Baby Please Don't Go: A Novel (15 page)

He opened the driver’s door and was about to heave Witt in. He stopped abruptly. The car from the far side of the parking lot eased up and stopped. It was a taxi. Lock closed the car door quickly.

“Your buddy there is out of it,” the driver said to Lock. “You want me to take him home? Friends don’t let friends drive drunk as hell.”

“Uh...” Lock said, averting his face.

“If he doesn’t live too far,” the taxi driver said, “it’ll be twenty bucks. Off the meter. This weather’s getting bad. Pretty soon you won’t be able to get a cab.” The guy certainly wanted a fare.

“Nah,” Lock said. “He says his brother-in-law’s coming over to take him.”

Witt looked up from his stupor.

“No brother-in-law of mine!” he said.

The driver shrugged, put the taxi into gear and drove off, windshield wipers moving wildly back and forth.

Lock looked around. He checked his watch again. A few people exited the bar, but they headed the other way.

He walked over to Witt and propped him up with one hand as he opened the driver’s door with the other. Lock dropped him into the driver’s seat, took hold of the car frame above the door, and with both feet, pushed a practically unconscious Witt onto the passenger seat.

Lock leaned in and buckled the man into his seat.

En route to meet up with Natalie, the roads were dark and slippery. Lock eyed Witt’s sleeping body and smiled inwardly.

He knew that what was about to happen was the riskiest part of the whole enterprise, but he felt confident everything would go as planned. The part in the bar had gone perfectly. And it was almost over. If other drivers went by when Lock was setting up the scene a few minutes from then, they wouldn’t know what they were seeing. If anyone stopped, they wouldn’t be able to identify him. Natalie’s Mercedes SUV might have been a problem, and that was why Lock had wanted her to use a loaner. And the bad weather was a good cover. Everything was going right. And as soon as the task was completed, he’d head straight to the cabin in the Poconos and take a long, hot shower. He was cold to his bones.

Natalie arrived at her destination on the curve at precisely 8:50.

The temperature had dropped several degrees, and a hard sleet pelted her car. She pulled off the road near a couple of picnic tables. No other cars were in sight. She killed the engine.

Around the bend, headlights appeared. It was hard to see. Natalie flashed her high beams. The oncoming vehicle hit its brakes. She could see it was a FedEx truck. It drove by slowly but never stopped.

Soon after, Lock arrived driving Witt’s car. He slowed down. Natalie blinked her high beams again.

He stopped alongside Natalie’s car and squinted through his icy window. He opened his door, got out, and walked toward her. He took off his leather jacket. When he reached her car, Natalie lowered her window. Lock threw her his jacket.

“Overkill,” she said, studying the cigar, glasses, and ball cap.

Lock tossed the cigar into the bushes. He crouched beside her and handed her his ball cap. She handed him his trapper hat, flaps down.

“This wardrobe stuff is silly,” she said.

“I play the percentages,” he said.

Natalie wriggled around and leaned back so she could reach the car seat holding the sleeping Dahlia. She unbuckled it and started to hand the car seat and Dahlia out through the window.

“No,” said Lock. “Keep her until after I hit the tree.”

“But it’s only going to be a little fender-bender,” she said. “She’ll be fine.”

“After I hit the tree,” Lock said. He dashed back to Witt’s car. He got in, buckled his seatbelt, and looked over at the semiconscious man in the passenger seat.

He backed up five yards and stopped. He checked the rear-view mirror. No one was coming.

From her car, Natalie had a view of the other bend, the one Lock couldn’t see. She signaled with her lights. All clear.

Lock stomped on the gas pedal and drove deliberately into the mighty oak tree there—he hated to hurt the tree—slightly harder than intended. Inside the car, the front airbags burst open. Lock sustained a bloody nose and dabbed at the blood with a napkin he found in his jacket pocket. Witt appeared to be okay. There was moderate front-end damage to the car—the bumper and grille were crumpled, a headlight was smashed, and the hood had buckled.

Witt groaned. Lock released his own seatbelt, opened his door, and jumped out, keeping an eye on his passenger. Witt, in a stupor, mumbled but did not move. Lock unbuckled Witt’s seatbelt and tried to lug him over into the driver’s seat. He was able to move him only partway, but that would be good enough.

Lock looked over his shoulder. Natalie’s car pulled up and stopped alongside her husband’s car. Lock left Witt sprawled on the front seat. He turned toward Natalie.

“Don’t forget to put the flashers on,” he said.

She did it and then passed Dahlia, secured in her car seat, to Lock who had opened the driver’s door. He adjusted the blanket to cover her exposed stomach.

Lock had anticipated that both front airbags would inflate upon impact, and he knew that would be a red flag to the police. He placed Dahlia on the passenger seat. Her weight would explain the front passenger airbag inflating, and it had the added bonus of being an unsafe place for her—another strike against Witt. He watched her as she slept soundly.

Lock straightened up and took another look at Dahlia.
I don’t want to do this.

“You’ll be fine, baby,” he said. “We’ll be right down the road.”

He shut the rear door quietly.

Lock next closed the driver’s door, took a deep breath, and checked the road in both directions. He saw nothing. He hopped into Natalie’s car, nodded at her, and they drove off.

“Nice and slow,” he said.

He took a new prepaid cellphone from his pocket and dialed 9–1–1 to report the crash.

19

The bulk of Witt’s now damaged car was on the shoulder, pressed up against the tree. Only the rear remained on the roadway. The car’s single working headlight illuminated a swath of the thick woods. Steam rose from the cracked radiator.

Moments after Natalie and Lock drove off, another vehicle, a late model pickup—weaving and with windshield wipers snapping back and forth—bore down on the curve where Witt’s car was.

The teenage driver’s girlfriend unbuckled her seatbelt and slid closer to him. She switched on the radio. Music blared. She put her arm around him and leaned in playfully to kiss his neck. These distractions occurred at precisely the wrong moment. The pickup’s right front end didn’t clear the corner of Witt’s car that jutted out onto the road, and they collided with a powerful impact, spinning it violently up against another tree. The pickup skidded off the road, bounced off a fieldstone wall and flipped over, landing on the passenger side.

Both driver and passenger lay there unconscious, the passenger ejected into a pile of sleet-covered gravel and the driver restrained by his seatbelt. The truck’s rear wheels spun in the sleet. Steam hissed from the engine.

20

Natalie pulled into a train station parking lot about a mile up the road. The sleet came down hard. Visibility was almost zero. A couple of cars were there, waiting to pick up commuters. Lock got out. The sleet stung his face.

From his pocket he retrieved the prepaid phone, put it in front of a rear tire, and motioned for Natalie to drive over it, crushing it flat. He scattered the splintered pieces with his shoe and got back into the car. Natalie noticed a tiny trickle of blood below his nose.

She found a wad of tissues in her bag and began to blot up the blood.

“Airbag got me. Your husband’s scratch-free. It’s almost over.”

“Let’s get out of here,” said Natalie. “And don’t fret about Dahlia. She’s fine.”

“Not if I don’t see the police,” he said. “I told them there was an injury. They’ll come even faster and they’ll dispatch an ambulance. Dahlia’s alone in the back of that car.” Lock checked his watch. Eight fifty-four.

“Like they’re not going to come,” she said. “Let’s go, Lock. We can’t be seen together. We’re so close to being safe. Besides, how do you know which direction the police will come from? How do you know we’ll even see them from here?”

“This is Kennett Square jurisdiction,” he said. “They’ll be coming from Route 1. At least, the ambulance will.”

They both sat, staring ahead. She turned the radio on.

Lock snapped it off.

“I need to hear,” he said.

He looked ahead and checked his watch again. Eight fifty-six.

A police car, red and blue emergency lights piercing the falling sleet, sped past silently, heading in the direction of Witt’s car.

“Satisfied?” she asked.

“There should be an ambulance any second now.”

Natalie started the car.

Another police car zipped by.

“Good enough?”

“I guess.”

Natalie put the car into gear.

“Nice and easy,” he told her.

Natalie was about to pull onto the road. She heard a siren and saw more flashing lights.

“Brake!” Lock shouted. Natalie stopped short. An ambulance sped toward and then past them.

“Damn sirens will wake Dahlia,” he said. “But thirty seconds from now she’ll be safe and warm, in the arms of a paramedic.”

“So what if the sirens wake her? She won’t be telling them anything.”

Lock gave her a hard look. She didn’t seem to understand how serious this was. He wondered if living a wealthy lifestyle for so long had made her forget the world wasn’t all yoga classes and orchids, but then he felt guilty for the thought. She was probably more stressed than he was—it was her daughter alone in the car.

Another ambulance passed, then another police car. Moments later, yet another police car, all moving fast in the direction of the accident.

“Five or six of them for one drunken son-of-a-bitch,” she said. “And you were worried they wouldn’t show.”

It took Lock and Natalie almost twenty minutes along icy and circuitous back roads to get back to a convenience store several blocks from the Cavern Tavern where Lock had parked his car earlier. He had refused to let her drive back the way they came. He did not want to pass the accident scene.

Natalie stopped the car.

“You need to go straight home,” Lock told Natalie, “so you’ll be available when the police call about the accident.”

“I’d rather go home with you to celebrate. I have my cell and Candice will call me if the police phone the house. Plus, I already set it up with Candice. She thinks I’m going to be with my sister in New Jersey.”

“No, not a good idea. Plus, I’m already packed and I’m going directly to the cabin for the weekend. I’m taking tomorrow off as a vacation day.”

“You don’t want to be at the office when Abby learns about the crash,” Natalie said. “If he learns about it.”

“Oh, he’ll hear about it one way or the other. No doubt about that. And you’re right. There are lots of places I’d rather be tomorrow when the news breaks.”

“So you drop down into a rabbit hole and I’m stuck here all alone. I won’t see you for three days. That sucks.”

Lock thought for a moment and checked the roads for any oncoming emergency vehicles.

“Okay,” he said. “I have an idea. I was going to come home Sunday night, but I don’t want to go three days without you, either. I’ll come back Saturday afternoon. You find a way to break away from your house and we’ll get together at the carriage house.”

Natalie reached over and squeezed his hand.

“That’s a good boy,” she said. “I’ll bring all the ingredients for my famous vegetarian chili. You relax and I’ll make us an early dinner. How’s that?”

“You never let me cook for you.”

“Next time,” she said. “I have us covered for Saturday.”

Natalie gave him a quick kiss before he jumped out and got into his car. She waited while he started the engine and cleared the snow off his windshield. Like synchronized swimmers, each car drove away at the same moment and headed in opposite directions, leaving nothing but tire tracks in the snow.

A sign on the turnpike read, “Blakeslee and Mt. Pocono, 34 miles.”

Lock drove, his expression grim, and he gripped the steering wheel tightly. He felt the cold night air trying to penetrate the car’s windows. He had the heat on full blast but he shivered in his seat. Leafless trees flashed by as snow fell.

On Lock’s way up to the mountains, he ran instant replays of everything through his mind. It was not enough of a crash—basically a one-car fender-bender—to warrant accident investigators. And anyway, it was late on an icy night and the accident scene was probably cleared already. They’d figure Witt went home in a stupor and for some drunken reason decided to take the two-year-old with him. Lock knew it made no sense for him to do that, but it didn’t need to. He was a blackout drunk. They’d find the Ambien in his blood work. So what that he’d deny it? According to Natalie, Witt had a prescription. No one had seen Natalie, and only people in the bar—and the taxi driver—had seen the guy with the cigar, but who was he? Lock knew all along that as soon as the police found Dahlia and took care of her, it would all be over.

And in case they needed it, there was Candice. She would say Witt had come home, messed the place up, and broken a wine glass. She would believe what she was saying—even Witt, knowing he’d blacked out, would probably assume it was true.

Lock arrived at the small log cabin a little before midnight. The snow, which had already accumulated seven or eight inches, fell harder. Inside the dark cabin, the chill hit him. He flipped a light switch and a lamp came on. He shivered. His first order of business was to load logs into the fireplace and get a blaze going. He opened a bottle of fruit juice and took a swig. The fire warmed the cabin quickly. A half hour after arriving, Lock got into bed and was asleep in ten minutes. His conscience was clear. He had done the right thing.

As dawn began to break through the pines, firs, and junipers that surrounded the cabin, Lock’s cellphone shrilled loudly in the cold air, waking him.

It was Abby. “I have calls from reporters,” he said. “There’s been a drunk driver accident and one of our kids was a passenger. Of course the driver is uninjured. And you know how the media is all over us whenever something bad happens and they can link it to CPS.”

“Was it one of mine?”

“Yeah, it was your case,” Abby said. “Before you closed it. The Mannheim case, son, out in Red Cedar Woods.”

“Shit, which one of the kids was it?”

“The younger one.”

“Dahlia?”

“I think that’s it, yes.”

“God dammit,” Lock said. “I couldn’t find anything to keep the case open, but I had that feeling. I should have looked harder. I swear, Abby, there was nothing there.”

“Well, there’s not nothing there now. Come on home. With the media all over this—well, you know, it’s always CPS negligence. Always our fault.”

“We’ll weather it, we always do. As long as the little girl’s okay, we did the best we could do.”

“Well, your pal Mr. Mannheim was uninjured. It’s icy and he meets up with a bad curve on Creek Road. A tough spot even if it’s dry, sunny, and you’re sober. He hits a tree. Minor damage. But his tail is sticking out on the highway, and now here comes another DUI around the same bend. Hits hard. See? The driver and the passenger in the second car—a pickup truck—were left unconscious. They’re both critical. The little girl in Mannheim’s car, the two-year-old, caught a very bad bump on her head. And a nasty gash. At least a concussion, if not worse.”

Lock turned white. “Wasn’t she in a car seat?”

“She was in a car seat,” Abby said, “but the ass never buckled her in. And what possible difference can that make? She’s injured, son.”

Lock swallowed hard and tightened his grip on the phone. His knuckles turned as white as his face. He inhaled rapid, shallow breaths.

“Give this one to McHugh, could you? I’m so tired I can’t see. And there must be a foot of new snow on the roads. I practically just got up here. I’ll fall asleep and get killed driving all the way back home.”

“I suppose that’d be CPS’s fault, too. So, you be here by noon. Press conference is at one. They’ll be all over us as to why that child was in a car with a known drunk. In the meantime, get a little sleep and remember, be here by noon.”

Lock hung up. He stared blankly as the dying flames of the fireplace glimmered and flashed upon his face.