Linwood Barclay - Bad Guys

The room was empty. I came back downstairs, passed Paul in the kitchen, and poked my head through the door to the basement. “Angie?”

“She’s not home, Dad,” Paul said. I was inclined to agree with him. I put one hand on the kitchen counter, resting. My heart was pounding, and I felt a little winded from running around the house. I was relieved that Angie wasn’t home, that Trevor hadn’t had a chance to find her here, but then again, where was she?

“What’s up?” Paul asked. “Did you get that car at the auction? Didn’t they have any cheap Beemers?”

“Where’s your sister?” I asked him.

“She’s at class, Dad,” Paul said, looking at me like I was an idiot. “She’s not going to be home now.”

Of course. I was an idiot. “Right,” I said. “Where else would she be?” Pulling myself together, I opened the fridge and grabbed a beer.

“Can I have one?” Paul asked.

“No,” I said.

“It’s not like I’ve never had a beer, you know,” he said. “And I think it would be a lot better, you know, if I had a beer in the open, with my dad, instead of, you know, trying to sneak around to have a beer.”

My mind went back to that six-pack left between the back of the garage and the fence.

“Is that what you do now, sneak booze?”

Paul’s face flushed. “Of course not.”

“Because if you are-”

The phone rang. I grabbed the receiver. “Hello?” I said.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Angie!” I said, perhaps a bit too enthusiastically. “Hey, we were just talking about you.”

“Who?”

“Paul and I. We were just saying you were probably in a class.”

“That’s right, Dad. That’s what I do. I’m at college.” Still a bit frosty.

“I know, I know. We were just thinking about you, that’s all.”

“Is Mom there by any chance?”

“No, hon, she’s at work. What can I do for you?”

There was a hint of a sigh. She would have to deal with me. “Would I be able to have the car tonight? Because I’ve got a bunch of things to do, and I need to go to the mall, and then I have to do some research for this essay, and-”

“Guess what. I bought a car today.”

A hesitation. “Oh my God, are you serious? Like, not to replace the Camry, but a second car?”

“That’s right.”

“That’s so awesome! What did you get?”

“Listen, why don’t I drive down and show it to you? I’ll give you a lift home.”

“Sure, I guess.”

“Now, I have to warn you, you may not like it. The car has not been unanimously endorsed by members of this household.” I glared at Paul, who had reached into the fridge, grabbed a beer bottle, and was miming the act of opening it, looking at me for approval. I shook my head.

“Oh well, as long as it’s got wheels,” she said, and told me to pick her up in front of Galloway Hall at 5:30 P.M., when her last tutorial of the day would be over.

I hung up the phone and barely had time to tell Paul to put the beer back into the fridge when the phone rang again. It was Sarah.

“This retreat thing starts early tomorrow morning,” Sarah said. “So the paper’s paying for a room at the conference center so we can go tonight, be ready to start fresh in the morning, instead of having to get up before dawn and driving an hour and a half.”

“Great,” I said.

“So I’m getting out of here now, gonna come home and throw some stuff in a bag, have a quick bite to eat, and then Bev, you know her? The foreign editor?”

“Yeah.”

“Bev’s being sent to this thing, too, so she’s going to pick me up around six and we’re going to head up.” It was already a little past four.

“If you’re here by five,” I said, “I’ll see you, but I’ve promised Angie I’d pick her up at five-thirty. I’ll get some dinner started.”

I had some pork tenderloin in a mushroom gravy going when Sarah got home at four forty-five. She dropped herself into one of the kitchen chairs.

“I saw the car,” she said. “In the drive.”

I waited.

“It’s kind of cute,” she said.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, it should do us. Although I looked all around it and couldn’t find the outlet where you plug it in.”

“That joke’s really running out of gas.”

“Hey, that’s a good one,” Sarah said. “I have to say, it’s perfect for Angie getting back and forth to school.”

“Paul hates it,” I said.

Sarah shrugged. You reach a point when you stop worrying about what your teenagers hate.

I called Paul to dinner, setting out three plates, and making up a fourth and covering it with plastic wrap for Angie to eat later. I stood and ate by the sink, Paul grabbed his plate and went to the basement, leaving Sarah the only one to actually sit at the kitchen table to eat her meal. But because she had to be ready to leave in a little more than an hour, she shoveled it down like a teenager.

“Guess who was prowling around the backyard when I got home,” I said.

Sarah glanced over, one cheek puffed out with pork tenderloin. “Urmff?” she said.

“Trevor Wylie.”

“Hmmff?”

“That’s right.” I filled her in on the conversation Lawrence and I had had with the boy. The dog named Morpheus. The satellite program, the six-pack in the backyard.

Sarah drank some water to clear all the food from her mouth. “I don’t know,” she said. “He does sound a bit weird, but lots of kids are like that, they grow out of it. He’s probably harmless.”

“You should meet him yourself.”

“Remember when you were first interested in me, and I lived out on Highway 74, and you came around one night, planning to call up to my window, but when you climbed the fence, you snagged your pants-”

“I know the story.”

“-you snagged your pants as you were coming over the other side, and you kept going but your pants got left behind?”

“I don’t see-”

“And my dad heard the racket and went out to investigate, and there you were in your Jockeys?”

I suffered a moment with the memory, then said, “The difference is, you were interested in me, but Angie’s not interested in Trevor.”

“Actually, at the time, I wasn’t interested in you.”

“You weren’t?”

“Not really. But you kind of grew on me. And it took a lot of convincing for my dad to accept a guy he’d first found standing in our backyard in his skivvies.”

“I think you have some of the details wrong. I was wearing a tuck-in shirt that had long tails front and back, so you could hardly even see my shorts.”

Sarah nodded. “I think you’re right. You were the picture of dignity.”

“So you’re saying finding Trevor in our backyard isn’t that big a deal?”

“Did he have his pants on?”

“Yes.”

“Well then, he’s one up on you, isn’t he?”

I finished the last bite of my dinner, rinsed off the plate in the sink and left it sitting in there. This didn’t seem like a good time to tell Sarah about the course of action I was contemplating for after dinner.

“I have to go,” I said. I gave Sarah a kiss. She said she would leave a note on the counter with the details of where she was going to be for the next two days.

“And you can always get me on my cell,” she said, and I ran out the door. Sarah’s Camry was parked behind our new Virtue, so I did some driveway car juggling so I could take the new one to show Angie.

Traffic heading back downtown toward the university was light, and I was down there in about fifteen minutes. It was a nice evening, so I opened the sunroof and occasionally raised the fingers of my right hand into the passing breeze.

What I’d forgotten was that to pull up in front of Galloway Hall meant paying a parking entrance fee to enter the system of roads within the university grounds. I protested to the gatekeeper who handed me my ticket.