Third Strike

I followed him, unzipping my jacket. “It’s a brothel, Sean,” I said. “And you knew that as soon as I told you where I was, didn’t you?”

He’d already started across the road. I fell into step just quickly enough to catch the way the corner of his mouth quirked upwards, little more than a flicker. “I had a pretty good idea.”

“So why didn’t you say anything?”

He sighed, and the flicker became impatience. “What would that have achieved, Charlie? Your father’s the most priggish, moral bastard I’ve ever come across. You said he didn’t go entirely willingly. You’re a bright girl. You put it together.”

“They left him here,” I murmured, feeling my eyes start to hollow out and burn. “He didn’t want to come, but now he’s stayed. He would only have done that if they’d … forced him.”

I shouldn’t have left him in there. I shouldn’t have let them put him into that damned car in the first place. At the time, part of me had been still too angry with him to care. And now …

“Not necessarily,” Sean said. He glimpsed my face and stopped, half turned towards me. “You know the real reason I’m here?”

I shook my head.

“The real reason,” he said, “is how could I live with myself if I missed out on a chance to catch the great Richard Foxcroft with his pants down?”

I threw him a disgusted look and stalked on. We turned into the gloom of the alley together, stepped apart and slowed slightly, wary. At the far end, past the Dumpster, I caught fast glimpses of passing cars, their paintwork glinting in the sunshine. Bright colors, movement. The alley felt stagnant by comparison, hushed and lonely as the grave.

We both did a casual sweep as we walked into that place, watching for watchers, even overhead. Either there weren’t any, or they were better at concealment than we were at spotting them. Sean paused and reached inside his jacket. When his hand came out, it was holding a cheap Kel-Tec P-11 semiautomatic. He passed it over to me.

I turned the unfamiliar handgun over in my hands. It was old but serviced, the action well oiled when I worked it. The magazine was fully topped off with hollow-point nines.

“What’s this?”

“Unregistered,” he said, succinct. “So I’d leave your gloves on if I were you.”

“Jesus, Sean! If I get caught with this—”

He flipped his jacket back to reveal what looked like a matching piece sitting just behind his right hip. The thought that he’d risked carrying two illegal guns through the middle of the city brought me out in a cold sweat. They’d throw away the key.

“Face it, Charlie,” he said, “if we get caught in a brothel, we’re probably screwed anyway. Just remember the trigger’s going to be a lot stiffer than your SIG, so watch you don’t pull your first shot.”

“I have fired one of these before, Sean.”

He flashed me a fleeting smile. “Yeah, sorry.”

He didn’t need to ask which door my father had been taken through. There was a line of them, peeling and dirty, but only one had a clear path to the base of it to give away its regular use. The door was steel plate, if I was any judge, with a facesize inset panel at head height.

“I think I’m better suited for this, don’t you?” he murmured.

Without argument, I backed round to the side of the Dumpster, out of sight of the doorway but only a couple of meters away. I held the gun down flat alongside my leg, where its outline wasn’t obvious from the street, my trigger finger alongside the guard.

In the four or five paces it took Sean to reach the door, his whole demeanor changed. Suddenly, his shoulders had more of a bow to them and he’d added a slight shuffle to his gait. He was a big guy who usually moved with lightness and a lethal dexterity but now, with his collar and tie sloppily loosened, he just looked clumsy.

If Parker could see him now, he would have bitten off Bill’s other arm rather than offer Sean a partnership. Mind you, if he really could see us now, we’d probably both get the sack.

Sean reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a sizable wedge of folded bills. He retrieved the Wayfarers, popped the lenses out carefully into a handkerchief and tucked it away, and slid the empty frames on. Not perfect, but convincing enough for now. The whole effect was the kind of tedious office nerd you’d run from the water cooler to avoid. He turned, saw my expression, and winked.

Then he banged on the steel and, after a long pause, I heard the grate of the panel sliding back.

“Yeah?” A man’s voice, deep and rough, managing to inject a wealth of hostile suspicion into that single grunted syllable.

“Oh, er, yeah, hi,” Sean said, his accent perfect New York yuppie. He’d allowed the glasses to slip down his nose a little and now he carefully used the hand that clutched the money to push them back up, like he was nervous. It was a beautifully weighted gesture that couldn’t have failed to suck the man’s attention to the folded bills.

“I was told I could, er, maybe meet someone here,” Sean went on. He coughed, then turned it into an uncomfortable laugh as the man behind the door didn’t immediately respond. “Er, have I got the wrong place? Only I—”

“Who sentcha’?” the doorman demanded.

“Oh, er, well, I don’t know him that good. Guy called Harry. At the office.” Sean waved the money again, jerking his thumb vaguely over his shoulder to indicate anywhere from Wall Street to Honolulu. “Well, he doesn’t actually work with me, y’know? Ha-ha. No, comes in all the time, though. Deliveries. Harry said this was the place.” He leaned closer, lowered his voice and wiped a leer across it. “Said the girls here were, uh, y’know, kinda broad-minded.”

There was another long pause, then the panel slammed shut. For a moment I thought his performance— authentically sleazy though it was—hadn’t done the trick. Then we heard the bolts slide back.

Immediately, I came out from round the Dumpster bringing the Kel-Tec up in my right hand, steadied with my left. The money was gone and Sean’s own gun was out though I hadn’t seen him reach for it. As soon as the door began to open and we could tell there wasn’t a secondary security chain, we both hit it. Hard. I was glad of the protective padding in the shoulder of my leather jacket.

I felt the hefty steel door kick as it connected with a body. One jolt as he rebounded backwards, then another as he cannoned off an inside wall and came crashing back for a rematch. The door won both rounds.

We charged through the gap to find a Goliath of a man struggling groggily to rise but his legs were trapped behind the vee of the open door. He wasn’t tall so much as enormously wide, with a stained T-shirt stretched to the limit of the fabric’s elasticity around his bulging gut. His physique might have been useful when he was upright, but floundering on the ground he was in serious danger of Greenpeace activists trying to roll him back into the sea.

Nevertheless, he made a reflexive grab for us. It was a valiant attempt but his coordination was gone. The best he could manage was to claw sluggishly at empty air as we passed. Sean merely swapped the gun into his left hand and, with almost casual violence, hammered the side of his fist into the man’s exposed temple. The smack Goliath’s skull made as it bounced off the brickwork behind him made me wince. When he went down for the second time, he was out cold.

We paused, tense, but nobody seemed to have overheard the doorman’s rapid defeat. Nobody who cared enough to come and see, anyway.

I straightened slowly as Sean stepped back over the unconscious man and shoved the steel outer door closed again.

“Harry?” I said, keeping my voice no louder than a whisper. “Who the hell’s Harry?”

He shrugged. “Oh, there’s always a Harry.”

Inside, the small bare entrance hall was only marginally less seedy than the exterior of the building had suggested. The doorman had a little recess at one side, with a folding card table and a chair with the stuffing leaking from the seat. The table contained a selection of dead beer bottles, some crumpled White Castle burger wrappings covered in ketchup, and a tiny portable TV tuned to one of the sports channels. It told me all I needed to know about Goliath’s lifestyle and expectations.