First Drop (16 page)

I flicked my eyes past him. The two cops were still in sight, stopping someone else further along the beach. I looked back and found Walt had been watching me carefully.

I smiled back at him. “Well, if you’re sure, then that’s very kind of you, sir,” I said. “We’d love to stay for breakfast.”

Walt led us into the house through the screen door where his wife had been uneasily observing our approach. She stepped back without speaking as we trooped into her kitchen, confining whatever doubts she may have had about Walt’s foolhardy actions to a single hurried look.

“Now, now, Harriet,” Walt said, catching it. He hooked the Panama onto a peg by the door and dumped the bag of shells on a worktop. Then he turned to face her, taking both her small hands gently in his, engulfing them completely. He was a good head taller than she was and he had to drop his chin to meet her eyes. “This young lady here’s from Manchester, where Grace went to school. How could I hear that and not invite them in for some good home cooking?”

She smiled indulgently at him, but didn’t look much reassured.

I moved forwards and put my hand out. “I’m Charlie and this is Trey. It’s very nice to meet you,” I said in my best well brought-up voice. “I’ve never been to America before and I’m overwhelmed by your husband’s generosity in inviting us into your home like this.”

Her shoulders relaxed a little. That was different, I saw. National pride was at stake. She disengaged herself from her husband and took the hand I’d offered. Her grip was firm rather than strong, the skin thin and soft.

“You’re very welcome,” she said. “I’ll get right on it. How d’you take your coffee?”

She poured us both a cup of the real stuff from a pot on the side. I added sugar to mine to try and stop my hands from shaking, aware that I hadn’t managed to keep anything down since that midday snack at the park yesterday. Besides, there’s only so much adrenaline your body can produce without giving it an outlet and mine was threatening to swamp me.

Trey and I hovered and drank our coffee while Harriet cooked and Walt fussed around, setting the table and generally getting in her way. They kept up a friendly banter between the two of them as they worked together. Trey watched, fascinated.

“OK, we’re nearly all set,” Walt announced, putting four glasses and a jug of iced water onto the large oval table near the kitchen window. “Either of you two kids need to use the bathroom before we eat?”

I glanced down at the dirty state of my hands and took him up on the offer. He pointed me in the right direction and left me to it, which was rather more trusting than I would have been, given the circumstances.

The back of the house, the one facing the water, was almost entirely open-plan, with just an island unit between the dining kitchen and the large living room, and a study area at the far side. Two ceiling-mounted fans lazily stirred the air in the living room.

Off that room were two hallways, one of which contained the bathroom and what looked like a couple of spare bedrooms. The bathroom was clean but shabby, the short little shallow bath marked by years of hard water.

As I scrubbed my hands I glanced at my reflection in the mirror above the sink. The side of my face still looked a little bright, but you might simply have taken that for overexposure to the sun. In fact, with my reddish-blonde colouring, if I didn’t take care when we were outside today it really
would
be sunburn.

I pulled back my perspective a moment and looked at my whole face, realising that the eyes staring steadily back at me showed no signs of guilt for what I’d done. I’d been hoping for some mark of inner torment, something to show that I was normal, that I was just like everyone else.

Not just a cold-blooded killer.

I looked away, turning to dry my hands on the towel hanging from the rail, then walked out of the bathroom taking care not to meet my eyes again.

When I got back to the kitchen I found Harriet serving up the promised blueberry pancakes. They looked more like thick Scotch pancakes than the familiar thin-style crêpes. She handed me a small jug of what appeared to be golden syrup, but turned out to be maple instead.

Walt and Trey were chatting about car stereos by the sound of it. The old man had a way of listening with his head on one side, like what you were saying was the most important thing he’d heard in ages.

It worked really well with Trey, who was sitting taller in his seat, puffed up with pride as he enthused to Walt about the big sound-off competition going on at the Ocean Center. Trey had already cut his pancakes into strips and slathered them with maple syrup. Now he abandoned his knife and started shovelling the sodden bits into his mouth with his fork, not bothering to stop talking while he ate. He shut up abruptly when I sat down.

I smiled at Harriet to cover the awkward silence. “You have a lovely house,” I said. “Have you been here long?”

“Oh, since we got married,” she said, fetching a plate of thin crispy bacon strips and indicating that we should dig in and help ourselves. “Walt and his daddy started building this place in the fall and we moved in in the spring, right after the wedding. Forty-five years ago next month.”

“My family’s been in construction going back three generations,” Walt put in.

“It’s been a good family home,” his wife said, contented.

“It still is, by the looks of it,” I said, finding that bacon went amazingly well with maple syrup. Even if it hadn’t I still would have eaten it. I hadn’t realised just how hungry I really was and it took some effort not to let my table manners slip to Trey’s level. “Do you have a lot of grandchildren?”

Harriet frowned. “No,” she said, “we’ve never been blessed.”

Surprised, I nodded to the toys in the garden and Walt smiled.

“We foster. Y’know – kids from problem homes,” he explained. “Try and set ‘em back on the right path.”

I thought about Sean’s sister and his younger brother, who’d taken his parents’ broken marriage much harder than Sean had done. His kid brother, in particular, had gone off the rails in fairly spectacular fashion the winter before. We’d since managed to retrieve him, more or less, but how either of them were going to react when they found out that the big brother they idolised was dead, I couldn’t begin to guess.

“So,” Walt said now, mopping his mouth with a paper napkin and sitting back in his chair, “Charlie here’s from Manchester, that much I know, but that doesn’t sound like an English accent you got there, Trey. Where you from, buddy?”

It was casually slipped in. If it hadn’t been for the shrewd look in the old man’s eyes, I wouldn’t have read anything more into the question.

“Oh, well, we’ve lived in a bunch of different places,” Trey said airily. “My dad kept us, like, moving around a lot.”

I glared at him. If he was trying to make it sound like Keith was a petty criminal, he was going about it the right way. “Trey’s from down near Miami,” I put in quickly. “I’m just looking after him.”

Now it was Trey’s turn to scowl. He didn’t like the idea that I was his nursemaid any better than he liked the idea that I was his bodyguard.

“Uh-huh,” Walt said slowly. He poured himself a glass of water, offering the jug to the rest of us before setting it down again on the table top. His movements had a slow precision to them, as though he weighed the merits of each one before he did it. “So how come you were sleeping on the beach last night?” he asked.

It was a reasonable question, I couldn’t argue about that. What to tell him was the problem.

“We got robbed yesterday,” Trey said. And just when I thought that maybe he was starting to think on his feet at last he had to go and embroider it unnecessarily. “Four guys jumped us – with guns. Took all our money.”

Harriet immediately made sympathetic noises, but I was watching Walt. His only reaction was to let his eyes flick up briefly from under those disordered eyebrows. He let his wife run on a little, then said, “Gee, that’s bad luck, Charlie. So what did the cops say?”

I took another sip of coffee while I thought furiously about my answer. Damn Trey’s smart comment. I hadn’t a clue what the American police would be likely to have told us in such a situation. I put my cup down again. “We didn’t go to them,” I said at last. “The guys who mugged us threatened to come back for us if we did and anyway—” I shrugged, “—we didn’t have much money to give them.”

“Musta had your credit cards, though – if you couldn’t get yourselves a motel room last night,” Walt said, apparently busying himself forking a slice of watermelon from the central platter onto his plate. “I know it’s Spring Break an’ all, but there’s still plenty of places further out with vacancies.”

For a moment I didn’t answer. This was getting sticky. I glanced at Trey’s worried face. “We’ll sort something better out for tonight,” I said. That, at least, was true.

Walt nodded at that, his eyes hooded and his face serious. “So,” he went on, his voice still slow and pleasant, “was that before or after you crashed your car?”

I went utterly still, eyes fixed on Walt’s face. How could I have ever thought he was just a nice friendly old man? He was ruthless. Relentless.

“Oh Walt,” Harriet protested with a shaky laugh, “I’m sure you’re mistaken about that.”

“You were driving, young lady,” he went on mildly, ignoring her. The sheer certainty in his tone sent the blood thumping in my ears.

“Whatever gives you that idea?” I asked, hearing the slightly steely note that had crept into my voice, however hard I tried to maintain my neutrality.

He had been trimming the skin off his watermelon with one of the table knives, and now he used the rounded blade as a pointer, waving it towards my bare forearms where they rested on the table top.

“When the airbag went off it burned along the inside of your arms as it deployed,” he said conversationally. “I’ve seen it happen plenty before. It’s one of the sure signs if the driver and passenger have tried to swap places after the event.”

“I see,” I said, unable to stop myself shifting my hands into my lap. If I’d remembered my upbringing and kept my elbows off the table to start with, I reflected, I might not have been rumbled. “You seem very well-informed about the mechanics of road traffic accidents for a third-generation construction worker.”

“Walt never followed his daddy into the construction business,” Harriet said. She was sitting very straight and very still, I saw. Her voice was unnaturally calm and clear. “After the navy he spent twenty-five years with the Bureau.”

The Bureau
. Even a non-American like me knew that meant the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Shit. We’d escaped from the cops and walked straight into the arms of the silver FBI.

I pushed my chair back and stood up. Trey followed suit, almost scrambling to his feet. Walt and his wife didn’t move to rise with us and they both kept their hands still. Harriet’s jaw was tight. I hated being the cause of her sudden fear.

“We’re really very grateful to you for feeding us,” I said, giving her a small smile, “but unfortunately we really must be leaving now.”

I backed towards the door we’d come in by, pushing the kid ahead of me. Trey shuffled, as though he could hardly move under his own steam.

As I reached it, Walt asked sadly, “What do you think you’re gonna achieve by running, Charlie?”

“Right now? Staying alive,” I said, flat.

“Maybe I can help.”

I shook my head. “The people we’re dealing with have no compunction about killing bystanders,” I said. “This is not your fight, Walt. You’d be better off staying out of it.”

“If you change your mind, call me. I mean it. Any time – day or night,” he said and reeled off a ten-digit number. “You want me to write that down?”

“I can remember it,” Trey said. I glanced at him and he shrugged. “I got a head for figures.”

I pushed open the screen door and thrust him out into the garden. As I stepped through it myself Walt threw me a final question.

“This trouble you’re in – it’s that bad, huh?”

I gave him a grim smile. “Keep watching the news,” I said.

***

We spent most of the rest of the morning lurking on the beach around the busy Boardwalk area, which was like an old-fashioned seaside promenade, complete with a pier. We tried to stay out of the way of anyone who looked vaguely official and I gave all the wrinklies a wide berth, too. However harmless they might first appear.

Closer to the centre of Daytona, where South Atlantic crossed over and became North Atlantic Avenue, there was a funfair with one of these contraptions that turns people into human bungee balls. They winch a circular cage down to ground level, strap you in, then release it. The cage goes catapulting up into the sky, suspended by elastic from two support towers. Trey was desperate to give it a try.

I had no desire to become reacquainted with my breakfast so soon after eating it, but I talked him out of having a go on the grounds of poor security.