sunglasses swing in our direction as his head came up.
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.
As we sped along the street I was checking out parked cars and empty driveways, comparing the layout against the mental image I’d snapped the last time we were there. It all seemed quiet, normal, with no new cars too smart for the area, no suspicious vans. I was aware of a slight disorientation, even so, in trying to overlay my night-time memory onto daylight.
Following Trey’s directions, Scott pulled up hard enough in front of Henry’s run-down house to have the neighbours twitching. If this had been the kind of estate where the neighbours bothered taking notice of what people got up to.
The place looked worse in the harsh sunlight. The wooden siding of the house itself had once been done pale blue, as though with paint left over from a swimming pool. The broken trellis that skirted the bottom pretended to be white, as did the window trims and the wooden supports for the porch, which leaned very slightly over at an angle. This gave the effect that the whole structure was collapsing slowly sideways off the front of the house. For all I knew, that might have been the case.
My bag was still unzipped, ready. I swung it onto my shoulder as I opened the passenger door. “I suppose it’s pointless to tell you to stay in the car?” I said but I wasn’t really expecting an answer. Besides, the four of them had already hopped out onto the dusty dirt driveway. The sight of their ready grins made me scowl.
I led the way past the battered Corvette and up the rickety steps. I leaned on the bell, hearing it ring through the house but no-one came to answer. We stood like that for a few moments, waiting. The kids’ grins had become a little more forced now and they began to squabble in a lighthearted undertone amongst themselves.
I tuned out the bickering, wishing they were anywhere but behind me on this. All the time I let my eyes drift across the scene over the road from Henry’s place but there was nobody in sight. It jarred.
Saturday afternoon and nobody in sight. Not a single person. Not even a dog. As soon as we’d hit the end of the street something had spooked me and now I knew what it was.
Henry had been very specific about time. Why? Anyone needing proof of his connection to Trey couldn’t reasonably have expected him to have the kid on tap, instantly available, so why the tight deadline? Why the urgency? Unless . . .
My heart had begun to pump again, setting that tingle along my forearms, that shiver between my shoulders. I dropped my right hand nonchalantly into the open bag hanging from my shoulder as I pulled open the outer screen door with my left.
The inner door was old, the paint faded although with two tough-looking shiny locks at different heights along the leading edge. When I tried the handle, it turned without resistance and the door opened.
I heard Xander suck in a breath. “Man, are you sure we should—”
“Shut up,” I murmured, and nudged the door all the way wide. It swung slowly back against the wall of the hallway, revealing the same grotty little living space. The door at the end of the corridor was the only one closed. I took one step across the threshold but that was all I needed before I knew the smell.
When I brought my hand out of the bag the SIG was in it. I shrugged the bag onto the floor. Without looking over my shoulder I said tightly, “Get back in the truck. Turn it round and have the engine running.”
