Linwood Barclay - The Twenty-Three

“I’m hurt,” he said. “I’m hurt bad.”

Celeste, shaking her head in disbelief, looked back at Cal and asked, “Did he do this?”

But before he could answer, something beyond him caught Celeste’s eyes. A large black plastic tarp was draped over something in the middle of the garage floor.

“What is that?” she asked.

Cal turned around to see what his sister was looking at. Celeste walked to the middle of the room, reached down, and took hold of a corner of the tarp and started to pull.

“No,” Dwayne said. “Don’t.”

Celeste gave the tarp a strong tug to reveal what had been hidden beneath.

Dozens of boxes of stereo components. Receivers, mostly. By Sony, Denon, Onkyo. A box marked “3-D Projector.” Several more boxes filled with Blu-ray disc players.

“Where the hell did those come from?” Dwayne said.

ANGUSCarlson said, “They’ve pulled me off active duty until the investigation is over.”

“I’m sorry,” Gale said, slipping an arm over his shoulder to comfort him. They were sitting on the curb out front of their house, under a streetlamp. “But you did the right thing.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. It seemed like it at the time. At least the guy isn’t dead. I shot him in the leg.”

“You did what you had to do. And you’ve got all those witnesses in the hospital. They’ll all back you up.”

“The gun was empty.”

“What?”

“The guy who was waving a gun around at the woman wearing the hijab-”

“Which one is that?”

“What?”

“There’re the hijab and the niqab and the burka,” Gale said. “Right?”

“The burka covers everything, and the niqab is like that, but you can see the eyes.”

“Then which one is the hijab?”

“That’s the scarf that goes around the head, covers the hair, but you can see the face.”

“Is that what the woman was wearing? That one?”

“Yeah. I was trying to tell you about the gun.”

“I’m sorry,” Gale said.

“When they checked the guy’s gun, there were no bullets in it. I just hope they don’t use that against me. I mean, he was waving it around, acting like a crazy person.”

“You couldn’t know his gun wasn’t loaded,” she said. “It’s not like you have X-ray vision. I mean, lots of people have been shot by the police for waving around toy guns. It wasn’t a toy gun, was it?”

“No, it was real. But when something like this happens, they look at everything. The other guy, he’ll probably get a lawyer who’ll say somehow I should have known, that I shot him needlessly, that I could have defused the situation some other way. But I talked to the chief, and she told me not to worry.”

“Then don’t.” She paused. “How long are you off duty?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will they still let you be a detective?”

Angus shook his head. “No idea. Probably, but I don’t know. This kind of thing, you think you’re in the clear, and then they find something to nail you on.” He laughed derisively. “Wouldn’t my mom just love to hear about this?”

“Angus.”

“It’s been great telling her how good I’m doing, how things have turned out for me, despite all the shit she put me through. But now, this happens, and-”

“Don’t talk about her,” Gale said. “I hate it when you bring her up. Just don’t do it.”

Angus became sullen. “Fine.”

They were both quiet for a minute. Finally, Gale said, “The hijab-niqab-burka thing got me thinking.”

“Thinking about what?”

“Actually, it doesn’t really have to do with that. But it’s just the way things link in your mind, you know. Anyway, it’s probably totally nothing.”

Angus Carlson closed his eyes and dropped his head. “Gale, just tell me.”

“I went for a walk this morning. I had to get out of the house, just to do something, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“So, you know Naman’s?”

“The bookstore?”

“Yeah, he sells used books. He doesn’t carry just-published stuff.”

“He got firebombed the other night,” Angus said. “Someone threw a Molotov cocktail through his window.”

“I didn’t know that. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have bothered, but I went down there looking for a book.”

“What book?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.

“Come on, what book?”

Now it was her time to sigh. “I wanted to see if there were any books about couples. You know, like us. Couples who don’t have children, and why that is, and why one partner might want a child and the other doesn’t.”

“Gale.”

“You asked me what I was looking for and I told you. But listen to me.”

“Okay, go on.”

“So I walked down to the store, and it was all boarded up, but Naman was there, inside, kind of going through the damage. It was just awful. Books that didn’t catch on fire were all water-damaged from when the fire department got there, but even so, there were some books that weren’t damaged that much at all, except for smelling like smoke. I slipped inside and I talked to him and I felt so bad for him.”

“Sure.”

“I mean, people were blaming him just because he’s Muslim or whatever he is. Thinking he had something to do with the bombing at the drive-in, or what happened to the water.”

“People can be like that,” Angus said. “They don’t know what to do with the anger, and they racially profile, and then that kind of thing happens.”

“Which is why I feel really bad to even mention this, but…”

“But what?”

“There was a book in his store, on the floor, right there in front of me, about poison.”

Angus stiffened, turned his head toward his wife. “A book?”

Gale nodded. “I can’t remember the exact title. But it was a kind of guide, of all the poisons that are out there. All these ways that you can kill people.”

Angus appeared to be thinking. “Just because he had a book like that doesn’t mean he’s the one who poisoned the town’s water.”

“I know. I know that.”

“Did you say anything?”

She nodded. “I picked it up and handed it to him. This was right after he’d made some comment about people being suspicious of him. And I made a bad joke of it, I guess, saying something like ‘Well, I guess you better not let anyone see you with this, then.’”

“You said that.”

“Yeah.” She screwed up her face worriedly. “You think I shouldn’t have said that?”

“I don’t know. Like you said, it’s probably nothing.”

“You’re right. It probably is.”

“Unless,” Carlson said, “it is something.”

“That’s kind of what I was thinking, too,” Gale said.

DAVIDset out Sunday at daybreak. He could make it to Lake Luzerne in under an hour, he figured. And if Sam and Carl were at Camp Sunrise, that’d be fantastic, because checking all the other campsites could take several hours.

“Where are you off to so early?” his mother asked him when she found him in the kitchen. She and Don were always up before David, so it was a surprise to find him there.

“Just something I have to do,” he said.

“Is it something for Mr. Finley?” she asked.

“No.” That got him thinking that he really needed to get in touch with Randy. The man had, after all, hired him to do a job, and David had not exactly been giving one hundred percent. Despite the contempt David felt for him, he felt some measure of guilt that he wasn’t earning his salary.

He didn’t want to call and wake the man, so he decided to send him a text that Finley could discover whenever he got around to looking at his phone.