Linwood Barclay - A Tap on the Window

“It’s settled then,” she says.

“When is this going to happen?” he asks.

“Soon. Very soon. There are just a couple of things to work out.”

The man smiles. It takes a lot out of him. The muscles that are employed to make a person smile have not been used by the man in some time.

“You’ve made my day. That’s great news.” He puts his hands together. “I can almost taste the ice cream on my tongue.”

“You just keep thinking about that,” the woman says as she retreats from the room and relocks the door.

I put up as much fight as I could.

I writhed and twisted and kicked and made a general pain in the ass of myself. Trouble was, even if I could break free, they still had my ankles bound. I wasn’t going to be able to make a run for it. Best I could hope to do was delay the inevitable.

At one point Red lost his grip on me and I tumbled to one side. Blue couldn’t hold me alone, and I hit the dirt path.

“Dickwad,” Blue said. I wasn’t sure whether he was addressing me or his partner.

I looked back where the car was parked. A red Civic. I was expecting a silver Hyundai, thinking that whoever’d been following me around had to be these two.

They got their hands under my arms again and dragged. I could see where I’d been, but not where I was going. I forced my heels down into the dirt, trying to create more resistance.

The roar of the water grew louder.

Then they stopped, hoisted me up, spun me around, and pushed.

Jesus.

They scared the living shit out of me. They threw me right up against the railing, bars pressing into my knees and chest. Below, and ahead of me, the rushing waters of the Niagara River.

The sound was nearly deafening.

They both got behind me, pinning me to the railing. Red put his mouth to my ear and said, “Pretty fucking scary, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

Then it was Blue’s turn. I could feel his breath on the side of my face. “You know what someone once told me?”

I waited.

“Some asshole once told me that unless you’re going over in a barrel — and even then your chances aren’t good — you’re pretty much fucked. You might try to grab onto a rock before you get to the edge, but you’d hit it so hard, it’d probably kill you anyway.”

He said to Red. “Whaddya think?”

“I guess now is as good a time as any.”

Together, they knelt down, grabbed me around the knees, and lifted.

I made a hell of a noise of protest behind the tape. I forced my hands, bound together in front of me, up slightly, just enough to catch under the uppermost railing.

“Let go!” one of them shouted at me.

I hugged the railing as hard as I could. They dropped me a few inches and tried to hoist me up again, but I managed to do the same thing again.

The water sounded like a low-flying 747.

“Fuck!” Red said.

They put my feet back on the ground. “Turn him around,” Blue said. “We’ll send him over on his back.”

But this time, as they bent down, I pitched myself forward. I hit the ground and rolled.

“Goddamn it!”

They came at me from either side, corralled me, and hauled me back up onto my feet one more time.

“Okay,” said Blue. “This time we just keep hanging on to his arms and lift him over.”

“Asshole.”

Seconds later, we were at the railing again, my back pressed against it. But because the railing came up to our chests, they couldn’t get any leverage with their hands positioned so high on me.

“Okay, this isn’t working,” Blue said. “On three, we get him around the knees and again heave him over.”

They pulled their hands out from under my arms and quickly got them around my knees.

“One...”

“Two...”

I started bucking and writhing again.

“Three!”

My feet came off the ground. With my back to the railing, there was nothing I could even attempt to grab onto. My head and shoulders began leaning out over the railing.

I thought of Scott.

I guess I’ve mentioned this already, but it bears repeating now. I’m not a particularly religious guy, but in that moment, I thought, Maybe I’ll see my son again .

Maybe not in heaven. But in some kind of ethereal place, some otherworldly dimension. I figured, wherever it was, I wouldn’t be long getting there. If I wasn’t dead before I went over the falls, I’d be dead soon after.

I thought of Donna. Wondered if she would ever know what happened to me. Wondered what that would be like, the not knowing.

I’d miss her. At least until she came to join Scott and me.

I was wondering what it would feel like, actually going over. Would you feel that you were falling, or would it be more of a floating sensation? Did you get your name in the history books if you went over as a murder victim, or did that honor go only to daredevils who went of their own free will?

These thoughts and others were flashing through my head at such a speed I can’t tell you what, exactly, I was thinking of when the shot rang out.

Just one shot. And then someone yelling.

“Put him down!”

Augie, I figured. Somehow, he knew. Maybe he’d been coming by the house just as these two clowns grabbed me. Followed us here.

“Shit!” said Red.

“What the—” Blue said.

They didn’t just put me down. They threw me onto the ground, hard. I rolled over, craned my neck around to get a look.

I couldn’t make him out at first. It was dark, and the man was silhouetted against the moonlight. But I could see the gun in his hand.

“You dumb fucks,” he said.

“We weren’t gonna do it!” Blue shouted. “We were just scaring him!”

“That’s right,” Red said. “Just wanted to scare the shit out of him!”

“Didn’t look that way to me.”

He came a few steps closer. Close enough that I could now make out who it was.

It wasn’t Augie.

Almost didn’t recognize him with a gun in his hand. Last time I’d seen him, he was wielding a meat cleaver.

Tony Fisk, pointing the gun at my two abductors, said, “Take ’em off.”

“Huh?”

“The masks. Take off the fucking ski masks.”

Slowly, and clearly with great reluctance, they did as they were told. I was not surprised to see Russell Tapscott and Len Eggleton.

I had to hand it to them. The execution of their plan — and the near execution of me — was certainly fitting.

Tapscott I’d threatened to pitch over this very same railing. Eggleton I’d tossed into my trunk, although only for a couple of minutes. Their names had come up when I’d been asking around about kids who might have sold drugs to Scott. They were both a couple of years ahead of him at school, both from well-off families, and despite Brindle’s assertion that the Tapscott kid had never been in any trouble, I still believed these two had, in fact, made the occasional sale. But I’d also been satisfied that they’d not sold anything to Scott.

Tony, the former Brott’s Brats employee, pointed his gun at Tapscott, waved it in my direction.

“Untie him.”

“Sure.”

He knelt next to me and started on the tape wrapped around me, picking and tearing at it. That allowed me to reach up and gently pull off the strips that were plastered across my mouth. Tapscott was working on my ankles. When he was done there, I held out my wrists so he could work on them.

Once he had me free, he backed away hurriedly, no doubt wondering whether I was going to take my revenge on him right then and there. But I was more consumed with getting the blood flowing to my fingers again. I gave my hands a few shakes, picked off the pieces of tape that were stuck to my clothes, and slowly rose to my feet.