Free Road of the Dead by Kevin Brooks Page A

got any change?”
    He dug some coins from his pocket and passed them over. I went into the phone box and dialed the number. Vince answered the phone. He sounded really abrupt at first, but as soon as I’d told him who I was and what had happened at the hotel, his tone quickly changed and he suddenly became really friendly.
    “Where are you now?” he asked.
    “In the phone box at the village.”
    “All right—just wait there. I’ll come and pick you up. I’ll be about five minutes—OK?”
    “Yeah, thanks…that’s really kind—”
    He hung up the phone before I could finish.
    I looked out at Cole. He was just standing there, smoking a cigarette, looking at nothing. I put some more money in the slot and called home. Mum answered almost immediately.
    “How’s it going?” she asked. “Is everything OK?”
    “Yeah, it’s fine. We’re staying at Abbie Gorman’s place tonight. We met her in Plymouth.”
    “How’s Cole?”
    “He’s all right.”
    “Any trouble?”
    “No—”
    “Don’t lie to me, Ruben.”
    “I’m not—honestly. Everything’s fine. He’s being really good.”
    I heard her sigh. She knew him better than that.
    “How are you?” I asked her.
    “I’m OK.”
    “Is Uncle Joe there?”
    “Yeah, he’s staying over for a couple of days. When do you think you’ll get back?”
    “I’m not sure,” I said. “I think we’re going to have a look around tomorrow, see if we can find anything—”
    “Do you think you will?”
    “I don’t know, Mum. It’s not much of a place. If there’s anything here, it shouldn’t take long to find it. Couple of days, maybe.”
    “Well, just you be careful—OK?”
    We spent the next few minutes talking about nothing—the yard, the business, what was happening, what wasn’t—and then I heard a car pulling up outside the phone box. It was Vince in his Land Rover.
    “I have to go, Mum,” I said. “I’ll call you sometime tomorrow.”
    We said good-bye and I hung up the phone and wentoutside. Cole was standing by the Land Rover talking to Vince. I went over and joined them.
    “Who were you talking to?” Cole asked me.
    “Mum.”
    “Is she all right?”
    “Yeah.”
    I looked up at Vince. He was sitting in the driver’s seat with his hands resting lightly on the steering wheel, watching us intently. For a brief moment I saw him as a thick-headed spider, waiting in his web, waiting to paralyze us and wrap us in silk and drag us back to his lair…
    “You can put your bags in the back,” he said.
    I looked at Cole. He nodded. We threw our bags in the back of the Land Rover, then got inside and headed off into the darkness.

Six
    I t didn’t take long to get from the village to Vince and Abbie’s place. A winding road led us up through a pine forest to a plateau of moorland, and then we were just racing along through an absolute darkness that could have been anything—sky, space, land, sea. It was impossible to tell. For all I knew it could have been nothing.
    “Everything all right?” Vince asked me.
    “Yeah,” I murmured, looking around. “It’s pretty empty, isn’t it?”
    “You get used to it.”
    After a minute or two he slowed down and changed gears and swung the Land Rover around a corner and down a steeply banked lane. The lane was barely any wider than the Land Rover, and as we swept along through the blurring darkness, the beam of the headlights lit up the banks on either side of us like the walls of a speeding tunnel.
    I closed my eyes and held on tight.
    After a while I felt the car slowing again, and when I opened my eyes we were turning off the lane into some kind of yard. Across the yard, pale lights were glowing in the windows of a small white farmhouse, and off to one side I could see the vague outlines of some larger buildings. Farm buildings, I guessed—barns, outhouses, cattle sheds. Beyond the yard, on the other side of the house, I could just make out a patchwork of granite-flecked fields in the