First Drop

by Zoe Sharp

  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 T
rey. 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.”

  Fourteen

  “There’s someone under the house.”

  “What?”

  For a moment I didn’t compute what Trey had said to me. His voice was little more than a whisper. I stuck my head round the kitchen door and stared at him across the narrow hallway.

  He was sitting with his back ramrod straight against the open bathroom door, hardly daring to move more than his eyes.

  “There’s someone under the house,” he insisted. “I can hear them.”

  And when I listened, I could hear them, too. Nothing overt, just the faintest cautious scuff and slither of someone trying to ease their way into a position. I felt my mouth dry so that my tongue stuck to the roof of it. So, Oakley man was trying to keep me talking while his men outflanked us.

  I looked at the floor, as if I was going to be able to spot some sign of this invasion like a lump under a carpet. I’d known when I’d first seen Henry’s house that it was constructed off the ground, hence the rotting trellis round the bottom of the outside but it hadn’t occurred to me that the gap might be big enough for a person to squeeze into. If I had I might have considered it as an escape route for Trey.

  And now, it seemed, it was too late for that.

  Somebody had beaten me to it.

  “Get into the bath and keep your head down,” I said. The bath tub was old-fashioned enamelled steel and a heavy enough grade to offer some measure of protection – either from the side or from below.

  I waited until Trey was safely in, then edged back across the hallway, trying to move very quietly. When I checked out of the kitchen window again, only the Hispanic man was visible, covering the front. There was no sign of Oakley man or Ginger.

  Maybe now would be a good time to make a break for it . . .

  I thought of Oakley man’s last words. So we were doomed anyway. The defeat tasted dirty, like spoiled food. Better to go out fighting, even with a pitiful supply of ammunition.

  “Trey?”

  He lifted just the top of his head over the rim of the bath and gave me a What now?look.

  “Change of plan,” I said, urgent. I jerked my head towards the front door. “Let’s go.”

  I waited until he’d climbed out and moved up close behind me. “If anything happens,” I said carefully, glancing at him, “you run like hell and you keep running, do you hear me? You don’t stop and you don’t come back, no matter what, understand?”

  He stared at me, then nodded, reluctant, even a little sullen.

  “Try and stay away from the police if you can,” I said and on impulse added, “Go to Walt and Harriet’s place on the beach. They’ll take care of you.” And I realised as I said it that it was true. I trusted the canny old man without quite knowing why.

  I also realised, in a detached kind of way, that I wasn’t expecting to get out of this alive. So, I’d fooled Oakley man once but that was when he wasn’t expecting me to be up to the job. I’d fooled the two men in the Buick, too – I could only assume they were his accomplices – when they hadn’t been expecting me to be armed. But now he had the measure of me, for what it was worth.

  I stood in that dingy hallway and felt the full reality of it settle on me, like a sense of calm. I was twenty-six years old. I always thought I’d feel more emotion at the prospect of my own death, when I’d thought about it at all. I wondered if I would have been approaching it with such equanimity if I’d known Sea
n was out there somewhere, moving heaven and earth to get to me.

  I tried to reach out, get a feel for him. I’d hoped for some kind of connection, some suspicion that he was alive or dead, but there was nothing. A big empty void where once he’d engaged some space in my mind. Perhaps there would be a time to grieve for him later.

  If I made it.

  I eased the locks clear and opened the newly ventilated door just enough to peer through the gap. Still the only person I could see in front of the house was the Hispanic man with the earring. His attention was focused off to my left, towards the corner of the house.