourn here when she was with a company in Miami that made car parts. Looks like he’s working for her again now.”
Gerri was frowning again. “A cop?” she said, sounding artfully distracted. “Wait a minute. I remember – he was one of the guys who brought Trey back to the house after he was caught at the Galleria. I knew I knew him from somewhere.”