Road Kill

“It was messy. He nearly got away from you, and he wasn’t even a professional.”

I felt my exasperation rise, partly at the harsh criticism and partly annoyance that I knew he was right. “Don’t you think you’re being overly critical? OK, so you feel I made a mistake. But I contained it – nobody else noticed. And come on, Sean – he was the kid’s father, for heaven’s sake!”

Sean cocked his head from one side to the other, slowly, like he was shifting the weight of his thoughts. “So?” he said coolly. “What difference does that make?”

What I’d heard of his own father, I recalled belatedly, sketched the man as a drunken bully, both to his wife and to his children. When Sean spoke, rarely, of his father’s premature death in a largely self-induced car accident, it was with a kind of quiet resentment. It had taken me quite a while to realise that was probably because Sean had harboured a secret ambition to kill the man himself.

I sighed. “In this case, it makes all the difference. Simone had just got through telling me how she still loves the guy. If she could be sure he was after her for herself and not just her money, she’d probably take him back in a heartbeat.”

“That’s only a small part of the story, seen from her perspective.” Sean threw me a sceptical glance. “Quite apart from the fact that you gleaned all this from what – a two-minute conversation in the ladies’ room?” he said mildly. “Did she have time to show you a photograph while she was about it?”

I knew where this was going but it was like playing chess with a grand master. Defeat was coming, but I didn’t begin to have the skill to fend off the inevitable.

“No,” I said, and felt my pawns scatter as my knights fell and my queen faltered.

He nodded briefly and went in for the kill. “So how did you know that the guy who came into the restaurant was Matt?” he said. Check. “He could have been any psycho stalker you care to name. Just because you’ve only been told about one threat doesn’t mean there won’t be others. You should know that, Charlie. You of all people.”

His voice was gentle and he hadn’t moved, but that very stillness seethed.

“Ella called him Daddy,” I said between my teeth, in a last-ditch castling to regroup. “He was carrying a pink rabbit.”

“You didn’t know that until after he’d made his move – and you’d made yours,” Sean countered. He took a step towards me, then another. It took conscious effort not to retreat. “You had him under control and you let yourself be distracted. The fact that he was Ella’s father shouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference. Children are murdered by their fathers and women are murdered by their spouses every day.”

Checkmate.

Exasperation curled into anger like smoke into fire.

“So I made a judgement call,” I bit out.

“Really? Is that what you think it was?” He paused. “It was an emotional call, certainly.”

I felt my chin come up, almost bobbing to the surface. There may as well have been a red flag attached to it for the signals it sent to him. I snapped, “Of course, and that’s a failing.”

“In this job, yes,” he said, closing his eyes in a slow blink, like he was gathering strength. “Carry on making decisions like that in the field, and I can’t use you.”

My mouth dried. I swallowed in reflex and tried not to make it obvious that’s what it was. But I saw him note my body’s automatic reaction with cold hard eyes, and something flickered in his face. Disappointment?

“I can do the job,” I said, keeping my voice even only with willpower. “Haven’t I proved that to you already?”

He paused again, just fractionally, then inclined his head in slight acquiescence. Just when I thought he’d given ground, he said, in a voice I wasn’t sure I recognised, “Prove it to me again.”

My eyebrows arched in surprise. “What? Now?”

He nodded, more fully this time. “Here and now.”

I glanced around me, took in the dirty, oil-blotched concrete floor, the rows of parked cars. Both of us had shifted our stance, I realised. Sean into offence, me into defence. My elbows were bent and my hands had come up slightly, but I didn’t remember raising them.

We both tensed as a salt-splashed BMW blipped up the ramp from the lower parking floor, then slowed as it drew level. The driver was a middle-aged woman with aggressively coiffured hair who stared at the pair of us as she crawled past. Not because she had hostile intent or was concerned for my safety, but more likely because she thought there might be a chance we were about to vacate a valuable parking space.

When she was just past us, she braked, the rear lights flaring, and I saw her head angle towards the interior mirror. She must have realised, from our lack of movement, that we were having a stand-off of some kind, that the situation was far from normal. But, would she intervene on my behalf?

After only a moment, the car’s brake lights snapped off again and the car began to edge forwards, then quickened. No, she wouldn’t.

My eyes went back to Sean. His body was giving off threat cues in waves, like heat. I could see them rippling outwards from his centre.

“Sean, come on—”

“What?” he threw at me. “Do you want me to make things easy for you, is that it?”

And that’s when I saw the knife in his left hand . . .

THIRD STRIKE