42.

It’d been the longest day of Devon Smith’s short life. As soon as he discovered the theft of both the weapons and the money he was called inside to work the kitchen and servery. He tried to fake a headache but Wiggs wasn’t buying it, told Devon to scoff some Tylenol and get back to work. Devon, Lenny and Marcus formed a skeleton staff and Wiggs wasn’t about to have the cocktail and dinner service compromised by a slacker. Wiggs instead promoted Lenny and Marcus to the line of bain-maries, and moved Devon back into the kitchen, working the tongs, taking out the heavy trays of pork and stuffing the brioche sliders with the meat filling, supervised by the Australian chef serving tarragon chicken volau-vents, both of them working silently alongside one another. Devon stuffed five hundred pork buns that were put on oven racks to keep warm before he was allowed a cigarette break and returned to the alley. There was no sign of the van, or its owner. The alley was hot and still. Devon lit a cigarette and walked to the end of the alley, looked out over the swampy lowlands that skirted the river and a vast blacktop area where the invited guests had left their cars.

Devon couldn’t see them, but he knew that they were there, watching. It was possible that the bikers had burned him, taking both the guns and their money, but that didn’t feel right. Someone had stolen the car and taken the lot. Possibly an opportunist, unaware of what was in the back of the van, although that too seemed unlikely – there were easier places to steal a car than a working alley where men and women came and went. The other option, the most likely, sickened him with its clear betrayal and its probable consequences.

Devon smoked his cigarette and lit another, glanced at his watch. The smart move would be to return with Wiggs and the others to the Vinson and stay put. The bikers couldn’t do anything to him while he was on the aircraft carrier. He would be safe until he returned home. The senior Nongs biker, Barry Brown, who’d made contact with clubs back home, would get the word out. That might mean that Devon’s father would be forced to take over his debt, and there was no way that Devon’s father could afford to pay that kind of money. It was true that Devon’s father had caused the whole problem by trying to screw the bikers in the original deal, but it was also true that he would find a way to blame Devon, like he always did.

Devon decided to call the bikers and gauge their reaction. If there was murder in the president’s voice, then Devon would get back on the bus, call his father to warn him, take his father’s ridicule on the chin, try and make amends somehow. The Vinson’s next stop was somewhere in South-East Asia. There might be drugs to be had there, that he could smuggle home.

Devon turned at the sound to his left, behind the nearest wall, the cracking of a twig. There was nothing behind the wall but as he turned to the alley, he heard the boots. He felt the blow on his neck and then he was toppling forward, gone into the black.