“Jesus,” I muttered, “What the hell are they—?”
Because of the silencers we didn’t hear the sound of the shots, and the muzzle flashes were reduced to little spurts of light, spilling out from the open doorway. I desperately tried to remember who’d been in there, but I hadn’t seen anybody, hadn’t known the room was occupied.
And even if I had it wouldn’t have made any difference, I realised with a sick taste at the back of my throat. I simply hadn’t known that I’d given Gerri Raybourn directions to the wrong room.
“What’s that?” Trey asked in a small voice. “What are they doing in there?”
For a moment I couldn’t answer. Then Whitmarsh and Chris reappeared, stalking out, moving fast. The set of their shoulders betrayed their anger. Whitmarsh tucked the gun away under his arm, bringing out a mobile phone and hitting speed-dial. Whoever he was ringing must have been waiting for the call.
“They’re not here,” I heard him say tightly into the phone, his voice loud with anger and tension. “How the hell should I know?” There was a pause while the person at the other end of the line had their say. “OK,” he added, glancing back at the room briefly. “You’d better send a clean-up crew out to the motel.”
He snapped the phone shut again and they both climbed back into the Chevy before swinging out of the car park. The whole thing took less than three minutes.
The door to the room they’d burst into was still standing open and I eyed it with major apprehension. Everything in me was screaming to get out of there, to run and keep running but I knew I couldn’t do it without knowing what devastation I’d caused, however unwittingly.
“Stay here,” I said to Trey. “I’m going to have a look.”
I could hardly see his face in the gloom, but I took his silence for compliance. I let myself out of the room, shutting the door quickly behind me. Despite the onset of evening it was still pleasantly warm outside, with the cicadas clicking constantly in the background.
I moved to the stairwell and hurried down it. The motel’s outside lights had come on and there weren’t any shadows to offer a comforting hiding place to linger. I was just going to have to get this over with as quickly as I could.
Nevertheless, once I’d reached the far block I paused at the doorway to the room, feeling Trey watching me from the other side of the car park but unable to walk straight in. Come on, Fox, where’s your courage?
When I stepped over the threshold, I needed all of it.
A girl lay sprawled over the bed, limbs flung wide. She had clearly just got out of the shower when they’d killed her. There was a bath towel knotted loosely around her body, and another around her head like a turban.
She’d been shot twice in the body, the blood a livid stain against the white cotton of the towel, splashing up the wall behind and across the same floral bedspread as in our own room.
I stood for a moment and stared down at her, this girl whose death I was ultimately responsible for. She was young, maybe in her early twenties, but she could even have been still in her teens.
From the bathroom came the sound of running water. I moved through there and found her boyfriend had never made it out of the shower before they’d shot him, too.
He must have grabbed at the plastic curtain as he’d fallen, snapping it off the rail and pulling it on top of him as he’d gone down. He sat slumped in a corner of the bath with the water still beating down on his head and bubbling across his open staring eyes. It hit the wall behind him, washing the last traces of his blood away down the drain. An expression of horror was forever frozen on his youthful features.
Without the curtain to hold it back, the bathroom floor was already flooded. I didn’t venture in. I didn’t need to in order to know there was nothing I could do for either of them. I turned and walked out, using the tail of my shirt to pull the splintered door as far closed as I could behind me.
As I walked back across the car park I felt nothing inside me but a cold, brightly burning rage against Whitmarsh, and Chris, and Gerri Raybourn. They would pay for this. At that precise point I had no idea how but, in the end, they would pay.
I would make sure of it.
Six
I took the steps back up to the room two at a time and knocked on the door twice in the time it took Trey to get his skinny backside off the bed and let me in. He took one look at my face and backed away from me.
“What was it?” he demanded, but he looked like that was a question he didn’t really want an answer to.
I didn’t give him one. Instead I grabbed the thin plastic bag out of the unused rubbish bin and swept the remaining snacks off the bed into it.
“Come on,” I said, twisting the top of the bag shut. “We’re leaving.”
Trey didn’t say anything further as we walked out of the room. I slipped the key into my pocket on the way out, even though I had no intention of using it again.
As we reached the bottom of the stairs a crowd of people had gathered round the doorway to the ground-floor room on the other side of the car park. A fat woman in the kind of loud check trousers you normally only see on a golf course pushed to the front to have a better look, then started screaming when she got what she was after. Trey faltered. I hooked my hand under his elbow and kept him moving all the way to the Mercury, which was still sitting behind the diner next door.
It was only as we pulled out into traffic that he finally spoke.
“There were people in there, weren’t there?” he said, curiously neutral. “Are they, like, dead?”
I took my eyes off the road briefly to glance at his set face in the flashes of reflected light from the shop fronts and restaurants along the sides of the road.
“Yes.”
He nodded and swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Then he said, “Why would Chris and Mr Whitmarsh do that?” and his voice was nearly plaintive, as though it wasn’t fair.
There wasn’t an easy way to say it. So, better to say it fast and get it over with. “Because they thought it was us.”
I’d come to that conclusion almost as soon as I’d walked in on the scene. In the split-second it would have taken Whitmarsh to take a bead and fire, he wouldn’t have had time to recognise that the girl who’d just got out of the shower wasn’t the me he’d been told to expect. Not with a towel covering her hair and shock distorting her face.
And after that? Well, maybe they were just being tidy. It still didn’t tell me if they were trying to take Trey alive, or if they’d wanted him dead from the outset.
“If they’re the ones trying to kill us, why did you call them and tell them where to find us?” he asked now, and the sudden anger in his tone made me wary.
“Trey, I didn’t know they were going to do that and anyway, I thought I’d directed them to the room above,” I said, not liking the defensiveness that was creeping in when it should have been cool command. “I thought I’d sent them to a room that was empty.”
“Yeah, you thought,” he threw back, half twisting in his seat to face me. “Jesus!” He shook his head. “Just how long have you been a bodyguard, Charlie? How many VIPs have you saved, huh?”
I waited a beat before I answered. The temptation to lie was great, but I knew in the long run it wouldn’t get me anywhere. “Well, if you count,” I said, “then you’re the first.”
He slumped back, letting his arms lift then flop back to his sides as though weighted down with despair.
“Oh man,” he muttered, “we are so screwed.”
***
For no particular reason other than the fact I recognised the road number, I headed north on A1A. We were travelling parallel with the Atlantic and somewhere over to my right endless rollers crashed and broke in the darkness.