First Drop by Zoe Sharp

how she’d find a place for us real soon, and it would just be the two of us.”
     
    He sniffed, letting go to wipe the back of his arm across his nose. He’d been gripping so tight he’d left reddened finger marks on the skin of his wrist. His hand still picked at the burn hole in the bedspread, which was now big enough for him to get his fist into, and growing all the time.
     
    I eyed the oblivious destruction. “How long ago did your mother disappear?”
     
    “Five years,” he said. “It was right around the time I turned ten. She’d promised me this real big party. The best ever. Dad was going on at her how we couldn’t afford it, ‘cos he wasn’t doing so good then. But that’s how I knew, when she didn’t come home, that it was down to him.”
     
    I closed my eyes momentarily, trying to get a handle on the logic. OK, supposing just for a moment that there was any grain of truth in all this. Supposing Keith Pelzner had murdered his wife five years ago. It seemed far-fetched, but then so did being pursued and shot at by an imitation or off-duty cop in an amusement park. So did being followed in broad daylight by a couple of hardcases in a Buick.
     
    “So why has he waited until now to do anything about you?” I asked.
     
    He shrugged. “Dunno,” he said, looking up at me but unable to hold my gaze for long. “Maybe it’s ‘cos I wanted to go to Daytona for Spring Break this year. Maybe he thought if I go back up there I might find out what really happened to her.”
     
    Now that really was stretching it.
     
    I shook my head slowly. “I just don’t know, Trey, it sounds a little—”
     
    That was as far as I got. He jumped off the bed like someone had turned up the gas under him. “Oh sure,” he cried. “That’s right, tell me I’m talking weird, just like Dad does whenever I try to talk to him about Mom. Why don’t you tell me I’m delusional, too? Drop a few hints about how maybe I should, like, see a shrink, huh?”
     
    And with that he stormed into the only place he could get away from me – the bathroom – and made sure he slammed the door behind him hard enough to set the wall light fittings jiggling.
     
    I sat there on the bed and put my head in my hands. Of all the training I’d had in the army to prepare me for stress under combat, nothing compared to trying to keep a stroppy teenager under control.
     
    “Jesus, Sean,” I murmured under my breath, “where are you now when I need you?”
     
    I reached behind me and pulled the SIG out of the back of my belt. With automatic movements I dropped the magazine clear and thumbed the rounds out into a little pile in front of me, counting them. I had the full eight, but no spare magazine. I hadn’t expected Sean to carry a gun that wasn’t fully loaded but if people were going to keep shooting at me it was nice to be sure, even so.
     
    The sight of the pistol and the copper-nosed bullets brought back all the rush of emotion I’d felt at the house. I had to take a couple of deep breaths and clamp down hard on it, scowling at my reflection in the mirror on the wall behind the TV.
     
    Sean might still be OK, I told myself. After all, he had said he was going to see Gerri Raybourn this morning to find out what the real story was with Keith Pelzner. Maybe it was Keith himself who’d intercepted him. Maybe Sean had never got there. If he had, I tried hard to ignore the fact that he had promised to go armed and had clearly not done so. There could be any number of reasons he’d left his gun behind other than the one that was uppermost in my mind.
     
    And there was one way to find out.
     
    I quickly refilled the magazine and tucked the gun away again out of sight, then dug the mobile phone out of my pocket. I didn’t know the direct line number for Gerri Raybourn but, along with the obligatory Gideon bible, there was a Bell South Yellow Pages in the drawer by the bed. I looked up the number for the software company Keith