“Why?”
His eyes flicked to mine in silent censure. “In case it escaped your notice, Charlotte, I’m your father.” He sprayed me with a coat of sealant dressing and straightened, nodding to signify he was done. “It’s what fathers do.”
And I realized then that, despite my earlier jealousy, whenever I’d called on him in the past, he’d come. He might not have agreed with my actions. In some cases he might not even have fully supported them, but he’d come nevertheless.
I stood, trying not to stagger as I put weight through my left leg, testing the knee to make sure it wasn’t going to fold on me.
“You know you can’t leave this here, don’t you?” I said. “Not now.”
My father looked up from scrubbing his hands, met my eyes in the mirror for a moment. Then he was back to his brisk rubbing.
“I was prepared to,” he said remotely, “but clearly they are not.” His face pinched and I wondered, briefly, what might happen if my father ever relaxed that ruthless self-control for long enough to well and truly lose his temper.
“So, are you going to tell the police the whole story?”
He had been drying his hands, and that halted him for a few long moments while he gave it due consideration. “What good will it do?” he said, sounding weary. “Do you honestly think they’ll give due credence to anything I have to say?”
I opened my mouth to respond but got no further. There was another knock on the door and Sean put his head round without waiting for an invitation. His eyes slid darkly from me to my father, who turned away, throwing the last paper towel into the waste bin and straightening his shirt cuffs.
“You okay?” Sean asked.
“I’ll live,” I said.
He advanced and folded my new clothing onto the counter next to the sink—a spare suit and shirt, still in their drycleaning bags. It was a rule of Parker’s that everyone kept a decent change of clothes at the office, just in case of emergencies. In his early days he had once had the misfortune, he’d told us, to have to face a widow when he was still spattered with her late husband’s blood. He’d taken considerable precautions not to be put in the same situation again.
“Are you ready for the police? They want your side of it.”
“Do they think I might have been jaywalking?”
He smiled and, just for a moment I saw the relief and the anguish swimming deep in his eyes, then it was gone.
“Getting hit by a car hasn’t knocked any sense into you, I see,” he said dryly. “I’ll tell them you’ll be another fifteen, shall I?”
I nodded, and he went out. I turned to find my father watching me with an expression that might have qualified as distaste. He removed his glasses and folded them into their slim case, which he tucked back into the inside pocket of his jacket.
“What?”
He shook his head and I shrugged, stripping away the plastic bag to remove the shirt from its hanger.
“What do you intend to say to the police?”
“What would you like me to tell them?”
He made a gesture of frustration. “Don’t play games, Charlotte,” he said, clipped. “It doesn’t become you.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Who’s playing games?” I said mildly, buttoning the shirt. By the time I’d eased my way into the trousers, he still hadn’t answered.
“Your reputation’s been blown, your home invaded, your family’s secrets smeared across the newspapers. And now somebody’s just tried to kill you,” I said then, keeping all the emotion out of my voice.
I lifted my jacket. Underneath it was my SIG P228 in a Kramer inside-the-waistband sheepskin clip. Sean must have been into the office gun safe. My father watched me go through my habitual checks and slide the holstered weapon into position just behind my right hip. There was absolute disapproval in his every line.
“If you’d trusted me and Sean enough to come to us when they first started threatening you, we could have dealt with it there and then and avoided it coming to this.” I pulled on my boots and straightened, stifling a groan the movement caused. I shrugged into my jacket, smoothing the cloth to make sure it covered the outline of the SIG. “Whether you like it or not, I’m bloody good at what I do. We could have taken out Buzz-cut and his friend before they got you anywhere near Bushwick.”
“Oh, I’ve no doubt you could have ‘taken out’ my aggressors, as you so coyly put it,” my father echoed bitterly. “Perhaps that was what I was afraid of most.”
CHAPTER 14
One way and another, we were tied up with the police for most of the day. After the uniforms came the plainclothes men. World-weary and sardonic New York cops, they’d seen everything and heard more. And they made it quite clear that the story my father was now telling was more far-fetched than most.
They were obviously aware of Richard Foxcroft’s name—anyone who had read a newspaper or seen a news report in the last week couldn’t fail to be. I got the distinct impression that the only reason they didn’t outright laugh in our faces was because Parker Armstrong’s name carried weight, despite recent events. The hatchet job that had been done on my father’s reputation, however, was a resounding success.
They’d investigate, the cops told us, but what was probably no more than an accidental hit-and-run wasn’t high on the priority list. If we could bring them something more—like the faintest shred of evidence to support our fanciful claims of attempted murder—they might be more inclined to devote some man-hours to the case.
While they were interviewing him and my mother, I brought Parker and Sean up to speed on the conversation with my father while he’d been patching me up. When I’d finished, both of them looked thoughtful and no less worried than they had before.
“We need to put a lid on this quickly,” Parker reiterated, although I was heartened by his continued use of the word we. He glanced from one of us to the other. “If he’s finally agreed to make a stand, we can do something. Let me make some calls.”
He stood, decisive, and regarded us gravely. “Meanwhile, you’re going to have to keep those two out of trouble. They’ve already come after them once. They’ll try again.”
I got to my feet, too. I’d taken the opportunity to swallow a couple of painkillers and they’d done a decent job at floating the edge off things. Rising was considerably easier as a result. “Thank you,” I said. “And I know you don’t like to hear it, but I’ll say it again—I’m sorry for all of this.”
“Jeez, I know that, Charlie.” He offered me a tired smile and, a rarity, put his arm around my shoulder in a more fatherly gesture than I’d ever had from my own. “Don’t worry, we’ll see it through. And anyhow, you can’t be held responsible for your parents.”
“Tell me about it,” I muttered. “Can’t live with’em. Can’t kill’em and bury’em in the garden.”
After the police had rolled up their crime-scene tape and departed, we gave my parents a choice. Either Sean and I would put them up in the spare room at the apartment, or we’d put a guard on them at the hotel and stick with them whenever they were outside it. After the briefest of consultations, they went for the latter option, which was both a relief and a snub as far as I was concerned.
I noticed Parker go a little pale when I bluntly offered this ultimatum. His whole ethos for executive protection was to keep clients as safe as possible without cramping their style. Some saw it as risky, but it certainly seemed to work for him. Time and again, I’d come across agencies who’d been fired for letting their operatives crowd the principal and vetoing what the client considered normal activities. I liked Parker’s attitude. It went a long way towards explaining why, family money aside, he was doing well enough to run a substantial office in New York and a weekend place in the Hamptons.