“Hold it right there, missy!” the FBI agent’s voice rapped out. “Don’t make me do this.”
I turned back and found he’d finally completed that fast draw and brought his pistol out and up and level in a textbook double-handed Weaver stance. From where I was standing the sizeable opening in the end of the barrel looked like the deck gun of a frigate.
“Andrew, don’t you dare!”
Outrage deepened Harriet’s voice so that, to begin with, I thought it was Walt who’d made the protest, but it wasn’t.
“Aunt Harriet, please, get out of the way,” Till said, the anguish clear in his voice as the old woman stepped, stubborn and determined, into his line of fire. “You know I have to take her in.”
“I know you do, dear,” Harriet said, facing him steadily, “but just not today.”
Trey edged round her carefully and joined me by the door.
“Stay here,” I told him quickly, pleading, one eye still on the FBI agent’s gun. He’d lowered it now, but was still ready if he got his chance. “You’ll be safe here. Special Agent Till will protect you.”
Trey cocked me a sideways glance. “No way, man,” he said. “That’s your job.”
I looked up, taking in Walt and Harriet and Andrew Till in a fast sweep. I shrugged helplessly. “I’m sorry,” I said to nobody in particular and pushed open the outside door.
***
We moved up the beach at a hurried jog, trying to put some distance between ourselves and the house. I stumbled along, forcing my limbs into an uneven rhythm. Ahead of me I could see the pier near the Boardwalk and the stepped sides of the Adam’s Mark hotel opposite the Ocean Center where the car show was taking place. It seemed a long way away, partly shrouded by the morning heat haze, but it became my target. If we could reach there, the bustle and the crowds, we would have sanctuary.
I didn’t look back, didn’t want to see if yet another group of men with guns was chasing us. I didn’t know if Harriet would hold sway over her nephew, would persuade him to let us run, but somehow I doubted it. Not for long, at any rate.
Trey ran alongside me with an easy stride I hadn’t expected for such a gawky kid. I’d thought him too much of a computer nerd to have any flair for athletics. Somehow the two were mutually exclusive.
He kept cocking sideways glances in my direction as we went but I didn’t look at him. I just kept running, my eyes on the soft sand in front of my next stride. It was the only way I could see past the wailing that was going on inside my head.
The heat crushed down onto me, weighting my limbs, making me punch-drunk. Eventually, when we’d covered the best part of a mile, Trey dropped back to a jog, gasping. I vaguely registered him falling away but momentarily couldn’t work out what it meant. There was a pause, then he caught me up again, staggering now.
“Hey Charlie,” he protested, breathless and pained. “Hey c’mon Charlie, slow down.”
Still I ignored him, my only focus on putting one foot in front of the other. It didn’t immediately register that he’d grabbed hold of my arm until I swung, half off balance. I looked round, almost surprised to see him clinging on there.
For a moment I failed to recognise his face. He was a stranger to me. His mouth was moving but I couldn’t hear the words. Then the noises of the beach suddenly rushed in and regained their natural volume.
“Charlie, c’mon man, snap out of it!” Trey shouted. There was something in his voice that it took me a moment to place. Then it clicked – panic.
The identification of Trey’s fear acted as a catalyst. I shook myself, tried to break free of the all-consuming grief that was paralysing my mind. As I surfaced my stride faltered, as though I was diverting energy from my limbs to control my emotions.
I stumbled, going down on my knees in the hot sand. Trey dropped next to me, his skinny fingers still clamped round my upper arm. In the warm gust of breeze from the sea I realised there was a wetness on my cheeks, that the tears were circling my mouth to drip unheeded from my chin.
For a moment Trey seemed utterly lost. He let go of my arm, put a tentative hand on my shoulder instead and gave me a little shake.
“C’mon, don’t go all girlie on me, Charlie,” he said, and that scornful teenage note was back with a vengeance. Before I could respond, he hit me again, caustic. “They said you were just somebody’s girlfriend. Looks like they were right, huh?”
It was the tone rather than the words that cut through and began to bite. I looked up, dazed, expecting to see bitterness and contempt on his face. Instead all I saw was a scared kid who was doing the only thing he could think of to shock me out of my stupor.
It worked.
Slowly, my head began to clear, like feeling your ears pop as the plane makes its final approach. My hands steadied and my legs seemed to come back under my own control. I got to my feet, brushing away the sand that still clung to the sweat-soaked knees of my silk trousers. Trey stepped back, hands hanging by his sides now, watching me.
We were nearly as far down the beach as the Boardwalk but I couldn’t quite remember how we’d got there. All I could feel was my own raging thirst and the fact that any exposed areas of skin had started to burn. I needed to get out of the sun. Find a bolt-hole. Somewhere I could regroup and take stock.
Somewhere I could try and come up with a plan to get us out of this mess.
“So, like, what do we do now?” Trey asked. He was panting a little, too. Not just me who was feeling the burden of the heat, then.
I smiled at him. Not a full-blown, reassuring, this-will-all-be-OK kind of a smile but not a bad fake, given the circumstances.
“We need some cover,” I said firmly, gesturing to my reddened arms when we both knew I was really referring to the FBI. “Do your ears feel up to another tour of the show?”
I saw his shoulders come down a fraction with a relief he tried not to let show too much. He shrugged, going for nonchalant, going for cool. “Whatever,” he said airily.
I guessed that was the nearest to enthusiasm I was going to get from him.
***
Inside the Spring Break Nationals it wasn’t any quieter than it had been the last time we were there on Friday. In fact, I realised that it had probably just been warming up and now, late morning on Sunday, it was building towards its climax.
Most of the exhibitors’ booths had acquired a new attraction today, it seemed. Pretty girls wearing not much more than their underwear were signing posters of themselves for queues of adoring, if slightly hungover, teens. The girls all wore exactly the same shade of tan, like they’d been sprayed out of a bottle.
I had to link my arm through Trey’s to stop him tripping over his tongue. When he realised he’d been caught ogling he dropped his gaze to the carpeting and kept it there unwaveringly. Until the next scantily-clad lovely, at any rate.
When my eyes and ears had had enough punishment we ventured back out into the heat. I let Trey lead me in apparently aimless fashion up and down the rows of cars on display, with no real clue what I was supposed to be looking at.
To be honest, half my brain was taken up with scanning the people around us, checking not so much for uniforms this time, but for the ones with the watchful eyes and ready hands. Looking for the ones who were looking for us.
It was with a jolt, then, that my eye ran across two faces I recognised but had never expected to see here.
Aimee and Xander.
For a moment I made no moves, did nothing to alert either them or Trey. My first thoughts were suspicious ones. Xander had claimed he was grounded for years. I’d assumed the same went for Aimee. So what were they doing out at all? Were they here as bait for us? If so, who was pulling their strings?
Every nasty scenario I could think of flashed through my head, including that the two were somehow connected to Whitmarsh or Oakley man. No, it was much more likely that they’d been drafted in by the Feds to
