by Zoe Sharp
Haines chuckled. “Well isn’t that cute?” he said. “Now you get to all die together.”
“No, no, we can work this out, surely?” Keith said. He hurried towards Brown, eager, keeping slightly ducked and submissive. “I didn’t know Trey was working on the neural net independent of me. I mean, he’s just a kid, y’know? I had no idea he’d made such progress with it.” He shoved his glasses back up his nose with a grubby finger and rushed on, his voice almost a gabble. “I need to check out his data, of course, but maybe I can knock it into some kinda shape. Maybe I can still give you what you want. Just give me another chance!”
“‘Me’?” Trey said, his voice quietly cutting. “‘I’?” He’d gone very still, watching his father with simmering resentment. “What d’you mean, ‘maybe you can knock it into shape’ huh? It’s my work, not yours!”
Keith gave a high-pitched nervous laugh, eyes darting from side to side. “Now now, Trey, don’t let’s argue about this now son, huh?” he said, in that strained way parents have of speaking out of the side of their mouths when their children are about to monumentally embarrass them in a public place.
“No,” Trey said, folding his arms across his chest so his fingers were tucked under his armpits, just leaving the thumbs out, like he was feeling the cold. He shifted his weight down onto one hip, confrontational. “Let’s talk about it right now, Dad.”
“What’s there to talk about, for Chrissake?” Keith snapped, the tension getting the better of him. His hands were a constant jitter. “I evaluate what you’ve done and, if it holds up, I incorporate it into the program. End of story.”
For a moment Trey didn’t respond, just stared fixedly at nothing, chewing his lower lip like he was struggling not to cry. “So you, like, actually admit I coulda done something you couldn’t, huh?”
Keith frowned. “What do you think?” he said, pained and edgy.
Trey nodded to himself, as though accepting that this was probably the nearest he was going to get to an admission of his own worth in the eyes of his father.
“So what do I get out of this?”
“Oh for crying out loud, Trey!” Now Keith looked as though he was the one about to burst into tears, or wet himself. Or both. “What d’you want, for Chrissake? A raise in your allowance?”
“I just want the truth,” he said, stubborn. “The truth about how you murdered my mother.”
“What?” Keith’s voice rose to an outraged squeal. “Of course I didn’t murder her. For Chrissake, Trey!” He brought his fists up to the sides of his head like he was about to tear his own hair out. Then he let them fall with a slap against his thighs. “She left us, OK? She walked out.”
“She would never have abandoned me like that,” Trey said tightly, body rigid to the point of quivering, two splotches of colour highlighted his otherwise pale face. “You murdered her. Admit it, or you can go fuck yourself before I’ll give you squat!”
“OK, OK!” Keith said, rolling his eyes, desperate now. “I did it, OK? Your mom didn’t move to Cleveland with the guy from the seven-eleven across the street. I killed her and buried her in the back yard. The front yard. Wherever. Is that what you want to hear?”
“Yeah,” Trey said and I saw his shoulders come down a fraction, as though he was relaxing for the first time.
“So, I get your data on the neural net, yeah?” Keith demanded.
But to everyone’s surprise, Trey shook his head.
“Oh come on, Trey,” Keith managed to force out from between his clenched teeth, “you can’t fuck about with these people. If you’ve got something I can use then I need it, mister, and I need it right now or—”
Trey shrugged. “That’s just it,” he said. “I don’t, like, have anything. There is no data. There never was any data.” His voice broke then, the tears squeezing their way out however much he was willing them back. He scrubbed them away, furious with himself, and lurched on with his fiercely controlled tirade.
“This so-called miracle program you’ve been, like, telling everyone is almost finished? Well, I got news for you, Dad, it doesn’t work. It never has worked and it never will. Face it, man, you’re a useless piece of shit. The program’s fucked.”
Keith closed his eyes and let out a long groan, stumbling back.
“Yeah,” I heard Whitmarsh murmur heavily behind me, “and so are we.”
Twenty-three
For several seconds after Trey had finished speaking there was utter shocked silence. But before the significance of what he’d just announced really had the chance to sink in, the doors at the end of the corridor burst open again.
This time it was the Ocean Center security guards who came charging onto the scene. The first guy through the door took one look at the blood and the guns on show and went into rapid reverse, almost tripping up the man behind him.
Brown’s two foot soldiers immediately snapped off half a dozen rounds in their direction, just to encourage the guards to keep up their retreat. The doors slammed hard behind them and even over the ringing in my ears I heard panicked shouting on the other side.
At the same moment the glass doors to the street slammed wide and Mason came through them. He was lucky he didn’t get shot by his own team in the process.
“Sir, we need to leave, right now!” he said, terse.
Brown’s spine had curved him forwards, making him seem older, greyer, more frail. But now he snapped out of the immobility that had gripped him and didn’t need telling twice. The old guy scurried down the corridor leaving the rest of us to his men.
The two who’d been grappling with Sean now hauled him roughly to his feet. Mason scooped me up and began herding me towards the exit with the others. Just as we reached the doorway and stepped back out into the fiery sunshine, Mason paused and I realised that Haines had stayed behind.
I looked back, just in time to see Haines swing back to where Chris lay trembling in a spreading pool of his own blood. As I watched, Haines moved in close to the fallen man and stood there for a second, like someone making up their mind about a piece of modern art.
Chris was still alive but only just, if the shallow liquid rasping he was making was anything to go by.
Haines leaned over and calmly put two rounds into the ruin of Chris’s face. There wasn’t a flicker of pity or remorse on his own features as he did it. The body jerked at the impact, then finally lay still.
Haines carefully picked up both the brass shell casings, then tucked the gun away out of sight in the belt holster under his shirt. As he jogged back to where Brown was waiting for him all the old man did was raise an eyebrow.
“Never could stand leaving things untidy,” Haines said, smiling.
If Brown made any reply to that I didn’t catch it. Mason jerked me forwards again and I was too busy trying to keep my feet as he hustled me outside and down the flight of concrete steps to the street. The sunlight was far stronger than the dark tinted glass of the doors had led me to expect and I squinted in the glare.
I could already hear the urgent clamour of the sirens heading towards the scene. Brown’s men had heard them too. They started to bundle us into the back of the van that was now waiting by the kerb.
“Wait. Put the boy in with us,” Brown said. He nodded darkly towards me and Sean. “Just in case they get any fancy ideas.”
Panic flared in Trey’s face. He tried to dig his heels in, even grabbing hold of the edge of the van door. Haines gave an irritated sigh and took him by the throat almost negligently with one hand, lifting the kid until his toes were barely on the ground.
“Think you’re some kinda tough guy, huh?” he growled.
I went for him but never got there. Brown brought the revolver up and the memory of how he’d killed Gerri with so little effort stopped me in my tracks. Mason grabbed my arms, just in case I thought about risking it anyway.
Trey’s face had congested. He let go of the van and clutched vainly at Haines’s hand. I wished fiercely that I’d had the chance t
o teach the kid some basic self-defence, how to break a stranglehold and your attacker’s little finger in the same move. There had never seemed to be the time. Or the need. He’d always had me to protect him before.
Haines had only been waiting for the boy to let go of the van door before he slackened his grip. Trey thumped back onto his heels, thoroughly shaken, and threw me a wounded glance as though I’d failed him. He allowed them to push him into the back of the Suburban without further resistance.
The rest of us got the van. Once the doors were slammed and locked it was stiflingly, suffocatingly hot in there. There was no handle on the inside of either rear door and no windows we could open – either to escape or to breathe. The air had a tangible mass, making it almost too heavy to drag into your lungs. I resisted the urge to pant like a dog.
The back of the van had been lined with cheap plywood, completely separating the load bay from the front seats and boxed out over the rear wheels to form a narrow bench. Whitmarsh and Lonnie ended up on one side, with Sean and I facing them and trying not to let our legs tangle in the middle. The only illumination came from a dim bulb in the centre of the roof.
Keith was forced to sit on the floor, his back to the cab. He looked insulted at being relegated to the dog shelf but he was wise enough to realise it wouldn’t make any difference if he voiced his complaint.
Nobody made any attempt to release Sean’s hands, which were still bound behind him with police-issue handcuffs. It made sitting on the cramped makeshift bench difficult and probably uncomfortable but with Sean it was difficult to tell. If he was in pain he didn’t show it.
The van pulled out, lurching as it gathered pace. We seemed to be making a series of sharp turns, weaving through the back streets rather than risking the exposure of the main drag.
I jerked my head to Whitmarsh. “You must have the keys,” I said. “Uncuff him.”
Whitmarsh just gave Sean a careful glance and shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said.
It was pointless to argue with him. I settled for sitting close to Sean, thigh to thigh, needy for any kind of contact. It still didn’t quite feel like it was really him. Why, I wondered, had it seemed more real to me to accept that he was gone than it did to find him suddenly resurrected?
I reached up, uncaring of the eyes fixed on us, and touched his face with a gentle hand. The stubble on his cheek prickled against the backs of my fingers. The blood there had dried into black flecks that came away like ash.
“I thought you were dead,” I murmured. “I thought they’d killed you.” And as I said it I realised with a cold shiver just how close I’d come to executing an innocent woman for that crime. It created a big dark hole somewhere in my mind. I teetered on the edge of falling into it.
“I know. They told me the same about you,” he said, adding with a quiet vehemence, “but I knew they were lying.”
“How?”
The black, expressionless eyes skimmed across the men opposite, then back to my face. “Because if you had been,” he said simply, “they would have had no reason to keep me alive any longer.”
I turned my own gaze on Whitmarsh. “So who was the dead guy you dumped with Sean’s ID on him?” I asked. “Don’t tell me – you keep a stock of corpses in the freezer, just in case?”
“Didn’t need to this time,” Whitmarsh returned with scorn to match my own. “You helped us out good there, Charlie.”
I stilled and he laughed when he saw me do it.
“Remember the two guys who followed you out of the motel before you had that shoot-out with the cop? Well, they were Brown’s boys. You plugged the driver in the gut – lucky shot through the door of the car by the look of it. He got away but he bled out before they could treat him. After that, well,” he shrugged, “I guess it was just too good an opportunity to waste.”
I considered that information for a moment, filing away the fact that I had another death on my hands. I was running out of fingers to count them all on. The mouth of the hole grew larger and more gaping and was lined with jagged teeth like a shark. When I looked down into it I couldn’t see the bottom. I closed my mind to the lure of the edge.
“That old Breitling of yours is still ticking, by the way,” I said to Sean absently, aware of the inconsequential comment.
“That’s good,” he said in turn. “It’s a nice watch.”
Whitmarsh gave one of his gasping laughs. “I hope they bring a good price on the secondhand market,” he said, “‘Cos one thing’s for sure, neither of you will be the next to wear it.”
I tried to keep my face cool and haughty. “Come on, Jim, do you honestly think Brown’s going to let you walk after what you’ve tried to do to him?” I laughed too, but it was a brittle, mirthless sound. “You go through with this and you’re going to be looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life.”
“Well, whichever way you square it,” he said, a touch of bravado creeping in now, “it’s gonna be longer than yours.”
“Brown will kill you,” I said, talking to Lonnie as much as Whitmarsh himself. “He’ll kill both of you. There’s too much at stake for him not to.”
“Brown’s an asshole,” Whitmarsh dismissed. “He got caught out bad when we had the last big hurricane through here and that fancy time-share he’s building is just about to go belly up. Why d’you think he’s gotten himself into this?” Another asthmatic laugh. “And for what?” he finished bitterly, with a vicious glance at Keith.
I followed his gaze. Keith was sitting with his thin knees hunched up in front of him, arms wrapped round his shins and his chin tucked down so his straggly little beard nested between his kneecaps.
I had a sudden vision of the way Trey had sat, just like that, in the enamelled steel bath at Henry’s place. If the boy hadn’t lied about his part in the program, I wondered, would Henry have been tortured and murdered? Would Scott have been half-paralysed?
As if suddenly aware of the hostile scrutiny Keith lifted his head, pushing his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose. “At least we have until sundown,” he said, like that made all the difference. “Isn’t that what Livingston said?”
Whitmarsh almost snorted. “Yeah,” he said, disdainful, “and you know why that is, don’t you?”
Keith shook his head.
Whitmarsh waited a beat, like a schoolboy dragging out a gory tale to see if he can make the little girls in his class sick. “That’s when the ‘gators come out to feed,” he said, baring his teeth in a malicious smile. “That way there ain’t no bodies for the cops to find.”
***
For a while after that nobody else had the energy or the inclination to speak. We sat and glared at each other, or avoided eye contact with each other, as the van rocked and bounced and vibrated at speed along the road south.
It seemed to take a hell of a lot longer to get back to Brown’s resort than it had done to get from there to the Ocean Center. Maybe they were just taking a more circumspect route.
Eventually, it was the music that gave it away. I heard the same raucous blare of manically cheery pap that had been pouring out of the clubhouse when I’d gone to confront Gerri. Was that really only a few hours ago?
The noise grew louder, then faded as we passed and drew further away from it. Perfect Doppler shift. The comparatively smooth metalled road gave way to what sounded like gravel, then to a rutted track that threw us around like we were the steel ball inside a tin of spray paint. By the time we stopped Keith had started to look slightly green. I don’t know if it was travel sickness or just anticipation.
When they opened the van doors Mason and his sidekick had the Mossbergs to hand again. They stood far enough back to make any thought of rushing them a suicidal one.
Whitmarsh and Lonnie got out first, moving smartly aside so Brown’s men had a clear line on the rest of us. I suppose I could understand their caution. If I’d had the opportunity I wouldn’t have hesitated to put either one of them between me and a shotgun blast.
As I climbed out I looked around me. We had come far enough on from the time-share so there was no sight or sound of it beyond the impenetrable body of trees that more or less surrounded us. The van and the Suburban had pulled up on a pad of cracked concrete that had been bleached white like old bones by the sun.
There was a single-storey building to one side of us, its walls made from silvered timber. Flakes of faded yellow paint still clung to the wood and every metal fastening was pitted with corrosion. A barely readable washed-out sign by the door announced airboat rides twice daily but I doubt it had seen a paying customer in years.
To the other side was the swamp, which was what Brown’s development must have looked like before he drained and reclaimed and reshaped the land. The concrete extended down to the edge of the sluggish water where two airboats were tied. Drums of fuel for their massive exposed V8 engines sat on the tiny dock.