A thousand suns

Chris wondered whether he should just have Mark race up the street, stop and drop him outside. With the engine still running he could race inside and hopefully, by knocking on one or two doors, find and rouse the old boy quickly and then hop back into the car and speed out of town. Screw doing this carefully, he thought, just be in and out again in the bat of an eyelid.

But then, on the other hand, it might be wiser to take a more cautious approach. If those men had tracked down Wallace they could be, probably would be, watching from a distance now. They might even be using Wallace as bait, anticipating Chris would come back for him.

‘Shit, I don’t know, Mark. They could be waiting for us,’ Chris mumbled unhappily.

Mark sat upright in his seat, and nodded towards the bed and breakfast. ‘Hang on! Somebody’s coming out of that place,’ said Mark quickly.

A door on the porch swung slowly open. Muted amber light from inside spilled out across the whitewashed woodwork momentarily. Chris could see someone coming out, the silhouetted form stooped, tired.

‘I think that’s him! Wallace.’

The old man shuffled out onto the porch, looking up and down the street warily. Then, he moved away from the single lamp above the door into the darkness of one corner of the porch and settled down on a seat. A moment later, Chris saw the momentary flicker of a cigarette lighter, and, a few seconds later, a cloud of pale blue smoke emerged from the darkness, caught in the amber glow of the porch light.

Having a hard time getting to sleep.

It was not surprising at all, given how jumpy he had been earlier that night in Lenny’s. Even if he hadn’t been jumped by those two goons in his room, Chris wondered if he would have been able to get much sleep tonight. His mind had begun going to work on the story as he had headed back from Lenny’s — which pictures he would use, whether to take the story to any larger publication or dutifully deliver it to News Fortnite first.

Wallace was probably just as wound up and twitchy as he was. And right now, Chris could happily have joined him indulging in some nerve-settling cigarette therapy. The nicotine gum his jaws were industriously working on was doing no bloody good at all.

Why’s he sitting outside for a fag? Probably some stringent ‘no smoking’ policy inside the bed and breakfast, he decided, answering his own question. Then again, maybe the old boy felt a whole lot safer watching the road outside. After this evening’s run-in, Chris could empathise with that. Right now there was no way he could see himself curling up in a nice warm quilt somewhere and nodding off, not with some armed psychotic nuts out there roaming the town looking for him.

‘Well, that makes our job a whole bunch easier, then. You ready to do this?’ said Mark, his hands firmly gripping the steering wheel.

‘Okay, mate, nice and easy. Let’s not tear up the street and burn rubber in front of him. We’d probably kill him with the shock.’

Mark nodded and had begun to slowly ease the vehicle forward. It was then that Chris spotted something reflective glinting in the darkness towards the other end of the street. ‘Hold the phone, what’s that?’

‘What?’ replied Mark.

‘I saw something,’ said Chris, ‘up the other end.’

It emerged out of the darkness, the light from the streetlamp above flickering across the windscreen. A dark, unmarked van approached them from the opposite end of Devenster Street. Like them, it was rolling forward slowly, with the headlights off.

‘That doesn’t look good,’ said Mark.

‘Fuck it then, just go!’ snapped Chris. ‘I’ll jump out and grab him.’

Mark pushed the pedal down hard, and with a squeal of rubber that robbed the quiet town of its silence, the Cherokee lurched forward down the narrow road towards the old man. The van, still several hundred yards up the street, further away than them, all of a sudden turned on its headlights and accelerated, the driver obviously aware that he had been spotted and casting caution aside.

Mark slammed the brakes on outside the bed and breakfast, the vehicle slewing to a halt. Chris leaped out of the passenger side and up the steps to the porch, taking the gun with him.

‘Wallace! Get up!’ he shouted as he approached the old man. Wallace’s eyes widened with fear when he saw the handgun. ‘What’s going — ?’ he managed to splutter before Chris grabbed him roughly by the arm and pulled him up out of the chair.

The van came to a noisy halt on the opposite side of the street. Chris saw the driver-side and passenger-side doors swing open and the dark shapes of two men emerge. From their profiles, and the way one of them moved, he guessed they were the same two men he had encountered a little earlier. That wasn’t so good, since the older guy with the crewcut hadn’t seemed too worried last time about using his gun indiscriminately.

‘Quick!’ he heard Mark shout from the Cherokee.