FIRST DROP: Charlie Fox book four

by Zoe Sharp

  A car audio competition. Only in America, I thought. As if to prove the point a car went past us with its stereo system cranked so high the spot welds holding the roof panel together were buzzing loose. All four windows were down but I still couldn’t name that tune.

  “I can’t wait,” I muttered. “So, what do we do tonight?”

  Trey shrugged. “This is Spring Break,” he said. “We do what everyone else does if they can’t get a room – we sleep on the beach.”

  Eight

  The amount of police cars cruising about in Daytona Beach soon convinced me the Kawasaki was going to have to go. Trey and I rode back down the strip until we came across a big hotel with an underground car park and ducked into there.

  I found a quiet corner next to the laundry room and that’s where we left it. I retrieved my Swiss Army knife from the ruined ignition and gave the bike a last pat on its battered tank. It had served us well and I was sorry to see the back of it.

  As an extra precaution, I unscrewed the rear numberplate and took that away with us, just to slow down the identification a little. I dropped the pressed ali plate down the first storm drain at the side of the road we came to. It must rain like hell in Florida, because they had openings in the gutter that would have been big enough to lose a medium-sized dog into.

  ***

  The prospect of sleeping on a beach, in March, without any camping equipment or a sleeping bag was not one that filled me with excited anticipation.

  Still, at least it was Florida. The last time I’d been forced to rough it like that had been doing Escape and Evasion exercises in the army. The Brecon Beacons at the same time of year is a whole different ballgame.

  On foot now, we crossed over the highway and walked along the strip until we came to one of the big surf shops that was still open.

  “What do we want from here?” Trey asked.

  “Beach towels,” I said. “They may not be quite up to blanket level, but at least they’ll keep the sand out.”

  I picked up a couple of what felt like the warmest, but Trey balked at the prospect of owning anything with twee cartoon mermaids on the front so I let him choose his own. The one he came back with was a leftover from the previous year’s bike week and looked half as thick as my choice. I didn’t have the energy to argue with him. There was only a desultory crowd as we went to the check-out, but the cashier was looking jumpy.

  When I followed his gaze I noticed a couple of teenagers, probably a year or two older than Trey, hanging around by the surfing gear. One was a skinny kid, wearing a bandana and an open shirt over a white vest that showed off his concave chest. His jeans were slung fashionably low, just about clinging on round his protruding hip bones and showing off two inches of underpant over the top. He walked like he thought he was hot stuff.

  His mate was shorter and fatter, still trying to shake off his adolescent puppy fat and look like a mean dog instead. It came over as clumsy bluster. The thin kid was the dangerous one. Neither of them looked like they were about to splash out on a new Lightwave longboard.

  I realised when I dug in my pockets that I’d let Trey have the last twenty to pay for the fuel. I had to break one of the hundred dollar bills Keith had given me, which I would rather have done without the audience, particularly not as the cashier counted my change out loud into my hand. The only good thing was that he was so busy watching what was going on behind me he didn’t spend long looking at my face.

  When we walked out of the shop and back across the road, I checked behind us regularly but as far as I could see there was nobody following.

  Beach ramps were spaced at regular intervals along South Atlantic Avenue. According to the signs, if you paid your fee you were invited to take your car down there and ride up and down the sand all day. It sounded like an invitation to major corrosion problems to me. The ramps were gated off at night but it was only to stop traffic. Trey and I walked past them, carrying our towels, and stepped out onto the soft sand.

  It wasn’t truly dark out there. There was too sharp a moon, caught and reflected by the white water of every breaker. The navigation lights of a big commercial ship far out to sea shimmered towards us.

  Moving heavily through the dry sand, we worked our way further down the beach. Someone had gathered enough odds and ends of driftwood together to light a campfire, in spite of the notices strictly forbidding such an activity.

  The night had taken on a chill now and it would have been tempting to stay near the fire, but I didn’t want to be around if the cops arrived to tell them to put it out. We skirted round the edge and kept going.

  The flames momentarily wiped out my night vision, so I didn’t see the skinny kid from the surf shop until he was a few metres in front of us. He was tight and wired. There was a cheap knife in his right hand.

  “Gimme the money,” he said. No wasted time on banter.

  I glanced over my shoulder to check Trey’s position and saw that the fat teen was now behind us. His hands were empty. I turned back to the skinny kid. The glint and shadow from the fire shifted satanically over his face.

  “We don’t have much,” I said.

  “Don’t lie to me, bitch,” the skinny kid said, raising the knife. “You got plenty.”

  Better to buy our way out of trouble if we could. I dropped the towel at my feet and reached into my pocket. I separated a couple of notes from the fold with my fingers and pulled my hand out. I held the money out to the side of me, wanting to make him work for it.

  The skinny kid smiled unpleasantly and nodded to his companion, who came forwards just far enough to grab the money, then retreated again to check his booty. It was obviously a system they’d used before.

  “It’s just a coupla twenties,” he said, disgusted.

  The skinny kid’s smile became a sneer.

  “What kinda fool d’you take me for?” he spat. He took a couple of steps forward, rolling the knife almost delicately between his fingertips so the blade flashed in the light. “Gimme the rest.”

  “No,” I said.

  He stopped. For a moment the only noise was the steady crash of the waves on the shoreline and the crackle of the fire behind me.

  Trey had moved up to my right shoulder but I was under no illusions that he was about to act as my wing man if it came down to it. His body was rigid, jaw clenched. When our eyes met he let his slide meaningfully down towards my back where the SIG was lying under my shirt. I gave the briefest shake of my head and turned back to the kid with the knife.

  I sighed. “Look,” I said. “I’ve had a very shitty day. I’m tired. You’ve just made twenty dollars each for ten seconds’ work. Be smart and quit while you’re ahead.”

  He bared his teeth. “Wise-ass, huh? Always heard you English chicks didn’t put up much of a fight,” he said and something else was gleaming in his eyes now. “Always heard as how it was like fucking a corpse. Looks like we’ve found ourselves a fighter, huh?”

  My heart accelerated, starting to flood my system with oxygenated blood. I could hear the echo of it thundering in my ears. “You have no idea,” I murmured.

  He came at me fast then, leading with the blade. I went to meet him, taking a couple of quick steps forwards to keep him away from Trey. I blocked his knife hand with my left forearm and snaked my arm around his so his wrist was locked up under my armpit.

  He jerked at his trapped arm and when he couldn’t immediately free it he tried to launch a wild left-hand punch instead. I tightened my grip, jamming my fist up under his elbow to force the joint straight beyond its limit. He gave a surprised grunt, the pain preventing him from turning far enough towards me for the blow to connect. I steadied him for a moment, then turned my body in towards his and jerked my knee up into his groin, quick and hard. The fight was over.

  The skinny kid’s eyes bulged as his legs gave way and he began to gag. I loosened up enough to let him fall to his knees, putting some twist onto his right hand as he went down to prise the knife out of his fingers.


  The fat kid hadn’t moved an inch while all this had gone on. He just stood there with his mouth hanging open.

  “Beat it,” I told him.

  For a moment he didn’t move. I hefted the knife one-handed, tossed it up and caught it by the blade, then brought my hand back like I was a circus knife thrower going for the big finale. “Now!” I said.

  The fat kid didn’t wait to see how good my aim was. He gave a kind of startled squeak, hurled the twenty-dollar notes down onto the sand, and then he turned and ran.

  I let go of the skinny kid’s arm and stepped away from him, but I needn’t have worried he was about to launch a counterattack. He just took it back and, very carefully, tucked both hands between his legs, cradling himself. His breath came quick and shallow, almost a pant, and his eyes were wet with tears.

  I leaned down, keeping my tone conversational. “Now, I wouldn’t like you to kid yourself that I’ve just been lucky and caught you off guard, because we both know that isn’t true, don’t we?”

  He managed a weak nod. The action shook loose a couple of tears, which tracked down the sides of his nose and dripped to the ground.

  “Good,” I said, still calm and pleasant. “So, we’re going to leave now and you’re going to crawl back to whatever hole you came out of and you’re going to stay there, aren’t you?”

  Another feeble nod.

  “Good boy,” I said encouragingly. I held the captured knife up in front of his face and watched the fear sharpen into focus as it caught his attention. “Because if you don’t, next time we meet I’m not just going to kick you in the bollocks, I’m going to cut them off, is that clear?”

  “Y-yeah!” he yelped.

  I straightened up, jerking my head to Trey. He picked up the fallen money and the towel I’d dropped, then stood looking down at the skinny kid for a moment, his face expressionless.

  “OK, let’s go,” I said gently. We carried on along the beach, leaving our would-be robber behind us, crying quietly into the sand.

  We kept walking, away from the campfire and the brightness of the big hotels and towards what looked like a residential area. Trey was quiet as we trudged along. I left him to work out what it was he wanted to say.

  My heartrate was slowing to its normal level, the tension going out of my body now.

  After I’d left the army I’d taught self-defence classes to women. Dealing with a situation like the one presented by the skinny kid and his mate was exactly the kind of thing I’d covered, week in and week out, for the best part of four years. There was no way he could have known that, so he’d woefully underestimated me.

  Sometimes that was annoying, being mistaken for less than I was, but at others I had to admit that it came in very handy.

  “Why didn’t you shoot him?” Trey asked suddenly.

  “What?”

  “You had a gun,” Trey said, sounding petulant, as though I’d somehow cheated, “so why didn’t you just, like, shoot him?”

  “I’ve already shot my quota of people for today,” I said, flippant.

  I heard his breath huff out.

  “Look, Trey, it’s not as simple as that,” I said. “What if he’d had a gun, too? Suddenly we’re in the middle of another shoot-out. If you pull a gun, you have to be prepared to use it. I wasn’t – not against a couple of chancers like those two. Besides anything else, I don’t have the ammo to spare. And if I’d just threatened them with the gun I’m sure they would have remembered us. This way, well, I don’t think matey-boy’s going to be in a hurry to go round telling anyone he’s just had his arse kicked by a girl, do you?”

  “No, I guess not,” Trey said. A slow smile spread across his face as the truth of it dawned on him. “‘Sides, man, it wasn’t his ass you kicked.”

  ***

  We found a secluded space by the side of a pair of weather beaten wooden steps that led up into the dunes and that’s where we spread out our beach towels for the night. I’d seen the amount of tyre tracks all over the place and I didn’t want to put us somewhere we were likely to be run down in our sleep.

  Trey rolled himself up in his towel and went out like he’d taken a punch, leaving me to lie awake listening to the relentless sea and the noises of the insects clicking incessantly into the night, and to think about the fact that I’d killed a man.

  Now the immediate dangers were past, that inescapable fact surfaced again. I replayed it over and over. Saw in minute detail the Buick slewing to a stop, the guy in the passenger seat putting his left hand on the A pillar to pull himself out of the car, the gun levelling in his right, the clenched concentration in his face.

  I tried to remember my own emotions, to put my actions down to extreme fear, or anger. Anything but the cold calm deliberation with which I’d shot him. In the end I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t blame heat for what I’d done because, in truth, beyond a determination not to let them get to us first, I hadn’t felt anything at all.

  Nothing.

  So what did that make me?

  Maybe it was partly down to my familiarity with guns. I associated them with sport, with accuracy and skill more than death.

  I’d been a first-class shot in the army, selected by my training instructors for the shooting teams in very short order. The first Skill At Arms meeting I’d done they’d brought me out almost as their secret weapon, gleeful as the scores came in for this unknown WRAC private. If I didn’t know better I’d almost say that most of the senior NCOs had put a bet on.

  But target shooting was different. Targets fell, or developed holes. They didn’t bleed. They didn’t scream. And they didn’t die.

  It wasn’t until I’d gone for Special Forces training that my temperament had been recognised for what it was. By Sean, of course. He’d been one of my sergeants then and he’d always seen too much. I suddenly remembered a conversation I’d had with him the year before, when we’d met again for the first time since the army.

  “You were one of the best shots with a pistol I’ve ever come across, Charlie. Cool-headed. Deadly.”

  “There were plenty who were just as good.”

  He’d shaken his head. “A lot of people had a reasonable ability to aim. That doesn’t mean they’d got the stomach to pull the trigger for real. Not like you, Charlie. You had what it took. Still do, at a guess.”

  I’d refuted it at the time, hadn’t wanted to admit he might have been right. Events in Germany had made any arguments I might have come up with redundant. I’d finally accepted that an ability to kill was part of me and I’d better learn to live with it if I didn’t want it to destroy me. Becoming a bodyguard had seemed the best way to channel such a talent, if that’s what it was.

  Maybe curse would be a better description.

  Trey shifted and mumbled in his sleep. Not surprising that he would have bad dreams after what he’d seen today. I watched him for a moment, but he didn’t wake.

  I didn’t like him, I admitted to myself, dispassionate. When all was said and done he was just a spoilt bratty kid and I hated spoilt bratty kids. In normal circumstance I wouldn’t have crossed the road to spit on him if he’d been on fire.

  Odd then, that my chosen new profession meant I was now supposed to lay down my life, if necessary, to protect him.

  ***

  Next morning – Friday – I woke with the sunrise. My body clock was still partly tuned to UK time, running some five hours ahead.

  I sat up with a groan. You think sand is nice and soft until you try spending the night with nothing between you and it except a towel. My hips creaked and grated every time I moved and I realised I should have dug hollows under them. Ah well, maybe next time.

  The sun was cranking up slowly from beyond the far horizon, casting the sky with a stunning wash of pinks and pale blues. I sat, wrapped in my towel against the early chill and watched it climb steadily over the teeming bird life.

  All along the shore line quick little piebald wading birds darted into the bubbling water as the sea a
dvanced and retreated, nipping at the wet sand. The seagulls seemed like slow bruisers by comparison, lurking with their thumbs in their pockets, looking for trouble. Across the tops of the swells a strung-out flight of pelicans cruised effortlessly, as though they were air surfing just for the fun of it.

  Trey was still spark out and I let him sleep, but I wasn’t the only one awake early. Lots of people were out for their morning exercise along the beach. In the golden dawn light they looked aggressively healthy as they power-walked briskly past us, elbows pumping. Most were elderly, dressed in shorts, pale shirts and those tinted sunshades that golfers wear. Nearly all were carrying insulated mugs. I smelt their coffee, and was envious.

  Not everybody was in a hurry. One young couple wandered at the waterline, hand in hand, soaking up the primitive peace of the sun’s ascent. I thought of the couple at the motel, pointlessly slaughtered, and it set up a dull aching pain behind my breastbone.