First Drop

Nine

Walt led us into the house through the screen door where his wife had been uneasily observing our approach. She stepped back without speaking as we trooped into her kitchen, confining whatever doubts she may have had about Walt’s foolhardy actions to a single hurried look.

“Now, now, Harriet,” Walt said, catching it. He hooked the Panama onto a peg by the door and dumped the bag of shells on a worktop. Then he turned to face her, taking both her small hands gently in his, engulfing them completely. He was a good head taller than she was and he had to drop his chin to meet her eyes. “This young lady here’s from Manchester, where Grace went to school. How could I hear that and not invite them in for some good home cooking?”

She smiled indulgently at him, but didn’t look much reassured.

I moved forwards and put my hand out. “I’m Charlie and this is Trey. It’s very nice to meet you,” I said in my best well brought-up voice. “I’ve never been to America before and I’m overwhelmed by your husband’s generosity in inviting us into your home like this.”

Her shoulders relaxed a little. That was different, I saw. National pride was at stake. She disengaged herself from her husband and took the hand I’d offered. Her grip was firm rather than strong, the skin thin and soft.

“You’re very welcome,” she said. “I’ll get right on it. How d’you take your coffee?”

She poured us both a cup of the real stuff from a pot on the side. I added sugar to mine to try and stop my hands from shaking, aware that I hadn’t managed to keep anything down since that midday snack at the park yesterday. Besides, there’s only so much adrenaline your body can produce without giving it an outlet and mine was threatening to swamp me.

Trey and I hovered and drank our coffee while Harriet cooked and Walt fussed around, setting the table and generally getting in her way. They kept up a friendly banter between the two of them as they worked together. Trey watched, fascinated.

“OK, we’re nearly all set,” Walt announced, putting four glasses and a jug of iced water onto the large oval table near the kitchen window. “Either of you two kids need to use the bathroom before we eat?”

I glanced down at the dirty state of my hands and took him up on the offer. He pointed me in the right direction and left me to it, which was rather more trusting than I would have been, given the circumstances.

The back of the house, the one facing the water, was almost entirely open-plan, with just an island unit between the dining kitchen and the large living room, and a study area at the far side. Two ceiling-mounted fans lazily stirred the air in the living room.

Off that room were two hallways, one of which contained the bathroom and what looked like a couple of spare bedrooms. The bathroom was clean but shabby, the short little shallow bath marked by years of hard water.

As I scrubbed my hands I glanced at my reflection in the mirror above the sink. The side of my face still looked a little bright, but you might simply have taken that for overexposure to the sun. In fact, with my reddish-blonde colouring, if I didn’t take care when we were outside today it really would be sunburn.

I pulled back my perspective a moment and looked at my whole face, realising that the eyes staring steadily back at me showed no signs of guilt for what I’d done. I’d been hoping for some mark of inner torment, something to show that I was normal, that I was just like everyone else.

Not just a cold-blooded killer.

I looked away, turning to dry my hands on the towel hanging from the rail, then walked out of the bathroom taking care not to meet my eyes again.

When I got back to the kitchen I found Harriet serving up the promised blueberry pancakes. They looked more like thick Scotch pancakes than the familiar thin-style crêpes. She handed me a small jug of what appeared to be golden syrup, but turned out to be maple instead.

Walt and Trey were chatting about car stereos by the sound of it. The old man had a way of listening with his head on one side, like what you were saying was the most important thing he’d heard in ages.

It worked really well with Trey, who was sitting taller in his seat, puffed up with pride as he enthused to Walt about the big sound-off competition going on at the Ocean Center. Trey had already cut his pancakes into strips and slathered them with maple syrup. Now he abandoned his knife and started shovelling the sodden bits into his mouth with his fork, not bothering to stop talking while he ate. He shut up abruptly when I sat down.

I smiled at Harriet to cover the awkward silence. “You have a lovely house,” I said. “Have you been here long?”

“Oh, since we got married,” she said, fetching a plate of thin crispy bacon strips and indicating that we should dig in and help ourselves. “Walt and his daddy started building this place in the fall and we moved in in the spring, right after the wedding. Forty-five years ago next month.”

“My family’s been in construction going back three generations,” Walt put in.

“It’s been a good family home,” his wife said, contented.

“It still is, by the looks of it,” I said, finding that bacon went amazingly well with maple syrup. Even if it hadn’t I still would have eaten it. I hadn’t realised just how hungry I really was and it took some effort not to let my table manners slip to Trey’s level. “Do you have a lot of grandchildren?”

Harriet frowned. “No,” she said, “we’ve never been blessed.”

Surprised, I nodded to the toys in the garden and Walt smiled.

“We foster. Y’know – kids from problem homes,” he explained. “Try and set ‘em back on the right path.”

I thought about Sean’s sister and his younger brother, who’d taken his parents’ broken marriage much harder than Sean had done. His kid brother, in particular, had gone off the rails in fairly spectacular fashion the winter before. We’d since managed to retrieve him, more or less, but how either of them were going to react when they found out that the big brother they idolised was dead, I couldn’t begin to guess.

“So,” Walt said now, mopping his mouth with a paper napkin and sitting back in his chair, “Charlie here’s from Manchester, that much I know, but that doesn’t sound like an English accent you got there, Trey. Where you from, buddy?”

It was casually slipped in. If it hadn’t been for the shrewd look in the old man’s eyes, I wouldn’t have read anything more into the question.

“Oh, well, we’ve lived in a bunch of different places,” Trey said airily. “My dad kept us, like, moving around a lot.”

I glared at him. If he was trying to make it sound like Keith was a petty criminal, he was going about it the right way. “Trey’s from down near Miami,” I put in quickly. “I’m just looking after him.”

Now it was Trey’s turn to scowl. He didn’t like the idea that I was his nursemaid any better than he liked the idea that I was his bodyguard.

“Uh-huh,” Walt said slowly. He poured himself a glass of water, offering the jug to the rest of us before setting it down again on the table top. His movements had a slow precision to them, as though he weighed the merits of each one before he did it. “So how come you were sleeping on the beach last night?” he asked.

It was a reasonable question, I couldn’t argue about that. What to tell him was the problem.

“We got robbed yesterday,” Trey said. And just when I thought that maybe he was starting to think on his feet at last he had to go and embroider it unnecessarily. “Four guys jumped us – with guns. Took all our money.”

Harriet immediately made sympathetic noises, but I was watching Walt. His only reaction was to let his eyes flick up briefly from under those disordered eyebrows. He let his wife run on a little, then said, “Gee, that’s bad luck, Charlie. So what did the cops say?”

I took another sip of coffee while I thought furiously about my answer. Damn Trey’s smart comment. I hadn’t a clue what the American police would be likely to have told us in such a situation. I put my cup down again. “We didn’t go to them,” I said at last. “The guys who mugged us threatened to come back for us if we did and anyway—” I shrugged, “—we didn’t have much money to give them.”

“Musta had your credit cards, though – if you couldn’t get yourselves a motel room last night,” Walt said, apparently busying himself forking a slice of watermelon from the central platter onto his plate. “I know it’s Spring Break an’ all, but there’s still plenty of places further out with vacancies.”

For a moment I didn’t answer. This was getting sticky. I glanced at Trey’s worried face. “We’ll sort something better out for tonight,” I said. That, at least, was true.

Walt nodded at that, his eyes hooded and his face serious. “So,” he went on, his voice still slow and pleasant, “was that before or after you crashed your car?”

I went utterly still, eyes fixed on Walt’s face. How could I have ever thought he was just a nice friendly old man? He was ruthless. Relentless.

“Oh Walt,” Harriet protested with a shaky laugh, “I’m sure you’re mistaken about that.”

“You were driving, young lady,” he went on mildly, ignoring her. The sheer certainty in his tone sent the blood thumping in my ears.

“Whatever gives you that idea?” I asked, hearing the slightly steely note that had crept into my voice, however hard I tried to maintain my neutrality.

He had been trimming the skin off his watermelon with one of the table knives, and now he used the rounded blade as a pointer, waving it towards my bare forearms where they rested on the table top.

“When the airbag went off it burned along the inside of your arms as it deployed,” he said conversationally. “I’ve seen it happen plenty before. It’s one of the sure signs if the driver and passenger have tried to swap places after the event.”

“I see,” I said, unable to stop myself shifting my hands into my lap. If I’d remembered my upbringing and kept my elbows off the table to start with, I reflected, I might not have been rumbled. “You seem very well-informed about the mechanics of road traffic accidents for a third-generation construction worker.”

“Walt never followed his daddy into the construction business,” Harriet said. She was sitting very straight and very still, I saw. Her voice was unnaturally calm and clear. “After the navy he spent twenty-five years with the Bureau.”

The Bureau. Even a non-American like me knew that meant the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Shit. We’d escaped from the cops and walked straight into the arms of the silver FBI.

I pushed my chair back and stood up. Trey followed suit, almost scrambling to his feet. Walt and his wife didn’t move to rise with us and they both kept their hands still. Harriet’s jaw was tight. I hated being the cause of her sudden fear.

“We’re really very grateful to you for feeding us,” I said, giving her a small smile, “but unfortunately we really must be leaving now.”

I backed towards the door we’d come in by, pushing the kid ahead of me. Trey shuffled, as though he could hardly move under his own steam.

As I reached it, Walt asked sadly, “What do you think you’re gonna achieve by running, Charlie?”

“Right now? Staying alive,” I said, flat.

“Maybe I can help.”

I shook my head. “The people we’re dealing with have no compunction about killing bystanders,” I said. “This is not your fight, Walt. You’d be better off staying out of it.”

“If you change your mind, call me. I mean it. Any time – day or night,” he said and reeled off a ten-digit number. “You want me to write that down?”

“I can remember it,” Trey said. I glanced at him and he shrugged. “I got a head for figures.”

I pushed open the screen door and thrust him out into the garden. As I stepped through it myself Walt threw me a final question.

“This trouble you’re in – it’s that bad, huh?”

I gave him a grim smile. “Keep watching the news,” I said.

***

We spent most of the rest of the morning lurking on the beach around the busy Boardwalk area, which was like an old-fashioned seaside promenade, complete with a pier. We tried to stay out of the way of anyone who looked vaguely official and I gave all the wrinklies a wide berth, too. However harmless they might first appear.

Closer to the centre of Daytona, where South Atlantic crossed over and became North Atlantic Avenue, there was a funfair with one of these contraptions that turns people into human bungee balls. They winch a circular cage down to ground level, strap you in, then release it. The cage goes catapulting up into the sky, suspended by elastic from two support towers. Trey was desperate to give it a try.

I had no desire to become reacquainted with my breakfast so soon after eating it, but I talked him out of having a go on the grounds of poor security.

“If the police spot us when we’re up there, we’re sitting ducks,” I told him. Thankfully, he seemed to believe me.

By ten-thirty, in any case, he was itching to get to the sound-off at the Ocean Center to meet his friends. We crossed back to the west side of the main drag, braving five lanes of traffic that didn’t seem to pay any attention to the walk/don’t walk pedestrian signals at the crossings.

The police were everywhere. I kept my head down and hoped that some quirk of fate didn’t make the SIG slip out of its place behind my belt and clatter to the floor in front of one of them.

The banners strung across the front of the Ocean Center announced, ‘Spring Break Nationals – the world’s most famous Sound-Off.’ If I’d never heard of it before, I couldn’t help but hear it now.

There were half a dozen wild-looking cars spread across the expanse of concrete in front of the building. They had amazing paint and graphics, the kind of thing I’d only seen at custom bike shows in the UK. We walked past a Cadillac Escalade with chrome wheels that, according to the tyre size, were a mind-boggling twenty-four inches in diameter. The truck was riding so low that I couldn’t have got four fingers between the side rail and the ground. How on earth did they drive them?

I’d never been particularly interested in cars. To me they were a means to an end. A preferable way to travel, but only if it was snowing, or the rain was being driven down horizontally. If it wasn’t, I would far rather have used my bike.

But nobody seemed to be looking at the vehicles themselves. They were too interested in the outlandish stereos inside them. Each competed for the crowd’s attention with the system wound up louder than the last. They made the whole of my chest cavity vibrate just walking past.

The kids weren’t content with that, though. They wanted to actually cram their heads into the interior, which struck me as an occupation only slightly less risky than trying to train a bunch of sharks to take morsels of food out of your mouth.

Either way you were likely to lose your head.

In spite of my misgivings, we paid our entrance fee on the door and moved into the building itself. I stuck my nose in one of the programmes they were handing out so I had a viable excuse not to be looking at any of the security guards in the lobby area.

Back when I was in the army I spent plenty of time out on the ranges during live-firing exercises. Since then, I’d worked nightclub doors, found myself in the thick of an urban riot and involved in a full-blown fire-fight, but nothing prepared me for the sheer barrage of noise inside the Ocean Center.

It had started out life as music but when a hundred different sound systems are all playing a hundred different tunes, it gets hard to tell. All you could feel was the pound of the bass.

There were customised vehicles of every type, from monster civilian versions of US military Hummers to new-shape Mini Coopers, even a Ferrari and a couple of full-dress Harleys, though I couldn’t quite see the reason for the bikes at a car stereo show.

Inside, the main conference hall was a huge open space, now filled with stands from equipment and accessory manufacturers. They varied from little more than a cloth-covered table laid out with boxes of product, to elaborate modular structures with space for two or three vehicles. One stand even seemed to be strung with inflatable small green aliens. I didn’t quite get the significance but no-one else was acting like it was out of the ordinary.

The place was heaving with people, mainly teenagers perhaps a few years older than Trey. They didn’t seem at all bothered by the din, although when I looked closer I saw that quite a few of them were wearing little yellow ear defenders like the ones I’d used for shooting in the past. I still had a load of them at home but it wasn’t something I’d ever thought to pack for this trip.

I reached forwards and tapped Trey on the shoulder as we wended our way through the crowd, putting my mouth close to his ear. “Where are we supposed to meet your friends?” I bellowed.

He pointed over into a corner of the huge conference centre hall. “By the main stage,” he yelled back. “Yeah – there they are!”

There seemed to be any number of people clustered round the raised stage area, sitting on the floor and sipping cola or eating junk food from the nearby concession stand, so I didn’t immediately spot Trey’s mates. It was only when one of them noticed him and waved that I got the idea.

There were three of them, two boys and a girl. The girl jumped to her feet and came bouncing over to greet Trey, wrapping herself onto his arm like bindweed and eyeing me up suspiciously.

“So, who’s this?” she asked, arching her eyebrows. She had a mass of ringleted dark hair and smooth caramel-coloured skin and, purely in my subjective opinion, way too much make-up for someone her age.

She was wearing shorts and a microscopic little crop top. The latter showed off a flat tanned midriff at the front and a painful-looking tattoo of a rising sun at the bottom of her spine. I could hear her chewing her gum even over the background noise.

“Oh, this is Charlie,” Trey said, trying to be cool and casual, like he was introducing me to his posse. “Charlie, meet the guys – Scott, Xander, and this is Aimee.”

Scott was taller than Trey but just as gawky, with short spiky hair dyed an aggressive white blond and studs through the left-hand side of his nose, his eyebrow, and the middle of his chin. His shorts came down to below his knees, showing only a small section of tanned calf between the hem of the legs and the tops of his absurdly large basketball boots.

Xander was a little shorter, his skin a deep Caribbean black and badly pockmarked by teenage acne. His hair was shorn to within five mil of his scalp and had intricate designs and swirls razor-cut down to his skin.

He was wearing a No Fear T-shirt that advised anyone who read it to ‘drive it like you stole it’. When he grinned in welcome he revealed a gold tooth in his upper set. None of them looked older than about seventeen.

I kept only part of my attention on the group as Xander and Scott went through some mystic teenage ritual of slapping palms with Trey rather than shaking hands. I was painfully aware that the two cops on the beach had come within a hair’s breadth of catching us this morning and I didn’t want to get caught napping like that again.

“What’s happening, man?” Xander asked. “Your message was kinda cryptic.”

“We’re in big trouble,” Trey said impressively. He was going for nonchalant but his pride took the edge off it. “Got the cops on our tail and we need a place to hide out for a coupla days, ‘til the heat’s off, y’know?”

The boys were nodding sagely, pretending that this kind of situation arose for them all the time. I didn’t like to break the mood by telling them that with four people dead it was likely to take longer than a few days for the manhunt to subside.

I hadn’t seen any news reports to know if they’d connected the couple at the motel with the dead cop. When they did, things were going to get thoroughly nasty. Always supposing that Walt and his wife hadn’t already brought in the cops. Or his former colleagues in the FBI.

“Cool,” Scott said. “My mom and dad are in the Carolinas. You can crash at my place.”

“So, what did you do, Trey?” Aimee asked with a giggle.

Trey glanced at me for guidance but I kept my face expressionless. They were his friends and I was interested to see what story he’d come up with.

“Dad’s gone AWOL,” he said at last, “and there’s these guys after us. They shot a cop down in Lauderdale but we, like, got away.” He saw the shock register on their faces and swallowed. “It’s kinda hard to explain here.”

I let my eyes slide away from him and roam over the sea of faces around us, looking for anyone who was staring too hard. Anyone who seemed to be trying to remember if that Identikit picture they’d seen on the TV this morning might really be one of us.

And then, over near one of the exits, I saw the pair of cops, led by a security guard in a uniform blue blazer. They were pointing their arms like they were designating a search area and talking into hand-held radios.

I moved forwards and nudged Trey’s arm. “Time to go,” I said, loud enough to be heard.

This time he didn’t question my reasons, just looked round for the cops.

“You got your truck, man?” he asked Scott.

Scott shrugged and jerked his thumb. “In the back lot,” he said. “We leaving already?”

“Unless you want to watch us being arrested,” I told him, “I think that would be a very good idea.”

But as we started to move towards the closest exit the doors opened and another couple of cops walked in. If it hadn’t been for the press of people, Trey’s sudden about-turn would have been more than enough to flag our whereabouts.

They could have been responding to some other emergency in the hall, but I very much doubted it. Someone – most likely some sharp-eyed security guard – had spotted us on the way in. Getting out might prove somewhat more problematic.

We pushed and hurried our way through to where the crowd was thickest. A whole swathe of it seemed to be gravitating towards one of the big industrial doors that led out of the main hall and into a corralled outdoor arena.

We allowed them to sweep us along and carry us out into the blazing sunlight, hoping it would be enough to cover our escape. Then, just when I was beginning to get my hopes up, the advance of people slowed and stopped.

They seemed to be gathering round a big electronic scoreboard and PA system that was set up in a corner of one of the parking areas. I glanced behind us and spotted a couple of peaked caps in among the baseball hats, heading in our direction, but without the urgency to suggest they’d actually spotted us. I kept pushing Trey towards the forward edge of the crowd, trying to put as many bodies between us and authority as I could.

Eventually we came up against a steel barrier fence, about waist high. On the other side a fat little Chevy van was pulled up in front of the scoreboard, surrounded by what looked like a ground crew. One of them was holding a control box, with a thick bundle of wires leading to a socket behind a fuel filler cap on the van’s rear panel.

Then the guy who was manning the PA said, “Hit it!” and every panel on the van began to buzz. Somewhere in the depths of the vehicle, muffled like it was buried under rock, there came an incredible deep bass rumble. The ground seemed to be jumping under my feet. I stuck my fingers in my ears but it didn’t seem to do much good.

The electronic scoreboard shot up to 165.3 and stuck there. The guy with the control box shrugged and shook his head and shut the system down. Everybody clapped and whistled.

Xander was standing next to me, cheering.

“What the hell is this?” I demanded.

“IdBL,” he said. When he saw my totally blank look, he sighed and added, “It’s a competition for measuring who has the loudest most kick-ass system, you understand what I’m saying? Whose system kicks the hardest.”

“And how hard does this one kick?” I asked, risking a quick scan for the police, then turning back to the van. The crew were unclamping the doors and taking the measuring microphone and its stand out of the interior.

Xander nodded to the scoreboard. “Says it right there – one-sixty-five-point-three dB.”

“Is that ‘dB’ as in decibels?” I said. He nodded again. “Christ, that’s more than enough to kill you if you sat in there.”

Xander smiled serenely. “Yeah,” he crowed. “How cool is that?”

Further to my right, another cop appeared. Or it could have been one of the same cops. I wasn’t paying attention to their faces. I turned away from him, and saw another away to my left. At least they were still searching, I saw. They didn’t know how close they were.

In front of us, the crew with the van had finished uncoupling it and were now positioning themselves around the body, starting to wheel it slowly out of the arena and towards the parking area beyond. Clearly all that stereo equipment hadn’t left any room for an engine.

“Come on,” I said, and squeezed through a gap between the barriers.

The five of us gathered round the back bumper of the van, heads down as we helped push. There were a couple of event officials sitting under sunshades on folding chairs between the arena and the car park but they were paying more attention to stopping unauthorised people getting in than they were to stopping unauthorised people going out.

We kept pushing until the van’s crew steered it into their pit space in the parking area and nosed it to a halt.

“Hey, thanks guys,” said the kid who’d been operating the controls.

“No problem,” Xander said. “Good score, man.”

Scott fished into one of the front pockets of his shorts for his car keys. The pocket was so long he had to bend down to reach the bottom of it. We threaded our way between the cars and trailers and trucks in the competitor car park until we reached the far end. He pressed his alarm remote and the lights flashed on a lowered Dodge pickup with blacked out windows and a mountain of coloured beads hanging from the door mirrors.

I wondered how five of us were going to fit into the pickup cab, but Xander and Aimee climbed straight into the rear load bed. Trey and I piled onto the front bench seat, with Scott behind the wheel. He cranked the engine up and roared out of the car park, raising a cloud of white sandy dust.

“I think it might be a good idea if you tried not to get pulled over for driving like a prat, don’t you?” I said mildly.

“She means a dork,” Trey supplied when he looked puzzled. “She’s from England,” he added.

“Oh, um, yeah,” Scott said, but at least he drove more sedately out onto the road behind the Ocean Center. As we joined the jam of stationary traffic waiting for the next lights, a couple of police cars came screaming into the car park we’d just left. The cops jumped out and went running into the exhibition hall.

I was suddenly glad of the tinted windows. Trey slunk down in his seat and put his elbow on the door frame so he could partly cover his face with his hand. The lights took forever to change in our favour. We all held our breath.

Finally, they flipped onto green. Scott gunned the motor and as we turned out onto the main road he gave a whoop of relief.

“Man, that was a close one,” he said, grinning as he reached for his sunglasses which were hanging from the rear-view mirror.

He flicked the stereo on to a local hard rock station and started slapping the top of the steering wheel in time to the music. “Tell you one thing,” he added, “if you’re gonna be around here a few days, we are gonna have to do something about a disguise for you two.”

It was the first sensible thing I’d heard him say.