Linwood Barclay - The Twenty-Three

Dwayne slowly shook his head, dropped his chin down to his chest in defeat. He dug into his pockets and withdrew a set of keys. In addition to the big remote for the truck, there were half a dozen others.

“Just gotta find the right one here,” he mumbled, moving in front of the door. He’d settled on a key, had it ready to slide into the lock.

Cal saw it coming, but he was too late to stop it.

Dwayne turned abruptly, ran a fist straight into his gut. Cal doubled over and collapsed into the weeds and grass surrounding the garage foundation.

“Really sorry about this, man,” Dwayne said, making another fist and driving it straight into Cal’s head.

This time, Cal went down all the way. Didn’t even feel the sharp edges of gravel jabbing into his cheek.

Now Dwayne unlocked the garage door, and dragged Cal inside.

BRANDONWorthington had definitely heard what his ex-wife’s stupid old neighbor was hoping he hadn’t heard. When he’d said he thought Sam and Carl “might have gone camp-”

Well, it didn’t take Stephen Hawking to figure out what he was about to say was “camping.” And the more Brandon thought about it, the more sense it made.

Back when they were first going out, and even after they’d been married awhile, they’d gone camping. They even did it a few times after they had Carl. Camping was about as cheap a vacation as you could take. No airline tickets, no expensive hotels. You just found a patch of land and pitched your tent.

Not that there weren’t some costs. He and Sam didn’t usually strike off into the middle of some woods somewhere. Fuck that. They tried that once, and it was no fun, unless your idea of a good time is hanging your bare ass over a log when you’ve got to do your business.

So after that experience, when they wanted to go away for the weekend with the tent, they’d find a licensed campground. KOA or something like that. At least then you had some facilities. A big restroom with toilets and sinks and even showers. Brandon didn’t mind cooking and sleeping under the stars, but when he had to deal with his morning constitutional, he wanted an honest-to-God toilet, thank you very much. He hadn’t exactly grown up roughing it. His father, Garnet, had worked in the financial industry his whole career, and his mother, Yolanda, had inherited money-a pretty good chunk of it, too-when her parents died.

Which made it all the weirder when he decided to rob banks. Although, the way he looked at it, it wasn’t all that weird. Once he and Sam were married, and living on their own, Brandon had just assumed his parents would buy them a house-and not some shitty starter home, either-and a decent car, maybe even a place on the Cape they could drive to on weekends in the summer.

Who knew his father was going to cut him off, insist Brandon make it on his own?

“You gotta have that fire in your belly,” his dad liked to tell him. “You’ll never get anywhere in life if I just hand everything to you.”

Not that Yolanda didn’t try to do an end run around her husband. Whenever she could, she’d slip her son a hundred dollars, sometimes two hundred, sometimes even more. Always cash. She knew her husband reviewed all the checks she wrote, but she skimmed where she could.

But it wasn’t enough. Not enough to live the way he expected to live.

Sam, however, wasn’t troubled by living in a small apartment. She hadn’t come from money, and she hadn’t been left much after her parents died. Her father had been a midlevel manager at a big-box hardware store, and her mother had worked in a high school cafeteria.

“We’re good. We’re okay,” she so often told him. “We’ve got each other. You’ve got a good job.”

Seriously? Working for the post office?

His perpetual anger and resentment poisoned the marriage. Brandon became abusive. He never actually beat her, but there was the time he shoved her a little too hard and she crashed into their piddly entertainment unit, knocking one of the small speakers off the shelf.

Landed right on her fucking toe.

If she hadn’t walked around the place barefoot, she’d have been fine.

So now and then, Sam would move out for a few days at a time, taking young Carl with her, bunking in with a girlfriend. Brandon would apologize and swear it would never happen again and talk Sam into returning. He became convinced that if he had enough money, he could buy them a better life.

He figured there was a way to solve his financial problems and stick it to his father at the same time.

So he went into a sister branch to the one his dad managed, and stuck the place up. Had the gun, the ski mask, the whole thing.

Just might have worked, too, if a cop wanting to exchange the fifties the ATM had given him for smaller bills hadn’t wandered in at that very moment.

Sometimes you couldn’t get a break.

Sam filed for divorce. Brandon went to jail.

Ed Noble, who of all of Brandon’s friends was the one with the most screws that needed tightening, came under Yolanda’s influence, started doing her bidding. Yolanda wanted Carl to herself. She’d lost her son to prison, but she was not going to lose her grandson, and she’d figured that with the right amount of intimidation, Samantha would give him up. She got Ed to do her dirty work.

It hadn’t exactly worked out.

It wasn’t just Brandon in jail now. Ed was there, too, awaiting trial. Garnet and Yolanda were facing multiple charges, and out on bail.

Then Yolanda went and had a heart attack.

At first, Brandon wondered whether she’d faked it, hoping to get some sympathy from the prosecuting attorney’s office. But it was pretty hard to fake an EKG. She ended up in intensive care, and for a while there it was looking touch and go.

Yolanda asked to see her son.

“Bring me my boy,” she whispered to the doctor from her ICU bed. “Don’t let me die without seeing him.”

Arrangements were made.

Brandon stood at Yolanda’s bedside, held her hand, looked sadly into her eyes. Yolanda whispered something he could not hear.

“I’m sorry. What was that?” he said.

She said it again, but he still could not make it out. So he leaned down, put his ear so close to her mouth that she could have kissed it.

Yolanda whispered, “Find the bitch, get your son.”

And then that orderly came in. A guy about Brandon’s height and build, maybe a little bigger. Brandon had spent a lot of time working out in prison, learned a thing or two.

He didn’t even have to think. He just acted. Looped his arm around the orderly’s neck and squeezed. The dumb bastard struggled, but Brandon just squeezed harder. Within seconds, the guy had passed out. Brandon stripped off his pants and shirt, pulled them on over his own clothes.

His mother smiled the whole time.

Brandon pushed the orderly under the bed, gave his mom a kiss good-bye, and walked right out of that ICU like he owned the place. Dumbass cop posted at the door was playing Angry Birds on his phone. Probably caught a glimpse of legs in pale green pants striding past him, never looked up.

Brandon flew down the stairs, came out into the hospital parking lot. He needed to find a car, but searching for one with the keys left in it would be a waste of time. No one did that anymore. He needed a car that was already running.

So he kept hoofing it until he got to a plaza where there was a 7-Eleven. Sooner or later, some idiot would leave a car running while he ran in for a pack of cigarettes. While he waited, he stripped off the scrubs and stuffed them in a garbage can. Half an hour later, a woman pulled into the lot in a little shitbox Kia. He wasn’t going to be choosy. She parked right close to the door and got out, and as soon as Brandon noticed exhaust still coming out of the tailpipe, he made his move.