We Are Here (11 page)

Tall, slim, in a long black coat.

“Got him,” I muttered into the phone.

“You sure?”

“Same guy. Even the same coat. Hold your position—I’m going to try to get around back.”

I started moving away, attempting to keep a line of people between me and the man. This was hard to do without banging into people, and there was a certain amount of maternal muttering.

“What’s he doing now?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

The truth was, I’d lost sight of him. I started trying to arc through the crowd toward the back, near to where I’d seen him last. Over at the gate Catherine was waving at two little girls running across the small playground on the other side of the fence.

I looked back across the press of women focused on the school gate. I caught a glimpse of the dark coat through a gap. He seemed to be heading away. To leave? Or to get in position so he was ready to follow?

Catherine was leading her daughters away, but coming in my direction. I hurriedly turned my back.

“Change of plan,” I muttered. I gave Catherine twenty seconds and set off after her, trying to remain discreet. “She’s coming this way.”

“So now what do I do?”

“Head up Ninth. No, actually … come up this way too.”

Catherine was near the corner of Tenth now. The man in the coat was still following her, about forty yards back. I got a clear enough view of him from behind to confirm that the coat was very long, almost floor length, and he had thick, dark hair.

I had to turn away for a moment after banging into a mother with three apparently identical boys, but looked back in time to see one of Catherine’s daughters disappearing around the corner holding her mother’s hand.

But now I couldn’t see the man in the coat. Kristina arrived at my shoulder, breathing hard. “What’s he doing now?”

“I’ve lost him again. Catherine just left the street. Come on.”

I started to trot. When we turned onto Tenth, I fanned wide to the edge of the sidewalk and saw Catherine hurrying her children up the block. “I still don’t see …”

“Is that him?”

Kristina was pointing across the avenue. “It can’t be,” I said, peering at a figure up at the next intersection on the other side. “There’s no way he could have … But yes, that’s him.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Follow Catherine. I’m going over there.”

The traffic along the avenue was heavy but slow, snarled by the rain. I threaded across the street between cars and yellow cabs, glancing back to see Kristina heading up the other side after Catherine, and doing it right, not closing the gap too much.

By the time I got to the other side, the figure had crossed 15th and was heading up the next block. I hurried after, trying to work out how to play the next few minutes. The chances now looked high that the guy was going to track Catherine to 18th Street and her house. She’d told me she’d thought she’d seen someone on her corner, so he evidently knew where she lived. The question was if he’d go further today—and follow her right to her door—or if he’d hang back as usual. I had to make a judgment call and I didn’t want to get it wrong, because something told me we were seeing a ramping up.

Following a woman on her own is one thing. Doing it when she’s got kids with her is far more serious.

We were closing in on 18th. I saw Kristina slowing so as not to be too obvious. The person in the coat was a block ahead of me now, walking fast with his head down, but showed no signs of crossing the road—and so I signaled to Kris to abandon Catherine and come to my side instead, waving to indicate she should go on half a block before she crossed so the guy in the coat would be stuck between us.

She got it, taking a diagonal course across the road, jogging up between the two lanes of traffic.

I started walking faster too, closing the distance with the man ahead. When Kris reached the sidewalk, she was sixty yards in front. She caught sight of the guy in the coat, glanced back for instructions.

I pointed at him and mouthed the word “Now.”

We started to run toward each other, matching pace so he would be trapped between us. It struck me that we hadn’t established a plan for what would happen at that point. I hadn’t really believed it would arise.

“Hey,” I said loudly when I was down to ten feet. “I want to talk to you.”

The figure stopped dead and turned.

It was a woman.

Slim and tall with thick, dark hair and strong features, eyes the gray end of blue.

She stared at me like a cornered animal, body tensed for flight. Kristina faltered ten feet away on the other side, seeing the same as me and not knowing what to do.

Disbarred from throwing myself at the person and tackling her to the ground, I hesitated.

It was enough. The woman darted away from us and across the street with disconcerting speed.

I lunged across the street just as the lights went green. Kristina got stuck, so I left her to it and ran. On the other side of the avenue I slipped on the wet curb and went careering across the sidewalk. By the time I got my balance, the woman was half a block down the avenue, headed back the way we’d just come, looking like she was going to take the turn onto 16th street.

I ran after her. She’d gotten a head start, but I’m pretty fit and was gathering speed fast. I hurtled around the corner and onto 16th, confident that somewhere along its hundred-yard stretch I’d be able to catch her.

I got twenty yards down the street before realizing I couldn’t see her anymore. I kept moving, looking both ways, at passing doorways, even up at first-floor windows, convinced I was somehow just being dumb.

By halfway along I knew it wasn’t so. The street was deserted but for a man at the bottom of one of the redbrick staircases I’d noticed a couple of nights before. He was middle-aged and dressed in a brown corduroy suit and watching me with an amused expression.

When I got closer I realized that he was wearing a priest’s collar. I stopped running.

“Is everything okay?” His voice was calm and friendly.

I tried to catch my breath, looking back and forth up the street. “Did you just see somebody?”

He raised one eyebrow eloquently.

“A woman,” I said. “Long coat. Must have come past here about a minute before I did.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve just this moment come out. Is something wrong?”

“No,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

I saw a winded-looking Kristina turning onto the street, and walked irritably away from the priest.

Kris was panting. “Any sign?”

“No,” I said. “She vanished.”

“But it
was
a woman, right?”

“Yes.”

“That changes things, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“So now what?”

“I don’t know.”

When David walked into Kendricks at a quarter of five, he realized how long it had been since he’d gone to a bar outside Rockbridge’s downtown area. Bars downtown make an effort. There are napkins with logos, the staff were perky, and high chairs are available. They downplay the alcohol side of things and pitch themselves as no big deal, a place you can go as part of a perfectly sane existence and enjoy an afternoon from which you will not emerge on all fours or married to someone deplorable.

Bars outside the city limits are different. Plenty are decent businesses who chose their position on the basis of zoning, convenience to the highway, or any number of reasonable criteria—including the one that says this is where the bar’s always been and who knows why or cares, and look, do you want a beer or not, pal. Their clientele will be more varied, however, and many of these people (and bars) aren’t going to a lot of trouble to hide the bottom line: they’re here because they don’t need to be anyplace else and because liquor is served and they want a big old glass of it, right now, with a peace-and-quiet chaser.

Situated just outside Rockbridge by Route 74, Kendricks was firmly in the latter camp. It had been in business forty years and had an unusually large metal sign over it that once sported an apostrophe before the “S,” but it blew down long ago and nobody had given enough of a crap to do anything about it, including Ryan Kendrick himself. The rusted punctuation mark was believed to still be around someplace, possibly in the overgrown creek that ran along the back of the parking lot. Once in a while the more intrepid sort of drunkard might amuse himself by having a look for it before lurching home. Kendrick died in 2008, following a short, bare-knuckle fight with lung cancer, and after a couple of years during which the bar seemed to change hands almost nightly, it had found its level once more, settling back into bleary, boozy equilibrium. Battered furniture, a pair of battered pool tables, a battered wooden bar, and some pretty battered regulars—these last in low numbers and staking out the corners with their backs to the door. Music played in the background, not too loud. Some guy earnestly advertised something or other on the TV screen above the bar, pointlessly, the sound off.

David tried to remember the last time he’d been in the place. It had to be five or six years, soon after he started seeing Dawn. Kendrick himself had still been alive, though a shell of the hulking bad-ass he’d once been. It had been a sketchy bar then. It was a sketchy bar now.

David got a beer from a barman who looked like he’d just received bad news about his dog. He took it to a table in the darkest corner and sat with his back to the door. It was unlikely he’d see anyone he knew, but the drinking-in-the-afternoon look was one he’d prefer to avoid. He hadn’t wanted alcohol at all, but the barman didn’t look like he’d respond positively to a request for a low-fat latte, extra shot or not.

David took a cautious sip of the beer and looked at a poster for a long-ago gig on the wall. Why was he even here? After a long night without sleep, he wasn’t sure. However hard he’d tried to work, his mind kept returning to the change left on their top step. For some reason that was working at him even more than the matchbook. It reminded him of something, but he didn’t know what. He kept trying to push it out of his head. It kept coming back. Each time it returned it felt as if someone was gripping his guts a little tighter in their fist.

He’d decided that he would come here and sit for half an hour. Dawn had a staff meeting and wouldn’t be back until nine, so that was covered. He had the matchbook in his pocket and intended to leave it on the table when he went, along with any notion that there was something he was failing to remember.

If you spend your life trying to make things mean something, it can be hard to stop when you get up from your desk at the end of the workday. That was all this was. Some unexplained change. A few scratch marks. Big deal.

In twenty-five minutes he was walking away.

“Hello, David.”

David looked up, heart thumping. A man was standing over the table. He was lean and wearing jeans and a white shirt under a dark coat. His skin was tan, chin stubbled, and he had sharp blue eyes.

It was the man David had seen in Penn Station. The man who’d followed him. Seeing him again was like hearing a phone ring in the dead of night.

“Who …”

“Is this chair free?”

David stared dumbly up at him. The man grinned back, a little too wide. “But then—are
any
of us truly free?”

“What?”

“You used to say that. It was funny.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

The man sat in the chair opposite. “It’ll come.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I came to see you, of course.”

David put the matchbook on the table. “I bumped into you in New York. It was an accident. I saw you again at the train station. That’s all I know.”

“No. That’s all you
remember
.”

“Look, is this some kind of scam? Because—”

The man held a finger up to his lips. “Don’t talk so much. You’ll learn more that way. And it’ll look less weird while you remember how things are done.”

Despite himself, David lowered his voice. “What are you talking about? What things?”

The man picked up David’s beer and took an unhurried sip, before placing the glass back exactly where it had been on the table.

David stared at him. “Are you
kidding
me?”

The man settled back and folded his hands behind his head. “Look around, friend.”

David did so. The barman was watching an advert for a barbecue set. The other drinkers were staring into their glasses or space or, in the case of one throwback, reading a paperback novel.

“I didn’t choose five o’clock by accident,” the man said. “Afternoon shift’s wandered home or too drunk to care. The evening crowd isn’t here yet. In the meantime, everyone’s giving each other plenty of space.”

“So?”

“Nobody saw what I did. So it didn’t happen. Nobody sees, nobody knows, right? Does
that
ring a bell?”

David swallowed. It did, though he didn’t know why. “How did you find out where I live?”

“I saw the train you left the city on. ’Course that wouldn’t have led me to this bump in the road, except I also overheard your wife mention somewhere called Rockbridge. It wasn’t hard and I’m not dumb. I usually get what I want. You should remember that.”

David felt the hand tighten around his guts—this time far worse than before, as if long fingernails were digging in. “I’m going to leave now.”

“Don’t. We’ve got a chance here, David. We can be friends again. That almost never happens.”

David tried to sound calm and firm. “Look, I don’t have much money. I don’t have
anything
you might want.”

“You’re so wrong,” the man said, leaning forward earnestly. “Just being here like this, seeing Dawn … you have no idea of how much that means. And she’s wonderful. You did well, my friend. Congratulations.”

David stared, chilled by the way the man had casually dropped his wife’s name. “This is going to stop,” he said. “
Now
. Or I’m walking out of here and going straight to the—”

There was a rasping noise.

The man swore and pulled a cheap cell phone out of his jacket, the disposable type that comes with prepaid credit and no contract. The kind, David gathered from watching cop shows, that are called “burners” and are favored by the criminal fraternity because they’re easy to come by and dispose of. Was that what this guy was? Part of a group who’d singled him out for a complex shakedown—some real-world version of an e-mail phishing scam?