‘Good of you,’ said Pope. ‘Thanks.’
He was using his generic American accent because although it was an effort to maintain, his grammar school vowels would be conspicuous. Particularly at a truck stop off a US interstate at a quarter to two in the morning, with a mute and shivering waif at his side.
They’d walked a mile up the road, the lights guiding him on. O’Connell’s, stuttered the pink neon when he was close to make it out through the thin steam from the blacktop. A pitted, oil-stained forecourt bristled at the periphery with seven or eight trucks of varying sizes and degrees of articulation. Below the neon sign was a low, long diner-style building with heaving movement beyond the blurred windows.
*
Pope had regained control of the wheel a second after the girl twisted it clockwise. He was almost, but not quite, quick enough to keep the Mercedes in the centre lane. As it happened, the involuntary pressure of his foot on the brake pedal caused the front to bank sideways slightly, carrying it across into the slow lane, where, as luck would have it, a car behind was accelerating to overtake.
The car behind — a Porsche roadster — rammed the rear door on the passenger side of the Mercedes at a thirty-degree angle, stoving it in and shunting the Mercedes back into the centre lane. Pope kept his foot off the brake and controlled the slide as best he could and the Mercedes stalled within a few feet. Behind and visible through Nina’s window, the Porsche too had stalled, its ballooned airbag filling the windscreen.
Pope did a quick inventory in the sudden silence. He was unhurt. The girl shuddered in the seat beside him but seemed to be moving all limbs. From what he could see of the Mercedes from the front seat, the rear door buckled inwards at a sharp angle and that side sagging awkwardly, to all intents and purposes the car was a writeoff.
He pulled the Heckler amp; Koch from beneath his seat and shoved it into his coat pocket, checked the road behind him — the cars were veering round into the fast lane — and stepped out. The meagre traffic was slowing to stare. One man leaned out his window and held his hand to his ear in a telephoning gesture but Pope shook his head, smiled and gave him the thumbs up.
One glance at the back of the car confirmed his suspicions. The rear wheel on the passenger side was flat and tilted inwards, the axle broken or at least bent. He moved forwards and opened Nina’s door. She didn’t look up at him. Gently, but with enough firmness not to leave any doubts, he took her by the shoulders and helped her out. She clutched at the violin case and he let her haul it after her.
At his side, a voice said, ‘You’re in a heap of shit, man.’
It was a young man, in his early twenties perhaps, his gelled-back hair only slightly rumpled. He was rubbing his face, his arms, his chest. His Porsche’s headlights backlit him.
‘Fucking asshole. Jumping lanes like that.’
Pope didn’t point out that the younger man had been trying to overtake in the slow lane. He calculated quickly. The fake UK driver’s licence he’d used to rent the car would hold up, as would the temporary insurance certificate he’d obtained; at least long enough for him to exchange details with the man and get going again. On the other hand -
The man had pulled a phone from the tight hip pocket of his jeans, wincing exaggeratedly as though discovering a pain in his torso he hadn’t noticed before. ‘My dad’s a lawyer, dickhead. Gonna sue your ass.’
Pope’s decision was made for him. The man stepped closer, invading Pope’s personal space, wordlessly daring him to push him or swing a punch. Still supporting Nina’s arm, Pope stiffened the fingers of his left hand into what he visualised as a shovel. He slammed the fingers into the young man’s abdomen below the breastbone, felt the gasp of minty breath as the man jackknifed. Pope caught him by the collar as he dropped, controlled his dead weight as he slid to the ground. Releasing Nina momentarily, Pope crouched beside the man, shielded by the Mercedes from the rest of the road, and twisted his neck sharply sideways.
Aware of cars sliding to a stop now, Pope ducked his head to minimise the exposure of his face and took Nina by the elbow and bundled her across the road to the hard shoulder. She squatted on her haunches when they got there, and Pope took a moment to orientate himself. The truck stop blinked in the distance.
The police would be looking not for somebody who had abandoned the scene of an accident — an offence in itself — but a killer. And they’d have eyewitness accounts of a man and a young woman carrying a case of some kind.
If he could make it to New York, he could lose himself there, even with Nina in tow. All he needed was transport to take them another hundred miles.
*
‘Fifteen minutes? Maybe twenty?’
The trucker was shovelling food into his face at a steady, leisurely pace. He sat at the long counter that ran around three sides of the service area, and had been chatting to two other men when Pope and Nina came in. the two men drifted away to a larger group further down the counter.
Everybody had glanced across and appraised Pope and, of course, Nina; but when Pope had steered them over to the solitary man the rest of the customers, perhaps twelve in all, lost interest. Pope held a fan of dollar bills up between his fingers.
‘We need a ride to New York.’
The man finished swallowing, nodding as he did so. ‘Going to Queens, as it happens.’
After refusing the offer of cash, the man reapplied himself to his meal. Pope wanted to say, no, fifteen minutes is too long to wait; twenty is even worse. We need to go now. But there was no legitimate reason why the time taken to finish a truck stop meal should make any difference, unless of course Pope and Nina were on the run. So Pope sat Nina on one of the stools and propped himself beside her and ordered coffee for two. In the long mirror on the opposite side of the counter he watched the windows, waiting for the sweeping lights beyond to change to flickering blue and red.
The trucker — Joel, he’d introduced himself as — made enthusiastic recommendations about the meatloaf, the cherry pie, and Pope answered him politely but non-committally. In answer to the inevitable question he said he was Mark Logan — the name on his driver’s licence — and that the lady, his girlfriend, was Carmela. Her mother in Brooklyn was seriously ill and they were travelling overnight to see her; that was why she sat silent and jumpy. Their car had broken down five miles back; the AA were taking care of it, but it would take a couple of days to fix.
‘Pissy luck, man,’ said Joel, sounding genuinely sorry.
The minute hand of the clock on the wall swept impossibly quickly through ten minutes, then fifteen. Pope felt the knot of tension in his stomach start to unfurl and spread branches.
He glanced at Nina. She sat resting her elbows on the counter, her head lowered, the coffee untouched before her. She hadn’t said anything since the crash. Every now and again she’d look up, but not at him; her eyes would flick about as though following an invisible point of darting light.
He understood that this was more than a delayed reaction to the violence of the last half a day, the horror and confusion of what he’d revealed to her about her parents. The girl was ill.
Pope had known a boy at school who’d started to behave oddly at the age of fifteen: his grades had begun to drop, he’d starting cutting himself off from the few friends he had, and he used to sit in one corner of the classroom filling both exercise and text books with doodles. One day the teacher had confronted him when he started drawing on the walls, and he’d laughed and run out. He hadn’t returned to the school, but a few years later Pope had met him by chance in the street. The boy had put on an enormous amount of weight, walked with a peculiar slow deliberation, and his eyes seldom blinked. He’d shown no recognition whatsoever when Pope met his gaze.