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.”
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
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.
Nevertheless, this was not a normal situation, nor the kind of clients he was used to dealing with. I knew that if we didn’t lay some ground rules right from the start, in an emergency things were going to go pear-shaped at somewhere approaching the speed of sound.
I was coward enough to let Sean tell it to them straight. I didn’t think they liked me any better, but at least I felt my father was likely to hold whatever Sean said in rather higher esteem.
“You are not under house arrest and we will not restrict your movements unless our experience and our judgment of the situation tell us it’s vital that we do so,” Sean said, disregarding the cynical twitch of my father’s mouth. “But, these people, whoever they are, are serious. If you take risks with
“We understand,” my father said stiffly.
“Good,” Sean said, and although he kept his face and voice and body entirely neutral, I could tell how much he was enjoying this. “In that case, there are a couple of things you’ll need to remember in case of attack. If we shout ‘Get down!’ at any point, all we want you to do is bend double and keep your head low, but stay on your feet and be ready to move unless we actively push you to the ground. Don’t try and stick your head up to see what’s happening. Don’t try and look round to see where the other one is. You’re going to have to trust us to have you both covered, yes?”
He paused and, after a second’s hesitation, they both nodded.
“One last thing,” Sean said, and now he did allow his voice to go soft and deadly. “This is not a democracy. We will do whatever we have to in order to preserve your lives and keep you safe. What we will
“So,” my father said, matching his tone to Sean’s almost perfectly, “what happens when, in the cold light of day, you find you
There was a long silence while they stared each other down. Here were two men who had both handled death, from one direction or another, and never flinched under the weight of that responsibility.
