Read Fear the Worst: A Thriller Online
Authors: Linwood Barclay
Tags: #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Fiction
Fear the Worst: A Thriller (14 page)
I couldn’t just hang around the house. With Patty’s help, I’d made a lot of progress getting the place back in order. I couldn’t sit there waiting for the phone to ring or an email to land. People knew how to reach me at the dealership.
I left the house around two-thirty. I plugged Syd’s iPod into the outlet in the CR-V as I drove along the Post Road to work.
If there was any pleasure in my life these days, it was learning about the music that my daughter enjoyed. Eclectic, to say the least. Punk, jazz, rock, classic pop tunes from the sixties and seventies.
I was haunted by some words sung by Janis Ian: “It isn’t all it seems, at seventeen.”
And when that song finished, something totally unfamiliar, and less professional, followed. First, some guitar reverberations, like someone was tuning up, getting ready to play. Then a bit of coughing, some giggling, then a young woman’s voice taunting, “Are you going to play it or what?”
Syd
.
“Okay, okay,” a young man answered. “Just give me a second. I can lay the voices in right over what’s on the computer.”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s going,” Sydney said.
“Okay, we’re good. Okay, so, this is a little song I wrote myself that I would like to sing—”
Sydney, adopting a mocking, low voice, interrupted with, “This is a little song I wrote myself I would like to—”
The boy said, “Would you knock it off?” Sydney made a snorting noise before the boy continued, “Okay, so, like, this song is called ‘Dirty Love’ and it is dedicated to Sydney.”
She began to giggle in the background. “Would you settle the fuck down?” the boy said.
I thumbed up the volume on the steering wheel-mounted control.
The boy belted out no more than a couple of lines. His voice was ragged, a harsh whisper with limited range. He sang, “She came into my life by chance, with a smile that put me in a trance.”
“Okay, stop,” Syd said. “I’m gonna puke. And I thought you were going to say, ‘She came into my life by chance, I can’t wait to get into her pants.’”
Now they were both laughing.
Sydney and Evan Janigan.
TWENTY
I
NEARLY CLIPPED A
F
ORD
W
INDSTAR
when I did a U-turn on Route 1 and headed flat-out for Bob’s Motors.
There wasn’t any more to the selection. Once The Sydney and Evan Show finished, the iPod jumped to another song from the White Album, “Rocky Raccoon.” I hit the back button to put it on the previous track, then paused it.
The CR-V doesn’t exactly handle like a sports car, so when it bumped up over the curb leading into the Bob’s Motors lot, I nearly lost control. But I gripped the wheel firmly, got the car back on track, and spotted Evan at the far end of a line of cars, a washing wand in his hand. I sped down to where he was, hit the brakes, and screeched to a stop.
He held the wand suspended in midair, water trickling out the end, and looked over at me through the dark locks that hung across his face.
I killed the ignition and as I got out of the car took the metallic green, match-pack-sized music player with me. Without headphones it wasn’t as if I could play his song for him, but I thought holding it up for effect would make my point.
It did. The moment Evan saw what was in my hand, his mouth hung open.
Even though I was walking, I was coming at him pretty fast. Speaking over the flapping of the multicolored pennant flags strung overhead, I said, “We need to have a little chat, Evan.”
“What the fuck,” he said.
I closed the distance between us, took the wand from Evan’s hand, and tossed it to the pavement. “So you and Sydney weren’t that close, huh? All you did was have dinner at the same table.”
“I don’t know what your deal is, man, but you’re not my fucking father, you know?” he said.
“No, but I’m Sydney’s fucking father, and I want to know what was actually going on between you two.” I’d moved even closer, forcing Evan up against a wet blue Kia sedan.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Tim!” It was Susanne, standing atop the stairs that led up to the office. “Tim! What’s going on?”
I ignored her, and held the music player up to Evan’s nose. “I’ve been listening to Sydney’s tunes the last few days, and guess what just came up? Your little song that you dedicated to her.”
“So?”
“So?”
I fired back at him. “That’s all you’ve got to say?”
“Tim!”
It was Susanne again, moving toward us. She was using her cane and her gait was awkward and unsteady.
“Susanne!” I shouted. “Just stay there!”
Now Bob was coming out of the office, squinting in the intense sunlight, wondering what all the fuss was about.
“My dad’s gonna bust your ass,” Evan said. He was trying to be tough, but his voice squeaked, and his eyes were darting left and right, like he was looking for a way to escape.
Susanne, nearly breathless, had her hand on my upper arm and was trying to pull me away. “Tim, what the hell are you doing?”
I tried to shake her off gently. “He’s been telling me he hardly ever talked to Sydney. But not according to this.” I held up the iPod.
Evan shot Susanne a look. Susanne looked at him, then back at me. “What are you talking about?”
“You need to listen to this.”
“It’s no big deal!” Evan said.
“What?” Susanne said. “What is it?”
“He’s lied to us about how close he was to Sydney,” I said. “I wonder what else he’s been lying about.”
Bob arrived, slightly winded. Evan said to him, “Dad, get this asshole away from me.”
Bob grabbed my arm, much harder than Susanne had, and threw me up against the side of a Nissan. It knocked the wind out of me, but that didn’t stop me from bouncing back, grabbing Bob around the waist, and pounding him into the Kia.
“Stop it!” Susanne shrieked.
“You son of a bitch!” Bob said, trying to find enough room between us to land a punch. “Didn’t you get the message to keep the fuck away from my son?”
He caught me with his right in the side of the head, but there wasn’t much power in it. Just enough to make me mad enough to form a fist and drive it into his stomach.
But now Evan was on my back, screaming at me, locking his arms around my shoulders and pulling me away from his father, who now had a clearer shot at me. As Bob wound up, I shot out with my right leg and caught him right where it counts the most. His punch never connected, and instead he cupped both hands over his crotch and doubled over. “Oh God!” he said.
“Stop it!” Susanne screamed again. She’d dropped her cane at some point and was using a car to support herself.
I tried to shake off Evan, but he was holding on to me with everything he had, trying to use his weight to drag me down to the asphalt. I managed to get some leverage into an elbow and drove it into his stomach. It made him loosen his grip on me, and I twisted away, stumbled, and fell against the Nissan.
Evan wanted to take another shot at me, but Susanne lurched between us and shouted, “Enough! Enough!”
The MP3 player had gone flying during the melee and was on the ground near my foot. I reached down, grabbed it, and slid it into the front pocket of my slacks.
Everyone took a moment.
Bob, whose face was red and puffy, tried to straighten up, using the Kia’s hood for support. But it was still wet, and Bob’s hand slipped, throwing him off balance momentarily.
“You okay?” I asked him.
“Fuck off,” he said.
“Are you out of your mind?” Susanne asked me. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“That’s what you are,” Evan said, pointing at me. “You’re out of your mind.”
To Susanne, I said, “He wrote a song for Sydney.”
“What?”
“They recorded it, she put it on her iPod. He wrote this song and dedicated it to her.”
Susanne turned on Evan. “Is that true?”
He shrugged.
“I asked you a question,” she said. “Is that true?”
“It was just a song,” he said.
Bob slowly stood back up to his full height, but you could see he was still feeling the pain. There’s nothing like it. He looked at me. “I swear to God I
m going to kill you.”
“Shut up, Bob,” Susanne said. That caught both Bob and me off guard.
I said, “Your boy knew our daughter better than he’s been letting on,” I said.
“What are you talking about?” he said.
I took the iPod back out of my pocket. “Let’s have a listen.” I walked back to my car, turned the key ahead a notch, plugged the player back into the auxiliary jack.
When Syd’s voice came on, Susanne’s face crumpled like paper. I knew how she felt. I hadn’t heard my daughter’s voice for weeks, either, until now.
Sydney’s and Evan’s voices came out of the car speakers, then Evan went into his lyrics. Sydney followed up with the joke about him wanting to get into her pants.
When it got to the end, I asked, “Anyone want to hear it again?”
No one did. But Evan said, “See? It’s not even a whole song. It’s just a couple of lines, that’s all. We were just goofing around.”
“Christ almighty,” Bob said to me. “This is what’s got your shorts in a knot?”
But Susanne clearly saw it differently. To Evan, she said, “Why is Syd making a joke about you wanting to get into her pants?”
Evan’s cheeks reddened.
“I’m asking you a question!” Susanne shouted.
“Suze,” Bob said, “don’t get yourself worked up.”
“Fuck off,” she said to him.
“Susanne, for crying out loud, stop listening to this ex-boob of yours. Don’t you see what he’s doing? He’s using Evan to drive a wedge between us. He wants you back and he figures the best way to do it is to turn you against us.”
“You’re an ass,” I said to Bob.
He lunged at me and swung. He caught me in the jaw and I stumbled to the right, tripped over my own feet, and hit the ground.
Susanne screamed at us, “Stop it!”
She wasn’t using a car hood or any of us for support now. She was standing directly before Evan. Her right leg seemed wobbly.
“For the last time,” she said, her voice now not much more than a whisper, “I want to know what was going on between you and my daughter.”
“We talked some,” he conceded.
“And what else?” Susanne asked. “What else did you do?”
Evan glanced hopelessly at his father. “Look, really, nothing happened. We were just getting along okay, all right? We liked to talk. But not when you guys were around. We figured, if our parents knew that we actually liked each other, you’d start freaking out. You’d think it was like incest or something, but it’s not.”
I think all the adults exchanged glances at that one. Even Bob and I.
“It was no big deal,” Evan persisted.
“Did you sleep with my daughter?” Susanne asked, point-blank.
Ordinarily, that might have been something I’d have wanted to know myself, but I was worried about more than my seventeen-year-old daughter’s sex life.
“I don’t believe this,” Evan said. “What a fucking question.”
“How about answering it?” Susanne asked.
“We only, we just, you know, okay, we made out a bit.”
“Great,” Bob said.
“She’s not my
sister,”
Evan said. “Just because you and my dad are getting it on doesn’t mean I’m messing around with my sister.”
“You stupid idiot,” Bob said to him. He reached over and grabbed Evan by the scruff of the neck. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“You moved me into the house with her!” he shouted into his father’s face, like it was his fault. On this, we were more or less on the same page. “What, you think I wasn’t going to notice?”
I struggled to my feet and looked at Susanne, but she was avoiding me. Then, to Bob’s son, I said, struggling to make my voice as calm as possible, “Evan, I can’t pretend not to care about what you and Syd may have been up to. Any other time, I’d want to kick your ass across this lot.”
Bob, perhaps calmed by the even tone of my voice, if not the words, released his hold on Evan.
I continued, “But the only thing that interests me right now is finding Sydney. We now know you’ve been less than honest about how well you two were getting along. Okay. Now we want to know if you’ve been less than honest about where she may be.”
“I swear I—”
“Shut up,” I said. “If you’re not straight with me, right now, right here, I’m calling Detective Jennings and turning it over to her.”
“Honest, I don’t—”
“Tell him,” Bob said. “Tell him what you know.”
All eyes were on Evan. “She was just—first of all, she didn’t like her job.”
“What job?” I asked. “Where was she working? What was she doing?”
“She told me she was working at the hotel. Same as she told you,” Evan said, looking at me.
“What didn’t she like?”
“She said she wanted to quit, see if she could get her job back at the dealership.”
“What else?” I said. “What else did she say?”
Evan swallowed. “She was also kind of worried about another thing.”
Again, we waited for Evan to spit it out. Finally, he said, “She thought she might be late.”
“Late?” I said.
“Oh shit,” said Susanne.
And then she collapsed.
TWENTY-ONE
B
OB AND
I
SHOUTED
“S
UZE!
” at the same moment. But even after having been kicked in the nuts, he was down on his knees more quickly than I. He whipped off his sports jacket, folded it over, and slipped it under Susanne’s head.
“Are you okay?” he asked urgently. “Suze?”
It was as though she’d simply crumpled. Her leg or hip or something had momentarily given out and she’d dropped to the pavement like a marionette suddenly without strings. She’d managed to put a hand out to keep her head from striking the ground with any force.
Bob looked at his son and barked, “Call an ambulance!”
Evan didn’t seem to know which way to turn first, whether to grab a cell from one of us or run back to the office. Before he could get his feet to move, Susanne breathed, “No, no, it’s okay.”
“Don’t move,” Bob said. He was bent over, cradling her head with his arm. “What’s happened? One of the fractures give way or what?”
“Honestly,” she said. “It’s okay. I just kind of slipped. I don’t think I’ve broken anything again.”
I stood, transfixed, looking not at Susanne, but at Bob. He was focused entirely on my ex-wife. Propping his back against a car, he had lifted Susanne enough to take her entirely into his arms.
“You sure?” he asked, his voice shaking. “That was a nasty fall.”
“Really,” she whispered.
And then I thought I saw Bob’s chin quiver as he struggled to contain his emotions.
“Why don’t I get some water?” I said.
“I can do that,” Evan said, and ran.
“I’m just an idiot,” Susanne said. “I should have been using the cane.”
I found it on the ground, grabbed it, and handed it to Bob.
Bob, still cradling her, said, “It’s okay. There was so much going on.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, not just to Susanne, but to both of them. “I kind of stirred things up.”
Susanne bristled. “You did not get me
all stirred up
. My leg gave out. Simple as that. Maybe the two of you can stop acting like squabbling children for a minute and help me up.”
We did. We had her on her feet just as Evan returned with a bottled water he’d just cracked the cap on. He handed it to Susanne and she took a sip.
“Thanks,” she said, getting hold of the cane and testing her weight on it. “I’m okay.”
We all took a moment. Then Susanne said, “We’re not done here.” She had Evan in her sights again. “Talk to me.”
The implications of Evan’s last remark, that Syd was worried about “being late,” had finally sunk in. I wanted to hear what he had to say.
Evan kept his head low, like he was a puppy about to be hit with a rolled-up newspaper. “It was just the one time,” he said.
“That’ll do it,” Bob said.
“But like, a couple of days before she disappeared, she got one of those get-pregnant-at-home kits,” Evan said.
“Home pregnancy test,” Susanne said, her voice weighed down with dread.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s it.”
“What did it show?” Susanne asked.
“I think it was positive,” Evan said.
“Oh God,” Susanne said.
“Or negative,” Evan said. “Which is the one if you’re not pregnant?”
“Negative,” Susanne said.
“Are you sure?” he asked. Susanne glared at him. “I was thinking, it’d be positive to find out you’re
not
pregnant.”
“Was she pregnant or not?” my ex-wife asked.
“I’m not really sure,” he said. “I wasn’t with her when she did the test. You have to go into the bathroom and pee on—”
“I know how it works,” Susanne said.
“So she went and did it and she told me everything was okay, I didn’t have to worry about a thing. So I said, so, you’re not having a baby? And she said don’t worry about it, everything was fine.”
“Did she actually say she wasn’t pregnant?” Susanne asked.
Evan’s shoulders went up half an inch and dropped. “I think that’s what she meant. I kind of didn’t push it, you know? In case she told me something I didn’t want to hear.”
Susanne and I exchanged looks. This wasn’t the sort of thing you made assumptions about.
“When was this?” I asked.
“Just before she came to stay with you for the summer,” he said to me.
“
Where
did this happen?” Susanne wanted to know.
Evan kept looking down. “At Dad’s. You guys were both here on the lot that night.”
“You’re really something else,” Bob said. “We welcome Susanne and her daughter into our home and this is what you do?”
“Hold on,” I said. “Let’s not get sidetracked. We can all have a chat later about what Sydney and Evan did, but what matters now is finding Syd. When we get her home, when we know she’s safe, there’ll be plenty of time for lectures on all this.”
I took a couple of deep breaths. “Let’s get back to the job thing,” I said to Evan. “Why wasn’t she happy?”
“Like I said, she didn’t really go into it. She just said the job made her sad. She said the people there, lots of them wouldn’t talk to her. It’s like they were scared all the time. It was creepy.”
“Scared?” said Susanne. “Creepy?”
Evan shrugged again. “I don’t know. That’s what she said. She didn’t like to talk about work that much when we were hanging out. It’s not like we were hanging out all the time. We’ve all got lots of stuff to do.”
“What
have
you been doing?” Susanne asked. “When you’re in that room of yours all by yourself?”
Bob said, “Suze. Come on.”
“I’d like to know,” I said.
“You’ve already admitted that you’ve had sex with my daughter,” Susanne said. “So you might as well tell us about the other stuff.” She paused. “Why don’t we start with the stealing.”
“Susanne, he told you he didn’t do that,” Bob said.
But Susanne wasn’t looking at him. She still had her eyes fixed on Evan.
“The thing is,” Evan said, now looking at his father, “I asked you if you could help me out a bit.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I told you I needed some money.”
“I gave you some money. For working around here.”
“I mean, more money.”
“Yeah, I remember,” he said. “And I said no.”
“Well, I kind of needed some extra cash,” Evan said.
“So you took it from my purse, from the office, and you took my watch,” Susanne said. She was on fire for someone who’d just collapsed.
“But I got it back from the pawnshop,” he said, like he thought he deserved some credit, “when I had a good stretch.”
“A good stretch?” I said. Evan glanced at me, realizing he’d made a slip. “A good stretch of what?” I took a shot. “Luck?”
“I guess.”
“What?” Susanne said to me, sensing I had figured something out.
“Gambling,” I guessed. “Online gambling.”
“It’s just once in a while,” Evan said. “Just for fun.”
“So you’re stealing money to pay off your credit card bills,” I said.
Evan didn’t respond. His father jumped in. “I gave you a card for emergencies, not for playing poker on the Internet.”
“How much do you owe?”
“Just, like, a thousand or so.”
“Or so?” Bob said.
“About four thousand,” Evan muttered.
“Christ on a cracker,” Bob said.
“Evan,” I said, “did you ever steal any money out of my house?”
He shook his head violently. “Never, swear to God, I never took anything from your place.” He paused. “But… I’ve borrowed some from friends.”
“In addition to the four grand on your Visa?” Bob asked.
Evan nodded sheepishly. “Like, about six hundred.”
All of us, except Evan, were doing a variation of the same thing. Looking down, shaking our heads, thinking, is there no end to the kind of shit that kids can get into?
Susanne turned to me and said, “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
We took a few steps back in the direction of the office. I let her put some weight on my arm.
“This thing, the gambling debts?” she said. “That’s Bob’s problem.”
I wasn’t sure. I wondered whether Evan’s debt problems could have drawn Sydney in somehow, but I let Susanne continue.
“Maybe the reason she’s gone… is she’s pregnant. She’s too afraid to tell us and she’s run off to have the baby.”
I wasn’t buying it, although, in some ways, it would be a relief to learn this was the reason for Sydney’s disappearing act. At least it would mean she was okay. That she was alive. I could welcome home a pregnant daughter if there was a pregnant daughter to welcome home.
And yet.
“Why run off now?” I said. “If she is pregnant, it’s just at the beginning. Is she going to be gone for eight months? If she were going to run off to have a baby, wouldn’t she have waited a little longer?”
Susanne nodded. “I know, I know. Maybe she ran off to have it dealt with. To get an abortion.”
“She’s been gone for weeks, Suze. How long would she need to do that? And don’t you think, even if she was scared, and embarrassed, that eventually she’d screw up her courage and come to us for help? Something like this, wouldn’t she have come to you, if not me?”
Susanne was starting to tear up. “Maybe not if she blamed me. Because I’d moved us in with Bob, and then Evan. Because she’d think it was my fault.”
I thought there was something to that, but kept it to myself.
“It doesn’t explain other things,” I said. “What about that van you said has been watching your house? Syd’s abandoned car? Or me being tricked into flying to Seattle? My house getting torn apart?”
Susanne shook her head in frustration. “The van, that’s probably just my imagination. I’m so tense, I’m seeing things that aren’t there. You know?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“And it could have been kids who broke into your house. Just stupid vandalism.”
I didn’t bother to tell her about the phone I’d found, how that discovery tightened the knot that brought all these things together.
“And maybe the Seattle thing,” Susanne continued, “was just some prankster. You know there are some pretty sick people out there. It could have been someone who saw the website, just wanted to mess with you.”
How comforting it would be to believe what Susanne wanted to believe, that our daughter was out there, pregnant but safe, just waiting for the right time to come back home.
“Suppose I talk to Detective Jennings,” I said, “and tell her they should check with Planned Parenthood offices, abortion clinics, that kind of thing. See if anyone there has seen Sydney.”
Susanne sniffed and nodded. “Okay.”
“It’s worth a shot,” I said.
“Okay,” she said again.
“Excuse me.” It was Bob, with a contrite Evan standing at his side. Susanne and I looked at the two of them without saying anything. “Evan has something he’d like to say to the both of you.”
Susanne and I waited. Evan cleared his throat twice and said, “I’m sorry.”
Bob offered up several small nods, smiled. Susanne and I looked at each other, then back at Evan.
“Well,” I said. “Everything’s just peachy now, isn’t it?”
TWENTY-TWO
I
LEFT A MESSAGE FOR
K
IP
J
ENNINGS
on my way to Riverside Honda. I pulled into the dealership a little after three, settled in behind my desk, and fired up the computer. Following my routine of the last few weeks, I checked the website for any tips about Sydney, and, finding none, checked my work voice mail. There were three calls from people wondering how much they could get for their used cars. I made a note of their numbers so that I could call them back.
The hell of it was, I still had to make a living. I had bills to pay, not the least of which was a round-trip to Seattle.
Andy Hertz had his head down at his desk, writing down some numbers on a yellow pad. “Hey,” I said to him. It wasn’t like him to be antisocial.
“Hey,” he said, glancing up. “Welcome back.”
“Anything going on?” I asked.
“Not much.”
“Sell any cars?”
“It’s been kind of slow,” Andy said. “This idea of yours, to call up people selling their used cars, that hasn’t worked worth a shit.” Then, remembering, “You find Sydney?”
“No,” I said.
I got back behind my desk, unable to think about anything but my daughter. But I’d been able to go through the motions before when she was the only thing on my mind, so I got to it. I dug out my book of recent leads—people who’d taken test drives, asked for brochures, made low offers, and walked away. I took a breath and started dialing numbers.
I didn’t leave messages when no one picked up. The chances that anyone would return a car salesman’s call were about the same as a Prius winning the Indy 500. You had to talk to people directly.
A rich stockbroker from Stamford told me he was still mulling over whether to get the Honda S2000 he’d been in salivating over a few weeks ago. I put him in the “call back” list. An elderly couple from Derby had changed their minds about getting a car now that the husband had been diagnosed with cataracts.
And then I’d come to Lorna and Dell. The couple who’d looked at just about every car on the market and couldn’t reach a decision. They’d come close to driving me mad with their indecision, but some sales you just had to work harder for than others.
I glanced at the clock, saw that it was after four, and took a chance Lorna might be home from her teaching job.
She picked up. “Hello?”
“Hello, Lorna,” slipping into my car salesman voice, which is not far off from my regular voice, except that it sounds as though I’ve just had some cough syrup. “Tim Blake from Riverside Honda.”
“Oh, how are you today?”
“I’m just great, how about yourself?”
“We’re terrific. We’re loving the car.”
I almost asked her to repeat herself, but calm prevailed. “That’s just great,” I said. “I’ve been off a few days, you know. Just what did you end up getting?”
“We bought a Pilot. We spent all this time looking at sedans, and then we thought, maybe we could use a little more room. Are you feeling better?”
Evidently I had been ill. “Yes, much better,” I said. “I trust you were well looked after in my absence.”
“Oh, yes. We came in looking for you, and that nice boy Andy helped us out.”
“That’s great,” I said. “Be sure to drop by and say hello when you’re in for service.”
I hung up.
How it’s supposed to work is this: If a customer you’ve been working with for some time finally decides to buy, and he shows up on your day off to make the deal, the salesperson who helps him splits the commission with you. That is, if he’s not a scumbucket.
I poked my head around the divider and said to Andy, “Hey, you want to go grab a coffee and get some air?”
Andy looked up nervously. “Now?”
“Sure,” I said. “I could use a coffee before I start making any more calls.”
We walked over to the communal coffeepot, poured ourselves each a cup, then walked around to the back of the dealership where there was shade from some tall oaks on a neighboring property.
“Nice day,” Andy said.
“Oh yeah,” I said, taking a sip of the hot coffee.
“Laura’s sure been on the warpath,” he said. “Leaning on everyone to get their numbers up. But sometimes, you know, things are just slow. What are you gonna do, right?”
“Sure,” I said. “It happens.”
“Yeah,” he said, like we were two buddies, just shootin’ the shit.
“So, you gonna tell me?” I asked.
“Hmm?” said Andy.
“You going to tell me about the Pilot you sold to Lorna and Dell?”
Andy coughed up a nervous laugh. “Oh yeah, I was going to.”
“Were you?” I said. “You seemed to have forgotten about it when I asked you how things had gone the last few days.”
“It just kind of slipped my mind, that’s all. Don’t worry, I’ll split that commission down the middle with you.”
“Let me tell you something, Andy,” I said. “You’re still relatively new, so I’ll cut you some slack today, but you ever pull a stunt like that again I’ll slam a hood down on your fucking hand.”
“Sure, you bet,” Andy said. “Won’t ever happen again. You gonna tell Laura on me?”
I shook my head. “Laura’s sales manager. She doesn’t give a shit who gets the commissions as long as the cars get sold. She’ll just let us sort it out, and that’s what I’m doing now. Understand?”
“You bet.”
I tossed my full coffee into an old oil drum and went back inside. There was a guy hanging around my desk. The girl at reception caught my eye as I walked into the showroom and said, “That gentleman asked for you.”
He was sandy-haired, trim, mid-thirties, smart clothes. I put out my hand as I approached. “Tim Blake,” I said. “You were looking for me?”
He nodded and returned the handshake. “Eric Downes,” he said. “I got your name from a guy I work with who bought a car from you a few years ago.”
“Who was that?” I asked.
“Dan?” he said. “I don’t even know his last name.” He laughed self-consciously. “You’d think I’d know a coworker’s last name.”
“No problem,” I said. I could recall two or three Dans off the top of my head, but it didn’t really matter which one. “What can I help you with?” I asked.
“I’ve been seriously thinking about a Civic coupe,” Eric Downes said.
“The regular coupe, or the Si?”
“Oh, the Si,” he said.
“Nice vehicle,” I said. “Six-speed, alloys, 197 horsepower. It really goes, and at the same time, you’re going to get respectable gas mileage with it.”
“Everyone’s thinking about that these days,” Eric said. “I’ve been reading up on them online, I’ve looked at other people’s, but this is the first I’ve been into a showroom to look at one. Thing is, I’ve also been looking at a Mini, and a GTI. The Volkswagen. But I wanted to check the Si first. You have any in stock?”
“I don’t have one on the floor here,” I said, “but I have one on the lot, a demo.”
“What I’d really like to do,” he said, “is take one for a test drive, but like, do I have to put down a deposit first to do something like that?”
“No, of course not,” I said. “I can arrange for you to take one out if you’d like. I just need a copy of your driver’s license, and it’d be my pleasure to ride along with you to show you the car’s features.”
Not that Eric would be able to pick up a load of manure with an Si, but I wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
Eric glanced at his watch like he had someplace to get to, then shrugged and said, “What the hell, let’s do it.”
While I was arranging to have one of the summer hires bring the red demo we had up to the door, I watched Andy skulk in and slink into his chair. He didn’t look over at me, or my customer. He was an okay kid. He just still had a lot to learn. Unless, of course, his ambition was to be a slimy car salesman. If that was the case, he was ahead of the game.
Shannon, at reception, made a copy of Eric Downes’s license, gave the original back to me, and I handed it over to him while he inspected other new cars on the lot. A couple of minutes later, the red Civic Si rolled up.
“What are you driving now?” I asked Eric.
“I’ve got a Mazda,” he said. “I’ve had good luck with it, but I feel like a change.”
“You’d be looking to trade it in?” I asked.
“I’m actually at the end of a lease,” he said.
“They call this Rallye Red,” I said, pointing out some of the Honda’s exterior features for Eric. The rear spoiler, the Si badging. I opened the door for him to get behind the wheel, then joined him on the other side.
“Nice,” he said, running his hands over the leather-wrapped steering wheel. I directed his attention to the navigation and audio systems, the side bolsters on the racing-style bucket seats.
“Start ’er up,” I said.
Eric turned the engine over, gave the accelerator a couple of light taps to hear the revs, pushed in the clutch and worked the gearshift around, getting an idea where all the gears were.
“Can I smoke in here?” Eric asked, about to reach into his jacket.
“Once you own it,” I said, smiling. “But for now, no, if you don’t mind.”
“No problem,” he said.
“Let’s go out that way,” I said, pointing right. “Then we’ll head up to the turnpike, get an idea how it performs on the highway.” I got the navigation screen set up so we could keep track of our movements. “You ever had a car with one of these built into the dash?” I asked.
“Yup,” said Eric. He didn’t seem particularly impressed.
While Eric waited for a break in traffic, I happened to look across the street at the vacant lot there. It’s usually totally empty, which probably explains why the dark blue Chrysler van with tinted windows sitting there caught my eye. I didn’t give it another thought after that. There are a few thousand of those on the road in Milford alone.
Eric put the Civic into first, eased up on the clutch, and took us out onto Route 1. But instead of turning right, as I had suggested, he went left, front tires squealing. This is one of the first things you learn in the car-selling business: test-drive routes have as few left turns as possible. You don’t want someone unfamiliar with the car making turns in front of traffic. That goes double when the car has a stick instead of an automatic.
I said, “No, I thought we’d head—”
“I want to go this way,” he said.
Eric tromped on the gas, the engine pushing the car up through the gears until we were cruising in sixth, weaving from lane to lane, zooming past motorists with more conventional driving habits. I glanced over at the digital readout on the dash, saw that the car was topping out at more than sixty.
“Eric, I know the car goes like stink and it doesn’t feel like you’re going as fast as you are, but I think you might want to let up a bit on the pedal there before we get a ticket or something worse.”
Eric glanced over and flashed me a grin, but there was nothing friendly about it.
“Why don’t you just sit back and enjoy the ride,” he said, “and tell me where the fuck your daughter is.”
TWENTY-THREE
W
HEN
I
DIDN’T IMMEDIATELY SAY SOMETHING
—I was too stunned to respond for several seconds—Eric said, “It’s got good handling, I’ll grant you that. You don’t really think of that with a Civic, at least I never have. I like the road feel. Comes right through the steering wheel. Some cars, they’re all mushy, you know? I like a car where you feel connected, you get what I’m saying?”
He glanced over. “Huh?” he prodded. “You know what I mean?”
“Who are you?” I finally managed to say, my hand gripped tightly around the brushed-aluminum passenger door handle. My heart, which had already started pounding when Eric Downes hit the gas, was going like a trip-
hammer now.
He flashed that grin again. “I’m Eric.”
“What’s happened to Sydney?”
“Hello? Timmy, my man, did you hear what I asked you a second ago? I asked
you
to tell
me
where your daughter is.”
“I don’t know where she is.”
“You know what? I tend to believe that. We’ve seen your website, we know you’ve been looking for her. We’ve been watching you, watching your wife’s place, haven’t seen your daughter. Not one titty tit tit. But I figured, hey, I had to ask, you know? Give you a chance to tell us where she was before we consider other courses of action.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” I asked.
Eric downshifted, turned hard left at a yellow light that was in the process of turning red, and gunned it up a residential side street. We were still doing sixty, but now we were doing it in a thirty. “You know what kind of suspension this baby’s got?” he asked.
“What kind of trouble is Sydney in?” I asked.
“She’s in a whole
fuck
of a lot of trouble,” Eric said. “She’s got her tit one hundred percent caught in the wringer, you know what I’m saying?”
“Tell me what it is,” I said. “Tell me what the problem is. If I can solve it, make you happy, then my daughter will come home and we can forget all about this. If it’s about money, just tell me how much and I’ll make it right.”
“You want to make me one satisfied customer, is that the idea? I tell you what your daughter’s done, and you’ll throw in free rust-proofing?”
Eric chuckled, swerved sharply to avoid a parked car. I tightened my grip on the door handle and pressed my right foot reflexively to the firewall, as though I had a brake pedal of my own. Glancing over, I caught a glimpse of a gun butt in his inside left jacket pocket.
“Do you know if Sydney’s okay?” I asked. “Has she been in touch with you?”
Eric came to another side street, hit the brakes, turned right, let the front-wheel drive pull the car so the back end hardly fishtailed. Every few seconds he’d glance over at me, but most of the time he had his eyes on the road.
“I still don’t think you’re getting it,” he said. “We haven’t heard from her. If we had, maybe we could have worked something out with her, come to some kind of an arrangement, you know? And if you’re not able to tell me where she is, it’s going to make that very difficult. Because we’d have liked nothing better than to put all this business behind us.”
“What business?”
Eric sighed. “You know what I think? I think you never tried hard enough. If she was my daughter, I’d have been out there looking for her twenty-four/seven, not sitting around being Mr. Car Salesman, slicking back my hair, wearing my plaid jacket, adjusting my white belt, trying to sell Jap cars.” What was with the past tense? Why was he talking like I was done searching? “What the hell kind of father you been, anyway?”
“You lousy son of a bitch,” I said. Even with the AC blasting in my face, I felt hot with anger. If this guy hadn’t been sitting behind the wheel, I’d have tried to grab hold of him around the neck.
Eric shot me another glance, then looked forward. Without taking his eyes off the road, he launched his shifting hand blindingly fast, backhanding me on the nose.
The pain was instantaneous, and tremendous. Most people go their whole lives without getting punched in the nose, and up to that moment, I’d been one of them. I shouted out in pain, cupped my hands over my face. Blood trickled into them.
“Try not to get anything onto the upholstery,” Eric said. “I’m not going to buy this car if it’s got blood all over the seats.”
“Jesus!” I said. “You son of a bitch!” If this had been my own car, I might have been able to find a box of tissues in the glove box, but there’d be nothing in there but a crisp, new, unopened driver’s manual. Blood dripped onto my pants as I reached into my pocket for something to blot my nose.
“Don’t be rude, Timmy, or I just might not buy this car. Can I ask you something? Does it come with a decent warranty, or do you have to buy those extended things, because, personally, I think those things are a huge fucking rip-off.”
I closed my eyes a moment, winced, opened them. Through tears, I surveyed the navigational screen. We were heading north through Stratford on Huntington, almost to the Merritt Parkway. Eric slipped a cigarette from a pack in his pocket, put it between his lips, and lit it with a silver lighter.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Eric said, breathing out smoke. “Maybe you want to grab the wheel or something, show you’re a tough guy, be a big hero, that kind of thing. Well, I’m better at this sort of shit than you are. You sit in your little showroom day after day, handing out brochures, filling out forms, trying to talk people into buying options they don’t really need, you probably don’t run into somebody like me every day. Somebody who can mess you up really, really bad. And the thing is, there’s not just one of me. There’s a whole fucking bunch of us, okay? So don’t go doing something stupid. You do something stupid, you’re not just putting yourself in jeopardy, but your daughter, too, got it?”
I dabbed some tissue under my nose. “Yeah,” I said.
“The fact is,” Eric continued, “it’s time for a change of approach. More direct, more up-front.” He smiled. “The Seattle thing, that was okay at the time, but things have escalated, you catch my drift?”
I glanced over.
“Can I ask you a question?” he said. “Seriously? Did the cops even
find
that coke?”
“Yes,” I said slowly.
He slapped his thigh. “I win the bet,” he said. “The others said, no, it was too well hidden, and I said, fuck, if it’s sitting right in the open, who’s going to believe that it wasn’t found when the place was torn apart? You get what I’m saying?”
“Yes.”
“But my other question is, what the fuck are you doing, walking around? Why didn’t the cops arrest you?”
“They didn’t buy it,” I said.
He banged the steering wheel with his fist. “Shit.”
“Why’d you do that? Plant cocaine in my house?”
He shook his head angrily for a moment, then became almost philosophical. “Honestly? The coke thing was kind of an afterthought. Mainly, we just wanted you out of town for a while, get you out of the way. Buy us some time, maybe your kid would show up while you were gone. Be a lot easier to deal with her with no daddy to run home to.”
He smiled to himself. “But once you were gone, I had what you might call an inspiration. Figured, tear your house apart, plant some coke. I thought, hey, once you came back, you’d have a whole ’nother shitload of problems to deal with, including having to explain to the cops how it got there.”
The anger returned. “Fucking stupid cops! Laid it all out for them. House torn apart like somebody was looking for something, the cops find the coke, they start leaning on you. It’s simple. I can’t believe they’re so fucking stupid!”
“If they’d bought it, wouldn’t that have made them stupid?” I asked.
“That just really pisses me off. I was in a good mood up to now.”
“Why’d you want me out of the way, for the police to arrest me? What have I done to you?”
Another glance. “You just won’t quit. Going here and there, bugging the shit out of everybody, looking for your kid. You’re a fucking problem waiting to happen. A goddamn liability.” He banged the steering wheel again. Then, “Did you happen to find a phone, by the way? It might have slipped out of somebody’s pocket.”
“Yeah,” I said.
Eric chortled. “Well, no biggie. We got no fucking use for it anymore.”
Eric guided the Civic onto the ramp for the eastbound Merritt Parkway. “Let’s see what this baby’ll do,” he said, downshifting, hitting the gas, and merging into traffic. “How much one of these run?”
I was still blotting my nose, thinking.
Eric glanced over. “You know what? I bet I know what’s on your mind.”
I just looked at him.
“Why hasn’t your daughter gotten in touch with you? Or even the cops? Am I right?”
After a moment, I said, “Maybe.”
“Fact is, I don’t think your daughter’s got much to gain by talking to the cops.”
“What do you mean?”
“You ask me, smartest thing she could do is pretend none of this ever happened.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m sure you don’t.”
“What do you want with my daughter? What’s she done?”
“She’s not the little angel you think she is, that’s for fucking sure.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. But I had to.
“What’s she done?” I asked. “She stolen something from you?”
“Oh, Timmy, if only it was that,” Eric said. “Don’t you think, if all she’d done was take something from us, she might have gotten in touch with you?”
I didn’t say anything.
“I mean, she’s got to be scared shitless and all. That’s part of it. But my theory is, she’s just ashamed.”
I blotted up some more blood. Neither of us said anything for about a mile.
It was Eric who broke the silence. “I think we’ll take the next exit, find us a nice place in the woods to continue our discussion. Fact is, I had another one of those inspirational moments when I was on my way to see you today, about what to do if you didn’t know where your girl was, which clearly you do not. I thought to myself, what if we had some sort of an event that would make her want to come home. Then we don’t even have to look for her. We just wait for her to show up. You get what I’m saying?”
“No,” I said.
“You ever read that book?” he asked. “The one where they talk about trusting your gut instinct? How going with the idea that just comes to you is usually a better plan than the one that you think over for months and months? You ever read that book?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I read that book.”
“Well, that was what I had before we left. One of those ‘Aha!’ moments. Sometimes, you know, the simplest ideas are the best ones.”
“I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
Eric grinned and tossed his cigarette out the window. “Well, if you were a little girl on the run, wouldn’t you come home for your daddy’s funeral?”
The next exit would take me to my execution. Eric Downes was going to take that gun out of his jacket and kill me in the woods.
I didn’t, at that moment, see a lot of options, save one.
I yanked up on the emergency brake.
“Shiiitttt!”
Eric screamed as the car suddenly decelerated and lurched toward the shoulder. He threw both hands back onto the wheel as a car coming up from behind laid on the horn and swerved past, narrowly missing the back end of the Civic.
As Eric’s hands went to the wheel I unbuckled my seat belt with one hand, threw open the passenger door with the other, and catapulted myself out of the car.
We probably weren’t going much more than five or ten miles per hour at that point, but jumping out of a car at any speed is an insane thing to try. Except, perhaps, when the guy behind the wheel is getting ready to shoot you.
I tried to maintain my balance as I hit the gravel, but I lost my footing on the loose stones and did a simultaneous tumble and spin, something that might have earned me a 7.2 in Olympic skating, right into the tall grasses beyond the shoulder. I rolled twice, then raised myself on my knees, gave my head a quick shake in a bid to get my bearings, and saw that the Civic had come to a stop on the shoulder about thirty yards up the highway.
Horns blared from several other cars speeding past. One driver stuck his middle finger out through the sunroof.
The driver’s door flew open and Eric jumped out of the Civic, gun in hand. He ran to the back of the car, scanning the side of the road, but I’d thrown myself onto the ground, flattened myself out. I could just make out Eric between the blades, but felt relatively sure he could not see me.
Now Eric was glancing at the traffic, and you could see the wheels turning. Motorists see a guy at the side of the road waving a gun, someone’s going to pick up their cell and make a call.
He knew he had to get out of there. There wasn’t time to hunt me down.
He ran around to the other side of the car, slammed the passenger door shut, then got in t
he driver’s seat. The car took off, kicking up gravel as it swerved onto the pavement.
I stood up and brushed myself off. Maybe, because my nose still hurt so much, I didn’t notice all the other aches and pains that come from jumping out of a moving automobile.
I got out my cell phone and called the dealership. “Andy in Sales,” I said when someone picked up.
A moment later, “Andy Hertz.”
“It’s Tim,” I said.
“Oh, hi,” he said.
“I need a lift.”
TWENTY-FOUR
I
COULD HAVE ASKED
A
NDY
, who was still feeling guilty about the stolen commission, for a lung right about then, but a ride was all I needed. I gave him directions and about twenty minutes later he found me alongside the Merritt Parkway.
“What the hell happened to you?” he asked as I got into the air-conditioned Accord.
I turned the mirror around to get a look at myself. My nose and left cheek were swollen and decorated with small red shreds of tissue. And my clothes were dusted and grass-stained.
“What are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere?” he asked.
“Take me back,” I said.
“What happened to the Si you went out in? Did the car get stolen?”
“Just drive, Andy.”
“Do you need me to take you to a hospital or something?”
I turned in my seat and said patiently, “No more questions, Andy. Just get me back.”
He did as he was asked, but that didn’t stop him from looking over every few seconds. While I’d been waiting for him to show up, I’d put in a call to Kip Jennings, and still had the phone in my hand, hoping she’d call back any second.
As we approached the dealership, I glanced over at the 7-Eleven parking lot, where I’d noticed the Chrysler van when Eric, or whoever he really was, and I left for our test drive.
The van was gone. But sitting right next to where it had been parked was the red Civic.
“Pull in here,” I instructed Andy.
He wheeled the Accord into the vacant lot and I got out. The Civic was unlocked, the keys in the ignition. I went around to the passenger side, opened the door, saw dark splotches of blood on the dark gray fabric seats. I reached in, took the key, waited for a break in the traffic, and ran across the street to the dealership, leaving Andy to get back across with the car by himself.
As I entered the showroom my cell rang. I flipped it open, put it to my ear, and said, “Yeah.”
“Jennings.”
Once I started talking, I couldn’t keep my voice from shaking. “Some guy just tried to kill me.”
“Are you hurt?”
“He acted like he wanted to buy a car, we got out on the highway, he wanted to know where Syd was, and then he was going for a gun—”
“Where are you?”
“The dealership.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. Well, no, but mostly yes.”
“How long ago?”
I had no idea. I glanced at my watch. “It all started more than an hour ago. I escaped on the Merritt Parkway about three quarters of an hour ago.”
“Five minutes,” she said and hung up.
I heard sirens in three.
J
ENNINGS WAS LOOKING AT THE PHOTOCOPY
we’d taken of Eric Downes’s driver’s license prior to the test drive.
“It’s a fake,” she told me.
“Let me see,” I said. I studied the photo on the license. It was a man with roughly the same facial shape and hair color as the one who’d tried to kill me, but it wasn’t him. The more I looked, the more I realized it wasn’t even close.
“That’s not the guy,” I said. “He handed over his license to me, I didn’t even look at it before I gave it to Shannon to copy. He could have handed me my mother’s ID and it would have worked.”
Jennings didn’t bother to lecture me on the obvious holes in our system.
“He said they were looking for Syd,” I said.
“Who’s ‘they’?” Jennings asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. While I was telling her my story, a team of cops descended on the red Civic across the street.
“You have surveillance cameras here?” she asked, looking about the showroom. “We might be able to get a look at him.”
“We only turn them on when we’re closed,” I said.
“Super,” Jennings said. She leaned in and got a closer look at my nose. “You should see a doctor.”
“I don’t think it’s broken,” I said. I had been, for as long as I could stand it, holding an ice pack on it. Laura Cantrell had found one in the lunchroom fridge.
Jennings asked countless questions. Not just about the man’s appearance, but his voice, his clothes, mannerisms, patterns of speech.
“He knew all about the Seattle thing,” I said. “He admitted he was in my house. They planted the coke, thinking you’d arrest me, that’d be one more headache for me to deal with.”
“Why would they want to do that?”
I paused. “He said I was a problem waiting to happen. Because I won’t stop looking for Syd.”
“A problem for who?” she asked. “Aside from that guy from the flower shop.”
“Just about everyone else who runs a business near the hotel,” I said.
Jennings’s eyes were piercing. “Have there been others?”
“Other what?”
“Other misunderstandings? Like the one you had with Ian Shaw?”
“No,” I said.
Jennings didn’t look convinced. She was about to ask me something else when her cell rang. She dug her phone from her purse, looked at who was calling, and said, “I have to take this.” She turned and stepped away.
I took the opportunity to go into Laura Cantrell’s office with my warm, damp ice pack.
“Thanks,” I said.
She took it from me gingerly, looking for a place to put it down where it wouldn’t leave a wet spot, and finally set it atop a crinkled copy of
Motor Trend
.
“I’m taking a leave,” I said.
“Tim,” she said.
“I’m going to look for Sydney and I’m not coming back until I’ve found her. If I have to, I’ll put my house up for sale to keep myself afloat.”
“I guess you do what you have to do,” she said. “But you know, at the end of the day, I can’t hold on to your job forever.”
“I’d expect nothing more.”
“Jesus, Tim, I know you’re going through a lot, but you don’t have to be an asshole.”
“I’ll turn my contacts over to Andy. He can have my customers. He’s already got a head start.”
“I was going to tell you about that,” she said.
“I don’t care, Laura,” I said.
I was about to turn and leave when Laura said, “This is kind of difficult, Tim, but…”
“What?” I asked.
“You
are
driving a company car.”
I wanted to see whether she could look me in the eye and ask for my keys, and damned if she didn’t. “I can help you out as best I can, but I can’t justify giving a car to someone on a leave,” she said.
Riverside Honda had plenty of used cars to choose from, but suddenly I didn’t want to give my own employer the business. “Give me a day or two?”
“Of course,” Laura said.
“I’ll give Bob a call,” I said, half grinning to myself. “I’ll bet he can put me into something.”
Detective Jennings was waiting by my desk. Her cell phone was tucked away.
“Tell me again why you think this guy was going to kill you,” she said.
“To get Syd to come back. I guess he figured she’d hear, somehow, if I was dead, and she’d feel she had to come back for the funeral.”
Jennings didn’t say anything for a moment.
“What?” I asked.
“That tends to support the idea that Syd
is
alive.”
I blinked. “You got some reason to believe that she isn’t?”
“That was the lab calling,” she said. “We got the DNA results, on the blood from your daughter’s car.”
I was feeling faint.
“We got two hits. One was your daughter.”
I
WAS ALREADY FEELING WOOZY.
Jennings put me in my own desk chair, then sat down across from me.
“Some of the blood on the steering wheel and door handle of Sydney’s car turned out to be hers,” Jennings said.
“That doesn’t mean she’s dead,” I said. “It just means that she lost a bit of blood. She could have had a cut finger or something.”
“That’s true,” Jennings said.
I was trying hard to focus, and thought back a couple of sentences. “Some?” I said.
“Some what?”
“You said
some
of the blood on the steering wheel was Syd’s.”
“We’ve acquired quite a database over the last few years of suspects and convicted criminals.” She paused. “And from the deceased. When we get a DNA sample, we run it against what we already have, see if we get lucky.”
Lucky
.
She nodded. “The other blood belonged to Randall Tripe.”
I looked at her oddly. “Should I know that name?”