Sean shrugged off the insult and started for the door. As he passed, my father gestured to the gun Sean carried with an expressive flick of his fingers.
“Violence. Is that the only thing you people understand?”
We’d caught him in a run-down brothel with a naked teenage hooker and still he tried to take the high ground.
“Perhaps it is,” I said, not moving. “So how’s this for violence? If you don’t walk out of here with us, right now, I’ll knock you senseless and carry you out—and, believe me, it would be a pleasure. Either way, you’re leaving.”
His spine straightened. “You can’t.”
“Oh, don’t tempt me.”
“No, you can’t!”
I registered the edge of panic in the rising tone with something akin to wonder. Of all the emotions he’d shown since we’d entered that room and exposed him, this was the first hint of fear.
“I can’t leave you here,” I said, without pity. “If my mother—”
“That’s just it.” He grasped the reference like a talisman. “Your mother. If you feel anything for your mother, Charlotte, then just leave me here and go before it’s too late. Please.”
“Too late? What the hell are you—”
Then, from underneath us, we heard crashing and highpitched screaming and loud voices bellowing commands. Sean and I ran into the corridor. About halfway along was a narrow window with a view down into the alleyway. When we looked down, all we could see were the flashing lights on top of the squad cars.
“Oh. Shit,” Sean muttered. His eyes met mine. There weren’t any other exits or we would have found them on our way up. The management was clearly more anxious about customers trying to skip out without paying, than they were about the possibilities of escape from a fire.
Sean picked the illegal Kel-Tec out of my nerveless grasp. Without having to watch his hands, he stripped the gun down to its frame and dumped it out of the window, where it fell five stories, straight into the open Dumpster by the entrance. His own weapon quickly followed. Nobody on the ground heard or saw a thing. Even so, I knew we were headed for deep, deep trouble.
We went back. My father hadn’t moved, but someone had hit fast-forward and he’d aged maybe twenty years. His face was gray in the dull light. “It’s the police,” I said. “The place is being raided.”
My father nodded, mildly resigned, as though I’d told him it looked likely to rain, and the sudden realization hit me that somehow he’d known this was going to happen. The girl continued to rock gently on the bed.
And we waited, the four of us, for the thunder of boots on the stairs.
CHAPTER 6
“Well, congratulations, guys. I do believe this will go down in history as a screwup of monumental proportions,” Parker Armstrong said. He raised a tired smile that lost heart long before it reached his eyes. “As I understand it,” he added with morose humor, “they can see it from space.”
We were in the conference room at the agency. High-tech and spotless, it had been furnished with an eye to luxury and none at all to cost. The suspended ceiling seemed to hang in a cloud of ice blue neon, perfectly highlighting the swirling grain of the maple wall panels. At one end was a projector screen for presentations. It was rarely used, but I knew for a fact the sound system that went with it had cost more than my last house.
Parker was in the power seat at the top end of half an acre of mirror-polished table. Sean and I were shoulder-to-shoulder about halfway along, with Bill Rendelson scowling ferociously at us from the other side.
We’d been offered a seat but preferred to stand. I had to fight the urge to do so at attention. Back straight up, arms straight down so my thumbs were precisely in line with the seams of my leather jeans, knees just slightly bent so I could hold the position for hours if I had to. Only the lack of dress uniforms prevented this from being an action replay of the travesty that was my court-martial.
I felt thoroughly dirty. We were both still wearing the same clothes we’d been arrested in, roughly twenty-eight hours earlier. If it hadn’t been for some fancy footwork on the part of Parker’s legal team, we would probably still be in jail.
The last glimpse I’d had of my father was of him being bundled, handcuffed, into the back of a police cruiser. I’d asked the lawyer who’d got me out what had happened to him, but the man seemed to be billing by the word as well as the minute and my credit was obviously running short.
“I’m sorry,” I said, aware that I was starting to sound like a scratch mix. “But don’t blame Sean for any of this. I’m the one who dragged him into it.”
“Aw, come on, Charlie.” Parker sat back, his voice almost gentle in its admonition, even if his body language betrayed his impatience. “You know as well as I do that Sean makes his own decisions.”
“Of course,” I agreed quickly, before Sean could jump in, “but nevertheless, this was—and should have remained—a family matter.”
“‘Family matter’—is that so?” Parker echoed sharply. “You make it sound like some kind of sick tradition. Does your father always take you along when he goes visiting cheap hookers?’Cause that’s just plain wrong.”
He waited to see if I had anything better to offer him. I did not. A few days ago I would have laughed at the idea of my father even looking at another woman, never mind paying her for sex. Now it was like dealing with a total stranger who’d somehow taken up residence behind his tight-lipped face.
“Or maybe he doesn’t have time.” Without taking his eyes off the pair of us, Parker reached out his hand and Bill hurried to smartly slap a folded newspaper into it, precise as a theater nurse handing over a pair of forceps. “Seeing as how he’s so busy with his alcoholism and his euthanasia.” With a contemptuous flick of his wrist, Parker sent the newspaper skidding across the tabletop towards us, adding grimly, “And there’re one or two things here about you that weren’t on your resume, that’s for sure.”
I reached out and stopped the paper sliding before it slipped over the edge onto the Italian tile, then unfolded it and scanned the story.
Somebody had been raking through the muck of my past history with a pretty fine mesh. They seemed to have caught just about all the most pungent bits of it, at any rate. My father’s current fall from grace was recapped with salacious glee, and my own alongside it. They built me up first—my army commendations, marksman certificates, trophies, Special Forces selection and high hopes—all the better to knock me down again. Laid out in the most lurid terms was the story of the vicious attack by four of my fellow trainees, the revelation of my affair with Sean, my ignominious expulsion.
Journalistically speaking, they picked over the carcass of my career and whooped as they waved the bones in the air. In their eyes, their words, I was damaged goods. They hinted in their snide way that either I had been brutalized out of my humanity, or that I was simply a product of my upbringing. And then they started in on my father again.
Sickened, I let the paper drop back down onto the surface of the table and glanced up. I could tell from the angle of his head that Sean had been reading it, too, and I knew Bill must have done so before he’d brought the paper through to Parker. I felt the heat steal up into my face.
Sean knew what had happened to me that freezing winter night, but only secondhand and at a distance. He’d been posted a few weeks before and it wasn’t until we’d met again, by chance, several years after the event that the truth had come out. And then he’d reacted both with anger and sorrow that had chilled me to the bone.