Linwood Barclay - The Twenty-Three

Didn’t even lock up. There were three customers in the middle of doing their laundry. Clothes agitating in washers, spinning round in dryers. Sam walked out the back door, got in her car, and headed straight for her son’s school.

Classes would have been over in another ten minutes, but Sam felt there was no time to spare. Her ex-husband had escaped the night before. That gave him plenty of time to get to Promise Falls. Granted, he might have a few challenges in that regard. He’d have to find transportation. He’d have to get out of the Boston area without being seen.

But what if he had someone helping him? Ed Noble was in jail, but maybe another one of Brandon’s idiotic friends had stepped into the breach. Maybe he was in Promise Falls already. Maybe he was waiting for her at her house.

She parked illegally at the school’s main entrance, went to the office, and said she had to pull Carl out now.

The office secretary said, “The bell will be going in just seven minutes, Ms. Worthington, so-”

“Now!”

Carl was dismissed from his class and showed up in the office two minutes later. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“Get in the car,” she said.

By the time they were almost home, she’d told him what she knew. They had to get out of town before his father got there.

“How do we even know he’s coming?” Carl asked.

“Are you kidding me?” his mother said. “After all the shit his parents pulled? What do you think he’s going to do? Go to Disneyland?”

But she couldn’t shake the fear that he might already be in the house. Carl had an idea.

“Drop me off a block away,” he said. “I’ll sneak up and peek in the windows and see if he’s there.”

Sam didn’t want to put her son in a risky situation. “Not a chance.”

“I can do it,” he said. “I’ve done it before.”

“What?”

“Like, one time-you won’t get mad, okay?”

Sam, with some reluctance, said, “Okay.”

“I found this dead cat on the road. It had been hit by a car, but it hadn’t been split open or anything, and me and my friends wanted to have a closer look at it, you know? So we put it in a bag, but then no one else wanted to take it home and they wanted me to do it, so I said okay, but I knew you’d freak out if you saw me come into the house with a bag filled with a dead cat, so before I came in, I peeked in the windows and saw you were in the kitchen, which gave me just enough time to get in the front door and up to my room.”

Sam was speechless.

“Anyway, I had it for like a day in my closet and it was starting to smell, so I put it in the garbage.”

Sam was going to ask Carl just when this had happened, then decided it did not matter.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll let you out here. I’m going to sit in the car, right here in this spot. You go find out if he’s in the house.”

Carl bolted from the car and almost instantly disappeared, ducking between houses half a block from their place.

Four minutes went by. Then six. Sam was starting to worry. The kid wasn’t as smart as he thought. Brandon must have been in the house and had spotted him. Grabbed him. Now she had to decide whether to call the police or-

Carl opened the passenger door, jumped in. “All clear,” he said.

Sam gave him his marching orders. Pack a bag, fast. She’d dig out the camping supplies. She’d find that cheap Styrofoam cooler and dump food from the fridge into it. They’d raid the cupboard for other stuff, then throw everything into the car as quickly as possible.

One of the last things she put into the car was the pump-action shotgun.

You just never knew.

She’d wrapped it up in a blanket, placed it on the floor of the backseat, the barrel propped up on the hump. She’d put three shells in the chamber, pulled the fore-end back to cock the hammer and load a shell, moved the slide back forward. All she’d have to do was pull the trigger.

“Do not touch that,” she told Carl.

Just before hitting the road, she went to a bank machine and took out five hundred. Her daily maximum withdrawal, but it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d been allowed to take out more. Once she’d made the withdrawal, all that was left was thirty-four bucks.

She headed north to Lake Luzerne. It wouldn’t take long to get to Camp Sunrise. Brandon knew she and Carl still went on camping trips, but she was pretty sure he didn’t know the name of their favorite campsite.

But when she got there, the place was fully booked. The kid in the booth suggested they try Call of the Loon Acres. There might still be some vacant campsites if they moved fast.

They got the second-to-last spot.

She and Carl pitched the tent, brought in their sleeping bags, set up the Coleman stove on their picnic table. If you were going to hide out, you might as well have some fun doing it. This, at least, was a hideout Sam could afford. She had enough cash to stay here for a week or more. They’d live on the food they’d taken from the house, and when that ran out, they’d hit a local grocery store.

No restaurants, no fast-food joints. Too expensive. Sam didn’t know how long they’d have to stay here. She figured the police would be out in force looking for Brandon and would have him back behind bars before too long.

Sam parked her car around the back of the tent. She hadn’t wanted to keep the shotgun in the tent with her. Didn’t want to take that kind of risk with Carl in there. But she had left it on the backseat of the car, the blanket no longer wrapped around it, but covering it loosely. So, if need be, she could run to the car, open the back door, and have that shotgun in hand in seconds.

She felt bad about David.

Carl had asked her, “Are you going to call him?”

She wanted to. But hadn’t she involved him enough in her problems? David had already rescued Carl from Ed. Did she want him having to rescue them from Brandon? Shouldn’t she be able to handle her own shit?

The truth was, David was better off without her. Samantha Worthington, she told herself, was bad news.

About as bad as it got.

By the time they’d set themselves up at Call of the Loon-seriously, how did they come up with that ?-it was something of a moot point. There was almost no cell service there. And Sam was starting to think she was safer with the phone turned off completely. She didn’t want anyone triangulating her position. Not that Brandon was likely to have the means to do that, but who knew? Maybe he had a friend somewhere who could do something like that.

Not worth taking the chance.

So now it was Sunday morning. They’d spent three nights sleeping in this tent, and the novelty was wearing off. The first couple of days had been, considering everything, fun. They’d gone on some hikes, seen a deer, if not a loon. The park bordered on the lake, and while it was still too early in the year to swim-the water was freezing-they’d wandered out onto the docks, skipped some stones.

But the night before, as they were bunking down for the night, Carl had said, “Can we go back tomorrow?”

“I don’t know.”

“This has been fun, but I don’t want to do it anymore. I want to go back. I want to see my friends. I want to see Ethan. I want to be in school Tuesday. I don’t know what I missed on Friday. I’m going to have to catch up. If we’re gone for lots of days, I’m going to get way behind and then I won’t get into the next grade.”

“I don’t know if it’s safe to go back. Tell you what. Tomorrow, we’ll take a ride someplace where we get cell reception, and I’ll make a call. See if the police have found your father.”

“Would it be so bad?” he’d asked.

“Would what be so bad?”