Linwood Barclay - The Twenty-Three

Maybe his description of the mystery man was so good, right down to the Yankees cap, because he wanted us to have someone else to look for.

Maybe someone he’d never seen at all.

“Thanks, Joyce,” I said. “I’ll be getting back to you.”

Maureen appeared again, looked at me standing there, stark naked, towel around my ankles, phone still to my ear.

“Coffee’s ready,” she said.

THEREhad been a lot of screaming and yelling before things had quieted down the previous evening. Celeste had been yelling at Dwayne to explain how Cal had come to be tied up in the garage. Dwayne was shouting back that he had no idea. Cal had cried “Bullshit!” on that. Then Celeste turned her anger on her brother, shouting that he had very likely broken her husband’s leg when Cal went at him with the two-by-four.

And then Crystal had started screaming hysterically at no one in particular.

At that point, Cal moved to calm her. He tried to bring the girl into his arms, but she was reluctant at first, standing rigidly, arms tight to her body. He knelt down next to her, spoke softly to her, but not before telling Celeste and Dwayne to go into the house.

“Don’t think about hightailing it out of here,” Cal had warned his brother-in-law. “Because I’ll find you, and when I do, I’m gonna be mad.”

Dwayne had said nothing as he retreated from the garage. But as he and his wife headed back toward the house, they could be heard arguing again.

“I’m okay,” Cal had told Crystal. “I really am. I’ve got a bump on the head, but otherwise I’m fine.”

“There wouldn’t be anybody to look after me till my dad gets here,” she said, “if you were dead.”

“I’m not dead.” He’d put his hands on her upper arms, squeezed. “I’m sorry you had to see all that. You’ve been through enough.”

“I heard the phone.”

Cal smiled. “You saved me.”

“Celeste phoned you, but I heard it. Dwayne said he didn’t hear anything, but I was sure. He was lying.”

“Yes, he was lying.”

“Are you going to kill him?”

Cal had shaken his head. “I don’t think so.”

“But you might.”

He was reminded that Crystal was not good at detecting irony or sarcasm. “I will definitely not kill him.”

“Because I’m okay with it if you do.”

“Celeste would be very upset with me.” He’d given her shoulders another squeeze. “You were there for me. I don’t know what might have happened if you hadn’t found me.”

Crystal had moved into his arms, put hers around him. “I love you,” she’d said.

Other than Crystal, no one had had any sleep by the time the sun came up.

Dwayne had finally come clean on what was going on. His friend Harry at the printing operation-a guy he had, years ago, gone to high school with-was part of a gang that was ripping off electronics stores. They’d stolen from parked trucks and broken into several stores over the last eighteen months and had acquired a lot of product.

Harry said they were starting to worry the police might be onto them, and they needed a few places to hide the merchandise. Harry knew that Dwayne wasn’t making much money these days, what with the town canceling many of his paving contracts, so he approached him. “Hide this stuff for us,” he said, “and we’ll give you a thousand bucks.”

Dwayne wrestled with it for a while. He convinced himself he wasn’t really doing anything wrong. He hadn’t stolen the goods. He wasn’t in on any of that. He hadn’t planned it, he hadn’t driven the truck, and he hadn’t broken into any places. All he was doing now was hanging on to some stuff for a friend. He told himself he didn’t really know for sure where it had come from. Harry could have been making up a wild story just to sound more important.

Sure.

So he started hiding stuff for Harry. He’d been doing it for the better part of a month. Celeste wasn’t sure whether to be horrified or relieved. At least she knew now that when her husband was gone at odd hours, he wasn’t having an affair.

Although, if you got caught sleeping with another woman, you weren’t likely to end up in jail.

When Cal guessed correctly that something was going on in the garage, Dwayne panicked. Once he’d knocked him out, he didn’t know what else to do but tie him up and hide him in the garage until he figured out his next step.

He was on the phone with Harry, trying to come up with a plan, when Crystal appeared, determined to find Cal.

“What was Harry’s plan?” Cal asked.

Dwayne was hesitant. “We hadn’t really come up with anything.”

“Was Harry’s plan to kill me?”

Dwayne, who was sitting across the kitchen table from Cal, holding an ice pack to his thigh, couldn’t look his brother-in-law in the eye. “There was no way I’d let that happen. No way. ”

“But Harry put it out there.”

“And I shut it down.”

“Oh my God,” Celeste said, pacing the kitchen floor. “How can this be happening? How is it possible? What the hell were you thinking?”

“I know,” Dwayne said sheepishly. “I fucked up.”

“Fucked up?” Celeste said. “Is that what you’d call this? A fuckup? A fuckup is when you back the truck into the mailbox. This-I don’t even know what to call this-this is a catastrophe . How could you have gotten us into this? This is my brother ! You actually discussed with this asshole the idea of killing my brother!”

“I told you, that never would have happened.”

“What if Harry decided if you wouldn’t be part of it? He’d just do it anyway?”

Dwayne looked blankly at his wife.

Cal said, “What if Harry decided you were as much a liability as me?”

That made him blink. “No. I mean, we go back. Harry and me go way back.”

Cal sighed. Celeste was about to light into her husband again, but her brother raised a calming hand. “We’re going to figure this out.”

“Figure it out?” she said. “How? By you laying charges against my husband? Because if I was you, that’s what I’d be thinking of doing. I’d want to send this son of a bitch to jail-that’s what I’d want to do.” But then her face began to crumple. “But tell me you’re not going to do that.”

Cal slowly shook his head. “I’m not going to do that.” He looked at Dwayne. “But that doesn’t mean you still couldn’t end up in prison. You’ve got a garage filled with stolen merchandise. You need to get rid of it.”

“I can’t just do that.”

“Why not?” Celeste asked.

“Are you kidding? Harry and his buddies expect to get it back when they think it’s safe. And there’s the matter of the money. They’ve paid me to do a job.”

“How much?” Celeste asked.

“So far, nineteen hundred.”

“So give it back.”

Dwayne lowered his eyes. “It’s already all gone.”

Cal was very quiet. Thinking.

Celeste said, “What are we going to do, Cal? What the hell are we going to do?”

He said to his brother-in-law, “Call Harry. Set up a meeting. Tell him we want to do a return.”

SAMANTHAWorthington had taken the call Thursday afternoon while working at the Laundromat. It was someone in the prosecutor’s office in Boston, who’d been involved in the trial against Brandon.

“He’s on the loose,” the woman said. “During a hospital visit to see his mother. He got away. Thought you should know.”

The first thing Sam did, after going into the bathroom to throw up, was call the owner of the Laundromat and tell him she was gone. Right then, right now. She was walking out the door and she didn’t know when she would be back.