Linwood Barclay - The Twenty-Three

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I heard you did your good deed before coming back up here. You set up by the falls and handed out hundreds of cases of bottled water.”

“Yeah,” he said, puffing himself up. “I did. You should have come by. I’d’ve given you one even if you are a horse’s ass.”

“It’s kind of amazing how you were ready to go so fast.”

Randy shrugged. “You do what you have to do when people are in trouble.”

“How’d you know?”

“How’d I know what?”

“How’d you know you were going to need so much bottled water?”

He was shaking his head. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“You cranked up production this week. Before any of this happened.”

“Where the hell did you hear that?”

I’d heard it from David Harwood. A comment just in passing. But it had been bothering me for a while now.

“Did I hear wrong?” I asked.

Finley’s mouth opened like he was going to say something, but he hadn’t figured out yet what it was going to be.

“Yeah, that’s wrong,” he said.

“So it’d be okay if I started asking around, checked that out. Because if it’s true, it raises a question. Why would Randall Finley, just as he’s on the comeback trail, start bottling more of his famous springwater on the eve of a catastrophic poisoning of the town’s water supply?”

“You fat fuck,” he said.

“You want to make life difficult for me?” I asked him. “Go ahead. Meanwhile, I’m going to go whisper in the ear of one of those CNN or New York Times reporters swarming all over town. Then I wouldn’t even have to start nosing around. I’d just let them do it for me. See how long it takes before someone puts a camera in your face and asks if you’d actually be willing to let hundreds of people die to advance your half-assed political career.”

“You son of a bitch,” he said.

“I didn’t mind ‘fat fuck.’ I gotta admit, that’s pretty accurate. But now you’re casting aspersions on my mother.”

“You saying I did this?” he asked, pointing a thumb back at the plant.

“Did you?”

I should have been ready. I should have seen it coming. But I’m not as young as I used to be, and I’m the first to admit I could be in better shape. So when Randy charged at me, I didn’t move as quickly as I could. I didn’t take a defensive stance, like shifting my weight forward so he’d have a harder time taking me down.

But take me down he did.

He rammed his body into me, put his arms around me, and tackled me to the ground.

“You fucker!” he said.

We turned slightly as we fell, which was just as well, because it meant I hit the pavement on my side, my left shoulder taking a lot of the impact. If I’d fallen straight back, I’d have probably cracked my head open. And I’d already hit it on a curb a few days earlier when that Thackeray College professor had gotten the better of me.

Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this anymore.

We rolled on the parking lot, a couple of overweight-Randy, less so, I admit-middle-aged guys duking it out. Not the sort of fight you could sell a lot of tickets to.

I was worried he’d go for my gun, which was holstered and attached to my belt on my left side. It wasn’t that I believed Randall Finley actually wanted to murder me, but in heated moments, sometimes people lose their heads. So I had to deal with this quickly before things spiraled even more out of control.

He’d lost his grip on me when we went down, so my arms were no longer pinned. I made a fist with my right hand, swung it as fast and as hard as I could, and aimed it where I thought it would do the most good.

At Randall Finley’s nose.

Our former mayor’s nose was something of a legend in Promise Falls. It had been punched before-at least two times that I knew of-and both times by his former driver, Jim Cutter. The second time, Cutter had broken it.

I connected. Not quite dead center, I’m afraid. A little off to one side. And I didn’t hear the crunch of broken cartilage that I was hoping for. But it did the trick.

Finley yelped in pain, put both hands over his face. Blood trickled out from under them and from between his fingers.

“Jesus!” he screamed. “Not my nose!”

“Should be used to it by now,” I said, getting to my knees, and then forcing myself back up onto two feet. Finley lay on the pavement, writhing.

“You didn’t answer my question,” I said. “Did you do it?”

“You’re crazy, you know that?” he said, taking his hands from his face, looking at the blood as he drew himself up into a sitting position. “Batshit crazy!”

“You know your way around this water treatment plant,” I said. “Ottman told me. You drop by here regularly.” I dusted myself off. “Is that what you did with Tate Whitehead? Jumped him? Before you went in there and poisoned the water?”

I didn’t know that I believed what I was saying, but as the words came out of my mouth, I realized the man I was looking at was not just an asshole that I’d had more than enough of.

He was a suspect.

“It was for the summer!” Finley said.

“What was for the summer?”

“The increase in production! Demand goes up in summer, just when we have people off on holidays! We up production in the spring to be ready, you dumb fuck!”

“That’s a good story,” I said. “I guess we’ll see how that holds up.”

I didn’t offer to help him to his feet. And I didn’t have the energy to charge him with assaulting a police officer. I could always do that later. So I left him there on the pavement and headed for my car.

I was going to take a short break from the Promise Falls water tragedy and go three years into the past.

It was time to think about Olivia Fisher. It was time to go back to the beginning. I just hoped Walden Fisher, whom I’d last seen in the emergency ward of Promise Falls General, was well enough to talk about what had happened to her.

THERESAand Ron Jones were already living in the house next to Samantha Worthington’s when she moved in with her son, Carl. Theresa and Ron had bought their place fifteen years ago, but the owner of the property next door rented it out, so they had seen people come and go over the years. There was a couple about ten years ago Theresa and Ron were pretty sure were dealing drugs out of the house, and they thanked God when that crew moved out after two years. There was that father and son who lived there for a while, who liked to repair motorcycles in the front yard. They sure weren’t sorry to see them go, either.

But they had liked Sam and her boy. The most noise they ever heard coming through the shared wall was when Carl and his mother carried on conversations between floors, shouting at each other-not in an angry way, just trying to be heard-or when Carl was playing some war-type video game, explosions and machine-gun fire rattling the dishes in their cupboards.

Their front doors were not much more than thirty feet apart, so they ended up seeing one another quite often, making small talk, chatting about the weather. But Sam Worthington never revealed much about herself, other than that she was raising her boy on her own, and that she managed a Laundromat. The little they knew about her life before Promise Falls, they had learned from short conversations with Carl.

The most interesting tidbit being that his dad was in jail back in Boston.

They also knew the two had been through quite a lot lately. There’d been something on the news about an attempted abduction, and a shoot-out-a shoot-out, for crying out loud!-at her place of work.

But even after all that, they saw Sam and Carl going in and out of the house, like, hey, life goes on.