But as we started to move towards the closest exit the doors opened and another couple of cops walked in. If it hadn’t been for the press of people, Trey’s sudden about-turn would have been more than enough to flag our whereabouts.
They could have been responding to some other emergency in the hall, but I very much doubted it. Someone – most likely some sharp-eyed security guard – had spotted us on the way in. Getting out might prove somewhat more problematic.
We pushed and hurried our way through to where the crowd was thickest. A whole swathe of it seemed to be gravitating towards one of the big industrial doors that led out of the main hall and into a corralled outdoor arena.
We allowed them to sweep us along and carry us out into the blazing sunlight, hoping it would be enough to cover our escape. Then, just when I was beginning to get my hopes up, the advance of people slowed and stopped.
They seemed to be gathering round a big electronic scoreboard and PA system that was set up in a corner of one of the parking areas. I glanced behind us and spotted a couple of peaked caps in among the baseball hats, heading in our direction, but without the urgency to suggest they’d actually spotted us. I kept pushing Trey towards the forward edge of the crowd, trying to put as many bodies between us and authority as I could.
Eventually we came up against a steel barrier fence, about waist high. On the other side a fat little Chevy van was pulled up in front of the scoreboard, surrounded by what looked like a ground crew. One of them was holding a control box, with a thick bundle of wires leading to a socket behind a fuel filler cap on the van’s rear panel.
Then the guy who was manning the PA said, “Hit it!” and every panel on the van began to buzz. Somewhere in the depths of the vehicle, muffled like it was buried under rock, there came an incredible deep bass rumble. The ground seemed to be jumping under my feet. I stuck my fingers in my ears but it didn’t seem to do much good.
The electronic scoreboard shot up to 165.3 and stuck there. The guy with the control box shrugged and shook his head and shut the system down. Everybody clapped and whistled.
Xander was standing next to me, cheering.
“What the hell is this?” I demanded.
“IdBL,” he said. When he saw my totally blank look, he sighed and added, “It’s a competition for measuring who has the loudest most kick-ass system, you understand what I’m saying? Whose system kicks the hardest.”
“And how hard does this one kick?” I asked, risking a quick scan for the police, then turning back to the van. The crew were unclamping the doors and taking the measuring microphone and its stand out of the interior.
Xander nodded to the scoreboard. “Says it right there – one-sixty-five-point-three dB.”
“Is that ‘dB’ as in decibels?” I said. He nodded again. “Christ, that’s more than enough to kill you if you sat in there.”
Xander smiled serenely. “Yeah,” he crowed. “How cool is that?”
Further to my right, another cop appeared. Or it could have been one of the same cops. I wasn’t paying attention to their faces. I turned away from him, and saw another away to my left. At least they were still searching, I saw. They didn’t know how close they were.
In front of us, the crew with the van had finished uncoupling it and were now positioning themselves around the body, starting to wheel it slowly out of the arena and towards the parking area beyond. Clearly all that stereo equipment hadn’t left any room for an engine.
“Come on,” I said, and squeezed through a gap between the barriers.
The five of us gathered round the back bumper of the van, heads down as we helped push. There were a couple of event officials sitting under sunshades on folding chairs between the arena and the car park but they were paying more attention to stopping unauthorised people getting in than they were to stopping unauthorised people going out.
We kept pushing until the van’s crew steered it into their pit space in the parking area and nosed it to a halt.
“Hey, thanks guys,” said the kid who’d been operating the controls.
“No problem,” Xander said. “Good score, man.”
Scott fished into one of the front pockets of his shorts for his car keys. The pocket was so long he had to bend down to reach the bottom of it. We threaded our way between the cars and trailers and trucks in the competitor car park until we reached the far end. He pressed his alarm remote and the lights flashed on a lowered Dodge pickup with blacked out windows and a mountain of coloured beads hanging from the door mirrors.
I wondered how five of us were going to fit into the pickup cab, but Xander and Aimee climbed straight into the rear load bed. Trey and I piled onto the front bench seat, with Scott behind the wheel. He cranked the engine up and roared out of the car park, raising a cloud of white sandy dust.
“I think it might be a good idea if you tried not to get pulled over for driving like a prat, don’t you?” I said mildly.
“She means a dork,” Trey supplied when he looked puzzled. “She’s from England,” he added.
“Oh, um, yeah,” Scott said, but at least he drove more sedately out onto the road behind the Ocean Center. As we joined the jam of stationary traffic waiting for the next lights, a couple of police cars came screaming into the car park we’d just left. The cops jumped out and went running into the exhibition hall.
I was suddenly glad of the tinted windows. Trey slunk down in his seat and put his elbow on the door frame so he could partly cover his face with his hand. The lights took forever to change in our favour. We all held our breath.
Finally, they flipped onto green. Scott gunned the motor and as we turned out onto the main road he gave a whoop of relief.
“Man, that was a close one,” he said, grinning as he reached for his sunglasses which were hanging from the rear-view mirror.
He flicked the stereo on to a local hard rock station and started slapping the top of the steering wheel in time to the music. “Tell you one thing,” he added, “if you’re gonna be around here a few days, we are gonna have to do something about a disguise for you two.”
It was the first sensible thing I’d heard him say.
Ten
“Pink?” I said, allowing the disgust to win out clear in my voice. “Of all the colours you could have chosen, and you went for pink?”
“Aw, c’mon, Charlie!” Aimee said and I could tell from the suppressed laughter in her voice that she’d been the one behind it. “I think you’ll look kinda cool.”
“We’re supposed to be keeping a low profile, not making prats of ourselves,” I said sourly. “Who the hell has pink hair?”
Aimee started to giggle, hiding her mouth behind her hand like she was still in junior school, setting Trey off as well. I wanted to knock both their heads together.
We were in the upstairs den of Scott’s parents’ place in Ormond Beach. Having said that, the house was actually a bungalow, like so many in Florida, with dark glass windows and a huge arched porch over the front door. The exterior stucco was painted salmon pink, so I suppose that should have been a warning of things to come.
The house was on a quiet residential side street of properties similar in size, if not in style. Scott had driven his pickup right up to the doors of the built-in triple garage at the left-hand side of the main entrance. He’d waited impatiently while the automatic mechanism ploddingly cranked the door up out of the way, then drove straight in, braking hard enough to make the tyres squeak on the painted concrete floor. The garage door slowly closed again behind us.
However Scott’s parents made their living, they clearly weren’t doing too badly out of it, I reflected, as he led us through a utility room and into the house itself. It was another mainly white interior, enlivened by a sprawling collection of native American art and sculptures.