Linwood Barclay: Bad Guys

Lawrence got out his cell again and punched in what I presumed was Miles Diamond’s number. He put the phone to his ear and waited. “Come on, Miles, pick up.” There must have been time for a good eight rings. Lawrence gave up, held the phone in his hand, which he rested on the bottom of the steering wheel.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“I don’t know.” His cheek bulged out as he moved his tongue around. “Sometimes you just can’t answer your phone. I’ll give him another minute.”

We didn’t say anything for the next sixty seconds. Lawrence entered Miles Diamond’s number again, put the phone to his ear.

The phone probably rang only twice. “Hey,” said Lawrence, and then something happened to his face. His eyes narrowed, grew sharper.

“Who is this?” Lawrence said. “No, why don’t you tell me who you are, and then maybe I’ll tell you who I am.”

I could hear, faintly, someone at the other end.

“Fuck,” said Lawrence. “It’s me, Steve. It’s Lawrence. What the hell’s happened to Miles?”

He listened quietly, then said, “I’ll be there in ten.”

He put the phone away, turned the ignition, and the Buick rattled to life. I just looked at him, waiting.

“Nothing’s going to happen here tonight,” he said to me. “But Miles got a little action.”

Lawrence put the car into drive, swung the car across Garvin so we were headed in the other direction, and drove a lot faster than that car had any business going.

We rounded the corner onto Emmett, a short but trendy street with several ritzy stores, including a jeweler’s, a shoe store, a place that sold rare art books, a couple of high-end ladies’-wear places, and one storefront that was nothing but shattered glass and splintered wood. Above what used to be the window was the name Maxwell’s.

There were three black-and-white police cars, and a couple more unmarked cruisers with their trademark tiny hubcaps, plus an ambulance, but the attendants weren’t doing any rushing around. Most of the attention seemed to be focused on something in the middle of the street.

Lawrence pulled the Buick up onto the sidewalk about a hundred feet back, and we both got out. A uniformed officer approached Lawrence, raising his hand up flat to press against his chest and keep him away from the scene, but before he could touch him Lawrence said, with some authority, “Where’s Steve Trimble?”

“Over there,” the cop said, lowering his hand and using it to point.

A tall white guy with short dark hair, glasses, and a pencil-thin mustache, who was kneeling over the facedown body of a man a few steps away from the curb, glanced our way and got to his feet. He and Lawrence approached each other with an uncomfortable familiarity, like they knew each other but weren’t friends. Still, I thought maybe Lawrence would extend a hand, but he didn’t, and this Trimble guy didn’t either.

“When he got hit,” Trimble said, “at least it didn’t break his cell phone. When we heard it ringing inside his jacket, I grabbed it. What was he doing here?”

Lawrence looked over at the dead body of Miles Diamond. “He and I were watching different stores, thinking they might get hit. I guess his did.”

Trimble pursed his lips, nodded. “You friends?”

“We each threw each other a bit of work. He was a good guy. He’s got a wife.”

“I’ve seen her,” Trimble said, grinning. “He was a lucky guy till now. Who’s this?” he asked, tilting his head toward me.

“Zack Walker. He writes for The Metropolitan .”

“Hi,” I said. Trimble glared at me briefly, then said to Lawrence, “What’s he doing, a piece on guys who couldn’t hack it on the force?”

Lawrence ran his hand over his mouth, like he was going to have to physically keep his comments to himself. He slipped his hand into his pocket and said, “Do you know what happened here, Steve?”

“Mr. Diamond appears to be the victim of a hit-and-run. We got a witness, guy walking his dog, about a block away, said this black SUV was backing out of Maxwell’s here after taking out the front of the store, and squashed our guy here. He must have got out of his car-that’s it parked over there-I don’t know, but he woulda been better off staying put.”

“So they ran him down,” Lawrence said. A vein I’d not noticed before was pulsing at the side of his head.

Trimble shook his head slowly. “Not sure. The dog walker, he said Miles was behind the SUV, one of those big tall ones, you know, and he was so short, they just might not have seen him when they were backing up. These SUVs, they should all go beep-beep when they back up, like trucks, you know?”

My daughter Angie was at the kitchen table, ignoring the buttered toast I’d put in front of her and fiddling with one of her nails instead, when her cell phone started chirping. She dug it out of her purse, looked at the display, and said, “Shit, my stalker.”

I made some coffee. I really needed some coffee. It had been nearly five o’clock when I’d fallen into bed, and even then I’d had a hard time sleeping. I’d nodded off around six, and now it was eight, and I’d been up half an hour, so do the math. I was hoping coffee would help, but was not particularly hopeful.

All I wanted to do was crawl back into bed, but it had been my plan originally to head into the paper with Sarah when she went in, and this particular week that happened to be around eight-thirty.

“I can’t believe he’s calling me this early,” Angie said. “Bad enough having a stalker. I have to get an early-bird stalker.” The phone had rung six, seven times now, but I’d lost track, since I was counting out eight spoonfuls of fine-grind Colombian into the coffeemaker. Finally, the ringing stopped. “Now he’ll leave me a message,” she sighed, brushing back some of the blond locks that had fallen across her face.

Her brother Paul, who at sixteen is two years younger than Angie, had his back to her as he looked into the fridge, but he’d been listening. “Five bucks says he phones the house next,” he said as he struggled to get a yogurt from the back of the fridge without moving the milk and pickles and orange juice that blocked the way.

Angie took one bite of her cold toast. “Last night he phoned me five times. I never did answer it. So then I have to listen to all his creepy messages. ‘How are you? I was just thinking about you. Why don’t you give me a call? Do you want to get together?’ Uh, I don’t think so.”

Paul, his head still in the fridge, said, “You’re so hard on everybody.”

I spilled the last spoonful of coffee before I could get it into the filter, and scooped it to the edge of the counter and into my other hand. I went to toss it into the wastebasket we keep under the sink, when I noticed a glass bottle sitting on top. It was an empty Snapple bottle that earlier, according to the label, had had apple juice in it. “Hey,” I said. “Who’s tossing Snapple bottles in the regular garbage?”

Angie was still shaking her head over her unwanted phone call and Paul was peeling off the top of the yogurt container. I glared at him. He was the one who liked apple juice.

“We have a recycling box,” I reminded everyone, taking out the Snapple bottle, which had its metal cap screwed back on it. “Glass bottles, tin cans, plastic-that all goes into the box, not into the garbage. Are we interested in saving the planet or not?”

“I could go either way,” Angie said.

“Is there, like, some Most Irritated Dad contest going on we don’t know about?” Paul asked.

“I didn’t get home till five,” I said.

Paul, putting on his concerned face and adopting his mock-parent voice, said, “Maybe if you got to bed in good time, you wouldn’t be so grumpy in the morning.”