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.
“If the police spot us when we’re up there, we’re sitting ducks,” I told him. Thankfully, he seemed to believe me.
By ten-thirty, in any case, he was itching to get to the sound-off at the Ocean Center to meet his friends. We crossed back to the west side of the main drag, braving five lanes of traffic that didn’t seem to pay any attention to the walk/don’t walk pedestrian signals at the crossings.
The police were everywhere. I kept my head down and hoped that some quirk of fate didn’t make the SIG slip out of its place behind my belt and clatter to the floor in front of one of them.
The banners strung across the front of the Ocean Center announced, ‘Spring Break Nationals – the world’s most famous Sound-Off.’ If I’d never heard of it before, I couldn’t help but hear it now.
There were half a dozen wild-looking cars spread across the expanse of concrete in front of the building. They had amazing paint and graphics, the kind of thing I’d only seen at custom bike shows in the UK. We walked past a Cadillac Escalade with chrome wheels that, according to the tyre size, were a mind-boggling twenty-four inches in diameter. The truck was riding so low that I couldn’t have got four fingers between the side rail and the ground. How on earth did they drive them?
I’d never been particularly interested in cars. To me they were a means to an end. A preferable way to travel, but only if it was snowing, or the rain was being driven down horizontally. If it wasn’t, I would far rather have used my bike.
But nobody seemed to be looking at the vehicles themselves. They were too interested in the outlandish stereos inside them. Each competed for the crowd’s attention with the system wound up louder than the last. They made the whole of my chest cavity vibrate just walking past.
The kids weren’t content with that, though. They wanted to actually cram their heads into the interior, which struck me as an occupation only slightly less risky than trying to train a bunch of sharks to take morsels of food out of your mouth.
Either way you were likely to lose your head.
In spite of my misgivings, we paid our entrance fee on the door and moved into the building itself. I stuck my nose in one of the programmes they were handing out so I had a viable excuse not to be looking at any of the security guards in the lobby area.
Back when I was in the army I spent plenty of time out on the ranges during live-firing exercises. Since then, I’d worked nightclub doors, found myself in the thick of an urban riot and involved in a full-blown fire-fight, but nothing prepared me for the sheer barrage of noise inside the Ocean Center.
It had started out life as music but when a hundred different sound systems are all playing a hundred different tunes, it gets hard to tell. All you could feel was the pound of the bass.
There were customised vehicles of every type, from monster civilian versions of US military Hummers to new-shape Mini Coopers, even a Ferrari and a couple of full-dress Harleys, though I couldn’t quite see the reason for the bikes at a car stereo show.
Inside, the main conference hall was a huge open space, now filled with stands from equipment and accessory manufacturers. They varied from little more than a cloth-covered table laid out with boxes of product, to elaborate modular structures with space for two or three vehicles. One stand even seemed to be strung with inflatable small green aliens. I didn’t quite get the significance but no-one else was acting like it was out of the ordinary.
The place was heaving with people, mainly teenagers perhaps a few years older than Trey. They didn’t seem at all bothered by the din, although when I looked closer I saw that quite a few of them were wearing little yellow ear defenders like the ones I’d used for shooting in the past. I still had a load of them at home but it wasn’t something I’d ever thought to pack for this trip.
I reached forwards and tapped Trey on the shoulder as we wended our way through the crowd, putting my mouth close to his ear. “Where are we supposed to meet your friends?” I bellowed.
He pointed over into a corner of the huge conference centre hall. “By the main stage,” he yelled back. “Yeah – there they are!”
There seemed to be any number of people clustered round the raised stage area, sitting on the floor and sipping cola or eating junk food from the nearby concession stand, so I didn’t immediately spot Trey’s mates. It was only when one of them noticed him and waved that I got the idea.
There were three of them, two boys and a girl. The girl jumped to her feet and came bouncing over to greet Trey, wrapping herself onto his arm like bindweed and eyeing me up suspiciously.
“So, who’s this?” she asked, arching her eyebrows. She had a mass of ringleted dark hair and smooth caramel-coloured skin and, purely in my subjective opinion, way too much make-up for someone her age.
She was wearing shorts and a microscopic little crop top. The latter showed off a flat tanned midriff at the front and a painful-looking tattoo of a rising sun at the bottom of her spine. I could hear her chewing her gum even over the background noise.
“Oh, this is Charlie,” Trey said, trying to be cool and casual, like he was introducing me to his posse. “Charlie, meet the guys – Scott, Xander, and this is Aimee.”
Scott was taller than Trey but just as gawky, with short spiky hair dyed an aggressive white blond and studs through the left-hand side of his nose, his eyebrow, and the middle of his chin. His shorts came down to below his knees, showing only a small section of tanned calf between the hem of the legs and the tops of his absurdly large basketball boots.
Xander was a little shorter, his skin a deep Caribbean black and badly pockmarked by teenage acne. His hair was shorn to within five mil of his scalp and had intricate designs and swirls razor-cut down to his skin.
He was wearing a
I kept only part of my attention on the group as Xander and Scott went through some mystic teenage ritual of slapping palms with Trey rather than shaking hands. I was painfully aware that the two cops on the beach had come within a hair’s breadth of catching us this morning and I didn’t want to get caught napping like that again.
“What’s happening, man?” Xander asked. “Your message was kinda cryptic.”
“We’re in big trouble,” Trey said impressively. He was going for nonchalant but his pride took the edge off it. “Got the cops on our tail and we need a place to hide out for a coupla days, ‘til the heat’s off, y’know?”
The boys were nodding sagely, pretending that this kind of situation arose for them all the time. I didn’t like to break the mood by telling them that with four people dead it was likely to take longer than a few days for the manhunt to subside.
