Third Strike

speed of our departure. I climbed in alongside her, leaving Sean up front, and McGregor gunned the V-8 and sped away.

“So, what’s the panic, Joe?” Sean asked.

“Better ask the boss,” McGregor said, uncharacteristically evasive.

Sean merely shrugged.

McGregor took the Queens-Midtown Tunnel under the East River and into Manhattan. Once we emerged, my mother spent the journey with her neck cranked to take in the towering buildings. I could identify with that, at least. Much as I tried not to let it show, I was still frequently overawed by the sheer scale of New York City, and Manhattan was tightly packed yet sprawling at the same time. As we approached midtown, the affluence of the area seemed more apparent.

“Where are we going?” my mother asked at last, starting to look flustered. She waved a hand towards her outfit—a stuffy tweed skirt and pale pink twin-set with the cardigan draped around her shoulders. “I mean, I don’t know if I’m suitably dressed.”

“Just the office.” Sean’s face gave away nothing of his opinion about such a trivial worry. “You’ll be fine.”

My mother was still fretful. “Perhaps I ought to have changed,” she said.

She looked carelessly smart in a well-bred, English kind of way. I debated on telling her that in New York, black was the new black, but decided against it. Informing my mother she was in danger of making a fashion faux pas would be enough to send her into a tailspin, and I reckoned we were going to have more than enough on our plate coping with her today.

“You’ll be fine,” I repeated, aiming for reassurance rather than exasperation. I’m not sure I quite pulled it off, but she let the subject go.

Instead she said, in a rather small voice, “When do you think I might be able to … see Richard?”

If it was me, I thought savagely, and it was Sean who was in trouble, I would never have stopped asking that question from the moment we got off the plane. It would have been my first—my only—concern. Why wasn’t it yours?

“That depends,” I said curtly, “on whether he’s out on bail.”

She looked hurt. Sean half-turned in his seat and I saw McGregor’s head tilt slightly to the rearview mirror, so that I was regarded by three reproachful pairs of eyes instead of one.

Despite the traffic, the journey didn’t take long. Parker’s offices were in a newly renovated building with an imposing entrance onto the street and a uniformed doorman. McGregor treated my mother with deference, calling her “ma’am” as he led her across the lobby. If he’d been wearing a cap, he would have tipped it.

I turned my head away so I could avoid the speculation that formed in her eyes as she now regarded me. As if maybe her daughter wasn’t associating with quite the thugs and peasants she’d always feared.

We took one of the express elevators, which whisked us up to the agency offices, and stepped out into the discreet opulence of the reception area. I saw my mother register the newly installed Armstrong Meyer nameplate behind the desk and resented the quickening of her interest.

Bill Rendelson toned down his habitual hostility in front of outsiders. He led us straight through to Parker’s office without his usual snide comments, pulling the door closed behind us. Inside, sitting drinking coffee, we found Parker Armstrong—and my father.

Both men rose when we entered. My father was still in the same suit he’d been wearing when I’d last seen him, but the shirt was clearly freshly laundered and he looked clean-shaven, showered, even rested, damn him. Only the discolored patch across his cheekbone gave away that he’d been through any kind of rough treatment. And that, I knew, was due to me.

I was suddenly very much aware of having just got off a seven-and-a-half-hour flight after very little sleep for the last three nights.

He went straight to my mother and, just for a second, I thought I might actually be about to witness genuine emotion between them. Then, when they were just a couple of paces apart, he seemed abruptly to remember the circumstances that had brought them here, and faltered, settling for a brief kiss on the cheek that was herculean in its restraint.

“Oh Richard,” my mother said, her voice wobbling as her face dissolved, as if she’d only just been holding it all together until now. “I’ve been so very frightened.”

“I’m so sorry, my dear,” he said, sounding somehow rusty. “It’s all over now.”

A gross exaggeration, in my view, but I didn’t like to point that out.

“They came into the house, Richard,” my mother went on, as if he hadn’t spoken. She dug in her handbag for a handkerchief and dabbed at her eyes. “Into our home, and threatened me.” Tears broke her voice. “They said such a—awful things would happen.”

“I know.” With a sigh, he finally folded her uncomfortably into his arms and they stood there for a while in that stiff embrace.

Then, over my mother’s bent head, his gaze shifted past me to Sean. “Thank you … for going to my wife’s aid,” he said in a quietly frozen tone, like he could hardly bring himself to express gratitude to Sean. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to express it at all to me.

Sean nodded. “You can repay us with a little honesty,” he said coolly.

My father tensed, as though his first response was denial, closely followed by the realization that he had very little choice. Gently, he put my mother away from him, guided her to a chair and handed her off into it with the kind of practiced delicacy I imagined him using on a critical patient’s dazed and grief-stricken next of kin. When he spoke, it was over his shoulder and with quiet dignity.

“I’d like a moment alone with my wife first, if you don’t mind.”

We’d all of us been through the military machine at one time or another, enough to respond instinctively to the innate command in his voice. My father ran his operating theaters with an iron hand tougher than any general’s and he was used to being obeyed utterly.

“Of course,” Parker said. “Just let Bill know when you’re ready.”

We filed out. As I closed the door behind me I saw my father take the chair next to my mother’s, close but not touching, and begin to speak in a low voice. Whatever he had to say, I considered, it had better be good.

Parker led us into the same conference room where we’d had our last confrontation, and took the same seat at the head of the table. I hoped we weren’t in for a rematch.

“Damn, he’s good,” he said with a rueful smile, blowing out a breath. “I don’t think I’ve ever been elbowed out of my own office before.”

“How long has he been here?” I asked. “I mean—I’m surprised they let him out of jail.”

“Well, they didn’t so much let him out as our legal team wrestled him loose,” Parker said. “The amount they charged for it, I was right about our lawyer putting his kids through college. I just didn’t realize he’d be able to fly them there in his own Lear 55.”

“Quit stalling,” Sean said, parting his jacket and taking a chair. “You were being very cryptic on the phone. What’s happened?”

“We’re taking serious heat,” Parker said bluntly. He ran a frustrated hand through his prematurely grayed hair. “Somebody’s been digging and they’ve been digging hard and deep. The Simone Kerse thing, for starters.”

“But that was nothing to do with you,” I said, then caught the look on his face and instantly regretted my unguarded choice of words. One of Parker’s men had been killed on that job and I knew that wasn’t something he took lightly, by any means.

“I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “What I meant was, Simone wasn’t your responsibility—she was ours. Mine, to be exact. And I was the one who lost her.”

“You didn’t lose her, Charlie,” Sean said. “Under the circumstances—”

“Nobody listens to circumstances,” I cut in, selfrecrimination making my voice harsher than it should have been. “The hard facts are that I was the one tasked to protect her and she died on my watch. After that, nobody cares about the how and the why.”

It was my own argument, but it hurt that he recognized the truth of it enough to fall silent.

“I realize it wasn’t your fault, Charlie,” Parker said. “But you know as well as I do how easily the newspapers put their own spin on things. And that’s not the only thing they’ve come up with.”