Out in the living area, I looked around but didn’t immediately see Matt or call out to him. Hell, he was probably jet-lagged to all hell and back and sleeping himself. It was only when I was almost in the kitchen area that I glanced across and spotted him sprawled on the floor between the sofa and the coffee table. Not where anyone would have chosen for a nap.
“Matt?” I said, alarmed. I hurried-as much as I could hurry-across and eased myself down onto the floor alongside him, ungainly. “Matt! Are you OK?”
He had a trickle of blood running down behind his left ear from a small wound at the back of his head. I pressed two fingers into the hollow beneath his ear and felt what seemed to be a strong pulse. I hadn’t heard anything, but I remembered the silenced Berettas that the men had used when they’d broken into the Lucases’ house. When I parted Matt’s bloodied hair and realized there was no bullet hole hiding underneath it, the relief was great.
But not that great. Assuming Matt hadn’t fainted and hit his head on the coffee table on the way down, that still meant…
I caught a soft noise from behind me and started to twist instinctively The pain brought me up short before I’d turned halfway
“Not so good at looking after people, are you, Charlie?” said a voice, soft and familiar. I turned just my head, although I hardly needed to in order to recognize him. The guy I’d dubbed Aquarium man was standing behind the sofa with his arms folded. He was smiling.
“I can’t tell you,” he said, “how much I’ve been looking forward to meeting you again.”
Eighteen
Mr. Reynolds,” I said flatly. “The pleasure is all yours, I assure you.” As snappy comebacks went, I didn’t think it was too bad. Not exactly James Bond, but the best I could manage under the circumstances.
“Oh-ho,” he murmured at my use of his name. “We have been doing our homework, haven’t we?” He came round the sofa, moving easily, in no hurry. I considered rising but knew I couldn’t do it in time, never mind in style.
Reynolds stopped, too close to me. I had to tilt my head back to look at him. He was dressed in jeans and tan boots and a high-tech designer fleece jacket over a T-shirt. “I’ve been doing my homework, too. You’ve got quite a reputation, Charlie.” He smiled. “From what I saw of you in action the other night, you might even have lived up to it-once.”
He was on my left, which I tried to tell myself was good. My left arm had maintained more or less its full strength. His groin was well within striking distance. I was just going to have to be smooth in the delivery-otherwise the resultant shock of the blow was going to do me as much damage as it would him….
And, just as I was contemplating making the first move, Reynolds lifted his foot and, almost casual, nudged my left leg with his boot.
At least, to him it must have seemed no more than a nudge. To me he’d just inserted a molten bayonet into my thigh and twisted it. Blind, I grabbed my leg with both hands, gripping hard as though pressure alone would cut off the nerve impulses that were currently screaming a rampant distress call along my neural pathways. I bit back a cry, knowing that was what he wanted above all, and sat there, panting until the worst of the crisis was over.
Reynolds had moved back a little way, more than an arm’s length, and squatted down on his haunches so he could better study my reaction.
“Through-and-throughs are a doozy, aren’t they?” he said, conversational.
“Remind me to make sure you can speak from personal experience some time soon,” I said, keeping my teeth clenched.
“Well, you see, Charlie, for that you’d need a gun, which I happen to know you don’t have,” Reynolds said, still cheerful. ‘And, unfortunately for you,/do.”
He reached under his jacket and pulled out a semiautomatic from a shoulder rig. Another Beretta M9, minus the suppressor this time. A replacement for the one I’d taken away from him at the Lucases’ house — and which Vaughan’s men had then taken away from me. Or the same gun?
He was carrying the Beretta cocked and locked, first round out of the magazine and in the chamber, hammer back, safety on. Now, he thumbed the safety off and smiled at me.
The action crinkled the skin around his eyes, which were very cold and very blue. A handsome face. One that lent itself easily to charm. Si-mone had certainly been taken in by it, had not seen past the attractive collection of features to what lay beneath.
“So tell me, were you planning on snatching Simone before we left Boston?” I asked. Anything to distract him.
“That would have been the easiest solution,” Reynolds agreed. “I would have gotten her at the Aquarium if you’d been thirty seconds slower.”
“What?” I said. “You think she would have walked out of there with you and left her daughter behind willingly?”
“Willing or not, she would have walked out of there with me,” he said, supremely confident. “Make no mistake about that.”
‘And that would have achieved what, exactly?” I said.
He laughed and shook his head. “No, no, Charlie,” he said, wagging a disapproving finger. “This is not one of those corny old movies where I tell you my whole evil plan and then let you escape moments from death. Let’s face facts — if I wanted you dead, lady, you’d be dead already”
I glanced at Matt, still lying still as a corpse on the floor next to me. I took reassurance from the fact that I’d verified his pulse myself, and that the wound to his head was still bleeding. Just a trickle, but at least that meant his heart was still pumping blood round his system.
“So why are you here?”
“To pass on a message,” he said. “A warning, if you like.”
“Which is?”
“Go home,” Reynolds said. “Simple enough, isn’t it? You and the rest of your crew just pack up and go home. No harm, no foul.”
The same message Vaughan had tried to deliver, right before Simone was killed. But I’d told him we were going. Wasn’t that enough?
“Or … what?”
He laughed. “Quite apart from the obvious threat, here and now, you mean?” he said. “Well, just remember that Ella’s a sweet kid. How old is she now-four? You leave, today, and maybe she’ll get to be five.”
The fear was a sudden starburst rising from my belly, bunched up tight under my ribs, a bright, leaking coldness that froze my heart to the inside of my chest. A cold flame ignited at the base of my right lung.
“That’s it?” I said.
He considered for a moment. “Yup, that’s it,” he said. “That’s the message, from my boss to yours, in full.”
“So you’re nothing more than the messenger boy, is that it?”
He smiled again, almost a grin this time. “Well, it was left to my own judgment how best to deliver the message-how to give it maximum impact, you might say”
He stretched out the Beretta and touched the barrel of the gun to my left leg. It was barely a brush against the fabric of my sweatpants, but I couldn’t control a flinch that had nothing to do with the physical contact.
Almost lazily, like a caress, Reynolds used the gun to trace the indentation where the bullet had exited at the front of my thigh. I compelled myself to sit motionless, to show no response.
“I wonder what will happen,” he said softly, “if I put another round through your leg in just the same place as the last. Will it hurt more or less than the first time?”
“Your message wouldn’t get delivered,” I said with a calm that came from somewhere else, somewhere outside of me.
“No?” He raised an eyebrow.
“No,” I said, firm but matter-of-fact. “Last time, I was lucky. A millimeter or two either way and you’ll hit an artery and I’ll bleed out before the others get back.” The tightness in my chest was making it difficult to get a whole sentence out in one breath. “And if that happens, Sean Meyer will find you and kill you, if he has to go to the ends of the earth to do it.” The utter conviction in my voice didn’t have to be forced.