Shattered

----

    MONDAY
        

    One
        
        Only four blocks from the furnished apartment in Philadelphia, with more than three thousand miles to drive before they joined Courtney in San Francisco, Colin began one of his games. Colin thrived on his games, not those which required a board and movable pieces but those which were played inside the head-word games, idea games, elaborate fantasies. He was a very garrulous and precocious eleven-year-old with more energy than he was able to use. Slender, shy in the company of strangers, bothered by a moderately severe astigmatism in both eyes that required him to wear heavy eyeglasses at all times, he was not much for sports. He could not exhaust himself in a fast game of foot ball, because none of the athletic boys his own age wanted to play with someone who tripped over his own feet, dropped the ball, and was devastated by even the most delicate tackle. Besides, sports bored him. He was an intelligent kid, an avid reader, and he found his own games more fun than football. Kneeling on the front seat of the big car and looking out the rear window at the home he was leaving forever, he said, “We're being followed, Alex.”
        “Are we now?”
        “Yeah. He was parked down the block when we put the suitcases in the trunk. I saw him. Now he's following us.”
        Alex Doyle smiled as he wheeled the Thunderbird onto Lansdowne Avenue. “Big black limousine, is it?”
        Colin shook his head, his thick shoulder-length mop of brown hair flopping vigorously. “No. It's some kind of van. Like a panel truck.”
        Alex looked in the rear-view mirror. “I don't see him.”
        “You lost him when you turned the corner,” Colin said. He pressed his stomach against the backrest, head thrust over the back seat. “There he is! See him now?”
        Nearly a block behind them, a new Chevrolet van turned the corner onto Lansdowne Avenue. At five minutes past six o'clock on a Monday morning, it was the only other moving vehicle in sight.
        “I thought it was always a black 'limousine,” Alex said. “In the movies, the heroes are always followed by a big black limousine.
        “That's only in the movies,” Colin said, still watching the van, which remained a full block behind them. “Nobody's that obvious in real life.”
        The trees on their right cast long black shadows across half the street and made dizzying, flickering patterns on the windshield. The first sun of May had risen somewhere to the east, still too far down the sky for Alex to see it. Crisp spring sunlight bathed the old two-story frame houses and made them new and fresh again.
        Invigorated by the early-morning air and by the spray of green buds on the trees, almost as excited as Colin was about the journey ahead of them, Alex Doyle thought he had never been happier. He handled the heavy car with ease, enjoying the quiet power at his disposal. They were going to be on the road a long time in terms of both hours and miles; but as imaginative as he was, Colin would provide better company than most adults.
        “He's still back there,” Colin said.
        “I wonder why he's following us.”
        Colin shrugged his thin shoulders but did not turn around. “Could be lots of reasons.”
        “Name one.”
        “Well… He could have heard that we were moving to California. He knows we'll take our valuables with us, see? Family treasures, things like that. So he follows us and runs us into a ditch on some lonely stretch of road and robs us at gunpoint.”
        Alex laughed. “Family treasures? All you have is clothes enough for the trip. Everything else went out on the moving van a week ago, or it went with your sister on the plane. And I assure you that I've brought nothing more valuable than my wristwatch.”
        Colin was unperturbed by Doyle's amusement. “Maybe he's an enemy of yours. Someone with an old grudge to settle. He wants to get hold of you before you leave town.”
        “I don't have any real friends in Philly,” Alex said. “But I don't have any real enemies, either. And if he wanted to beat me up, why didn't he just catch me when I was putting our bags in the trunk?”
        Fluttering laces of sunshine and shadow flipped rapidly over the windshield. Ahead, a stoplight turned green just in time to spare Alex the inconvenience of braking.
        After a while Colin said, “Maybe he's a spy.
        “A spy?” Alex