outside the house and the big coloured guy jumped out of the driver’s seat, leaving the doors open and the engine running. He moved round the back of the car and opened the boot.
“C’mon,” he said to Whitmarsh, “we don’t have much time.”
“OK.” Whitmarsh nodded. “Check her over, first.” To me he said, “You exceeded my expectations, Charlie. Takes a lot to impress me, but I’m impressed.”
“Excuse me if I don’t take that as a compliment,” I said with a touch of acid.
He smiled. “Yep,” he went on as though I hadn’t spoken, holding my gaze as he added with a certain cruel deliberation, “you put up more of a fight than Meyer, that’s for sure.”
I felt my face harden but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of rising to that one. We continued our stare-out competition as Chris approached and gave me a quick pat-down search. He kept out of Lonnie’s field of fire and stepped back when he was done, shaking his head to Whitmarsh. As I’d hoped, he didn’t bother with the boy.
“OK,” Whitmarsh said, “get them both into the trunk.”
“Oh come on,” I snapped, edging closer to Trey and stamping on my fear. “If you’re going to kill us, just get on with it. You don’t have to go through the classic ‘taking you for a ride’ crap.”
Chris flicked his eyes to his boss and in that instant I read just a hint of nervousness there. The sudden realisation it triggered was like someone had flicked a switch inside my head and turned on all the floodlights at a Premier League football game.
In fact, having Trey dead was the very last thing they wanted. To the point where they’d actually stepped in to prevent us being shot by Oakley man and his crew.
It all made a twisted kind of sense now. I’d thought Whitmarsh and Oakley man were all in this together but, when I thought about it, I’d never seen them working as a team. Even though they’d always appeared to have a common aim.
“Maybe we aren’t of a mind to kill you,” Whitmarsh said, narrow eyed. “You thought of that?”
Lonnie paused just long enough in his constant surveillance to flick his boss a brief, pained glance, as though he considered Whitmarsh was wasting time they didn’t have on idle chitchat. Chris was tense, too. For a few moments the only sound was that of the Taurus’s quietly running engine.
“Well it certainly looked that way when we watched you slaughter that pair at the motel,” I threw back.
Surprise rocked him, then he smiled. “Maybe we’ve had a change of heart since then,” he said and jerked his head to Chris to get on with it.
Trey was right next to me and, as Chris closed on us again, I took a step back, leaving the boy to the fore. Chris’s face flickered at my apparent display of cowardice but as I moved I reached behind Trey with my right hand, as though to put my arm around his shoulders. Instead I went under his shirt and grabbed hold of the pistol grip of the SIG, snatching it free.
My left arm snaked round Trey’s neck, fisting my hand into his shirt to pin him hard against the front of my body, unashamedly using him as a shield. I brought the SIG up into view, planting the muzzle under his jawline. His head came back as his spine went stiff both with outrage and with fright. All the time I made sure I presented as small a target as possible to Whitmarsh.
He was the one who worried me. If they were as desperate to capture Trey alive as I suspected, Lonnie couldn’t risk firing the shotgun when we were so close together. Chris had nothing in his hands. That left Whitmarsh and his Beretta.
But they all froze, which gave me hope to think there might be an escape route still open to us. It was a gamble. All I had to do now was play it.
“You must think I’m amazingly stupid,” I spat. “OK, so you’ve decided you need the kid. So where does that leave me?”
I contrived a suitably whiny note of low cunning into my voice. I was dealing with men without honour. They wouldn’t have any difficulty in believing I might have my eye solely on my own interests. A rat who’d suddenly found a life jacket and decided now was the time to leave this ship.
I nudged the barrel of the SIG further into Trey’s neck, angled upwards where a single shot would scatter his brains all over the lawn and watched the alarm in their faces.
“You want him alive?” I sneered. “Well in that case you better be prepared to let me walk him out of here, because otherwise he’ll be yet another dead body you’ve got to clean up. And trust me,” I added, voice positively dripping with venom, “after two days solid in this little brat’s company, it would almost be a pleasure.”
For a moment nobody spoke and I feared I’d overdone it, but then Whitmarsh lowered his gun and nodded to the other two. They let me shuffle Trey towards the Taurus, making sure I kept him turning so they never had a clear shot at me while we got there. Not that any of them tried for one. I began to realise that whatever value they now placed on Trey must be a high one.
Getting into the driving seat without exposing myself wasn’t easy and I managed it with less style than I would have liked, but we got there. Trey was taut and ungainly, barely seeming able to fold himself into the car.
As soon as we were in I stuck the car into gear and floored it, not caring how much rubber I left stuck to the road. The boot lid bounced up and down a couple of times as we hit a few bumps, then finally latched shut. I kept hunched down in my seat, waiting at any moment for the shots to come through the back window, but they never came.
Either Whitmarsh knew when to admit defeat, or he really was terrified of injuring the boy.
As we reached the end of the street I risked sitting up far enough to glance in the rear-view mirror. It was set for a taller driver and I had to tilt it down slightly to use it, but when I did so I found that everyone had disappeared from the front of Henry’s house.
I turned and looked over my shoulder, just to be certain, but there was nobody there. Whitmarsh and his men had gone just like they’d never existed.
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.
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.
