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.
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?”
Trey scratched at his armpit, frowning as he was overtaken by a sudden worry. “Nah. It just said there was a double homicide at a motel and that a cop was gunned down by the side of the highway.”
As I restarted the Kwak’s motor he hopped onto the pillion seat, grabbing on round my waist. He leaned forwards. “That means they know it was Mr Whitmarsh and Chris, yeah?” he said in my ear, and there was a painfully hopeful note in his voice. “That means we’re, like, in the clear, right?”
Now would have been a good time to stop being so truthful with the kid, I recognised, but it seemed a shame to break the habit.
“No, sorry,” I said, grim. “It means now we’re in the shit twice as deep . . .”
***
It was late in the evening by the time we arrived in Daytona Beach. The whole place was bright and brash and lit up with neon like Blackpool sea front on steroids. Lots of steroids.
We crossed over the inland waterway and came in on South Atlantic Avenue, past block after block of high- rise luxury flats that were perched on the narrow ribbon of land between the road and the beach. The motels and hotels lined both sides, mostly with signs out welcoming the Spring Breakers. The bars and surf shops all seemed to still be open, bright and brash and loud. They were doing a roaring trade if the number of teenagers thronging the pavements was anything to go by.
I stopped before we got too far into the thick of things. The sight of numerous police cruisers pulling teenage drivers over in the centre turning lane for traffic and drink driving offences was enough to make me want to get us and our stolen motorbike off the road, and fast.
I turned into the first reasonable-looking motel that had a vacancies sign lit up and tucked the Kawasaki away behind a massive pickup truck.
“I’ll stay with the bike,” Trey offered as I cut the engine and we climbed off.
I nodded and walked into the reception. There were a crowd already in there, including a family of harassed and sunburned Brits who were complaining about the noise.
“I’m real sorry, sir,” the thin youth behind the desk was saying, “but you have to understand that this is Spring Break.”
The man kept grumbling until the duty manageress was wheeled out to discount his bill. He accepted the reduction with poor grace and stalked out, his crotchety-looking wife and family trailing after him. His plastic sandals squeaked annoyingly on the tiled floor as he went. As they passed me I noticed that the backs of their collective necks were scorched to the colour of a red brick house.
A group of American teens were next in line, all good tans and gum and braces. I busied myself leafing through a rack of local attractions by the main desk, mainly so I could avoid eye contact with people. I didn’t want to stick in their memory if I could help it.
I quietly checked out my reflection in the mirrored glass panel behind the reception desk, but to my surprise I didn’t show any signs of having just lived through a car crash and a bloody shoot-out. My nose looked a little puffy, sure, but if you didn’t know what it looked like normally, you wouldn’t notice. And the reddened patches on my face