No Safe House (7 page)

“Wait!” I shouted through the glass.

She dropped her arm, waited to hear the click, then swung open the door and got into the front passenger seat. She wouldn’t look at me, but the brief glimpse I had of her face revealed damp cheeks.

“What the hell happened?” I asked.

“Just go.”

“Where’s your friend? How did you end up here? Why are you alone?”

“Just go,” she said again. “Just drive.
Please
.”

I drove out between the pumps, got back onto New Haven, and headed west.

“Grace,” I said, firmly but gently, “you can’t expect me to drive out to some gas station in the middle of the night to pick you up without your offering up some kind of explanation.”

“It’s not the middle of the night,” she said. “It’s only after ten. Ten
fifteen
. You always exaggerate.”

“Okay, it’s ten. What’s going on? You said something happened.”

“I just want to get home. Then … maybe … I can tell you.”

We rode in silence the rest of the way. I kept glancing over at her. Her head hung low, her hands were in her lap, and she appeared to be studying her fingers, which she laced together, took apart, laced together again. It looked to me like she was trying to keep them from shaking.

She was getting out of the car before I had it in park, then made a beeline for the front door. By the time I’d caught up to her, she was trying to unlock it with her own key, but her hand was shaking so much she couldn’t slide it into the lock.

“Let me,” I said, edging her out of the way and using mine.

Once the door was open, she ran up the stairs as fast as she could.

“Grace!” I shouted. If she thought she was going to hole up in her room and close the door and avoid an interrogation, she was very, very wrong. I chased her up the stairs, but she didn’t run into her room. She was in the bathroom, on her knees in front of the toilet.

She attempted to pull back her hair as she retched once, then a second time. I had mixed feelings about whether to help her. When your kids experiment with drinking, maybe they need to endure the consequences without sympathy. Although if Grace had been drinking, surely I’d have smelled it on her breath when she got into the car. I hadn’t noticed anything.

Grace gave it a third try, but hardly anything came up. I handed her a thick wad of tissues to blot her face, squatted down next to her, and reached over to the handle to flush the toilet. Grace slid back from the toilet and propped herself up against the wall.

It was my first real look at her, and she did not look good.

“You going to be okay?” I asked her.

No response.

“What did you drink? I didn’t notice anything on your breath.”

“Nothing,” she whispered.

“Grace.”

“Nothing! Okay?”

Maybe she really was coming down with the flu or something, and I was giving her hell for being sick.

“You sick? Did you eat something bad?”

“I’m not sick,” she said, so quietly I could barely hear her.

I said nothing for the better part of a minute. I took the wadded tissues in her hand, tossed them in the basket, then ran a washcloth under a cold tap. “Here,” I said. She wiped her mouth again, then put the cool cloth on her forehead.

“It’s time,” I said.

Grace fixed her wet eyes on me. I thought I saw fear in them.

“You weren’t with Sarah,” I said.

“Sandra.”

“Okay. You weren’t with Sandra, were you?”

Her head moved side to side half an inch.

“And you didn’t go to the movies.”

“No.”

“Who were you with?” I asked. When she didn’t respond, I added, “What’s his name?”

Grace swallowed. “Stuart.”

I nodded. “Stuart what?”

She mumbled something.

“I didn’t catch that,” I said.

“Koch.”

I had to think a second. “Stuart Koch?”

A furtive glance my way, then she turned away. “Yeah.”

“I taught a Stuart Koch a couple of years ago. Tell me it’s not that Stuart Koch.”

“It might be,” she said. “I mean, yeah, it is. He went to Fairfield, but he dropped out this year.”

That was the Stuart I knew. “Jesus, Grace, how did you hook
up with him?” I was trying to get my head around it. Stuart Koch was the kind of kid who’d ask you how to spell DUI. A chronic underachiever if ever there was one. “Where’d you meet him?”

“Does it matter?”

“He’s a lost kid. Hopeless. Going nowhere. Honestly.”

She shot me a look. “So what are you saying? He wasn’t worth saving because he’s not a girl?”

Her aim was good with that one.

I knew that was a reference to a student I’d had seven years ago. Jane Scavullo, her name was. A troubled kid, always getting into fights. No one on staff had any use for her. But I’d thought there was something there. It came through in her writing assignments. She had a real gift, and I ended up going to bat for her. Of course, there were some extenuating circumstances, too, but those aside, Jane had struck me as a kid who could amount to more than she herself could have imagined. She ended up going to college, and not that long ago, I’d run into her.

I’d talked about her from time to time with Grace, so she knew the story.

“It’s not that,” I said defensively. “Jane had … potential. If Stuart has any, it wasn’t evident to me at the time.” I hesitated. “If I’ve misjudged him, feel free to set me straight.”

She had nothing to say to that, and I let it go—I sensed there was a more immediate problem involving this kid. Were they going together? If so, when had it started? How long had this been going on without my knowledge? Had they had some kind of fight this evening? A breakup?

“What were you doing at that gas station?”

“I walked there,” she said, wiping a tear from her cheek. “I walked for, like, ten minutes or so, and when I got there I figured it would be an easy place for you to find to come get me.”

“Was Stuart driving?” A nod. “But he left you to walk on your own at night, to that gas station? That sure as hell speaks well of him.”

“It’s not like that,” she said. “You don’t understand.”

“I don’t understand because you haven’t told me anything. Did Stuart hurt you? Did he do something he shouldn’t have?”

Her lips parted, as if she was about to say something, then closed.

“What?” I asked. “Grace, I know that maybe some things would be easier to talk about with your mother, but did he … did he try to make you do things that made you uncomfortable?”

A slow, torturous nod.

“Oh, honey,” I said.

“It’s not what you think,” she said. “It wasn’t … it wasn’t that kind of stuff. He knew about this car.”

“What car?”

“A Porsche. He knew where there was one that he wanted to take me for a ride in.”

“But it wasn’t his car?”

Grace shook her head.

“Did it belong to someone he knew?”

“No,” she whispered. “He was kind of going to steal it. I mean, not forever, but just for a little while, and then he was going to take it back.”

I put a hand to my forehead. “Good God, Grace, tell me you and this boy didn’t take someone’s car for a joyride.” My mind made several leaps in a nanosecond. They’d stolen a car. They’d hit a pedestrian. They’d fled the scene and—

“We didn’t steal it,” she said. But she didn’t say it in a way that gave me any reason to feel relieved.

“You got caught?
He
got caught? Trying to take the car?”

“No,” Grace said.

I folded the lid down on the toilet and took a seat. “You gotta help me here, Grace. I can’t play twenty questions with you over and over until we get to what happened. Tell me that when Stuart went to take this car, that’s when you walked away.”

“Not totally,” she said, and sniffed. I handed her more tissues
and she blew her nose. Even if she wasn’t sick, she looked terrible. Eyes red and bloodshot, skin pale, her hair in tangled strands. An image of her when she was five or six flashed before my eyes, when Cynthia and I took her to Virginia Beach and she was covered in sand from head to toe, building a castle at the water’s edge, flashing a smile with three missing teeth.

Did that girl still exist? Was she still here? Buried deep inside this one curling in on herself in front of me?

I waited. I could sense her steeling herself. Getting ready to tell me, and then face the music after I knew what she’d done.

“I think …”

“You think what?”

“I think …”

“Jesus, Grace, you think
what
?”

“I think … I think I might have shot somebody.”

GORDIE
Plunkett was starting to think everybody was going to be late for this meet tonight. Even the boss.

He spoke to the guy behind the desk in the motel office, rented the room, and not for the going rate, either, since they wouldn’t be messing up the sheets. This was the kind of place many customers would take for an hour, and Gordie knew Vince wasn’t going to need it for much more than that, unless their latest customers were late.

Even then, it wouldn’t be an issue. If people you were meeting with didn’t show up on time, you didn’t wait around. Made you look weak. Vince had taught Gordie that. You didn’t sit on your ass while someone disrespected you. You got up and you left. Besides, someone being late could mean something bad. Maybe the cops had picked them up. You didn’t wait around to find out.

Gordie just hoped the boss, and Bert and Eldon, managed to get here before their latest clients.

Bert Gooding showed up first.

“Where’s Eldon the Cock?” Bert asked, getting out of his car
and walking over to Gordie, who was standing on the sidewalk outside of room twelve.

“Eldon? What about you? Where you been? And where’s Vince?”

“I think maybe he had a doctor’s appointment this afternoon and it took a lot out of him,” Bert said.

“He looks like shit lately.”

“Yeah. First his wife, and then he gets it. But he should be along any second. I don’t know where Eldon is.”

“Jeez,” Gordie said. “Eldon’s supposed to be covering the front door. You’re supposed to be out back—”

“I know where I’m supposed to be.”

“And I’m inside. That’s the way Vince likes it.”

“Yeah, well, Vince don’t run as tight a ship as he used to,” Bert observed.

Gordie’s eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean? You mean because he’s been sick?”

“That’s just part,” Bert said. “He’s not cracking the whip. Things are sliding. We should be out jacking cars, pulling over trucks, the kind of stuff we used to do.”

“Vince hasn’t got the energy for that anymore,” Gordie said. “He should do the chemo.”

“He doesn’t want to.”

“He doesn’t do the chemo, he’s just hurting himself.”

“Don’t argue with me about it,” Gordie said. “Where the fuck is Eldon?”

“All I’m sayin’ is, I don’t like the way things are going.”

“Then maybe you should bring it up with the boss,” Gordie said, using a tone almost daring Bert to do it, knowing he never would. Vince Fleming might not be the man he once was, but you didn’t cross him. “Anyway, what’s your excuse?”

“For what?”

“For being late.”

Bert shrugged. “Jabba.” As in Jabba the Hutt, his pet name, at least away from home, for his wife, Janine.

Gordie didn’t have to ask for details. Janine had a face that would make a Pamplona bull turn around and go back, and a disposition to match. Gordie figured it was a testament to Bert’s character that he hadn’t killed her. God knows he had the wherewithal, and plenty of experience at getting rid of bodies. He could take her up to the farm, feed the pigs for a couple of days. Unlike Bert, Gordie had never married. He’d always figured paying someone once a week was a simpler way to take care of one’s needs. The irony was, Bert did the same.

“There’s Vince,” Bert said, pointing to the Dodge Ram pickup turning into the lot. He parked the truck, got out and walked over to the two men.

“Where’s the Cock?” Vince asked. It was Eldon’s bad luck to have a last name that, while spelled differently, looked as though it would be pronounced similarly to the male member.

“Don’t know,” Bert said.

Vince Fleming angled his head to one side. “And why don’t you know?”

Slowly, he said, “Because I haven’t called him.”

“Why don’t you do that, then?”

Bert got out his phone as Vince said to Gordie, “This the room?”

“Yeah. I did a Dunkin’ run. There’s some coffee and shit in there.”

Vince grumbled something unintelligible as he went into the unit. Gordie sidled up to Bert, who was waiting for Eldon to pick up, and said, “I was sure you were going to ask the boss why he was late.”

“Fuck off.” Bert shook his head in frustration. “Eldon’s not answering. It’s going to voice—Hey, asshole, Bert here. You should already be here. If you’re not here in the next two minutes,
you better call with a good reason why.” He ended the call, put the phone back into his pocket.

“I’m goin’ ’round back,” he said. It was their standard operating procedure. Watch the meeting place from all sides.

Gordie went into the motel room. It had all the charm one could expect for twenty bucks an hour. Vince was putting cream into one of the takeout coffees, helping himself to a strawberry-filled donut. Biting into it, he said, “They say these things’ll kill ya.”

Gordie didn’t know whether he was supposed to laugh at that, so he played it safe and said nothing.

“What’s up with Eldon?”

“Bert left a message.”

Vince went to the window, used two sugar-dusted fingers to pry apart the chipped and grimy blinds. “I need someone out there before these assholes arrive.”

“You want me to cover the front, have Bert come inside?”

Vince took another bite. “No, let’s wait. Hang on—someone’s coming.”

A pair of headlights swept the lot as a car turned in off the street. It was an old, rusted VW Golf that sounded like a lawn mower, with Eldon behind the wheel. Bald as a cue ball, but a head more basketball-sized. Vince had been expecting to see Eldon in his massive old Buick.

“I’m going out,” Vince said to Gordie, who was prying another coffee out of the cardboard takeout tray. Eldon was backing the Golf into a spot across from the unit so he’d have a good view of anything that went down. But what was going down now was Vince, and he looked pissed. He was walking toward him slowly but deliberately. Vince hadn’t been able to run for some time, not since he’d been shot seven years earlier. The bullet damaged the muscles in his gut, among other things, and made it difficult for him to move quickly.