I drove straight through the parking area to the back of the small diner next door where the Mercury couldn’t easily be seen from the road, and reversed into a space. The car only had a numberplate on the back and there was no point it making it easy to read for anyone doing a casual drive-by.
I switched off the engine. “Stay here,” I said. “Lock the doors when I’m gone and if anyone comes, hit the horn and don’t let them in. OK?”
He shrugged and muttered, “OK.”
I walked back to the reception via the central courtyard. The motel was made up of ugly two-storey blocks of accommodation lining the car park on three sides. Each block had ten rooms per floor. Their doors were all accessed from open walkways at the front with stairwells at either end. It looked more depressing from here than it had done when I’d picked it, but I wasn’t going to go back and admit defeat to Trey
I walked into the reception, which was small and nastily lit by a string of fluoro tubes across the water-stained ceiling tiles. It smelt of coffee that was brewed two days ago and has been on the hot plate ever since. The black girl behind the counter met my arrival with unsmiling lack of enthusiasm. Her name badge told me her name was Lacena. She had hair so elaborately styled and set it looked like a sculpture, and her fingernails were too long for her to have been able to put contact lenses in without the serious danger of losing an eye in the attempt.
She took an imprint of my credit card and a cursory glance at the photograph on my UK driver’s licence. Apart from my name, I filled in a completely fictitious set of details required on the registration form and took the key making as little eye contact as I could get away with.
Trey hadn’t shifted when I got back to the car. He’d even had the sense to slump down in his seat. I tapped on the window and he followed me silently to the room we’d been given.
We were in the left-hand block, on the top floor in the end room furthest from reception. The number on the key fob read 219, which was ambitious considering there were only around sixty rooms. Maybe they were just trying to make the place sound bigger than it was.
I opened the door on a pair of twin beds with cigarette-singed floral covers. The low-wattage bulb made the whole place look dingy and depressing.
“Oh man,” Trey moaned. “This place is a dump.”
He grabbed the remote control for the TV and flopped down on one of the beds. Even channel-hopping didn’t appease him, as he soon discovered that the promise of Home Box Office movies was a broken one. The picture on the other channels was so badly adjusted they were just about unwatchable. Still, there were hundreds to go at and he seemed determined to try every one.
I left him to it, pulling the edge of the curtain back slightly and looking down on the car park. It all looked quiet. No-one new had arrived since we’d checked in.
In my head I backtracked, replaying the conversation I’d had with Livingston Brown III outside the house. So Keith Pelzner had gone, apparently of his own accord. Sean, on the other hand, had not gone quite so willingly. I would have put money on it.
Then a man who’d come to the house as a policeman – and I could only assume he was a genuine cop – had followed Trey and me to the amusement park and tried to grab the kid. Something about the setup didn’t quite hang true. I kicked and pummelled at my lumpy thoughts, trying to break the sense out of them. Then my brain tilted, and in the light of what Brown had told me I began to look at things from a slightly different angle.
Supposing Oakley man hadn’t followed us? Supposing he didn’t need to, because he already knew where we were going to be? After all, Keith knew exactly where his son was heading. Exactly.
Just after he’d handed me that wedge of cash that morning he’d turned to the boy and said, “I suppose you’re gonna drag Charlie onto your favourite old woodie until one of you is sick, huh?”
Oh yes, Keith had known precisely the area of the park where we could be located, and that’s just where Oakley man had picked up our trail. I saw again the gun in his hands, the people scattering. The woman he’d shot fell again before my eyes.
But if the cop was there simply to snatch Trey, why had he fired at us?
I let the curtain fall closed and turned away from the window, moving to sit on the empty bed.
“Trey,” I said. “We need to talk.”
He sighed and clicked off the TV. I got the feeling his reluctance was more to do with a desire to avoid the subject rather than fascination with a fuzzy game show.
“OK,” he said. “Talk.”
“Have you any idea where Keith might have gone, or why he’s disappeared?”
He shrugged. “Sounds kinda like he’s run out on me, doesn’t it?”
I might have known this would be all about Trey. “Why would he do that?”
Another hunch of those skinny shoulders.
I waited, and when that seemed to be as much of an answer as I was going to get I added carefully, “Is there any reason you can think of why your father might want to harm you?”
His head snapped up at that, eyes unnaturally bright. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I can think of plenty.”
I sighed. God preserve us from teenage angst. “He’s your father, Trey, why would he want to do that?”
“Why not?” the kid threw back at me, his voice oozing with bitterness. “He already murdered my mother.”
Five
For a moment I sat very still, my face expressionless while my mind reeled. I skimmed back over every chance remark and casual word I’d overheard since I’d arrived in the Pelzner household and came up blank.
No-one had mentioned Trey’s mother.
From somewhere I’d formed a vague impression that it was a bit of a sticky subject as far as Keith was concerned, but I’d no idea what the official line was on her whereabouts.
I glanced at the boy. He was worrying at one of the burn holes in the bedspread with the end of his finger, staring fixedly at the bed. His other hand was clamped onto his own wrist so tight the knuckles showed up as a row of whitened double indentations. I wavered over believing him or dismissing the whole thing as another of his fantasies.
“What happened to her?” I said quietly.
“When I was a kid we were living up in Daytona and she and my dad used to fight all the time,” he said, speaking so low I could hardly hear him. “One night they had this mega row, like total war, screaming at each other and throwing stuff. The next day, when I got home from school, Dad told me she’d gone.”
“It happens,” I said, disappointed at the lack of concrete evidence – or just of fresh laid concrete in the back garden. I tried not to put anything into my voice, one way or another. “Marriages break up every day.”
He speared me with a single vicious look. “She would never have left me,” he said, vehement. “Oh she talked about going, but she swore she’d take me with her. She swore. Every time after they’d been fighting she’d come into my room and sit on my bed and cry and tell me how she’d find a place for us real soon, and it would just be the two of us.”
He sniffed, letting go to wipe the back of his arm across his nose. He’d been gripping so tight he’d left reddened finger marks on the skin of his wrist. His hand still picked at the burn hole in the bedspread, which was now big enough for him to get his fist into, and growing all the time.
I eyed the oblivious destruction. “How long ago did your mother disappear?”
“Five years,” he said. “It was right around the time I turned ten. She’d promised me this real big party. The best ever. Dad was going on at her how we couldn’t afford it, ‘cos he wasn’t doing so good then. But that’s how I knew, when she didn’t come home, that it was down to him.”