First Drop tcfs-4

by Zoe Sharp

  “So if it was Mr Whitmarsh he was in contact with, how did that cop, like, get to hear about Henry?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “The only explanation that occurred to me was that perhaps they were working together.”

  He stared. “But Lonnie killed that guy . . .”

  I nodded. “I did say ‘were working together’, but maybe that all went out of the window when Henry let it out of the bag that you could make the program work. Maybe they’ve somehow got hold of a part-finished version when your dad left and now Whitmarsh realises he’s got the opportunity to make some serious money out of it – if they can get hold of you alive. It would explain the abrupt about face.”

  Trey was still frowning. “How did Mr Whitmarsh know right off that Henry was talking about me when he wanted proof he’d got a hold of me?” he said slowly. He looked up. “That was what he said, right? But if Dad’s disappeared too, how did they know Henry wasn’t talking about him?”

  “My God, I think you’re right,” I murmured and found it was my turn to stare. I’d completely missed the significance of that but the more I thought about it, the more significant it became. Trey was quite right. Whitmarsh had assumed – no, more than that, he’d known – Henry was referring to Trey.

  So how could he have known?

  He couldn’t. Not unless Keith was controlling this whole thing from behind the scenes. I did some mental shifting to see if that fitted and it did, after a fashion. But for what purpose?

  “Did Xander say anything else?” Trey asked.

  “Only that he’s grounded until he’s an old man, and that we can’t go back to Scott’s place.”

  As the full consequences of that piece of news hit him Trey’s face grew mournful. “So that means . . .”

  “Yeah.” I raised a tired smile and waved an arm to indicate the sands all around us. “Looks like we’re back to sleeping on the beach again.”

  ***

  It was dark before we knew it, the inky blackness above us spangled with stars. It gave the sky an illusion of a boundary it didn’t have, dropping straight down into the sea at the far horizon.

  We weren’t far away from the area where we’d slept out on that first night, near Walt and Harriet’s place. I suppose I needed time to get my head round the idea of asking for help, but first thing in the morning, I promised myself, we’d go and take Walt up on his offer. With any luck, another of Harriet’s breakfasts would be part of the deal.

  We weren’t the only people who’d decided to spend a night out in the open air. The beach itself, as it had been last time, was crowded with kids, half of whom seemed to be courting couples. They grappled with each other in the shadows, tucked up under the walls of the apartment blocks and hotels that edged the seafront, intent on ingraining sand into the most uncomfortable places.

  Every now and again we’d get a silvery moonlit flash of naked flesh as we moved past. It was hard to get an adolescent like Trey to concentrate on putting his feet one in front of the other and keep walking. As it was he was so busy ogling that he nearly tripped up twice.

  “What d’you want to do?” I muttered eventually, “Give ‘em marks for style?”

  “It’s all right for you,” he groused when we reached a quieter stretch. “I bet you’ve, like, done it loads of times.”

  “‘Done it’?” I queried. He should have taken the stinging tone as a warning but he had a thicker skin than that.

  “Yeah,” he ploughed on, discomfited but persistent. “Y’know – fucked.”

  “I don’t ‘fuck’, as you so elegantly put it,” I bit back.

  “No way!” Trey said. “Mr Whitmarsh said you were fucking Mr Meyer. He said—”

  “Sean and I have slept together, yes, but that’s not the same thing,” I cut in, not wanting to hear Whitmarsh’s cruder description of what Sean and I had shared. Especially not now. I didn’t want to hear Trey talk about it, either. He didn’t even begin to have the right to bring up something so private.

  “Why isn’t it?” Trey wanted to know and I suddenly realised why you heard so many parents answer awkward questions from their kids with the waspish phrase, “Because I say so, all right?” through firmly gritted teeth.

  Instead, I strapped down my irritation and made an attempt to explain. “Because just fucking somebody is very different from making love with them, where you have a bond, a connection. Fucking implies little more than an all-out, selfish, I’m-using-you-for-my-own-gratification kind of act.”

  Trey was at an age where his squirm at the mention of the word “love” was almost a reflex action. Then he just shrugged. “Yeah – and your point is?”

  The strap broke and my temper let fly. I rounded on him, almost unable to see his face for the starbursts going off inside my head. “You asked me once why I left the army. Well, shall I tell you why?” I threw at him, not waiting for an answer. “I left because four of the men I was training alongside, four of the men I was supposed to know and trust, got drunk one night and decided they were going to fuck me, regardless of what I thought about it.”

  Trey tried to flinch away but I grabbed his arm and spun him back to face me, not letting him escape my bitter words. Some part of me knew he didn’t deserve this but now I’d started I couldn’t stop, it just spilled out and kept coming. “And because there were more of them than me, and they were bigger and stronger than I was, that’s exactly what they did. They had to beat the shit out of me to do it, but they did it, just the same. And when they were done, they stood around and actually had a discussion about how it might be best to kill me, just in case I decided to kick up a fuss. It was like to them I wasn’t even human any more.”

  I stopped and realised that my chest was so tight it was making me breathless. I made a conscious effort to relax, to speak normally. “Fucking is something you do to someone. Making love is something you do with them,” I finished, calmer now. “That’s the difference, Trey. Might not sound a lot, but trust me, it is. It really is.”

  I let go and this time it was my turn to stamp off, not really caring if he followed or not. After half a dozen strides he caught me up. I could feel him wanting to speak but I wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t give him an opening.

  Donalson, Hackett, Morton and Clay.

  The litany of names went round and round inside my head in time to the fall of my feet in the sand. The names of the men who’d raped me, who’d finished my army career. The names of the men who’d set me on the path that eventually had led me here.

  After another few minutes of silent walking I stopped abruptly. “This will do,” I said, indicating a relatively sheltered spot in the soft sand at the top of the beach. “Make yourself at home.”

  I lay down with my back studiously towards him, resting my head on the ridiculous bag containing the bony shape of the SIG. Because of the rumbling hiss of the surf I nearly missed Trey’s quietly spoken words behind me.

  “I’m – I’m real sorry, Charlie.”

  In the whole of this sorry mess it was the first time he’d apologised or shown any remorse, the first time he’d made any sign of dropping the act and reaching out to me. Too bad that I couldn’t bring myself to meet him halfway.

  “You weren’t to know,” I said shortly, not turning round. “Now get some sleep. We’re going to need it.”

  Despite my words, sleep didn’t come easy for me. I lay awake, staring into the semi-darkness. I could tell by his breathing rate that Trey was awake, too but we didn’t speak. It seemed to take a long time before he began to snore.

  What on earth had possessed me to come out with all those shameful details? Trey was a comparative stranger. I hardly knew him and certainly didn’t like him and yet I’d told him things I hadn’t even shared with my real friends, people I’d known for five years or more. The realisation of what I’d done sent a shiver across my skin in spite of the warm sand I was lying moulded into.

  I hadn’t even told Sean the truth, not right away.
At first I thought he’d been a part of the whitewash the army arranged to cover what those four men had done, including the ludicrous events of their court martial. What should have been an open-and-shut case degenerated into a farce that had ruined my reputation along with everything else.

  It had been years until I’d found out that they’d manipulated Sean as much as they had done me. But once the Powers That Be had accidentally learned of our illicit relationship they’d subtly forced him out of his own career by a war of attrition. The worst thing was that, until we’d met again after five years and discovered what had really happened, he hadn’t really known what he was supposed to have done wrong.

  And now I’d blurted it all out to a fifteen-year-old boy who undoubtedly didn’t have enough sense to keep his mouth shut. Oh, wonderful move, Fox. For a while I silently berated myself for my own stupidity, but gradually I recognised what had compelled me to dump that clutch of vitriol onto Trey.

  If ever he found himself the aggressor in that kind of situation and it made him pause, just for a moment, then it was worth it. Yeah, a one-woman crusade, that’s me, scoffed the voice in my head.

  Maybe I was starting to lose it. After all we’d gone through, maybe this desire to open up to unsuitable people was one of the first signs. The thought was terrifying. I shut my eyes and willed sleep onto my unquiet mind.

  ***

  Surprisingly perhaps, the nightmares I’d been half expecting didn’t come. I slept sound and quiet and didn’t wake until after sunrise the next morning.

  And as soon as I did, I knew there was something wrong.

  My body woke from the inside out, individual senses coming on line first and hitting the mental alarm buttons. I couldn’t quite put my finger on how it happened, but somehow I was alert to the danger before I ever opened my eyes and found out exactly what it was.

  The brightness outside my closed eyelids told me the sun was well on the way up. The slightly receded lull of the surf told me the tide was on the way out. The mingled odours of sour sweat and last night’s joints reaching my nostrils told me we weren’t alone any more. It rippled over the top of the fresh morning smell of the salt water, tainting it.

  From somewhere above me I heard the snigger of young male voices. Not Whitmarsh, then. Not Oakley man. There wasn’t time for relief. I kept my eyes shut, regulated my breathing, but my system had started to rev, building up speed like pressure. The SIG was a reassuring lump in the bag under my cheekbone. A last resort.

  Eventually, tiring of waiting for us to wake of our own volition, a foot nudged me in the stomach. None too gently. I opened my eyes and saw a sideways picture made up of pairs of tanned legs and baggy jeans. Someone leaned down into my field of vision and smiled nastily.

  “Hi, remember me?” he said. It was the skinny kid with the bandana round his head who’d unsuccessfully tried to rob us that first night on the beach. The one whose knife I’d taken away from him and which I’d left, now I belatedly remembered about it, in the backpack I’d abandoned at Henry’s house. Too bad if he’d come to ask for it back.

  I’d never even considered that the skinny kid might have gathered reinforcements and be lying in wait for us on the beach. His halfhearted attack had seemed so insignificant compared to the other dangers we’d had to face. Well, not any more.

  I sat up fast enough to make him take an instinctive step back. No doubt his reflexes would be sharper this time, in view of the pain and humiliation I’d inflicted on him before. Mind you, he’d partially negated the need for extra vigilance by bringing half a dozen of his mates with him as back-up. Of the fat boy who’d served as sidekick during his last jaunt, there was no sign.

  Trey was already awake, I saw, sitting up with his arms wrapped round his shins like he had in Henry’s bath. He looked scared and defensive, as though he was expecting this to hurt. He threw me a single reproachful glance, as though I should have seen this coming and somehow deflected it.

  “What do you want?” I said, shading my eyes with my hand so I could look up at the skinny kid against the low sun.

  He gave a short, disbelieving laugh. “She wants to know what I want, huh?” He looked round at the others who joined in dutifully with his amusement. Then he looked back at me and the smile blinked out. “You know exactly what I want,” he said, quiet and deadly. He was doing a pretty good impression of total meanness until the flicker of his eyes telegraphed his intentions.

  He swung a vicious kick at my body. I caught his foot before it connected and twisted it sideways. It could have wrenched his knee or ankle out if he hadn’t allowed himself to roll with it. He landed hard, sending up a plume of dry sand that was instantly scattered by the breeze.

  I bounced to my feet while I had the chance, Trey scrambling up, also. The bag with the flowers on it was in my hand, keeping the SIG only inches from use, but I couldn’t bring myself to get it out, even then.

  They were just kids. Offensive and repugnant kids, maybe, but kids nonetheless. Perhaps if I drew the line somewhere I could come back to myself. Perhaps there might still be hope for me.

  The skinny kid was back on his feet in a flash, his momentary lapse firing his anger. I turned so Trey was directly at my back and watched the eyes and hands in front of me for the first move.

  “Can I ask what the hell you boys think you’re doing?” said a sudden familiar voice from a little way off to one side.

  We all spun to face it. Walt stood a couple of metres away, staring at the bunch of us from under the brim of his Panama hat. My heart lurched. Before I’d only had Trey to worry about in this uneven fight. Now I had another civilian to protect. The gun was so close. It would end things quickly and I might not even have to use it . . .

  I checked Walt. He didn’t have his bag of seashells with him this morning but instead he carried a stainless steel insulated coffee mug. As we watched he raised the mug to his lips and drank some of the contents. When he was done he looked inquiringly at the group that surrounded Trey and me.

  “Well?” he said, with a fine touch of belligerence. “Cat got your tongues?”

  For God’s sake, Walt. Don’t provoke them. You’ll only make it worse for yourself.

  But he turned to the skinny kid with the bandana, who had been making out like this was the baddest part of South Central LA and he was the baddest dude in it. “Nathan, isn’t it?” Walt said, his voice slow and easy. “What are you doing out when your mother’s sick? Shouldn’t you be at home helping out with the chores?”

  “No sir, um, I mean yes sir,” Nathan muttered, hanging his head. “She’s much better.” He all but scuffed his toes in the sand.

  “Well, if you’ve finished fooling around with these young friends of mine,” Walt said, his gaze steady, “we’ll let you be on your way.”

  It struck me then that he was like an old-time Wild West sheriff, facing down the gunslinging brat pack by the slow weight of his reputation alone. One day they might have the courage to take him on, but today was clearly not that day.

  Abruptly, Nathan turned and trudged away and his gang went with him. I studied their retreat but he didn’t even dare to go for a resentful backward glance. I gradually allowed my fists to unclench, my shoulders to unlock. It was only now that I became aware of the stiff ache of my body and the dull thumping pain behind my eyes.

  I turned back to Walt, who was calmly drinking more of his coffee as though completely oblivious to what might have been.

  “Nathan’s not a bad kid,” he said conversationally. “Gets a little wild now and again but basically he’s OK. Harriet and I go to the same church as his mother.”

  He swung his cool gaze onto me then and I struggled not to quail under it just as the skinny kid and his mates had done.

  “Not sure about the new hair style, Charlie,” he remarked. “And if you don’t mind me saying so, ma’am, you look like hell.”

  Seventeen

  Walt and Harriet’s kitchen looked exactly the same as it had the last ti
me Trey and I had been there. More importantly, it smelled the same – of food.

  The lady of the house was working furiously at the hob when Walt opened the door and ushered us inside. The smell of bacon frying on the grill hit me straight in the stomach, which immediately let out a clearly audible grumble.

  “Well, somebody’s hungry,” Walt said with a smile. “Can I get you guys some coffee?”

  Harriet turned then and it was relief I saw in her face. “Oh, you found them,” she said, putting down her spatula. She came forward then, all smiles, wiping her hands on the apron she was wearing over her loose pinafore dress. She pulled out chairs from the table and hastily brought out extra cutlery for us. It was only as I sat down that I noticed there were already three settings.

  I looked up at Walt, tense, and saw from his face that he knew right away I’d spotted the extra place.

  “My nephew, Andrew,” he said calmly, by way of explanation. “He’s staying with us for a few days.”

  At that moment I heard footsteps approaching across the tiled floor of the living room. A young man in a casual jacket and tie appeared round the corner of the kitchen cabinets. He was shorter than Walt, slightly more thickset than the old man but he had a sharp upright stance that usually denotes time in the military – or the police.

  Even without that suspicion, his instinctive reaction confirmed my fears. He’d been holding a mobile phone up to his ear with his left hand, making, “uh-huh,” noises. As soon as he caught sight of the pair of us he jolted to a standstill and dropped the phone. His right hand snaked for the gun on his hip.

  “Now hold it right there!” Walt thundered and his nephew froze automatically. I could just see the Glock 23 service pistol halfway out of its belt holster under the pushed-back hem of his jacket. If he’d ever got to finish it, it would have been one hell of a fast draw.

  I had been holding my bag on my lap under the level of the table, which had a wipe-down vinyl cloth hanging over the edges that masked my hands. As soon as I’d made the guy for what he was, I’d stuck my hand inside the bag, trying to sit still and not to let the movement translate into my shoulders. I had my fingers curled round the SIG’s pistol grip and already had it clear of the bag when Walt rapped out his command. I froze, too.