Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

He had left Red Queen listening to the staticky burr of an open line, then Doc had rolled his old wagon down onto the highway, and followed them at a leisurely distance. And it was as that orange car, with its big, bald, white-sided tyres was lumbering onto the great artery heading west, that Alex had exclaimed, aloud and to himself: ‘Don’t forget your toothbrush.’

Doc said, also to himself, musingly: ‘Something about a toothbrush…’

And two hours later, Doc found a payphone and called Red Queen, who called Bree on her cellphone, and directed her to a superstore in a roadside mall on the east side of Albuquerque in the early afternoon.

‘He’s there,’ Doc said. ‘I’m just not sure when.’

Bree and Jones showed up, and did two circuits of the wide parking lot, and weren’t able to see the boy, or his car, or anything of that sort.

‘Had a feeling, this guy, apparently,’ said Bree, with a shrug. ‘Another hit for the Directorate. Still, best we’ve got. We proceed,’ she added philosophically, ‘through hints and accidents.’

Jones went to get some tobacco. Bree ambled in to check out the store. She walked the aisles, found nothing. No sign of the kid. Near the door there were a couple of girls with too much make-up, wearing long coats. They were chewing gum. With them was a middle-aged man in a cheap suit, pretending not to be watching her as she came in the door. He had something concealed in his palm. She saw his thumb work at it, and he turned his hand, looked surreptitiously down at it. It glinted. Bree didn’t like it.

She turned round and headed outside, intending to take up a position where she could watch the front entrance unobserved. She took a trolley. A trolley would be good. Make it look like she was shopping. Who was that guy? Where was the boy?

Alex ran his tongue around his teeth. His upper incisors were pleasantly slippery. He was worried about the lower set, though. They felt furry, clagged. He had a stark visual memory of his toothbrush, sitting red on the white sink at the last motel. He had left it there, hadn’t he?

It was about lunchtime anyway. He’d stop. Two birds with one stone.

‘Don’t forget your toothbrush,’ he said aloud to himself, before pulling into the supermarket car park. He slammed the car door, hopped out, and set off for the entrance to the shop.

The store dominated the parking lot: a wide glass frontage that could have done with being cleaned more recently, and big scrolls of paper yellowing in the windows advertising special offers, on beer and cleaning products, mostly. Next door were two smaller shops – a tobacconist and a pizza place.

A dirty great sign, hoisted above the entrance like a hat, announced simply: ‘SUPERSTORE’. The letters were picked out in broken light bulbs. A nondescript cartoon character – it looked like a smiling chocolate button – was giving the world an unwavering thumbs up from next door to the letter E.

MIC’s guns for hire had lost Alex’s trail again, and Sherman had morosely assented to Davidoff’s insistence that they stop driving and get some food. A roadside sign half a mile back had promised pizza. Davidoff used a hand on the roof to haul his big frame from the car and they stood there scanning the scene like children at the gates of Disneyland.

Sherman saw the kid before Davidoff did, and nudged the bigger man. He saw the recognition bloom and take hold in his face like a pilot light. Davidoff’s eyes scanned the parking lot, and Sherman knew what he was seeing. There was a hedge down the left-hand side. Maybe a hundred metres of asphalt between the kid and the entrance to the store, twenty metres between the two men and the boy they were chasing.

A fat woman in a T-shirt was pushing a shopping cart out of the store. Nobody seemed to be here other than that. A tall grey-haired guy, a couple of hundred metres away, was leaning up outside the door of the tobacco store next door, smoking. A handful of cars in the lot, empty. Sherman picked up pace. Davidoff broke right, out on a slight trot, as if he was someone jogging to get a parking ticket while his family waited in the car. Sherman closed slower.

Ninety metres, fifteen metres.

The boy was moving on a diagonal. Across the front entrance of the store there was a snake of trolleys – what had once been bright pink plastic faded to brittle white in the weather – shucked into each other. To reach the entrance, the boy would have to walk round the right-hand end of them and up the wheelchair ramp.

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.