Third Strike

he got to his feet. “Make it the last.”

The Ford turned out to be an F-350 on a Pennsylvania plate. It was a double cab, which meant there was more than enough room inside for the four of us and our luggage. And, apart from the trio of bullet holes in the front windscreen, it was relatively undamaged.

Sean drove us away from the scene, making as much speed as he could without attracting too much attention, pushing the big pickup hard. I’d retrieved boxes of ammo from our bags before we set off and now I occupied my hands topping off both magazines while I had the chance. Sean’s Glock had only two rounds gone. My SIG was light by eight.

At one point Sean reached over and gave my hand a quick hard squeeze. I squeezed back and that was it. For several miles, nobody spoke.

When I glanced over my shoulder to check on my parents, I found them holding each other close in the backseat. But, to my surprise, it seemed to be my mother who had her arms wrapped around my father, when I would have expected him to be the one to be offering the most comfort. She met my eyes over the top of his bent head and gave me a faint smile. After a second, I smiled back.

“So, where now?” I asked Sean. “Miranda Lee’s?”

Sean shook his head. “They must have been there, or they’re intercepting her calls,” he said. “We didn’t decide we were going back there until this morning, and she’s the only person we told. Either way, she’s compromised.”

“So, has Vondie gone rogue again, or is Collingwood pulling her strings?”

He shook his head. “If Collingwood’s behind this, we’re so far up the creek they’ve never even seen a paddle,” he said. “I think we’d better assume the worst. Turn off your phone, just in case they’re tracking us through the system. We’ll find somewhere with a landline and call Parker.”

“If Collingwood’s bent,” I said, fishing my mobile out and holding down the power button until the screen went blank, “he’s going to have Parker under surveillance, too, surely?”

“Of course.” He flashed me a grim smile. “We’ll just have to make sure we’re suitably cryptic, won’t we?”

Cleaning up was a priority if we were to remain at large. We stopped at a little roadside fuel station that seemed to have branched out into garden furniture and windmills as well as the usual supplies. The rest room was round the back of the building and we had to get a key from the cashier before we could use it.

We sent my mother in, seeing as she had come out of the encounter relatively unscathed and had the least amount of blood on her. She returned with a rusty key on one end of a piece of weighted chain, just in case any of us took a fancy to it.

There was only one—unisex—rest room, which my mother took one look at and declined to use, regardless of need. It was lined largely with scuffed stainless-steel panels held together with antitamper fastenings. The cracked sink was minus a plug, but at least there was soap in the dispenser and the water was hot.

My father’s nose wrinkled, but he rolled up his sleeves and got on with it. He’d even fetched a nail brush from his overnight bag. I wadded paper towels into the bottom of the sink and kept one hand on the top of the push- down tap to fill the bowl with water.

He washed his hands with technique born of long practice, thoroughly cleaning each area of skin, including the backs and round the base of his thumbs. It was so obviously methodical that you knew he would be able to get them spotless even in the dark.

I leaned on the cracked tiles under the long slot of a window and watched him scrub at the blood I’d caused to flow. I saw again the way Vondie and Don Kaminski had got out of the Chevy, the guns in their hands, the clear intent. It was as if I needed the reassurance that it had been a necessary shot, a good clean kill. Kaminski might yet not die but, if he did, I supposed I could live with the consequences.

The adrenaline had left my hands unsteady, and increased the ache in my thigh until it was a fierce burn that I longed to alleviate with Vicodin. I was thankful we’d had a chance to grab our luggage before we’d fled the scene and I was mentally sorting through my bag, trying to remember exactly where I’d left my painkillers, in order to make their retrieval when we went back outside as unobtrusive as possible.

“Does it make you feel differently about him?” my father asked suddenly.

I’d been thinking about Kaminski and my brain immediately turned back in that direction. I blinked. “Does what make me feel differently about whom?”

My father sighed, as though I was being deliberately difficult. “Sean,” he said, all but curling his lip at being forced to say the name. “The fact that he ran, back there, and left you and your mother to be slaughtered.”

I stared at him. He met my eyes for a moment as he emptied out the dirty water and filled the bowl again to repeat the process.

“What do you mean, ‘he ran’? Of course he did—I told him to,” I said, a little blankly. “You should be bloody glad that he ran! If he hadn’t, it might have been you who was shot.”

“He left you both to die, Charlotte,” my father said. “Are you so blinded by the man that you can’t accept the unequivocal facts of the situation?”

“I’m not blind to Sean’s faults,” I said. “But I’m damned if I’m going to let you call him a coward when he’s not.” I elbowed off the wall, stalked towards him. “We told you the ground rules back in New York. Did you think we didn’t mean any of it? What you think you saw back there, that wasn’t what happened, and until you have a better understanding of what we do, I’d thank you to keep your half-baked bloody opinions to yourself, okay?” I threw him a contemptuous glance. “I’ll wait outside.”

I turned and went for the door, suddenly needing to get out of the same room before I did something both of us would regret. Damn the man to hell!

“Charlotte—”

I turned back, fully prepared to give him both barrels, but he’d stopped his scrubbing and was standing there, head down and shoulders bowed, gripping the edge of the sink with both hands, as if holding on for dear life.

Then I saw his head come up with that arrogant tilt I knew so well, and the moment of apparent vulnerability passed like it had never been.

“You’re right. I don’t understand,” he said, stony. “I saw a man who professes to love you turn his back and run in the middle of a gun battle, leaving you in danger. So … explain it to me. What exactly did I fail to see?”

I let go of the door handle and took a breath. When I let it out my voice was calmer. “We were under attack. One principal outside the vehicle, one trapped inside,” I said in a clipped tone that, ironically, must have made me sound very much my father’s daughter. I cast my eyes up and down him.

“You must outweigh my mother by—what, forty or fifty pounds? Sean outweighs me by sixty. Purely from a logistical point of view, it made no sense whatsoever for me to try and get you to cover, and leave my mother to Sean. If you’d been injured, I would have carried you, make no mistake, but I knew he could do it so much more easily. And that would make him more efficient. Better at his job.”

“But—”

“But what?” I demanded, not letting him cut me off. “All I had to worry about was getting my mother out. I didn’t have to worry about you, because I knew Sean would keep you safe—would die to protect you, if he had to. I knew exactly how he was going to react because he’s always the absolute professional and that makes him utterly dependable when the chips are down.”

I stalked forwards, got right in his face and took mean satisfaction in the way he flinched back. “If he’d come back for me, there was a chance he might have just got in my way, cluttered my backgrounds when I was taking a shot. As it was, I knew Sean had my back, but not at the expense of yours.”

I paused, took a breath that went in fine but came out less steady than I would have liked. “If things had been reversed, if it had been you stuck in that car, and we’d got my mother out, I would have taken her and run, just the same,” I went on. “And, if I had, would you now be accusing me of cowardice?”

“No,” he said, low. “Of course not.”

“Well, halle-bloody-lujah,” I threw back at him. “Are you really so blinded against Sean you can’t see anything good in him?”

My father paused, brow creased in concentration. “I’m never going to be able to think of it as normal behavior,” he said at last, slowly, “that he’s prepared to kill or die for a stranger.”