Before he had the chance to speculate further, Alex flinched: in the shadow of the loading bay he thought he saw something move. He turned to face it, but his eyes were still adjusting to the brightness. There was something there, though. Definitely something there. He stepped a bit further back -
At that precise moment the fire door banged open again with some force. Out of the door came Sherman, looking as he was: furious. The door itself swung out and struck Davidoff – who had been unfortunate in the moment he picked to pounce – hard on the top of his forehead. Davidoff, behind the door, went down like a rail of shirts, but not before the momentum of his charge had sent the door slamming back onto his colleague. Sherman, weighing not more than three-quarters what Davidoff did, himself fell over, again, right at Alex’s feet.
Alex, not sure at all what had just happened, looked down at the crazy man – who, he noticed, had a gun in his sock and looked like he was proposing to start pointing it at Alex just as soon as he got round to not being on the ground again – and bolted for the corner. If the bad guy was now behind him, the decision where to run had become a whole lot more straightforward.
Jones had caught up with Bree outside the superstore. Jones was smoking and Bree was wondering what to do when Alex emerged from the gap between the low trees and the left-hand side of the store running at full pelt across the parking lot towards them.
Bree looked at Jones, whose expression was perfectly blank. Let him go, thought Bree. This was too public. They knew what car he was driving. The brief was to follow. Protect.
‘Like a bat out of hell,’ Bree murmured as the boy closed the gap between them. She felt a stirring of anxiety in her gut as to what was following him, then quenched it and put on her best bovine bystander expression.
Like a bat out of hell. She wondered about the origins of the phrase. Why were bats, especially, keen to leave hell? The boy ran right between the two of them, legs pumping almost comically high, breath coming in rags and tatters.
Something occurred to her as she watched him go.
‘You have no idea,’ she said to his departing back, ‘what’s going on, do you?’ He took a corner – Scooby-Doo legs – and was fumbling at the door of the silver Pontiac and then was in it, overrevving the engine before he got it in gear, then taking a wide loop round the near-empty parking lot and grounding the undercarriage with a scrape as he bounced down the awkward gradient onto the street. He was gone.
The guy Bree had hit with her trolley earlier came out from the same place more or less as Alex was getting into the car. He had something in his hand that he stowed quickly inside his jacket as he saw Bree. At around the same moment, the front doors of the store slid sideways and out came – to Bree’s considerable surprise – some sort of store detective in a brown uniform, along with a pair of cut-price beauty queens and a really distressed-looking guy with a wad of crimson toilet tissue clamped to his nose and nosebleed all down his cheap shirt and what looked like confetti in his hair.
The guy with the gun in his jacket clocked them. Bree could see him making a swift calculation. He broke into the sort of awkward, loping run that someone who has just sustained a crunching blow to the coccyx might adopt. First he seemed to be making for the road on foot, the store detective making a half-hearted attempt to lumber in pursuit and the nosebleed guy waving one arm and shouting something from the safety of the doorway. Then, a way away, Bree could hear something that sounded like a siren and the man thought better of it and swerved towards a car parked near the entrance to the lot. He was gone before the store detective got halfway across the space between them.
The guy’s car was a rental. Bree shrugged. Everyone’s car seemed to be a rental. She had the plate. Red Queen would run something up.
‘’s go,’ she said. ‘I made the plate. Did you make the plate?’
Jones nodded. ‘Every one in the lot.’
‘Jonesy,’ said Bree. ‘There is a use for you after all.’
‘There was another man,’ Jones said. Bree looked at him with eyebrows raised. ‘He came past me when I was buying cigarettes. I saw them talking.’ Bree was thinking – what with them both having been standing in the middle of the parking lot for the last ten minutes and the guys in the stripy cars about to show up – that it was time for them to be off.
‘Wait,’ said Jones, and vanished at a run towards the far side of the building.
‘Jones!’ said Bree.
A police car rolled, siren blipping off, into the parking lot and pulled up outside the line of trolleys in front of the store. The store detective and the nosebleed guy mobbed the window as the cop got out. Arms were waved. Bree couldn’t afford to stay still and risk becoming somebody’s witness so she moved off, fussing ostentatiously with her trolley, and then stood behind their car pretending to do something in the trunk.
When that got boring, she sat in the passenger seat and started to eat Jolly Ranchers from the stash in the glove compartment, two at a time. She liked to combine the cherry and peach ones. Thinking about recipes kept her calm, she had discovered.
Where the hell had Jones gone? The cop had gone into the store with the nosebleed guy and his entourage. He had his notepad out and was writing as he went. He looked, from his body language at least, bored. Good. Bree waited some more. She ran out of Jolly Ranchers. She thought about calling Red Queen but then thought she better be safe and wait for Jones and wait for a landline. She wondered if there were some Reese’s Pieces at the back of the glove compartment. There were not.
Then the door opened and Jones climbed into the driver’s seat. He smelled of stale smoke and something else. He pulled a rag out from the compartment in the door and wiped at his hand. He was looking dead ahead. Under the level of the steering wheel Bree could see -
‘Is that blood? Jesus. Jones: what the hell? Are you hurt?’
‘No,’ said Jones. ‘The other man is dead.’
Bree was speechless, for a moment.
‘You’re joking.’ She felt dizzy.
‘Don’t joke,’ said Jones. A fact about himself. He showed her a cellphone. On the screen was a picture of a man’s face. He looked startled. There was a penknife sticking out of his neck. His mouth was slightly open. Very little blood. The background was tarmac.
‘He was unconscious,’ said Jones. ‘I was searching him and he woke up. I didn’t know what to do so I killed him. No documents. Only phone. Took his photograph. Might be helpful.’
‘You killed him?’
‘I didn’t know what to do.’
Jones looked intently ahead, turned on the engine, drove the car out of the lot.
Alex was freaking out. He spent at least as much time looking in his rear-view mirror – for what? He barely even got a look at the guy – as out of the windscreen. Within thirty seconds of joining the freeway he’d come so close to rear-ending a truck (he reckoned his front bumper had been about four inches from the sign reading ‘I Brake For Pussy’, which would have been fatal had the driver done as advertised) that he’d given himself an even bigger fright than he’d had round the back of the supermarket. He’d had one nasty near miss as he’d become confused as to what was the inside and what the outside lane when you’re driving on the other side of the road. A wailing horn had reminded him.
A panicky attempt to fish his mobile phone out of his left-hand pocket – he was still sketchy as to who he would call but he knew he’d rather have it on the passenger seat than in his pocket – had nearly ended in the sort of disaster they show on the news.
Who the hell was that man? With a gun! An honest to God gun. As he drove, he started to calm down. Just a random lunatic. Another one. America was full of those. But what had happened back there? It looked like the door had bounced off something and hit him. What had the door bounced off?