I hadn’t seen any news reports to know if they’d connected the couple at the motel with the dead cop. When they did, things were going to get thoroughly nasty. Always supposing that Walt and his wife hadn’t already brought in the cops. Or his former colleagues in the FBI.
“Cool,” Scott said. “My mom and dad are in the Carolinas. You can crash at my place.”
“So, what did you do, Trey?” Aimee asked with a giggle.
Trey glanced at me for guidance but I kept my face expressionless. They were his friends and I was interested to see what story he’d come up with.
“Dad’s gone AWOL,” he said at last, “and there’s these guys after us. They shot a cop down in Lauderdale but we, like, got away.” He saw the shock register on their faces and swallowed. “It’s kinda hard to explain here.”
I let my eyes slide away from him and roam over the sea of faces around us, looking for anyone who was staring too hard. Anyone who seemed to be trying to remember if that Identikit picture they’d seen on the TV this morning might really be one of us.
And then, over near one of the exits, I saw the pair of cops, led by a security guard in a uniform blue blazer. They were pointing their arms like they were designating a search area and talking into hand-held radios.
I moved forwards and nudged Trey’s arm. “Time to go,” I said, loud enough to be heard.
This time he didn’t question my reasons, just looked round for the cops.
“You got your truck, man?” he asked Scott.
Scott shrugged and jerked his thumb. “In the back lot,” he said. “We leaving already?”
“Unless you want to watch us being arrested,” I told him, “I think that would be a very good idea.”
But as we started to move towards the closest exit the doors opened and another couple of cops walked in. If it hadn’t been for the press of people, Trey’s sudden about-turn would have been more than enough to flag our whereabouts.
They could have been responding to some other emergency in the hall, but I very much doubted it. Someone – most likely some sharp-eyed security guard – had spotted us on the way in. Getting out might prove somewhat more problematic.
We pushed and hurried our way through to where the crowd was thickest. A whole swathe of it seemed to be gravitating towards one of the big industrial doors that led out of the main hall and into a corralled outdoor arena.
We allowed them to sweep us along and carry us out into the blazing sunlight, hoping it would be enough to cover our escape. Then, just when I was beginning to get my hopes up, the advance of people slowed and stopped.
They seemed to be gathering round a big electronic scoreboard and PA system that was set up in a corner of one of the parking areas. I glanced behind us and spotted a couple of peaked caps in among the baseball hats, heading in our direction, but without the urgency to suggest they’d actually spotted us. I kept pushing Trey towards the forward edge of the crowd, trying to put as many bodies between us and authority as I could.
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
“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
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,
