B009XDDVN8 EBOK (24 page)

I leaned forward and gripped the steering wheel tighter. The accelerator was jammed to the floor, my hands were bolted onto the wheel, the BMW jumped forward as if in bloody anticipation. I screamed Caitlin’s name into whatever breath of existence remained within the vanishing gap between us.

I
GUESS
I wasn’t going as fast as I thought.

When I came to, there was a loose airbag hanging from the steering wheel, the windshield was cracked, shards of safety glass covered my lap. My face held the swollen numbness you get when you’re hammered into submission by a bullyboy’s fist. I lifted my hand to my cheek and it came away bloody. Through the car window I could see smoke rising from beneath my creased hood. Beyond that, still with my front corner buried in its side, was the blue Ford, rammed over the curb, its front end bent around the narrow trunk of a maple.

With a panicky start I remembered where the hell I was and what the hell I had done. And for a moment, I admit, I was disappointed to still be alive. Then I got a grip and reached for the keys. The starter screamed like a cat in hot oil; the damn car was still running. Those wily Germans—how’d we beat them twice, anyway? I put the car into reverse. The engine roared, there was the straining sound of metal bending, and then my car popped free. The Ford slapped down onto all four of its tires, and in that motion I saw something bobbing inside the crushed cabin.

I backed away hard, shifted into forward, stopped with a jar when I was parallel to the wrecked Ford, pushed open, with much effort, my door. I tried to jump out of the front seat, found myself unable, and realized I was still belted in. Once out, I examined
my car. It was a mess, its side bowed, its front absolutely wrecked, the metal torn, the headlight blown, the bumper sagging.

A dog across the street was barking. An old woman had come out of one of the houses right on the circle, but she was in no hurry to get involved. I snarled at her and she backed away before running inside. With the blood on my cheek, I must have looked a fright. She would justify her cowardice by dialing 911, no doubt. It wouldn’t be long before the cops appeared.

I leaned over and peered into the Ford. The airbags hung limp, the man’s head was bleeding, his eyes were unnervingly open but glassy with shock, his leg trapped by the twisted steel of the door. A tremor in his hand let me know he was still alive.

Should I wait for the police, and explain? And then what? Wait for what I knew would come after the explanation? Hell with that.

Something sounded from inside the car that made me jump. A phone. With a familiar stupid jazzy ringtone. My phone. Son of a bitch. Old Spice was still staring his blank stare at me. I reached through an opening in the shattered glass of the car’s front window, snaked my hand inside his jacket. I could feel the buzzing sensation of his chest rising and falling, but the phone wasn’t in his jacket. It kept ringing. I tried to open the door, it wouldn’t budge. I ran around to the door on the other side, gave it a pull, yanked it open. And there it was, on the floor, right inside the door, its screen lit with excitement. I grabbed it and took the call.

“Where have you been?” said a voice familiar enough, since it had infected my dreams over the last few days. “You shut off right in the middle. What happened?”

“There’s been an accident,” I said.

“Holmes?” said Clevenger.

“Someone should have told Holmes not to talk on the phone while he was driving.”

“Frenchy? My God, is that you? Tell me it is—that would be so precious.”

“Don’t call me Frenchy,” I said.

He laughed. “You are in so far over your head you need a snorkel.”

“I want to make a deal.”

“Here it is. You give over what you got and we’ll talk about the rest.”

“What kind of deal is that?”

“The best you’ll ever get from me, friend.”

“Then maybe I should find someone else to negotiate with. You’re just a hired thug, anyway. Who hired you to find me?”

His sharp voice grew snappish enough to confirm my suspicion. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, boy.”

“I’m ready to make a deal, but not with you. After what you did to Augie, I’ve got nothing for you but spit. You tell whoever’s giving you your orders that he’s the one I want to deal with.”

“Silly boy, I’m giving the orders.”

“Not anymore. When I call back I want to talk to the man in charge. But before we talk, I need to take care of some business.”

“My advice?” said Clevenger. “Take care of it quick.”

I hung up and closed my eyes and felt something lift me into the air. Not a way out, exactly, it was too early for that, but maybe the merest intimation of a way out, which was a hell of a lot more than I had had a bare few moments ago.

I hopped around the wreck and headed for the still-smoking Beemer, but I stopped for a second when Holmes, his eyes still open, shifted on the seat. I could almost see the comprehension of his situation starting to bleed into those eyes, and with that comprehension I sensed a new danger. I doubled back, reached again through the shattered window, pulled his pistol and holster off his belt.

“It turns out I’m going to need a gun after all,” I said to him. And then I had a thought.

My briefcase was still in my car. I jacked the case open, put the gun in one of its pockets, took out a piece of paper and a
pen. I scrawled something quick. Just as I stuffed the paper in Holmes’s shirt pocket, I heard the sirens in the distance, two of them at different pitches, coming closer. I jumped into the still-smoking BMW and headed out of Chandler Court. Something dragged on the cement beneath me, but I didn’t care.

The sirens were to my left; I turned right and started weaving through the roads of the development. I wasn’t going to wait around for them, I needed to get away clean, because the phone call had given me a clue to a way out. For too long I had been sitting back, waiting for them to come at me. For years, for decades, even before I woke up to the knife at my throat. But it was time to stop waiting, it was time for me to put a knife at someone else’s throat. I wasn’t sure yet whose throat or how to do it, but I had cash and a gun and the ghost of a plan. It wasn’t much, but it was enough.

The sirens were getting louder, closer, but I was already heading the other way, toward the back entrance of the development. If I had my druthers, the cops and I would pass like ships in the night, one in the Atlantic, one in the Pacific. By the time the police set up shop at the scene of the accident with their cameras and their yellow tape, by the time they found the message I had left in Holmes’s pocket, I would be long gone from Patriots Landing. Maybe for good.

M
Y FACE WAS
raw, my eye was bruised, my cheek was scraped and bleeding, my nose might have broken but it hurt too much to tell. As I stared in the mirror I had a strange case of the déjà vus. Here I was, back in a high-school bathroom, washing off the results of some unabashed brutality. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find Tony Grubbins sitting in the back of one of the classrooms, gloating.

I cleaned off the blood, dabbed at the clear fluid rising on the wounds. I put on the white baseball hat that had been in the briefcase to hide what I could, and my sunglasses to cover the rest. I still looked a mess, but better, I am sure, than I did when I pressed the intercom and looked into the camera to be let inside. As satisfied as I was going to get, I left the bathroom and headed for the office.

“I’m here to pick up Shelby Willing,” I said to the secretary. “We forgot about it but she has a doctor’s appointment that she really can’t miss.”

“And you are?”

“Her father.”

“I’ll need some identification.”

“Of course.”

The woman at the desk looked at me like I was a felon, which I suppose I was, before examining the license. And then she
tap-tap-tapped her computer to check Shelby’s schedule and, I assumed, for any extant protective orders. “She’s in Spanish now. Sign her out and I’ll call down to the classroom.”

“Thank you.”

“And next time, Mr. Willing, try to remember to have your daughter bring in the official form the morning she’s to be pulled out.”

“We surely will,” I said.

As Shelby dragged her backpack down the hallway toward the office she seemed strangely young and out of place, a black-clad sparrow in a meat locker. She smiled when she saw me, which must have been a product of the surroundings, because at home she never smiled when she saw me. At home, for Shelby, I was the death of smiles.

“What are you doing here?” she said, and I realized her smile was nervous only, and that she was worried that something terrible had happened. Which I guess it had.

“We have an appointment.”

“With whom?”

“Dr. Reilly,” I said, referring to her pediatrician for the sake of the woman staring at us from behind the office counter.

“Why?”

“Come on, let’s go,” I said, leading her out of the office and toward the entrance.

“What happened to your face?” she said after the door closed behind us.

“Is it that noticeable?”

“A-yeah. What did you do, wrestle a raccoon?”

“Pretty much. Hurry, we have to pick up your brother.”

“Why? Does he have an appointment, too?”

“Something like that,” I said.

When we reached the high school’s parking lot she stopped in her tracks, her jaw dropped, and she stared at me with accusatory eyes. “What happened to the car?”

“A little fender bender,” I said. “Nothing to worry about.”

“Dad, that is not a little fender bender. You had a massive accident. Tell me the truth now. What is happening? Who died?”

“No one, yet.” I walked around the car to the dented driver’s door, yanked it open with a crunch of metal, and then spoke over the car’s hood. “Get in, we have to go.”

“Does this have anything to do with the stuff in your briefcase?”

I looked at her for a moment without saying anything, as if I had no idea what she was talking about.

“All that money, and the rubbers, and the fake license plate,” she said. “That was all very shady, Dad. When you came back from Vegas you were acting all weird, so I looked in. That was a lot of money. I didn’t take any, but Dad. And what were you doing with rubbers?”

“It’s a long story, Shelby. Get in the car.”

“I didn’t tell Mom, if you want to know.”

“You didn’t?”

“I mean, if you’re cheating on Mom then you’re a skeevy asshole, but that’s your business.”

“I’m not cheating on your mother.”

“It was a box of rubbers. Not one, not two, a fricking box. What was in Vegas, a stripper convention?”

“It’s a long story. But thank you for keeping my confidence.”

She smiled at me, for a second time that day, a new record, and then shrugged. “It’s no big deal, I don’t talk to Mom either.”

“Well, maybe it’s time you start. While I’m picking up Eric, could you please take out that phone of yours and find out where your mother is?”

When Eric came out of his middle school and saw the car sitting crushed and steaming in the circle in front of the entrance,
he stopped walking and stared at the sight with the calm of a calculator.