Mason came up by his shoulder. “We’d best get ourselves outta sight, sir,” he said. “Don’t want to scare this guy off.” His eyes flicked to Gerri and something happened to his mouth that might almost have been a sign of amusement. “If he shows up.”
Brown nodded and flashed me a quick smile. “Now don’t you worry none, Charlie,” he said, patting my shoulder. “Me and the boys’ll be close by.”
Most of the office doors were locked but that didn’t seem to be much of a problem. Mason produced a set of picks from his inside jacket pocket and within moments the doors were open and they were inside.
I was left standing in the centre of the polished floor, alone. Beyond the doorways to my left I could hear the thunder of the show coming up from the lower floor. The bikini contest was under way now, by the sound of it, the commentator trying to whip the crowd into an ever-greater fever of excitement as each girl took the stage.
“You gotta cheer for the girl you wanna win,” he yelled. “The louder you cheer, the better she’ll do. Let’s hear it now for Chastity, from Orlando. Come on out Chastity!”
I don’t know how good looking Chastity was. Or, more to the point, how little of her chest was covered by her bikini top, but the crowd went wild.
The noise was suddenly amplified as one of the doors from the balcony looking out over the auditorium further along the corridor was pushed open. I tensed, automatically reaching for the gun in my bag.
There was a pause, then Keith Pelzner stepped out into view.
He was shuffling, looking back nervously over his shoulder. His gaudy Hawaiian shirt was stained and crumpled and his hair was matted down onto his head. Wherever Whitmarsh had been keeping him for the last few days, it wasn’t anywhere with a bath and full room service, that was for sure. Keith looked round vaguely, like he’d no idea where he was and didn’t remember me either.
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.
Twenty-two
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.