by Zoe Sharp
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.
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?”