First Drop

by Zoe Sharp

  ***

  Getting to Henry’s place in time was the thing that proved the most difficult. After my reluctant capitulation Scott retrieved his Dodge from the car park behind the Ocean Center where he’d left it and edged out into the slow-moving traffic on North Atlantic. It had snarled to a crawl, not helped by the police cruisers which seemed to be pulling over an unending stream of cars into the centre lane and booking them on the spot.

  After fifteen minutes we’d barely made three blocks and I had to make a conscious effort not to look at my watch every thirty seconds. Besides, Scott was looking nervous enough for all of us, fingers beating a relentless tattoo on the top of the steering wheel.

  “Aw, come on, will ya?” he kept muttering through clenched teeth as he forced his way into a gap that didn’t really exist in the next lane on the grounds it had moved six inches further forwards than the one we were in. The driver he’d just cut up blew his horn and gave him the finger.

  “Same to you, asshole!” Scott shouted into the rear-view mirror.

  Four cars ahead of us a traffic cop was writing a ticket for some other poor unlucky driver at the next intersection.

  “Hey, calm down,” I said, eyeing the cop. “The last thing we need right now is for you to get involved in a road rage punch-up.”

  Unfortunately, the cop’s attention had been grabbed by the horn and the raised voices. I saw a pair of sunglasses swing in our direction as his head came up. Christ, why did they all wear dark glasses? I started to pray silently that he’d let it ride, ignore us.

  I should have known we wouldn’t be that lucky.

  As the lights changed and Scott began to move forwards, the cop pointed firmly at the Dodge and then to the centre lane with a contemptuous flick of his wrist. His manner had an overwhelming authority about it. I could feel Scott start to cringe in his seat.

  “What do I do?” he asked, his voice tight with either excitement or fear. “You want me to make a break for it?”

  I looked at the sea of creeping vehicles that surrounded us. The cop’s partner had joined him now and he was staring in our direction, hand drifting towards his hip in a reflex gesture. There was another police car waiting in a motel forecourt less than two hundred metres further on.

  Alongside me, both Scott and Trey had turned as pale as their hair. Aimee and Xander were kneeling behind the cab, their faces pressed in through the sliding window. They looked scared.

  I glanced down. The SIG was in the open bag on my lap. I had four rounds left.

  I couldn’t risk it. I couldn’t risk them.

  I sighed. “No,” I said, aware of a sickly taste in my mouth. “I think we’d better see if we can talk our way out of this one. Just do what he wants, Scott. Pull over.”

  Thirteen

  In the end, the cops neither recognised nor arrested any of us.

  They read Scott the riot act about lane discipline and proper signalling, and they made a big deal out of checking the truck over but in some ways it was all routine. We were just the latest in a long line of kids they’d booked that weekend for some minor violation or another. Not the first and definitely not last by any means. They didn’t even bother to search the rest of us and they didn’t ask for ID.

  As soon as I realised there was nothing sinister about the stop, I felt the muscles across my shoulders begin to unlock, one by one. I took my hand off the pistol grip of the gun in the bag and propped my elbow on the edge of the door instead, resting my chin on my palm. Then I sat in my side of the cab and chewed gum with my mouth open and tried to look teenage and bored.

  Scott stood in front of the Dodge, between the two cops. His whole body language was submissive, head bowed, hands clasped behind him. Every now and again he stole a glance back into the cab. If the cops had been a little more on the ball they should have taken that as a cue to rip the inside apart looking for a stash of soft drugs at the very least. I suppose the kid must just have had an honest face.

  And all the while, the seconds ticked on into minutes. By the time ten had passed Trey had started to fidget.

  “I’m gonna call him,” he whispered to me, talking out of the side of his mouth. “I gotta tell him we’re gonna be late.”

  He eased the phone out of his pocket and started flicking through the buttons, but soon discovered that Henry’s number had been withheld. I realised that an e-mail address was the only contact we had for the man. OK, we could find his house again, but being able to give directions doesn’t generally mean much to Directory Enquiries, unless the US version was much more accommodating than it was at home.

  Trey held the phone in front of him, so tense that it almost vibrated in his hands, hoping for another call. But as Henry’s deadline approached he didn’t make contact again.

  With the engine, and therefore the air conditioning switched off, the heat expanded inside the pickup cab until it was crushing us into our seats. It didn’t seem to make any difference that the windows were all open. In fact, that probably made it worse.

  By the time the first cop finally handed Scott his ticket and told him to beat it and to be more careful in future, we were already twenty minutes beyond our half-hour maximum time limit.

  Scott climbed back into the cab, looking very pink around the ears as he twisted the ignition key.

  “For God’s sake don’t spin the wheels setting off,” I said quietly, “or we’ll be here all day.”

  He threw me a miserable glance but drove away with commendable sedateness, still clutching the crumpled ticket in his right hand.

  “Jeez,” he said, close to tears, once we were on the move again. “I’m real sorry, guys. I let you down.”

  “It was just luck,” I said, pinching Trey’s arm when he opened his mouth to disagree. “Just be thankful they didn’t do a full search.” I threw him a quick reassuring smile. “And don’t worry about it. It could have been worse.”

  Me and my mouth.

  ***

  Once we were away from the main crush Scott put his foot down, but it still took another six minutes to reach Henry’s street.

  Scott turned in so hard the truck gave a little wriggle as the suspension overloaded. In the back Aimee and Xander were clinging on to the side panels and laughing to each other like it was an amusement park ride.

  As we sped along the street I was checking out parked cars and empty driveways, comparing the layout against the mental image I’d snapped the last time we were there. It all seemed quiet, normal, with no new cars too smart for the area, no suspicious vans. I was aware of a slight disorientation, even so, in trying to overlay my night-time memory onto daylight.

  Following Trey’s directions, Scott pulled up hard enough in front of Henry’s run-down house to have the neighbours twitching. If this had been the kind of estate where the neighbours bothered taking notice of what people got up to.

  The place looked worse in the harsh sunlight. The wooden siding of the house itself had once been done pale blue, as though with paint left over from a swimming pool. The broken trellis that skirted the bottom pretended to be white, as did the window trims and the wooden supports for the porch, which leaned very slightly over at an angle. This gave the effect that the whole structure was collapsing slowly sideways off the front of the house. For all I knew, that might have been the case.

  My bag was still unzipped, ready. I swung it onto my shoulder as I opened the passenger door. “I suppose it’s pointless to tell you to stay in the car?” I said but I wasn’t really expecting an answer. Besides, the four of them had already hopped out onto the dusty dirt driveway. The sight of their ready grins made me scowl.

  I led the way past the battered Corvette and up the rickety steps. I leaned on the bell, hearing it ring through the house but no-one came to answer. We stood like that for a few moments, waiting. The kids’ grins had become a little more forced now and they began to squabble in a lighthearted undertone amongst themselves.

  I tuned out the bickering, wishing they were anywh
ere but behind me on this. All the time I let my eyes drift across the scene over the road from Henry’s place but there was nobody in sight. It jarred.

  Saturday afternoon and nobody in sight. Not a single person. Not even a dog. As soon as we’d hit the end of the street something had spooked me and now I knew what it was.

  Henry had been very specific about time. Why? Anyone needing proof of his connection to Trey couldn’t reasonably have expected him to have the kid on tap, instantly available, so why the tight deadline? Why the urgency? Unless . . .

  My heart had begun to pump again, setting that tingle along my forearms, that shiver between my shoulders. I dropped my right hand nonchalantly into the open bag hanging from my shoulder as I pulled open the outer screen door with my left.

  The inner door was old, the paint faded although with two tough-looking shiny locks at different heights along the leading edge. When I tried the handle, it turned without resistance and the door opened.

  I heard Xander suck in a breath. “Man, are you sure we should—”

  “Shut up,” I murmured, and nudged the door all the way wide. It swung slowly back against the wall of the hallway, revealing the same grotty little living space. The door at the end of the corridor was the only one closed. I took one step across the threshold but that was all I needed before I knew the smell.

  When I brought my hand out of the bag the SIG was in it. I shrugged the bag onto the floor. Without looking over my shoulder I said tightly, “Get back in the truck. Turn it round and have the engine running.”

  They didn’t argue with me. Maybe they’d caught the odour too, even if they couldn’t identify it. Living in a climate like Florida’s, how can you fail to recognise the smell of death for what it is?

  “Is it – is it him?” Trey’s hushed voice by my shoulder sounded a little wavery.

  I glanced back at him, took in the pale but determined face and didn’t repeat my last order.

  “Yes, I think so,” I said. “You up to this?”

  He nodded once and I wasn’t going to ask him again. Together we took the few short steps along the hallway and opened the door to Henry’s lair.

  The man of the house was sitting in the chair where we’d last seen him, amid a sea of wreckage and destruction.

  And blood.

  Henry’s massive torso had been tied into position with nylon rope and his wrists had been handcuffed to the metal arms of the chair, then double-secured with silver duct tape around his forearms. They must have needed the two methods of holding him down while they methodically broke every one of his fingers.

  They’d gagged him while they’d done it, wrapping more duct tape around his face, half covering one ear. It was tight enough to distort Henry’s bulging cheeks and make his jaw sag, like his whole head was being squeezed in the middle. The dirty dishcloth they’d forced into his mouth was just visible beneath the lower corner of the tape, poking out like a lizard tongue.

  His head was slumped forwards so his chins rested on his chest. His eyes were closed, but I didn’t bother to check for a pulse. After the men who’d tortured him had finished extracting whatever he had to give them, they’d put a single bullet through the centre of his forehead. They’d held the barrel close enough for the explosive discharge to tattoo an imprint into his flesh around the small neat hole. Henry would, without a doubt, have known exactly what was coming to him.

  It hadn’t been a small calibre gun they’d used, either. The impact had lifted off the back of his skull, radically redecorating the window and far wall of the room in the process. The round had kept going, scattering the slats of the venetian blind and taking out the small centre pane of glass, then travelling on to God knows where in the trees beyond.

  Behind me I heard a slithering bump and I turned to find Trey had concertina’d slowly down the door jamb. He was still clutching desperately at the woodwork even after his skinny rump had hit the floor.

  I opened my mouth to say something but realised there wasn’t much I could say that was going to help in a situation like this. I stepped carefully further into the room, trying to keep my feet out of the blood. The flinty taste of it was sharp on the back of my tongue as I breathed.

  So that was why Henry had sounded breathless on the phone.

  Not excitement. Not greed.

  Pain.

  Poor bastard.

  But who had done this to him? And were they still waiting around to do the same to us?

  With an acute awareness of time passing, I eyed what was left of Henry’s prized computer array. Every piece of it had been trashed and I didn’t know nearly enough about them to work out if anything could be salvaged from the ruins. But I was damned if I was going to come this far and leave with nothing. I turned back to Trey. He hadn’t moved a muscle.

  “Trey,” I said, loudly. “Would any of this gear still work?”

  He shook his head a little as if to clear it, like a boxer who’s just taken a good strong combination to the jaw and is doing his best, against all expectation, to stay in the fight.

  “Wha-what?”

  “Henry’s computers,” I said, slow and clear. “Would any of them still work enough for us to find out who he was in contact with?”

  “I dunno,” Trey said, unable to take his eyes off the corpse. It was the hands, I noticed, more than the head that bothered him. It seemed such a deliberately sadistic act to take the hands of a man who lived by the dexterity of his fingers.

  I moved in front of the boy, blocking the vision. “Trey,” I said again, bending over him. “We don’t have much time. Think about it.”

  It took him a moment to refocus on me, like an old camera struggling to follow the action. “We might get something off of the hard drive, I guess,” he said at last.

  “Great,” I said, giving him an encouraging smile. “Where do I find it and what does it look like?”

  “Them,” he said. He cleared his throat. “He was using three separate systems. They’ll each have a hard drive, and he could have a back-up unit somewhere as well.”

  “Three plus a back-up?” I repeated. I glanced at my watch. This was all taking much too long. “OK, where are they likely to be?”

  Trey shook his head again but just when I was about to snap at him he dragged himself to his feet and wiped his nose across the back of his hand. “Last time we were here I kinda noticed that he only had one machine connected to the Net,” he said.

  I shrugged. “Meaning?”

  “Less chance of picking up a virus and if you do you don’t, like, lose your whole setup, like you would if they were all networked together.” He nodded towards one of the tower units on the far side of the room, carefully avoiding what lay between him and it. “That’s the only one plugged into a phone jack.”

  “How difficult is it to take the hard drive out of it?”

  “A coupla minutes if I had a screwdriver.”

  “Here.” I pulled my Swiss Army knife out of my pocket and threw it across to him. “Get on with it.”

  Trey didn’t want to come any further into the room than he had done already and he certainly didn’t want to touch the computer he’d indicated. It had been behind Henry at the moment he’d been killed and its outer casing had taken on a colour and texture not usually available in office equipment catalogues.

  He took a quick peek at what was left of the back of Henry’s head just once while he worked. That was enough, even for a fifteen-year-old kid who lives on a diet of thrill rides and horror flicks. After that he kept his back slightly turned and his chin tucked down.

  As soon as the stained outer casing was removed, his hands seemed to steady and he fumbled less. The hard drive he’d mentioned was about the same size as a double-album CD case. It wasn’t long before he stood up with it in his hand.

  I grabbed a towel from the kitchen and quickly wiped over the surfaces I thought we’d touched. Better for the police not to find our prints at another murder scene, if we could help it. I smiled bracin
gly again. “OK?” I said. “Then let’s go.”

  We hurried back down the hallway as far as the outer screen door. I picked my bag off the floor and Trey shoved the hard drive into it.

  Scott had swung the Dodge round and was sitting with the motor turning over, as requested. He saw us appear and started to wave, just as a man in a dark suit stepped out from behind the shrubbery of the house opposite.

  I elbowed Trey back into the hallway and brought the SIG up in front of me, almost as one move. In the truck, Scott, Aimee and Xander hadn’t noticed what was going on behind them and when they saw the gun come out their expressions froze.

  “Get down!” I shouted.

  The man in the suit reacted to the warning much faster than the kids. I didn’t see him pull a gun but one had suddenly appeared in his hand. He kept low, crabbing sideways so that he had the cover of a rusting Chevrolet. I put one round into the front end of it, shattering a headlight, just to keep his head down.