Bad Guys (21 page)

“Just asking,” I said.

“Look,” said Trimble, his tone softening a bit, “I’m willing to work a two-way street here. You were there, you know Lawrence. If there’s something you know that you think might be relevant, you share it with me, and anything I get, I give it to you first. We make an arrest, I call you.”

“Even before Dick Colby?”

Trimble actually laughed. “Even before Dick Colby. I’ve given him lots of stuff in the past. Preferably over the phone, if you get my drift.”

“I do,” I said, feeling that maybe I’d broken the ice a bit with Trimble. If he was willing to make fun of Colby, he couldn’t be all bad. “If it’s okay with you, I’d like to check in with you once a day, see if you’ve got anything. And if I’ve got something, I’ll call you.”

“Anytime,” Trimble said. There was a pause. He added, “Night or day.”

“Deal,” I said.

I’d barely replaced the receiver when the phone rang.

“Hey,” said Sarah. “We’re on a break here. This guy from the newspaper association is telling us how to
listen
to our reporters’ concerns, to imagine how they must
feel
when their copy is chopped to ribbons, as a way of making a newsroom more harmonious. I want to feed this guy into a paper shredder. How’s Lawrence doing?”

“Holding his own, I think. Not great, but not getting worse.”

“Have you seen him?”

“I went there this afternoon, a couple of hours ago.”

“How’d he look?”

“Bad.”

“Y’able to talk to him at all?”

I paused. “Only a little. I did most of the talking. He’s hooked up to a lot of machines and shit. Looks like a Borg.”

“Huh?” Sarah, not a
Star Trek
fan, missed the reference. “I’m outa here tomorrow, after the morning session. Should be back home late afternoon, unless I decide to pop into the office first.”

“Don’t bother. Just come home. We miss you.”

Maybe it was something about Letitia’s story about looking after Lawrence when they were young, but more and more, I was appreciating that the only sure thing that protected us from the bad things out there were the people closest to us.

I wrote my story, let Nancy know it had been filed and updated with a call to Trimble, and left the building. The Virtue started for me just like that. Good ol’ Otto. He knew what he was doing. I decided to stop on the way home for some groceries. Maybe, just maybe, there’d be a chance for me, Angie, and Paul to have a meal together.

The cross street at the bottom of Crandall is a busy thoroughfare lined with shops, cafés, restaurants, and a small theater that shows second-run stuff. It was a nice day, and the cafés had moved some tables and chairs out onto the sidewalks. I found a spot by the curb and went in Angelo’s Fruit Market and bought the makings of a salad, then went next door, to the fresh pasta place, for some linguine and a tomato-Alfredo sauce, and as I was coming back out I glanced in the direction of the café two doors down, where there were half a dozen tables out front, and thought I recognized the person sitting with his back to me, fiddling with a laptop computer.

I came up behind him, this young man in a long black jacket, and peered over his shoulder. There was a map on the screen, which, at a glance, looked like our neighborhood. There was a small, pulsing dot moving across it.

“Lost Morpheus again?” I asked.

Startled, Trevor Wylie whirled around, reaching up with his right arm and easing shut the lid of his laptop at the same time.

“Mr. Walker,” he said, taking off his sunglasses so he could see me more clearly.

“How are you, Trevor?” I said, moving around in front of him.

“Good, I’m good,” he said. “Whatcha doing around here?”

“Just picking up some things for dinner. How about you?”

He motioned to the paper cup next to his computer. “Having a coffee, doing a bit of surfing, homework.”

Across the street I noticed Trevor’s black Chevy, sitting low in the back as though the rear springs were going. It was a hulking piece of Detroit machinery amidst smaller, newer, mostly imported cars. Black jacket, black car, the wandering black Annihilator. The forces of darkness were aligned against me.

“That really is an amazing program you’ve got there,” I said, resting my bags on the top of the table. “If I ever get a dog, I guess I’ll have to get something like that.”

“Sure.”

“What’s your homework?”

“Just stuff. Nothing particularly interesting.” He looked around, thinking maybe, by the time he looked back, I’d be gone. But I was still there. “How’s Angie?” he asked.

“She’s good, Trevor.”

“I think she might have something wrong with her cell phone,” he said. “Sometimes, I try to call her, it doesn’t go through.”

“You know how cells are. What were you calling her about? I could pass on a message.”

“College stuff. I was thinking I might try Mackenzie, I think they have a computer science program there, and that would be right up my alley, you know? And if my classes were around the same time as Angie’s, we could share rides. I could drive one week, she could drive the next, that kind of thing. But I’ll talk to her about it myself. You don’t have to worry about it.”

“The thing is,” I said, “I do worry.”

“What?”

“I worry. I’m kind of a worrier, Trevor. Ask anyone who knows me. I’m a bit over the top at times. Especially where members of my family are concerned. Like Angie. I worry about her. All fathers worry about their daughters.”

“Yeah, I guess they would.” Trevor slipped his shades back on. “There’s a lot of freaky people out there.”

“That’s right,” I said. “So I try to keep as close an eye on her as I can, you know? To make sure she’s okay. Because if something ever happened to her, I don’t know what I’d do.”

Trevor nodded in agreement. “I can understand that. Totally.”

“I hope you do,” I said.

We didn’t speak for a moment. Trevor broke the silence. “So, you’ve written some SF.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve done a few sci-fi novels.”

“I like sci-fi. But as much as I like the scientific aspect of it, I find there’s something mystical about it, too. There are forces other than those of nature at play. I don’t think science rules everything in the universe.”

“Maybe not,” I said.

“And I believe, sometimes for reasons that we can’t possibly understand, that certain things are meant to happen.”

“Okay.”

“And that there are people out there that we’re destined to meet up with. That everyone has, from the moment they’re born, a certain other person that they’re supposed to hook up with for them to fulfill their destiny.”

“I don’t know much about that,” I said. “It’s not the sort of thing I’ve written about. But it’s one point of view.”

Trevor smiled knowingly, nodded slowly. “It certainly is.”

I tilted my head in the direction of the black Chevy. “That’s your car, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t see a lot of those around,” I said. “They haven’t made that model for quite a few years, have they?”

“I don’t suppose so.”

“And yet, with so few of them around, I saw one at the mall last night, at Midtown? Same color as yours, parked right by the doors.”

Trevor swallowed. “Huh.”

“And then, I was heading out of town, toward Oakwood? And I saw another one, just like it, same color, everything.”

This time, Trevor didn’t even have a “huh” to offer.

“Isn’t that a coincidence,” I said. “That I’d see two cars exactly the same, in different places, in the same evening.”

I couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses. Couldn’t tell whether he was looking away.

“Trevor, take your glasses off for a sec.” He sat rigidly, made no move to do what I’d asked. “Trevor, just for a second.”

Slowly, making a ritual of it, he removed the glasses. I eyed him intently.

“I would never want anyone, ever, to hurt my daughter, or scare her, or cause her any trouble.”

“Of course not,” he said, not looking away.

“I just wanted to make myself clear about that.”

“Absolutely,” he said.

“So we understand each other,” I said.

“We do,” Trevor said. I nodded my farewell to him, and moved on.

“And don’t buy my son booze anymore,” I added.

“Whatever you say.”

I turned and walked away.

I had two surprises shortly after that.

The first: As I walked by Trevor’s Chevy on the way back to my car, there, asleep in the backseat, was Morpheus.

The second: After I got back in the Virtue, I turned onto Crandall. Looking up the street, I noticed the back end of a big black Annihilator SUV. Trolling past my house, slowly, then picking up speed as it headed north.

“CAN WE WATCH TV WHILE WE EAT?” Paul asked, standing next to me in the kitchen.

I was putting linguine on three plates, and had put the salad in a glass bowl with a couple of tongs.

“I don’t know,” I said. “You know how your mother feels about having the TV on during dinner.”

“Yeah, but Mom’s not here. And
The Simpsons
is on.”

This did raise an interesting question. Did we have to play by Sarah’s rules if Sarah wasn’t home? Especially when
The Simpsons
was on?

While I made up my mind, I said to Paul, “Call your sister, tell her dinner is ready.”

Without moving an inch away from me, Paul shouted, loud enough to make the wineglasses on the kitchen shelf ring, “Angie! Dinner!”

“Thanks,” I said.

She’d gotten home the same time as I had, headed straight up to her room and closed the door. I’d barely had a chance to ask whether she was dining with us, and she’d had only enough time to grunt “Yes.”

Paul grabbed the TV remote as he took his plate to the table. We have a TV in the kitchen, which we often have tuned to the news. He turned it on, flipped through a few channels until he had the one he wanted.

“Oh!” said Paul. “It’s the one where Homer’s an astronaut.”

That was, I had to admit, a pretty good one. Particularly the part where he eats the potato chips, rotating in zero gravity in a parody of the space station docking maneuver in
2001: A Space Odyssey
. “Okay,” I said, pulling up a chair.

And besides, I wanted something to take my mind off things, so that I’d stop obsessing about Trevor, Lawrence, what Angie was doing visiting Trixie, and that Annihilator.

It wasn’t like there was only one Annihilator in the city, or even one black one. Lots of people owned them. The sports editor had one, in yellow. There was a guy around the block had one, in green. And I’d seen plenty of black ones since they started coming onto the market a couple of years ago. It was probably the most popular color.

So a black Annihilator driving up my street was not reason to panic. A black Annihilator racing up the driveway, plowing through the front of the house, that would be reason to panic.

Half an hour earlier, when the SUV had made a left at the next cross street on Crandall, I had tromped on the accelerator. When the Virtue didn’t take off with as much speed as I’d hoped, I literally leaned forward in the seat, as if rocking my own body would give the car some momentum. If I could get close enough to the truck, maybe I’d know for sure that it wasn’t the one from the other night. For example, if I could read the license plate, that right there would be all the evidence I needed to relax. The plates on the one that had chased me and Lawrence, that rammed into Brentwood’s, had been obscured.

And it had had deeply tinted windows. If the SUV that had driven up Crandall and past my house had regular windows, windows that allowed you to see who was driving and riding inside, that would be even more proof that it was not the same vehicle.

I got to the cross street, turned left. The SUV was gone.

I sped up to the next intersection, glanced both ways. They weren’t hard to spot, these Annihilators, towering above all the other traffic as they did. But I didn’t see one, not in either direction. So I drove home, slightly rattled, as always.

Once I’d put the linguine into a pot of boiling water, I went up to our bedroom and dumped the contents of the Gap bags I’d left there that morning onto the bed. I ripped off tags, put the shirts and “loose fit” khakis on hangers.

Angie’d seemed a bit hurt in the morning that I hadn’t been wearing any of my new purchases, so I stripped down, pulled on a new pair of boxers, buttoned up one of the new shirts, and stepped into a pair of tan khakis. Loose fit was right. Although they hugged my waist well enough with a belt, I had all this room in them, certainly compared to the jeans I’d been wearing. They were loose enough in the leg that I might be able to pull them on over shoes, a dressing routine I had abandoned around the same time I’d stopped making peanut butter and marshmallow Fluffernutter sandwiches. I admired myself briefly in the mirror, then went down to finish dinner preparations.

I was waiting for Angie to show before taking my first bite of dinner, and when Paul shoveled in a mouthful of pasta, I gave him a disapproving look.

“She could be forever,” he said. “I think she’s making herself look beautiful, and I can’t wait that long.”

“What’s she getting all dolled up for?”

“She’s probably going out.”

I glanced at the fridge, where we’ve posted an oversize calendar and an erasable marker for keeping track of everyone’s activities. For tonight, Angie had scribbled, “Lecture.”

“She has a lecture tonight,” I said.

“Yeah, but I think she’s going out after.”

I leaned in, as though we were conspirators. “She seeing someone?”

“Hey, don’t ask me. You want to know what she’s up to, ask her. I know how this works. I squeal on her, then you’ll be pumping her for information on what I’m doing.” He twirled some more linguine onto his fork. “I’m going to eat this. I don’t care that she’s not here.”

“How about you?” I asked. “You seeing someone?” Paul put the fork into his mouth, his cheek poking out on one side. I went on, “What about, what was her name, Wendy?”

Paul shook his head. He chewed a few times, washed the linguine down with some water. “I never went out with her. Besides, she has a butter face.”