Linwood Barclay: The Twenty-Three

Once those three conditions have been met, I’m ready to actually step on the scale.

This must be done very slowly. If I pounce on the thing, I fear the needle will shoot up too quickly and stick there. Maureen will wander in later and ask if I’m really 320 pounds.

I am not.

But if I’m being honest with you, I’m at 276. Okay, that’s not exactly true. It’s more like 280.

Anyway, I put one hand on the towel rack as I step on, not just to balance myself, but to give the scale a chance to prepare for what’s coming. Once I’ve got both feet planted firmly on it, I carefully release my grip on the bar.

And face the music.

Maureen, in the kindest, most supportive way, has been trying to get me to lose a few pounds. She hasn’t expressed the slightest disapproval about how I look. She claims to love me as much as ever. That I’m still the sexiest man she’s ever known.

I’m grateful for her lies.

But she says more fruit and vegetables and grains, and fewer donuts and ice cream and pie, might be good for me.

She doesn’t know the half of it.

I’ve been to the doctor. Our regular GP, Clara Moorehouse. Dr. Moorehouse says I am borderline diabetic. That my blood pressure is dangerously high. That I am carrying extra weight in the worst place a man can-on my gut.

It really hit home for me the other day, at the drive-in. A woman who served over in Iraq as a bomb deactivator was helping us out, trying to figure out how the explosive charges had been rigged to bring the screen down, and it was all I could do to keep up with her as she moved about the rubble like a mountain goat scaling a cliffside.

I was out of breath. My heart was pounding.

Which I told Dr. Moorehouse yesterday.

“You have to make a decision,” she told me. “No one can make it for you.”

“I know,” I said.

“Do you know why you do it?” she asked.

“I like to eat,” I said. “And I’ve been under a lot of stress lately.”

That made her smile. “Lately?” she said, looking at me. “Did this just happen in the last week or so?”

She had me there.

The truth was, I had been under a lot of stress lately. Not that it had anything to do with what I was or was not eating. But in the twenty years I’d worked for the Promise Falls police-the anniversary had slipped by this month largely unnoticed-I had never had a month like this one.

It had started with the horrific murder of Rosemary Gaynor. And then there were some strange goings-on around town. Everything from dead squirrels and a Ferris wheel coming to life all on its own to a college predator and a flaming bus.

As if all that weren’t enough, that bombed drive-in.

And then there was Randall Finley, the son of a bitch.

He was running for mayor again and looking for whatever dirt he could get on anybody. The current mayor, the chief of police, anybody . I’d learned that he’d gone so far as to blackmail our son, Trevor, who was driving a truck for Finley’s bottled water company, into telling him things Trevor might have heard me talking about around the house.

I wanted to kill the asshole.

Maybe, I told myself, I’d be better equipped to deal with all this bullshit if I weren’t lugging so much weight around.

Today had to be the day.

After I’d weighed myself, I shaved. I don’t always bother on a Saturday, but I decided to make an effort. Either my blade was too dull or the shaving cream too loaded with menthol, because my cheeks and neck felt like they’d been set ablaze. I patted my cheeks thoroughly with a towel, which helped. I dug an oversized red T-shirt out of one drawer, and some old purple sweatpants I hadn’t worn in years out of another. Then I went into the closet for my running shoes. When Maureen came upstairs and into the room and saw me, she said, “What’s going on? You look like a down-on-his-luck superhero.”

“I’m going to do a walk this morning,” I said. “A mile or two. I don’t have to go in this morning. I’m taking a day.”

I needed a month.

“I just put on the coffee,” Maureen said.

“I’ll have some when I get back. And don’t bother making me any breakfast. I’ll just have a banana or something.”

She eyed me slyly. “You can’t do it this way.”

“Can’t do what?”

“I mean, the walk, that’s a good idea. Go. But you have to eat more than a banana for breakfast. You have nothing more than that and by ten you’ll be inhaling six Egg McMuffins. I can help you with this. I can-”

“I know what I’m doing,” I said.

“Okay, okay, but if you try to do too much too fast, you’ll get discouraged. You have to do these things gradually.”

“I don’t have time to do them gradually,” I said. I hadn’t meant to say that.

“What do you mean?” Maureen asked.

“I’m just saying, I need to make a change. I might as well do it.”

“What happened between yesterday and today?”

“Nothing.”

“No, something’s happened.”

Maureen had acquired over the years, as if by osmosis, some of my skill at spotting a lie when it was being told.

“I said, nothing.” I looked away.

“Did you go see Dr. Moorehouse?”

“Did I what?” God, I was terrible at this.

“What did she say?”

I hesitated. “Not a lot. Just, you know, a few things.”

“Why did you go see her? What prompted it?”

“I… the other day, I felt-I was a little, you know, short of breath. At the drive-in. Climbing over stuff.” Also, recently, at Burger King, but I did not see the point in mentioning that particular incident.

“Okay,” Maureen said slowly.

“And she said that maybe I might want to start thinking about maybe considering some slight changes to, you know, my lifestyle, as such.”

“As such,” Maureen repeated.

“Yeah.” I shrugged. “So, that’s what I’m doing.”

Maureen nodded slowly. “Okay. Terrific.” She surveyed me, head to toe. “But you’re not going out like that.”

“Like what?”

“Those pants. Dear God, you look like you were shot and left to die in a vat of grapes.”

I looked down. “They are a bit purple.”

“There must be something else. Let me look.” She brushed past me and went into the closet. I could hear her moving clothes back and forth on the racks. “What about-no, not that. Maybe-”

My cell phone rang. It was plugged in next to the bed, still charging. I went over, saw who was calling, detached the cord, and put the phone to my ear.

“Duckworth.”

“Carlson.”

Angus Carlson. Our new detective, bumped up from uniform because we were shorthanded. As I recalled, he was working today.

“Yeah,” I said.

Maureen stepped out of the closet, a pair of gray sweats in her hand. How could I have missed those?

“You need to come in,” Carlson said. “Everybody and his dog is getting dragged in here.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“The end of the world,” Carlson said. “More or less.”

WHENEVERDavid Harwood dismissed something his father heard, he regretted it later. If Don heard an odd rattle under the hood of David’s car, he got it checked out. That time, years ago, when David was just a kid, and Don heard something in the ceiling no one else had noticed, it turned out they had raccoons in the attic.

So when Don said he’d been hearing a lot of sirens, David walked out of the kitchen, through the living room, and out onto the front step of the house.

There was, in the distance, not just a siren but a chorus of sirens. At least two, maybe three. Maybe even more than three.

He scanned above the trees, looking for smoke, but they soared too high in his older part of town for him to see very far. But something was up. Even though David no longer worked for a newspaper, he still had a reporter’s instincts. He had to know what was going on.