Run into Trouble by Alan Cook

slightly less
stiff. By the time they finished the run, he might be in the kind
of shape he should be in right now—if it didn’t kill him before
then. Peaches, his driver, was sitting in the lobby reading a
magazine about martial arts.
    They walked out to the company car. Drake
sat in the passenger side of the front seat. In a nod to the warm
weather, Peaches was wearing a summer-weight suit with the jacket
on to hide his gun, Drake was sure. Although not as tall as Drake,
he was broader, with a bull neck and large head topped with short,
dark hair. Drake decided to see if he could get Peaches to
talk.
    In a conversational tone he asked, “How long
have you worked for Giganticorp?”
    Peaches made a turn onto the street in front
of the motel and glanced at Drake. “Long enough.”
    That wasn’t a promising start. “Are you
stationed in San Jose?”
    “That’s what it looks like.”
    “How many employees does Giganticorp have
there?”
    Peaches looked at Drake as if he thought
Drake were trying to pry company secrets from him. Was Giganticorp
so private that they didn’t even release employment figures? What
could he ask Peaches that wouldn’t be considered confidential? He
wanted to ask his real name, but that would sound like an
interrogation.
    “I guess Giganticorp is a good company to
work for.”
    When Peaches didn’t say anything at first,
Drake wondered whether he had used up his quota of words for the
day.
    Finally, he said, “It’s a job. Better than
some, worse than others, but it keeps beer in the cooler.”
    Encouraged that Peaches had uttered more
than one sentence at a time, Drake was going to try to keep the
conversation going, but at that moment they arrived at the
chiropractor’s office. When Peaches drove him back to the motel an
hour later, he had retreated into his shell and only grunted in
response to Drake’s questions.
    ***
    “Fred tried to call my mum at noon, but
there was still no answer. That would have been eight o’clock at
night her time. She should have been home.”
    Melody and Drake were waiting in the motel
lobby for Tom and Jerry, the runners they were going to have dinner
with.
    “Did you try again from here?”
    “It was too late. I don’t want to call her
in the middle of the night there. It would scare her to death. When
I was working for the agency, although she didn’t know exactly what
I was doing, she suspected enough that she said what she feared
most was that call in the middle of the night because something had
happened to me.”
    Tom and Jerry appeared in the lobby, two
runners cut from the same mold: medium height, skinny frame. They
wore their hair down over their ears, but not long enough for them
to be mistaken for hippies. More like the Beatles. Tom’s was red
and Jerry’s was brown. It flopped when they ran.
    “Do you want to go to an Italian place?” Tom
asked. “Italian food’s good for carbohydrates.”
    “There’s one about two blocks from here.”
Jerry looked at Drake. “Do you think you can walk that far?”
    “I don’t have my cane with me, but I think I
can make it.” Drake used an old man’s voice. “If not, you can carry
me.” He exaggerated a hobble as they started along the street.
Young whippersnappers.
    “Congratulations on being in first place.”
Melody was trying to direct attention away from Drake.
    Fred had posted a typed listing of the teams
on a bulletin board in the motel and written down the time of each
team so far. Drake and Melody were so far behind that they didn’t
even try to figure out how far.
    “Thanks,” Tom said. “But we’re only about
five minutes ahead of three or four other teams. Not exactly a
comfortable lead with so far to go. We’ve had to learn to pace
ourselves. A couple of teams tried to break away today, but they
ran out of steam and we caught them.”
    Jerry nodded. “They underestimate the
difficulty of running on sand. It slows you down and takes a lot of
energy, something they