Finally, he decided he’d rather just go than keep sitting here. He waited till after dark, and then drove. The forecourt and the neon sign were still illuminated but the glass front was shut. Sherman parked the car a couple of blocks away, and walked back to the shop.
The snake of trolleys, locked and chained in the black light, looked like something’s spine. A single car, seemingly abandoned, gleamed grey-white in the middle of the car park. The display windows of the shop faced blankly over the asphalt, eating the dark. Sherman shivered, pushed his hands into the pockets of his jacket and broke into the beginnings of a trot.
There was nothing outside the building. Sherman spent a few minutes in a pool of shade near the exit, watching the windows of the building for the sweep of a flashlight – anything that said ‘nightwatchman’. Nothing. He circled towards the back of the building.
A sign directed deliveries to a roughly laid tarmacked strip down the side of the store. He trotted down under the shoulder of the building, into the dark. He could smell diesel and grass. He walked round – down a long wall, one locked door and a shuttered loading bay. All quiet. On the other side of the loading bay was the fire door that had knocked him over that afternoon. There was a dim, hooded light over it. He shuffled down the wall towards it.
He was startled, then, by a rustle in the bushes and froze. A tousled figure – not tall enough to be Davidoff – was standing still out there in a pool of dark, seemingly looking in his direction. As Sherman’s eyes adjusted he could see the outline of a rough beard. He’d disturbed a hobo. Dumpster-diving probably. There was another rustle, and the old man stepped back and was gone. He wouldn’t have been able to see much of Sherman, not from that distance and with Sherman in the shadow of the building. Probably just heard him.
Sherman waited, then went on. Screened from two sides by the low bank and the hedge, he risked the light, tried the door. There wasn’t a handle – just the bar on the inside, and the shop may not have had a nightwatchman but it was bound to be alarmed.
If Davidoff had got trapped in there, he supposed, he could have decided it was better to wait the night out than risk tripping the alarm. He didn’t have a car. But that didn’t make sense. Davidoff hadn’t gone into the shop, not from the front, anyway. And if he was in there he wouldn’t know that Sherman had taken the car. And why would he have got locked into the shop in the first place? He had a phone… No. Sherman had a bad feeling about his partner.
It was just as he was thinking about this bad feeling he had, about his partner, that Sherman heard the sound of a motor idling outside the front of the shop, then coming closer. It sounded like it was coming down the side of the building, where he’d just walked. It stopped. Then there was the sound of a car door opening, and closing. What made Sherman freeze was that the noise of the car – throatier, a van of some sort – and the noise of the voices sounded like someone trying to be quiet. His route back was cut off.
He moved quickly, scrambling out of the light and over the wall and up the slope into the foot of the hedge. He wriggled down into a long, ditch-like concavity he found in the earth. He could hear low, purposeful voices. The foliage was good above him. He risked raising his head.
Four men – all in dark overalls. They had penlights on them, and they were sweeping methodically, stealthily, down the back of the building and up the slope towards where he was hiding.
Shit. He could bolt onto the waste ground behind and risk running for it. But an image came into his head of being shot efficiently in the back. He stayed, put his head down. If they rolled him, he’d pretend to be a sleeping drunk.
He breathed as shallowly as he could. The dancing penlights, he was relieved to see, were moving up towards the ditch a little further along from where he was. Then one stopped, there was a sharp whisper, and the others converged on it. They’d found something. They were maybe six feet away.
There were now two torch beams. Two of the men had clipped off and stowed theirs to free up their hands. In the play of the light Sherman saw the men haul something up, something heavy. As it came, Sherman knew what it was. He’d seen these things hefted like that often before. They yanked it awkwardly out of the ditch, then each man hooked an arm briskly, professionally, under each armpit – another man picking up the legs. No hesitation, no alarm. One man directing.
The head flopped back as the torso came up. A splash of light flashed over it. Mouth open, eyes open, a slick darkness down one side of the neck. That was where Davidoff was.
The four men bore him away, head jouncing, round the corner of the building at speed. Sherman heard a car door close – quietly, but firmly, then another one. Then the motor started and retreated and he was left alone in the hedge in the dark. He waited there for a very long time, and then he got up, walked a long route back to his car, and drove to a new motel.
It was 4 a.m. He found a payphone and he phoned Ellis.
The first thing Ellis said was: ‘We know.’
Chapter 17
Bree and Jones hadn’t said very much since the incident. Bree, because she was nervous. Any second she expected a siren to hiccup and whoop, and blue-red lights to revolve in the rear-view. She didn’t know how far Red Queen’s reach went, but there was only so much you could do. Someone would have found the body, she thought. Made their car from a security camera at the store – as usual, she’d ensured Jones parked with the plate towards a low wall and the car well away from the store, but there’d been only one way in and out of the parking lot.
Jones had killed. And Red Queen was leaving him in the field? Leaving Bree with him?
It made Bree feel faintly sick to think about him. That large-knuckled hand settled on the steering wheel had pushed a penknife into a man’s neck a few hours previously. And if he was upset by that he wasn’t showing it. She’d thought – when she’d found him in distress – that she’d been getting somewhere with him. She’d started to feel something towards him – protectiveness, even.
Bree looked at him as they drove through the city’s backstreets in search of somewhere to lie low. His face was expressionless and his eyes seemed to be watching something out of sight. They scanned the road; his right hand passed the wheel round to his left hand as he turned corners. He blinked, occasionally. He didn’t talk. It was as if, since the incident, there was nobody there. She felt like she was sharing the car with a ghost.
They had eaten separately and Bree had insisted they check into separate motels, a few blocks apart. She said she’d collect him in the morning and they’d go on. He could cry all he liked.
She dropped him off, took the car back, found her way into another of those rooms. It had low yellow light, like all the other motel rooms in America. There was a bedspread that made you feel sad, and the sort of mirror that turned even a young face into a landscape of pits and pocks and defeated skin. Bree could feel her DNA fraying, her cells ticking down and closing in. She looked at herself in the mirror and wondered what it was like to have fun, not to be scared, not to have to work from the time you got up until the time that, gratefully, you whimpered into sleep. She felt very, very sober.
Not that she’d sleep. The incident at the store, the sight of the dead man’s face, was going to see to that. Ever since she had been tiny, Bree had been terrified of dying and death. She hadn’t been able to visit her father in the hospital. She’d never seen a dead body. Didn’t know how anybody could do so and carry on. The very thought of it was enough to bring up a small tremor in her hands.