Read Fear the Worst: A Thriller Online
Authors: Linwood Barclay
Tags: #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Fiction
Fear the Worst: A Thriller (21 page)
“I don’t know,” I said. I wasn’t a big believer in coincidences, although I knew they could happen. “When the detective reported everything back to you, he must have included the names of my wife and daughter.”
“He did.”
“So when Patty said she had a friend named Sydney, didn’t that set off any bells?”
“In the report I got, your daughter’s name was down as Francine,” Carol Swain said.
Francine was Sydney’s first name, the name that showed up on her birth certificate. But when she was just a toddler, her second name, Sydney—and ultimately, Syd—just seemed to suit her better, and we stopped calling her Francine altogether.
I explained this to Patty’s mother. “So there was never a time that I suspected,” she said. “Maybe, if Patty had ever brought your daughter around, I’d have noticed some similarities.”
“This report you got from the detective,” I asked. “Do you still have it?” She nodded. “Is it here, in the house?” She nodded again. “So then maybe Patty found it.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s hidden.”
“Hidden where?”
She set down her beer and went upstairs. I heard her moving around up there, then she came back downstairs clutching a thick manila business envelope with her name printed on the front. She tossed it onto the coffee table. “There it is. Everything anybody ever wanted to know about Timothy Justin Blake. It was in a zippered compartment in a travel bag I keep under the bed.”
I slid the envelope’s contents out onto the table as Carol sat back down and resumed her relationship with the beer.
There were quite a few pages. Photocopies of birth certificates, my father’s death certificate, a photo of me from a Bridgeport Business College graduation ceremony, a picture of the house I grew up in and the house I had been living in at the time. All that, and a copy of the bill for services rendered from Denton Abagnall.
“Have you spoken to Mr. Abagnall lately?” I asked.
She shook her head. “He got killed a couple of years ago. It was in all the papers. He’d been hired by that woman whose family disappeared when she was a kid.”
I remembered reading something about that at the time. “So you never showed this to your daughter?”
“I’m telling you, no,” she said.
“Who else might have known?” I asked. “That you’d hired someone to find out I was Patty’s biological father?”
Carol Swain shook her head. “No one,” she said. “Unless Abagnall told someone. And I don’t think he would have done that. He seemed like a real professional, you know?”
“What about your husband, Ronald?” I asked.
“I don’t see how…” she said, but then her voice drifted off. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Do you and he still keep in touch?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Off and on.” There was something in the way she said it. Her eyes did some kind of twinkle.
“What do you mean, ‘off and on’?”
She looked away, drank some beer. “It’s just… He’s a total asshole, okay? I know that. It’s just that, sometimes, we hook up. You know? No strings, just get together for old times’ sake.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s not like I’m going to get pregnant or anything with the guy shooting blanks.”
“How often do you see him?”
She shrugged. “Every few months. Maybe, if it’s been a long time for either one of us, someone gets an itch that needs scratching, we kind of send out a little email, you know, like, what’s doing?”
“When was the last time?”
“Maybe eight, ten months ago. It’s been a while. And the last time before that was way more than a year ago, for a few days.”
“He came here?” I asked.
“His wife wouldn’t exactly be crazy about it if I went and stayed with him at their place.”
“Ronald stayed here for a while? More than a year ago?”
“He had a blowout with his missus, needed a place to camp out for a while. So I shipped Patty off to stay with my sister in Hartford for a bit so I could have some peace and quiet. Seemed like a good time for a bit of a reunion with Ronald.”
“He slept in your room?”
She looked at me and said, “Duh.”
“I’m just asking because he’d have been in the same room with th
is file.”
She shook her head. “You’re wrong.”
“I’m not accusing him of anything,” I said. “I’m just saying it’s possible. He might have gone looking through your things, looking for something else—”
“What, a pair of my panties to try on?”
“I was thinking more like money. And instead, he came across that envelope. Maybe he’d have thought there was money in it, looked inside, found something else.”
“Anyway,” she said dismissively, “it’s not like it would be a huge shocker, even if he had looked inside. He already knew he wasn’t Patty’s father.”
“But he’d never known the actual identity of Patty’s biological father. And that I had a daughter of my own, about Patty’s age.” My mind was racing, trying to see whether any of these pieces fit together. “If he did see the file, do you think he would have told Patty?”
This time she was more definite. “No way,” she said. “Even though he was a piss-poor father to her, he still felt he was more her father than anyone else was. He wouldn’t have wanted to admit you existed.”
That made sense to me. “But if he read the file, is there any way he might act on the information?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just thinking out loud here. Do you think he might have engineered a way for the girls to meet each other?”
“Why?”
“I’m telling you I don’t know. I mean, would he do it out of mischief? Because he liked the idea that he knew they were half sisters, even if they didn’t know?”
And did it have anything to do with the fact that they were both, now, missing? I didn’t pose the question out loud. I felt I was already too far down a strange road without a map.
“That sounds crazy to me,” Carol said.
“Have you been in contact with Ronald since Patty went missing?”
“Yeah, the first day, before I called the cops,” she said. “I felt like an idiot doing it, because I knew what the chances were. So I call him at work and say, you know, has Patty been by your place or anything, and he says, you’re kidding, that’d be a first.”
“She doesn’t keep in touch with him,” I said.
“No. And he couldn’t be happier. He’s not bad in the sack, but as a dad he’s a complete and total washout.”
I tossed the various pages of the report onto the envelope and stood up, paced back and forth a few steps. “We need to talk to him,” I said.
“Huh?”
“We need to go talk to Ronald.”
“What’s the point of that?”
“I want you to introduce me. Just tell him the truth. That I’m Tim Blake, my daughter Sydney is a friend of Patty’s, the two of them are missing. I want to see his face when you tell him who I am.”
“You think that’ll prove something,” she said.
“It might,” I said. “He still work for Sikorsky?”
“In his dreams. He works at a liquor store.” Right, I thought. I did know that. “He’s probably still on. I’d shop there, but the son of a bitch doesn’t give me a discount. So I take my business elsewhere.”
My cell phone rang.
“Hello?”
“You said you were going to get back to me.” It was Detective Jennings.
Hearing her voice made me feel as though a trapdoor had opened under me. “I’ve kind of had a lot on my plate,” I said. “When I get a minute, I’ll call you.”
“Where are you, Mr. Blake?” she asked.
“Out and about,” I said. Carol Swain looked at me curiously.
“I want to talk to you right now,” Jennings said. “In person.”
“Why’s that so important?”
“I dropped by your house,” she said.
I swallowed. “Oh,” I said. “Like I said, I’ve been out, looking for Syd.”
“I’m not asking you to come in,” Jennings said firmly. “I’m telling you. You’re coming in right now, or we’re going to find you and bring you in.”
I decided to take a shot at playing dumb. “I don’t understand the urgency.”
“Mr. Blake, one of your neighbors saw you come home less than an hour ago and leave again in a hurry. I know you were here.”
“I really have to go.”
“Mr. Blake, let me lay it out for you. Kate Wood is dead. Unless you can tell me something to persuade me otherwise, you’re the lead suspect in a homicide.”
“I didn’t do it,” I said. Carol was still looking at me.
“That’s not what I’d call persuasive,” Jennings said. “Call your lawyer, Edwin Chatsworth. He can arrange a surrender so no one has to get—”
I closed the phone and said to Carol Swain, “Let’s go see your ex.”
I
PUT
M
ILT IN THE BACK SEAT
so Carol wouldn’t crush him when she got into the Beetle. She gave me directions to a store in Devon, not far from the dealership, that was sandwiched between a courier franchise and a distributor of appliance parts.
At a four-way stop, we waited for a police car to go through ahead of us. I gripped the wheel a little tighter and held my breath, trying to will myself into a state of invisibility as the patrol car went past.
Carol picked up on my anxiety. “Somebody looking for you?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” I said. I figured it would take a few more minutes for Jennings to put the word out to every cop in Milford to be watching for me. It wouldn’t take her long—a call to Susanne or Bob would do it—to find out what I was driving now.
It was getting to be dusk as I pulled into a spot in front of the liquor store. Carol Swain was out of the car before I’d turned the ignition off. She was making a beeline for the door and I told her to wait up.
An elderly, unshaven man clutching a brown-bagged bottle shuffled out the door as we went in. The old guy had evidently been the sole customer. The only one left in the store was the man behind the counter.
The guy who scratched Patty’s mother’s itch every eight to ten months might have been a good-looking man once. About five-ten, strong jaw, blue eyes. But he was thin to the point of emaciated, his hair was thinning, and he’d gone a day or two without shaving. He peered at me through a pair of cheap reading glasses.
“Hey,” he said. He noticed his ex first, me second, and my nose third. He didn’t look puzzled, surprised, annoyed, intimidated, you name it. There was nothing there.
“Hey, Ron,” she said.
“Hey,” he said.
I thought he might ask Carol if she’d heard from Patty, but he didn’t.
“Ron, this here’s Tim Blake.” He just looked at me. “He’s been trying to find his daughter, Francine?”
That had been my idea, to refer to Sydney by her first name, the one that the detective had used in his report.
Ronald’s expression stayed blank.
“She was a friend of Patty’s,” Carol Swain continued. “Now the two of them are missing.”
“Kids,” he said dismissively, shaking his head. He asked me, “Did they run off together?” It seemed a genuine question.
“We don’t know,” I said. “I came by to talk to Carol, see whether she had any idea about where either one of them might be.”
“I don’t know what your daughter’s like,” he said, “but Patty’s the kind of girl, she’s probably just blowing off some steam, getting a little wild for a couple of days. I’m sure she’ll turn up. And if your Francine is with her, they’ll probably come back together.” He looked at his ex-wife and said, “Joyce is going to give me a lift home when I lock up so, you know, you might not want to be hanging around when…”
“It’s okay,” Carol Swain said. “We just wanted to pop in, in case you’d heard from Patty, you know?”
“Yeah, well, no,” he said, looking back and forth between us.
I said, “Mr. Swain, do y
ou know who I am?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you recognize my name?”
He looked at me a moment and finally said, “Yup.”
“Where from?”
He glanced at Carol, then back at me. “You’re the one supplied the juice to make Patty.”
From Carol Swain, a sharp intake of breath.
“How would you know that?” I asked.
Ronald Swain offered up half a shrug. “It was all in the report. The one the detective did. It was hidden in a suitcase under Carol’s bed.”
“You son of a bitch,” Carol said. If Ronald was hurt by the name-calling, he didn’t show it.
“When did you see that report?” I asked.
Another shrug. “A year ago? Something like that.”
I tried to probe a bit. “What did you think when you read it? Were you angry?”
“Not really. I mean, I knew I wasn’t Patty’s father. Somebody had to be.”
“You were never curious?”
He shook his head. “I mean, when I found the report, I was interested enough to read it. But that was about it.”
“What about my daughter? Were you curious about her? Were you interested in Patty’s half sister? Did you think about trying to get the two of them together?”
There was almost nothing in his dull eyes. “Why would I want to do that?”
“Did you ever show that report to Patty?” Carol asked. “Did you ever tell her about it?”
Ronald Swain sighed tiredly. “Both of you have evidently mistaken me for someone who gives a damn. Why would I tell Patty? The only thing I might have done, if this had been ten years ago, is go knocking on your door”—he looked at me—“with Patty in tow and seen if you wanted to take her off our hands. Might have kept the two of us together. But now, with her grown up and all, what would be the point of that?”
Carol Swain looked from Ronald to me and offered up half a shrug, as if to say, “There you go.”
Ronald, looking at Carol, said, “You should give me a call. But here, not at home.”
“When this whole thing with Patty blows over,” she said, giving him a wink as she turned away.
It didn’t feel as though we’d been in the store all that long, but it was noticeably darker out when we got back into the car.
“Well, fuck me,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“He read the file.” She shook her head. “He’s never been much of a reader.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
T
HERE WAS A POLICE CAR SITTING IN
C
AROL
S
WAIN’S DRIVEWAY
when we turned the corner. I hit the Beetle’s brakes.
“Whaddya suppose they’re doing there?” she said. “Maybe they brought home Patty.”
She had her hand on the door handle, getting ready to bolt. I reached for her arm and held her.
“They’re probably looking for me,” I said. “Checking all the possible places I might turn up.”
Carol settled back into the car. “What do they want with you?”
“It’s a long story,” I said.
“I can hoof it from here if you want,” she said.
“I’d appreciate that,” I said. “And if they ask if you’ve seen me—”
“Seen who?” she said, and smiled. “I couldn’t turn in my daughter’s real-life father. What kind of mother would I be if I did that?”
“If the police find me right now,” I said, “they’re going to slow me down trying to find Syd.” I paused. “And Patty.”
“You think Patty’s mixed up with what happened to your girl?”
“I don’t know. I hope not.” I didn’t want to tell Carol I had a bad feeling about Patty. “Thanks for your help,” I said.
“No problem,” she said. She had her hand on the door again but didn’t push it open. “It was good to finally meet you. I mean, I know the circumstances are kind of shitty and all, but I’m glad to be able to talk to you, to tell you what you did for me, after all this time.”
I smiled awkwardly.
“I don’t blame you for not saying anything,” she said. “I wouldn’t know what to say, either.”
“I had to know I might be the biological father of some child out there somewhere,” I said. “So that part’s not a surprise. I guess I never expected to actually know the identity of one of them.”
She smiled ruefully. “There might be more. Maybe there’s hundreds of them running around out there. Little Tims and Timettes all over southern Connecticut.”
“I doubt that,” I said. “I think they limit just how much of the stuff they spread around.” I winced. “That didn’t sound right.”
Carol smiled. “That’s okay. But I can’t help wondering, if you’d been her father in every way, not just the biological, if she’d have turned out different. Whether she would have been such a screwup. So ungrateful, always getting into trouble.”
I felt maybe I was being blamed here. I wanted to ask whether Patty might have turned out differently if Carol’s husband had hung in, if Carol hadn’t turned into an alcoholic over the years.
That was what I wanted to say to her. But I didn’t because I did feel the blame.
I felt responsible.
Patty existed because of me. But I’d done nothing to help her since she came into the world.
I rested my hands on the steering wheel, looked at the Swain house shrouded in darkness, the cop car out front. “You make decisions years ago, not thinking they mean a great deal, and then years later…”
“It’s a bitch, isn’t it?” she said. Then, impulsively, she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. Tentatively, so as not to put any pressure on my injury. “If you find my girl, tell her to get in touch with her goddamn mother, would you do that for me?”
“Sure,” I said, my cheek cool where her lips had been.
As she slipped out of the car, my cell phone went off again. This time, I looked at the ID. I didn’t want to talk to Jennings again.
“Hello?” I said.
“Tim?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s Andy.”
“Yeah, Andy.”
I’d almost forgotten Andy was out there trying to find this elusive Gary. There’d been a lot of events in the last couple of hours that seemed to have overtaken his errand.
“Okay, so, I ended up leaving that other bar. Some guy said Gary didn’t hang out there anymore, he mostly goes to Nasty’s? You know the place?”
“I know of it.”
“So then I went there, and hung around a bit, and had a couple more beers, asked if anyone had seen him there.”
“Go o
n.”
“So anyway, I got a lead on where I can find him.”
“What’d you find out?”
“Okay, um, it’s kind of complicated, but I’m going back to the dealership to check something out.”
“The dealership?”
“Okay, so, I’m thinking, actually, that this guy might have gone for a test drive last summer with Alan?” One of the other salesmen. “And Gary’s card, with a work address and number, might be in Alan’s Rolodex on his desk.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to turn up at the dealership. The police might be looking for me there.
“What’s his last name, Andy? What did you find out about him?”
“Okay, I didn’t get a lot, and I can’t really talk right now. But can you meet me at the showroom? By the time you get there, I might have the info.”
“The showroom’s going to be all locked up.”
“I’ve got a key,” he said. “Give a loud rap on the service door and I’ll let you in.”
I wasn’t crazy about the idea. For a second, I wondered whether Andy could be setting me up. Maybe Jennings was behind this call. But I was so desperate for leads I decided to take the chance. “Okay,” I said. “Twenty minutes?”
“See you then.” Andy ended the call.
I started up the Beetle, listened to the engine rattle, then backed up to the corner so I wouldn’t have to drive past Carol’s house, where the police car still sat in the driveway.
Any info Andy had learned about Gary—a full name and maybe an address—might tip things in my favor. Even if it wasn’t something that led me directly to Syd, maybe it would be something that would give me leverage. Regardless, I had to avoid the police. They were more interested in finding me than Syd. I believed the only one who had a hope of finding her was me.
I drove past the dealership once, looking for cop cars, marked or unmarked. The used cars in the west end of the lot sparkled as brightly as the new models under the lights. Never buy a used car at night, my father used to say. All cars look good at night under streetlamps. While the lights in the lot were turned up, the lights inside the building were turned down. The showroom lighting was dimmed at night to save on the electric bill, but not to the point that you couldn’t see the cars or people moving around in there. I could just make out Andy sitting at his desk up near the glass.
I went down the road a block, turned around and came back. The glare from the Beetle’s headlights caught Andy’s attention. I parked around back, and before I even had a chance to bang on the service door, Andy was pushing it open from the inside.
“Hey,” he said. “Right on time. Where you been?”
“Around,” I said as I slipped inside and made sure the door was locked behind us. As we were walking past the service counter in the direction of the showroom, I said, “So did you find this card in Alan’s Rolodex?”
“Yeah,” Andy said, staying ahead of me. “I got it.”
“That’s great.”
Maybe I should have felt excited, but Kate Wood’s death and constantly looking over my shoulder for the police had ratcheted up my anxiety level.
We were in the dimly lit showroom now. Andy headed over to his desk. He seemed distracted. Every time I asked him a question, he answered while keeping his back to me.
“So what’s his last name?” I asked, standing just behind him and to one side as he looked through some papers on his desk.
“The card must be here someplace,” he said. “I just found it.”
I jumped when I heard the familiar sound of car doors opening. Not outside, in the lot, but right here in the showroom. You didn’t expect to hear that when there were no customers or other salespeople in the building.
The driver’s doors of an Odyssey van, a Pilot, and an Accord all opened at once. A man got out of each vehicle. Two of them were holding guns. One of them was Carter, from the front desk of the Just Inn Time. The second was Owen, the young man with the acne-scarred face who’d been on the desk with Carter that first night I’d come looking for Syd. And the third was the man who’d taken me for the test drive in the Civic.
“You’re looking for me,” he said, standing behind the open door of the Accord.
“So, you’re Gary,” I said. I looked from him to Carter, standing by the van. “Hey,” I said. Carter had nothing to say. Nor did Owen, getting out of the Pilot.
I looked at Andy, who’d finally turned around, but couldn’t look me in the eye. So he had set me up, but not with the cops. That, I thought in retrospect, might not have been so bad.
“Sorry, man,” he said.
THIRTY-NINE
“W
HAT HAPPENED
, A
NDY
?” I
ASKED.
“They promise to buy a car if you set me up?”
He looked hurt. “They were going to mess me up, big-time,” he said. “I asked a couple of people at the second bar about Gary, and someone made a call, and then he showed up with these other guys.” He sniffed. “Look, they just want to talk to you.” To the others, he said, “Isn’t that right?”
Gary, a lit cigarette dangling from between his lips, stepped forward, keeping the gun trained on me. He looked at the nose he’d damaged and grinned. “Can I ask you something?” he said.
“Sure.”
“Where’s your girlfriend get her Chinese food from? They got awesome egg rolls.”
“Did she find you or did you find her?” I asked.
“I was waiting for you, and then she came by with the food. She got a bit hysterical when she found me in the house.”
“You didn’t have to kill her,” I said.
“Figured the neighbors might have heard the shot, decided I’d have to get you later.”
“Hey, hold on,” Andy said. “We had a deal. You said you just wanted to talk to him.”
“Shut up, Andy,” Gary said, turning the weapon on him briefly. Andy shut up.
I happened to glance up at one of the closed-circuit TV cameras. Gary saw where I was looking and said, “Your friend here disabled that for us. He’s been super helpful.”
“What do you want?” I asked him.
“I want you to stop nosing around the hotel,” he said. “Forever. We don’t need someone like you drawing attention to what we’re doing there, messing things up for us with the cops or the INS or anybody else.”
“I’ve never seen you there,” I said to him. I nodded toward Carter and Owen. “You two, yeah.”
“I work off-site,” Gary said. “I’m what you call hotel support.”
“Support for what?”
He shrugged. “Hotel brings in the workers—”
“Illegals,” I said.
“And before we find them work, we need to get them clothes and food and shit, and I help with the financing of that.”
“By getting kids to rip off people’s credit cards.”
With his free hand, he took the cigarette from his mouth and blew smoke toward my face.
“My daughter did work at the hotel,” I said. “And everyone there covered it up.”
“The fact is,” Gary said, “your daughter should be grateful we covered up the truth.”
I waited.
“I mean, if you killed somebody, would
you
want the cops to know?”
Slowly, it started to make some sense. “Randall Tripe,” I said.
Gary nodded.
“Whatever my daughter did,” I said, “she must have had a very good reason.”
“I’ll tell you what she did. She shot the fucker. Her aim was off some. A little closer to the heart and he could have gone out quicker.”
“What was he doing?” I asked. “Why did she have to shoot him? You think I’m going to believe she just shot him for no good reason?”
Gary mulled that over some. “Okay, maybe. But dead’s dead. If she’d just minded her own business and done her job, none of this would have happened.”
“What
was
her job?”
“Front desk, like these two clowns,” Gary said. That’s what Syd had always said. “The hotel’s lousy with Chinks and slopes and Pakis doing the grunt work and getting rented out to other places, but you need people up front who can speak English. So when Sydney was recommended to us, she seemed just fine. She shouldn’t have interfered in other parts of our business.”
“What happened with Tripe?”
Gary grimaced, like he didn’t want to get into it. “Look, sometimes Randy got a bit, well, randy. But the guy had a point. He figured, hey, we’re giving these people the American dream, and they should be grateful. Randy had a way that he liked them—the ladies in particular—to show their gratitude. Your little girl got in the way of that.”
“What are you saying? Sydney shot this guy while he was raping someone?”
Gary didn’t want to talk about this anymore. He waved his gun at Andy, but asked me, “How’d you know to send this dipstick to look for me? How’d you make that connection?”
I said nothing.
“Let me guess. You were talking to that kid. The one who fucked things up for me at Dalrymple’s. That how you did it?”
I didn’t want to get Jeff in any more trouble than he was already. Gary took my silence as admission.
“That stupid fucker,” he said. “I was thinking we wouldn’t have to worry about him.”
“What about Patty?” I asked.
“Hmm?”
“Patty Swain. What’s happened to her? Where is she?”
He smiled. “You don’t have to worry about her anymore.”
Part of me died at that moment.
“And as far as your daughter’s concerned,” Gary added, “it’s just a matter of time now before we solve that problem.” He glanced at his watch. “They might even be there already.”
“You know where she is? You know where Syd is?”
Gary snapped his fingers at Owen. He approached, and I saw that he was holding a roll of duct tape.
“Stick out your hands,” Owen said. With Gary pointing the gun at me, I didn’t have much choice but to comply. He wrapped the tape around my wrists half a dozen times.
Andy said, “Listen, guys, come on, what are you doing here?”
“Shut up,” Gary said to him again.
“Jesus Christ, you’re not going to kill him, are you? That’s insane! You can’t just kill the guy!”
“No?” said Gary, who then raised his weapon to Andy’s forehead and pulled the trigger.
The bullet didn’t even knock him back all that much. His head snapped back, but the bullet went through him so quickly the rest of his body barely had a chance to react. His face had no time to register surprise. He dropped to the floor, his face landing on the tile, dark blood starting to pool almost instantly.
Gary took the cigarette from his mouth, blew out more smoke. “Fuck. There I go making an even bigger mess for myself. That is
so
me.”
Some droplets of blood, warm and wet, had splattered back onto my cheek.
I wasn’t the only one startled. Carter and Owen had jumped back when Gary pulled the trigger.
Carter said, “Jesus.” Owen was staring wide-eyed. The shot was still ringing in my ears, and must have been for them, too.
“So,” Carter said, “what now?”
“What do you mean, what now?” Gary snapped.
“Tell me we don’t have to drag him down to a Dumpster in Bridgeport, too. If we get pulled over along the way, we’re fucked.”
Gary was agitated. He had been fairly composed up to now, but having lost his cool with Andy seemed to have thrown him off his game.
“Let me think, let me think,” he said.
“I won’t say a word,” I said to him. “Just leave Sydney alone. Let her come home alive. She’ll never tell anyone what you’ve been doing at the hotel. It’s like you said. She’s killed someone. She’s not going to want to talk to the police.”
“Oh please,” he said. He pointed his gun down at Andy’s body and said to me, “You know, that’s
your
fucking fault. If you hadn’t sent him looking for me, he wouldn’t have ended up like that.”
There was some truth in that.
“Put this asshole somewhere while I think!” he shouted to Owen, who shoved me through the front door of the minivan and slammed the door so hard I was lucky to get my foot out of the way.
Carter said, “If that’s really what you want to do, we can take both of them, dump them in the garbage. We just drive slow so nobody pulls us over.”
Ashes dropped from Gary’s cigarette as he shook his head. “No, no, wait a second. We just fuckin’ leave both of them here. We don’t have to dump them anywhere. Let the cops come here and think what they want. The TV cameras are off. No one has to know we was even here.”
I’d been tossed so hard into the car I was hanging over the open area between the driver’s and passenger’s seats. Slowly, and awkwardly, with my wrists tied together, I tried to right myself behind the steering wheel. Once in a sitting position, I looked through the windshield. The van was surrounded by other vehicles: a Pilot directly ahead, a Civic to the rear, an Accord off to the right, a boxy Element to the left. Gary and Carter and Owen were in front of the van, off the right fender, debating how to handle this new predicament.
Andy’s body lay just ahead of the Element.
He was just a boy.
Duct tape had been wound around the outside of my wrists, but not looped around the insides. Below the steering wheel, I started twisting my arms back and forth, trying to create some play in the tape. I’d have had a go at the edge of it with my teeth, but one of the three might notice.
I wasn’t quite sure what I hoped to accomplish even if I got my hands free. There were three of them, two with guns. I could try to make a run for it, but I didn’t like my chances. The showroom doors that led outside couldn’t be opened without a key. I’d have to stay ahead of them all the way through the service department to get to a door I could push open.
“I think we just need to get out of here,” Carter said. “Kill Blake and we go.”
“Yeah,” said Owen. “I don’t want to hang around here.”
Gary was nodding. “Okay, okay.”
I kept twisting at the tape. Even with my wrists bound, maybe, when one of the three approached the door, I could kick it open, knock him back, jump out, run like hell.
I wouldn’t stand a chance.
I could lean on the horn. But how much attention was that likely to attract, really? And how long did I think I’d be able to lean on it before they dealt with me? A quick bullet through the windshield would put an end to it.
Horn aside, how long did I have, anyway?
I looked down, checked what progress I was making with the tape. Another minute and I thought I’d have it. The tape pulled at the hairs on my arm, but the pain didn’t mean much in the overall scheme of things.
Something about the center console caught my eye.
It was open just a crack. Just wide enough to see something shiny inside.
I felt my heart start to pound. I swung my two hands over to the right and tipped the compartment door back another inch.
A set of keys.
I leaned over slightly, caught the keys between the thumb and index finger of my right hand, and carefully removed them from the compartment without jiggling them. Awkwardly, I maneuvered my wrists so that I could slide the proper key into the ignition.
I was going to need my hands separated to pull this off. Because the moment I turned the ignition with one hand, I was going to have to lock the doors and power up the windows with the other.
I hoped, first of all, that I’d be around so Laura Cantrell could give me shit for what I was about to try, and second, that there was some gas in this goddamn van.
FORTY
I’
D LOOSENED THE TAPE ENOUGH
that I was able to slide my right hand through the loop. I took my left hand, tape hanging loose about the wrist, and positioned it over the controls on the driver’s door. I could have hit the power lock button now—the key didn’t have to be turned to make it work—but Gary and Carter and Owen would have heard the thunk of all the locks engaging and wondered what I was up to. That would give them a one-second head start, maybe enough to get to one of the two open windows and make a grab for me through them. A lot of vans on the market didn’t have power rear windows. This one did, but I’d caught a break there. They were already in the up position.
Of course, bulletproof glass was not currently an option. Even with the windows up, I was hardly going to be immune.
I got my other hand on the key.
The three of them were milling around the front of the van, looking down at Andy’s body, then at me. Carter and Owen were looking at Gary. He gave them a subtle nod.
They turned and glared at me behind the windshield.
I twisted the key forward.
The engine turning over would have sounded loud anyway inside the showroom, where sounds bounce off the glass and the other cars. But under these circumstances, it was like a bomb going off.
The three men jumped as the engine roared only three feet away from them. It took them a good half second to realize what I’d actually done.
By that time, I had the two front windows halfway up.
Carter moved first. He ran for my door, reached for the handle with his left hand, couldn’t open it, tried to hit me with his right, which was still holding the gun. He slipped his hand through as the window was about three quarters of the way up.
The window kept moving.
Owen had run after Carter, but there was nothing for him to do but watch what was happening. He slapped both hands on the front fender, as though he had superhuman strength and could hold the van there should it start to move.
Carter fired.
The gun went off about six inches from my left ear and sounded like a cannon blast, but with the way the window was traveling and forcing Carter’s hand higher and higher, his shot went north and into the ceiling of the van.
Gary, still standing near the front of the van, screamed, “What the fuck!”
The driver’s window went as high as it could, trapping Carter at the narrowest part of his wrist. He screamed.
I grabbed the shift lever mounted on the center on the dash, put the van into reverse, and floored it. I might normally have been inclined to watch where I was driving, but as the van began to move backward, I kept staring straight ahead at Gary, who had tossed his lit cigarette and was raising his gun, getting ready to fire.
The van took off with a squeal, the front tires spinning on the tile floor. To my left, Carter’s face slammed against the window as he was dragged along. Owen leapt backward.
It was a short trip.
Ten feet into the journey, the van smashed broadside into the Civic. The crash momentarily drowned out Carter’s screams. My head slammed back into the headrest.
Carter squeezed off another shot. I wasn’t sure where it went, exactly, but I didn’t feel a bullet tear through my brain, so I grabbed the shifter again and threw the automatic transmission down into first.
I tromped onto the accelerator, interrupting Carter as he banged on the driver’s door window with his free hand, trying to shatter it so he could free himself. Maybe if he’d been hitting it with something harder than his fist, he could have broken it. Owen, unarmed, was shunting back and forth, like the target in a game of dodgeball, clueless about what to do.
I realized we now had a soundtrack. There was a cacophony of car alarms going off.
As the car jumped toward Gary, he got off a shot just before diving off to my left. The windshield instantly spiderwebbed, the bullet hitting in the windshield’s upper right corner. Gary’s foot slipped in the blood leaking from Andy Hertz’s brain. He went sprawling onto the floor just beyond the van’s path.
Still dragging a screaming Carter, I slammed broadside into the Pilot. I must have knocked the back end of it a good two feet across the floor. I knew the airbag in the steering wheel in front of me was bound to deploy at this point, but it was like when you know the flash is going to go off when your picture is being taken. You think you can keep from blinking, but you can’t.
So it was still a shock when the white pillow exploded in front of me, a cloud moving at jet speed. It enveloped my face. Unable to see for the few seconds it took the bag to deflate, I blindly put the car into reverse, turned the wheel a bit to the right, and floored it again.
My head slammed into the headrest a second time. I’d hit the Civic once again, this time more to the front. The gun Carter had been holding slipped from his grasp, bumped my shoulder, and dropped down between the door and the seat.
I didn’t really have a moment to look for it.
I patted down the airbag so I could see what was happening. Carter I didn’t have to worry about, especially since he’d lost his gun. He was just coming along for the ride, wherever I decided to go, at least until his hand came off.
Owen had run to the far corner of the showroom, on the other side of the Pilot, just beyond my desk. Gary, still down on the floor next to Andy’s body, his shirt and pants smeared with blood, took another shot. He didn’t have time to aim and it went wild. A bullet pinged someplace into the sheet metal.
I heard a kind of primal screaming, almost animalistic. It took a moment to realize it was coming from me.
Gary was slipping as he struggled to his feet, preparing to get off another shot. I threw the car back into drive, pulled the wheel, hit the gas, and went straight for him.
He fired and this time his aim was better, hitting the windshield midway, about a foot left of center. The glass shattered into a million tiny pieces. Gary dove to my right, in the direction of a bank of offices, including Laura’s, and the van plowed into the back end of the Element, to the left of the Pilot I’d already pretty much destroyed. Glass shattered and the hood of the van buckled upward to the point where it was starting to obstruct my view.
Carter’s wrist was bleeding. He was still banging on the glass, screaming at the top of his lungs.
I needed to get out of there.
I hit the brakes, put the van in reverse, took a millisecond to plot a way out. I needed to find a wide expanse of glass, an area without any partitions, if I wanted to drive out of here. I was thinking it would be almost better to smash my way out in reverse; otherwise the shards of glass coming through my front window—which no longer had any glass in it—could end up beheading me.
With enough speed, I might be able to blast a hole between the Civic and a metallic blue Accord that had, so far, escaped any damage.
“Please!” Carter screamed. “Put the window down!”
I glanced at him long enough to say, “Fuck you.”
I shoved my foot down on the accelerator. Carter, anticipating the move, tried running alongside, but I’d altered my course a little, heading for the back end of the Accord, squeezing in past the end of the Civic.
The front end of the Civic knocked Carter’s legs out from under him. As I sped past the front of the car, Carter continued to be dragged over it by his wrist.
The Accord moved a few feet, but not enough to clear me a path.
Somewhere, I thought I smelled gasoline.
I looked ahead, and Gary was on the move, closing in at two o’clock. I moved the shift lever back into drive, steered right, and went for him. He dove farther right but I kept on going, smashing through the door and frosted window glass of Laura’s office. Shards flew across the crumpled hood and slid over the dashboard.
Carter, no longer screaming, was hanging off my door like a rag doll.
The rear window on the passenger side suddenly exploded. It had been shot out. I didn’t have time to see where Gary was. I backed out of Laura’s office at high speed, went barreling halfway across the showroom, and smashed into the other end of the Element, threw the van back in drive and hurtled forward, this time taking out the office next to Laura’s. The leasing manager’s. He would not be pleased.
More shots rang out. Gary was running around to the far perimeter of the showroom, using the smashed cars as cover. I was leaning over as far as I could while driving, using the van’s doors and the dashboard for my own cover.
Car alarms continued to whoop.
Again, I put the van into reverse and my foot to the floor. The only thing I didn’t want to hit was Andy’s body, and I was worried the van was heading in that direction, so I pulled left on the wheel, glanced back, broadsided the Element again, and before I’d even turned to look forward I’d put the car in drive and given it gas.
I swung my head around, looked ahead, and there was Gary.
He was between the van and the Accord. He was holding the gun in both hands, arms outstretched, taking a bead on me.
He shifted slightly to the left. I turned left and kept on going.
The gun fired, but it went off just as the van connected with Gary, so the bullet angled up toward the ceiling. There was, maybe, a hundredth of a second when all Gary was feeling was the front of the van barreling into him. By the time that hundredth of a second had passed, he was feeling the Accord at his back.
If he made a sound when the life was crushed out of him, it couldn’t be heard for the tearing and wrenching of sheet metal. At the moment of impact, the gun flew out of his hand and sailed over the van, landing somewhere on the showroom floor behind me.
Gary’s mouth was frozen into a grotesque grin, his face smeared with blood.
I sat there a moment, letting the engine idle. I looked out my window. Carter appeared to be as dead as Gary. It must have been when his lower body hit the Civic and was dragged across it. Maybe the impact severed his spine. I powered the window down an inch, freeing Carter’s wrist and allowing him to slide to the floor.
The engine was still running, the alarms were still blaring, but a moment of calm washed over me.
“Don’t move, motherfucker!”
I glanced up in my rearview mirror. It was Owen, holding the gun that had flown out of Gary’s hands.
I don’t know quite how to explain this. I’d been terrified through everything that had happened so far, but now… now I was just annoyed.
I put the car into reverse and gave it everything I had.
The tires squealed again and the van powered its way past the Pilot, kept on going, took out my desk, and then there was a huge crash as the tail end went through the massive plate-glass window.
The ass end of the van dropped two feet to the ground, the front end went skyward. The front wheels, suspended in midair, spun at high speed.
I looked down between the seat and the door, knowing Carter’s gun was there someplace.
Now there was a new noise added to the mix. My going through the showroom glass had activated the building’s security alarm.
The van was so out of kilter I couldn’t get a look at the showroom, didn’t know where Owen was. I twisted in my seat, shoved my right arm down in the narrow space between the door and the seat.
I found the gun. I slipped my fingers around something cold and slender, what had to be the barrel. I fished it up between the seat and the door, thought I had it, but as I tried to clear the gun butt past the seatback adjustment lever, it slipped from my hand and dropped back down, farther out of reach than it had been before.
Beneath the sirens, I thought I could hear someone walking across broken glass. Owen was working his way around the van.
“You’re not going anyplace now!” he shouted.
Through the open windshield, there was the flickering of light. It took a second for me to realize it was from flames.
I jammed my hand down into the space again, hunted around for the gun. It was caught under the edge of a floor mat. I got my fingers around the barrel again, pulled the gun back up, turned it around so that my hand wrapped around the butt, the finger around the trigger.
Suddenly my door was yanked open. The crash must have somehow released the lock.
Owen said, “Hey, asshole, I’m going to—”
I shot him.
“Fuck!” he screamed, toppling backward onto the asphalt just outside the showroom window. Gravity swung the door closed, but I kicked it open with my foot and scrambled down to the ground, the van’s engine still running.
Fire was spreading through the showroom.
Owen was splayed on his back. I could see red blossoming on his left shoulder. So I hadn’t fired a fatal shot. His right hand still held the gun, but before he could train it on me I stood over him and pointed Carter’s gun directly at his head.
“Throw away the gun,” I said.
“What?” he said. There were so many alarms blaring he couldn’t hear me.
“Throw it!” I said.
He tossed it a few feet away.
“Where’s my daughter?” I shouted at him. “Gary said he knew where she was!”
“I don’t know!” he said.
I fired the gun into the ground between his legs.
“Jesus Christ!” he said.
“Gary said they were on their way to get her. Where is she?”
“I can’t tell you,” he said. “I can’t.”
“I’m going to shoot you in the knee if you don’t tell me,” I said.
“Listen, if I tell you they’ll—”
I held the gun over his knee and pulled the trigger. The resulting scream momentarily drowned out the various alarms.
“The next one goes in your other knee,” I said. “Where is she?”
“Oh God!” he screamed, writhing on the ground.
“Where is my daughter?” I asked.
“Vermont!” he wept.
“Where in Vermont?”
“Stowe!” he said. “Somewhere in Stowe!”
“Where in Stowe?”
“They don’t know! Just somewhere!”
“Who’s going for her?”
Before he could answer, he passed out. Or died.
I walked over and picked Gary’s gun up off the ground. I might need two. As I was heading back to the Beetle, the entire showroom erupted into flames behind me. A car’s gas tank exploded. A fireball blew out one of the other plate-glass windows.