I felt him turn. “You reckon?”
“You remember what was said at the Ocean Center?” I asked. “Well, Trey and I have been helped out over the last couple of days by a retired FBI man called Walt – lives down on the beach. He gave me one of those micro-cassette tape recorders to try and get a confession out of Gerri Raybourn.” I blanked out my own reasons for wanting to confront Gerri and pushed on. “It was in my bag at the Ocean Center. It should have got everything that happened there.”
For a moment Sean was silent. “
“I know that,” I said, hearing the wobble in my voice. “But right now it’s the only hope we’ve got of getting out of this, so please don’t take it away from me.”
I heard him sigh. “Come here,” he said. My eyes were beginning to adjust to the dimness now. I could see his outline more clearly but I would have known where to find him, in any case. My system was tuned to his, alert and sensitive.
I walked into his open arms without a stumble and laid my head against his chest. Under my ear his heart beat a steady hypnotic rhythm. His hands closed gently across my back, enveloping me.
I wanted to stay like that forever.
“I thought I’d never get to do this again,” he said into my hair, so quiet I had to strain to catch the words.
I said nothing. What could I say? That I’d already accepted his death? I kept the cold little secret to myself. It sounded so faithless to admit it out loud.
Sean didn’t seem to notice my silence. “They got me getting out of the bloody swimming pool – how stupid is that?” he said, rueful. Those agile fingers had begun to stroke up and down my spine, feeling their way across each vertebra, almost distracted.
“I managed to put Whitmarsh on his arse before Chris waded in and then Lonnie turned up with that shotgun and made it pretty damned clear I was a disposable item. Chucked some clothes at me, then it was the usual blindfold and cuffs and into the boot of his car.” I felt him shrug to try and slacken the tension that was tightening him up as he recounted the story. “I thought that was it. Game over. They’d lined the whole thing with plastic.”
“I know,” I said, remembering what we’d found in the boot of the Taurus I’d hijacked outside Henry’s place.
“The worst thing was knowing what they had planned for you and not being able to do a damned thing about it,” he went on. “They were talking about you like you were already dead.”
“We probably would have been if I hadn’t found the SIG where you left it,” I said. And as I said it I remembered that I’d abandoned the gun, too, in the little flowered bag at the Ocean Center. What I would have done to have it back right now.
“I wasn’t sure if they’d miss it when they cleaned out my room,” Sean said, “but I knew if they did you’d find it. If you made it back to the house.”
“Yeah, we made it.”
“So I understand. You know where I was when that little bit of news came through?” Sean said and his voice had taken on a flat, dispassionate tone now, like he was debriefing after a disastrous operation, burying the emotion and keeping strictly to the facts.
I gave a slight shake of my head, though I realised his question was largely rhetorical.
“Haines took me out into the Everglades – some godforsaken track in the middle of nowhere – and they put me on my knees and he put a gun to the back of my head,” he said calmly, although under my cheekbone his heart was punching like a fist. “And just before he did it Haines’s mobile rang and that’s when he found out that they’d missed you at the house, and then again at the motel. And they thought I might still have some value, after all.”
“Jesus,” I murmured.
He told me the rest then, not that there was much to tell. They’d kept him and Keith in a darkened room not unlike this one and told him nothing. The only time he’d gleaned that something was happening was when Whitmarsh’s crew had suddenly tooled up and cleared out in a hurry yesterday. Their mood had been one of jubilation, he said, as though they’d set a trap for me.
Sean had sat and sweated until their return and then the ill-tempered slamming of doors and kicking of walls and the morose snatches of conversation had made it plain that I’d somehow got Trey away from them again.
“I felt so damned helpless, just waiting for it to happen, and then the relief was just incredible,” he confessed. “Not just at your survival but my own too, I suppose. I don’t know what you did, Charlie, but it really pissed them off.”
So I told him my side of the story. The only part I glossed over was my real intention when I’d gone to face down Gerri. I wasn’t quite ready to admit that yet. Even to Sean.
Eventually we sat against the wall opposite the doorway, close together, unashamedly holding hands. The floor was hard and unforgiving, and occasionally things with more legs than I wanted to think about skittered across it but at least they weren’t rats. Besides, I was just so glad to be with Sean that I didn’t care about the minor problems of insect infestation and my backside going to sleep.
Outside, the sun finally began to lose its harsh edge as another day died in flawless, but largely-ignored tragic beauty. The light filtering through the vents turned mellow, almost misty, as the ferocious heat started to abate a little.
Sean and I sat without speaking as we watched the onset of the end of the day, my head tilted onto his shoulder. There was too much to say to know where to start and so it was better to say none of it than to say it badly.
“If you see a chance, Charlie, take it,” Sean said at last. “If I have to go I’d rather go out fighting than being caught with my bloody pants down again.”
“You never told me you were skinny-dipping in the pool,” I said.
Just for a moment he laughed and squeezed my fingers.
“I’m serious,” he said. “If you get an opportunity, don’t hesitate. They won’t, that’s for sure.”
He paused and when he spoke again his voice had lost any trace of amusement. “Do you remember you once told me that if I went out of my way to kill a man – even one who blatantly deserved it – you’d feel compelled to try and stop me?”
My mouth had suddenly gone so dry I had to peel my tongue away from the roof of it. “Yes,” I said. “I remember.”
“You know what you mean to me, don’t you, Charlie?”
“Yes.”
He nodded. “Good,” he said, cool and distant now. “So this time, don’t try and stop me.”
I should have made some response to that. How could I accept such a sinister statement of intent without argument? If you planned to kill in advance of needing to, it wasn’t self-defence any more. It was murder.
But I knew all about planning a murder, didn’t I?
And then we heard the footsteps approaching and it was too late for anything else but jumping to our feet, braced and ready.
The light gushed in like floodwater as the door was unlocked and swung wide. Beyond it stood Whitmarsh, now reunited with his Beretta. His jaw was set, determined. He waved us out with a jerk of his head.
“OK people,” he said, tense. “It’s time to go for a little ride.”
Twenty-four
I’d never been in an airboat before. Given other circumstances I might even have enjoyed the experience.
Each craft was around eighteen or twenty feet in length, with a flat-bottomed hull that sat less than six
