First Drop

and you went for pink?”

“Aw, c’mon, Charlie!” Aimee said and I could tell from the suppressed laughter in her voice that she’d been the one behind it. “I think you’ll look kinda cool.”

“We’re supposed to be keeping a low profile, not making prats of ourselves,” I said sourly. “Who the hell has pink hair?”

Aimee started to giggle, hiding her mouth behind her hand like she was still in junior school, setting Trey off as well. I wanted to knock both their heads together.

We were in the upstairs den of Scott’s parents’ place in Ormond Beach. Having said that, the house was actually a bungalow, like so many in Florida, with dark glass windows and a huge arched porch over the front door. The exterior stucco was painted salmon pink, so I suppose that should have been a warning of things to come.

The house was on a quiet residential side street of properties similar in size, if not in style. Scott had driven his pickup right up to the doors of the built-in triple garage at the left-hand side of the main entrance. He’d waited impatiently while the automatic mechanism ploddingly cranked the door up out of the way, then drove straight in, braking hard enough to make the tyres squeak on the painted concrete floor. The garage door slowly closed again behind us.

However Scott’s parents made their living, they clearly weren’t doing too badly out of it, I reflected, as he led us through a utility room and into the house itself. It was another mainly white interior, enlivened by a sprawling collection of native American art and sculptures.

The hallway opened out into an open-plan lounge, dining room and kitchen. A massive picture window ran floor to vaulted ceiling on the opposite wall, giving a view into the greenery of the garden outside. To one side was an open-tread staircase leading to a loft that looked down onto the lounge below.

I don’t know how long his folks had been away, but the house showed obvious signs of lone teenage occupation. Dirty clothes littered the cream leather corner sofa and a mess of old takeaway food containers was strewn across the glass-topped dining table, along with empty cans of high-energy soft drink. Like kids in the States really need that extra hit of sugar and caffeine.

Scott made straight for the stairs and we followed him up to what turned out to be the den, complete with computer and games console. Scott had yet more sugar-loaded pop in a mini-fridge up there, too. So the poor lamb didn’t have to traipse all that way down to the kitchen when he got thirsty. He chucked everybody a can without asking if they had a preference, and slumped down into a chair.

“So, Trey, you wanna tell us what the fuck is going on, man?” he’d asked.

I let the kid tell the story in his own way without interruption, mainly because I was curious to hear his take on it. And from the way he described the last twenty-four hours I almost managed to recognise them as the same ones I’d also been through.

What was interesting was how much he emphasised my role in the proceedings. Mind you, he built his own part up some, too. No mention was made of the fact I’d had to practically carry him away from Oakley man at the theme park, or drag him out of the crashed Mercury. On the other hand, I hadn’t realised he’d witnessed quite so much detail of the shoot-out with the men in the Buick. It had clearly made a lasting impression.

“You should have seen it, man,” he enthused, coming half out of his chair and gesturing with his arms as he recounted the tale. “She just jumps out of the car and caps this guy, like, blam, blam! And he goes down and we take off and, like, just steal a bike and head up to Daytona.”

He paused, nodding, to slurp from his can of drink. The other three were sitting tense and still, hanging on his every word. Trey looked at their absorbed faces and I saw his ego start to climb at the respect he was getting.

“So you’re a bodyguard, right Charlie?” Xander said, eyeing me up and down. “Like, for real?”

I took a sip of my drink, trying not to wince as my teeth instantly began to melt, and nodded in reply.

He looked at me for a moment longer, a smile beginning to form. It was as if he just knew he was having his leg pulled and didn’t want to come across as too gullible, but there was this edge of doubt there, too. Eventually he sat back and looked at Trey and laughed. “No shit, man?”

“You shoulda seen her last night on the beach,” Trey said, a trace of defensive anger in his tone now. “These guys came after our dough, like, with a knife. And Charlie, she just tore them apart. Go on,” he added to me, “show ‘em how you did it.”

I raised one eyebrow, not making any moves to comply. “I am not,” I said mildly, “a performing seal.”

Trey coloured at that, but pushed on regardless. “She was in the military, right? She rocks, man, I’m telling you.”

This last seemed to convince them a little. At least enough not to express their scepticism out loud. Maybe women played a more active role in the US forces so there wasn’t quite the same resistance I’d always encountered.

But I could feel their excitement more than their apprehension and it scared me. In spite of Trey’s lurid reconstruction, they hadn’t the faintest idea how serious this all was. They were just a bunch of middle-class kids pretending to be gangsters, playing at rebellion.

Maybe they would never have agreed so readily to help us if they’d stopped to think. I offered a silent cynical prayer of thanks that none of them were great thinkers.

One thing that everyone agreed on was that we needed to do something about our appearance. Xander offered to take Scott’s truck down to the nearest superstore and bring back enough stuff to change our hair and clothing, and to try to make me blend in with the rest of the Spring Break crowd.

As soon as shopping was mentioned, Aimee jumped at the chance to go with him. She looked critically at my tired secondhand shirt and grubby shorts and said, “Trust me girl, you need some help.”

After they’d gone Scott unearthed the remote, switching on the giant projector TV in the lounge and channel-hopping until he found a news report. We soon discovered we’d made the headlines in a big way.

“Broward County police are today mourning the loss of one of their fellow officers, gunned down in the line of duty last night,” said the serious-voiced but plastic-faced news anchor. “The officer, who had been with the department just six months, was the victim of a brutal slaying during a routine traffic stop on the county’s roads yesterday evening . . .”

The report ran on, showing a lingering hand-held night shot of the Mercury crashed in the ditch with the punched-out rear screen and the obvious bullet holes in the back end. I watched it with detached interest, as though it hadn’t happened to me at all.

The logical half of my brain told me that, when they’d had a chance to properly analyse the scene, the police would know the men in the Buick had been there. The young cop hadn’t got a shot off, his gun would be fully loaded and unfired. Surely they had to ask where all the rounds in the Mercury had come from?

I remembered, also, that I hadn’t even thought to stop and pick up the brass shell casings the SIG’s eject mechanism had scattered into the ditch. I’d been too busy running for our lives. At least if they linked those to me they should work it out that I wasn’t the one who killed the cop.

Apparently not.

The sound of my own name brought me up short. In a corner of the screen, just by the newscaster’s head, they’d put together a half-reasonable likeness to go with it. Having said that, the description they read out would have fitted half the female population.

The only worrying thing was they knew about the scar on my neck.

That shook me. I’d acquired the injury that had caused it nearly a year and a half before. It was a permanent and sobering reminder of how easy it would be to get myself killed.

Since I’d started working for Sean, the glamorous Madeleine had taken me under her wing as far as the use of make-up was concerned. Given enough opportunity and a shelf full of wickedly expensive cosmetics I could now make a tolerable job of concealing the scar unless you were right up close. But I was still self-conscious about it.

Since I’d arrived in Florida I’d been very careful to avoid awkward questions from Gerri Raybourn’s men by keeping it covered up beneath polo and standard shirt collars.

I’d even done my swimming in the house pool early enough in the mornings not to have the rest of the household around staring at me. It was only quite by chance that Keith Pelzner had unexpectedly come out into the