by Zoe Sharp
I didn’t see Chris right away, not until the car arrived. A maroon Ford Taurus braked to a fast halt right outside the house and the big coloured guy jumped out of the driver’s seat, leaving the doors open and the engine running. He moved round the back of the car and opened the boot.
“C’mon,” he said to Whitmarsh, “we don’t have much time.”
“OK.” Whitmarsh nodded. “Check her over, first.” To me he said, “You exceeded my expectations, Charlie. Takes a lot to impress me, but I’m impressed.”
“Excuse me if I don’t take that as a compliment,” I said with a touch of acid.
He smiled. “Yep,” he went on as though I hadn’t spoken, holding my gaze as he added with a certain cruel deliberation, “you put up more of a fight than Meyer, that’s for sure.”
I felt my face harden but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of rising to that one. We continued our stare-out competition as Chris approached and gave me a quick pat-down search. He kept out of Lonnie’s field of fire and stepped back when he was done, shaking his head to Whitmarsh. As I’d hoped, he didn’t bother with the boy.
“OK,” Whitmarsh said, “get them both into the trunk.”
“Oh come on,” I snapped, edging closer to Trey and stamping on my fear. “If you’re going to kill us, just get on with it. You don’t have to go through the classic ‘taking you for a ride’ crap.”
Chris flicked his eyes to his boss and in that instant I read just a hint of nervousness there. The sudden realisation it triggered was like someone had flicked a switch inside my head and turned on all the floodlights at a Premier League football game.
They didn’t want us dead.
In fact, having Trey dead was the very last thing they wanted. To the point where they’d actually stepped in to prevent us being shot by Oakley man and his crew.
It all made a twisted kind of sense now. I’d thought Whitmarsh and Oakley man were all in this together but, when I thought about it, I’d never seen them working as a team. Even though they’d always appeared to have a common aim.
“Maybe we aren’t of a mind to kill you,” Whitmarsh said, narrow eyed. “You thought of that?”
Lonnie paused just long enough in his constant surveillance to flick his boss a brief, pained glance, as though he considered Whitmarsh was wasting time they didn’t have on idle chitchat. Chris was tense, too. For a few moments the only sound was that of the Taurus’s quietly running engine.
“Well it certainly looked that way when we watched you slaughter that pair at the motel,” I threw back.
Surprise rocked him, then he smiled. “Maybe we’ve had a change of heart since then,” he said and jerked his head to Chris to get on with it.
Trey was right next to me and, as Chris closed on us again, I took a step back, leaving the boy to the fore. Chris’s face flickered at my apparent display of cowardice but as I moved I reached behind Trey with my right hand, as though to put my arm around his shoulders. Instead I went under his shirt and grabbed hold of the pistol grip of the SIG, snatching it free.
My left arm snaked round Trey’s neck, fisting my hand into his shirt to pin him hard against the front of my body, unashamedly using him as a shield. I brought the SIG up into view, planting the muzzle under his jawline. His head came back as his spine went stiff both with outrage and with fright. All the time I made sure I presented as small a target as possible to Whitmarsh.
He was the one who worried me. If they were as desperate to capture Trey alive as I suspected, Lonnie couldn’t risk firing the shotgun when we were so close together. Chris had nothing in his hands. That left Whitmarsh and his Beretta.
But they all froze, which gave me hope to think there might be an escape route still open to us. It was a gamble. All I had to do now was play it.
“You must think I’m amazingly stupid,” I spat. “OK, so you’ve decided you need the kid. So where does that leave me?”
I contrived a suitably whiny note of low cunning into my voice. I was dealing with men without honour. They wouldn’t have any difficulty in believing I might have my eye solely on my own interests. A rat who’d suddenly found a life jacket and decided now was the time to leave this ship.
I nudged the barrel of the SIG further into Trey’s neck, angled upwards where a single shot would scatter his brains all over the lawn and watched the alarm in their faces.
“You want him alive?” I sneered. “Well in that case you better be prepared to let me walk him out of here, because otherwise he’ll be yet another dead body you’ve got to clean up. And trust me,” I added, voice positively dripping with venom, “after two days solid in this little brat’s company, it would almost be a pleasure.”
For a moment nobody spoke and I feared I’d overdone it, but then Whitmarsh lowered his gun and nodded to the other two. They let me shuffle Trey towards the Taurus, making sure I kept him turning so they never had a clear shot at me while we got there. Not that any of them tried for one. I began to realise that whatever value they now placed on Trey must be a high one.
Getting into the driving seat without exposing myself wasn’t easy and I managed it with less style than I would have liked, but we got there. Trey was taut and ungainly, barely seeming able to fold himself into the car.
As soon as we were in I stuck the car into gear and floored it, not caring how much rubber I left stuck to the road. The boot lid bounced up and down a couple of times as we hit a few bumps, then finally latched shut. I kept hunched down in my seat, waiting at any moment for the shots to come through the back window, but they never came.
Either Whitmarsh knew when to admit defeat, or he really was terrified of injuring the boy.
As we reached the end of the street I risked sitting up far enough to glance in the rear-view mirror. It was set for a taller driver and I had to tilt it down slightly to use it, but when I did so I found that everyone had disappeared from the front of Henry’s house.
I turned and looked over my shoulder, just to be certain, but there was nobody there. Whitmarsh and his men had gone just like they’d never existed.
Fifteen
I drove without direction, heading down the main strip for a couple of blocks then making a series of random turns, just to keep us and our stolen Taurus away from prying police eyes. Not that I thought Jim Whitmarsh would be in any hurry to report the car as taken.
Mind you, we wouldn’t have lasted the first ten seconds in a traffic stop. The Taurus had a beige interior and my nervous hands had left bloody prints all over the rim of the steering wheel. It looked like I’d gutted a live rabbit in there at the very least.
And then there was my unlicenced SIG, which I’d stuffed back under my thigh. A gun bullets from which could now be found in two dead bodies. The thought sent a shiver across my shoulders.
Shit. How had it come to this?
For a time I drove without speaking, barely giving Trey a second glance. The boy was burrowed into the far corner of the passenger seat, his face turned away to the glass. I could tell by the angle of his head that he was sulking and I didn’t have the energy to start a fight with him about it. Not right now.
I was too busy trying to make some sense of what had happened at Henry’s place. It all seemed such a tangle. Oakley man was genuinely with the police, of that I was now quite certain. Otherwise, how could he have known about – and diverted – Xander’s call for help?
It was also Oakley man who had tortured and then killed Henry. He’d admitted as much to us – when he’d been confident we weren’t going to live long enough to report the fact. The question was, how had he found Henry in the first place?
The only answer had to be that Henry himself had contacted Oakley man, offering to negotiate for Trey. But if that was the case, where did Whitmarsh and his mob fit in? At the motel I’d assumed they all had a common aim, but now it seemed like they were on opposite sides.
Oakley man had simply wanted us dead, so at least he was consistent in that. Whitmarsh, though, seem
ed to have changed his stance. A change of heart, he’d called it but I hadn’t believed him. I didn’t think he had one to change. But he now wanted to take us alive desperately enough that he’d let us go when I’d threatened Trey. And he’d been prepared to use deadly force to protect us when necessary.
But why the secrecy? Why hide in the shadows and wait until we made a break for it to take potshots at the Hispanic man? And why allow Oakley man and Ginger to pick up their dead and run? If Whitmarsh’s men were prepared to kill one, what did it achieve to let the others escape alive?
I remembered the young cop who’d stopped us and the men in the Buick who’d intervened. It wasn’t just a black and white case of dead or alive, I realised. Neither side wanted us to fall into the wrong official hands, either. So who were the right ones?
I flicked my eyes across to Trey. He was still staring pointedly out of the window.
“Maybe it’s time we went back to see Walt,” I suggested, a little tentative.
No response.
“Trey,” I said, snappier this time. “Did you hear me? I said maybe—”
“I heard you!” The words burst out of him, too loud inside the confines of the car, startling. He twisted round and now I could see the tears running down his face. He pressed his lips together until they were white and without definition, his whole face pinched.
“What’s the matter?”
My question only made things worse.
“What’s the matter?” he shrieked, uncaring that his voice rose and wavered, shrill as a reed. “How the fuck can you go ‘What’s the matter?’ like that, after what you just did?” He broke off, shaking his head for a moment as his temper boiled up under the surface, then he slammed his fist sideways into the door panel. “How can you?” he repeated.
“Trey,” I said carefully, trying to keep one eye on the traffic through his outburst. “I did what I had to do to get us out of there alive. Surely you realise that?”
He was silent and it dawned on me that he’d taken every word I’d spoken on Henry’s porch at face value. My mouth dried. No wonder the kid was so touchy.
“Trey,” I said, trying again. “I didn’t mean it – any of it. Christ, you can’t have thought I did, not after what we’ve been through these last couple of days?”
“How was I s’posed to know?” he threw back, sullen. “You sure sounded like you meant it.”
“If I hadn’t been convincing, Whitmarsh would have called my bluff.” I broke off for a moment while I looked for another way to make him see it. “I’m here to protect you,” I said at last. “It’s my job. I have protected you. Christ, I’ve even killed to protect you. Actions are supposed to speak louder than words. Doesn’t that tell you anything about me?”
There was a long pause. “I never asked you to kill anyone,” he muttered.
“Shit, I really can’t win with you, can I?” I let my breath out fast, but my annoyance didn’t go with it. “I do everything I can to keep you alive and suddenly I’m a cold-blooded killer. But if I hadn’t done what I’ve done, we’d both be dead by now.”
“Didn’t do much for Scott, though, did it?”
He seemed determined to chuck any argument he could at me. I set my jaw and tried to hang on to my temper. “I did my best,” I ground out. “He made a poor call. If he hadn’t got out of the wrong side of the truck, he probably would never have been hit.”
Trey huffed and threw his hands in the air. “Oh great! He’s my friend and he’s probably dead and all you’re doing is saying as how it’s, like, not your fault!”
“Trey, don’t jump to conclusions,” I said, starting to lose it myself now. “We don’t know how Scott is.”
“So let’s go to the hospital and find out.”
“We can’t,” I shot straight back. “Don’t be a prat. That’s the first place everybody will look for us.” I waved a hand towards my hair. “And they know exactly what we look like now. We’ve got dead bodies piling up all around us and Whitmarsh and good old Gerri Raybourn seem determined to make sure I’m the one lined up to take the blame for the lot of them. There’s no other way to explain what happened back there.”
Trey didn’t want to ask me to expand on that, but curiosity got the better of him. “What d’you mean?”
“Why else would Lonnie blow that Hispanic guy away without showing himself? Why let the other two get away when they had plenty of opportunity to shoot them, too? I think they wanted Oakley man – the guy from the theme park – to assume I’d done it, though Christ knows where I was supposed to have suddenly acquired a shotgun from.”
Trey was still frowning. “So?”
“I don’t know,” I said, more quietly now. The traffic slowed and stopped as the next light turned red ahead of us. “The only thing that’s changed since yesterday is that Henry found out about your part in this program of your dad’s. We need to find out who he was in touch with. And for that we need to find out what was on the hard drive we took out of Henry’s computer.”
“Which you gave to Xander,” Trey put in, and there was a slight accusing note in his tone.
“Which I gave to Xander,” I agreed, adding pointedly, “when I didn’t think we were going to live long enough to do it ourselves.”
“So we gotta go to the hospital now anyways,” Trey said, his jaw coming out, stubborn. “We gotta find Xander.”
“No.” I shook my head. “We’ll wait until later and catch him somewhere else – at home, maybe. It’s way too dangerous to try now.”
“I want to go to the hospital. If you’re too scared to go with me,” he said, loud and scathing, “let me out of the goddamned car and I’ll go on my own!”
“You can’t go on your own, Trey. Use some sense for once.”
“I’m not running out on my friends!” He was almost yelling at me now. “You can’t hold me against my will. That’s, like, kidnapping. You can’t—”
The people in the car alongside us had begun to stare. “OK, OK,” I said, cutting him off. “For heaven’s sake! We’ll go to the bloody hospital. Just calm down, will you?”
He subsided into his seat, sniffing loudly and mopping his nose on the back of his hand. He looked too close to smug in victory for my liking. I couldn’t help wiping that off his face with a quiet reminder. “But if I have to shoot anyone to get us out of there, just remember whose idea it was, OK?”
***
The Halifax Medical Center on Clyde Morris Boulevard was more like a sprawling office complex than a hospital. I left the stolen Taurus reverse parked against the wall in a corner of their cavernous multi-storey car park and we followed the signs for the Trauma Center.
We’d already stopped off briefly at a shopping mall, just long enough to find a quiet restroom where I could scrub the blood off my hands and wipe the worst of it from my silk trousers. It had turned black against the green, which didn’t look so bad, but I still thought it wasn’t a good idea to walk into a place where, in theory, they should be able to identify it for what it was.
I sent Trey into the store with some money to buy me a cheap bag, something I could use to conceal the SIG. He’d come back with a lurid Barbie-pink plastic over-the-shoulder job, decorated with bright violet and yellow flowers. He tried to look innocently disdainful but I was sure he’d picked that one out deliberately.
Now we hurried into the main hospital building itself. I slipped on my best worried teen expression along with my best American accent as I asked after Scott at the desk.
The jaded-looking big black woman on the other side eyed me with suspicion. “You a relative?” she asked.
“No, but this is Scott’s brother,” I lied, nodding to Trey. “He’s only fifteen. I brought him in as soon as we heard.”
She looked at Trey and for some reason his petulant demeanour caused her to soften. She didn’t quite say, “Ahh,” but it was a close-run thing.
We followed the directions she gave us until eventually we turned a corner and found Xander a
nd Aimee waiting nervously in a corridor and we knew we were in the right place.
Trey broke into a jog as soon as he caught sight of them. “Xander, hey man! How is he?”
Xander turned at the sound of his voice but looked away quickly, like he could hardly bear to have us in sight. Aimee jumped to her feet and came to meet us, looking pale and frightened.
“They won’t tell us much, ‘cept he’s still in surgery,” she said. She had her hands wrapped round her upper arms, unconsciously rubbing at her skin. “He lost a lot of blood and there’s, like, other complications.”
Trey stared from one to the other. “Like what?”
“They took X-rays and they reckon the bullet’s pretty close to his spine, man,” Xander said, voice compressed. “There’s a chance he might not walk again.” Just for a moment, his eyes landed on me as he spoke and I knew without it being said that he blamed me – us – for what had happened.
I could have pointed out that no-one had forced them to come to Henry’s with us. In fact, I’d specifically asked them not to, but there was enough guilt floating around without me adding my contribution.
“They called Scott’s folks,” Aimee put in. “They dropped everything and got on a plane. They should be here any time. I just don’t know what we’re gonna, like, tell them.”
“Have you said anything to the hospital?”
Aimee shook her head, glancing to Xander.
“We’ve had the cops hassling us already,” he said, “but we didn’t tell them nothing.”
“Good,” I said. “For God’s sake don’t mention me or Trey to them.”
“What?” Xander yelped. He muscled in close, putting his face into mine. He was slightly taller and when he was pumped up on anger and grief he seemed bigger still. Aimee made a protesting noise and put her hand on his arm. With an effort he got a grip on his temper, lowering his voice to a growl. “Our friend could be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life because of you, and all you wanna do is stay out of trouble?”
“Trouble isn’t the beginning of it,” I said, flat. “At least one of the guys who murdered Henry and then came after us is a cop. Two of them are now dead. If you want to tell the cops – who might or might not be in on this – all about what really happened, then on your own heads be it. Far better to invent a drive-by shooting incident and leave it at that. Everybody keeps telling me it’s Spring Break. Wild things happen all the time.”