Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

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?

Alex’s appetite for his road trip was dwindling. What was causing him especially strong palpitations was the thought – he didn’t know from where – that he recognised that man. Could the man have been stalking him or something? He thought of Rutger Hauer’s character in The Hitcher : a blond, amused lunatic killing his way through the desert and always, as in a nightmare, seeming to get ahead of the hero. Wherever you showed up, he’d already be there, and would have marked his arrival with some dead bodies or a severed finger in a bowl of chips.

Alex kept going west.

He stopped, two hours later, when his petrol gauge started to wag into the red zone. He found a service station, a busy one. And only when he’d been standing in there for twenty minutes, affecting to browse the Doritos under the reassuring eye of the CCTV camera, watching the arrivals on the forecourt, did he set out on the road again with something like a restored sense of calm.

The guy couldn’t possibly be following him. Too much time on his own was affecting his imagination. Even so, he came within an ace of calling Saul, just to hear his brother’s voice, sleepy and annoyed, at whatever time it was in England.

They’d risked sending the photograph of the dead man in over the dead man’s phone.

Red Queen had spent fifteen minutes talking Bree down.

‘I did not sign up for this,’ had been the agent’s first words when she’d got a line to the Directorate. ‘Your guy killed someone in cold blood. We don’t do that. We don’t do things like that. We have no -’ Bree flapped her hand – ‘no – we have no – we’re not -’

‘Don’t panic,’ said Red Queen. Red Queen was panicking.

‘- we have no jurisdiction. If we were – we’re not -’

Bree was hyperventilating, nearly. The DEI wasn’t a judicial body. It didn’t have any jurisdiction at all. It just had a remit.

‘Did you know? Did you know he was going to do that?’

‘Don’t panic -’

‘ Tell me.’

Red Queen left a silence a bit too long. ‘No, I didn’t. He wasn’t supposed to…’

‘You – what – who told him? He’s… this, this “thing”. He’s like mentally ill, and you’ve got him -’

‘We thought. Our Friends thought -’

‘He’s what? He’s what? Our Friends are involved?’

‘Of course they’re involved. This is very big. Of course -’

‘Jesus, RQ. He could go to jail. I could go to jail. He murdered someone. In a Kwik-E-Mart parking lot. With a frigging squad car outside.’

Bree breathed in and out, raggedly, gathering breath to continue, goggling at the telephone cable. She felt sweaty.

‘Where did he get a knife? What was he doing with a knife?’

‘Bree – half the people in this country carry a gun -’

‘So why didn’t he use a gun? What’s wrong with him? He’s a Friend? Are you saying he’s a Friend? I thought he was Directorate -’

‘On loan. Their asset.’

‘Well, how do you know? Was this part of their plan?’

Red Queen exhaled.

Bree said: ‘You don’t know, do you?’

The silence lengthened.

Eventually Red Queen said: ‘None of that matters. You know how important this is. Keep your head. Stay with it. Do your job. We’ll look after you. Trust me.’

Bree didn’t say anything to that, put down the phone, went back to the motel room.