First Drop

Ten

“Pink?” I said, allowing the disgust to win out clear in my voice. “Of all the colours you could have chosen, and you went for pink?”

“Aw, c’mon, Charlie!” Aimee said and I could tell from the suppressed laughter in her voice that she’d been the one behind it. “I think you’ll look kinda cool.”

“We’re supposed to be keeping a low profile, not making prats of ourselves,” I said sourly. “Who the hell has pink hair?”

Aimee started to giggle, hiding her mouth behind her hand like she was still in junior school, setting Trey off as well. I wanted to knock both their heads together.

We were in the upstairs den of Scott’s parents’ place in Ormond Beach. Having said that, the house was actually a bungalow, like so many in Florida, with dark glass windows and a huge arched porch over the front door. The exterior stucco was painted salmon pink, so I suppose that should have been a warning of things to come.

The house was on a quiet residential side street of properties similar in size, if not in style. Scott had driven his pickup right up to the doors of the built-in triple garage at the left-hand side of the main entrance. He’d waited impatiently while the automatic mechanism ploddingly cranked the door up out of the way, then drove straight in, braking hard enough to make the tyres squeak on the painted concrete floor. The garage door slowly closed again behind us.

However Scott’s parents made their living, they clearly weren’t doing too badly out of it, I reflected, as he led us through a utility room and into the house itself. It was another mainly white interior, enlivened by a sprawling collection of native American art and sculptures.

The hallway opened out into an open-plan lounge, dining room and kitchen. A massive picture window ran floor to vaulted ceiling on the opposite wall, giving a view into the greenery of the garden outside. To one side was an open-tread staircase leading to a loft that looked down onto the lounge below.

I don’t know how long his folks had been away, but the house showed obvious signs of lone teenage occupation. Dirty clothes littered the cream leather corner sofa and a mess of old takeaway food containers was strewn across the glass-topped dining table, along with empty cans of high-energy soft drink. Like kids in the States really need that extra hit of sugar and caffeine.

Scott made straight for the stairs and we followed him up to what turned out to be the den, complete with computer and games console. Scott had yet more sugar-loaded pop in a mini-fridge up there, too. So the poor lamb didn’t have to traipse all that way down to the kitchen when he got thirsty. He chucked everybody a can without asking if they had a preference, and slumped down into a chair.

“So, Trey, you wanna tell us what the fuck is going on, man?” he’d asked.

I let the kid tell the story in his own way without interruption, mainly because I was curious to hear his take on it. And from the way he described the last twenty-four hours I almost managed to recognise them as the same ones I’d also been through.

What was interesting was how much he emphasised my role in the proceedings. Mind you, he built his own part up some, too. No mention was made of the fact I’d had to practically carry him away from Oakley man at the theme park, or drag him out of the crashed Mercury. On the other hand, I hadn’t realised he’d witnessed quite so much detail of the shoot-out with the men in the Buick. It had clearly made a lasting impression.

“You should have seen it, man,” he enthused, coming half out of his chair and gesturing with his arms as he recounted the tale. “She just jumps out of the car and caps this guy, like, blam, blam! And he goes down and we take off and, like, just steal a bike and head up to Daytona.”

He paused, nodding, to slurp from his can of drink. The other three were sitting tense and still, hanging on his every word. Trey looked at their absorbed faces and I saw his ego start to climb at the respect he was getting.

“So you’re a bodyguard, right Charlie?” Xander said, eyeing me up and down. “Like, for real?”

I took a sip of my drink, trying not to wince as my teeth instantly began to melt, and nodded in reply.

He looked at me for a moment longer, a smile beginning to form. It was as if he just knew he was having his leg pulled and didn’t want to come across as too gullible, but there was this edge of doubt there, too. Eventually he sat back and looked at Trey and laughed. “No shit, man?”

“You shoulda seen her last night on the beach,” Trey said, a trace of defensive anger in his tone now. “These guys came after our dough, like, with a knife. And Charlie, she just tore them apart. Go on,” he added to me, “show ‘em how you did it.”

I raised one eyebrow, not making any moves to comply. “I am not,” I said mildly, “a performing seal.”

Trey coloured at that, but pushed on regardless. “She was in the military, right? She rocks, man, I’m telling you.”

This last seemed to convince them a little. At least enough not to express their scepticism out loud. Maybe women played a more active role in the US forces so there wasn’t quite the same resistance I’d always encountered.

But I could feel their excitement more than their apprehension and it scared me. In spite of Trey’s lurid reconstruction, they hadn’t the faintest idea how serious this all was. They were just a bunch of middle-class kids pretending to be gangsters, playing at rebellion.

Maybe they would never have agreed so readily to help us if they’d stopped to think. I offered a silent cynical prayer of thanks that none of them were great thinkers.

One thing that everyone agreed on was that we needed to do something about our appearance. Xander offered to take Scott’s truck down to the nearest superstore and bring back enough stuff to change our hair and clothing, and to try to make me blend in with the rest of the Spring Break crowd.

As soon as shopping was mentioned, Aimee jumped at the chance to go with him. She looked critically at my tired secondhand shirt and grubby shorts and said, “Trust me girl, you need some help.”

After they’d gone Scott unearthed the remote, switching on the giant projector TV in the lounge and channel-hopping until he found a news report. We soon discovered we’d made the headlines in a big way.

“Broward County police are today mourning the loss of one of their fellow officers, gunned down in the line of duty last night,” said the serious-voiced but plastic-faced news anchor. “The officer, who had been with the department just six months, was the victim of a brutal slaying during a routine traffic stop on the county’s roads yesterday evening . . .”

The report ran on, showing a lingering hand-held night shot of the Mercury crashed in the ditch with the punched-out rear screen and the obvious bullet holes in the back end. I watched it with detached interest, as though it hadn’t happened to me at all.

The logical half of my brain told me that, when they’d had a chance to properly analyse the scene, the police would know the men in the Buick had been there. The young cop hadn’t got a shot off, his gun would be fully loaded and unfired. Surely they had to ask where all the rounds in the Mercury had come from?

I remembered, also, that I hadn’t even thought to stop and pick up the brass shell casings the SIG’s eject mechanism had scattered into the ditch. I’d been too busy running for our lives. At least if they linked those to me they should work it out that I wasn’t the one who killed the cop.

Apparently not.

The sound of my own name brought me up short. In a corner of the screen, just by the newscaster’s head, they’d put together a half-reasonable likeness to go with it. Having said that, the description they read out would have fitted half the female population.

The only worrying thing was they knew about the scar on my neck.

That shook me. I’d acquired the injury that had caused it nearly a year and a half before. It was a permanent and sobering reminder of how easy it would be to get myself killed.

Since I’d started working for Sean, the glamorous Madeleine had taken me under her wing as far as the use of make-up was concerned. Given enough opportunity and a shelf full of wickedly expensive cosmetics I could now make a tolerable job of concealing the scar unless you were right up close. But I was still self-conscious about it.

Since I’d arrived in Florida I’d been very careful to avoid awkward questions from Gerri Raybourn’s men by keeping it covered up beneath polo and standard shirt collars.

I’d even done my swimming in the house pool early enough in the mornings not to have the rest of the household around staring at me. It was only quite by chance that Keith Pelzner had unexpectedly come out into the lanai on the second morning and caught me in the act.

I could tell he’d spotted the scar straight away but he hadn’t made any comment. Question was, had he mentioned it to anyone else? And if not, how had they found out?

“. . . Broward police have also announced that Fox is wanted in connection with an earlier double homicide at a motel in the Lauderdale area that left a young couple tragically slain. They advise anyone who identifies Fox to approach only with extreme caution . . .”

“You really have a scar like that?” Scott asked, taking his eyes off the screen for a moment. Trey was looking at me, too.

Without speaking, I peeled back the collar of my shirt and showed it to them. A pale and ragged five-inch line around the base of my throat. If my neck had been a clock face, it would have run roughly from six until nine.

“How d’ya get it?” Scott said. He swallowed. “I mean, was it, like, saving someone’s life?”

I had a brief mental snapshot of the moment the knife had gone in and the sheer hate on the face of the man who’d been wielding it. I’d believed completely that I was on borrowed time from then on. That nothing I did after that point mattered any more because I was already dead. I wondered if it had coloured all my actions since.

“Yes,” I said.

“Wow, that is intense,” Scott said, shaking his head. “So you have a gun, right?”

“Yes,” I said again. I wasn’t trying to unnerve him by the monosyllabic answers, there just didn’t seem to be any more to say.

“That’s cool,” Scott said. “My dad has a coupla hunting rifles but he won’t let me touch them. When he and Mom went on this trip he locked them away and, like, took the key with him so—”

The shrill buzz of a mobile phone cut through the tail end of his sentence. He instinctively started looking round for his phone but to my utter amazement it was Trey who reached calmly into a pocket and pulled out a mobile.

“‘S’up?” he said into it, then handed it over to Scott. “It’s Xander for you, man.”

“No shit? Why didn’t he call me on my own cellphone.”

“Because you left it in the truck, stupid,” Trey said. “What d’you think he’s using to call me on?”

Scott grabbed the phone. “Hey, Xander, get off my cellphone, asshole!” he said, laughing. “‘S’up dude?”

As he went over by the window to have his conversation I grabbed Trey’s arm and steered him to one side, out of Scott’s immediate earshot. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me you had your own mobile?” I demanded.

He shrugged out of my grip. “You never asked,” he said, both truculent and shifty.

I rolled my eyes. “For fuck’s sake, Trey,” I ground out, “I lost mine in the car. There are people I could call in the UK who might be able to help us get out of this mess and I haven’t been able to do it. And all this time you’ve had a damned mobile phone and not thought to tell me?”

“I thought you knew,” he said, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. “You were the one who told me to call the guys last night. Why do that if you didn’t know I had a cellular?”

“I thought you used the payphone outside the motel,” I said. Why hadn’t he really told me about his mobile? What was he trying to hide?

“Anyways,” Trey said, sulky now, “I can’t use my phone to call long-distance. My dad had like, a block put on it.”

I sighed. “Trey, if I’m going to protect you in all of this you’re really going to have to start communicating with me.”

“Protect me?” he said, his voice low but scornful. “How? First you send Mr Whitmarsh into the wrong room at the motel so they, like, kill those people who didn’t have nothing to do with this. Then you crash our getaway car. You’ve never even done this before.”

“Hang on a minute!” I stared at him in surprise. “You’re the one who’s been making me out to be some kind of Wonder Woman in front of your mates.”

“Yeah,” he said, churlish. “What did you expect me to tell them – that you’re just, like, the nanny who’s in way over her head? No way!”

Scott ended his call and ambled back across the lounge to hand the mobile back to Trey. “What’s up?”

“I really need to call someone in the UK,” I said. “Can I use the phone here?”

He looked sheepish. For a moment my temper sparked. He was prepared to help us outrun the police, but the prospect of a transatlantic phone call was too much to ask.

“I’m quite happy to pay for the call,” I said through gritted teeth.

“It’s not that,” Scott said quickly. “It’s just that, well, when my folks were up in New England skiing last winter I kinda used the phone a lot when they were away. I mean a lot.” He glanced from one of us to the other, clearly not keen to reveal his misdemeanours in front of his friend. “Dad went ape when he got back and found out. He, like, totally lost it. So now, when they go away, they have the phone company put a block on the line. All I can do is make local phone calls ‘cos, like, they’re free, y’know?”

“Another one,” I muttered, turning away in frustration. “That’s just great.”

Scott stuck his hands in his back pockets, making his shoulders round. “These guys you need to get in touch with,” he said, diffident. “Can’t you just e-mail them?”

I turned back, slowly. I’d been a latecomer to the information superhighway. I still didn’t own a computer and I’d only occasionally used the ones at Sean’s office to surf the Internet.

Then, I regret to say, it was usually looking for cheaper quotes for motorbike insurance, rather than sending e-mail. It just hadn’t occurred to me that it was the perfect way to get in touch with Madeleine, regardless of the time difference.

“Scott,” I said, smiling at him, “you’re a genius.”

He grinned back at me.

Trey didn’t like that much, either.

***

The message I sent to Madeleine was short and to the point, more like a telegram than an e-mail. “Job blown up. Locals hostile. KP disappeared. TP with me. SM missing. Instructions?”

I put Scott’s phone number on there as well and sent it with a certain feeling of relief, like I’d got an SOS out from a sinking ship. I hoped the whole thing wasn’t too cryptic, but I was reluctant to say much more without knowing who might be monitoring e-mail traffic.

All I could do now was wait for a reply.

Then I checked my watch and realised with a sense of dejection that it was 12.37pm, Eastern Standard Time. Add five onto that and it was just outside office hours in the UK. And on a Friday afternoon, as well. There was always a chance that Madeleine wouldn’t even pick up my cry for help for another two days.

By that time, we could both be dead.

Downstairs, a door slammed and we heard chattering voices. Scott leaned over the rail and called for Xander and Aimee to come up. Trey was still hunched over the computer keyboard, logging on to his own e-mail account.

It was at that point I discovered Aimee had bought a packet of pink hair dye that she was fully expecting to use on me.

“It’s not, like, permanent,” she pointed out, pouting. “It’ll wash out in about a month.”

I thought about the picture on the news report.

“OK,” I said, resigned. “Let’s get this over with.”

***

I had to wash my hair first anyway, so they let me shower in peace in one of the guest bathrooms. I stood under a shower head the size of a dinner plate and let the hot water pummel my face and body for a long time. After twenty-four hours on the run, it felt indescribably wonderful to be clean again. I could have stayed in there for days.

Eventually, I reluctantly shut off the water and stepped out. I towelled myself roughly dry and opened one of the brown paper bags that Aimee had handed over. Inside was one of the smallest bikinis I’ve ever seen and a pair of flip-flops with plastic flowers on the straps – also in pink.

I glanced at the limp pile of clothes I’d discarded on the bathroom floor, but I couldn’t face the prospect of putting them back on again. I wrapped myself firmly in a bath towel, draped another round my neck, then grabbed the bag and ventured back out into the lounge.

The kids were all clustered in the kitchen. Someone had switched channels so MTV was playing loudly enough in the background for you to have to raise your voice to talk over it.

Trey was on a chair in the centre of the tiled floor, his hair covered in gunk. He didn’t seem to have changed out of his old clothes and he certainly hadn’t showered.

They all stopped talking when they saw me.

“Is this all you’ve bought for me to wear?” I asked, holding up the bag.

Aimee giggled. “If I’d left it to Xander – yeah,” she said. Her hands were still encased in the throwaway plastic gloves she’d used to spoon the dye onto Trey’s hair. She nodded to the nearest worktop, where a rake of other brown paper bags were scattered. “There should be some, like, y’know, green silk pants in there someplace.”

Fearing the worst, I searched through the bags for the article described, but discovered she actually meant a pair of loose-fitting trousers in a rather restrained colour that was close to olive drab. The only problem was that the waistband was held up by a drawstring that was nowhere near strong enough to contain the SIG.

I turned back and realised all four of them were watching me with a certain amount of anxiety.

“We got you a bag and a shirt, too,” Aimee said hesitantly.

I kept looking. The bag was a tiny thing with straps for you to wear it on your back like a rucksack. It was just about big enough for the gun. At least the shirt had a collar, even if its shortened tails were designed to be knotted to show off your midriff, so that left no room for the SIG either.

I tried not to show impatience with them. I’m sure that concealing an illegal firearm wasn’t something Aimee normally had to think about when she went clothes shopping with her pals. Considering what she could have picked out for me, she’d done a good job.

“That’s great,” I said, relieved. “Thanks.”

I took my haul back into the bathroom and got dressed. The bikini top seemed at least a size too small. If I made any sudden moves even someone of my relatively limited attributes was likely to fall out over the top of it.

I gave up on the flip-flops. The thought of trying to run anywhere in them didn’t bear thinking about. Instead, I washed out my socks in the sink and hung them to dry on the towel rail. That way I could put my boots back on. The trousers sat quite low on my hips and would be plenty long enough to cover the boots when the time came.

I slipped the SIG into the backpack, together with the blade I’d taken away from the skinny kid on the beach. Just those two items filled it enough for me to have trouble closing the zip and I had to slip my Swiss Army knife into my trouser pocket. What were people actually expected to carry in these things?

By the time I was dressed and went back out again Aimee had Trey’s head bent into the kitchen sink, rinsing the dye off. She glanced up and grinned at my appearance.

“You’ll have to lose the shirt,” she said. “I don’t wanna, like, get dye all over it.”

Reluctantly, I complied, shifting uneasily as Scott and Xander did a double-take at the sight of me in a bikini top. Aimee grinned again at their reaction. “I thought so,” she said airily, sounding a little smug. “I got just the right size.”

She suddenly seemed businesslike, less silly, as she set to on Trey with a pair of scissors and enough gusto to make me nervous. But by the time she’d finished snipping and blow-drying and gelling his hair, Trey had a short white blond spiky cut, very like Scott’s. It was quite a change.

“Now why couldn’t I have gone blonde as well?” I wanted to know as I sat down and prepared for my turn.

“Too close to your natural colour,” Aimee dismissed. She picked up a strand of my still-damp hair. “You have great hair. This is natural, yeah?”

“Well, it was,” I murmured. She grinned and began spooning the gloop onto my head.

I had to sit still while the dye did its thing. I spent the time ignoring the chatter that was going on above my head and trying not to watch the clock and wonder if Madeleine had picked up her e-mail.

Eventually, Aimee peered closely at a bit of hair and said. “OK, you’re done.”

She washed it off in the sink again but I backed off when she got her scissors out.

“Aw, c’mon Charlie, don’t sweat it,” she said. “I’m not gonna do yours real short like Trey. And you need it cutting anyways.”

So I let her do what she wanted. Whenever I’ve had my hair cut in the past I’ve always had a mirror in front of me, so I can see what they’re up to, and that’s when I’m dealing with professionals. This was something of a leap of faith.

It seemed to take her a long time, trimming a bit here and there. She blow-dried it and finished off by plaiting two small sections of my hair into thin braids, just above the outside corner of my right eye, with coloured beads threaded onto the ends. If I turned round suddenly the beads clunked irritatingly against my cheekbone.

“I’ve got some more beads you can wear round your neck that will, like, cover up your scar,” she told me, her voice chatty.

I made a noncommittal reply, uncomfortable having something I’d always viewed as so private discussed so publicly.

Aimee didn’t stop with my hair. She fished out boxes of make-up and started smoothing it onto my face with her fingertips. I would have objected but I’d seen the length of her fingernails and didn’t want to do anything that might make her jump when she was so close to my eyes.

Finally, she stood back, hands on hips as she studied me. “OK, Charlie,” she said, “you’re all set. Go have a look.”

I stood up, brushing the bits of loose hair from my knees. Nothing seemed to stick to the silk trousers for long. I went back through to the bathroom and stared at my reflection in the mirror.

Only it wasn’t me.

Aimee had done something to my face that brought my cheekbones out and made my eyes look huge. The pink hair was in more of a bob than my usual rather straggly style and, I had to admit, it really quite worked. So did the braids and the outfit.

I struck a pose, giving it some attitude and putting my hands on my hips like I’d seen Aimee do. If I worked my jaw like I was chewing gum with my mouth open, the transformation was complete. Sure, I still looked older than Trey, but not by much.

I went back out into the lounge. Aimee looked up, expectant.

I shrugged awkwardly. “It’s amazing,” I said. “Thank you.”

She flushed and smiled, her cheeks dimpling prettily. “You’re very welcome,” she said.

***

We stayed in the house for most of what was left of the afternoon. Trey seemed to spend most of it up in the loft, either playing computer games or surfing the Internet. It was the only time I’d seen him look really at home anywhere. He seemed to lose his gawkiness when his right hand was clawed round a mouse and his eyes were locked on the screen. Mind you, then he just looked nerdy instead.

I even had a bit of a go at surfing myself, although I won’t say I was anywhere near being at his level. I tried putting in a search for the name of the software company Keith Pelzner worked for. That gave me their official website, which failed to tell me much more than I’d found out from Madeleine’s original report.

But, it also found any references to the company, including one that I guessed must be an online edition of the financial paper article that had so annoyed Gerri on the day of my arrival.

I scanned quickly down the page. All it said was that the company was on the brink of launching a new program that would mean big things for anyone intra-day trading on the futures markets, whatever that meant. It was not only couched in wildly technical terms, but also written in a style so leaden my eyes started to glaze over by the time I was halfway down the first page.

There was still no word from Madeleine.

***

Later, we ordered takeaway pizza delivered to the door. You couldn’t get to the surface of the dining table, so we ate with the huge boxes open on our knees, watching the news reports.

They’d expanded since the first ones we’d seen that afternoon. Now they’d linked me to the shooting at the theme park as well. Jesus, I thought, how many different guns do these people think I’ve got?

“Wow, this is getting wild,” Xander said. He shook his head and looked speculatively at Trey. “Who’da thought it, huh?”

“Shush!”

A new face had appeared on an outside broadcast camera but I’d missed the opening introduction. Not that I needed it to recognise who she was.

“Aw crap,” Trey burst out, “it’s Ms Raybourn!”

“Will you shut up,” I snapped, “and let me listen!”

“. . . more about the missing teenager?” the reporter was asking.

Gerri nodded, her face doing a perfect impression of serious solicitude.

“Sure,” she said. “Naturally, we are extremely concerned at this time for the safety of both the Pelzners – father and son – but particularly so for Trey, who is just fifteen years old. We are appealing to the kidnappers to release the family.”

“I believe you have already had some contact with the kidnappers. Can you tell us anything about their demands?”

Gerri shook her head. “Not at this time,” she said. “Though clearly we are dealing with some very dangerous people and we are really looking forward to writing the bottom line on this without further loss of life.”

“Like hell you are,” I muttered, still reeling.

The outside broadcast cut back to the studio and the beginning of the next story. For a moment none of us reacted.

“Kidnappers?” Scott asked, looking from one of us to the other. “What the fuck do they mean, man – kidnappers?”

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “I don’t know what on earth Raybourn hopes to gain by trying to make out that I’ve kidnapped Trey – or Keith for that matter.”

“She was the one who sent Mr Whitmarsh after us at the motel,” Trey said blankly.

I nodded. “Yeah, and they didn’t manage to get us that time, or afterwards, and now with that cop getting killed it’s all got well out of hand.” I looked around at their faces, still and a little pale now. “If I had to guess, I’d say good old Gerri’s trying to make sure she’s got a suitable scapegoat ready to take the blame for whatever it is that she and your Dad are up to,” I said. My lips twisted into a mocking smile. “Looks like I’m it.”