“We’re on our way,” Trey said and ended the call.
Yeah, a voice in my head piped up, but to what?
Scott was already on his feet, dropping a few dollars onto the table. “All right,” he said, “let’s roll.”
As the others pushed back their chairs I held my hands up. “Hang on a moment,” I said and everybody stilled. “Henry asked just for Trey. Now Trey doesn’t go anywhere without me, but that doesn’t mean all of us are going.”
Xander pulled a face. “Aw c’mon, man,” he moaned. “You can’t shut us out now.”
I caught Aimee’s glance, looked away. “I can’t look after all of you,” I said.
“We’re not asking you to,” Scott said quickly. “It’s just—” He broke off, slumping back down into his chair and grimacing as he searched for the right words.
“Don’t cut us out of this – not now,” Xander said with a note of quiet pleading in his voice. “You can’t let us get close to the action when it suits you, man, and then kinda dump us when it don’t, y’know.”
I looked at Aimee again, hoping she would be the voice of reason. She just smiled and picked the keys to Scott’s pickup off the table. “You don’t take us with you,” she said sweetly, swinging the keys tantalizingly from one finger, “and how you gonna get there in time?”
***
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.