bag of old spanners and the exhaust can was in dire need of replacement, but at least it ran.
No-one came rushing out of the bar to rescue their trusty steed.
I toed the bike into gear, feeling weird to be riding without a helmet for the first time in my life. Trey wrapped his arms round my waist and clamped himself to my back like a monkey as we trundled across the uneven car park.
When I got to the highway I checked both ways carefully before I pulled out. The cluster of cop cars was about a third of a mile further back down the road. As I turned in the opposite direction I tried not to look too hard, and I made sure I went up through the Kwak’s gearbox slowly and smoothly enough not to attract their attention.
As I rode north into the subtropical night I could see the visual disco of their lights behind me for a couple of miles before they finally disappeared from view.
Seven
I managed to get us forty miles away from the scene of the shoot-out, across two county lines and almost into West Palm Beach, before I had to stop.
There was a wooden shack by the side of the road, with a faded sign by the side of it to tempt passers by with the offer of homegrown citrus fruit for sale. The shack looked as though it hadn’t had anything fresh inside it for years. A thick coating of weed was the only thing holding the rotting timbers upright. I slowed and rode carefully in through the open doorway, paddling the Kawasaki round with both feet down, clumsy.
As I pulled the clutch in and we finally came to a halt, I muttered over my shoulder to Trey, “OK,
He almost tripped in his effort to be off the bike faster than me. I staggered to the doorway and stood bent over with my hands braced on my knees. There was a roaring growing louder in my ears like I was standing in the shallows waiting for the surf to wash over me. I didn’t have to wait long.
The teriyaki beef jerky tasted no better on the way up than it had done on the way down.
Trey stood by the bike inside the shack, watching me throw up with irritating intensity. I could feel his distaste, but sensed it wasn’t so much at the fact that I was vomiting, as at my need to do so. He despised my weakness without sympathy. I wasn’t so keen on it myself.
When I was finally on empty I came upright slowly, buffeted by dizziness and fresh nausea. Considering I was relatively uninjured I felt like hell. My eyes were gritty from squinting unprotected into the hot wind that had blasted up over the bike’s fairing. I seemed to have been hit in the face by every living species of insect in Florida. It reminded me why I never even rode with my visor open at home, never mind with no helmet at all.
I put a hand up to wipe the bug splats off my face. I swear my nose was at least twice its normal size. I prodded gently at the bridge with my fingers but I didn’t think it was broken.
The moonlight was clear and startling by the doorway and it seeped inside the shack. I noticed for the first time that Trey had acquired a small cut over his eyebrow when the airbag had gone off in his face. A little blood had trickled down past the side of his eye. Apart from that he looked OK. More or less. He was staying further back in the gloom and it was difficult to tell.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Yeah, ‘course,” he said, with a defiant edge to him. Reminding him at this point of his tears and listless shock as we’d run from the cops would not, I thought, be a way to gain his friendship and trust. I let it ride. Besides, I soon found out that he had other things on his mind.
“Was that—?” he broke off, took a breath and tried again, his voice detached. “Was that the first time you’ve like, y’know, killed someone?”
Again, I was tempted to lie. Again I didn’t see the point. “No.” I said.
Trey gulped. “Did it . . . did you throw up then, too? Afterwards, I mean.”
I cocked my head, as though giving the question serious thought. “Probably. I don’t remember.” I said, trying to be truthful. “I didn’t exactly come out of it in the best of health myself and the paramedics were giving me a lot of painkillers. Things were a little hazy.”
I didn’t explain any further than that, but Trey nodded seriously, as though what I’d just told him made perfect sense. “Can I see it – the gun?”
I eyed him doubtfully. There was a kind of fearful eagerness about him now. He’d got over the shock of watching me shoot the men in the Buick and all the ghoulishness of your average schoolboy had returned. Nevertheless, there was no good reason to refuse him.
I sighed and pulled the SIG out of my belt again. He moved forwards, his gaze locked on the gun. I deliberately dropped the magazine out and removed the chambered round before I handed it over to him. His contained excitement outweighed the offence he took at having his judgement so obviously mistrusted.
“Awesome,” he said. Even knowing the gun was unloaded, he handled it with exaggerated care, surreptitiously reading the maker’s name off the side of the barrel, but not wanting to let me see him do it in order to recognise what it was. “SIG Sauer, huh? Where d’ya get it?”
“From the house,” I said. “It’s Sean’s.” I couldn’t quite bring myself to talk about him in the past tense. Not yet.
“Where d’you learn to shoot like that?” His stance had altered, I noted. He was holding the SIG in a showy double-handed grip now, posing almost, with both elbows bent sharply in best movie tough-guy tradition. So the camera can pan in good and tight on the hero’s face and still get the gun in the same shot.
“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.
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?”
