Linwood Barclay - A Tap on the Window

It was very quiet in the car.

“So,” Sean concluded, “that’s why, when I saw you, I told you right out that I didn’t know anything. Because I didn’t want to end up in a trunk like Len. That’s why Roman decked you. He was trying to save my ass.”

I shot him a startled look, but said nothing. I pulled the car over to the shoulder, eased to a stop, and put it in park.

“We’re here,” I said. “This is where I dropped Hanna off.”

We both got out and stood a moment in the cool night air. Unlike twenty-four hours before, there was no rain. There was the sound of distant traffic, and the occasional vehicle that went right by us, but other than that it was very quiet.

A few car lengths up, the traffic light changed. The businesses were closed, and there were few lights on in the homes that were sandwiched between them.

“You let her out here?” Sean said. “This is, like, the middle of nowhere.”

“She tried to jump out of the car when it was moving. I had to pull over. I couldn’t force her to stay.” I was trying to convince myself as much as Sean.

“Seems like a shitty thing to do,” he said.

I went around to the back of the car, used my remote to pop the trunk. Sean spun around, a nervous look on his face.

“Don’t worry, I’m just getting a flashlight,” I told him, and grabbed a heavy Maglite I kept in there, along with other tools of the trade, like a bright orange safety helmet that would allow you to go almost any place you wanted when you put it on your head, as well as a laptop, a mini-printer, even a Kevlar vest I’d kept from my days as a cop but had never worn since. I closed the trunk, joined Sean, and clicked the light on.

“When she jumped out,” I said, “she ran that way.”

“Why are we doing this?” he asked. “This doesn’t make any sense to me.”

“This is where Hanna called you from. Last thing she did was show me she had a phone, which I took to mean she was going to call someone else for a ride.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“She called you. And got interrupted. Right now, it looks like you’re the last person we know who’s spoken to her. It happened around here. So I want to look around. Over here, by these bushes, that’s where she tossed her wig.”

I cast the flashlight beam around the shrubs. Panned it low first, then went higher, in case the wig had caught on a branch before it hit the ground.

“There,” I said.

We closed the distance. I went down to one knee and took hold of the wig, tentatively at first, like it was a piece of roadkill. “This look like the wig?” I asked him.

“I think,” Sean said.

“Me, too. How many wigs can you expect to find along the side of the road?”

“I guess.”

I got up, heard my knee crack. I walked back to the car, unlocked it, and set the wig on the backseat.

“Let’s head up this way,” I said, pointing to the corner. “When she got to the corner, she turned right.”

I kept scanning my flashlight across the sidewalk, using it like a white cane. I didn’t know what I was looking for, if anything, but it seemed like a detective-ish thing to do. When we hit the corner, I saw that the cross street went only about a hundred yards before there was a short bridge. Just this side of it, on the right, was a house that looked as though it had been knocked down in one windstorm and reassembled by the next. Boards askew, eaves hanging loose. But there was activity here. Three people sitting on the sagging porch, drinking beer, sitting in what were once, perhaps in another millennium, living room chairs that now had the stuffing exploding from them.

“Hey,” I said as we came up in front of the house.

There were two women, heavyset, and a thin, bearded man between them. All in their sixties, I guessed, enjoying a night of getting buzzed in the evening air.

“Hi,” said the man. “How you boys doing tonight?”

“We’re good,” I said. “My name’s Cal, and this is my friend Sean. We wonder if you might be able to help us.”

“You lost?” the man asked. “’Cause I can’t imagine anyone would intend to be walking along here at night unless they was.”

The women cackled softly.

“We’re trying to find a girl,” I said.

“You can have both of these ones,” he said, and the women cackled some more. I laughed along with them, showing I could appreciate clever repartee.

Sean was drifting away, heading toward the bridge. From what I could see, it spanned little more than a creek, and was only about forty feet long.

“A girl came running along here last night, about this time,” I said. “It was raining, and she might have been on her cell phone.”

“What she look like?” one of the women asked.

“About seventeen, five and a half feet tall, slight, with short blond hair,” I told them. “We think that while she was making the call, someone may have stopped, given her a ride maybe.”

“What time did we go in last night?” the woman asked the man.

“We didn’t even sit out here,” he said. “’Cause it was raining. We enjoyed our evening festivities indoors.”

“That’s right. We didn’t come out here at all,” the second woman said.

I was trying to keep track of what they were saying while keeping an eye on Sean. He was at the bridge, which had two streetlamps at each end, and was peering over the right railing.

“You didn’t hear anything at all?” I asked. “Nothing out of the ordinary?”

“Nope. Except for Mildred here, who had some terrible gas.” He pointed to the woman to his left. There was more cackling.

“And those damn dogs,” Mildred said.

“What dogs?” I asked.

The man said, “They’ve been going at it, off and on, all day, like they’ve been fightin’ over somethin’. Settled down lately.”

“Where?”

The man pointed in Sean’s direction. I turned my head. He was on the other side of the bridge now, leaning over the railing, looking down into the dark. Sean shouted: “Come here! Come here!”

I ran.

“Down there,” he said as I came up alongside him. “It looks like there’s something down there.”

I shone the light down. Water trickled along a gravel bed, probably no more than six inches of it at its deepest point. Along the bank, close to the abutment, there was something lighter in color up against the dirt and brush.

I played the light over it. It looked to me like a foot, and a leg, up to the knee. Badly mangled. I wouldn’t be able to see any more until I got under there.

Sean was starting to move, but I grabbed his arm and said, “Stay here.”

“I gotta see if—”

“Stay here,” I repeated, more firmly.

I ran to the end of the bridge, then cut my way through brush and tall grasses that matted the hill down to the creek. I nearly fell twice, my foot slipping on a beer bottle or can. I worked my way toward the slope of the abutment, shining the light ahead of me.

It was a body. And it was a mess.

From what I could tell, it was a young woman with short blond hair. Wearing the same clothes I’d seen Hanna in the night before. Most of them, anyway.

She was naked from the waist down.

She was on her side, her legs angled down toward the creek. I shone the light on her face, and I was as sure as I could be that this was the girl I’d found in my car when I came out of Iggy’s.

“Jesus,” I said under my breath.

The phone in my jacket pocket, pressed against my chest, went off. It was like someone had placed the paddles of a heart defibrillator on me.

I reached for the phone, nearly dropped it next to the body, and put it to my ear before I’d had a chance to see who it was.