Blake Crouch: *69

He sipped the whiskey, pushed the bottle back to Martin.

“Wish you’d come over more,” Tim said. “Feel like I don’t see you much these days.”

“See me every Sunday at Mom’s.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

Tim wanted to ask Martin if he felt that wedge between them, met his brother’s eyes across the table, but couldn’t bring himself to say the words. They didn’t operate on that frequency.

A frigid mist fogged Laura’s glasses, and with the porchlight out, she took her time descending the steps, the soles of her slippers holding a tenuous grip on the wet brick. The fog had thickened since Martin’s arrival, the streetlamps putting out a glow far dimmer and more diffused than their normal sharp points of illumination-now just smudges of light in the distance.

She hurried down the sidewalk that curved from the house to the driveway.

Martin had parked his police cruiser behind the old Honda Civic she’d had since her junior year of high school, over 200,000 miles on the odometer and not a glimmer of senility.

Laura walked around to the front door on the passenger side, out of the sight-line of the living room windows. She reached to open the front passenger door, wondering if Martin’s cruiser carried an alarm. If so, she was about to wake up everyone on the block, and had better prepare herself to explain to her brother-in-law why she’d tried to break into his car.

The door opened. Interior lights blazing. No screeching alarm. The front seat filthy-Chick-Fil-A wrappers and crushed Cheerwine cans in the floorboards.

She leaned over the computer in the central console, inspected the driver seat.

No phone.

Two minutes of leafing through the myriad papers and napkins and straws and stray salt packets in the glove compartment convinced her it wasn’t there either.

She glanced back through the partition that separated the front seats from the back.

In the middle seat, on top of a Penthouse magazine, lay Martin’s black leather cell phone case.

“Yeah, I was seeing this woman for a little while.”

“But not anymore?”

Martin took another long pull from Old Grandad, shook his head.

“What happened?”

“She wanted to domesticate me, as they say.”

Tim forced a smile. “How so?”

“Tried to drag me to church and Sunday school. Anytime we’d be out and I’d order an alcoholic beverage-her term-she’d make this real restrained sigh, like her Southern Baptist sensibility had been scandalized. And in bed…”

Laura opened the door behind the front passenger seat and climbed into the back of the cruiser. Wary of the interior lights exposing her, on the chance Martin happened to glance outside, she pulled the door closed.

After a moment, the lights cut out.

She picked up the leather case, fished out Martin’s cell phone, and flipped it open, the little screen glowing in the dark.

“…I’d gotten my hopes up, figured she’s so uptight about every other fucking thing, girl must be a psychopath between the sheets. Like it has to balance out somewhere, right?”

As he sipped the whiskey, Tim glanced around Martin toward the front door.

“Sadly, not the case. When we finally did the deed, she just laid there, absolutely motionless, making these weird little noises. She was terrified of sex. I think she approached it like scooping up dogshit. Damn, this whiskey’s running through me.”

Martin got up from the table and left the kitchen, Tim listening to his brother’s footsteps track down the hallway.

The bathroom door opened and closed.

It grew suddenly quiet.

The clock above the kitchen sink showed 11:35.

Laura stared at the cell phone screen and exhaled a long sigh. Martin’s last call had gone out at 4:21 p.m. to Mary West, his and Tim’s mother.

She closed the cell, slipped it back into the leather case, sat there for a moment in the dark car. She realized she’d somehow known all along, and she wondered how she’d let Tim know-maybe a shake of the head as she crept past the kitchen on her way up the stairs. Better not to advertise to Martin that they’d suspected him.

She searched for the door handle in the dark, and kept searching and kept searching. At least on this side, there didn’t seem to be one. She moved to the other door, slid her hand across the vinyl. Nothing. Reaching forward, she touched the partition of vinyl-coated metal that separated the front and back seats, thinking, You’ve got to be kidding me.

Ten minutes later, flushed with embarrassment, Laura broke down and dialed her home number on Martin’s cell. Even from inside the car, she could hear their telephone ringing through the living room windows. If she could get Tim to come outside unnoticed and let her out, Martin would never have to know about any of this.

The answering machine picked up, her voice advising, “Tim and Laura aren’t here right now. You know the drill.”

She closed Martin’s cell, opened it, hit redial-five rings, then the machine again.

The moment she put the phone away, Martin’s cell vibrated.

Laura opened the case, opened the phone-her landline calling, figured Tim had star-sixty-nined her last call.

Through the drawn shades of the living room windows, she saw his profile, pressed talk.

“Tim?”

“Thank God, Laura.” Marty’s voice. “Someone’s in the house.”

“What are you talking about? Where’s Tim?”

“He ran out through the backyard. Where are you?”

“I um…I’m outside. Went for a late walk.”

“You on your cell?”

“Yeah. I don’t understand what’s-”

“I’m coming out. Meet me at the roundabout and we’ll-”

Martin’s cell beeped three times and died.

The whiskey had made Tim thirsty, and Martin was taking his sweet time in the bathroom.

Tim went over to the sink, held a glass of water under the filter attached to the faucet.

He heard the creak of wood pressure-Marty walking back into the kitchen-and still watching the water level rise, Tim said, “Let me ask you something, Marty. You think whoever left that message knows they left it?”

“Yeah, Tim, I think they might.”

Something in Martin’s voice spun Tim around, and his first inclination was to laugh, because his brother did look ridiculous, standing just a few feet away in a pair of white socks, a shower cap hiding his short black hair, and the inexplicable choice to don the yellow satin teddy Laura had been wearing prior to his arrival.

“What the hell is this?” Tim asked, then noticed tears trailing down Martin’s face.

“She’d gone to the movies with Tyler Hodges.”

“Who are you talking-”

“Danielle.”

“Matson?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s a junior in high school, man.”

“You know what she did with Tyler after the movie?”

“Marty-”

“She went to the Grove with him and they parked and the windows were steamed up when I found them.”

“Look, you can have the tape from our answering-”

“They’d trace the call,” Martin said. “If you were to encourage them.”

“We wouldn’t.”

“I can see the wheels turning in your eyes, but I’ve thought this through quite a bit more than you have. Played out all the scenarios, and this is-”

“Please, Marty. I could never turn you in.”

Martin seemed to really consider this. He said, “Where’s Laura?”

“Upstairs.”

Martin cocked his head and shifted into his right hand the paring knife he’d liberated from the cutlery block.

“Don’t fuck with me. I was just up there.”

“You need help, Marty.”

“You think so?”

“Remember that vacation we took to Myrtle Beach? I was twelve, you were fourteen. We rode the Mad Mouse roller coaster eight times in a row.”