‘Why?’
She looked away, thinking, and finally shrugged: ‘I’m not sure.’
*
They went past the Honolulu and Tom retrieved his Buick, which was sitting on soft tyres and took an age to start. Then he followed Lucia back to her place, where they left her Colt.
At LAX, he bought Lucia a ticket for the seat across the aisle from his own. They were three hours early but had nothing else to do, so sat side by side in complete silence as the airport ebbed and flowed around them.
His phone rang.
‘Tom?’ It was Halo.
He was immediately wary. ‘Hey. Where are you?’
‘Hangar Three.’
‘What’s up?’
There was a pause and Tom heard a muffled voice. When Halo spoke again, his voice was tight with tension. ‘Some guy just walked in and asked me to call you. Says he’s a friend of yours.’
‘I don’t have any friends.’
‘That’s what I thought.’
‘What does he look like?’
Halo lowered his voice. ‘Dark hair. Bad skin. Cowboy boots.’
Tom ran.
*
The decorator was ripping him off. Halo knew it. Vee knew it. Halo had a sneaking suspicion that even Katy had an inkling. Fuck, even Tom Patrick – Mr Perceptive, Not – had told him what would happen.
Now Halo sighed and felt dumb, which was unusual for him. He usually felt pretty smart. He knew he was smart. Had known it since he was in junior school. But he’d been brought up in Redondo Beach, instead of Watts or South Central, which meant that he’d missed out on acquiring the street smarts most people thought any black resident of LA or New York acquired as a birthright.
Halo’s parents hadn’t split up. He and his brothers, Chas and Victor, hadn’t joined gangs and died in blazes of drive-by glory; his sister, Maddie, hadn’t turned ho’ and got herself knocked up or drugged up or hooked up with a pimp. They’d all graduated from high school and college. Chas was a realtor in Torrance, Victor designed websites, Maddie arranged weddings at English stately homes. She even spoke with an English accent now, to enhance the experience for her clients. And while Halo was eternally grateful for all that, he knew it left him vulnerable to being shat on by people with more low cunning and fewer scruples than himself.
That was why – despite his 125 IQ – he was being ripped off by a man with a tattoo that read: ‘Whose the Daddy?’
Halo sighed and gripped the handle of his toolbox. Tool closet, would be closer to the truth: it was five feet tall, wheeled, made of galvanized red steel and had his name stencilled on the side: Halo Jackson. Chris had done that for him, he never failed to remember with a pang.
The crew had already started on the 747 next door in Hangar Two, but Halo had been delayed by what he’d tried to keep to a civilized discussion with the decorator, which was why he was only now fetching his tools.
He’d just got the toolbox rattling across the cement floor when he noticed the man walking towards him. The guy didn’t have any ID tags and wasn’t wearing Day-Glo, a uniform, or coveralls, so he shouldn’t have been there. But Halo wasn’t the kind of man to chew the guy out: he was probably just lost.
‘Hi,’ said the man. ‘You Halo Jackson?’
‘Yes. Hi.’
The man stuck out his hand and Halo let go of the toolbox to shake it out of politeness. He noticed the man had a half-healed ring of bloody bruising on one cheek that looked suspiciously like a bite.
‘I’m a friend of Tom Patrick’s.’
‘Oh, yeah.’ The skin on Halo’s forearms prickled. He was almost sure that no one in the world would introduce themselves that way and really mean it.
*
Tom ran. Adrenalin burned through him. He never heard Lucia shout his name; never noticed the blurred faces turn to watch him as he flashed past them, never felt the pain in his tender leg.
The escalator was full of people and luggage. He shouldered past the people; trampled over the luggage, skidded off the end, stumbled, regained his footing. Security guards came at him but he didn’t wait to show them his ID, just ran on. He didn’t have time to stop, explain, convince. Instead he headed for the nearest check-in desks. American Airlines. First Class. No lines.
He slid under the guide tapes, like Willie Mays, then bounded to his feet and jumped onto the conveyor-belt scales beside an immaculate check-in girl. She grabbed his sleeve with surprising strength for one so manicured, but he wrenched free, making her yelp and shout, ‘Motherfucker!’ He dove through the hatch where luggage disappeared, behind a pile of Louis Vuitton that made him think fleetingly of Ness.
The alarms rang. Shouts behind him. He tumbled off the belt in the baggage-handling hall, took his bearings – saw the jagged square of daylight that meant a door, and headed for it under the towering roller-coasters, their little carts filled with bags starting their journeys to all over the world.
Off to his right he saw three security men coming at him, angling to stop him reaching the door. Like a running back trying for the end zone, Tom computed the angles, the relative speeds, the numbers, the gaps.
Fuck. He’d never make it.
They were only fifteen feet behind him when he hurled himself up onto one of the conveyor-belts. His fingers were briefly caught in the chain and he tugged them free, grabbing the edge of the rubber belt as his legs flailed for purchase beneath him and he rose from the floor. A hand snatched at his ankle and he kicked it away. Then he was too high to be caught, although he was still dangling and his fingers were wet with blood, his grip slipping.
He looked under his arm at the men staring up from below, keeping pace with him on the floor as he pulled himself up and onto the belt and leaped from cart to cart, some empty, some containing bags that slowed him a little. But not much. He sprang off trolley bags as though they were little trampolines, heard things breaking in duffel bags and kicked smaller items clear of the conveyor-belt, scattering the men below as they burst open on the cement, like cluster-bombs.
Forty feet in the air, his belt crossed another, and Tom dropped onto it, almost bouncing off and crashing to the floor thirty feet below. This belt was heading off at right angles to the first, straight towards the door, and had very few carts on it. Tom ran along it recklessly, the extra speed of the belt allowing him to outdistance his pursuers. He hurdled two carts, teetering as he landed each time on moving rubber, rather than solid ground, but kept going.
Thirty yards from the doorway, he approached a long line of luggage and knew his free ride was over. He swung down onto a lower belt running almost parallel, and almost immediately another, tumbling awkwardly off onto the floor.
The security guards were seven in number now, and the nearest was fifty yards away and coming at him fast. Tom was up and running again.
In the doorway, two men in Day-Glo coveralls tossed bags onto caged low-loader trailers. One saw Tom and stepped into the doorway. Tom fumbled for his ID and yelled, ‘NTSB,’ but was not surprised when the man showed no sign of bowing to officialdom. He blocked Tom, who lashed out – his badge still in his fist – and opened the man’s cheek.
‘Shit!’ The guy clapped one hand to his face, but held onto him with the other, and Tom ripped out of his leather jacket, shook it loose from his arms, and kept going.
Hangar One, Hangar Two … He could hear the wail of Airport Police sirens. He ran into Hangar Two, under the wings of a 747, past surprised engineers, ignoring angry shouts, dodged left and crashed through a side door, across the strip of asphalt, and through the matching door into Hangar Three.
Hangar Three was darker than Hangar Two, or the LA sunshine. Tom willed his eyes to adjust. He couldn’t hear for the blood in his ears, the sirens, the pounding of his own heart.
No work was going on in here, no plane, no maintenance crew, the only light the little fluorescent strip over the side door he’d just come through.
‘Tom!’
The word was choked off. He turned and saw Halo, Stanley’s arm round his throat, a gun to his head, the smaller man arched against his captor, stumbling, trying to stay upright, blood staining his teeth as he grimaced in pain.
Stanley’s teeth were all white when he smiled. ‘Hello, asshole.’
‘Hi,’ said Tom. He didn’t want to waste any breath. He knew he had a limited supply. He put his hands on his knees, sucking at the air, but keeping his eyes on Halo and half a brain on the clock. He needed to get that flight to DC. Having come this far, he could only trust that Ness wasn’t lying to him, that he would indeed find an incriminating file under seat 15C. All he needed was to miss the flight and have some over-enthusiastic National Airport cleaner find it and put it in a dumpster.
