If Sherman took the straight line – went left of the trolleys and vaulted up the wrong end of the ramp – he’d get there about the same time as the boy.
Eighty metres, ten metres.
Davidoff way out to the right. Scan left – that angle covered. Was there a back entrance? Probably. Best not let him get into the store in the first place if at all possible. Best not let him bolt.
Seventy metres, ten metres. Easy. Easy.
Ouch! Shit. The fat woman – not at all where he’d expected her to be – had barked her trolley against his shin. Stupid fat -
‘Sorry, sorry,’ she was at once muttering, fussing: ‘Oh gosh, oh gee. Sir, I’m real sorry – I didn’t see where you were…’ She started, inanely, trying to brush down the lapels of his jacket with her hands…
Sherman struggled to keep his temper. He could see the kid reaching the end of the ramp, and here was this woman right in the -
‘It’s fine, really,’ he said.
‘Oh, you’re so kind, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’
‘It’s fine,’ he repeated, jerking away from her. A bit too snappy an emphasis. She was startled, suddenly looking offended.
‘Well, there’s no call -’
Oh for fuck’s sake. ‘Dammit -’
He pushed her trolley to one side roughly – it clattered to the tarmac, lighter than he had anticipated; he didn’t have time to wonder why she was pushing an empty trolley – and hopped past, breaking into an angry trot for a couple of paces, enough to carry him to within nearly grabbing distance of the kid. But as he did so the kid heard something and jerked his head round – saw Sherman looking straight at him, read the tension in his face.
Alex Smart didn’t recognise Sherman but something in him knew instantly and viscerally that the man behind him was after him. He gasped, stumbled over on one ankle, recovered, hip-checked the back end of the line of trolleys and sprinted up the ramp for the entrance of the shop.
Shit shit shit. Sherman abandoned all pretence of stalking him and just went flat out. A fraction of a second of indecision – go right and round the line of trolleys, or try to hurdle them – resolved in favour of cutting the corner.
He grunted and put one hand out to grab midway down the caterpillar of trolleys, pushed off the tarmac and swung his legs up to vault – the kid whipping back his head to look with candid fright at the man cutting the corner off between them – feeling as he left the ground the trolleys sliding under his hand, his trailing foot now not clearing but catching the steel railing on the other side – angular momentum bringing him round faster than he could compensate for.
The electric doors of the supermarket whooshed open and Alex ran inside. Sherman crashed down onto the top of the ramp behind him. His left hand broke his fall at the cost of an impact in the heel of his hand so hard the pain detonated in his elbow. He lost a smear of skin – he didn’t feel it – then first his left then his right knee crashed onto the hairy black-and-red plastic mat that said ‘WELCOME’ in big letters.
Nothing was broken, but the physical shock – a charge of adrenalin and humiliation – made Sherman very, very angry. The electric doors had half swiped shut behind Alex, but then Sherman’s face broke the beam, and they jolted open again. Sherman scrambled to his feet and stumbled through the doors.
He got his head up just long enough to see, confusingly, what seemed to be the bottom half of a girl in a bikini before his forward momentum drove his head into the soft part between her bikini top and her bikini bottoms. There was a shrill squawk, interrupted by the sound of the air being driven out of her lungs by Sherman’s head. She went down and so did Sherman, rolling off sideways and sprawling on his back.
It was a girl in a bikini – two of them. Both blonde. One of them now on the deck somewhere, the other shying above him on her platform shoes like some sort of horse. As Sherman tried to get his footing and his dignity back, there was the sound of an air horn and his field of vision was obscured by an avalanche of something coming down on him – colours, red, white and blue…
He threw his hands up to protect his face, and yelped. Sherman was engulfed in something soft and multicoloured and swirling. The air horn gave another great asthmatic hoot and Sherman found himself spitting out something dry in his mouth… little bits of paper.
The girl on the floor was crying – or wailing, anyway – and Sherman was sitting in a small snowdrift of red-white-and-blue confetti, half of which seemed to be wrapped in flakes round his tongue. The air horn went off again.
Sherman scrambled to his feet. There was a guy in a white button-down shirt with a tie on, trying to help him up and grinning inanely in his face.
‘-tulations! Sir, yes, sir, sorry. Sorry, sir, let us -’ the man in the shirt sweeping confetti from Sherman’s shoulders, the one girl helping the other girl up – ‘quite unprepared, quite an entrance, ha ha, but no harm done, no, sir, let me extend the compliments of the store to you, yes, sir-’
‘What the fuck?’
‘Ha ha, sir, no, I’m sorry, sir, there’s no need for that kind of language, I think you’ll be pleased, sir, to learn – let me help you up with that – sir, this is a very proud moment, a proud moment I say, in the history of this store, to be able to say you are our one MILLIONTH customer!’
And with that the man in the shirt and tie extended the open palm of friendship to the man from MIC and the man from MIC hit him in the face.
Alex heard all this – or some of this – behind him as he ran through the store. He dodged a startled sales assistant, brought down a revolving rack of tennis shirts, gulped air, hurdled a low stool on which until moments before someone had been trying on a pair of trainers, and then seeing half concealed between two racks of off-brand sportswear a beige fire door with a bar across it at waist height rammed his hand into the bar so hard his palm hurt.
The door slammed open and disgorged Alex into a corridor of whitewashed breeze blocks and grey floor tiles. It smelled of stale air and long-ago bleach. Alex let the door shut behind him and ran down the corridor and round the corner, grabbing at a bit of pipework to swing himself round as he went.
He heard his own trainers squeaking on the lino, and his chest hurt at the Y-shaped bit where his lungs met.
There were what looked like storerooms off the corridor to one or other side – grey doors, with wired windows in them. He wondered about hiding in one but the fear of being trapped was too strong. Besides, his body – he didn’t know who that guy was, but he knew he needed to get away from him – seemed to be taking these decisions for him. He carried on running. At the end of the corridor there was sunlight leaking in round the edges of another door with a bar across it. Alex bet that would be the outside door.
He didn’t know how long the guy he’d heard fall over behind him would take to be on him and he didn’t want to find out. He barrelled into the door. It resisted the first bump, but then he pushed again and the bar yielded and the door opened. He spilled out into the light. He was by an open loading bay of some sort – a thin and inexpertly laid strip of tarmac led round to the far corner of the building and back out.
Ahead there was a shallow bank of scrubby grass, a low wall, a patch of waste ground. Further away, in the distance, the highway. He stopped for a moment and looked around. If he could sneak back down between the outside wall of the store and the hedge he could maybe make it to his car. But he’d have to cross the car park. That guy had moved fast. If he hadn’t seen where he’d gone would he have doubled back to try and ambush him? Or would he even now be making his way through the back corridor of the building?