Side by Side

46

Winter Massey looked in his rearview mirror at Alexa’s headlights, and then beside him at sulking Click’s profile. Being almost killed had a sobering effect on people lucky enough to be able to remember it after the fact. Click was still wearing his red-and-blue plaid flannel robe over his T-shirt and boxers. The athletic sock on his right foot was bunched around his ankle like a badge of defeat.

“Your girlfriend was going to kill me,” Click said.

“You were trying to load your gun. If you had, I would have killed you. What are you bitching about? You’re murdering a young mother and her child.”

“You have children?” Click asked.

“No,” Winter lied.

“Married?”

“No.”

“Girlfriend?”

He shook his head.

“Gay?”

“Don’t talk to me unless you’re ready to tell me where the Dockerys are.”

“Why?”

“You really want to know?”

“Du-uh,” Click said. “I wasn’t asking so I could smell your breath.”

“I don’t want anything personal about this. It’s business. I intend to keep your family from killing two innocent people, and I am willing to do whatever I have to do. I don’t want to remember you as a real person because it might make me feel bad about what I had to do to you.”

“I was just making conversation.” Click looked at the road ahead, sullen. “I mean, somebody saves your life, keeps their girlfriend from killing you, and plans to torture you, you have to wonder about them.”

“I didn’t save you because I like you or give a damn if they kill you. I did it because I want to find out what you know. You’re just a map to me. Whatever happens to you depends on how it affects my route to find the Dockerys.”

“I can’t help you hurt my family.”

“You’re not like them. They’re killers, you’re not.”

“They might be what you say they are, but they’ll be around a long time after you’re dead. I’m no Judas.”

“If they murder the Dockerys, I’ll make sure you spend the next thirty years in prison without access to computers.”

“Smoot blood goes back hundreds of years. Our ancestors came here from England. No Smoot has ever ratted out another one.”

Winter figured the first Smoots came kicking and screaming, clapped in irons, straight from the bowels of some British penal institution.

“One way or the other, you’re going to tell me where the Dockerys are. That, Click, is a dead-certain fact.”

“You can’t make me tell you anything.”

Winter smiled.

“I bet you’ve never beaten anybody up or tortured them before. You don’t have the eyes for it. You didn’t even shoot back at Randall.”

“No need to make a racket that would have brought the cops.”

Click reached down, opened his robe, and pulled up the T-shirt. Even in the dimly lit cab, Click’s torso looked like Jackson Pollock had created a masterpiece on the young man’s canvas of skin by using a variety of blades and red-hot objects to get the desired effect.

He sneered. “Do anything you want to me. We have this family tradition that gets passed down from father to son. You can burn me with cigarettes, break bones, pull out my fingernails, or carve me up like a Thanksgiving turkey and all you’ll get for your trouble is your own sweat.” Click dropped his shirt and closed his robe. He said offhandedly, “Whatever you can do, I’ve already had. You might as well just shoot me and go on about your snooping business without wasting any more time than you already have.”

Winter thought about a man who would do such a thing to his own child. He thought then about his own son and his infant daughter, and deep inside he was on fire.

He intended to find Lucy and Elijah, but after he did, he wanted to kill Peanut Smoot.

Maybe Click truly believed he wasn’t going to rat out his father, but Winter knew differently.