Shattered Read Free

ago.” He held his hands out in front of another vent and dried them as he had seen Doyle do.
        Though it was a small thing, that gesture made an impression on Doyle. He, too, had been a skinny, nervous kid whose palms were always damp. Like Colin, he had been shy with strangers, not much good at sports, an outcast among his contemporaries. In college he had begun a rigorous weightlifting program, determined to develop himself into another Charles Atlas. By the time his chest filled out and his biceps hardened, he grew bored with weight-lifting and quit bothering with it. At five-ten and a hundred-sixty pounds, he was no Charles Atlas. But he was slim and hard, and he was no longer the skinny kid, either. Still, he was awkward with people whom he had just met-and his palms were often damp with nervous perspiration. Deep inside, he had not forgotten what it was like to be constantly self-conscious and never self-confident enough. Watching Colin dry his slender hands, Alex understood why he had taken an immediate liking to the boy and why they had seemed comfortable with each other from the day they met eighteen months before. Nineteen years separated them. But little else.
        “He still back there?” Colin asked, breaking into Alex's thoughts.
        “Who? “
        “The van.”
        Alex checked the mirror. “He's there. He doesn't give up easily.”
        “Can I look?”
        “You keep your belt on.”
        “This is going to be a bad trip,” Colin said morosely.
        “It will be if you don't accept the rules at the start,” Alex agreed.
        Traffic' picked up on the other side of the expressway as the early-bird commuters began their day and as an occasional truck whistled by on the last lap of a long cargo haul. On the westbound lanes, their own car and the van were the only things in sight.
        The sun was behind the Thunderbird, where it could not bother them. Ahead, the sky was marred by only two white clouds. The hills, on both sides, were green.
        When they got on the Pennsylvania turnpike at Valley Forge and went west toward Harrisburg, Colin said, “What about our tail? “
        “Still there. Some poor FBI agent tracking the wrong prey.”
        “He'll probably lose his job,” Colin said. “That'll make an opening for me.”
        “You want to be an FBI agent?”
        “I've thought about it,” Colin admitted.
        Alex pulled the Thunderbird into the left lane, passed a car pulling a horse trailer. Two little girls about Colin's age were in the back seat of the car. They pressed against the side window and waved at Colin, who blushed and looked sternly ahead.
        “It wouldn't be dull in the FBI,” Colin said.
        “Oh, I don't know about that. It might be pretty boring when you have to follow a crook for weeks before he does something exciting.”
        “Well, it can't be any more boring than sitting under a seatbelt all the way to California,” Colin said.
        God, Alex thought, I walked into that one. He took the car into the right lane again, set the automatic accelerator for an even seventy miles per hour so that if Colin got too interesting they would still make decent time. “When that guy following us gets us on a lonely stretch of road and runs us into a ditch, you'll thank me for making you wear your belt. It'll save your life.”
        Colin turned and looked at him, his big brown eyes made even larger by the eyeglasses. “I guess you aren't going to give in.”
        “You guessed right.”
        Colin sighed. “You're more or less my father now. Aren't you?”
        “I'm your sister's husband. But… Since your sister has custody of you, I guess you could say I have a father's right to make rules you'll live by.”
        Colin shook his head, brushed his long hair out of his eyes. “I don't know. Maybe it was better being an orphan.”
        “Oh, you think so, do you?” Doyle asked, full of mock