“So,” Walt said now, mopping his mouth with a paper napkin and sitting back in his chair, “Charlie here’s from Manchester, that much I know, but that doesn’t sound like an English accent you got there, Trey. Where you from, buddy?”
It was casually slipped in. If it hadn’t been for the shrewd look in the old man’s eyes, I wouldn’t have read anything more into the question.
“Oh, well, we’ve lived in a bunch of different places,” Trey said airily. “My dad kept us, like, moving around a lot.”
I glared at him. If he was trying to make it sound like Keith was a petty criminal, he was going about it the right way. “Trey’s from down near Miami,” I put in quickly. “I’m just looking after him.”
Now it was Trey’s turn to scowl. He didn’t like the idea that I was his nursemaid any better than he liked the idea that I was his bodyguard.
“Uh-huh,” Walt said slowly. He poured himself a glass of water, offering the jug to the rest of us before setting it down again on the table top. His movements had a slow precision to them, as though he weighed the merits of each one before he did it. “So how come you were sleeping on the beach last night?” he asked.
It was a reasonable question, I couldn’t argue about that. What to tell him was the problem.
“We got robbed yesterday,” Trey said. And just when I thought that maybe he was starting to think on his feet at last he had to go and embroider it unnecessarily. “Four guys jumped us – with guns. Took all our money.”
Harriet immediately made sympathetic noises, but I was watching Walt. His only reaction was to let his eyes flick up briefly from under those disordered eyebrows. He let his wife run on a little, then said, “Gee, that’s bad luck, Charlie. So what did the cops say?”
I took another sip of coffee while I thought furiously about my answer. Damn Trey’s smart comment. I hadn’t a clue what the American police would be likely to have told us in such a situation. I put my cup down again. “We didn’t go to them,” I said at last. “The guys who mugged us threatened to come back for us if we did and anyway—” I shrugged, “—we didn’t have much money to give them.”
“Musta had your credit cards, though – if you couldn’t get yourselves a motel room last night,” Walt said, apparently busying himself forking a slice of watermelon from the central platter onto his plate. “I know it’s Spring Break an’ all, but there’s still plenty of places further out with vacancies.”
For a moment I didn’t answer. This was getting sticky. I glanced at Trey’s worried face. “We’ll sort something better out for tonight,” I said. That, at least, was true.
Walt nodded at that, his eyes hooded and his face serious. “So,” he went on, his voice still slow and pleasant, “was that before or after you crashed your car?”
I went utterly still, eyes fixed on Walt’s face. How could I have ever thought he was just a nice friendly old man? He was ruthless. Relentless.
“Oh Walt,” Harriet protested with a shaky laugh, “I’m sure you’re mistaken about that.”
“You were driving, young lady,” he went on mildly, ignoring her. The sheer certainty in his tone sent the blood thumping in my ears.
“Whatever gives you that idea?” I asked, hearing the slightly steely note that had crept into my voice, however hard I tried to maintain my neutrality.
He had been trimming the skin off his watermelon with one of the table knives, and now he used the rounded blade as a pointer, waving it towards my bare forearms where they rested on the table top.
“When the airbag went off it burned along the inside of your arms as it deployed,” he said conversationally. “I’ve seen it happen plenty before. It’s one of the sure signs if the driver and passenger have tried to swap places after the event.”
“I see,” I said, unable to stop myself shifting my hands into my lap. If I’d remembered my upbringing and kept my elbows off the table to start with, I reflected, I might not have been rumbled. “You seem very well-informed about the mechanics of road traffic accidents for a third-generation construction worker.”
“Walt never followed his daddy into the construction business,” Harriet said. She was sitting very straight and very still, I saw. Her voice was unnaturally calm and clear. “After the navy he spent twenty-five years with the Bureau.”
The Bureau. Even a non-American like me knew that meant the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Shit. We’d escaped from the cops and walked straight into the arms of the silver FBI.
I pushed my chair back and stood up. Trey followed suit, almost scrambling to his feet. Walt and his wife didn’t move to rise with us and they both kept their hands still. Harriet’s jaw was tight. I hated being the cause of her sudden fear.
“We’re really very grateful to you for feeding us,” I said, giving her a small smile, “but unfortunately we really must be leaving now.”
I backed towards the door we’d come in by, pushing the kid ahead of me. Trey shuffled, as though he could hardly move under his own steam.
As I reached it, Walt asked sadly, “What do you think you’re gonna achieve by running, Charlie?”
“Right now? Staying alive,” I said, flat.
“Maybe I can help.”
I shook my head. “The people we’re dealing with have no compunction about killing bystanders,” I said. “This is not your fight, Walt. You’d be better off staying out of it.”
“If you change your mind, call me. I mean it. Any time – day or night,” he said and reeled off a ten-digit number. “You want me to write that down?”
“I can remember it,” Trey said. I glanced at him and he shrugged. “I got a head for figures.”
I pushed open the screen door and thrust him out into the garden. As I stepped through it myself Walt threw me a final question.
“This trouble you’re in – it’s that bad, huh?”
I gave him a grim smile. “Keep watching the news,” I said.
***
We spent most of the rest of the morning lurking on the beach around the busy Boardwalk area, which was like an old-fashioned seaside promenade, complete with a pier. We tried to stay out of the way of anyone who looked vaguely official and I gave all the wrinklies a wide berth, too. However harmless they might first appear.
Closer to the centre of Daytona, where South Atlantic crossed over and became North Atlantic Avenue, there was a funfair with one of these contraptions that turns people into human bungee balls. They winch a circular cage down to ground level, strap you in, then release it. The cage goes catapulting up into the sky, suspended by elastic from two support towers. Trey was desperate to give it a try.
I had no desire to become reacquainted with my breakfast so soon after eating it, but I talked him out of having a go on the grounds of poor security.
“If the police spot us when we’re up there, we’re sitting ducks,” I told him. Thankfully, he seemed to believe me.
By ten-thirty, in any case, he was itching to get to the sound-off at the Ocean Center to meet his friends. We crossed back to the west side of the main drag, braving five lanes of traffic that didn’t seem to pay any attention to the walk/don’t walk pedestrian signals at the crossings.
The police were everywhere. I kept my head down and hoped that some quirk of fate didn’t make the SIG slip out of its place behind my belt and clatter to the floor in front of one of them.
The banners strung across the front of the Ocean Center announced, ‘Spring Break Nationals – the world’s most famous Sound-Off.’ If I’d never heard of it before, I couldn’t help but hear it now.
There were half a dozen wild-looking cars spread across the expanse of concrete in front of the building. They had amazing paint and graphics, the kind of thing I’d only seen at custom bike shows in the UK. We walked past a Cadillac Escalade with chrome wheels that, according to the tyre size, were a mind-boggling twenty-four inches in diameter. The truck was riding so low that I couldn’t have got four fingers between the side rail and the ground. How on earth did they drive them?