Shattered Read Free Page B

ran around the corner of the building, his tennis shoes slapping loudly on the concrete.
        Alex got in the car, started it, and set the air conditioning a notch higher to blow out the stale air that had accumulated while they were having breakfast.
        By the time he had belted himself in, Colin was back. The boy opened the passenger's door and climbed inside. He was downcast. “Not back there either.” He shut and locked the door, slumped down, thin arms folded over his chest.
        “Seatbelt.” Alex put the car in gear and reversed out of the parking lot.
        Grumbling, Colin put on the belt.
        They pulled across the macadam to the service station and stopped by the pumps to have the tank topped off.
        The man who hurried out to wait on them was in his forties, a beefy farmer-type with a flushed face and gnarled hands. He was chewing tobacco, not a common sight in Philly or San Francisco, and he was cheerful. “Help you folks?”
        “Fill it with regular, please,” Alex said, passing his credit card through the window. “It probably only needs half a tank.”
        “Sure thing.” Four letters-chet-were stitched across the man's shirt pocket. Chet bent down and looked past Alex at the boy. “How are you, Chief?”
        Colin looked at him, incredulous. “F-f-fine,” he stammered.
        Chet showed a mouthful of stained teeth. “Glad to hear it.” Then he went to the back of the car to put in the gasoline.
        “Why did he call me Chief?” Colin asked. He was over his incredulity now, and he was embarrassed instead.
        “Maybe he thinks you're an Indian,” Alex said.
        “Oh, sure.”
        “Or in charge of a fire company.”
        Colin scrunched down in the seat and looked at him sourly. “I should have gone on the plane with Courtney. I can't take your bad jokes for five days.”
        Alex laughed. “You're too much.” He knew that Colin's perceptions and vocabulary were far in advance of his real age, and he had long ago grown accustomed to the boy's sometimes startling sarcasm and occasional good turn of phrase. But there was a forced quality to this precocious banter. Colin was trying hard to be grown up. He was straining out of childhood ' trying to grit his teeth and will his way through adolescence and into adulthood. Doyle was familiar with that temperament, for it had been his own when he was Colin's age.
        Chet came back and gave Doyle the credit card and sales form on a hard plastic holder. While Alex took the pen and scrawled his name, the attendant peered at Colin again. “Have a long trip ahead of you, Chief?”
        Colin was as shaken this time as he had been when Chet had first addressed him. “ California,” he said, looking at his knees.
        “Well,” Chet said, “ain't that something? You're the second in an hour on his way to California. I always ask where people's going. Gives me a sense of helping them along, you know? An hour ago this guy's going to California, and now you. Everyone's going to California except me.” He sighed.
        Alex gave back the clipboard and tucked his credit card into his wallet. He glanced at Colin and saw that the boy was intently cleaning one fingernail with the other in order to have something to occupy his eyes if Chet should want to resume their one-sided conversation.
        “Here you go.” Chet handed Alex the receipt. “Way out to the coast?” He shifted his wad of tobacco from the left to the right side of his mouth.
        “That's right.”
        “Brothers?” Chet asked.
        “Excuse me?”
        “You two brothers?”
        “Oh, no,” Alex said. He knew there was no time or reason for a full explanation of his and Colin's relationship. “He's my son.”
        “Son?” Chet seemed not to have heard the word before.
        “Yes.” Even if he was not Colin's father, he was old enough to be.
        Chet looked at Doyle's coarse hair, at the way it