Second Shot

Matt was an awful driver, slow and jerky even with the Range Rover’s automatic transmission and cushioned ride. He had no idea how to judge the width of the vehicle or place it on the road, and he wandered alarmingly

Eventually, Rosalind jammed the silenced end of the Beretta against the base of his skull and growled at him to quit messing around. I thought Matt was going to burst into tears again at any moment.

“Ease up on him,” I snapped over my shoulder. “He’s never driven on the wrong side of the road before.”

“And if he carries on like this,” Rosalind said grimly, “he never will again.”

The snow had stopped coming down now and already people with pickup trucks that had snowplows attached to the front of them were out clearing the streets. There was a quiet efficiency to it all, a kind of small-town neighborliness that was totally at odds with the woman in the backseat. I wondered when her determination to succeed with her father’s business had passed over into the kind of obsession that meant she was willing to shoot someone in the back and use a four-year-old child as a pawn in the game.

We didn’t talk again until Rosalind instructed Matt to turn off the main road into the parking area for the surplus store. It was well past closing time, but there were still lights on inside the building, although there were no tire tracks in the fresh coating of snow in front of it. Matt nosed the Range Rover gingerly into a space at the side and braked to a halt.

“What now?” he said, swallowing. “Where’s Ella?”

“She’s inside-being well looked after, don’t you worry about that,” Rosalind said, and something about the way she said it made my skin shimmy over my bones.

Reynolds. The images of what he might be doing to Ella twisted and writhed and shrieked through my subconscious.

I heard the muted bleep of a mobile phone dialing and knew without turning round that Rosalind was calling Vaughan again. She’d said she’d give him an hour to make his decision and that time was gone. It was so quiet inside the car I could hear the sound of the phone ringing out at the other end of the line.

“Felix?… It’s me again,” Rosalind said, and her voice had a rich quality to it, gloating, riding a crest of self-confidence. She chuckled. “Oh, I’m sorry-are you entertaining guests? I kinda thought you might be, by now.”

I was aware of a leaden weight in my chest. Until then I’d clung to a slight conceited notion that Sean and Neagley and Lucas might somehow have avoided the trap Rosalind had engineered at Vaughan’s place out near Bretton Woods. I’d become so used to Sean’s abilities that I’d expected too much this time. They’d thought they were going in under cover of stealth and surprise, only to find they were thoroughly expected. Even so, I’d held out an unrelenting sliver of hope that Sean had side stepped the trap and prevailed.

I heard Vaughan’s muttered response, not clearly enough to discern the words, but I picked up a vibration in them nevertheless. I heard the quick hiss of Rosalind’s indrawn breath, and when she spoke again her voice was harder and flatter than it had been before. “What do you mean, you’ve been having a nice little chat with them?” she demanded. “Felix, you can’t possibly listen to-” And she was cut off abruptly as Felix Vaughan clearly told her what he thought of being given orders.

Matt kept his eyes fixed on the front windscreen, shoulders hunched and hands on the wheel, like he was still driving. I risked a glance back and found Rosalind sitting stiffly upright, her whole body practically trembling with rage.

“You’ll regret this, Felix,” she snapped. “Greg won’t be around much longer anyway-did they tell you that? You think you’re showing solidarity with your old comrade in arms and he wasn’t even a soldier, just some goddamn salesman!”

My eyes dropped surreptitiously to the Beretta in her right hand, but she caught the gesture and brought the gun up, glaring at me. She looked agitated enough to shoot me out of sheer temper, just to let off steam. I quickly faced forwards again.

“Well, you can pass on a message to that worthless no-account husband of mine,” she said now, low and bitter. “You tell him he’s going home to England after all these years and he’s going to jail for what he did, and his precious little granddaughter’s going home with him-in a box.”

She ended the call and sat for a moment, fighting for calm, breathing hard. I heard the hitch in it and realized that she was crying. Beside me, Matt’s shoulders had begun to quiver.

“She’s only four,” he said brokenly. “For God’s sake show some compassion. …”

“Oh, spare me the woe-is-me crap,” Rosalind told him, harsh. “If you want to feel sorry for anyone, feel it for yourselves. I don’t know what kind of a deal your boyfriend worked out with Felix, Charlie, but he’s just ensured that the pair of you won’t last the night.”

“You were planning on having Reynolds kill us anyway,” I pointed out.