Bad Move (30 page)

From the roof I had a chance to get my bearings. I could see the three cars to the north, which meant that my own car was over to the west, not that far from where I was now. And now that I wasn't on the run, I could listen more carefully for my hunters. Not that Rick was that hard to hear.

"That fucker! We're gonna find you, you fucker!"

Greenway and Carpington were navigating their way across the terrain with a lot more care. They were, after all, wearing expensive suits and didn't want to stumble. "Rick! Where are you?"

"Over here!" he shouted. He was in front of the house next to the one I was perched atop.

Greenway and Carpington caught up to him. The councilman said, "We should just get out of here. Even if you could find him, what are you gonna do? You can't deal with everyone the way you did with Spender."

Neither Rick nor Greenway answered. But after a moment, I did hear Rick say, "I lost him right around here. Let's check in here."

As they approached the house under me, they slipped from my range of vision. They were down on the first floor, shuffling about. They'd become very quiet, as though one of them had put his index finger to his lips. I peered into the skylight hole, but there wasn't enough light down there to make anything out. But I thought I could hear someone scaling the ladder to the second floor. If it was anyone, it would be Rick.

I moved away from the opening, trying to will myself to become weightless. The roof hadn't been shingled yet, so my knees and feet didn't make scuffing noises against the surface. Inside, it sounded as though Rick had made it to the second floor.

He would see the stepladder under the opening. Would he think it had been left that way by the workers? I didn't think he would.

I slipped one leg over the peak, down the steep side. I was straddled across it now, like I was riding a horse. Carefully, I pulled the other leg over, gripping the peak with my hands. Slowly I let my body slide down the steep slope, an inch at a time.

Inside, I heard Rick mount the stepladder. Once he was to the second step from the top, his head would be above the surface of the roofline. I hoped the moonlight wasn't bright enough for him to see my eight fingers that gripped the peak and kept me from plummeting down the other side, past the edge of the roof, and then two stories to the dirt below.

It didn't take any time at all for the pain to become excruciating. Not just in my fingers, but down the lengths of both arms. I squeezed my eyes shut, clamped my jaw tight, and breathed through the cracks between my teeth.

I was counting the seconds in my head. One thousand. Two thousand. Three thousand. Concentrating hard on the numbers so I wouldn't think about how my fingers couldn't hold on much longer. The side of my head was pressed hard against the roof, and the movements of the three people within the house gently reverberated through the lumber and to my ear. Eventually, I heard more footsteps, some muffled conversation, and then the sounds seemed to slip away.

Seconds later, they became much clearer. They were outside. Right below me. If I didn't hold on, I'd slide away and drop right on top of them. And I couldn't haul myself back over without scrabbling away at the roof with my legs, and that would make too much noise.

"I'm getting out of here," Carpington said.

"He was here!" Rick said. "I know he was here!"

"Let's go, Rick," Greenway said. "We'll never find him out here in the dark. He could be anywhere. He probably made a break for it while we were in the house. We'll get him. Don't worry about that. We'll find him at his house later."

"Fuck!" Rick said, and I could hear him kicking at something. My fingers were becoming numb. I thought I had another fifteen seconds, tops, before they let go.

"Come on," Greenway said, and I heard them moving away.

When the voices seemed a house or two distant, I drew on strength I never knew I had to get myself back over the peak, first to my waist, then one leg. I lay there for a moment, catching my breath, letting the feeling come back into my arms. From my perch, I saw the headlights of three cars come on. All three had to back up, turn around, and they left in a convoy, heading off in the direction of the sales office.

o o o

Even though I knew they were gone, I made my way back to the car moving along the edges of buildings, ducking behind front-end loaders. I wasn't taking any chances. I wanted to take a look through Stefanie's purse - it was probably too small to hold this ledger they'd been talking about, but it might offer some clues as to where I might find it. First, however, I had to get out of the neighborhood. I drove to a twenty-four-hour doughnut place on the outskirts of the subdivision and parked back by the Dumpster.

I decided the purse could wait two more minutes.

I went into the doughnut shop and swung open the door to the men's room. After taking a whiz, I stood in front of the sink and as I washed my hands took a look at myself. I looked bad. The front of my jacket, shirt, and pants were scuffed with mud and grit, and my face was smeared with dirt. I took a moment to wash up, attempted to dry myself with the hot-air machine. (I still felt my book about the guy who goes back in time to keep the inventor of this infernal gadget from ever being born was my best.)

I lined up to buy a large coffee with triple cream and two double-chocolate doughnuts. It hit me that I was running on empty in every sense of the word. I took my order to a table in the corner and surveyed my fellow customers. A couple of teenagers on a date. An old man reading the paper by himself. Two cops, evidently bucking tradition, eating muffins. Upon seeing them I tried to draw into myself, to disappear. Even though I had no reason to think they were looking for me, specifically, I couldn't help but feel I looked like a suspect.

I wolfed the doughnuts, guzzled the coffee. I exited the shop through the door furthest away from the cops and got back into my Civic. I turned on the overhead light and grabbed Stefanie's purse from behind the passenger seat. I wanted her car key. It was a thick, black plastic thing, like a rounded oversized skipping stone emblazoned with a VW symbol, with buttons for opening the trunk and locking and unlocking the doors.

So Greenway and Rick wanted a ledger Stefanie'd run off with. It was too big for Stefanie's purse. But it would fit in a car. And I knew where she'd last parked.

I turned over the engine. It was time for me to return to the scene of my crime.

Chapter
23

Every time I saw headlights in my rear-view mirror, I held my breath. Maybe it was the police. Maybe they'd figured out I was involved in the Stefanie Knight matter, at least as some sort of witness, if not the actual perpetrator. Or maybe it was Rick. I guessed that he'd be cruising the neighborhood, looking for my car. He'd probably gone by the house, and when he hadn't seen it there, had trolled the neighborhood in the hopes of finding me.

The Mindy's Market parking lot was nearly empty, no more than half a dozen cars scattered about. Two of them, as it turned out, were Volkswagens. A Jetta and a Beetle. I seemed to remember Stefanie's mother saying that Stefanie drove a Beetle, a blue one, and the one in the lot here was a dark blue that reflected the lamps of the parking lot.

Not wanting to make my approach to the car too obvious, I parked the Civic across the street, in the lot of a darkened McDonald's. I locked up, the VW key held tightly in my fist. By the time I crossed the street I figured I was close enough to determine whether I had the right car. I aimed the key at the Beetle and tapped the unlock button. The taillights flashed.

I came around from the back and opened the driver's door. The floor was littered with candy wrappers, coffee cup lids, wadded tissues. I flipped the switch to unlock the trunk and walked around the back, lifting up the hatch that went all the way to the top of the rear window. The trunk was littered with debris as well, plus a couple of pairs of shoes, some Valley Forest Estates flyers and floor plans, an empty box of low-fat cookies. There was a strap at the front end of the trunk that lifted up the floor, revealing the spare. I peeked under there, but found nothing.

I looked under the front seats, in the glove compartment. I flipped the seats forward, ran my hand down the pouches behind each seat, came up empty. I lifted each of the four floor mats, found seventy-eight cents in change, which I left, and began to think that maybe this car had no secrets to share.

The car, as I'd noticed, was a hatchback, which meant you could fold the rear seats down to create a modest cargo area. It appeared that before you could fold the back of the seat down, you had to flip the base of the seat up.

I reached my hand into the crack where the two parts of the seats met and pulled, and as I'd suspected, the seat pulled away from the floor.

And there it was.

A pale green ledger book. I grabbed it, put the seat back in place, got out of the back and flopped into the front driver's seat, pulling the door shut. There was enough light from the parking lot lamps to see without turning on the inside light and attracting any more attention.

I opened the book up and saw dates and names and amounts. As I've mentioned, I can't balance a checkbook, so I wasn't sure what all this meant, but I had a pretty good idea. And I had an even better idea who'd be able to interpret what it all meant. I needed Trixie.

At that moment, I caught something out of the corner of my eye. A car slowing as it drove by on the street in front of Mindy's. A small foreign sedan. Just like Rick's.

The car's brake lights came on. The car stopped, backed up, idled in front of the McDonald's. Then moved forward, swung into the lot, parked alongside my car.

I slunk down into the seat of the Beetle, but not so low that I couldn't see what was happening across the street. Rick got out of the sedan, walked slowly around the Civic, confirming that it was in fact my car. He must have been cruising the neighborhood, hoping to find me, and when he spotted a car similar to mine, wanted to investigate. Chances are he wouldn't have taken notice of the plate number the other times he'd seen the car at my home.

He peered through the windows, looking first in the back, then the front, and his eyes landed on the purse in the front seat. If he was anything like me, he couldn't tell one purse from another - this skill shortage had led me to hide in this Volkswagen in the middle of the night - but this purse looked close enough to Stefanie's that he figured he had the right car. He tried all four doors, found them all locked, and walked calmly back to his own vehicle, reaching for something from the back seat.

A baseball bat.

He swung it hard and took out the driver's-door window. Shards of glass flew across the interior. Inside the Beetle, with the windows up, I could barely hear it. He pulled up the door lock, opened the door, and took the purse, which he tossed into his own car. But he'd looked through this purse once before and knew it hadn't contained a ledger. Maybe, he thought, it was in my car somewhere.

So he began a search of it, not unlike mine moments earlier of the Beetle. He rooted through the trunk, looked under the seats, ripped up the back seat. Frustrated, he glared at the car, paced back and forth angrily, looking like Basil Fawlty getting ready to beat it to death with a tree branch. The bat, I suspected, would be more effective.

He took out the front window first. It took about ten swings of the bat to break out all the glass. Then the three remaining passenger windows, and finally, the back. But that wasn't enough to satisfy him. He smashed off the mirrors, then swung the bat into the middle of the hood. The fenders were next, followed by the headlights, taillights, and trunk lid.

Jeez, I thought, why don't you just set fire to it?

Rick went back to his car to hunt for something. He had a rag, possibly part of an old shirt. Then he opened the driver's door on my car, pulled the lever next to the seat that popped the tiny door on the back fender that covers the gas cap, unscrewed it, and stuffed the rag partway down the tube.

Then, with a lighter, he set it ablaze.

Now he had to move fast. He jumped back into his car, backed so far up the drive-through lane of the McDonald's that he was almost behind it but still able to watch his handiwork, and waited for the explosion.

It was a good one.

The back of my car was facing the front of the McDonald's, and when the car blew up, erupting into a huge ball of flame, the front windows of the restaurant shattered and fell, setting off alarms. Rick got out of his car, and even from where I was sitting, I could see the big grin on his face.

It must not have occurred to him until then to wonder why my car was parked there in the first place. He scanned around, looking to see where I might be, figuring that the noise of the explosion would draw me out. Finally, he looked across the street to the grocery store parking lot and saw the Beetle. I tried to slide even lower into the seat but still keep him in view. He knew Stefanie, and it was a pretty safe assumption that he knew the kind of car she drove.

He started coming across the street.

I slipped my hand down into the front pocket of my jeans and took the Beetle key out, then slid it into the ignition. Before I turned the engine over, I pressed the button to lock the two doors.

I had to slide up now to be able to see over the wheel, and when I did, Rick saw me and started to run. Perfect, I thought. I want you as far away from your car as possible before I pull out of this lot.