Second Shot

This time, though, there was a man walking along one of the pathways towards us. A big guy in a tweed flat hat and a three-quarter-length tweed coat, unbuttoned. It was too cold to be wearing a coat that way and I didn’t like the way his eyes never shifted away from Simone and Ella as he moved. Surely Tweed had seen a kid and her mother building a snowman before? I checked around me, looking for a second prong before I edged sideways so I was directly in his line of sight, blocking his view of my principals.

Not for the first time, I missed the weight of a 9mm SIG SAUER P226 on my hip. There were a lot of countries around the world where accredited UK bodyguards were allowed to carry a concealed weapon while they were on the job. The U.S., sadly, wasn’t one of them.

Tweed flicked his gaze onto me. Our eyes held for a second, and it was only then that I realized where I’d seen him before. It was the man from the Aquarium who’d lured Simone away from her daughter and me by the sea lion enclosure. A nice, normal guy, huh? I wheeled away and scooped up Ella, ignoring her wail of protest.

“We’re leaving,” I said sharply to Simone. She had just finished rolling a snowball the size of a watermelon for the snowman’s head and was halfway through lifting it onto the larger sphere of his body. She gave me a startled look but must have caught enough of what was in my face to quell any arguments she’d been about to make. She dropped the snowman’s head, which broke in two on the frozen earth. I thrust Ella into her arms and hurried the pair of them back towards Beacon Hill, which ran along the north side of the Common.

“What?” Simone demanded, breathless, as I hustled her along. “What is it?”

“Just keep moving,” I muttered, resisting the urge to glance round until we reached the edge of the park and scrambled up the steps by the Shaw Memorial. Tweed-Aquarium man-was still fifty meters behind us but closing in a leisurely kind of way Like he knew we didn’t have to hurry because he knew we had nowhere to go.

But luck was on our side for once. A lone cab was cruising towards us up the hill with its “for hire” light on. I stepped off the curb and stuck my arm out, abandoning my usual reluctance for transport I didn’t know. The driver swerved slightly towards me and pulled up right alongside, so all I had to do was lower my arm and my fingertips touched the rear handle. I yanked the door open and piled a baffled Simone and Ella inside, climbing in after them and slamming the door behind me.

I gave the driver the address of the hotel and he set off with commendable haste, setting up a wallow in the suspension like an ocean liner.

I looked back through the rear window as we made the first corner by the gold-domed State House building, to find Aquarium man standing by the curb, staring after us. I couldn’t see his face clearly, but it wasn’t difficult to read his body language, even at that distance, and I know anger when I see it.

It took Simone just about until we were back at Rowe’s Wharf before she’d got Ella quietened down enough to turn her attention to me. I greeted Simone’s shocked questions with a meaningful nod towards the back of the cabdriver’s head. For a moment Simone seemed set to protest, but then she looked away, concentrating on distracting Ella instead, and we didn’t speak at all until we were back at the hotel.

But as soon as we’d paid off the cab and headed for the hotel entrance, she grabbed my arm.

“What the hell was all that about, Charlie?” she demanded, keeping her voice low. I don’t know why. She was holding Ella balanced on her hip. The little girl was watching the pair of us intently and looked like she was picking up on every nuance.

“Remember the guy from the Aquarium?” I said. “Well he turned up again at the park, heading right for us. I don’t know if you believe in coincidence, Simone, but I — “

“The guy from the Aquarium,” she repeated flatly, and I didn’t like the dull flush that crept up her cheeks any more than I liked the glitter in her eyes. ‘And that’s what you were panicking about, was it?”

“I did not panic, Simone,” I said, struggling against a rising temper. “I got the pair of you away from what I considered was a possible source of danger. That’s my job.”

“I don’t suppose it occurred to you to tell me what you were up to before you hustled us away from there, huh?”

I stopped and turned round. We were halfway across the lobby, which was almost deserted. Just a gray-haired guy with a short beard talking to the concierge and a middle-aged couple sitting reading guidebooks at the far side. I moved in, getting right in Simone’s face and not caring about the way she flinched back from me.

“I can’t run this as a democracy,” I said through gritted teeth. “If I feel there’s a threat, I can’t stand around and ask your opinion on it. I have to use my judgment and act.”