First Drop

Seven

I managed to get us forty miles away from the scene of the shoot-out, across two county lines and almost into West Palm Beach, before I had to stop.

There was a wooden shack by the side of the road, with a faded sign by the side of it to tempt passers by with the offer of homegrown citrus fruit for sale. The shack looked as though it hadn’t had anything fresh inside it for years. A thick coating of weed was the only thing holding the rotting timbers upright. I slowed and rode carefully in through the open doorway, paddling the Kawasaki round with both feet down, clumsy.

As I pulled the clutch in and we finally came to a halt, I muttered over my shoulder to Trey, “OK, now I’m going to hurl.”

He almost tripped in his effort to be off the bike faster than me. I staggered to the doorway and stood bent over with my hands braced on my knees. There was a roaring growing louder in my ears like I was standing in the shallows waiting for the surf to wash over me. I didn’t have to wait long.

The teriyaki beef jerky tasted no better on the way up than it had done on the way down.

Trey stood by the bike inside the shack, watching me throw up with irritating intensity. I could feel his distaste, but sensed it wasn’t so much at the fact that I was vomiting, as at my need to do so. He despised my weakness without sympathy. I wasn’t so keen on it myself.

When I was finally on empty I came upright slowly, buffeted by dizziness and fresh nausea. Considering I was relatively uninjured I felt like hell. My eyes were gritty from squinting unprotected into the hot wind that had blasted up over the bike’s fairing. I seemed to have been hit in the face by every living species of insect in Florida. It reminded me why I never even rode with my visor open at home, never mind with no helmet at all.

I put a hand up to wipe the bug splats off my face. I swear my nose was at least twice its normal size. I prodded gently at the bridge with my fingers but I didn’t think it was broken.

The moonlight was clear and startling by the doorway and it seeped inside the shack. I noticed for the first time that Trey had acquired a small cut over his eyebrow when the airbag had gone off in his face. A little blood had trickled down past the side of his eye. Apart from that he looked OK. More or less. He was staying further back in the gloom and it was difficult to tell.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Yeah, ‘course,” he said, with a defiant edge to him. Reminding him at this point of his tears and listless shock as we’d run from the cops would not, I thought, be a way to gain his friendship and trust. I let it ride. Besides, I soon found out that he had other things on his mind.

“Was that—?” he broke off, took a breath and tried again, his voice detached. “Was that the first time you’ve like, y’know, killed someone?”

Again, I was tempted to lie. Again I didn’t see the point. “No.” I said.

Trey gulped. “Did it . . . did you throw up then, too? Afterwards, I mean.”

I cocked my head, as though giving the question serious thought. “Probably. I don’t remember.” I said, trying to be truthful. “I didn’t exactly come out of it in the best of health myself and the paramedics were giving me a lot of painkillers. Things were a little hazy.”

I didn’t explain any further than that, but Trey nodded seriously, as though what I’d just told him made perfect sense. “Can I see it – the gun?”

I eyed him doubtfully. There was a kind of fearful eagerness about him now. He’d got over the shock of watching me shoot the men in the Buick and all the ghoulishness of your average schoolboy had returned. Nevertheless, there was no good reason to refuse him.

I sighed and pulled the SIG out of my belt again. He moved forwards, his gaze locked on the gun. I deliberately dropped the magazine out and removed the chambered round before I handed it over to him. His contained excitement outweighed the offence he took at having his judgement so obviously mistrusted.

“Awesome,” he said. Even knowing the gun was unloaded, he handled it with exaggerated care, surreptitiously reading the maker’s name off the side of the barrel, but not wanting to let me see him do it in order to recognise what it was. “SIG Sauer, huh? Where d’ya get it?”

“From the house,” I said. “It’s Sean’s.” I couldn’t quite bring myself to talk about him in the past tense. Not yet.

“Where d’you learn to shoot like that?” His stance had altered, I noted. He was holding the SIG in a showy double-handed grip now, posing almost, with both elbows bent sharply in best movie tough-guy tradition. So the camera can pan in good and tight on the hero’s face and still get the gun in the same shot.

“In the army,” I said, short.

“Yeah? Why’d you leave?”

“I had my reasons,” I said. I could have added a whole lot more to that, as well. The Special Forces course I’d been on when I’d been unceremoniously chucked out had taught me an awful lot more about firearms than basic training had ever done, but he didn’t need to know that.

I busied my hands feeding the loose round back into the magazine. I had just four left. I tried not to dwell on what I’d done with the other four.

My job?

Or murder?

No, far better to concentrate on what I had left.

“Will you show me how to shoot?” Trey asked, trying out the feel of the SIG one-handed, with his arm outstretched. It was heavier than he’d expected. His narrow muscles began to shiver with the effort of keeping it up there.

“Yeah, sure,” I snapped, my nerves edged into sarcasm. “Let’s go and buy you a .357 Magnum and then we’ll go out robbing banks together.”

Trey stared at me blankly for a moment and I remembered all of a sudden that irony was a concept lost on him.

I sighed. “No,” I said, holding my hand out.

He scowled, hesitating for a moment before he surrendered the gun, slapping it down onto my palm. I slipped the magazine back into the pistol grip and tucked the whole thing back into my belt, watching him all the while. My patience was starting to wear so thin that keeping a check on it was giving me a bad head.

“What makes you so damned important, Trey, that four people have died today because of you?” I demanded. It was more like an accusation. I was feeling like shit and he was the nearest person I could take it out on.

The body count could be more than that by now I realised as I spoke. The woman at the amusement park for one.

“I dunno,” he muttered.

I rubbed my eyes, which had the effect of sandpapering my retinas a little flatter. “Why the hell has Keith done a runner? What’s he up to?”

“I dunno!” Trey said, more emphatic this time. He let his head droop and was back to mumbling again. “Maybe it’s like, y’know, connected somehow with the work he does for the government.”

That brought my head up. “What kind of work?”

He shrugged. “It’s classified,” he said, snotty with it, like he’d always wanted to say that line.

I tried for a sigh, but my breath came out too fast to qualify, so it ended up more as a hiss. “Trey,” I said carefully, “it may have escaped your notice, but I’ve just had to kill a man to protect you and right now I don’t feel too good about that. So tell me what you know.”

He would only look at me for a half-second at a time. The rest of the time his eyes swivelled away into all the far corners of the shack. “I don’t know what kind of work he was doing,” he admitted at last, sulky. “You think he used to tell me stuff like that?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

I fell silent for a moment, trying to assimilate these new disclosures into the incomplete jigsaw of what I already knew. Keith Pelzner working for the government. If anything, it made the presence of the two armed men in the Buick more sinister, not less.

I recalled again the way they’d gunned down the young cop, their casual ruthlessness. It had not, I recognised, been their first time out. And suddenly they’d moved up from simple outlaws into something so much more. Now there was the possibility that they might be backed by limitless authority.

And I’d just shot one of them dead.

My anger slumped into weary resentment, sending a more up-tempo beat surging outwards across my temples. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this earlier?” I said quietly.

“Why?” he lashed out. “What difference would it have made?”

I opened my mouth, preparing to launch in, then thought better of it. “Probably none,” I allowed weakly. “But I’m trying to work out who’s out to get you and right now it seems to be just about everybody – the cops, your dad, Gerri Raybourn and Jim Whitmarsh – you name it. And exactly who those two guys in the Buick were, I’ve no idea.” I shrugged, letting my hands fall back against my sides. “Sean’s missing. He could be dead,” I went on, my voice flat now. “I’m running out of ideas.”

Something of Trey’s own resentment seemed to leave him at my admission. Maybe it was the first time an adult had consulted him for his opinion. He was silent while he thought about it.

“We could go to Daytona,” he said, almost diffident, the way kids are when they’re asking for something that’s desperately important to them and trying to make it look like they don’t really care.

“Why? What makes Daytona safer than here?”

He stuffed his hands into his pockets. “I got friends there,” he said. “We can go hang with them – hide out if we need to.”

“Are you sure we can rely on them? No, think about it,” I said when he started to make an automatic response. “After tonight there are going to be a lot of people looking for us.”

“Trust me.” He smiled, an abrupt cocky grin that showed off all the metalwork behind his lips.

It wasn’t reassuring. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more heading up to Daytona Beach seemed like a bad idea but I was damned if I could come up with a better suggestion.

I swung my leg back over the Kawasaki and jerked my head for him to climb on the back.

“OK,” I said heavily. “Daytona it is.”

***

We stayed on A1A, travelling steadily northwards and trying to stay inconspicuous. By the time we were passing through Indian River Shores the Kawasaki’s fuel gauge was showing we were running on fumes. Not knowing the bike, I wasn’t sure how accurately it read and the last thing we could afford to do was run out by the side of the road. I pulled into the first quiet-looking filling station we came across.

There was a sign on the pump that told customers they had to prepay after dark. I thought the fuel prices were high until I realised they were per gallon, not per litre. I sent Trey in with a more than adequate twenty dollar note while I broke the lock on the filler cap with my knife, making as little fuss about it as I could. The tank seemed to take a long time to fill and I stood with my back to the CCTV cameras, trying not to look furtive whenever a car drove past on the highway.

According to the window posters, the filling station also sold coffee and hot dogs. The slightly burnt greasy smell of them permeated out into the warm night air. I knew I ought to put something in my empty stomach but the thought of doing so brought on a rising queasiness I struggled to suppress. The snacks we’d brought with us when we came away from the motel, I remembered, had been abandoned in the Mercury.

A sudden thought had me checking my pockets, then cursing. The food wasn’t the only thing that had been left behind at the crash site.

The mobile phone had gone, too.

The feeling of having just severed my last lifeline to the outside world was a strong one. It wasn’t a mistake I wanted to boast about to the kid.

I hung the nozzle back into the pump and flipped the filler cap closed. I’d already climbed back onto the bike by the time Trey reappeared from paying for the fuel. He didn’t offer to hand over any change and it seemed petty to push for it.

He was looking wired. “Hey, there was a TV on in there,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “We made the news!”

“Jesus! What did it say?” The speed with which the story had got out surprised me, but I suppose the murder of a cop in the line of duty is always going to be an emotive subject. “Did they mention us by name?”

Trey scratched at his armpit, frowning as he was overtaken by a sudden worry. “Nah. It just said there was a double homicide at a motel and that a cop was gunned down by the side of the highway.”

As I restarted the Kwak’s motor he hopped onto the pillion seat, grabbing on round my waist. He leaned forwards. “That means they know it was Mr Whitmarsh and Chris, yeah?” he said in my ear, and there was a painfully hopeful note in his voice. “That means we’re, like, in the clear, right?”

Now would have been a good time to stop being so truthful with the kid, I recognised, but it seemed a shame to break the habit.

“No, sorry,” I said, grim. “It means now we’re in the shit twice as deep . . .”

***

It was late in the evening by the time we arrived in Daytona Beach. The whole place was bright and brash and lit up with neon like Blackpool sea front on steroids. Lots of steroids.

We crossed over the inland waterway and came in on South Atlantic Avenue, past block after block of high-rise luxury flats that were perched on the narrow ribbon of land between the road and the beach. The motels and hotels lined both sides, mostly with signs out welcoming the Spring Breakers. The bars and surf shops all seemed to still be open, bright and brash and loud. They were doing a roaring trade if the number of teenagers thronging the pavements was anything to go by.

I stopped before we got too far into the thick of things. The sight of numerous police cruisers pulling teenage drivers over in the centre turning lane for traffic and drink driving offences was enough to make me want to get us and our stolen motorbike off the road, and fast.

I turned into the first reasonable-looking motel that had a vacancies sign lit up and tucked the Kawasaki away behind a massive pickup truck.

“I’ll stay with the bike,” Trey offered as I cut the engine and we climbed off.

I nodded and walked into the reception. There were a crowd already in there, including a family of harassed and sunburned Brits who were complaining about the noise.

“I’m real sorry, sir,” the thin youth behind the desk was saying, “but you have to understand that this is Spring Break.”

The man kept grumbling until the duty manageress was wheeled out to discount his bill. He accepted the reduction with poor grace and stalked out, his crotchety-looking wife and family trailing after him. His plastic sandals squeaked annoyingly on the tiled floor as he went. As they passed me I noticed that the backs of their collective necks were scorched to the colour of a red brick house.

A group of American teens were next in line, all good tans and gum and braces. I busied myself leafing through a rack of local attractions by the main desk, mainly so I could avoid eye contact with people. I didn’t want to stick in their memory if I could help it.

I quietly checked out my reflection in the mirrored glass panel behind the reception desk, but to my surprise I didn’t show any signs of having just lived through a car crash and a bloody shoot-out. My nose looked a little puffy, sure, but if you didn’t know what it looked like normally, you wouldn’t notice. And the reddened patches on my face from the airbag would pass for too much exposure to the Florida sun.

It was at this point I noticed the sign on the corner of the desk. The one that said, ‘It is the policy of the management to request valid ID with check-in during Spring Break weekend. Thank you for your cooperation.’

I thought about that one for a moment, then turned and headed for the door.

“Excuse me, ma’am, can I help you?”

I half-turned, smiled and waved the leaflet for the Daytona Motor Speedway that I was still clutching. “No thanks,” I said, smiling. “Just wanted one of these.”

Trey was leaning nonchalantly on the Kawasaki when I got back outside. Too nonchalantly. I wondered briefly what he’d been up to while I’d been gone.

“They have a room?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t get that far,” I said. “They’ve a sign up asking for ID and in view of the fact that I showed my driver’s licence when we checked into the motel in Fort Lauderdale, I didn’t think that was a good idea.”

Trey didn’t have to ask me to explain my reasoning. OK, so we were in a different county and I had it in my head that the US police were a lot more territorial than back at home. Even so, when the murder of one of their own was concerned, I’d bet they wouldn’t have much trouble getting assistance from other departments.

Besides, the cop who’d stopped us had known we were the ones he was after. That much was obvious as soon as he’d got out of his car. They must have discovered we’d disappeared from the motel after the shooting and decided that running away from a crime scene made us instant suspects. What had happened afterwards would have put us right at the top of the list.

Either that or the young cop was in league with Oakley man and had simply wanted us dead. In which case, whose side were the men in the Buick on?

I shook my head, setting the fading headache off again. I was too tired to think straight tonight.

There were a couple of pay phones on the wall outside the reception door. I looked at Trey and nodded towards them. “Any chance you can get in touch with your mates tonight and see if we can cadge a bed from them?”

“I called already but they weren’t home,” he said. “I left a message that we’d meet up tomorrow, down at the Ocean Center.”

“What’s going on there?”

“It’s the Spring Break Nationals,” he said, as though I should know straight away what he was on about. “It’s, like, y’know, the biggest car audio competition in Florida. In the whole of the States, probably. It’s just awesome.”

A car audio competition. Only in America, I thought. As if to prove the point a car went past us with its stereo system cranked so high the spot welds holding the roof panel together were buzzing loose. All four windows were down but I still couldn’t name that tune.

“I can’t wait,” I muttered. “So, what do we do tonight?”

Trey shrugged. “This is Spring Break,” he said. “We do what everyone else does if they can’t get a room – we sleep on the beach.”