“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 advanced 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.
Strange how I could feel more distress at the deaths of two people where I’d been little more than a bystander, rather than the one where I’d actually pulled the trigger myself.
Now, the couple paused a little way off to my right with the waves lapping gently at their ankles. They turned their faces towards the sea and embraced. I shifted my gaze, unwilling to intrude.
I suppose there’d been a time, once, when I’d wondered if that would ever be Sean and me – strolling barefoot on a subtropical beach at sunrise. Instead we’d spent more time with our backs to the wall, fighting for our lives. Violence, mostly not of our own making, had always seemed to come between us.