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.
Shit. How had it come to this?
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.
But why the secrecy? Why hide in the shadows and wait until we made a break for it to take potshots at the Hispanic man? And why allow Oakley man and Ginger to pick up their dead and run? If Whitmarsh’s men were prepared to kill one, what did it achieve to let the others escape alive?
I remembered the young cop who’d stopped us and the men in the Buick who’d intervened. It wasn’t just a black and white case of dead or alive, I realised. Neither side wanted us to fall into the wrong official hands, either. So who were the right ones?
I flicked my eyes across to Trey. He was still staring pointedly out of the window.
“Maybe it’s time we went back to see Walt,” I suggested, a little tentative.
No response.
“Trey,” I said, snappier this time. “Did you hear me? I said maybe—”
“I heard you!” The words burst out of him, too loud inside the confines of the car, startling. He twisted round and now I could see the tears running down his face. He pressed his lips together until they were white and without definition, his whole face pinched.
“What’s the matter?”
My question only made things worse.
“What’s the matter?” he shrieked, uncaring that his voice rose and wavered, shrill as a reed. “How the fuck can you go ‘What’s the matter?’ like that, after what you just did?” He broke off, shaking his head for a moment as his temper boiled up under the surface, then he slammed his fist sideways into the door panel. “How can you?” he repeated.
“Trey,” I said carefully, trying to keep one eye on the traffic through his outburst. “I did what I had to do to get us out of there alive. Surely you realise that?”
He was silent and it dawned on me that he’d taken every word I’d spoken on Henry’s porch at face value. My mouth dried. No wonder the kid was so touchy.
“Trey,” I said, trying again. “I didn’t mean it – any of it. Christ, you can’t have thought I did, not after what we’ve been through these last couple of days?”