First Drop

Fifteen

I drove without direction, heading down the main strip for a couple of blocks then making a series of random turns, just to keep us and our stolen Taurus away from prying police eyes. Not that I thought Jim Whitmarsh would be in any hurry to report the car as taken.

Mind you, we wouldn’t have lasted the first ten seconds in a traffic stop. The Taurus had a beige interior and my nervous hands had left bloody prints all over the rim of the steering wheel. It looked like I’d gutted a live rabbit in there at the very least.

And then there was my unlicenced SIG, which I’d stuffed back under my thigh. A gun bullets from which could now be found in two dead bodies. The thought sent a shiver across my shoulders.

Shit. How had it come to this?

For a time I drove without speaking, barely giving Trey a second glance. The boy was burrowed into the far corner of the passenger seat, his face turned away to the glass. I could tell by the angle of his head that he was sulking and I didn’t have the energy to start a fight with him about it. Not right now.

I was too busy trying to make some sense of what had happened at Henry’s place. It all seemed such a tangle. Oakley man was genuinely with the police, of that I was now quite certain. Otherwise, how could he have known about – and diverted – Xander’s call for help?

It was also Oakley man who had tortured and then killed Henry. He’d admitted as much to us – when he’d been confident we weren’t going to live long enough to report the fact. The question was, how had he found Henry in the first place?

The only answer had to be that Henry himself had contacted Oakley man, offering to negotiate for Trey. But if that was the case, where did Whitmarsh and his mob fit in? At the motel I’d assumed they all had a common aim, but now it seemed like they were on opposite sides.

Oakley man had simply wanted us dead, so at least he was consistent in that. Whitmarsh, though, seemed to have changed his stance. A change of heart, he’d called it but I hadn’t believed him. I didn’t think he had one to change. But he now wanted to take us alive desperately enough that he’d let us go when I’d threatened Trey. And he’d been prepared to use deadly force to protect us when necessary.

But why the secrecy? Why hide in the shadows and wait until we made a break for it to take potshots at the Hispanic man? And why allow Oakley man and Ginger to pick up their dead and run? If Whitmarsh’s men were prepared to kill one, what did it achieve to let the others escape alive?

I remembered the young cop who’d stopped us and the men in the Buick who’d intervened. It wasn’t just a black and white case of dead or alive, I realised. Neither side wanted us to fall into the wrong official hands, either. So who were the right ones?

I flicked my eyes across to Trey. He was still staring pointedly out of the window.

“Maybe it’s time we went back to see Walt,” I suggested, a little tentative.

No response.

“Trey,” I said, snappier this time. “Did you hear me? I said maybe—”

“I heard you!” The words burst out of him, too loud inside the confines of the car, startling. He twisted round and now I could see the tears running down his face. He pressed his lips together until they were white and without definition, his whole face pinched.

“What’s the matter?”

My question only made things worse.

“What’s the matter?” he shrieked, uncaring that his voice rose and wavered, shrill as a reed. “How the fuck can you go ‘What’s the matter?’ like that, after what you just did?” He broke off, shaking his head for a moment as his temper boiled up under the surface, then he slammed his fist sideways into the door panel. “How can you?” he repeated.

“Trey,” I said carefully, trying to keep one eye on the traffic through his outburst. “I did what I had to do to get us out of there alive. Surely you realise that?”

He was silent and it dawned on me that he’d taken every word I’d spoken on Henry’s porch at face value. My mouth dried. No wonder the kid was so touchy.

“Trey,” I said, trying again. “I didn’t mean it – any of it. Christ, you can’t have thought I did, not after what we’ve been through these last couple of days?”

“How was I s’posed to know?” he threw back, sullen. “You sure sounded like you meant it.”

“If I hadn’t been convincing, Whitmarsh would have called my bluff.” I broke off for a moment while I looked for another way to make him see it. “I’m here to protect you,” I said at last. “It’s my job. I have protected you. Christ, I’ve even killed to protect you. Actions are supposed to speak louder than words. Doesn’t that tell you anything about me?”

There was a long pause. “I never asked you to kill anyone,” he muttered.

“Shit, I really can’t win with you, can I?” I let my breath out fast, but my annoyance didn’t go with it. “I do everything I can to keep you alive and suddenly I’m a cold-blooded killer. But if I hadn’t done what I’ve done, we’d both be dead by now.”

“Didn’t do much for Scott, though, did it?”

He seemed determined to chuck any argument he could at me. I set my jaw and tried to hang on to my temper. “I did my best,” I ground out. “He made a poor call. If he hadn’t got out of the wrong side of the truck, he probably would never have been hit.”

Trey huffed and threw his hands in the air. “Oh great! He’s my friend and he’s probably dead and all you’re doing is saying as how it’s, like, not your fault!”

“Trey, don’t jump to conclusions,” I said, starting to lose it myself now. “We don’t know how Scott is.”

“So let’s go to the hospital and find out.”

“We can’t,” I shot straight back. “Don’t be a prat. That’s the first place everybody will look for us.” I waved a hand towards my hair. “And they know exactly what we look like now. We’ve got dead bodies piling up all around us and Whitmarsh and good old Gerri Raybourn seem determined to make sure I’m the one lined up to take the blame for the lot of them. There’s no other way to explain what happened back there.”

Trey didn’t want to ask me to expand on that, but curiosity got the better of him. “What d’you mean?”

“Why else would Lonnie blow that Hispanic guy away without showing himself? Why let the other two get away when they had plenty of opportunity to shoot them, too? I think they wanted Oakley man – the guy from the theme park – to assume I’d done it, though Christ knows where I was supposed to have suddenly acquired a shotgun from.”

Trey was still frowning. “So?”

“I don’t know,” I said, more quietly now. The traffic slowed and stopped as the next light turned red ahead of us. “The only thing that’s changed since yesterday is that Henry found out about your part in this program of your dad’s. We need to find out who he was in touch with. And for that we need to find out what was on the hard drive we took out of Henry’s computer.”

“Which you gave to Xander,” Trey put in, and there was a slight accusing note in his tone.

“Which I gave to Xander,” I agreed, adding pointedly, “when I didn’t think we were going to live long enough to do it ourselves.”

“So we gotta go to the hospital now anyways,” Trey said, his jaw coming out, stubborn. “We gotta find Xander.”

“No.” I shook my head. “We’ll wait until later and catch him somewhere else – at home, maybe. It’s way too dangerous to try now.”

“I want to go to the hospital. If you’re too scared to go with me,” he said, loud and scathing, “let me out of the goddamned car and I’ll go on my own!”

“You can’t go on your own, Trey. Use some sense for once.”

“I’m not running out on my friends!” He was almost yelling at me now. “You can’t hold me against my will. That’s, like, kidnapping. You can’t—”

The people in the car alongside us had begun to stare. “OK, OK,” I said, cutting him off. “For heaven’s sake! We’ll go to the bloody hospital. Just calm down, will you?”

He subsided into his seat, sniffing loudly and mopping his nose on the back of his hand. He looked too close to smug in victory for my liking. I couldn’t help wiping that off his face with a quiet reminder. “But if I have to shoot anyone to get us out of there, just remember whose idea it was, OK?”

***

The Halifax Medical Center on Clyde Morris Boulevard was more like a sprawling office complex than a hospital. I left the stolen Taurus reverse parked against the wall in a corner of their cavernous multi-storey car park and we followed the signs for the Trauma Center.

We’d already stopped off briefly at a shopping mall, just long enough to find a quiet restroom where I could scrub the blood off my hands and wipe the worst of it from my silk trousers. It had turned black against the green, which didn’t look so bad, but I still thought it wasn’t a good idea to walk into a place where, in theory, they should be able to identify it for what it was.

I sent Trey into the store with some money to buy me a cheap bag, something I could use to conceal the SIG. He’d come back with a lurid Barbie-pink plastic over-the-shoulder job, decorated with bright violet and yellow flowers. He tried to look innocently disdainful but I was sure he’d picked that one out deliberately.

Now we hurried into the main hospital building itself. I slipped on my best worried teen expression along with my best American accent as I asked after Scott at the desk.

The jaded-looking big black woman on the other side eyed me with suspicion. “You a relative?” she asked.

“No, but this is Scott’s brother,” I lied, nodding to Trey. “He’s only fifteen. I brought him in as soon as we heard.”

She looked at Trey and for some reason his petulant demeanour caused her to soften. She didn’t quite say, “Ahh,” but it was a close-run thing.

We followed the directions she gave us until eventually we turned a corner and found Xander and Aimee waiting nervously in a corridor and we knew we were in the right place.

Trey broke into a jog as soon as he caught sight of them. “Xander, hey man! How is he?”

Xander turned at the sound of his voice but looked away quickly, like he could hardly bear to have us in sight. Aimee jumped to her feet and came to meet us, looking pale and frightened.

“They won’t tell us much, ‘cept he’s still in surgery,” she said. She had her hands wrapped round her upper arms, unconsciously rubbing at her skin. “He lost a lot of blood and there’s, like, other complications.”

Trey stared from one to the other. “Like what?”

“They took X-rays and they reckon the bullet’s pretty close to his spine, man,” Xander said, voice compressed. “There’s a chance he might not walk again.” Just for a moment, his eyes landed on me as he spoke and I knew without it being said that he blamed me – us – for what had happened.

I could have pointed out that no-one had forced them to come to Henry’s with us. In fact, I’d specifically asked them not to, but there was enough guilt floating around without me adding my contribution.

“They called Scott’s folks,” Aimee put in. “They dropped everything and got on a plane. They should be here any time. I just don’t know what we’re gonna, like, tell them.”

“Have you said anything to the hospital?”

Aimee shook her head, glancing to Xander.

“We’ve had the cops hassling us already,” he said, “but we didn’t tell them nothing.”

“Good,” I said. “For God’s sake don’t mention me or Trey to them.”

“What?” Xander yelped. He muscled in close, putting his face into mine. He was slightly taller and when he was pumped up on anger and grief he seemed bigger still. Aimee made a protesting noise and put her hand on his arm. With an effort he got a grip on his temper, lowering his voice to a growl. “Our friend could be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life because of you, and all you wanna do is stay out of trouble?”

“Trouble isn’t the beginning of it,” I said, flat. “At least one of the guys who murdered Henry and then came after us is a cop. Two of them are now dead. If you want to tell the cops – who might or might not be in on this – all about what really happened, then on your own heads be it. Far better to invent a drive-by shooting incident and leave it at that. Everybody keeps telling me it’s Spring Break. Wild things happen all the time.”

I watched my words penetrate, saw Xander take on board the truth of them and mentally step back. Even if he couldn’t bring himself to back down physically. Eventually, Aimee wedged herself between us.

She walked Xander back until his calves hit one of the waiting chairs, then she gently pressed on his shoulders until he sat. He complied without resistance, keeping his eyes on me all the while.

Aimee came back to us, managing a rueful smile. “Look, you guys better go,” she said. “Soon as we know anything, we’ll call you.” Her smile expanded when she turned it on a dejected Trey. “I’m real glad you’re OK.”

As she made to go back to Xander I caught her arm. “There’s one more thing,” I said quietly. “You remember I gave Xander the hard drive from Henry’s computer?”

She nodded. “You want it back?”

I shook my head. “It’s no good to us without access to a computer to put it into,” I said. “But we still need to know – now more than ever – who he contacted.”

She shrugged, her disinterested look clearly suggesting I was being insensitive to ask after something so trivial at a time like this. “Why?”

I paused, trying not to show my impatience, while I hunted for a way to persuade her. “Because otherwise we’re not going to find out who the guys who shot Scott are really working for,” I said.

I watched that hit home. She nodded again. “OK, I’ll, like, see what we can do.”

We left quickly, trying not to attract any attention. Suddenly the hospital seemed to be full of people in uniform but none of them appeared to be looking for two kids. And if they were, we didn’t appear to be the kids they were looking for.

Although I was reluctant to abandon our transport, keeping hold of the Taurus would have caused more problems than it would have solved. Nevertheless, I couldn’t resist checking it over before we left it for the last time, just in case there was anything tucked away in there that we could use.

It wasn’t until I opened the boot that I realised just how carefully Jim Whitmarsh and his men had planned our abduction from Henry’s place. The whole of the inside of the boot area was lined in heavy plastic, the kind that builders use. It had been taped down around the edges and, when I cut an experimental slit in it with my Swiss Army knife, I found it was two layers deep.

“What’s that for?” Trey asked, still subdued.

“For a man who claimed to have had a change of heart about killing us immediately,” I said, voice grim, “Whitmarsh was certainly taking precautions not to leave any forensic evidence that we’d been in his car.” I glanced across at him and suddenly felt the need to reinforce my earlier actions. “If I hadn’t got us away from him, he was planning to kill the pair of us, sooner or later. You do realise that, don’t you?”

After a moment’s pause Trey nodded, although without making any comment on whether he’d come to terms with what I’d had to do or not. He stood and watched while I wiped the inside of the Taurus down as best I could and locked the doors. Then we walked out of the car park into the blazing heat on International Speedway Boulevard. The massive spectator stands of the Daytona Speedway loomed away to the west of us, on the other side of the eight-lane highway.

I stopped by the first storm drain we came across and dug the keys out of my pocket. But as I dangled them over the slats of the grid Trey’s obvious surprise made me pause. “What?”

“You can’t just, like, dump the keys down a drain,” he said, actually sounding shocked.

I looked at him for a moment, head on one side until he realised how that sounded and coloured up. So, it was OK to shoot at people and steal their car, but . . .

I shook my head and let go of the keys. They bounced once and disappeared into the gloom. Kids today. I’d been one myself but I swore then I’d never understand them.

***

We walked as far as the next diner, where we found a bunch of kids who were heading to the strip and were easygoing enough to offer us a lift. Then Trey and I spent most of what was left of the afternoon hanging out around the Boardwalk area, looking at the crazy cars on display, being deafened by the bands that were playing. I hadn’t heard of any of them but they were pretty good on the whole. Even if they didn’t know where to find the volume control on most of their amplification.

Trey was moody and quiet, which suited me because it left me largely alone with my thoughts. I was still trying to work out what on earth was going on and failing to put together anything that would hold water.

I tried all the permutations I could think of, however unlikely they seemed, starting with the facts as I knew them. Keith had vanished. Oakley man was trying to kill us. Whitmarsh, originally hired to protect the family, had been at first trying to kill Trey, but was now trying to capture him alive – for the short term, at least. Gerri Raybourn was trying to frame me for kidnapping the boy – and possibly the father, too.

It all boiled down, as far as I could see it, to who had possession of the program Keith had been working on at the time of his disappearance. There was too much potential money at stake for it to be a coincidence.

Keith had part of it, although the fact that he’d run when he was apparently so close to completion had suggested to Henry that Keith had realised he was unable to finish the job. But if people thought the program didn’t work, why had they put all this effort into going after Trey? Revenge?

But whose revenge?

If it was the company Keith worked for – and therefore Gerri Raybourn and Whitmarsh – that would make a certain amount of sense. Maybe they’d started out for revenge, but then Henry must have let it slip that Trey might just have the missing pieces. Their agenda had abruptly changed from trying to eliminate the boy to needing him alive if they were going to have any chance of their promised millions.

And just when I thought I might have put it together, it all started to unravel again. As I understood it, Trey only had a small part of the program. With Keith missing and possibly in hiding, how were they planning on getting hold of the rest?

Unless Keith was involved, too. But in that case, if he was trying to get rid of Trey because he might stir up trouble over his mother, why stop now? And where did Oakley man fit in? After all, he claimed he was the one who’d tortured and executed poor Henry. Had he been bluffing just to scare us?

The one thing I was trying not to think about was what had happened to Sean, but I couldn’t help it. Especially not after Whitmarsh’s throwaway line. “You put up more of a fight than Meyer,” he’d said, “that’s for sure.”

Even so, I wouldn’t allow myself to give up all hope. I couldn’t allow it.

***

As the light started to drop we grabbed some food in one of the crowded barbecue places on the main strip, squeezing into a booth to share a table with a group of kids who’d driven down from Georgia just for the weekend.

Trey livened up enough to chat to them over a meal of burger and fries but I could see the effort it was costing him to act normal. When he thought nobody was looking his eyes had begun to carry a haunted, hunted edge. He’d picked at a hangnail on the side of his thumb until he’d peeled strip after strip of skin away, making it bleed. He was worrying at it now, I noticed, as unconscious an action as a nervous twitch.

He couldn’t, I realised, go on like this much longer. He may be an irritating brat with the usual modern teenager’s blasé attitude to danger, but faced with its constant reality he was starting to suffer. What had begun as a live-action version of one of his computer games had turned into a nightmare he couldn’t just pull the plug on when things got tough.

Whatever I was going to do about the situation, I needed to do it fast. Before he came apart at the seams.