First Drop

by Zoe Sharp

  Sean nodded.

  “The company owner told us that he also secretly leaked some advance news of the program to the financial press, trying to keep the stock price up,” Till went on. “Our guess is that’s when Brown cooked up the scheme to make it look like Pelzner had run out on the deal.”

  “But they messed it up,” Sean said.

  Now it was Till’s turn to nod. “Oh yeah, they messed it up all right,” he said. He glanced at me, his expression brooding. “I suppose that’s all thanks to missy here.”

  “And then he found out that Keith couldn’t make the program work, after all,” I put in. “And it was just a case of stopping us falling into the wrong hands and then getting rid of us as fast as possible.”

  “Well he sure left a trail of destruction trying to do just that,” he replied. It’s gonna take months just to fill out all the paperwork.”

  I smiled. “But then Whitmarsh found out from Henry that Trey might just hold the key.”

  “Which he doesn’t.”

  “I wasn’t there for this part,” Sean said. “Who’s Henry?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” I said. There would be plenty of time for talking later. I turned back to the FBI man. “So do I assume from all this that we’re more or less off the hook.”

  He favoured me with a slow appraisal. “Sure looks that way,” he said. “Particularly if you was to agree to give evidence in court.”

  I sat back in my seat. “Well how about that?” I murmured with more than a hint of irony in my tone. “Chief suspect to star witness all in the same day.”

  ***

  The first person I saw when we walked through the main entrance doors to the clubhouse was Randy, the time-share salesman I’d hijacked to get to Brown.

  He did a classic double-take. First at the fact that both Sean and I were coated in slime and leaving a wet muddy trail across the tiles behind us. And second when he recognised me underneath it all.

  “Oh my God,” he yelped, “somebody call the cops!”

  “No need, sir, she’s with me,” Till said, flashing his official ID. “Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  “FBI? You’re with the FBI?” Randy repeated, looking dazed. He blushed at the memory of what he’d tried to do with me up against a filing cabinet. “Am I under arrest?”

  Till sighed. “Just take us to Mr Brown,” he said.

  Randy led the way with much more eagerness than he’d shown last time I was there. He eventually stopped just outside a pair of large double doors with a plaque on one that said Party Room. By the sounds of it Brown was just rounding off his big welcome speech on the other side. Nobody listening to the old guy’s melodious voice would ever guess he was a vicious murderer.

  Till spoke fast and low into his radio, then issued brief instructions to the men he had with him. They all seemed to know the drill without needing long explanations, in any case.

  When the moment came they kicked the doors open and went in at a run. There were a few squeals and shrieks from the assembled crowd, but mostly it was all over before anyone had the time to get excited.

  It was only then that Sean and I were allowed into the room. Several hundred pairs of shocked and bewildered eyes followed our entrance, but the most stunned belonged to the harmless-looking old guy with the wispy grey hair, currently face down on the floor with two FBI men on top of him, cuffing his hands behind his back.

  Brown was loudly announcing his outrage at this manhandling and, I considered, was making a pretty convincing show of wronged innocence along the way.

  “You don’t begin to have the right to treat me this way,” he protested, sounding hurt and a little self-righteous, just as he would if he was truly blameless. “You don’t have a single shred of evidence against me.”

  “Oh I’m afraid we do, Mr Brown,” Till said. “Not only do we have a boatload of witnesses, as it were, but thanks to this little lady here we even have a tape recording of you actually in the act of carrying out a homicide. In fact, we got so much on you it’s gonna take from now ‘til Thanksgiving just to file the charges.”

  Brown managed to turn his head enough to look right at me. The surprise on his face was followed quickly by disgust. Not for me, I realised, but for himself. That he’d been fooled.

  “She was just a girl,” he muttered as Till’s men dragged him to his feet. The disbelief was a faint tinge around the edges of his voice. His eyes slid to Sean and then back again to me. “She was Meyer’s goddamn girlfriend. A nobody . . .”

  Special Agent in Charge Till put a hold on his satisfaction just sufficiently to give me his own brief, sombre appraisal. He took in the sodden filthy shirt and the matted tangle of revolting pink hair. And he saw that above it all I was still standing, still in there. Right to the bitter end.

  He nodded to me, just once, and turned back to his prisoner.

  “Yeah,” he said, and his stern face cracked into the first genuine piece of emotion I’d seen him display. A big grin. His voice had never sounded so laconic, so laid back as it did then.

  “I guess if you was a stupid man,” he said, “you might just make the mistake of thinking that.”

  Epilogue

  “So, Charlie, how are you?”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’m fine.” But we both knew I was lying.

  “That’s good,” he said, not fixing me with that piercing stare, careful not to let me know outright that he could tell. That wasn’t his way, this quiet man. He made a few notes on the pad in front of him. “And how is Sean?”

  “He’s fine, too,” I said. Another half truth.

  The man sighed at that and laid down his pen. It was a nice pen, a shiny chrome Sheaffer and he was careful how he placed it, with precision, between the pristine blotter and the small framed photo of his wife and children. He was a careful man altogether.

  We were in his office. A quiet room, but then, I wouldn’t have expected anything else. Outside his window was a tranquil view onto public parkland, with trees in the hazy distance.

  Nobody disturbed the emptiness of the space except a solitary dog walker. Later, the office workers would be out to sunbathe on the parched grass and return, pink and sleepy, to their afternoon desks. For the moment, though, the dog walker had it all to himself.

  “I found a news cutting since your last visit that I thought might be relevant,” the man said now. “I saved it for you, if you’d like to see it?”

  It was phrased politely but if I refused it would send up flags. Denial. I shrugged, suddenly reminding myself of Trey.

  He reached into the desk and brought it out, a folded magazine rather than a clipping. As he handed it across I looked at the page header out of curiosity and found it was a copy of a US financial journal, dated a week ago.

  I opened the magazine out and there right across the top of the left-hand page was a picture of Walt and Harriet. They were standing in front of what could only be described as a mansion in the modern American style. They were arm in arm, and smiling.

  I started to read the article, heedless of the fact that the meter was running. The man opposite brought a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘time is money’. My only consolation was that it wasn’t me who was footing the bill.

  The piece turned out to be an interview, the gist of which was that in the last four months this self-effacing retired law enforcement officer had come from nowhere to become one of the most successful intra-day traders on the US futures market.

  I read on, frowning. It wasn’t until I turned the page that it all became clear. There were several smaller pictures there, including one, a little group shot tucked away in the bottom right-hand corner, that showed half a dozen kids sitting around a swimming pool and grinning self-consciously. Walt presided over a barbecue nearby. He was wearing a chef’s apron and his usual battered Panama hat.

  The text told me that Walt and Harriet were using their newfound wealth to continue fostering kids from broken homes. They didn’t mention Trey by na
me, but they didn’t need to for me to recognise him.

  He was lurking in the background of the photo. The braces had clearly served their purpose and been discarded, and he no longer had his hair short and blond and spiked, but there was something familiar about the eyes, the line of the chin.

  And next to him was Scott, looking self-conscious for the photo, standing with his arms folded and his weight on one hip, striking a pose. But he was standing. On his own two feet. That was the main thing.

  I put the magazine down slowly onto my lap.

  “Son of a bitch,” I murmured. “So he really could make it work.”

  “How does that make you feel, Charlie?” He picked up his pen again. Another incomprehensible scribble. Was he condemning or redeeming me?

  I stared at him a little blankly. “Feel?” I echoed. “I don’t know. Glad, I suppose. Glad that it wasn’t all for nothing, just a monumental waste of time and effort and life.”

  “So you feel regret at the loss of life?”

  “Of course I do,” I said, but it was the bystanders I was thinking of. The woman at the theme park who’d lost a lung to Haines’s wild shot. She would always have that to remind her of the day of fun that turned into a living nightmare.

  The young cop, whose only mistake had been eagerness to make his mark but who had never lived long enough to grow out of being known as the rookie. He’d had a wife and a ten-month-old baby son who would never know his father.

  And the teenage couple at the motel, away together for the first time, who’d found death instead of love.

  Not the men I’d killed, though. Even though I knew their names now, it had failed to make them more real to me. They had been professionals who’d known the risks and gambles when they’d agreed to play the game. And not for Haines, either.

  I looked up. “Of course I feel regret,” I said again.

  But most of all, selfishly, I was regretful for myself and for Sean. For the people we’d been before. The people who had been more or less in control of the demons.

  Those people – that control – was gone. The box was open and I was afraid we might never get them back inside.

  Which was why I found myself here, in the offices of this eminent psychotherapist. I’d been coming to him once a fortnight since I’d returned from America, but in all honesty I didn’t feel we were making any real progress towards fixing what lay inside my head, inside my soul.

  I wasn’t unrealistic enough to think this man could change that. But if he enabled me to keep a grip on my humanity, to live with myself knowing what I’d done and what I could do, then it would all have been worth while. It would give me something to take forwards. To enable me – and Sean – to move on.

  The worst thing – the thing that frightened me the most when I woke sweating in the dark hours of the early morning – was that the greater part of me didn’t feel broken. A part of me felt this was how things ought to be. How they always had been.

  And, just maybe, how they always would be.

  From the Author’s notebook

  The idea for this story came through my day-job, working as a photo-journalist for many years. I used to go out to the Spring Break Nationals every year to cover the car and car stereo show. Daytona Beach was always crawling with teenagers who came from all over the States to celebrate the first proper break from school, to hang out, party, and check out the cool cars on display. If you were on the run with a wanted teenager, I thought idly, what better place to hide out?

  From that basic idea, the whole of the story developed. The title FIRST DROP came from the rollercoaster analogy – once you reach the top of the first lift hill and hit the first drop, you can’t stop and you can’t get off. You just have to sit tight, hold on, and hope you survive to the end of the ride.

  It never occurred to me that my US publishers would pick up this book – number four in the series – and then ask for “Second . . . something” as their next foray. Endless confusion has resulted!

  The peripheral characters in FIRST DROP are among my favourites. I particularly like the retired FBI guy, Walt, and have even toyed with making him – and Harriet, of course – the hero of his own story. Maybe one day . . .

  FBI Special Agent In Charge, Andrew Till, was another notable character. The real Andrew Till is one of the staff at Lancaster Public Library, who were so supportive of my early work. His colleagues confided that he had always wanted to be a character in a book, and it was my pleasure to include him here.

  Please note, by the way, that this book was written during 2003 and first published in 2004. Back then, mobile phones, smart phones, and instant anywhere-access to the internet was nothing like as easy as it is today. I always had Charlie as a bit of a late-adopter when it came to technology. Perhaps the events of this book finally convinced her she needed to catch up a little.

  Acknowledgements

  Taking Charlie on her first American adventure wouldn’t have been so much fun without the assistance of a number of people. First of these has to be Maryellen and Paul Papadeas of Soundcrafters and organisers of the Spring Break Nationals – the World’s Most Famous Sound-Off. Maryellen and Paul not only graciously allowed me to use their event as the location for some of the action in this book, but were also absolutely wonderful about digging out obscure bits of information on Daytona Beach. If you haven’t been to SBN, then go. Experiences like Charlie’s happen in the pages of novels only!

  Richard and Beth Smith of Seattle were another pair of friends who patiently provided excellent and detailed advice on the correct use of numerous Americanisms, and I shouldn’t forget to mention the contributors to the DorothyL website who had their say on teenage speech patterns. Thanks to all of you.

  Also, Dr Perran Ross of the Florida Museum of Natural History, who told me all about the feeding habits of alligators; Ian Cottam and Lee Watkin, who taught me how to win a dirty fight; and Glynn Jones for making suitable armament suggestions. Any slip-ups are undoubtedly by my own hand.

  Various people eviscerated the first draft to try and help me keep the mistakes to a minimum. A big thank you for this to Peter Doleman, Claire Duplock, Derek Harrison, Sarah Harrison, Iris Rogers, Tim Winfield, and my copy editor, Sarah Abel.

  As always, my husband Andy has been my best critic and biggest fan.

  Also, grateful apologies go to our temporary neighbours, Robert and Caroline Roper, for putting up with much pounding of computer keys in the flat above them late into the night while I was writing this story.

  And finally, thank you to Blake Crouch, who so generously allowed me to include an excerpt from his novel RUN as a bonus feature at the end of this novel; to ZACE-eBookConversion for immaculate conversion of the printed book to e-format; and to Jane Hudson of NuDesign for the wonderful new cover design.

  if you’ve enjoyed FIRST DROP, why not try Zoë Sharp’s Other Works:

  Buy the Books!

  the Charlie Fox crime thrillers

  KILLER INSTINCT

  RIOT ACT

  HARD KNOCKS

  (FIRST DROP)

  ROAD KILL

  Excerpt from ROAD KILL

  SECOND SHOT

  THIRD STRIKE

  FOURTH DAY

  FIFTH VICTIM – out in e-format Spring 2012

  Short stories – eBook exclusive

  FOX FIVE: a Charlie Fox short story collection

  A Bridge Too Far

  Postcards From Another Country

  Served Cold

  Off Duty

  Truth And Lies

  KILLER INSTINCT

  Charlie Fox book one

  by Zoë Sharp

  ‘Susie Hollins may have been no great shakes as a karaoke singer, but I didn’t think that was enough reason for anyone to want to kill her.’

  Charlie Fox makes a living teaching self-defence to women in a quiet northern English city. It makes best use of the deadly skills she picked up after being kicked out of army Special Forces training for reasons she prefer
s not to go into. So, when Susie Hollins is found dead hours after she foolishly takes on Charlie at the New Adelphi Club, Charlie knows it’s only a matter of time before the police come calling. What they don’t tell her is that Hollins is the latest victim of a homicidal rapist stalking the local area.

  Charlie finds herself drawn closer to the crime when the New Adelphi’s enigmatic owner, Marc Quinn, offers her a job working security at the club. Viewed as an outsider by the existing all-male team, her suspicion that there’s a link between the club and a serial killer doesn’t exactly endear her to anyone. Charlie has always taught her students that it’s better to run than to stand and fight, But, when the killer starts taking a very personal interest, it’s clear he isn’t going to give her that option . . .