First Drop

Thirteen

In the end, the cops neither recognised nor arrested any of us.

They read Scott the riot act about lane discipline and proper signalling, and they made a big deal out of checking the truck over but in some ways it was all routine. We were just the latest in a long line of kids they’d booked that weekend for some minor violation or another. Not the first and definitely not last by any means. They didn’t even bother to search the rest of us and they didn’t ask for ID.

As soon as I realised there was nothing sinister about the stop, I felt the muscles across my shoulders begin to unlock, one by one. I took my hand off the pistol grip of the gun in the bag and propped my elbow on the edge of the door instead, resting my chin on my palm. Then I sat in my side of the cab and chewed gum with my mouth open and tried to look teenage and bored.

Scott stood in front of the Dodge, between the two cops. His whole body language was submissive, head bowed, hands clasped behind him. Every now and again he stole a glance back into the cab. If the cops had been a little more on the ball they should have taken that as a cue to rip the inside apart looking for a stash of soft drugs at the very least. I suppose the kid must just have had an honest face.

And all the while, the seconds ticked on into minutes. By the time ten had passed Trey had started to fidget.

“I’m gonna call him,” he whispered to me, talking out of the side of his mouth. “I gotta tell him we’re gonna be late.”

He eased the phone out of his pocket and started flicking through the buttons, but soon discovered that Henry’s number had been withheld. I realised that an e-mail address was the only contact we had for the man. OK, we could find his house again, but being able to give directions doesn’t generally mean much to Directory Enquiries, unless the US version was much more accommodating than it was at home.

Trey held the phone in front of him, so tense that it almost vibrated in his hands, hoping for another call. But as Henry’s deadline approached he didn’t make contact again.

With the engine, and therefore the air conditioning switched off, the heat expanded inside the pickup cab until it was crushing us into our seats. It didn’t seem to make any difference that the windows were all open. In fact, that probably made it worse.

By the time the first cop finally handed Scott his ticket and told him to beat it and to be more careful in future, we were already twenty minutes beyond our half-hour maximum time limit.

Scott climbed back into the cab, looking very pink around the ears as he twisted the ignition key.

“For God’s sake don’t spin the wheels setting off,” I said quietly, “or we’ll be here all day.”

He threw me a miserable glance but drove away with commendable sedateness, still clutching the crumpled ticket in his right hand.

“Jeez,” he said, close to tears, once we were on the move again. “I’m real sorry, guys. I let you down.”

“It was just luck,” I said, pinching Trey’s arm when he opened his mouth to disagree. “Just be thankful they didn’t do a full search.” I threw him a quick reassuring smile. “And don’t worry about it. It could have been worse.”

Me and my mouth.

***

Once we were away from the main crush Scott put his foot down, but it still took another six minutes to reach Henry’s street.

Scott turned in so hard the truck gave a little wriggle as the suspension overloaded. In the back Aimee and Xander were clinging on to the side panels and laughing to each other like it was an amusement park ride.

As we sped along the street I was checking out parked cars and empty driveways, comparing the layout against the mental image I’d snapped the last time we were there. It all seemed quiet, normal, with no new cars too smart for the area, no suspicious vans. I was aware of a slight disorientation, even so, in trying to overlay my night-time memory onto daylight.

Following Trey’s directions, Scott pulled up hard enough in front of Henry’s run-down house to have the neighbours twitching. If this had been the kind of estate where the neighbours bothered taking notice of what people got up to.

The place looked worse in the harsh sunlight. The wooden siding of the house itself had once been done pale blue, as though with paint left over from a swimming pool. The broken trellis that skirted the bottom pretended to be white, as did the window trims and the wooden supports for the porch, which leaned very slightly over at an angle. This gave the effect that the whole structure was collapsing slowly sideways off the front of the house. For all I knew, that might have been the case.

My bag was still unzipped, ready. I swung it onto my shoulder as I opened the passenger door. “I suppose it’s pointless to tell you to stay in the car?” I said but I wasn’t really expecting an answer. Besides, the four of them had already hopped out onto the dusty dirt driveway. The sight of their ready grins made me scowl.

I led the way past the battered Corvette and up the rickety steps. I leaned on the bell, hearing it ring through the house but no-one came to answer. We stood like that for a few moments, waiting. The kids’ grins had become a little more forced now and they began to squabble in a lighthearted undertone amongst themselves.

I tuned out the bickering, wishing they were anywhere but behind me on this. All the time I let my eyes drift across the scene over the road from Henry’s place but there was nobody in sight. It jarred.

Saturday afternoon and nobody in sight. Not a single person. Not even a dog. As soon as we’d hit the end of the street something had spooked me and now I knew what it was.

Henry had been very specific about time. Why? Anyone needing proof of his connection to Trey couldn’t reasonably have expected him to have the kid on tap, instantly available, so why the tight deadline? Why the urgency? Unless . . .

My heart had begun to pump again, setting that tingle along my forearms, that shiver between my shoulders. I dropped my right hand nonchalantly into the open bag hanging from my shoulder as I pulled open the outer screen door with my left.

The inner door was old, the paint faded although with two tough-looking shiny locks at different heights along the leading edge. When I tried the handle, it turned without resistance and the door opened.

I heard Xander suck in a breath. “Man, are you sure we should—”

“Shut up,” I murmured, and nudged the door all the way wide. It swung slowly back against the wall of the hallway, revealing the same grotty little living space. The door at the end of the corridor was the only one closed. I took one step across the threshold but that was all I needed before I knew the smell.

When I brought my hand out of the bag the SIG was in it. I shrugged the bag onto the floor. Without looking over my shoulder I said tightly, “Get back in the truck. Turn it round and have the engine running.”

They didn’t argue with me. Maybe they’d caught the odour too, even if they couldn’t identify it. Living in a climate like Florida’s, how can you fail to recognise the smell of death for what it is?

“Is it – is it him?” Trey’s hushed voice by my shoulder sounded a little wavery.

I glanced back at him, took in the pale but determined face and didn’t repeat my last order.

“Yes, I think so,” I said. “You up to this?”

He nodded once and I wasn’t going to ask him again. Together we took the few short steps along the hallway and opened the door to Henry’s lair.

The man of the house was sitting in the chair where we’d last seen him, amid a sea of wreckage and destruction.

And blood.

Henry’s massive torso had been tied into position with nylon rope and his wrists had been handcuffed to the metal arms of the chair, then double-secured with silver duct tape around his forearms. They must have needed the two methods of holding him down while they methodically broke every one of his fingers.

They’d gagged him while they’d done it, wrapping more duct tape around his face, half covering one ear. It was tight enough to distort Henry’s bulging cheeks and make his jaw sag, like his whole head was being squeezed in the middle. The dirty dishcloth they’d forced into his mouth was just visible beneath the lower corner of the tape, poking out like a lizard tongue.

His head was slumped forwards so his chins rested on his chest. His eyes were closed, but I didn’t bother to check for a pulse. After the men who’d tortured him had finished extracting whatever he had to give them, they’d put a single bullet through the centre of his forehead. They’d held the barrel close enough for the explosive discharge to tattoo an imprint into his flesh around the small neat hole. Henry would, without a doubt, have known exactly what was coming to him.

It hadn’t been a small calibre gun they’d used, either. The impact had lifted off the back of his skull, radically redecorating the window and far wall of the room in the process. The round had kept going, scattering the slats of the venetian blind and taking out the small centre pane of glass, then travelling on to God knows where in the trees beyond.

Behind me I heard a slithering bump and I turned to find Trey had concertina’d slowly down the door jamb. He was still clutching desperately at the woodwork even after his skinny rump had hit the floor.

I opened my mouth to say something but realised there wasn’t much I could say that was going to help in a situation like this. I stepped carefully further into the room, trying to keep my feet out of the blood. The flinty taste of it was sharp on the back of my tongue as I breathed.

So that was why Henry had sounded breathless on the phone.

Not excitement. Not greed.

Pain.

Poor bastard.

But who had done this to him? And were they still waiting around to do the same to us?

With an acute awareness of time passing, I eyed what was left of Henry’s prized computer array. Every piece of it had been trashed and I didn’t know nearly enough about them to work out if anything could be salvaged from the ruins. But I was damned if I was going to come this far and leave with nothing. I turned back to Trey. He hadn’t moved a muscle.

“Trey,” I said, loudly. “Would any of this gear still work?”

He shook his head a little as if to clear it, like a boxer who’s just taken a good strong combination to the jaw and is doing his best, against all expectation, to stay in the fight.

“Wha-what?”

“Henry’s computers,” I said, slow and clear. “Would any of them still work enough for us to find out who he was in contact with?”

“I dunno,” Trey said, unable to take his eyes off the corpse. It was the hands, I noticed, more than the head that bothered him. It seemed such a deliberately sadistic act to take the hands of a man who lived by the dexterity of his fingers.

I moved in front of the boy, blocking the vision. “Trey,” I said again, bending over him. “We don’t have much time. Think about it.”

It took him a moment to refocus on me, like an old camera struggling to follow the action. “We might get something off of the hard drive, I guess,” he said at last.

“Great,” I said, giving him an encouraging smile. “Where do I find it and what does it look like?”

“Them,” he said. He cleared his throat. “He was using three separate systems. They’ll each have a hard drive, and he could have a back-up unit somewhere as well.”

“Three plus a back-up?” I repeated. I glanced at my watch. This was all taking much too long. “OK, where are they likely to be?”

Trey shook his head again but just when I was about to snap at him he dragged himself to his feet and wiped his nose across the back of his hand. “Last time we were here I kinda noticed that he only had one machine connected to the Net,” he said.

I shrugged. “Meaning?”

“Less chance of picking up a virus and if you do you don’t, like, lose your whole setup, like you would if they were all networked together.” He nodded towards one of the tower units on the far side of the room, carefully avoiding what lay between him and it. “That’s the only one plugged into a phone jack.”

“How difficult is it to take the hard drive out of it?”

“A coupla minutes if I had a screwdriver.”

“Here.” I pulled my Swiss Army knife out of my pocket and threw it across to him. “Get on with it.”

Trey didn’t want to come any further into the room than he had done already and he certainly didn’t want to touch the computer he’d indicated. It had been behind Henry at the moment he’d been killed and its outer casing had taken on a colour and texture not usually available in office equipment catalogues.

He took a quick peek at what was left of the back of Henry’s head just once while he worked. That was enough, even for a fifteen-year-old kid who lives on a diet of thrill rides and horror flicks. After that he kept his back slightly turned and his chin tucked down.

As soon as the stained outer casing was removed, his hands seemed to steady and he fumbled less. The hard drive he’d mentioned was about the same size as a double-album CD case. It wasn’t long before he stood up with it in his hand.

I grabbed a towel from the kitchen and quickly wiped over the surfaces I thought we’d touched. Better for the police not to find our prints at another murder scene, if we could help it. I smiled bracingly again. “OK?” I said. “Then let’s go.”

We hurried back down the hallway as far as the outer screen door. I picked my bag off the floor and Trey shoved the hard drive into it.

Scott had swung the Dodge round and was sitting with the motor turning over, as requested. He saw us appear and started to wave, just as a man in a dark suit stepped out from behind the shrubbery of the house opposite.

I elbowed Trey back into the hallway and brought the SIG up in front of me, almost as one move. In the truck, Scott, Aimee and Xander hadn’t noticed what was going on behind them and when they saw the gun come out their expressions froze.

“Get down!” I shouted.

The man in the suit reacted to the warning much faster than the kids. I didn’t see him pull a gun but one had suddenly appeared in his hand. He kept low, crabbing sideways so that he had the cover of a rusting Chevrolet. I put one round into the front end of it, shattering a headlight, just to keep his head down.

As I did so, another two figures appeared round the corners of the houses on either side of Henry’s, closing in fast. This was getting silly.

“Get back into the house!” I yelled to the kids.

Xander and Aimee jumped straight out of the pickup bed onto the scrubby front lawn, hitting the ground already running. Scott should have just hutched across the front seat of the Dodge and left via the passenger door, the one nearest to the house, but panic stole from his logic and left it weak.

He opened the driver’s door and got straight out onto the road instead. As he sprinted round the front of the truck the man behind the Chevrolet rose into a crouch. He was holding a silvered revolver with a stubby barrel but he had the advantage of short range.

He fired three shots, the second of which hit Scott in the back. I’ll never forget the look of sheer surprise on the kid’s face. He stumbled over his own feet and began to stagger.

“Shit,” I muttered.

Aimee, who’d just reached the safety of the hallway, turned as I spoke. When she caught sight of Scott she started screaming.

I moved out fast onto the porch, aware that almost anything was better than staying close to that noise. Scott had made it halfway to us but he was losing momentum and direction. The man behind the Chevrolet had risen into plain sight and was steadying his aim for another shot.

I ran across the grass until I was up against the solid front end of the Dodge and shot the man on the other side of the Chevy, just once, about half an inch below his right eye. He fell back behind the car and didn’t come up again. I hadn’t expected him to.

His mates took that as their cue to open fire but I’d lost interest in this uneven game. I turned back for the house, ducking my shoulder under Scott’s arm as I ran past him, just as his legs gave out and he started to sag. I swept him forwards, using all my strength to keep him on his feet. Xander ventured out as far as the porch steps to help take the load. The bullets seemed to be raining down all around us. How the hell could they keep missing?

We all burst through the narrow doorway into the hall and fell onto the tiles. Aimee slammed the door shut behind us, turning the locks firmly like that was going to keep them out.

“Shit man, who are these people?” Xander muttered softly under his breath. “Like, shit!”

Aimee had bent and was clutching Scott’s hand as he thrashed and twisted. Her eyes were shimmering with tears. “Do something!” she pleaded. “He’s bleeding.”

I knelt in front of Scott who was sprawled where he’d landed, half on his side, propped against the wall to the kitchen. He was still conscious and crying with the pain.

I eased his hands away from his body. The bullet had left a small but messy entry hole just behind his left hip. There was no exit wound, but that didn’t make it any better. He was losing blood at a rate that meant most of the loose rug in the hallway was already greasy with it.

“We need to get him away from the door,” I said. Xander and Aimee’s faces were grey with shock. Suddenly this adventure game had cracked back and bitten them, big style. It wasn’t fair. “Scott, you’re going to have to move now.”

“No-o,” he wept, writhing when we tried to get him up. In the end we just grabbed the edges of the rug and dragged it, with him on top, through the door into the tiny bathroom. He mewled at every jolt.

I gathered all the towels I could find from the rail and used them to pack onto the wound. They were pale colours that turned almost instantly scarlet. “Here,” I said to Aimee and Xander. “Lean on the towel, keep it pressed hard onto his hip. Like this.”

My demonstration was met with a squeal of protest from Scott. His legs threshed weakly.

“You’re hurting him!” Xander objected.

“It’ll do more than hurt him if we don’t stop the bleeding,” I shot back. “Keep it pressed on – as hard as you can. And call the cops.”

Xander glanced at me sharply, but he nodded and flicked his mobile phone out of his pocket. I heard him already speaking to the dispatcher as I got up and moved past Trey, who was still in the hallway, staring at his injured friend.

“For God’s sake stay down and keep out of sight of any of the windows,” I told him.

I tiptoed round the house, skirting Henry’s corpse to peer carefully out of the broken window in that room. Outside it had all gone quiet again. The kitchen looked out onto the front porch but from that angle I couldn’t see if the man I’d hit was still lying behind the Chevrolet.

I cursed myself then for shooting him dead. At the time my only thought had been to save Scott’s life, but wounding the man would have been a far better strategy. That way his comrades would have had to tie up manpower and resources to either get him away from the scene, or treat him there, as we were doing with Scott. Killing the gunman outright meant they could forget about him until the fight was over.

Which, by the looks of things, wasn’t going to take long.

“The cops are on their way,” Xander said, the strain clear in his voice. “They said to just sit tight and wait for them to get here.”

I nodded. I was waiting for our opponents to make the first move in any case and it wasn’t a lengthy wait. Just as I started to move back out of the kitchen again the first of the shots came, half a dozen of them in a random pattern straight through the front door. I dived across the hallway and landed half on top of Trey, keeping him flattened down hard onto the floor.

After the pandemonium came an eerie silence, broken only by Scott’s quiet moaning.

Then a voice I didn’t recognise shouted, “Hey, Fox, we want you and the kid. Come on out and the others get off.”

I lifted my head. “And if we don’t?” I yelled back.

I could almost hear the man shrug. “Makes no difference to us.”

I shuffled round until I could look at the bullet holes in the door again. Sunlight shafted through them, highlighting the dust motes that drifted and spun inside the hallway. The holes ranged from a couple of feet off the ground to head height. If we’d been standing they would have hit us. Not exactly warning shots, then.

I hutched back into the bathroom. Xander and Aimee both had their eyes fixed on me. They were still keeping the balled-up towels hard against Scott’s hip, their hands bloody with their efforts. Scott protested less, now. His face had turned almost as pale as his hair and pearls of sweat had formed on his forehead, sliding sideways to the floor.

“The cops are on their way,” I called to the men outside, hoping that their need not to be apprehended was greater than their need to kill us.

The man on the other side of the door just laughed. “I know,” he said, almost lazy with it. “Actually, Charlie, we’re already here.”

For a moment I was stilled by my own surprise, then I scrambled across the hallway into the kitchen and risked a peek through the window. Outside, behind Scott’s pickup, stood a good-looking man I recognised instantly. Even without his trademark Oakley eyejackets.

He wasn’t in uniform, like the first time I’d seen him at the house in Fort Lauderdale. Neither was he in casual dress, as at the theme park. Today was different. Today Oakley man was wearing a dark suit and white shirt like the other two men alongside him. Brought a whole new meaning to the phrase dressed to kill.

I looked at the others while I had the chance, but I knew I hadn’t seen either of them before. One was short and stocky, with pale gingery-blond hair. The other guy was dark skinned, slightly Hispanic, with a pencil-thin moustache across his upper lip and a single gold hoop in his left ear. I wondered if all three of them were cops and just how they were planning on explaining the dead man behind the Chevrolet.

I dropped back below the level of the kitchen cabinets. Through the doorway I could see Scott had started to twitch, going almost into convulsions. I could hear Aimee’s voice taking on an edge of panic as she whispered to Xander.

I crawled back through to the bathroom.

“It’s the same guy,” I said to Trey. He didn’t need to ask who I meant. The fear froze his face into a tight mask across his bones. “We’re going to have to give ourselves up.”

He hesitated, just fractionally, then nodded once, not arguing about it.

“OK,” I shouted. “I’ll bring Trey out, but only if you let us get the kid who’s injured out of here first.”

“You’re in no position to bargain,” Oakley man shouted back.

“That’s true, but if you have to shoot us out of here you’re likely to lose more men. This way’s easier.”

There was a pause, as though he was weighing up the merit of what I’d had to say. His voice matched his appearance, I realised. I didn’t know enough about American accents to pinpoint his origins, but it sounded educated. The kind of voice I would have expected from that attractive collection of features.

“OK, Charlie,” he said at last. “Come on out and we won’t stop the others leaving.”

“No way,” I said. “Xander and Aimee will bring Scott out first and put him into the pickup. As soon as they drive away, you get us. Not before.”

And if you double-cross us, I didn’t add out loud, then I will do my best to put a bullet in your brain, you bastard.

“OK,” Oakley man said again. “You got yourself a deal.”

“Right,” I said, more quietly, to Xander and Aimee. “Grab the biggest bath towel and get that under Scott. You’ll have to use that to carry him like he’s in a sling. Get him to the nearest hospital,” I added, trying to smile reassuringly. “He should be fine. He’ll make it.”

We manoeuvred ourselves with difficulty in the cramped bathroom, getting the towel in position. Scott’s cries had subsided into a low groaning now and his skin was chilled and clammy to the touch.

Xander was physically strong, so I put him at Scott’s head, leaving Aimee to carry the end of the towel at his feet. As they staggered into the hallway with their burden I slipped the hard drive we’d taken from Henry’s computer into Xander’s pocket.

“If we don’t get out of this,” I murmured, “that might tell you who’s behind it all.”

He nodded briefly, face tight with tension. “Good luck, man,” he said.

“Right,” I called through the door. “They’re coming out. Pull your men back to the other side of the street.”

I waited a moment or two, opened the door just far enough for the two of them to hustle through it, then slammed it shut again and moved back to my kitchen window vantage point.

Oakley man may have been many things, but at least he kept to his promise as far as Scott was concerned. The three of them watched from the far side of the Chevy as Xander and Aimee struggled to get Scott into the back of the pickup. Aimee hopped into the load bed with him, as Xander got behind the wheel. He set off fast, as though scared they’d change their mind and try to prevent him. I watched the Dodge all the way to the end of the street, until it turned out into traffic and disappeared from view.

And all the time I was furiously searching for a way out of this that didn’t involve our surrender. That didn’t involve our defeat and capture.

“OK, Charlie,” Oakley man said. The three of them had moved forwards again, taking up position just to the rear of Henry’s old Corvette which was parked to the side of the house. “I’ve kept my side of the bargain. Now it’s your turn.”

“How do I know you’ve let them get clear?” I hedged. “Not exactly one for leaving witnesses, are you? Let’s give them a little longer.”

He laughed again, but there wasn’t much amusement in his voice. “If you’re waiting for rescue, Charlie, you’re gonna have a long wait,” he said. “No-one’s gonna save you this time.”

I didn’t answer right away. I knew I didn’t have many options left. Not ones that were survivable, at any rate.

For Trey or for me.

I looked down. The hands that were tightly gripping the SIG were covered in Scott’s blood. I knew I had just two rounds left in the gun and there were three bad guys left outside. Not good odds, whichever way you looked at it.

“Come on Charlie,” Oakley man said gently. “You make us come in there and get you and you’ll regret it.”

“Why?” I tossed back, reckless now. “You’re probably going to kill us anyway.”

I expected some kind of reassurance but it didn’t come. Instead there was a pause and then that bloody annoying laugh again. “True, but some ways of dying are harder than others,” he said and the very lightness of his tone made his words all the more brutal, all the more chilling. “Just ask your pal Henry in there.”