“In the army,” I said, short.
“Yeah? Why’d you leave?”
“I had my reasons,” I said. I could have added a whole lot more to that, as well. The Special Forces course I’d been on when I’d been unceremoniously chucked out had taught me an awful lot more about firearms than basic training had ever done, but he didn’t need to know that.
I busied my hands feeding the loose round back into the magazine. I had just four left. I tried not to dwell on what I’d done with the other four.
My job?
Or murder?
No, far better to concentrate on what I had left.
“Will you show me how to shoot?” Trey asked, trying out the feel of the SIG one-handed, with his arm outstretched. It was heavier than he’d expected. His narrow muscles began to shiver with the effort of keeping it up there.
“Yeah, sure,” I snapped, my nerves edged into sarcasm. “Let’s go and buy you a .357 Magnum and then we’ll go out robbing banks together.”
Trey stared at me blankly for a moment and I remembered all of a sudden that irony was a concept lost on him.
I sighed. “No,” I said, holding my hand out.
He scowled, hesitating for a moment before he surrendered the gun, slapping it down onto my palm. I slipped the magazine back into the pistol grip and tucked the whole thing back into my belt, watching him all the while. My patience was starting to wear so thin that keeping a check on it was giving me a bad head.
“What makes you so damned important, Trey, that four people have died today because of you?” I demanded. It was more like an accusation. I was feeling like shit and he was the nearest person I could take it out on.
The body count could be more than that by now I realised as I spoke. The woman at the amusement park for one.
“I dunno,” he muttered.
I rubbed my eyes, which had the effect of sandpapering my retinas a little flatter. “Why the hell has Keith done a runner? What’s he up to?”
“I dunno!” Trey said, more emphatic this time. He let his head droop and was back to mumbling again. “Maybe it’s like, y’know, connected somehow with the work he does for the government.”
That brought my head up. “What kind of work?”
He shrugged. “It’s classified,” he said, snotty with it, like he’d always wanted to say that line.
I tried for a sigh, but my breath came out too fast to qualify, so it ended up more as a hiss. “Trey,” I said carefully, “it may have escaped your notice, but I’ve just had to kill a man to protect you and right now I don’t feel too good about that. So tell me what you know.”
He would only look at me for a half-second at a time. The rest of the time his eyes swivelled away into all the far corners of the shack. “I don’t know what kind of work he was doing,” he admitted at last, sulky. “You think he used to tell me stuff like that?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
I fell silent for a moment, trying to assimilate these new disclosures into the incomplete jigsaw of what I already knew. Keith Pelzner working for the government. If anything, it made the presence of the two armed men in the Buick more sinister, not less.
I recalled again the way they’d gunned down the young cop, their casual ruthlessness. It had not, I recognised, been their first time out. And suddenly they’d moved up from simple outlaws into something so much more. Now there was the possibility that they might be backed by limitless authority.
And I’d just shot one of them dead.
My anger slumped into weary resentment, sending a more up-tempo beat surging outwards across my temples. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this earlier?” I said quietly.
“Why?” he lashed out. “What difference would it have made?”
I opened my mouth, preparing to launch in, then thought better of it. “Probably none,” I allowed weakly. “But I’m trying to work out who’s out to get you and right now it seems to be just about everybody – the cops, your dad, Gerri Raybourn and Jim Whitmarsh – you name it. And exactly who those two guys in the Buick were, I’ve no idea.” I shrugged, letting my hands fall back against my sides. “Sean’s missing. He could be dead,” I went on, my voice flat now. “I’m running out of ideas.”
Something of Trey’s own resentment seemed to leave him at my admission. Maybe it was the first time an adult had consulted him for his opinion. He was silent while he thought about it.
“We could go to Daytona,” he said, almost diffident, the way kids are when they’re asking for something that’s desperately important to them and trying to make it look like they don’t really care.
“Why? What makes Daytona safer than here?”
He stuffed his hands into his pockets. “I got friends there,” he said. “We can go hang with them – hide out if we need to.”
“Are you sure we can rely on them? No, think about it,” I said when he started to make an automatic response. “After tonight there are going to be a lot of people looking for us.”
“Trust me.” He smiled, an abrupt cocky grin that showed off all the metalwork behind his lips.
It wasn’t reassuring. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more heading up to Daytona Beach seemed like a bad idea but I was damned if I could come up with a better suggestion.
I swung my leg back over the Kawasaki and jerked my head for him to climb on the back.
“OK,” I said heavily. “Daytona it is.”
***
We stayed on A1A, travelling steadily northwards and trying to stay inconspicuous. By the time we were passing through Indian River Shores the Kawasaki’s fuel gauge was showing we were running on fumes. Not knowing the bike, I wasn’t sure how accurately it read and the last thing we could afford to do was run out by the side of the road. I pulled into the first quiet-looking filling station we came across.
There was a sign on the pump that told customers they had to prepay after dark. I thought the fuel prices were high until I realised they were per gallon, not per litre. I sent Trey in with a more than adequate twenty dollar note while I broke the lock on the filler cap with my knife, making as little fuss about it as I could. The tank seemed to take a long time to fill and I stood with my back to the CCTV cameras, trying not to look furtive whenever a car drove past on the highway.
According to the window posters, the filling station also sold coffee and hot dogs. The slightly burnt greasy smell of them permeated out into the warm night air. I knew I ought to put something in my empty stomach but the thought of doing so brought on a rising queasiness I struggled to suppress. The snacks we’d brought with us when we came away from the motel, I remembered, had been abandoned in the Mercury.
A sudden thought had me checking my pockets, then cursing. The food wasn’t the only thing that had been left behind at the crash site.
The mobile phone had gone, too.
The feeling of having just severed my last lifeline to the outside world was a strong one. It wasn’t a mistake I wanted to boast about to the kid.
I hung the nozzle back into the pump and flipped the filler cap closed. I’d already climbed back onto the bike by the time Trey reappeared from paying for the fuel. He didn’t offer to hand over any change and it seemed petty to push for it.
He was looking wired. “Hey, there was a TV on in there,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “We made the news!”
“Jesus! What did it say?” The speed with which the story had got out surprised me, but I suppose the murder of a cop in the line of duty is always going to be an emotive subject. “Did they mention us by name?”