FIRST DROP: Charlie Fox book four

by Zoe Sharp

  I resisted an urge of a different kind, one that would have involved swift contact between the back of my hand and the side of his head, and shepherded him into the nearest group of restaurants. According to the menu boards they served a whole range of stuff that sounded surprisingly good for that kind of venue, including taco, Caesar, or garden salads, chili beef, and baked potatoes.

  I should have guessed that a fifteen-year-old would despise anything not stuffed with E-numbers and MSG.

  “Oh gross,” he whinged. “I want proper food.”

  Proper food, it turned out, was burger and fries which we found at one of the smaller concession stands. At least it was warmer sitting out there at the benches provided. You just had to fend off the bold sidlings of the local scavenging bird population. If you chewed with your mouth open they’d practically have your food straight off your tongue. Trey was in constant danger of losing his lunch.

  The kid shovelled down his meal doused in ketchup to equal proportions, pushing the lettuce and tomato garnish to the side of his plate like he’d found a slug in it.

  Still, it was nice to sit down somewhere that didn’t try to buck you out of your seat. Even in the shade of an awning the day had a bottomless warmth to it that permeated right down to your bones. I’d just spent a cold winter being reminded about all the bones of mine I’d previously broken. Being here was a luxury, I told myself, regardless of having to look after an obnoxious oik like Trey.

  The kid finished his burger, slurped the last of his drink up through the straw and got to his feet, dragging the crumpled park map out of his pocket.

  “We gotta go ride Demon next,” he decided.

  Great. Now we have fear and indigestion, too.

  I got up and took my time over collecting the debris of our meal and sliding it into one of the nearby bins, trying to give my food some time to go down before I had to stomach another vomit-inducing piece of so-called entertainment. I’d never been on a rollercoaster of any description before today. If, when this assignment in Florida was over I never got on another as long as I lived, it would still be too soon.

  Nevertheless, it went with the territory. When I’d agreed to an alternative career in close protection, to become a bodyguard, I’d agreed to take discomfort along with reward and danger.

  Just my luck that I’d got landed with Trey.

  ***

  The Demon coaster was across the other side of the park. Scarlet-painted bits of its twisted superstructure were visible over the tops of the trees as we drew nearer. It looked immense and tangled, with no obvious sense of direction. Signs we passed informed us that Demon was newer, higher, and faster than anything we’d ridden so far. I was amazed Trey hadn’t headed straight for it, and said so.

  He shrugged. “It’s a steelie,” he said, dismissive.

  “A what?”

  “A steel coaster, not a wooden one. They’re OK, I s’pose, but woodies rule. They’re, like, awesome.”

  I tried not to think about the ride quality of something that didn’t live up to the bone-shaker we’d spent half the morning on.

  The queue line for Demon was certainly no shorter. We weaved our way in guided by a maze of stainless steel barriers. If you touched them your hands came away sticky with the sweat from a thousand nervous palms. I’m not sure mine were any drier.

  As we moved deeper in we came to a split in the path, manned by a young attendant who only had a couple of years on Trey at most.

  “Singles to your left,” he said as we approached.

  Trey started to go left. I caught his arm.

  “Hang on a moment, what does that mean?”

  He tried to shake me loose. “If you go in the singles line it means you get on the ride faster ‘cos they use you to, like, fill up the empty seats.”

  “No way,” I muttered, steering him off to the right. “We’d rather go on together, thanks,” I told the attendant, who shrugged and pointed us wordlessly in the other direction, his attention already lost.

  As we joined the end of the long, shuffling line Trey was back to sulking again. “Oh man,” he complained, “anyone would think you were my mother.”

  I didn’t know what had happened to Mrs Pelzner. She could have been off visiting her folks, spending her divorce settlement, or dead. It was difficult to respond to Trey’s jibe without knowing which, so I let it pass.

  “Look, Trey,” I said, making a valiant stab at tolerance again. “The company your dad works for has hired me to keep you safe. It’s hard enough doing that on a bloody rollercoaster to begin with, but there’s no way I can do my job if we don’t stick together. You don’t have to like it,” I added, as he opened his mouth to protest, “but that’s the way it is, so learn to live with it.”

  Yeah, right, his expression said, but he didn’t speak to me again as we shuffled our way to the front of the queue line.

  I had to admit, privately, that the singles route did seem to be moving much faster. I swear I saw one kid go round twice in the time it took us to get there.

  I even saw the good-looking guy again who’d been in the wooden coaster gift store. I only spotted him because one of the attendants held the car back while she made him take off his hat and sunglasses. So this one really was going to turn you upside down and shake the change out of your pockets.

  The guy was a little sheepish to be singled out for censure. He looked around as though hoping no-one else had noticed. And when it was uncovered like that I couldn’t help getting the feeling that I knew his face from somewhere.

  I only had a moment’s glimpse before the car was released and clanked its way up the first lift hill. After what seemed like an eternity, the clanking stopped, there was a pause, and then the usual screaming started.

  They were running two sets of cars on this ride, so it wasn’t long before the last run was in and emptying. I was worrying too much about what was coming next to bother racking my memory for where I might possibly have known the Oakley guy from. As the attendant checked the overhead harness was down securely over my shoulders and buckled to the seat between my legs, I had other things to occupy my mind.

  I was in for a big surprise.

  After the woodies that had been my introduction to coasters, the steelie was a revelation. It was blisteringly quick, yes, but it was smooth the way a sports bike ridden hard on an open road is smooth. It inverted us so many times I lost all comprehension of which way was ground and which was sky, but for the first time I began to see what all the fuss was about.

  “Now that,” I said when it was over, “is more like it!”

  Trey immediately lost all interest in further turns on Demon. He hurried out along the ride exit, his amusement now blighted by my unexpected pleasure. I realised belatedly that all I would have had to do to curtail my earlier torment would have been to make a show of enjoying it. At that moment I could cheerfully have strangled him.

  I went after the kid, determined not to scurry to match his petulant pace. Outside I spotted him over by some shops, perched on a low concrete wall with his arms folded and shoulders hunched. He was too cross even to put on an act in front of the two teenage girls who were sitting next to him. As I walked across the open area between us, I saw the guy from the coaster again out of the corner of my eye, now back in his Oakleys and his Yankees cap.

  And something about the predatory way he moved sent the hairs rising on the back of my neck in a way no rollercoaster, however scary, would ever be able to do.

  He was already closer to Trey than I was and moving closer still, focused on him, intent. His shirt was hanging loose outside his chinos but his right hand was stealing underneath the hem, going for something that was concealed at his waistband. Something I couldn’t see, but could certainly guess at.

  I broke into a run, using my arms to pump up instant speed like a sprinter leaving the blocks. At the last moment Trey became aware of my full-pelt charge and looked up, startled out of his surly guise. Oakley man was watching his expressi
on. He started to twist, head turning.

  And that’s when I hit him.

  I ducked my shoulder and caught him with a full body slam without breaking stride. I hit him hard and low, and was lucky to stay on my feet in the process. I was luckier still I didn’t snap my damned collarbone. He wasn’t carrying muscle bulk but he was solid, all the same.

  Oakley man went down in an ungainly sprawl, letting go the .40 calibre Smith & Wesson he’d been unholstering as he went. The pistol clattered onto the concrete and spun out of both our reach under the legs of the nearest group of fleeing passers-by. I didn’t stop to wait for him to retrieve it, just hurdled his legs and kept on going.

  I grabbed hold of Trey’s shirt by the front and the collar and hauled him sideways off the wall, ignoring his wail of protest. But for once, he didn’t argue about doing what I suggested, or going where I wanted him to go.

  Out of there. Fast.

  I pushed the kid ahead of me, trying to keep my body between his back and our unexpected attacker. I knew I should have just kept my head down and kept running, but I couldn’t resist a quick glance behind us.

  Oakley man was still on the floor. His hat was missing but the sunglasses were still in place, giving his face a terrifyingly blank stare. Worse, he had managed to recover his gun. He was clasping it firmly in both hands and swinging the muzzle in our direction, heedless of the crowd.

  Finding the nearest exit suddenly wasn’t as important as finding cover. I jerked Trey sideways just as the first two shots rang out, so close together the second report sounded like an echo of the first. After that I didn’t need to urge him to greater speed.

  Panic ripped through the immediate vicinity. I’d heard people screaming all day but this was different. This was the real thing. A scattering became a stampede as everyone strove to get out of the firing line. In doing so they inadvertently put themselves directly into it.

  Oakley man wasn’t deterred by having human obstacles in his way. He fired another two-shot salvo towards us just as a terrified woman darted across our path. Both rounds caught her in the body. The second passed straight through in an explosion of blood. She was so close to us that we were both splattered with it as she tumbled.

  I didn’t even stop to check if she was dead.

  In a heartbeat, Trey had shifted from pain in the backside to principal. My sole concern was to get him away from the source of the danger and to keep him alive. Nothing else mattered.

  I’d automatically taken in enough of the park layout during the morning to know where to find the exits. The security guards we encountered on the way were too busy heading for the trouble-spot to try and detain us, despite our freakish appearance.

  We bolted out through the turnstiles and I was suddenly glad Trey had insisted we pay for preferred parking so he didn’t have to walk from the far parking area to the front gate. Nevertheless, by the time we reached the Mercury Sable I’d been allocated the sweat had glued my polo shirt to my back and drenched through where it was tucked in to the waistband of my shorts.

  I fumbled with the key in the door, then bundled Trey straight across the front bench seat into the passenger side, jumping in after him. As I jammed the key into the ignition and cranked up the engine my eyes were frantically searching the nearest rows of cars for the first sign of those wraparound shades.

  I yanked the column-mounted gearlever down into drive and released the parking brake, chirruping the tyres as we set off. I forced myself not to put my foot down too hard on the way out. If Oakley man didn’t know what car we were driving, there was no point in making it obvious. My eyes constantly scanned the rear-view mirror.

  Trey sat huddled in the corner of the passenger seat furthest away from me, his eyes wide and blank with shock. I knew I should do something to reassure him, but for the life of me I couldn’t think what.

  “Put your seatbelt on,” I said instead, calmly. He threw me a disbelieving glance, but buckled up without demur. Shit, he really is frightened.

  I followed the signs for the freeway doing my best not to exceed the posted speed limit. No cars seemed to be making an effort to get close to us. Still, I didn’t start to breathe again until we were on I-95 heading away from Fort Pierce, south towards Fort Lauderdale.

  It was only then, as my heartbeat finally began to settle and my brain started to come out of survival mode, that the question returned of where I’d seen Oakley man before. It lurked brooding at the back of my mind, an itch I couldn’t scratch.

  I pulled the mobile phone they’d given me out of my pocket, noticing for the first time the blood on my bare forearms, and I remembered again the woman who’d been shot in front of us. I glanced down and saw that her blood was all over the front of my pale fawn polo shirt as well, a livid splash of colour already turning dark as it dried. Trey had a few flecks, but I’d caught the brunt of it and looked like an extra from a Tarantino flick. No wonder he’d been unnaturally co-operative.

  I hit the speed-dial for the house. Whitmarsh was in charge of house security and he was going to go ape-shit. But that was nothing to what my boss, Sean was going to do when he found out my low-risk babysitting job had ended in a full-scale assault. The fact that, technically, Whitmarsh had authority over Sean would make very little difference.

  The Pelzners’ home number rang without reply, the endless long burr of the US phone system. I let it ring until it clicked off, then tried it again, checking carefully that I’d punched in the right number. I steered with one hand, flicking my eyes from the phone to the road. There was no mistake.

  I tried Sean’s own personal mobile, but all I got was a recorded message telling me the number I was calling was switched off. I knew that the house was never empty and my boss never had his phone off without leaving it on divert or answering machine.

  Right there, in a big car on a big stretch of open road in a big country, I suddenly began to feel very small, and very lonely.

  And then, because I’d pushed it to some peripheral part of my brain, my mental retrieval system finally connected and spat out the information I’d been searching for. I remembered exactly where I’d seen Oakley man before and I wished to God that I hadn’t.

  It was just about this time I realised how much trouble we were really in.

  Two

  The first State Trooper flashed past in the opposite direction less than ten minutes after we left the park. He was going like hell, lights and sirens at full bore, in a black and tan Chevy Camaro. Even the cops out here had cool cars.

  The distance across the grassy central reservation was such that he couldn’t have seen us in any detail. Hell, in London they would have built housing on a tract of land that size, but Trey still ducked down further in his seat.

  “Are you OK?” I asked him, taking my eyes momentarily off the road, but he just hunched his shoulders in a jerky shrug and turned his face away. If he’d been alone, I realised, he probably would have been crying. If I’d been alone, maybe I would, too.

  I sighed, trying not to snap at him for clamming up on me right when I needed him to tell me everything and anything he knew. And I was pretty sure he knew more than I did.

  Still, for all his pseudo grown-up posturing he was still a kid. An immature kid, at that, and he’d just been through an experience that would have left most adults little more than a puddle of jelly on the floor mat. At least he’d held it together long enough to keep running.

  But from what?

  Even though I’d worked out who our assailant had been, that hadn’t got me much further forwards. I still had no idea why he’d been after Trey. Kill or capture? I wasn’t sure about that one either.

  A stark, vivid snapshot of the woman who’d run in front of us exploded out of nowhere, action frozen at the moment when the bullets struck and the blood sprayed outwards. I hoped with all my heart that she had survived, but I couldn’t find it in me to feel more than fleeting concern for an unlucky stranger. A fractional shift of fate and timing and that could
have – would have – been us. There but for the grace of God . . .

  I gripped the steering wheel tighter in an effort not to lose all self-possession. I focused on my anger instead. It was much safer ground.

  I’d been kept out of the information loop ever since I’d arrived in Florida. With the clarity of hindsight I wished I’d pressed for more background, but they’d just kept patting me on the head and fobbing me off. I’d let it go because I was aware of being new in the business and I hadn’t wanted to make waves, to come across as too pushy.

  What a time to turn over a new leaf.

  ***

  At the time of the abortive attack on Trey Pelzner I’d been in America for just four days. I’d flown into Miami International airport expecting a laid-back couple of weeks’ jaunt in the sun, and no trouble.

  Officially, I’d been working for Sean Meyer’s exclusive close protection agency for six weeks by then. Unofficially, my involvement in the world of the professional bodyguard had begun at a dodgy training school in Germany shortly after New Year.